That one will stick with me for awhile
While picking out some orange juice at the market just now, I glanced at the expiration date. SEPT 11. Instead of thinking, "oh, that's a good one, that'll keep for awhile," I thought, of course, of 9/11.
Thinking back on September 11th
I wrote this almost a year ago when I was still trying to work through my feelings about the WTC/Pentagon bombings:
"I want to expand slightly on my statement on September 11th that 'this is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue'. It's not that America is the center of the world and, by extension, any problem that America has, the rest of the world has too. Certainly not. These terrorist actions are part of something larger than an 'Attack on America'...that's just too simplistic.
"As a planet, we're trying to deal with the consequences of the Cold War, living in a single superpower world, and the dramatically increased power of the small group & individual, as well as the age old problems of wealth, poverty, oppression, freedom, religious differences, and just plain getting enough food to eat for the people of your tribe without ruining things for the generation to come.
"When you look closely at the various peoples of the world, we have many more similarities to each other than differences. We're all dealing with the same problems, just from different perspectives. I just keep coming back to this photo of the earth rising over the moon taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Looking at that photo, the earth seems so small and fragile, like a soap bubble in the empty black of space, and I can't help thinking that we're all in this together, Americans, Afghanis, Saudi Arabians, New Yorkers, Australians, Israelis, blacks, whites, Asians, men, women, Moslems, Christians, atheists, Jews, etc., etc., etc."
I don't have anything more to say about it, I just wanted to remember the time, place, and personal feelings that generated it.
James Gleick on What Just Happened
James Gleick is one of my favorite authors, mainly because of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, a brilliant book. I went to see him tonight down in Menlo Park at Kepler's Bookstore; he was in town promoting his new book, a collection of essays on the Internet called What Just Happened.
From what I heard at the reading and what I've read of his writing about the Internet, what just happened was what happened with the telephone at the turn of the last century. It connected people, changed how people interacted with each other, shortened distances, and changed the world. Along the way, he mentioned how many felt wary of the Internet after 9/11 because the terrorists had used it to plan the attack, but how that could really be said about anything (as Matt said, it's silly to ban cell phones because they can be used for potentially illegal or otherwise bad activities).
So far, so good.
In the course of answering a question from the audience about the future of print journalism, Gleick made a curious argument for newspapers versus online media. He said that there's a quality associated with newspapers that the Web just can't match -- he cited weblogs at this point, which surprised the hell out of me -- and that the editing process and overall ideology of a newspaper like the NY Times is missing on the Web. The way in which he said it implied that this whatever-it-was just wasn't possible on the Web, which seemed odd in light of his earlier comments.
After the reading, we chatted with Gleick briefly about weblogs. He revealed that didn't much care for them, saying that perhaps it wasn't such a good thing that we now have thousands of people filling the Web with nothing. After hearing him extoll the virtues of the anything-goes Internet (and rightly so, in my view), I was very disappointed that he missed that same aspect when considering weblogs.
Steven Levy, writing for Newsweek about Living in the Blog-osphere, nails what Gleick missed:
"Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what's happening on Planet Blog don't go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what's happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives."
Help with a 9/11 project?
I got an email today from a Danish multimedia design student. He needs some help with a school project: he's looking for someone (age 16-25) that was in New York on September 11th of last year and was an eyewitness to the WTC collapse. That's all I know about the project. If you'd like to offer your assistance, email me and I'll send your contact information along to him. Thanks.
A change of heart
A would-be Palestinian suicide bomber has a near death experience:
"She wanted to be a shaheed [martyr], to blow herself up on an Israeli street and kill as many Jews as possible. The bomb was already strapped to her body. But on the way to the attack, she had a change of heart and returned home. Now the defense minister has come to ask her why: Why did she say yes at first - and why did she say no later? She looks into his eyes, searching for a hint of compassion."
These colors don't run but they can fade
The people in the apartment across the street have had an American flag hanging outside their second floor window since the day after 9/11. Looking out my window this morning, I noticed that the bottom of the flag is tattered from waving in the brisk San Francisco breeze for ten months. The top red stripe is seceding from the rest of the flag, the wind gradually tearing it away from the other twelve.
I wonder if they've forgotten about the flag and the reasons they bought it in the first place, the respect they must have felt for it then and the disrespect with which they are treating it now.
NY Times: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died
Some powerful journalism in the NY Times today: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died. It's an account of the people who didn't survive the attack on the WTC, pieced together from frantic phone calls and emails to friends and family. The Web version includes some well-done interactive pieces (a chronology and detailed annotated maps of the interior of the buildings) as well as full transcripts of the interviews and email texts used in writing the story (North Tower transcripts, South Tower transcripts).
Daniel Pearl execution video
I just watched the Daniel Pearl execution video. To say the least, it was disturbing. I'm not sure if I'm glad I watched it or not (if it helped my understanding of anything, etc.), but I am glad that I was able to make the decision without worrying about if my government or some network news department concerned with ratings wants me to or not.
War and blogs, what are they good for?
There's a warblogging book coming out.** No, that isn't a link to a story at The Onion...it's really happening. In all fairness, a collection of online writings about the events of September 11th with the proceeds going to charity sounds like a decent idea. It's interesting, possibly important, and it's doing some good. What I find curious is the agenda attached to it: "Let us crush the apologist/root-cause-spewing/Western-civilization-hating/lefty-fascist essayists with blogger logic and righteous indignation. This is a mission."
