Enough doom and gloom for the week. I have been meaning to post this awesome clip of the group OK Go performing its song “Here It Goes Again” using synchronized treadmills. They did it in one take and its ridiculous – I especially like when they “swim” or “skate” from the back to the front – plus its a jazzy song too. Happy Friday!
Via Chris
Sir Richard Branson just stepped up big time today by saying that all profits from his five airlines and train company, projected to be $3 billion through the next 10 years, would be invested in developing energy sources that do not contribute to global warming. He said this during the Clinton Global Initiative, a three-day meeting in Manhattan that amounts to a competitive festival of philanthropy run by former President Bill Clinton. I say simply, “Thank friggen G-d!”
Please note that this donation comes in the same calendar year as when Bill Gates pledged a whopping $40 billion to his Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. This amount was then quickly matched by Warren Buffet, the world’s 2nd richest man, who will donate 85 percent of his fortune amassed from stock in the Berkshire Hathaway company, worht today around $37 billion, to five foundations. Four are run by his kids and the last, the aforementioned B&MG Foundation, will receive about 5/6 of the 85 percent, or about $31 billion. So, the B&MG foundation will have a budget of around $70 billion over time while Branson is funding a foundation that it seems will have around $30 billion.
As Billy C put it, “No matter how cynical you are, that’s serious money.” Thank g-d someone is finally stepping up and doing something good in this world. If the world’s governments are too busy fucking up diplomacy, trashing international treaties, starting wars, spreading lies and other assorted nonsense to do something good for their citizens, its nice that the rich are giving back our money in a sense (they got rich through us – we use the goods and services they own and/or control). I have always believed that we needed a Vanderbuilt/Carnegie to step in and help out the world’s ills. Now its happening and I’m thrilled – if Bill, Warren and Richard want to down in history as the men that saved the planet, they’ll be happy to know that I have a Windows box at home, love the Geico gecko and fly Virgin Atlantic whenever I can.
You can’t make this stuff up: Dog the Bounty hunter was just captured in his own home by bounty hunters and is being sent to Mexico to answer an unlawful imprisionment charge he picked up when in 2003 he captured an American, who happened to have raped 3 women in America, in Mexico. They caught the whole capture on film as A&E is busy taping the 4th Dog season and they are airing it tomorrow night in a special. This one I have to watch!
After the jump, read a long article about it and Duane Chapman, aka Dog.
A Cornered Pit Bull: Bounty Hunter Becomes Prey by David Carr
The eight or so men crept quietly up to the house in the Portlock neighborhood of Hawaii at the crack of dawn. The woman inside was making school lunches for her children and noticed them too late. They bum-rushed the bedroom, capturing their target in cuffs before he knew what hit him.
Duane Chapman, known as Dog, the premier American bounty hunter, would have appreciated their artistry had he not been the guy in handcuffs. Mr. Chapman, the star of A&E’s highly rated “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” was transported to the federal detention center in Honolulu to await extradition to Mexico on a three-year-old charge stemming from his capture in Mexico of Andrew Luster, the Max Factor heir who was eventually convicted of raping three women.
Back in 2003 Mr. Chapman and his colleagues were charged by Mexican authorities with “deprivation of liberty” and held in jail in Puerto Vallarta before they made bail and slipped out of the country. Now, with less than a month before the warrant would have expired and in the midst of filming the fourth season of his enormously successful reality series, Mr. Chapman was the one being brought to justice. (Yesterday the Chapman family suggested that some horse trading was under way, pointing out that Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, part of a Mexican drug cartel, was handed over to United States authorities.)
As American symbols go, Mr. Chapman is a pretty epic one. He has had 4 wives, 12 children, 18 robbery convictions, a conviction for being an accessory to murder, and, according to his math, more than 7,000 fugitives brought to justice. He belonged to a biker gang, but cries easily and enjoys vacuuming. His show, filmed mostly in Hawaii, is a mix of tweaking meth-heads and postarrest moralism, a business built on repossessing human flesh. But with Mr. Chapman, the drama always seems to continue after the cameras shut off. On the day he was to be married this spring in a filmed ceremony, his estranged daughter died. And now this.
