This is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
The moment
This photo was taken by Robert Clark from the window of his studio in Brooklyn.
Quote of the Day
“At most 5,000 vehicles will be built. Because there are not more chauffeurs to drive them”.
- Gottlieb Daimler, founder of DMG, in 1895.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Requiem | Lacrimosa
Long Reads of the Day
1 Jeff Jarvis’s 9/11 story
Jeff is a great journalist and a distinguished teacher of journalism. He arrived at the World Trade Centre from the train just as the first plane hit and stayed to report. He was a block from the South Tower when it fell, enveloping him “in the dust of destruction”. “In th 25 years since,” he wrote, “many, including me, have ongoing health issues. I don’t know to this day what the effect is on children, including mine.”
He wrote a vivid memoir of what happened to him afterwards, of which this is the first section.
Yes, I am blessed to be alive.
I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed Tuesday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.
As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams…
Read on.
2 Tina Brown’s recollection
From her diary…
Tuesday, September 11, 2001 is a famously glorious blue-sky morning, the air so clear and crisp, you feel you can see all the way to L.A. or London. At Talk’s offices, an old piano factory in Chelsea, two miles north of the swanky financial district, we are all at work early closing the November issue. An editorial assistant rushes into the art department, where we are choosing photographs from Fashion Week: “Can you believe it? A plane has flown straight into the World Trade Center!”
We crowd into the elevator and hurry to the corner of 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, which offers a straight-on view of the Twin Towers, downtown. The clarity of the air provides to our astounded eyes a giant smoking rip across the face of the north tower. Some awful accident? A crowd starts to build, young downtowners heading for work with their brown bags of coffee and bagels.
We are still frozen in incredulity when the second jetliner knifes through the south tower. Collective disbelief turns to fear. A woman in jogging clothes starts to cry. Two hotshots who have been offering surefooted disaster opinions grow suddenly quiet. This isn’t, after all, going to be a tabloid drama we can understand about crazy pilot error and dramatic rooftop rescues. Something incomprehensible is happening, something terribly wrong.
The trunk of a car is open, with a boombox radio inside it. The driver turns up the volume. Everyone clusters around to hear fragments of news that only feed the rising panic. And then the unthinkable happens. The south tower buckles, drops in slow motion, vanishes. Then the north tower. Suddenly, we are all holding hands and sobbing. “My children!” yells a previously buttoned-up young woman in a business suit. “I’ve got to get home!”
The weeping cluster disperses to begin the trek through the dust to collect their loved ones wherever they are. That night, in our 57th Street apartment I hold my own 11-year-old daughter close. It is just the two of us here, with Georgie at boarding school in Connecticut and my husband secluded in our house in Quogue writing a book. In the small hours, Izzy is frightened and climbs into my bed. “It’s that funny smell,” she keeps saying. “What is it? What is it?” The wind has changed. I don’t tell her it is the smell of death.
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