Good morning. We have news — on the war in Iran, artificial intelligence and Kawhi Leonard — below. But first, I’m going to hand things over to my editor, Adam Kushner, to talk about the meaning of 9/11. (All of the links related to the anniversary are free to read.)
25 years of 9/11After an airliner hit the first tower, my dad rang. “Some idiot has flown a plane into the World Trade Center,” he told my roommate, who woke me up with the news. We were in our college dorm a few miles north of the site, and we figured it was a freak accident. When the next plane struck, we knew it wasn’t. From our building, we could see the smoke column rising over Lower Manhattan. “All of us who were around then have our stories,” Dan Barry, who saw the plumes from a ferry that morning, writes in an elegy to “the memory of what you’d rather not remember.” For our journalists, it was a hometown tragedy. The Times has chronicled every chapter of the 9/11 saga — the wars and their costs; the transformation of politics and culture and law and technology; the attackers and the victims. On this 25th anniversary, reporters and critics are reflecting. Today, we offer a few ways to understand the meaning of 9/11. What we lived through
Grief. It is famously not a thing you can pack away neatly with the passage of time. But I was moved by the story of Jacob Campbell, who was a 10-month-old baby when his mom died in the south tower. Sept. 11 haunted him into adulthood and drove him to booze, weed and suicidal thoughts. What brought him back from the brink? He realized what his grandparents had done in giving him a happy childhood. As he put it: “There are people out there who are in the midst of tragedy, and are helped. There is love in the world in equal measure to the suffering.” Consequences. Many Americans joined the armed forces. We profile three whose service changed them. One 19-year-old became a machine gunner and eventually rose to squad leader in Iraq. Today his right arm is wrapped in a black tattoo scattered with skulls — one for each person he killed in Ramadi. “Only two of them I regret,” he said. “One, I threw a hand grenade through a window, and it killed a 16-year-old boy. Another, we blew a door in not knowing Grandma was right on the other side.” In New York, a wave of Islamophobia made neighbors suddenly suspicious of one another. Muslims in the city also became more politically engaged. A generation later, the city has a Muslim mayor whose efforts to observe the anniversary have not always been welcome. Justice. Kenneth Feinberg had the strange job of deciding how much government money to award the surviving family members. He saw their pain up close. Some bridled at the idea that money could make them whole. A husband contemplating a $4 million payout snapped: “I got a better idea. Bring my wife back.” In this quiet portrait, Feinberg wonders whether a spiritual leader might have been better equipped for his task. Normalcy. Listen to this terrific conversation between our critics Wesley Morris and Jason Zinoman about how 9/11 changed comedy. The weeks after the attack were awkward: On the return of “Saturday Night Live,” the NBC impresario Lorne Michaels asked Rudy Giuliani, “Can we be funny again?” The mayor’s reply: “Why start now?” A new direction. The Times’s editorial board looks at the U.S. response. It argues that the government showed resolve and sought justice, admirably and correctly, but that it also bumbled by trying to rebuild Afghanistan, launching the Iraq war under false pretenses, torturing prisoners and spying on citizens. What remains unresolved
The forever war. Al Qaeda, the terrorist group American troops went abroad to fight in the weeks after 9/11, is still a force in Afghanistan. By one estimate, the war on terror cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. This collection of images from 25 years of conflict is sobering. (The photograph from a 2009 suicide bombing in Kabul, in particular, has stayed with me all this time.) The site. A quarter-century after the attack, the apartment building designed to replace 5 World Trade Center still hasn’t gone up. Around the corner, the 9/11 Museum is struggling to stay afloat. About one in three Americans was born after Sept. 11; it may have shaped their lives, but their memories are not seared. The historical significance. At the time, it seemed that something was ending and another thing, maybe worse, was beginning. But was it? Charles Homans argues that life does not divide into neat geopolitical demarcations. Instead, 9/11 “is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning.” For more
102 minutes— That’s how long it took after the first impact for the second of the two buildings, the north tower, to collapse. What happened in between? In 2002, Times journalists gathered phone conversations, emails and voice messages of people’s final moments. In many cases, they are the only window we have onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at a brutal time. Please read it.
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Untouched for centuries: Ancient Chimu tombs recently discovered in northern Peru are the first of their kind to be found undisturbed by looters. See what was inside. Your pick: The most clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about Trump’s makeover of Space Force uniforms. Lives Lived: In 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama became the first Japanese person and the first journalist in space. He didn’t like it and his complaints earned him the nickname “space antihero.” He died at 84.
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