“He leads a complicated, edgy life,” said Lucas Platt, the supervising producer of the show. “Going after Andrew Luster was a risky decision, but he thought it was the right thing to do. Now it has taken an unfortunate turn.” The turn won’t hurt ratings. A&E plans a special for tomorrow night, and the stories about his travails will only add to the legend. The man who brought vengeance to thousands of bail jumpers found himself on the wrong end of justice.
“I was totally freaked out,” Mr. Chapman said on the phone Saturday after he had posted a $300,000 bail to await a hearing on extradition. “There were guys that I had put in there that were yelling all sorts of things at me.”
His wife Beth, a co-star in the series, worked frantically for his release.
The 2003 Luster arrest, which catapulted Mr. Chapman to a new level of celebrity and eventually resulted in A&E signing him for the series, led to a lasting grudge on the part of Mexican authorities, who demanded that the United States extradite the bounty hunter.
On Thursday night the Mexican attorney general released a statement suggesting that what Mr. Chapman had done was an affront to national sovereignty.
Larry Butrick, chief of the criminal division for the United States Attorney’s Office in Honolulu, said that his staff was merely executing a valid warrant that came from headquarters in Washington.
“The court here really will just be looking at the legality of the extradition and if there is a fit under the treaty we have with Mexico,” he said.
One of Mr. Chapman’s lawyers is hoping that the matter can be settled somewhere short of a Mexican prison.
“I have a high level of confidence that we will be able work with the good will and good faith of the Mexican authorities in resolving this satisfactorily,” said William C. Bollard, who represents Mr. Chapman, his son Leland and Tim Chapman (no relation), a bounty-hunting colleague, all of whom helped apprehend Mr. Luster. For now the Dog is at large, albeit with an ankle bracelet.
“If I have a fugitive on the run and have to go out at night, I have to notify them,” he said, referring to federal officials. “I have no problem with that.”
In the month before his arrest, Mr. Chapman was busy hunting jumpers for the benefit for those who posted bond, and for a nimble A&E camera crew that jogged after them. The show’s template is simple and effective: The quarry is selected, a plan is made among the family members who make up most of his crew, the hunt commences and then capture, usually followed by a hug at the end, although a handcuffed one.
A bad guy made good by an 18-month stint in prison on the accessory-to-murder charge, Mr. Chapman sees an arrest as a kind of intervention, a way to let the runner face the music and begin a new life.
“We put families back together,” he explained, even though they often do that by putting one of the heads of the household behind bars. It has been wildly popular — “Dog the Bounty Hunter” is A&E’s most-watched show — partly because his mix of mayhem and moralizing has a kind of outlaw sweetness. It is a bit of Ward Cleaver, though accompanied by multiple cans of Mace, just in case.
On television, or in person during a recent visit by a reporter to Mr. Chapman’s headquarters in Hawaii, the hunt is a spectacle to behold. On a hot day near the end of August, Mr. Chapman laid out the agenda for the day. Item first and last: putting bond jumper Monalisa Hartsock in cuffs.
“She has the letter R tattooed on her left breast,” Dog told his colleagues at Da Kine Bail Bonds, which he and his wife own on Queen Emma Street in Honolulu. Speaking from behind major sunglasses that play MP3’s including “I Fought the Law” and thumping an ornate American Indian walking stick for emphasis, Dog warned that Ms. Hartsock was one of the many island inhabitants who got lost in smokable meth: “She knows she is going to jail.” The lowdown on Ms. Hartsock is followed by a shout-out to Jesus, who always rides point on any hunt.
