Scott Raab

A look at the power, money and politics behind building the Freedom Tower that has delayed its completion:

“The PA is run by a board of twelve unpaid commissioners, six appointed by New York’s governor, six by New Jersey’s. Traditionally, the board chair is a New Jersey commissioner, and the executive director — effectively the Port’s CEO — is selected by the governor of New York. In theory, the idea — a product of the Progressive Era of American politics — was to create a quasi-governmental corporation, self-supporting, free of corruption, and insulated from partisanship.

“In practice, the PA has yielded to the surrounding political culture. From 1942 until 1971, the PA’s executive director was Austin Tobin, the strongman who built the World Trade Center. More powerful than any elected official, Tobin used the PA’s power of eminent domain to seize those sixteen acres and erect the Twin Towers, the world’s two tallest buildings when they were completed in 1973, steamrolling the city’s private real estate developers, who found it unsporting that a regional transportation agency would flood New York with more than ten million square feet of office space for lease.

“Austin Tobin answered only to himself, and his PA was a monolith, omnipotent, opaque. The opacity alone remains; the Port Authority these days is little more than a punching bag, patronage pit, and piggy bank for politicians and those who own or are owned by them. Its stewardship of Ground Zero — in substance and as symbol — has been a bumbling puppet show and an obscene gold rush.” #Sept11

People talk a lot about the “healing process.” Well, this is New York. In the aftermath of a tragedy of monumental proportions, the healing process has been noisy and rude, with elbows out, redolent of greed, power, and the darker forces that drive human existence. And most of the shouting has been about how to make a fitting monument to what happened here. But in a hundred years, all the shouting and all the politics will be forgotten. What will be remembered is what is built here, now, on these sixteen acres. #Sept11

Napping is for mortals. The Angel of the Bottomless Pit has souls to harvest, a mission demanding as much science as art. Seacrest’s voice — full of wiseass pep — has worked on radio for more than half his present incarnation, dating to his high school days in suburban Atlanta. It is not a versatile or interesting voice — expunged of all traces of any but the most generic middle-American accent, it is the aural equivalent of a bag of fast-food fries — but it is quick and, in a familiar sort of way, engaging.

There are worse places to be stuck in traffic than midtown Manhattan, worse people to be stuck with than Philip Roth.

Given all the political noise, you might not realize that the towers of the new World Trade Center are swiftly reaching the sky, rising by a floor a week. Soon, the noise will be forgotten. It’s the towers we’ll remember. #Sept11

Finally back on the A-list, Robert Downey Jr. is getting the respect — and the money — he deserves. But is he getting just a little dizzy up there?

Funny thing is, he was never a Nazi, nor Ivan the Terrible, nor even German. So why now is he standing trial in Munich as accessory to 27,900 Nazi murders?

Over a bowl of soup with another older Jewish man, the Curb Your Enthusiasm auteur discusses the Seinfeld curse (“so annoying”), acting for Woody Allen (“very daunting”), and hitting his peak (“no one wants to see this old man on TV”).