So, what are the choices here? Either a) everyone with a weblog is a hawkish right-wing Westerner; b) only those webloggers who are hawkish right-wing Westerners can submit something for consideration; or c) I'm not getting a joke here. What seems like an opportunity to take a balanced, accurate snapshot of what people all across the Web were writing online at the time of the events of 9/11 has somehow turned into us vs them. Isn't there enough us vs them going around these days? How about letting everyone play...or at least make folks who may not be right-wing or pro-West feel welcome to contribute?
Related topic: what the hell are the warbloggers going to talk about when the "war" is over? There will still be political issues and current events to yammer on about, but they seem to have a lot invested in that name. Maybe they could all turn their sites into a big online book club that only discusses H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
** I sincerely apologize for the weblog-related posts of the last two days...there are probably about 3 people out there who could give a shit. I promise that tomorrow I will return to posting about more important things like what I ate for breakfast, how freelancing sucks, my continuing battle with the shower, and how deeply I have been injured by the repeated disparagement of my personality (or lack thereof). Wait, that's no good either...
59th Annual Pictures of the Year International Competition
Instead of attending to my work and errands this morning, I spent about an hour looking through the winning photographs in the 59th Annual Pictures of the Year International Competition. I could write up descriptions of my favorite entries with words like "arresting" and "poignant", but my weak prose can't do justice to the photos themselves. Just go have a look.
Terrorism, Nonlinearity & Complex Adaptive Systems
Terrorism, Nonlinearity & Complex Adaptive Systems: "The events on 11 Sep 2001 were a tragic, but decisive, reminder of the emergence of a formidable new kind of 'enemy' in the world; an enemy that is widely dispersed, decentralized and whose many destructive parts are autonomous, mobile, and highly adaptive. The need for developing new complex systems theory inspired analytical tools and models for understanding the dynamics of this threat (and for providing insights into how to combat it) has never been greater."
Here is New York
Uncomfortable juxtapostion: visiting the new Prada store in SoHo followed by a visit to the Here is New York photo exhibit. Shopping has always made me uncomfortable, but I felt positively unclean after coming out of the exhibit, like I needed a shower.
BTW, if you have any WTC photos, you might want to contribute them to the Here is New York project. Having experienced the exhibit, I can say it's for a good cause.
P2P journalism not picked up?
I'm really surprised that this first-hand account of last week's attempted shoe bombing didn't get picked up by more weblogs and news outlets. I'm mentioning it again because I think it's a great example of a type of journalism that just didn't happen before the Internet.
Weblog account of shoe bombing
A first-hand account of the attempted shoe bombing earlier this week: "The staff get his shoes off (we wonder why?), his bag, his passport, maybe some drugs. Strong men are chosen to restrain him (they are relieved later on). The captain announces that we will be landing at Boston instead of Miami and that we'll be escorted by fighter pilots." via bb.
September 11th photos and eyewitness accounts of the WTC and Pentagon bombings
Note: Many of these links are broken. One of these days, I'm going to clean them up as much as I can. -jkottke, 5/27/02
Some reports from the scene, in NY:
- eyewitness video of 2nd plane crashing into WTC
(fast mirror @ apple, mirror01, mirror02, mirror03, mirror04 (de))
- First-hand photos of someone fleeing the WTC and the aftermath. Amazing stuff.
- Video of the second plane crash (if you look carefully, you can see the plane approaching from the left)
- eerie time lapse of both towers burning and collapsing
(mirror01)
- photo of plane just before it hit WTC #2
- amazing photo of second plane crash taken by an amateur photographer
- some photos on Ultradio (almost artistic)
- Blogger search for "World Trade"
- Sara Schwittek (pix)
- Poignant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow
- Super Hyper Demon Child (scroll for pix)
- MetaFilter thread (w/pix)
- some pictures of tower collapsing
- Planet Kevin (pix)
- Animus Rex (pix)
- John C. Glass (pix, especially this and this)
- The Fine Line (text and pix)
- Like an orb (pix)
- Steve Riskus (pix in DC seconds after the Pentagon crash)
- Lackadaisical (pix)
- Lightning Field (w/pix)
- toothpickgirl (w/pix)
- guns media (pix)
- wireless NY (pix)
- Place Name Here (pix)
- Before pictures of the WTC by Dale Sorenson (pix)
- Missing Pieces @ {fray}.
- Lots of first-hand accounts on this Slashdot thread
- lots of stories from stinky.com
- potkettleblack in DC
- Brian Bernstein (in-building acct.)
- The Tin Man
- Netwert IdeaPad
- Exegesis
- Dirt Dirt
- Broadwaystars.com
- primenumber.com in DC
- CamWorld
- pic on momus
- Michelle in DC
- allenplummer.com
- Saranwarp
- Mr. Barrett
- Q Daily News
- World New York
- bgirl
Misc. Stuff
- Some links about talking to children about crisis and trauma
- lots of video from the day (very fast and high bandwidth connection)
- Check to see if people are OK in NY
- A chronology of what happened from CNN
- a design piece from testpilotcollective
- Tara has a resource page up at Research Buzz
Some personal thoughts (I want to get these down to read later):
- I have no context for this. Challenger times 1000. Comparable to Pearl Harbor, but I didn't live thru that.
- All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.
- I'm so scared right now. I don't want to hear any reports of Americans grabbing the nearest Arab and beating the crap out of him or her. Don't do it. Please.
- Some people cope by hearing and distributing information in a crisis. I'm one of those people, I guess. Makes me feel like I'm doing something useful for those that can't do anything. Or something.
- I'm planning on travelling by air twice in the next month, one flight overseas. I'm not so sure now.