Hawaii is a near-perfect ecosystem for bounty hunting. It is a rock, after all, thousands of miles out in the ocean, so a person can hide in only so many places. Meth has overtaken the island, so there is no shortage of bail-jumping, tweaky perps. Dog crossed over after his prison time, but just barely, still working the corners of the law to substantial effect. The rest of his crew could not be cast any better: Beth, a large sexpot with brutal intelligence and an oft-hidden heart of gold; Tim, the wizened sensei who works himself into a quiet rage; Duane Lee, the normal guy with abnormal biceps who loves taking down bad guys; Leland, the wayward son swaddled in tattoos and mail from adoring fans, and “Baby” Lisa, the up-and-coming toughie.
Mr. Chapman sees himself as a fisher of men, an enforcer who brings people to justice in what he calls “the cuffs of love.” He first turned it around as the No. 1 Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman in the country during the early 1970’s and now has taken his dust-busting ways to cleaning up the culture at large.
In a single episode he works the gutters for data, deploys phony accents and white lies on the phone, and physically tracks a runner in a way that seems a bit supernatural. It helps that most crooks are dumb as a box of rocks, but still.
The name Monalisa has Beth Chapman humming the song recorded by Nat King Cole. She has a lovely voice, albeit paired with a top-heavy endowment that borders on the architectural and a tendency to go junkyard dog when cornered. All honey for the time being, she convinces one of Monalisa’s pals who posted bail to help them find her.
Beth gently explained to Desiree that while it is hard to give up a pal, “the alternative is you have to pay the bond.” A call finally went through to Monalisa: Desiree convinced her to meet at a 76 gas station. The trap is set.
Right on schedule, Monalisa pulled in. “That’s her,” Desiree said. But Beth’s car was momentarily blocked in by Tim’s so she could not come around the other side; Monalisa saw Dog — tough to miss in his stunt mullet— hop out of Tim’s car, and she began backing up. Leland flew out of Beth’s car and filled the fleeing car with Mace, as did Duane Lee, but Monalisa tore out in reverse and careened through an intersection toward the highway, cars squealing to avoid her. Beth, in hot pursuit, filled the car with expletives : “Of all the rookie moves in the world!” she said. She fruitlessly crisscrosses the nearby neighborhood at high speed, while the car driven by Tim does the same. Mistakes were made. (Monalisa was finally captured by Dog and company early this month.)
Dog freely admits later to messing up Monalisa’s capture. He pleads guilty as well and to rolling around in his 15 minutes. “I always wanted to be the good guy in the black hat,” he said.
Despite the success of his show, his team had to scrape together money to bail him. Each member of the crew has a hard-knock history, no one assuming they deserve or can depend on success. They may have gone Hollywood, but their trashy roots are never painted over with peroxide.
By definition, anybody Mr. Chapman catches is having a bad day, but when the chase is over, Dog always gives them a cigarette and The Talk, an echo of a life-changing discussion he had with a deputy who was taking him to jail so many years ago.
Earlier that same week in August the hunting was more fruitful. After looking all over Oahu, they found Jacob Falenofoa, another meth casualty, with the help of his wife, who co-signed the bond. They found him at the house of a girlfriend’s parents in Pearl City. Riding back on H1, a highway that heads back to Honolulu, Dog went all biblical on Jacob, talking about how the drugs he was doing “ate his brain” and how deep down he was a good family man. This being Hawaii, a rainbow bloomed to the north as the speech peaked.
Dog said he was happy with the day’s outcome.
“I believe in what I do, I am good at what I do, and I want to be able to say that Jesus played a role in it,” he said. “Never, ever, has anyone ever escaped.”
Not even Dog. A few short weeks later, the cuffs of love found Mr. Chapman.
CNN is reporting that “Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on “The Children of Hurin,” an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of “The Children of Hurin,” which includes the elves and dwarves of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and other works, have been published before.”
More stories with Gimli? I hope so….dwarves rock!
Via Slashdot
Unfinished Tolkien work to be published in ’07 from the AP:
NEW YORK (AP) — An unfinished tale by J.R.R. Tolkien has been edited by his son into a completed work and will be released next spring, the U.S. and British publishers announced Monday.
Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on “The Children of Hurin,” an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of “The Children of Hurin,” which includes the elves and dwarves of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and other works, have been published before.
“It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of the ‘Children of Hurin’ as an independent work, between its own covers,” Christopher Tolkien said in a statement.
The new book will be published by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and HarperCollins in England.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings Trilogy” has sold more than 50 million copies and was also adapted into a blockbuster, Academy Award-winning trio of films. A stage version is scheduled to open next year.
CNBC is reporting that office fantasy football leagues, being made up of employees from different levels of the org chart (from entry level employees to senior level management), create an interaction that may not happen throughout the typical work day. In fact, they may help you get a raise. Okay, its dubious but still, anything to validate my office league. Please note however that not only is my supervisor in my league but I’ve already repeatedly insulted her team so maybe I’ve shot myself in the foot here…
Fantasy football could help you get a raise: Author offers tips on using the game to climb the corporate ladder by Darren Rovell
Updated: 11:39 a.m. ET July 31, 2006
NEW YORK – It’s that time of year again. Fantasy football junkies absorbing all the information they can, crunching numbers, predicting breakout performances, and agonizing over whom to draft as quarterback, Peyton Manning or Tom Brady.
But did you ever think that your office league could ever lead to a promotion?
“These office leagues, they are made up of employees of different level of the org charts from entry level employees to senior level management,” said Michale Henby, author of a book on fastasy football. “And it creates an interaction that may not happen throughout the typical work day.”
Henby’s book shows fantasy players how to use the game to their advantage.
“A conversation will last longer when fantasy football is involved,” he said. “Especially when it’s involved with two people who are in the same office, who are in the same league.”
Henby’s work features a fantasy football conversation topic schedule broken down by a month. It also emphasizes the importance of seeding the league with upper management. Henby thinks he’s on to something, but others are cautious to endorse his idea.
“I’ll be honest, I would be leery of going to the CEO of my company and saying ‘Listen, our draft is at 3:00 on Tuesday. I scheduled it right before the meeting at 3:30. Would you like to be in it? It will be fun. It will be a great waster of time for all of us,'” said Will Leitch, editor-in-chief of Deadspin.com.
“It’s sad to take that little time when your brain gets to check out from work for a little while to work on fantasy football and to maneuver in, ‘Okay, I have to make a bad trade with the CEO, but maybe I can screw over the underling, so I look better if I still have the CEO win,'” said Leitch.
Henby actually covers that. Making a lopsided trade is the first deadly sin of fantasy football networking.
“One should not do anything unethical while they are playing fantasy football,” said Henby. “If they do that, it could be perceived as a character flaw, which could then compromise future networking relationships.”
With the average fantasy player being classified as a 39-year-old male who makes $75,000, Henby has many potential customers.
“It sounds like a good idea, but if that’s what we’re coming to, where fantasy football is being used as a corporate networking tool, then maybe fantasy football has gotten too big,” said Leitch.
The NY Times lets readers post comments to their articles. One man named John Chuckman wrote a very interesting opinion to “The Hole in the City’s Heart” which, while provocative, neatly encapsulates many of my opinions about what has happened over the past 5 years. The only thing his piece leaves out is a thought about our military response in regards to Afghanistan (which I believe was justified and almost effective, until we decided to focus on Iraq). Feel free to read John’s thoughts after the jump.
Hole in the heart of the city? Many in the world would ask, what heart?
America’s response to 9/11 has been dangerously unbalanced, about as crazed as Senator McCarthy’s drunken rants over non-existent lists of communists. Americans badly need to get a grip on reality.
The roughly 3,000 who died is far fewer than any number of earthquakes and other natural disasters since have killed in many other places. Yet we keep hearing about 9/11 as though it were pivotal in human history.
The fact is the average American’s chance of being killed by terrorism remains about on a par with slipping on a banana peel or being struck by lightning.
