2025-10-07 08:00:00
So many of the best, most thoughtful, most caring and talented people I’ve collaborated with in my career have had a focus on inclusion and equity as either the primary role or the supporting and enabling context of their work. But thanks to a well-funded, decades-long concerted effort, the reasonable and moral consensus that we should care for one another and offer opportunities to those who haven’t had them has become a vulnerability that those in political power right now are using to target anyone who is trying to empower or uplift the marginalized.
It’s a war on DEI, and it’s left good people feeling afraid to make basic statements of plainly human dignity, like “we should work to undo the harmful effects of decades of racist exclusion”, or “we should fix the pay inequities that have kept women from being paid fairly when they do the same work as men”. These were uncontroversial statements for decades even amongst the most conservative segments of America and the extremist takeover of both social media and conventional media has quickly normalized such a radical shift that people are now often afraid to plainly state these kinds of fundamental truths in public, especially in the workplace.
But there are so many good people who care about this work, whose values have not been corrupted just because the authoritarians currently in power have decided to persecute others, or to strip funding from organizations, if they dare to use “forbidden” language when describing the way they’re going to take care of people. The MAGA extremists aren’t content just to take television shows off the air, or to ban books in schools — they’ve also provided lists of words that can cause organizations to lose federal funding, and now have escalated their attack on empathy and kindness to include firing people who have expressed sympathy or solidarity for communities through demonstrations such as kneeling in a gesture of support.
The net result is a situation I’ve come to describe as the “**Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era of DEI. Much of the work of inclusion and support is still going on, because the spirit of kindness and justice is an unstoppable one. But just as there have always been LGBTQ+ people in the military, and the DADT legal framework just allowed institutions to continue to be in denial about reality, many pragmatic organizations have begun evolving to say “fine, we won’t call it DEI if these delicate MAGA crybabies can’t hear those words — but we can still do the work”.
Because the truth is, communities focused on justice and community care have always been able to provide for each other, even when persecution or circumstance required that they be clandestine about it. It was never easy, but there was indeed a railroad that did run underground. And it has always been communities on the margins that invent and evolve language anyway; when the right decided to demonize the word “woke” after belatedly (mis-)appropriating it from Black and queer cultures, I was angry about the injustice of the intellectual dishonesty of that campaign. But I’ve never worried about whether these communities would find even more expressive and joyful ways to communicate the vibrant and vital ideas that vexed these soulless fascists so completely.
And there’s some shedding of the old that might even be a small silver lining to the cloud. Within our communities of practice, many of us have felt some degree of fatigue or burnout at the cynicism and ineffectiveness with which many organizations embraced their DEI efforts, especially those that tried to engage at a superficial level in 2020 and then only maintained a cosmetic embrace of the work without proper resourcing or structural support in the years since. In truth, I think a lot of the institutions whose leaders have followed that pattern were just waiting for this excuse to drop the pretense, and at least now we can all stop the charade.
Not being able to speak plainly about the vital work of inclusion is, to be clear, a grave injustice. But the fact that the petulant children in this administration are desperately hoping that a network of quislings will tattle on their coworkers for using the forbidden word “diversity” reveals just how fragile – and importantly, how unpopular this attack on equity really is.
Though the right wing has been able to game the refs in media for the last decade enough that many people feel “this woke thing has gone too far!”, in reality, most people also really do like the idea that things should be fair. They really do like the feeling that they’re being good to those who’ve been mistreated, and they liked when The Muppets taught them how to be nice to people who were different from them. It’s not fair that we have to endure these indignities and attacks but there is also some solace and comfort in knowing that so many people also know intrinsically what is good and right, even when they may be afraid about how and when they can say it.
So the specific wording we have been using may be dormant for a while, and many people who used to use these descriptions may have to refrain from doing so. Maybe these particular names for these concepts will even slip from popular vernacular, replaced by updated names that reflect a new generation’s sensibilities. I’ll never stop being furious about these liars having misrepresented the work of good people and twisted acts of kindness and love into something that is vilified.
But I’m also heartened to remember past eras of resilience and adaptability when an imperfect and inelegant compromise helped navigate through a tumultuous time until everyone in a community could come out stronger on the other side. If the cruelty of this moment forces all of us to again face a situation where there are no good choices, at least we’ve seen that there are ways we can help preserve the progress that’s been made so far, by any name.
2025-10-07 08:00:00
Much of the conversation about video and content over the last few weeks has been about the silencing of Jimmy Kimmels's show and the fact that we're seeing a shockingly rapid move towards the type of censorious media control typical of most authoritarian regimes.
