Some people still think knowledge is power.

We can guarantee advertisers a highly invested readership. Outside, it's colder already.

Back at the City Room, I ask my editor to do me a little favor.

I think maybe I've found a pattern. It looks as if every parent might have read the same poem out loud to their child the night before it died.

"All five?" he says.

I say, let's try a little experiment.

This is late in the evening, and we're both tired from a long day. We're sitting in his office, and I tell him to listen.

It's an old song about animals going to sleep. It's wistful and sentimental, and my face feels livid and hot with oxygenated hemoglobin while I read the poem out loud under the fluorescent lights, across a desk from my editor with his tie undone and his collar open, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. His mouth is open a little, his teeth and his coffee mug are stained the same coffee brown.

What's good is we're alone, and it only takes a minute.

At the end, he opens his eyes and says, "What the fuck was that supposed to mean?"

Duncan, his eyes are green.

His spit lands in little cold specks on my arm, bringing germs, little wet buckshot, bringing viruses. Brown coffee saliva.

I say I don't know. The book calls it a culling song. In some ancient cultures, they sang it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land. You sing it to warriors crippled in battle and people stricken with disease, anyone you hope will die soon. To end their pain. It's a lullaby.

As far as ethics, what I've learned is a journalist's job isn't to judge the facts. Your job isn't to screen information. Your job is to collect the details. Just what's there. Be an impartial witness. What I know now is someday you won't think twice about calling those parents back on Christmas Eve.