In the last five years, Americans themselves have murdered about 70,000 other Americans. Also in that five years, over 200,000 Americans were killed on the nation’s highways. Over 2,000,000 American children were seriously abused by Americans, usually family members, in that time. And about 2,000,000 Americans died from cancer.
What is almost never talked about is the fact that 9/11 was completely preventable without an insane, pointless war on terror. Just simple safety measures like secure cockpit doors and better inspections would have prevented it. But, no, despite all the hijackings that had become common in the previous decades, no new provisions for safety were made. The Congress of the U.S. is about as responsible as anyone for 9/11 through its failure to govern responsibly.
Then, after one freak event, all hell broke loose with hundreds of billions squandered. That wasted money could have built countless new schools and funded vital research and science.
America is now effectively trying to wall itself off in a globalized world. That’s absurd for the world’s largest economy.
We have idiotic, meaningless measures like no-fly lists. The truth is it wouldn’t matter if Osama himself flew over the US so long as good security measures were in place to prevent his doing anything inappropriate.
Americans have surrendered their own rights and freedoms to a shocking extent for no good reason to a leader whose capacities are best described as extremely meager.
Americans permit horrors like secret prisons and torture to go on in their name. This is a terrible shame for America that 9/11can never justify.
Even worse, Bush’s invasion of Iraq took 100,000 innocent lives, wreaked the economic lives of millions, left tons of vaporized uranium for children to breathe, vandalized one of humanity’s great archeological treasures, and reduced a once-advancing country to hopelessness. A total shame and the equivalent of having dropped a nuclear weapon on Iraq, it did absolutely nothing for American security.
I think that the NY Times editorial from today is really on point. Please read it in full after the jump.
The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.
What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?
The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.
But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.
That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.
When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.
Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.
Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.
Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.
If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.
The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda’s leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.
No matter, declared President Bush: “I truly am not that concerned about him,” he said about bin Laden in March 2002, and more or less stopped mentioning Osama for the next four years. By the time he made his what-me-worry remarks — just six months after 9/11 — the pursuit of Al Qaeda had already been relegated to second-class status. A long report in yesterday’s Washington Post adds detail to what has long been an open secret: early in 2002, the administration began pulling key resources, such as special forces units and unmanned aircraft, off the hunt for Al Qaeda’s leaders, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, the administration balked at giving the new regime in Kabul the support it needed. As he often does, Mr. Bush said the right things: the history of conflict in Afghanistan, he declared in April 2002, has been “one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”
But he proceeded to do just that, neglecting Afghanistan in ways that foreshadowed the future calamity in Iraq. During the first 18 months after the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S.-led coalition provided no peacekeeping troops outside the capital city. Economic aid, in a destitute nation shattered by war, was minimal in the crucial first year, when the new government was trying to build legitimacy. And the result was the floundering and failure we see today.
How did it all go so wrong? The diversion of resources into a gratuitous war in Iraq is certainly a large part of the story. Although administration officials continue to insist that the invasion of Iraq somehow made sense as part of a broadly defined war on terror, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just released a report confirming that Saddam Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat, not an ally; he even made attempts to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But Iraq doesn’t explain it all. Even though the Bush administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to consider the possibility that things wouldn’t go exactly the way they hoped.
These days most agonizing about the state of America’s foreign policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we’ve made in Iraq. But let’s not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven.
“There was a time when the world asked ordinary men
to do extraordinary things”
The photo above is of Engine Company 22, Ladder Company 13 10th Battalion at 9:17 AM today. The words are from a plaque that is found under the photos of nine men who gave their lives trying to save ordinary people like you and me that fateful day. May G-d rest their souls.
While 343 FDNY firefighters, a truly staggering amount, lost their lives 5 years ago today, others have lost their lives in lesser known fires before and after. The circumstances are in the end the same – selfless men and women run straight into danger to get you and me out of it.
One way to help and show you care is by making a donation to the Uniformed Firefighters Association College Fund which provides the families of active and deceased firefighters the opportunity to go on to higher education.
