Ned Kahn. Parking Structure 9. Santa Rosa, Ca. 2007.

“A series of stainless steel cables stretched across the space between two circular access ramps of a parking structure. Hanging from the cables are approximately 20,000 small mirrors that move in the wind and bounce beams of sunlight onto the architecture and pavement below. Resembling a series of parallel spider webs, the artwork is visible from many vantage points inside the parking structure and the courtyard below. Intricate patterns of light and shadow, much like the pattern of sunlight filtering through a canopy of trees in a forest, sweep across the ground throughout the day and change with the wind.”

Since I have selected a possibly less glamorous piece to show here (for personal aesthetics :)), do check out as much as possible here, here, and here.

(I am reposting here the essay I wrote for 3QD on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It had been a few years since I'd last read it, and when pulling it back up I expected I would be embarrassed by its juvenile irreverence. In fact, I discovered that I remain fairly attached to what I said –anything to break this drone of sanctimony that is quickly becoming a late-summer tradition!–, and that I would be hard pressed to come up with any reflections for the tenth anniversary that differ much in tone or content from those of five years ago.)

*

What could be more self-indulgent than to recount where one was on September 11? As if other people were not somewhere. As if being anywhere at all on the planet automatically made one a survivor.

I survived September 11, as it happens, in an internet café in Berlin packed with smirking German hipsters, who could not wait to go find more hipsters, at a rave or at a squat, with whom to wax ironical about the day’s events and to recount with a smirk where they were when it happened, a whole six hours later.

My grandmother survived Auschwitz: disguised since birth as a Swedish Protestant, she rode it out teaching elementary school in Minnesota. But she had the decency to stay pursed-lipped after the war. We on the other hand must carry on about where we were, what we felt and thought, as though that mattered. I am no exception.

The first thought I had when asked to write something for the fifth anniversary of September 11 was: Jesus. I must be really old. I was old then, and it's been five years. I should probably start wrapping things up right about now. I don't even have a will, let alone a legacy. I can't seem to bring myself to think about such things. I just love life too much. I do not want to die.

I knew of course that what I was expected to produce was hard-nosed political analysis — I'd managed to do it for Counterpunch — and here I was carrying on as though it was all about me. I would like to be a sharp political analyst, I truly would: on the one hand, the chickens of American imperialism came home to roost, but on the other hand taking innocent lives is never acceptable, etc.

But some topics just stifle all that analytical acumen and cause me to regress into infantile self-absorption, unable to write about anything other than myself. My hope is that I will get away with this by lacquering it up with essayistic style, and claiming membership in a venerable tradition. Montaigne got away with it, some will respond, only because in the 16th century the self was a new and exciting discovery. Today it is old news. And yet, today, I carry on.

Read more »

Jerry A. Coyne in the New York Times Book Review:

My undergraduate students, especially those bound for medical school, often ask why they have to study evolution. It won’t cure disease, and really, how useful is evolution to the average person? My response is that while evolutionary biology can explain, for example, the origin of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we shouldn’t see evolution as a cure for human woes. Its value is explanatory: to tell us how, when and why we got here (by “we,” I mean “every organism”) and to show us how all species are related. In the end, evolution is the greatest tale of all, for it’s true.

David Sloan Wilson, on the other hand, sees evolutionary biology as a panacea for the world’s ills. By understanding “human nature” — that is, the behaviors and attitudes instilled in our ancestors by natural selection — we will, he claims, finally be able to solve problems like poor education, dysfunctional cities, bad economics, mental illness and ethnic cleansing. “Evolutionary science,” Wilson argues, “will eventually prove so useful on a daily basis that we will wonder how we survived without it. I’m here to make that day come sooner rather than later, starting with my own city of Binghamton.” “The Neighborhood Project” describes Wilson’s ambitious proposal for using evolutionary biology to raise up Binghamton, a down-at-the heels town of about 50,000 in upstate New York. An evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York there, Wilson formerly worked on toads and mites, but has now adopted his own town as a study organism.

More here.

Christopher Eppig in Scientific American:

A great deal of research has shown that average IQ varies around the world, both across nations and within them. The cause of this variation has been of great interest to scientists for many years. At the heart of this debate is whether these differences are due to genetics, environment or both.

Higher IQ predicts a wide range of important factors, including better grades in school, a higher level of education, better health, better job performance, higher wages, and reduced risk of obesity. So having a better understanding of variations in intelligence might yield a greater understanding of these other issues as well.

