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Reminders of Irish America’s lethal impact played out every day on the streets of Belfast and Derry, but there was something more intimate, and horrifying, about seeing those tallies laid out one by one, every bullet wound and body that was felled by an American trigger. Among them was a curious toddler named Andrew Fennel who had walked outside his family home in Belfast, wandering near the cars that were parked on the street. There, underneath one of them, the boy had found a Magnum handgun—bought in the States, investigators would later determine—and pressed the trigger. It was a passing bread man who found him, collecting his small bloodied body and rushing him to Royal Victoria Hospital. Whether the gun had been dropped there or stashed, no one could know. But at three years old, a little boy shot himself in the head with an American gun on a Belfast street.

— Next One Is for You by Ali Watkins (68%)

Facing the threat of prison, Duffy got his own lawyer and agreed to the man's defense strategy: Duffy needed to distance himself from Cahalane and Byrne. It would be an uphill battle, the man warned him, but Duffy ought to fight for a severed case, or at least claim that he had never purchased a gun for the IRA.

"He's a pacifist," a friend said of Duffy at the time to the newspapers. "He's been raising money for a Catholic glass factory in Derry. Based on a lot of knowledge, Dan Duffy has never been involved in anything illicit."

Not everyone had such harmless views of Duffy, though. Someone, clearly, was watching and didn't like what they saw.

Around the time of the indictment, Duffy's teenage daughter found a blank envelope stuffed in their mailbox. Inside was a note, with no return address. "You are brave enough to send the guns to kill others but not brave enough to stand up and do battle yourself," the note said. Tucked inside the fold of the envelope was a bullet, with a chilling message: "The next one is for you."

— Next One Is for You by Ali Watkins (63%)

If there was a place that crystallized the Northern Irish conflict, Derry, and Bogside within, was it. The very name of the place—Derry, or Londonderry—carried a dark political weight, laden with centuries of meaning. Your chosen descriptor revealed your own loyalties: Derry, if you were Irish: Londonderry, if you were Unionist. It was a tough place to grow up, and a tough place to stay in, and Duffy hadn’t, as much as he’d wanted to. The city was defined by oppression, and for Duffy and his Irish Catholic neighbors, this meant fewer jobs, flimsy housing, and the constant threat of Unionist police forces and the Loyalist gangs they tacitly encouraged.

— Next One Is for You by Ali Watkins (28%)

One doctor noticed something particularly chilling: gunshot wounds coming from West Belfast and Derry were no longer the moderately traumatic result of antiquated weapons. Instead, emergency wards were seeing severe injuries, indicative of high-velocity guns whose bullets tore through their targets with explosive force.

— Next One Is for You by Ali Watkins (25%)

In Northern Ireland, partition resulted in a deeply segregated, unequal society, where gerrymandered districts ensured that Catholic residents would remain in the minority, subject to widespread discrimination in almost every aspect of daily life, from housing to employment to education. Catholic schools were less resourced. Catholic housing was sparse and poorly maintained. A Catholic surname got you passed over for jobs, if you even got the chance to apply. Nowhere, perhaps, were these forces felt as potently as in Belfast and Derry, Northern Ireland’s two largest, most deeply divided cities. There, tensions over these skewed realities simmered for years, threatening to boil over at any moment.

— Next One Is for You by Ali Watkins (15%)

I mentioned the conversation I had with Yehuda Bauer on this question: "Bauer told me one can't believe that God is both all-powerful and good because if he's omnipotent, then he's Satan for not having intervened."

"Yes, absolutely," Bullock said. "Never believe God is omnipotent."

— Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum (25%)

"If you ask me what I think evil is," Alan (now Lord) Bullock was saying as we approached the soot-begrimed, gargoyle-encrusted facade of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, "it's the Incomplete."

"The Incomplete?"

"In the sense it has a yet-to-be-brought-into-being quality, yes," he said.

— Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum (22%)

It might be said that the marginalization of Hitler in contemporary thought is an analogue of the "death of the author" vogue in contemporary literary theory: the Holocaust as a "text" produced not by human agency but somehow, autonomously, inevitably, by culture and language.

— Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum (5%)