For many people who live in NYC, there is a clear line between those that were here on 9/11/01 and those that were not. In prepping for the 5 year anniversay next Monday, the Times has an article today about this very topic.
“I’m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,” said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. “When you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.”
I myself have a crazy intense story and unless you were here on that day, and by here I mean in NYC close enough to smell the odor of burnt everything in the air, to see the fighter jets circling Manhattan like slot car racers and to hear the deafening wail of sirens then you have a much different understanding and experience of that day than I do. Unfortunately, I got to experience it live with all five senses.
I do not know if I’ve touched on my personal experiences from that day on my blog yet. I’m not sure I want to frankly but in my hopes that “100 years from now a researcher, in his attempts to learn more about the late 20th and early 21st centuries, will discover these words on a server somewhere” I feel that I should. Stay tuned.
Old New Yorkers, Newer Ones, and a Line Etched by a Day of Disaster by Micahel Brick
Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live.
In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed.
The population grew by more than 134,000 from 2000 to 2005, the city’s latest Planning Department calculations show. In that time, 645,416 babies were born and 304,773 people died. A half-million more people came from other countries than departed for them, and 800,000 more people left for the 50 states than came wide-eyed from them.
The meaning in the math is that today a great many New Yorkers lack firsthand knowledge of the city’s critical modern moment.
Five years on, New York is a city of newcomers and survivors. And between them runs a line. The line makes for no conflict, no discernible tension; it works a quieter breach.
Borne of the routine comings and goings of urban life, of births and deaths, the line divides views of a singular moment. Across the line, consummately familiar events can appear contorted.
On one side, the newcomer side, a man seeks accounts of that day; on the other side a man withholds his account. On the newcomer side, a woman visits the absent towers to feel some connection; on the other side a woman feels connected, and then some.
On the side of those who lived in New York, you can share a sense of trauma both layered and ill-defined.
“It’s like someone who has been in a war zone,” said William Stockbridge, 50, a finance executive who was working downtown during the attack. “It’s different.”
On the other side, you can feel like the new boyfriend at your girlfriend’s family reunion the year somebody died — somebody young, somebody you never met.
“You feel like you’re on the outside,” said Matthew Molnar, 26, a waiter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who lived in Middlesex County, N.J., in 2001. “You feel like you missed out on a little bit of history.”
Newcomers and survivors: those terms ring harsh and blunt only because the line is so often unspoken. It runs soundless and invisible down Broadway from Harlem over the Williamsburg Bridge out to Coney Island and to Fresh Kills, up past the airports across the Grand Concourse into Yankee Stadium, through the bleachers where you can’t drink beer anymore and up out of the park into the nighttime sky.
The line flashes into view on the city streets for moments at a time. When jet fighters buzz the skyscrapers for Fleet Week, some of the people below — the ones who were here on Sept. 11 — flinch. More frequently, though, the line operates beneath the surface of conversations, of interactions, of transactions, of life. The line controls small things, controls the way people react to the phrase “and then Sept. 11 happened,” as though a date on the calendar could “happen.”
The line’s contours emerge in conversations. Ask about the attack, and people will describe a sense of ownership.
“You either experienced it firsthand,” said Amanda Spielman, 30, a graphic designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, who was in the city, “or you didn’t.”
Others describe that sense differently, but draw the line in the same place.
“I think for the people that seen it on TV, it is more painful than for the people who saw it here,” said Paolo Gonzalez, 29, who manages a parking lot under the Brooklyn Bridge and who saw the attack. “For the other people it was real. If you was here, when the buildings came down the only thing you were thinking was, ‘Run.’ ”
Across the line, the new arrivals recognize that sense of ownership.
“I’ve been told that I just don’t get it and that I could never understand what it was like to be there in New York on Sept. 11,” said Laura Bassett, 27, who moved to the city from North Carolina after 2001. “I hate that five years later, people still debate which bystander is allowed to be more upset, the New Yorker or the American.”
