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After

By

On September 11, 2026

In writing

I was a junior in college on September 11. Coming back to work at the university where I completed my undergraduate degree has brought plenty of déjà vu moments—not to mention the surreal feeling of seeing my children walk the sidewalks I once walked as a student—but today, twenty-five years after the attacks, I became aware that there was a lot of time and space between then and now.

All of it can be classified as after.

Just as there were on the fifth and tenth and twentieth anniversaries of that clear-blue Tuesday, today’s news has featured a parade of recollections, photos and videos just as fresh in my mind as they were a quarter century ago. There have been a few stories I hadn’t heard, new chapters to consider.

For the first time, there is a focus on the generation that was born and has come of age in the span of days since our national frame was shattered.

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Battle Hymn for a Weary Republic

By

On September 7, 2021

In writing

It is quite easy to forget that on the morning of September 11th, very few people thought that the twin towers would actually fall, that the audacious spires of steel and glass and concrete would betray the rescuers climbing heavenward inside their cramped stairwells, and give out, and vanish in enormous clouds of dust. Instead, we imagined the fires would be extinguished, that the buildings would be fixed, and our lives as we had known them until that point would simply continue.

We were wrong.

“Oh my God.”

You can go back and find full broadcast episodes of the major network morning shows from the morning of September 11th and see for yourself how naïve we all were. Five minutes after the first plane struck the north tower, Good Morning America‘s Diane Sawyer returned from an otherwise mundane commercial break to carefully attempt to describe what becomes the first of many horrific and unprecedented television images from that Tuesday.

The slow, deliberate pace with which Sawyer describes the scene–the tower, captured from a news chopper, a black scar high across its upper reaches, fatally engulfed–exemplifies the relative innocence we all woke up with that morning.

“We want to tell you what we know as we know it,” Sawyer says, a look of concern on her face. “One report said–and we can’t confirm any of this–is that a plane may have hit one of the two towers.”

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911morning

We are Stewards of the New America

By

On September 11, 2016

In writing

9/11 essay

One of the more poignant stories I’ve heard this week, as the media performs its annual retrospective of terror, is an NPR StoryCorps interview with Vaughn Allex, the poor fellow working the American Airlines front desk who checked in everyone on Flight 77. He remembered all of the people who came through—an older couple, a student tour group—and, finally, two men running late, who turned out to be the terrorists responsible for crashing the plane into the Pentagon. His guilt was like a millstone about his neck.

Then there was another profile, this time in Esquire, this time about the iconic photograph Richard Drew captured of a man hurtling through space after jumping from the molten crown of the Twin Towers. Its subject, dubbed “the Falling Man,” inspired a search among that Tuesday morning’s victims to uncover an identity—a name, a story, anything that would fill in the heart-stopping vacuum of space in which he dives death-ward.

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