Before our work, several scientists had offered explanations for the global pattern of IQ. Nigel Barber argued that variation in IQ is due primarily to differences in education. Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa argued that colder climates are difficult to live in, such that evolution favors higher IQ in those areas. Satoshi Kanazawa suggested that evolution favors higher IQ in areas that are farther from the evolutionary origin of humans: sub-Saharan Africa. Evolution, the hypothesis goes, equipped us to survive in our ancestral home without thinking about it too hard. As we migrated away, though, the environment became more challenging, requiring the evolution of higher intelligence to survive.

We tested all these ideas.

More here.

Amy Finnerty in the Wall Street Journal:

Millicent Rogers (1902-53) was a fashion muse and femme fatale who charted an unsteady course through the boutiques, ballrooms and salons of America and Europe. Cherie Burns has written a bracing, sex-and-shopping account of that life, suggesting that haute couture provided a cloistered young debutante a way to “lay claim to herself” and become a sophisticated socialite. But this puts perhaps too psychological a spin on the fashion forays of Millicent, who was forever in search of novelty to combat her upper-class ennui.

The money came from her paternal grandfather, Henry Huttleston Rogers, a Standard Oil founder called the “hellhound of Wall Street.” As a child she was kept out of school for long stretches by rheumatic fever, but she learned French and German, studied Greek and bantered with her brother in Latin. Millicent's family summered on an 1,800-acre estate in Southampton, N.Y.; her parents had built an Italianate villa there that would make one of Edith Wharton's buccaneers blush. “God, I'm sick of the place,” Millicent wrote in her diary near the start of World War I. “I want to do something for a change.” She took a nursing course but found changing dressings “horrible in the extream [sic].” Her English correspondence throughout this book is notable for atrocious spelling.

More here.

It took a few weeks for Annette Vukosa to finally break it to her elder son, Austin, that his father would not be coming home, and for a long time after that, the two spoke only sparingly about him. Finally, a few months after Sept. 11, Austin, all of 7, went up to his mother in their apartment in Kensington, Brooklyn, and announced: “I have a plan.” “We can be together with Daddy when we die,” he said. “If we cut our wrists, we’ll die and we’ll all be with Daddy again.” How Austin grew from being a bereft little boy to a hyperambitious beanpole of a 16-year-old is a story of stand-ins and mentors, therapy and special camps, and a universal desire by everyone close to him to ensure that Sept. 11 would neither destroy nor define his life. Most of all, it is a story of a child who grew up fast and focused, picking himself up, realizing early on that the boy truly is the father to the man.

more from David Gonzalez at the NYT here.

“So many contradictions, so little time”
—Roshi Bob
.

Faithful Contradictions

But when the forbidden months are past,
then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them,
and seize them, beleaguer them,
and lie in wait for them in every stratagem…
–Koran 9:5

or

. . . have patience with what they say,
and leave them with noble dignity.
And leave me alone to deal with those
in possession of the good things of life,
who yet deny the truth,
and bear with them . . .
–Koran 73:10,11

or

And all the cities of those kings,
and all the kings of them, did Joshua take,
and smote them with the edge of the sword,
and he utterly destroyed them,
as Moses the servant of the LORD
commanded.”
–Bible; Joshua 11:12

or

A new command I give you:
Love one another. As I have loved you,
so you must love one another.
–Bible; John 13:34

Zadie Smith in The New Yorker:

“We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re”—it’s a line from a recent Frederick Seidel poem, “Downtown,” about the Fourth of July, and the sadness of fireworks over the Hudson (“the flavorful floating shroud”) and the casual brutality of eating shad roe (“What a joy to eat the unborn”). It reminds me of this whole, unlovely decade, which started downtown, and made us all monstrous, me as much as anybody. I was for the war, at first. Later, I was pleased when President Obama promised to commit more troops to Afghanistan, not because I thought it would end that war but because I hoped it would win him the election. I sat at dinner parties and felt envious of people who had not supported the war, as if whether or not a lot of armchair intellectuals did or did not support a war was what the war was actually about. For a few Google-eyed hours, I thought that Sarah Palin was not Trig’s mother. The rise of the Internet dovetailed with this tribalism. You could pass a decade online without ever hearing from the “other.”

About one thing, though, we could all agree: everything had changed. Or had it? The 9/11 perpetrators wanted a world in which (their version of) religious belief trumped all other concerns. But in the real world our concerns are necessarily diverse: we must attend school and find work, provide for children, look after parents. And in these matters we cannot avoid one another for long. Of course, mixed communities are not without tensions—no such community exists. (Relative racial and cultural homogeneity—as Northern Ireland knows—is no guarantee of peace.) But we have many common causes and priorities. It’s to be noted that class meant little to the terrorists: they saw only two human categories, believer and heathen. Here on earth, poverty and privilege cross the religious and the cultural divide. Look a little closer at the recent CCTV footage, in London: we riot together, and together we clean the streets.

