Referring to his late but hard-won graduation this summer, one of Michael Brown’s high school teachers told the Washington Post, "In the last two months, man, Mike was there every doggone day and he was giving it his full effort." In the past 24 hours, more details are filtering out about the life of 18-year-old Brown, cut down in Ferguson, Missouri, by a still unreleased number of police-issue bullets. Below, here’s today’s wrap-up of reporting or commentary that helps cut through the noise of this national story (or, that just makes me think). Let’s go.

"We don’t need to keep talking about [Mike Brown’s] college plans to communicate that his killing was dead wrong." Or do we? Would Ferguson have protested under similarly suspicious shooting circumstances for a more questionable kid? Would Ferguson be national news if Brown wasn’t a "gentle giant?" Whatever your position on the need for victims to be innocent in order to get justice, check out parent Jasmine Banks’s provocative essay.

Writing for Essence.com, ProPublica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones calls out national media for overlooking critical details in Ferguson and hewing to the official police version of events last Saturday. "The reliance on law enforcement to provide the official record of a shooting it was involved in is highly problematic," she says. "Over and over again, we’ve seen the first reports on police shootings contain errors or just be plain wrong. For instance, in the July death of Eric Garner in New York, an internal police report did not mention the chokehold used on Garner and said that Garner was not in ‘great distress.’"

Why did Ferguson explode this weekend? The definitive account is still a ways off. But in the search for answers, it appears that local concerns about racial profiling, residential segregation, police diversity and more are being explored with a new intensity and purpose.

And finally, in "Why you’ve been seeing young kids at Ferguson crime scenes," Post-Dispatch reporter Aisha Sultan gives voice to families in the neighborhood.

As always, feel free to add to this list. See you back here tomorrow.