9/11/2009

From a 2001 story in New York magazine written a couple of weeks after the attacks, by David Carr:

# Everyone who comes after will never understand.
Not a new brand of New York provincialism but a cold fact. This is the place where the world seemed to end in a single morning. That day, as it was experienced here, was not televised.

# The jumpers will always be with us.

Faced with the most horrible of all human choices, the kind of riddle that grade-school children use to torture each other, many leaped rather than burn. And as the debris falling from the top anthropomorphized into human beings, people watching understood that for the time being, we were all beyond help. “I don’t remember faces, just bodies jumping out,” says Alexandra Rethore, a second-year analyst at Lehman Brothers. “And the girl next to me was hysterical. She kept saying, ‘They’re catching them, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, they’re catching them. Let’s go.’ ” It was a noble act, a message to loved ones: “I’m gone but not lost. I’m still here. Find me.”

18 Truths About the New New York (New York, 10-2001)

Worth reading today:
A Fortress City That Didn’t Come to Be (NYT, 09-2009)

What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media? (LA Weekly, 09-2009)