Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’ intrepid book reviewer, had a front-page piece in  Wednesday’s edition detailing the digital doings of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Unraveling Boston Suspects’ Online Lives, Link by Link

It is America’s first fully interactive national tragedy of the social media age.

The Boston Marathon bombings quickly turned into an Internet mystery that sent a horde of amateur sleuths surging onto the Web in a search for clues to the suspects’ identity. And once the search focused on Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers’ social media postings provided a rich vein of material to mine and sift.

There are more than a thousand messages on Dzhokhar’s Twitter account in addition to a profile page on VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site, and in Tamerlan’s case, a list of favorite videos on YouTube and what appears to be an Amazon wish list belonging to him (Amazon would not confirm whose list it was, citing its privacy policy.)

These posts instantly became dots that people began trying to connect.

Which Kakutani proceeds to do at length.

Whatever you think of the Times, this is worth reading.