But there's a broader trend that poses a looming threat to online video creators that I think is going a bit under the radar, so I took a minute to pull together a quick short-form video on the topic:
The key things that have shifted can be summarized with three points:
All of this is trying to make clear to video creators that they need to embrace the same radical control that podcasters have always had.
Separately, I'm also (obviously!) using this as a chance to start sharing a bit more of the videos I've been making lately. It's still very early, and I'm not quite sure what direction they're headed, so please do share any feedback you've got.
In general, I'm going to try to complement my writing here with some videos from time to time, just to make some of these concepts more accessible to different audiences. If you're inclined, please do take a look, and share them with people who might find them interesting. (I'm expecting to use both quick vertical formats and more substantive traditional horizontal videos, and to post across most of the major social networks so as to not be overly dependent on any one platform.)
2025-09-29 08:00:00
Anyone who knows me know that I love the esoteric, confusing and complicated aspects of pop music's greatest artists. When a Garth Brooks goes on a detour to become Chris Gaines? I'm there.
So, for decades, I've been a bit obsessed with Mariah Carey's long-lost side project Someone's Ugly Daughter, which she created under the name "Chick", as a grunge-influenced emotional release from the stresses she was under during the creation of her 1995 album Daydream. A not-very-veiled dig at the frustrations she had with her then-husband and label head Tommy Mottola, the songs themselves have been circulating amongst fans for years, with lead vocals from Clarissa Dane, Mariah's friend and collaborator on the project. (Mariah herself was barred from taking lead on the project due to her commitments to Sony at the time.)
The Daughter project came to much higher visibility, though, after Mariah mentioned it in her (incredible! highly recommended!) memoir "The Meaning of Mariah Carey", which came out in 2020. The book taught a lot of people who saw Mariah as primarily a pop artist or merely a remarkable vocalist that she's a truly gifted songwriter, and the breadth of her catalog was exemplified by the revelation to many more casual fans that she had things like an entire Hole-inspired grunge album sitting unreleased in her vault.
But at long last, we're seeing Mariah finally acknowledge this hidden part of her catalog in the promotional tour for her latest record, Here For It All. After a fan flashed a (presumably homemade?) album cover for Daughter at an event, Mariah began to talk about the record, and even let the crowd listen to one of the best songs on the record, "Love Is A Scam".
It's hard to imagine, at the same moment that "Always Be My Baby" was still all over the radio, and when she was recording "Fantasy", that Mariah was listening to acts like Garbage and recording this harder-edged album at night, art-directing an album cover featuring a dead cockroach on the front. But I do have a theory that nearly all great pop artists have at least one great alter ego hiding inside them, and perhaps Chick is that one for Mariah. I'm hoping this belated acknowledgment of the Someone's Ugly Daughter record is a major step towards its eventual, long-overdue, release.
Update: Well, I should have known. Back in January of 2021, the best interview that Mariah's ever done was, to no surprise, her appearance on Questlove Supreme, which was the first time she publicly talked about the Chick album at length. Quest and I have talked about our appreciation of the record a few times since then, debating its place in her catalog, but I guess his opinion is settled now: best in her catalog! (I still think Emancipation of Mimi might be better.)
2025-09-18 08:00:00
You didn’t used to have to be an expert on intellectual property law just to be a music fan. You would just put on your headphones, hit play, and enjoy whatever your favorite artist had made for you to listen to. Maybe you would listen to a record, or if you were old enough, a CD, or if you were old enough, a record.
But thanks to the bottomless greed that suits in the music industry have had her the years, fans have had to learn about formerly-obscure concepts like recording contracts and licensing rights and master recordings. And no one in recent years has done more to teach them about these details than Taylor Swift, whose years-long campaign to wrest back control of her master recordings culminated with the triumphant announcement, earlier this year, of her having purchased her entire catalog of master recordings. This announcement meant fans were no longer forced to choose between the versions of her albums they originally heard, or the re-recordings of those classics that she’s been releasing to streaming services with expanded tracks and guest features and all-new art, all meant to displace the legacy versions with ones under her control.
The capstone on Taylor’s reclamation of her work was the recent New Heights podcast her with her now-fiancé Travis Kelce, where her narration of the battle to own her work, talking about the loss she felt over work she’s been creating since she was a teenager, was moving even to those who weren’t fans of her music or who didn’t know her songs very well. It humanized these kinds of battles as being about art and heart, not just abstract legal concerns.
