To an extent, we are all survivors. One study asserted that 17 percent of the entire United States population outside New York reported symptoms like nightmares, sleeplessness, and anxiety in the days after September 11. Still, the more intense the exposure, the greater its effect. So for every non–New Yorker who suffered, almost three New Yorkers reported symptoms. And the closer that New Yorker was to the Trade Center, the more he felt it. You could measure the difference in blocks. People below Canal Street reported symptoms at almost three times the rate of those below 110th Street. If this is true, then the most intense experience of survival was had by sixteen who experienced almost incomprehensible luck that day. These people—a bookkeeper, an office temp, an engineer, a Port Authority cop, and twelve firemen—survived despite having the World Trade Center collapse on top of them.
For them, surviving has proved to be a complicated task. As one survivor’s wife explains, “Everyone else feels like 9/11 was a long time ago. I still feel like we are stuck on September 12, not really able to move beyond it.” And, as she inevitably reminds herself, they are the lucky ones.
Category: News
The Season
Kid, the thing that none of the documentaries will show you was how that morning, after the first reports, nobody knew anything.
CNN had reported about a fire on the National Mall, which turned out to be people seeing smoke from the Pentagon and not understanding what they were seeing. There were rumors of a car bomb at the State Department building, a bomb at the U.S. Capitol building, and one at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. “The USA Today building in Rosslyn was supposedly enveloped in smoke,” per one report. You name the Washington landmark, chances were somebody had heard it had been hit.
It felt like the whole world had spun off its axis.
View from the inside
Mr. Walczak is quick to clarify something at this point in conversations about the missing film. He does not believe the pictures will reveal some hidden explanation for the events of that day. He is not a conspiracy theorist.
He is something different — a Sept. 11 completist. The two can look very similar from a distance, people foraging for things that will supposedly show what really happened on that day. But Mr. Walczak has a track record of actually finding them.
On an episode of a 2021 podcast he created, “Missing on 9/11,” he rattled off a list of photos that he has verified were taken on various floors of the towers: “One picture from the 48th, three from the 35th, one from the 51st, five from the 74th, two from the 61st.”
And in his sprawling, labyrinthine quest for those photographs, he would come to know a community of sleuths intent on finding and preserving unseen footage from that singular day. They huddle in Reddit threads, inspecting images and triangulating the exact positions of the photographers.
“People just assume everything’s been published,” Mr. Walczak said. “Not only is that not true, there’s a lot of fascinating footage that hasn’t been published.”
It is like they are working together on a puzzle that, 25 years later, still seems not quite complete. And new pieces keep emerging.
He’s Seen Images of 9/11 From Just About Every Angle. Except This One. – The New York Times
Why there will be a new moment of silence at this year’s Ground Zero ceremony
“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of September 11th whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this week. “Now, close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed on the day itself.”
New York City released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records Tuesday, showing city officials at the time misled the public about air quality around Ground Zero. The release not only underscores how dangerous the conditions were, but it is also an important moment for responders and survivors who have long fought for help and recognition.
The World Trade Center Health Program, established in 2011 after years of advocacy for compensation for survivors, provides medical monitoring for first responders and survivors, and free treatment for 9/11-related conditions. More than 57,000 responders and survivors enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program have been diagnosed with cancer.
As of March 2024, nearly 7,000 people enrolled in the program have died.
Why there will be a new moment of silence at this year’s Ground Zero ceremony | CNN
Pope Leo XIV – Man of the People
“When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. – J.R.R. Tolkien”
– Pope Leo XIV
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
Pope Leo XIV invoked Gandalf when addressing artificial intelligence in his first encyclical.
Pope Leo XIV published his landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence “Magnifica Humanitas” May 25, comparing the attempt to build an AI future that excludes God to the “Tower of Babel” and underlining the need to safeguard human dignity as it is “threatened by new forms of dehumanization.”
“The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” Pope Leo wrote in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace,” he said.
There is a LOT of great stuff in here. Worth a nice long read.
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.
…
More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.
AI’s Token Bang for Big Bucks
Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.
“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”
Uber’s COO Says It’s Getting Harder to Justify the Money Spent on AI – Business Insider
On one hand, I kinda smirk at the idea of Uber getting caught up in the SAAS “sell it for super cheap and at a loss to destroy the competition and hook the buyer and then kick up those prices” business model that, well, made Uber.
On the other, this makes total sense when you consider the costs of AI at scale for companies like Uber, Duolingo, Microsoft, etc. Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
Duolingo, for instance, walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews after employees asked whether they had to use AI for the sake of using it.
“It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.
For a person using it at home on the free level generating funny lyrics or images, AI is a neat little toy. For companies looking to use it across the company for coding or as AI assistants, every little ask adds up in ways we’re not trained to look for. I mean, how much does it cost to Google something?
Add on the seemingly random token consumption* newer models of Claude or ChatGPT require to do even rudimentary tasks and it gets real tough to see the bang for buck.
* I say “seemingly random” because the use makes sense. In some ways the new models are pulling back the curtain on how they’re thinking behind the scenes, in others it’s tweaks that make them work better. But there’s no real method of measuring exactly what a query is going to cost until you commit, and when you’re paying by the token for hundreds or thousands of employees, that can run away from you real fast.
I’m curious if we have any real examples yet of AI usage seeing a net positive ROI across all players – company using AI sees profits from its use, AI provider is making enough money to more than cover its costs, etc.
Why I’ll be rooting for the Blue Jays
The long wait is finally over.
After 5,231 games over 36 seasons as a player, coach and manager, Donnie Baseball is going to his first World Series.
“Obviously it feels great to get there, and I feel like we’re gonna play well too,” Don Mattingly, Toronto’s bench coach, told MLB.com on Tuesday, about 12 hours after the Blue Jays clinched the American League pennant.
U.S. Army Purple Heart veteran forced to self-deport from Hawaii
At 19, he joined the army and fought in Panama during the Noriega war in 1989. He was shot twice during combat and was awarded a Purple Heart for his bravery.
“I got shot in the spine with an AK-47, M16 my left lower back,“ he recalled. ”In my mind, I’m going, ‘Oh my god, I’m shot in the back. I can’t feel my legs. I must be paralyzed.’”
Miraculously, his dog tag deflected the bullet aimed for his spine, saving his life.
Park was honorably discharged and returned to his then-home in Los Angeles, where he suffered from severe PTSD. He turned to marijuana to cope with nightmares and sensitivity to loud noises and moved to Hawaii in 1995 for a better lifestyle. But he became addicted to crack cocaine and struggled for years to get clean.
“Drugs had a big control throughout my life and that’s what eventually got me into trouble with the law and everything,” he said.
In 2009, he was convicted for drug and bail offenses and served two and a half years in prison. When he was released, ICE agents detained him and revoked his green card.
He fought deportation in court and as a Purple Heart veteran was allowed to stay in the U.S. under deferred action, as long as he checked in each year and stayed clean and sober.
Park turned his life around — he became a loving father to his two children, now in their 20s, and cares for his aging parents and aunts, who are in their 80s.“These last 14 years have been great, like really proud of myself, proud of my kids, how I’ve been acting and how I’ve been living my life,” he said.
But this month, officials ended his deferred action status and told him he had to leave the country or be detained and forcibly deported. He was given an ankle monitor and three weeks to handle his affairs. He and his family were in shock.
“People were saying ‘You took two bullets for this country. Like you’re more American than most of the Americans living in America,’” he said.
U.S. Army Purple Heart veteran forced to self-deport from Hawaii
The Passing of Pope Francis
On Afghanistan
In light of what’s happening in Afghanistan, I may have made this statement 12 years ago in reference to health care but it still stands.
If the government is going to get into the business of doing something – health care, utilities, etc. – then it has a moral obligation to do it right.
We can make all of the arguments in the world about why and whether we should have been there, but once we were there, we – and ALL of those involved (allies) – owed it to the people of Afghanistan to do it right. We clearly failed.
Already there are those who served alongside America who are suffering and dying for fighting for something even the Afghani government didn’t believe in.
And the Taliban’s historical treatment of women and ethnic and religious minorities hasn’t changed in twenty years so the tragedy there is only going to grow.
Of course, it’s easy to sit and rant on Twitter compared to those who have had to figure out an optimal solution over the last 20 years. It’s just hard to believe that the best outcome was what we’re seeing now.