As the sun set Wednesday on the birthplace of the king of rock and roll, federal agents in hazmat suits wrapped up their daylong scouring of a tae kwon do studio on the edge of town, a watchful throng of reporters standing vigil, waiting to see what the hell could possibly happen next.

It’s been quite a week here in Tupelo, what with the arrest last week of a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator on suspicion of sending letters laced with ricin to President Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), and a local judge, Sadie Holland. Then came the stunning announcement Tuesday that Paul Kevin Curtis was free to head back to Heartbreak Hotel and shake his exonerated pelvis all over Mississippi again. Then news broke that another man—a 41-year-old blues singer, karate master, insurance salesman, Mensa member, accused child molester, and one-time GOP candidate for the Mississippi House of Representatives named J. Everett Dutschke—had become the focus of the investigation. Then stories spread that this Curtis fella and this Dutschke fella had it out for each other and were trading nasty emails about body parts allegedly found at a hospital and fraudulent Mensa memberships and snarky comments left on each other’s YouTube pages about all that. Then rumors swirled Wednesday that Dutschke had skipped town, and the cops had a BOLO (be on the lookout) for his van. Then Dutschke showed up at the studio—in the van!—and the men in the white suits searched that, too, as the karate master, who has not been named a suspect or charged with any terrorism-related crime, shifted his public-relations strategy from talking to any reporter within earshot to pacing beneath the green awning of a tattoo parlor across the street. Then Curtis, the Elvis impersonator, hopped on a plane to New York City with his lawyers in tow, set to celebrate his independence Thursday morning on Good Morning America, among other places.

The captain wouldn’t let anyone off the plane, and I began to suspect I had something to do with it.

The United Airlines flight from DC to San Francisco, a 6-plus hour slog in a decrepit aircraft, had just landed and pulled up to the gate. Passengers leapt up from their seats, grabbed their bags and clogged the aisles maneuvering to escape the cramped, unpleasant and outdated experience that flying on many U.S. airlines has become.

The bodies of 25-year-old Brendan Mess and two other men were found with their throats cut on September 12, 2011, in what police deemed a triple homicide related to the drug trade.

Still-grieving relatives of the victims believe the men were killed the night before. And with word that Mess had once been the best friend and boxing partner of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it seems there might be more significance than anybody imagined in this triple slaying being committed on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The controversy over when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would be read his Miranda rights illustrates how respect for both basic civil liberties and simple common sense are among the leading victims of this nation’s hysterical preoccupation with terrorism.

After Tsarnaev was captured on Friday night following a day-long manhunt, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz announced that, for at least 48 hours, Tsarnaev—who had been seriously wounded during the chase—would be interrogated without being informed of his right to remain silent, or his right to be represented by an attorney.

The government’s decision to try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in civilian courts has been met by vociferous criticism. Obama’s move was itself in response to calls by Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others to label Tsarnaev an “enemy combatant.” That designation might justify continued interrogation of Tsarnaev, which is otherwise much more limited under ordinary rules of criminal procedure.

Was the administration right not to deem Tsarnaev an enemy combatant?

These should be sun-filled days for America’s national, if now somewhat beleaguered, sport. The spectacle of opening day—in which every stadium in America is filled to capacity—has come and gone in all its glory. The season has sprung, and, with it, all the clichés of spring and rebirth and childhood. At this point, most baseball fans still keep hope alive of a competitive summer and triumphant fall for the teams they love and hold dear. Off the field, the biopic 42 that portrays the game’s great groundbreaker, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the first black man to play in the major leagues, has hit theaters, accompanied by a rush of nostalgic, sentimental stories about a time and place in America when one man stood alone to change the course of the world.

But here in New York, Alex Rodriguez is casting a pall. When the star, whose luster has dimmed thanks to outstanding reporting by journalists at the Miami New Times, ESPN, and The New York Times, comes up in conversation, his name is often followed by disgusted dismissal even though, because of an injury, he’s yet to play a single game this season.

Even while she sleeps, the dangerous voices are still speaking. Someone in St. Louis reports that two men in a truck are driving to New York with a bomb. A man was seen wandering the Lincoln Tunnel. Someone posts his rage on YouTube, threatening attack. The alarm buzzes at dawn, chopping her world in two, between the knowing and not knowing. She rises into a world where her job is to know what story the city is telling.

In her Manhattan apartment, as she sits on her bed, her BlackBerry flashes. The two men in the truck have left Kansas with their bomb ... Off to the gym, home to shower, up come the blue dress trousers, on with the white blouse and blazer. On comes the cracked leather belt, her holstered Glock. She swings a leg over the seat of her Vespa, drops a helmet over her shoulder-length brown hair, and pilots into the stream, into the story. Who are these people whose voices speak destruction?

it is, obviously, understandable that people are shocked when something like the Boston bombing happens. Such an attack is a shocking thing—the images, the video, the beautiful faces of the three young people whose lives were taken; all shocking.

But in today’s world, it isn’t really a surprising thing. After 9/11, how can anyone be surprised? In fact, I would take it back further. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and after Oklahoma City, how could anyone have been surprised? I remember the 1993 bombing very well. I was in New York and, as it happens, at CBS that Friday afternoon to tape a public-affairs discussion show that was preempted. And maybe I’m strange, but one recurring thought I remember having that day was, I wonder what took them so long.

The mosque on Kotrova Street in the capital of Dagestan is abuzz with passionate discussions. Here in the northern Caucasus, Muslim revolutionaries are fighting to break away from Russia and create a Salafi “emirate” akin to the caliphate yearned for by Al Qaeda. So people are used to talk about “terrorism.” But they are not used to hearing it linked to words like “Boston” and “marathon.” And they are trying to square what they’re hearing now with their memories of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the elder of the two brothers at the center of the atrocity in the United States, who was killed last Friday in a Boston suburb.

The men at the mosque on Kotrova Street saw a lot of Tsarnaev last summer and so, it appears, did the local security forces. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, allegedly even had a case file on him, according to one well-placed security source. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dossier 1713. He was allegedly in the constant company of another Salafist, later killed, whom the FSB believed to have ties to the rebels in Caucasus. The Russian and Dagestani cops were allegedly “watching him closely for five months and three weeks,” according to this source. (The Russians had asked the FBI to take a close look at Tsarnaev in 2011, but the FBI had found nothing on him that they thought worth pursuing.)