All of this seemed very familiar to me as a Prince fan, as it mirrored the pioneering battle he’d fought starting in the early 1990s, based on his having signed a contract when he was a teenager As he explained in a letter to fans, “both youth and excitement towards the opportunity to have an album produced made me, as Prince, naïve”. Based on the long history of Black artists having been exploited and abused by the music industry, Prince knew that it would be an arduous battle, but after nearly two decades of persevering, he won back full control of his master recordings for his entire catalog of dozens of albums before the end of his life. It was a triumph and a fitting victory for a man who wanted to be remembered for the phrase “If u don’t own your masters, then your masters own u.” It was a rallying cry that galvanized fans.
But that was a battle from the 20th century. I wasn’t sure if a generation of music fans growing up in the current era would have the same passion about these issues that we did, until I saw Swifties everywhere rallying behind her fight over these last few years. It’s been exciting to watch, especially in light of what’s been happening on the internet, and in technology at the same time. Great artists inspire the entire culture to change. And it was obvious that Taylor’s fans are ready to fight, and they have her back.
The single biggest conversation in every creative community right now is the enormous impact that the recent rise of artificial intelligence is having on creators. Virtually all of the biggest AI companies are training their models on massive amounts of creative work gathered almost entirely without consent, and very often without any respect for licensing or permissions. Worse, the models that are trained on those works are then very often used to create poor facsimiles of the works that were ingested into these systems, attempting to displace the very art that made them possible.
Now, I’m of the belief that AI systems don’t actually have to work this way, but the reality is that, at least right now, they almost all do. The big tools from the big companies have all been created this way, and the people running these companies largely treat the use of content without consent or compensation as an inevitability.
It’s worth noting, this is true despite the fact that many of the coders and programmers who create today’s technologies don’t necessarily agree with this ethical stance. Many developers and coders see themselves as much more aligned with other creators like writers and artists than they are with the management of tech companies. Coders recognize that their work has been used to train AI tools without consent or compensation as well — and that their management is just as eager to displace them with AI tools, too. So even within the “tech” world, there isn’t a unified consensus that this approach to intellectual property and the work of creators is the right one.
Even if people don’t have the right technical words for it, there’s a broad sense that things aren’t quite fair.
Where that leaves us is with an enormous and passionate fan base of millions of people who know that an artist they care deeply about has fought for years for control of her work. They undoubtedly believe that she should have the right to say who has access to that work, and how they can profit from it. And nobody is more notorious than extremely-online fan bases when it comes to figuring out clues about how someone might be transgressing against their favorite artists.
It is almost a certainty that one of the big AI models has already trained its system on Taylor Swift’s music without her consent. It is nearly inevitable that their tools might start generating content based on having learned from her work, whether that is music or videos or lyrics or any other kind of media. And these companies are already charging money for that output, profiting from the things they derive from this work.
Once it becomes obvious to the global community of Swifties that a big AI company has taken Taylor’s Version without permission — has done to Taylor again what those creepy old record execs did to her as a young artist — how do they think that is going to go?
A lot of people are working on technical solutions to figure out what to do about all of the good and interesting and creative parts of the internet being sucked up into AI tools without any regard for what happens to the creators when that happens. Some are working on making sure people get paid when that happens. Some are just trying to block it all and stop it from happening. Some are working on even more complicated solutions. And I expect that we’ll see a combination of all of these approaches in the years to come.
But that’s looking at the problem as a technical issue. It’s much more of a social and cultural issue. And in that context, I would never count out the massive cultural force that is fan culture. The sheer cultural power that can be wielded by Swifties, or k-pop fans, or the Beyhive, or any other activated fanbase deciding that they really, really care about tech companies showing some damn respect to the artists that they love is going to turn out to be far more powerful than any technological approach to solving these issues.
This is especially key because most of the people creating the AI platforms, or the super-technical solutions to moving content around the internet, are nearly illiterate in the contemporary aspects of fan culture. They’re boomers (either literally or figuratively) who seldom consume today’s most relevant music or streams or tiktoks, they are unfamiliar with most influencers or cultural figures. They’re too often incurious about why people even love these artists and creators to begin with.
So as we try to figure out how to protect artists and creators, how to keep the open internet vital and flourishing, and how to preserve the culture and inspires and engages so many, the answer might be right in front of us. The biggest underestimated factor is the power of fan culture and the passion of people standing behind the artists and creators who they love, and the technologists and platforms that embrace that sentiment, and work with those fan communities, and tap into that feeling instead of fighting against it, are the ones that are destined to succeed in the long term.
