But assigning motives is a misleading practice and most often an ungenerous one.
And in recounting the murder, for which both killers are serving life sentences, Loffreda appreciates the difficulty of assigning motives: "Discriminatory violence is rarely fully plotted... it is far more often a bleak and ugly blur of knee-jerk discomfort".
A well-chosen cocktail cements the personality of the character, assigning motives, attitudes, and background with a simple sip.
"I have seen no particular evidence of Boko Haram even targeting Western facilities," said John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria who is now an Africa analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, adding that "we have to be terribly careful" when assigning motives to the group.
Russian officials did not immediately assign motive or blame, but images on television today showed a fierce firefight erupting outside the building after the bombing.
The point here is not to assign motives, as they can't be known and don't finally matter; moreover, the critic does a personal disservice to his psyche when he habitually assumes bad faith.
The senators' letter steered clear of assigning any motive to the Bush administration's position.
The trajectory of that mythmaking, usually communicated through the news media, is consistent: Focus on the perpetrators rather than the victims, assign motive as rapidly as possible, and start speaking of "closure" and "healing" as if those psychobabble constructions were as definable and exact as days of the week.
"I'm not assigning political motives," he said, but the seed was planted.
The White House did not let a single news cycle go by before questioning that the alleged encounter between the president and Clarke had ever taken place, assigning dark motives to a man who has served four presidents, three of them Republicans.
The scientists I spoke with are very cautious about assigning any motives to the media's "room-for-doubt" reporting on global warming.
