You’re reading Critic’s Notebook , our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.

More pedestrians than not pause at a street memorial under an elevated section of the J and Z lines in North Brooklyn. This behavior is unusual. New York City is full of remorseless individualists who nonetheless stick to some codes very rigidly. When you encounter a memorial during your commute, the paying of respect is the quickening of your walk, the feigning of a blank mind, the averting of your gaze. And yet these pedestrians are forgetting themselves; they are slowing to a complete halt at this one altar because it is a display of something uniquely upsetting: the grief of adolescents. Nested in the recess of a steel column, there are bodega flowers, there are v

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