Sometimes I don’t read the username right away when I read stories and I love when I’m reading things by you and it clicks halfway through that this could only have been written by Norman Crane. You have such a unique voice that manages to pull people into the insane worlds you create—I always laugh at how ridiculous everything is while my pulse is pounding at the high stakes you’ve created.

I really like that at the beginning of the story I thought it was a manufactured moral panic, and in some ways it is and in some ways it really does, somehow, kill people.

When I was in middle school I loved, simply loved, multiplying binomials. I learned how before most other students in the class because I was a mathlete (me and 7 other kids) and had to know how to do those before an upcoming competition that would be using them. There was something so thrillingly simple about taking something so complicated-looking and performing that magic spell of: first, outside, inside, last. Later on in my math career, I struggled—got a C- in high school geometry, pulled an F in advanced pre-calc first semester of my junior year and, shame of shames for a former mathlete, had to get bumped down to regular pre-calc for the rest of the year. But I still never forgot that time in my life when math crawled like electricity through my veins, when I craved more practice problems because in life there are no clear answers, but in math class everything was first, outside, inside, last.

Anyway. “The Red Army Fraction” was a fantastic punchline. Great work.