My college magazine featured alumni David Friend and his book about the 9/11 attacks.
The book, which I don’t have yet, sounds fascinating – seeing the effect of the attacks through the images that define the experience for most of us and most of the world:

Conceived by Osama bin Laden as the toppling of an image of America right before the world’s eyes, the tragedy swiftly came to be defined by photography, as families posted snapshots of their loved ones, police sought terrorists’ faces on security-camera videotapes, and officials recorded the devastation and identified the dead.

That resonates for me with what I wrote that week, how I felt the attacks hardest as an attack on New York’s integrity “as a collection of images. … Pick up the phone, there will be a dial tone. Look downtown, you’ll see the skyline the way it was yesterday. … The skyline is as basic to who we are here as the accents, the team logos, the yellow paint on the traffic lights, the order of the avenues we learn like the list of English vowels. …”

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