2025-09-17 08:00:00
Hearing the news yesterday that Robert Redford had passed away reminded me of one of the most moving, and bittersweet, memories that Prince shared with us toward the end of his life. It began as an uncharacteristically direct moment of vulnerability, and eventually turned into a conversation about the one most important lesson he wanted everyone to learn about his life’s work. It’s one that seems more relevant than ever today.
Prince’s final tour was called “Piano & a Microphone”, an intimate show where he’d play his own songs, and songs that had meant a lot to him growing up, while telling stories of his life or of the moments that inspired those songs.
In those last shows, including at the final concert of his life, Prince would play a searing, heartfelt medley of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” and his own “If I Was Your Girlfriend”.
During the song, Prince paused and put up a still photo of Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand from “The Way We Were”, asking the audience if they remembered the scene in the film where the couple breaks up, only for Streisand’s character to immediately call Redford’s character to console her despite being her ex.
Prince then resumes his song with the next verse, “would u run 2 me if somebody hurt u, even if that somebody was me?” It’s a surprisingly revealing look at the inspiration, or at least an artistic connection, behind one of Prince’s most beloved songs. Though it’s far from one of his biggest hits or his best-known compositions, “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is beloved by fans for its groundbreaking bending of gender, its genuinely unique production, and especially the empathy and vulnerability of its narrative. And now we saw Prince dropping his long-maintained stage persona to talk about a romantic movie that came out when he was 15 years old. We can only imagine the impression it left on him as a teenager, enough for him to reference it more than 40 years later with absolutely no loss in emotional resonance.
In an era when an entire generation has grown up listening to “Taylor’s Version” of a recording, fans’ fluency about intellectual property and artists’ rights of ownership is very high. But in the 80s and 90s, it was often considered gauche for an artist to talk about such commercial concerns, and very few mainstream media outlets even mentioned the long history of Black artists having had their work exploited and extracted by the music industry over the years.
After becoming one of the most popular and consequential artists of the 1980s, Prince started, in the early 1990s, to focus his career on getting control of his artistic output — specifically his master recordings. During this time, he said that the one thing he wanted to be remembered for was “If u don’t own your masters, then your masters own u.”
That message of artistic control over creativity has always stuck with me, and I was reminded of it again when Prince had performed his beautiful, moving cover of that Marley song mashed up with one of his own greatest compositions.
So I asked him if he would release a recording of his live performance of the track for us fans to be able to listen to legally.
He responded in a deleted tweet (he usually deleted nearly all of his tweets shortly after posting) that he would have to ask the Marley estate's permission in order to release the recording. I pointed out that he technically didn't need to do so, since the legal regime of compulsory licensing meant that artists could record a cover without having to ask the original composer. This was, for example, how Sinead O'Connor had been able to record his composition "Nothing Compares 2 U" without having had to ask for his clearance.
Prince's response was, well... classic Prince. (He tended to respond to tweets by copying-and-pasting them into his responses instead of quoting them.)
ONE OF THE MOST HEINOUS ACTS EVER PERPETRATED ON MUSICIANS!! seems to be fairly consistent with his views about how artists should have been able to maintain full control over their work. Well, at least how he should have been able to maintain full control over his work — Prince played covers of other artists without their prior consent all the time. In fact, the true genius of how Prince played the greatest Super Bowl halftime show of all time was due to his deep and brilliantly subtle use of cover songs as incredibly thoughtful cultural commentary.
But that complexity aside, what I largely took away from reflecting on this exchange from almost a decade ago was how much I miss having this kind of interplay about artists' rights and artistic influence with smart, engaged, thoughtful creators.
Redford fought throughout his career for underrepresented creators to have the stage (and the screen) at platforms like Sundance, just as so many institutions falter and back off of support for those vital creators. He gave voice to narratives like the immorality of McCarthyism in films like The Way We Were, just as a new wave of equally virulent witch hunts begins to ramp up. His most legendary roles like All The President's Men ring most resonant when we see The Washington Post making a mockery of itself against the backdrop of a presidency whose corruption is even more depraved, carried out by those who don't even bother to hide it.
Similarly, Prince shared his stages and studios with an incredibly broad and diverse set of collaborators, and constantly reminded them that they needed to walk away with real ownership of their work. He fought the biggest and most powerful companies that attempted to control every aspect of culture and media, and even when it took decades to do so, wrested control of his work back into his own hands, all while pioneering so many of the tools and technologies and techniques that would inspire a new generation of artists to demand the rights they deserve. Just as importantly, he never backed down from using the art he created to speak up on issues of social justice and equity, standing on the biggest stages to plainly speak to the humanity and dignity of every person.
