9/11: The Winners
The September 11, 2001 attacks have been a symbol of many things and many causes, but like the lavish, flag-draped rebuilding of the site, it has also been a vehicle for enrichment. From corporations to politicians to government officials to nonprofits to the security industry to publishers to the health industry (not to mention the incidents of outright fraud over the years), many people have found ways to profit from one of the nation’s biggest disasters. 9/11 has created an economy all its own. “The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” says retired New York City firefighter Kenny Specht. Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College, active in a range of 9/11 issues, puts it this way: “Lots of people have got their hand in the till. A lot of people and a lot of companies have made a lot of money off of 9/11.” Is it sacrilege to point this out? #Sept11
My Favorite Year
There’s no reason you should care about this … but 1986 was the pivotal year of my life. It was the year my car spun out, the year I worked in a factory and in the photo department of a retail store (I called people while they were eating dinner to offer them a free 3×5 photograph), the year she said she just wanted to be friends. It was the year everything seemed hopeful and the year when reality came crashing down like the top shelf of an overstuffed closet. It was the year when a little man dunked, when young Bears rapped and an old bear charged, when the hand of God reached out (and the referee missed it), when a ball rolled through the legs, when a genius set up behind the net. It was a year of folk heroes and comic book bad guys, a year when a gladiator dressed in black terrified the world.
CIA Shifts Focus to Killing Targets
In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill. The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed. #Sept11
The Price of Intolerance (Part 1 of 2)
One evening that summer, Clark, then 19, walked his dog from his home at 5213 S. Green to a weedy vacant lot a half block west at 52nd and Peoria. A group of white kids was gathered in an alley next to the lot, and Clark soon was dodging rocks and bottles and hearing the usual taunts: “Get outta here, nigger!” “You don’t belong here!” His mother had instructed him to turn the other cheek, but that ran against his nature. He flung a few rocks back. … Clark headed back toward his house. More jeers; a bottle crashed next to him. Then, suddenly, he heard a gruff voice snapping at his attackers. He turned and saw a middle-aged white man shooing the troublemakers away. The man approached Clark and introduced himself: Sam Navarro. He said he lived nearby, and he offered to walk Clark home. He apologized for the mob’s actions. Clark responded, “This ain’t nothing new.” Navarro frowned, shook his head, and said, “Some people are just ignorant. But we’re not all like that.”
Remains of the Day
“It’s pretty much with you all the time. And then there are just silly things—I think a week before the most recent 9/11 anniversary we were riding [the] PATH, and you’re a little antsy anyway. We get on the PATH train and there is a bag sitting on the floor. It’s a Victoria’s Secret pink-striped bag and there’s a man, kind of standing near it. The next stop he gets off and the bag is just sitting there. So I say to my husband, ‘Go check out the bag.’ He says, ‘Somebody left their bag.’ I said, ‘No. I’m not staying on this car, unless you go check out the bag.’ So he goes over, and he comes back. And he says, ‘Somebody left their lunch.’ I said, ‘How do you know it’s their lunch?’ He said, ‘There’s a banana on top.’ I said, ‘What’s under the banana?’ He said, ‘It’s a napkin.'” #Sept11
The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway
Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.
The Local-Global Flip, Or, ‘The Lanier Effect’
“It’s funny to say that because I’ll often get a lot of pushback and they’ll say, ‘No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that’s free’, and I’ll say, ‘Well, show me. Where’s all the wealth? Where’s the new middle class of people who are doing this?’ They don’t exist. They just aren’t there. We’re losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.”
My Life in Stories
I went back to work. Just about a year later, I sent out another story. Again, I sent it to the New Yorker. This time, someone wrote on the post card rejection: “Strong writing. Thanks.” Then, in November, I received a two-sentence letter from C. Michael Curtis at Atlantic Monthly: “‘A New Year’s Resolution’ starts out promisingly, but we think it veers into improbability (emotional) and something like melodrama. You’re awfully good, however, and I hope you’ll try us again.” It’s no exaggeration to say it: This letter kept me going for years.
Company Man
Like everyone with a nodding acquaintance of the history of that time, Sanjiv Mehta assumed that The East India Company had ceased to exist until he was contacted by the group of English businessmen who had quietly resurrected its name. With appropriate approvals from the British Treasury and the Royal School of Arms, they secured the rights to assets like the coat of arms that Queen Elizabeth I issued the Company in 1600, and the Merchant’s Mark—probably the world’s first trademark. They recruited historians, built relationships with museums and started with distributing tea and coffee and publishing books. And as they looked to streamline their distribution network, they got in touch with Mehta.
Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Truth About Innovation
Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Steve Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One parc scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, parc’s prized personal computer.
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