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In the blurred hours after the 9/11 attacks, I sent out a brief edition of NextDraft. In part, I wrote, In the coming days, there will be much analysis about the performance of the U.S. Intelligence agencies, investigations into these acts and undoubtedly, severe and swift retaliations. But for now, the focus must be on downtown New York, where people wait for word on what will be grim, horrific, and historic numbers of deaths. Twenty-five years later, I suggest we return to Ground Zero once again, to mourn the loss and celebrate the lives of those first responders who ran into collapsing towers while everyone else was trying to run out.
In The Atlantic, Sally Jenkins cuts through the rubble of a quarter century’s worth of politics, wars, conspiracy theories, rage, and history to zoom in on the life of one family. “Twenty-five years after the attacks, ‘Never Forget’ is a T-shirt slogan. A third of the American public is too young to recall that day. Anniversaries have become rote rituals in which politicians describe scenes they did not witness and national unity that no longer exists. To get beyond the benumbed abstraction, it’s necessary to remember with specificity. September 11 was a lived event. One way to recall it meaningfully, then, is through a life.” Kevin Dowdell was a firefighter who was known for taking extreme risks to save people under extreme distress. “The bigger the fire, the calmer Kevin acted.”
But this was different. As his crew reached the site of the towers, “a torrent of debris fell from the buildings—shredded metal and insulation, chunks of concrete, shivering glass shards—amid an earsplitting clamor of sirens and screaming. Torsos, luggage, and aluminum scraps of 767s were strewn on the sidewalks. What looked like splashes of red paint on the plazas were the remains of jumpers who had pinwheeled from the upper floors of the North Tower. Kevin ran into a stunned fellow lieutenant named Robert LaRocco, from Ladder 9, who had seen a severed forearm with a perfectly manicured hand. LaRocco managed to get a call through to his wife. He told her, ‘It’s raining people.’” It was raining people, and still Kevin and so many other first responders ran toward the destruction. Kevin Dowdell often told his sons, “Don’t sit on the sidelines. Make things happen. Do things.” Little did they know that one day, doing things would include searching for their father amid the unthinkable ruins in downtown NYC. The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines.
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War, What Was It Good For?
In the 25 years since 9/11, we’ve fought a so-called war on terror. On one very obvious level, we’ve had success. There hasn’t been another 9/11-like act on American soil. On other levels, it’s unclear that we’ve made a lot of progress, especially considering that “our several military campaigns against extremism around the world [have resulted] in the deaths of almost a million people.” In The New Yorker, Robin Wright looks at what we’ve accomplished and what we’ve lost in our quarter-century war. The U.S. Was Never Going to Win the War on Terror. (Alt link.)
+ “She says it felt like just another job, and a duty to the city that had welcomed her. Like a lot of people who went to clean up at ground zero, she went armed only with her house-cleaning gear: a paper mask and rubber gloves. The hours were long. ‘We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust,’ she recalls. ‘Then we’d go home wearing the same clothing we’d been working in.’ Since then, Lucelly has battled breast cancer and respiratory disease. She is among the tens of thousands whose health was severely compromised by exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic debris the tower’s collapse released into the air.” NPR: They cleaned up Ground Zero. Now many are hiding from ICE.
+ You’d think a person who lied about his actions related to something as solemn as 9/11 would be forever shunned. Not elected president, twice. The muted response to Trump’s 9/11 fantasy is a media failure.
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The Giving and Taking Tree
“An open letter, entitled ‘Pacing the Frontier,’ had begun to circulate among the leading A.I. labs. This letter called on the U.S. government to build an international regulatory body for AI ... I have covered Silicon Valley for some time now and I can tell you this: The existence of this letter is just as astonishing as the hacks. Both Anthropic, the developer of Claude, and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, are preparing trillion-dollar I.P.O.s. Here are two companies, both posting blockbuster results, that are asking — begging, really — for the U.S. government to please come and regulate them as soon as possible. We have never seen anything like it.” Stephen Witt in the NYT (Gift Article): This Is Really Bad. (In retrospect, that would have been a good name for this publication.)
+ Even if we build guardrails and even under the best circumstances, it seems inevitable that the rise of AI and other technologies is destined to level the military playing field. NYT: Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Anthropic Says US Adversaries Aimed Claude at Weapons Research. And from AP: Users in Houthi-held Yemen tried to develop advanced weapons with AI. (To think this all started because we wanted a place to share cat photos with our friends.)
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Weekend Whats
What to Rock: Here’s the official video from the first seven songs of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band’s Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour’s Philadelphia finale. The rest of the concert will be released in additional segments. But this will give you the idea. And then some.
+ What to Watch: The Office spinoff series, The Paper just dropped season two on Peacock. It’s a fun, light comedy that will take your mind off the stress of global conflicts, raging politics, and this weekend’s US Open matches.
+ What to Book: Fruit Fly by Josh Silver is a novel about a struggling writer who appropriates the life of a much more struggling drug addict to write her next book. The novel features a television executive, reads like a series, and has already been optioned by A24. So read it now and I’ll include it in the What to Watch section later.
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Extra, Extra
Strait Flushed: “That loss leaves Trump, who had been hoping to win back control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, with a bitter surprise. His enemies now control both of the two important straits in the Middle East, through which a combined total of about a third of the world’s oil shipments pass every day. It also underscores a stubborn fact: For all the setbacks suffered by Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ over the past year or two, its forces retain an ideological fervor and an esprit de corps that is sorely lacking on the other side. The Gulf states’ failure to work together against the Houthis has been catastrophic, and it echoes Trump’s own failure to devise a plausible or coordinated strategy against Iran.” Robert F Worth: Trump Loses the Other Strait. Meanwhile, “Trump held at least two phone conversations with the Saudi leader on Thursday, sources said. In the end, Washington told Riyadh that it was not willing to take direct military action for now but would help with intelligence sharing and targeting, the two sources said.
+ It Was a Helluva Run: The largest ever outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the U.S. is officially over. (That’s according to the CDC, which makes this seem like a smart time to buy toilet paper futures.)
+ Talarico Suave: Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico was not televised because of threats from the FCC. So they put it on YouTube. It has more than 3 million views so far. Let’s add to that number.
+ They Made Each Other a Pledge: