9/11 Remembered

For people in my demographic (early thirties), 9/11 will be our 12/7 (December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor). But unlike 12/7, 9/11 has a resonance that's aided by the deep offerings of our modern media. There will be so many ways, so many angles, so many television channels (!) to remember what happened that fateful day last year. Last year!

CBS will be rebroadcasting 9/11, a film by Frenchmen Jules and Gedeon Naudet, and I highly recommend watching this. The brothers were filming a documentary about firefighters, when both suddenly found themselves in the middle of "the most audacious attacks" the United States has ever seen. It's chilling to watch the footage from inside the towers that terrible day.

Last Sunday, the NY Times ran a magnificent article about the building of the World Trade Center. It's a mind boggling story. There was a tremendous amount of political fighting surrounding the project. There were also struggles in designing and then building this landmark. The frightening thought of an airplane striking the towers was actually articulated in 1968 by one of the owners of the Empire State Building, Lawrence Wien. The authors James Glanz and Eric Lipton suggest that the towers could have been safer, in its design, and in its construction. Super writing. The kind of article that I wish could have been longer.