The first people in line on Tuesday, I was told, started camping out on the sidewalk two days ago. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, was due in court at 9AM ET for a hearing in one of three concurrent criminal cases against him. And this time everyone was prepared for the mayhem: the signs, the fans, the livestreamers, the protests, the media circus. That’s why the line started even earlier than last time — the people who really wanted to get in to see him knew that no time was too early.
Mangione is both ubiquitous and fleeting. The last time the public saw him (aside from a bizarre, unauthorized appearance in a men’s shirt listing on Shein) was in February at this same courthouse in Manhattan, when hundreds of members of the general public and media convened for a routine pretrial hearing. He exists in memes, in passing references, and in content moderation decisions, and he lives rent-free in the mind of Donald Trump — yet most people are likely not thinking or talking about Mangione day to day. They are reminded of him when new photos drop or when there are incremental updates in the cases against him. But the wall-to-wall coverage of the case has waned, and it’s the people who are the most tapped in that are working to keep interest in the case alive. Mangione and the larger discussions around healthcare reform are one item in a list of approximately 8,000 pressing topics swirling in the US. How do you keep attention and energy alive in an information ecosystem defined by its fragmentation?
Read Article >There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if there’s a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm — unclear if it’s from the bodies or the heat — and it’s a little smelly, which could just be me but I don’t think it is. I estimate between 100 and 150 people are hanging around, waiting for 2:15PM to roll around, their anticipation building. This is not a club with a strict bouncer, though it feels like it. This is the Luigi Mangione hearing.
The hearing is a relatively minor pre-trial status update, but for the people most tapped in, there is a lot riding on it — the Luigi info-drip has been a bit dry lately. Court dates for the 26 year old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December keep getting pushed back. Mangione, who is currently being held in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail, has not made a public appearance since before Christmas. (Mangione is accused of gunning down Thompson in December outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, and has pleaded not guilty.) On TikTok, commenters regularly complain that they haven’t seen Luigi on their For You page in months. When Mangione’s legal team launched a new website with updates on the case, a flood of donations came pouring into his legal fund — more than half a million dollars as of this writing.
Read Article >Luigi Mangione has been inescapable, hasn’t he? His face is all over my social media feeds. Outlet after outlet — some mainstream, some otherwise — have published stories about the video games he liked, his Reddit comments, his Goodreads page, his political ideology, his back pain. Mangione is not merely an accused murderer; he is a celebrity.
There was a time, fairly recently, when it was felt that the best practice in a high-profile shooting was to avoid publicizing the accused killer’s identity and detailing the method by which it was accomplished. The idea, as articulated by Zeynep Tufekci in 2012, was that highly publicized killings functioned as a kind of social contagion; murder as a kind of advertisement for the shooter’s manifesto. Social media platforms generally scrubbed the profiles of people accused of high-profile killings; as recently as 2020, Facebook suppressed searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse,” after he was charged with murder.
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OpenAI just made another circular deal