"Those are Chechen names," said my wife, upon first seeing the Tsarnaev brothers identified in print.  "Interesting that Putin offered his assistance to Boston."

Then, we were off.  After all, how else could a pair of brothers hold off the entire Boston area police apparatus for so long?  Generally speaking, civilians don't survive shootouts with the police.  Even before modern technology, even in the old west, the police would usually win.  They bring superior numbers.  They bring basically infinite resources.  You might hold out for awhile but the police eventually overwhelm you.  The police never give up and have institutional support to keep up the fight forever.

Yet these two kids had a standoff with police and one of them escaped.

They just had to be Chechen super terrorists, right?  They had to be people with uncommon martial skills.  Add the weird comment from Putin, a dictator and spy with a pretty known racist streak when it comes to Chechens and the story just makes sense  -- a couple of rogue Chechen super warriors, hardened by wars against Russia's toughest military units, were on the loose in Boston.

Except, not.

The story made sense.  The mind certainly wants to go there.  But it doesn't add up.  Even the older brother was too young, when he left Chechnya, to have had battlefield experience.  Both brothers spent their formative years in the U.S., fitting in with varying degrees of success.  The older brother was a very good boxer (qualifying for the Golden Gloves national isn't easy) with a bad temper and the younger brother is described as a polite and smart student.

Life is full of exceptions and things that don't "fit the story."  That these two held off the police for so long is one of those exceptions.  Now, a new narrative is developing, one that's less 9/11 and more Columbine.  Maybe.

Now that the younger brother has been captured alive, we'll get the story in his words.  My mind leaps to the D.C. snipers with a younger brother in thrall of his elder.  Could be.

Or not.  Perhaps the criminal's words won't be the truth.  This might be a story of politics, or aspiring international terrorists of a controlling brother and a follower, of two equal collaborators raging against society, or extreme mental illness.  So many stories might fit the facts.

We keep rushing to these stories, hence the media's many mistakes over the course of the week.

Stories can be quickly written.  Explanations take time.  Our minds are built for narrative -- it's probably part of the evolutionary process, it's how we reason.  But it doesn't always serve us.

No real point to this except to observe that a week of chaotic news reminds us of what we already knew deep down, which is that life constantly defies our hunches and expectations.  In light of that, the political theater about who uses the word terrorism first when stuff like this happens seems pretty silly.