Last Christmas, standing in an apartment building in New York, I was struck by a hallway where papier-mâché Stars of David and holy crosses came together in a decorative seasonal theme. Here these “people of the book” (whose religious texts overlap and divide as deeply as either text with the Koran) lived peaceably in the same space, finding one another’s religions by turns amusing, irrational, beautiful, banal. What enabled it? It took generations; it passed through periods of unspeakable horror; sometimes people forgot, sometimes they forgave, and they did both these things imperfectly. Practical matters helped. General economic parity, difficult acts of good will on both sides, and a democratic country in which the apparently impossible has the freedom to happen. It is not a perfect relationship—there’s no such thing—and it took two thousand years to get this far. We forget: these things take time. “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., who presided over another meeting of supposedly irreconcilable peoples. Not everyone is a monster.

More here.

From The Independent:

In the last few days, as we have approached its 10th anniversary, we have all been bombarded with opinion pieces about the meaning of 9/11, about the lost opportunities and wasteful wars of the following decade, with human interest stories of the hapless victims and the heroic firefighters, and perhaps too much “never-seen-before” footage of the carnage of that day. I choose to highlight here instead a brilliant and poignant essay that my nephew Asad Raza wrote on the fifth anniversary of the attacks about what the actual World Trade Center towers meant to him:

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure, but the reasons I do have much to do with how it expressed these signature qualities of New York City. Visually, the buildings gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between. Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike. Emerging from the Brat Pack-era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you. A perfect visual metaphor, they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities. Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York.

I often think about how important it was that there were two of them. One skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Woolworth, somehow remains a building, its mass of steel and concrete impossible to forget. The twoness of the Twin Towers brought into being relations with the air, dramatized space. The few places where one tower completely occluded the other (such as the pier leading to the Holland tunnel exhaust, off Spring and West Streets) were uncanny viewing points. The one visible tower despotically oppressed, rather than symbolized, the city. One tower was a fascist; two towers invoked psychology, doubleness, complexity. And because the footprints of the buildings occupied two diagonally opposed squares, they almost always presented themselves to the eye as perspectival, one slightly higher than the other. The aura of their unevenness brilliantly leavened their austere shapes. They hovered.

As you approached the plaza, you always noted with pleasure the little arches near the bottoms of the aluminum facade. These merest bends subtly recalled and paid homage to the Deco architectural landmarks of the city. They conjured the relation of the Chrysler and the Empire State to the grid itself, represented as the endless lines that clad the trade center's sides. The optical illusions those shimmering lines made were almost arrogant: excessive on a building that already inspired vertigo. For a time, the cavernous lobbies contained a satellite airline terminal. The sight of those ticket counters was oddly right in buildings that, like airports, constituted entire worlds unto themselves, with the frisson of rocket ships or space stations. The towers' otherworldliness made them the unlikely site of a Wednesday evening club night at Windows on the World, frequented by Kate Moss and the rest of the New York glitter circuit of the mid-Nineties. You'd wander around with a drink and then suddenly come to the windows, through which the shockingly faraway streets below gave a pleasing shock.

More here.

And you can read other reflections on 9/11 from the fifth anniversary special that 3QD did on the subject here.

And a remembrance of my friend Ehtesham U. Raja, who was in the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center exactly ten years ago this morning, and who never made it out, is here.

Lauren Walsh in Nomadikon:

On this occasion of the ten-year anniversary of September 11th, we are, instead of remembering the events of that fateful day, concealing them under a mountain of American mythology.

The New York Philharmonic announced in June that it will hold a memorial concert to mark the anniversary. A result of this, said Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president, is that the free summer concerts, held in city parks across the five boroughs for the past 45 years, must be canceled. This unfortunate undoing of a tradition of collective cultural appreciation will make way for a commemorative performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, the “Resurrection.”

The New York Times noted that this is “[o]ne of the first major 9/11 cultural remembrances announced so far.” Not only will many others follow, but they will be exceedingly similar in tone. They will acknowledge loss, but primarily they will celebrate resurrections. They will foreground the heroes. They will mark our resiliency, as a city and a nation. They will continue to construct a triumphal narrative of 9/11 that began shortly after 8:46 a.m. nearly ten years ago.

If the recent past is any predictor, these cultural remembrances will also carry on the practice of ignoring some of the gruesome details of that date, especially the manner in which an entire category of victims perished. These victims constitute approximately 7% of those who died in New York City—they are the men and women who fell and jumped to their deaths from the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center.

The Forgotten 7%

In the United States the photos of victims falling and jumping from the World Trade Center towers generally ran in the newspapers for one single day—September 12, 2001—and then never again. Those photos were deemed too painful, too much a violation of the dying moments of the victims depicted.