The line emerges perhaps most powerfully around the fallen towers, 2.06 acres of concrete known as ground zero. Because of the line, the site is a paradox, an emotional contradiction, a mass grave and a tourist attraction.
Some people feel so strongly about the place they cannot agree on an arrangement for listing the names of the dead; others feel so strongly about the place that they make sure to visit between Radio City Music Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Between those emotional poles is a middle ground, and the line runs through its center.
“People who moved to New York, everyone wanted to go down and see it,” said Dede Minor, 51, a real estate broker who was in her office in Midtown on the day of the attack. “For New Yorkers, it was too real.”
Jose Martias, 57, a construction worker who was drinking coffee near the East River when the attack began, said he knew why the newcomers visit the site.
“They don’t understand it so they go down there to see the hole,” Mr. Martias said. “It’s an attraction to them, like going to the circus.”
But across the line there is genuine emotional curiosity, a feeling that people in less cynical times used to call empathy.
“I’d didn’t think I’d be that affected,” said Leah Hamilton, 24, a logistics consultant who moved to Manhattan from Washington State last year. “But when I went to ground zero, it was the first time I’ve felt an emotional reaction like that to something I wasn’t a part of. You feel the energy and you could feel the sadness.”
The line can reach into the future, forging perceptions of New York and its destiny. Some new arrivals speak of the attack as a reason to come to the city.
“We felt like there was a lot of energy here,” said Meg Glasser, 26, a student who moved to the East Village from Boston this year. “We wanted to be a part of it in some way.”
But across the line, that sense of energy is tempered by standards for comparison.
“I know people who have been here a year or two, and they find New York fantastic,” said Father Bernard, 67, a Roman Catholic monk who was born in Brooklyn and who goes by only that name. “They’re right, but they didn’t know the New York before.”
The line reaches into the past as well, dividing memories. Each generation tells the next where they were when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were killed or when a space shuttle exploded, but a major act of destruction in a major American city creates more firsthand accounts.
Psychological studies suggest those accounts have played a role in drawing the line. After the attack, a group of academic researchers interviewed 1,500 people, including 550 in New York City, to gauge memories of detail, said Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Proximity to Lower Manhattan during the attack, Dr. Phelps said, “increases your confidence in your memories, and your accuracy as well.”
In a separate study, the researchers measured activity in parts of the brain connected to memory. With verbal cues, subjects were asked to conjure visions of the terror attack and of personal events from the summer of 2001. Only half registered a difference in neural activity.
“Those who did show a difference were, on average, in Washington Square Park,” Dr. Phelps said. “Those who didn’t were, on average, in Midtown.”
Among those who have come to the city since 2001, the line dividing memories is undisputed.
“I had been there as a tourist to the World Trade Center, so I have memories,” said Marielle Solan, 22, a photographer who moved to the city from Delaware this year. “But obviously I can’t have any sense of what it was like. Every Sept, 11, you get a sense of fear and depression, but in terms of actual visceral reactions, I don’t really have that.”
The new arrivals have found a conspicuous void of shared memory.
“I’m amazed because it was such a big event, and people never mention it,” said Deenah Vollmer, 20, who moved to the city last year. “When you do mention it, everyone has these crazy intense stories.”
Across the line, many of those who lived in the city hold their memories close.
“The people I already knew know my stories from that day, so there’s no need to repeat them,” said Ms. Spielman, the graphic designer. “The new people I’ve met don’t ask me. It’s not something I bring up.”
But each year the calendar brings it up. Alexandria Lambert, 28, who works as an administrative assistant, sees the line run through the center of her office. Each year, a co-worker who witnessed the attack asks for the day off, and each year a boss who did not declines the request.
“His point of view is, ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ ” Ms. Lambert said, “but she just doesn’t want to be here.”
The Onion’s Caltech Physicists Successfully Split The Bill article is ridiculously funny if you are a science nerd. Anytime someone references the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle in a humor piece, I smile big-big thankee-sai.