"Autumn Fern" photographed in the Nordic Valley area of Eden, Utah by Rory Wallwork

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It's been 10 years since Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming, ran into two young men at a bar in Laramie who robbed him, drove him to the edge of town, tied him to a wooden fence and struck him 18 times in the head with a .357-caliber Magnum handgun before leaving him to die.

This weekend National Public Radio looks back on how the murder turned Laramie into "the country's newest symbol of hate," and also how it deeply affected the journalists who covered it.

The phrasing of the sign struck me as imprecise and perhaps even a little sinister, kind of like the announcements we keep hearing from the federal government about the financial crisis. Either you are closed today, or you are closed until you can get your oven fixed, but ovens are complex devices and it could conceivably take more than a day to fix one. Likewise, either we need to spend $700 billion buying distressed mortgage securities, or we need to nationalize the banks, but maybe next time you could make up your mind before giving the first panicky press conferences?