But beyond those big headlines, there are the simple acts that these artists performed on a daily basis. They made art where they allowed themselves to be vulnerable. They dressed with style all the time, even when nobody was looking. They let themselves be inspired by the unexpected, by other forms of art, by everything around them. And they made a space for the next generation to follow in their footsteps, to create on their own terms, to go even further after they're gone.
2025-09-11 08:00:00
It was clear fairly immediately that the political goal of the attacks on September 11th was to undermine the American empire. Sitting here less than a quarter-century later under authoritarian rule, with the rule of law in America in tatters, tanks in the streets, political violence becoming routine, and the country’s stature permanently (at least for my lifetime) diminished, it would seem that we could put up a banner saying “Mission Accomplished”.
There was so much to grieve for on the day. All these years later, there is so much more grief. As I noted last year, the reality of the actual day has fully faded into mythology; it’s hard to recognize the version of the story that’s repeated under the pretense of “never forget” in comparison to anything any of us actually remember from the time.
But worse, the hope and even optimism that many of us had about some sense of unity, of collective purpose, arising from the moment has given rise to the revelation of the darkest impulses that anyone could attribute to America. I still don’t believe it’s most people, just the ones who have seized power, and those who are willing or complacent enough to enable them, but it’s enough that the United States became in character more or less exactly what Bin Laden said we were.
Despite all this, New York City is still the New York that permanently became a part of my heart that day. We will embrace the young Muslim man who will, inshallah, be our mayor soon. We will hold the line on remembering that day as it actually was, and caring for each other now as we did then. If Manhattan has to be a figurative island as much as a literal one, then that’s what it was always born to be.
As I write this, I’m walking around our neighborhood surrounded by people who are both adults and without any memories of being in NYC on that day. I feel like I have a secret that is terrible and a little bit beautiful that could reveal the truth of this place to them. But also I hope they take this tragedy and wreckage that they’ve been given right now and make something beautiful for each other.
Last year, 23: What was 9/11?:
The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either gone or their memories have faded. But I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I can say definitively: The constructed cultural narrative around the day bears almost no resemblance to the actual lived experience of anyone I know who was here that day. So maybe it’s worth telling a little bit of what I actually saw.
Two years ago, "It's unrecognizable":
[M]aybe I keep coming back because I am hoping that others might still recognize the little glimpses of humanity that I saw on the day of the attacks, and that I saw in abundance, in New York City, in the days that follow. It wasn't a myth, it wasn't just wishful thinking, there really was kindness and care in this place that I love so much. I don't think those who tell the loudest stories today would even recognize it.
Three years ago, "There Is Nothing To Remember"
So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as rhetoric in a culture war, or as justifications for violence. Nothing epitomizes this more than the fact that, while the memory has faded in culture broadly, it's only brought to the fore in situations like those where most New Yorkers would be targeted.
Four years ago, "Twenty is a Myth":
I can't change how society overall sees this event. To my eternal regret, I couldn't change how we responded in any meaningful way. But I did get to make personal changes, permanently and for the better, and the loss and grief of that day does still motivate me to try to honor the moment by pushing for justice, and care, and an earnest engagement with the world.
Five years ago, Nineteen is When They Forgot
I do have the experience of having seen this city bounce back from unimaginable pain before. I have seen us respond to attacks on our public life by rebuilding and reimagining public space. I have seen us grieve our losses and rally behind those who cared for those injured, and preserve space in our cultural memory for their pain and sacrifice. By no means have we done enough for all those lost, but it is absolutely true that we can rebuild. We’ve done it before.
Six years ago, Eighteen is History
There are ritualized remembrances, largely led by those who weren't there, those who mostly hate the values that New York City embodies. The sharpest memories are of the goals of those who masterminded the attacks. It's easy enough to remember what they wanted, since they accomplished all their objectives and we live in the world they sought to create. The empire has been permanently diminished. Never Forget.
In 2018, Seventeen is (Almost) Just Another Day
I spent so many years thinking “I can’t go there” that it caught me completely off guard to realize that going there is now routine. Maybe the most charitable way to look at it is resiliency, or that I’m seeing things through the eyes of my child who’s never known any reality but the present one. I'd spent a lot of time wishing that we hadn't been so overwhelmed with response to that day, so much that I hadn''t considered what it would be like when the day passed for so many people with barely a notice at all.
In 2017, Sixteen is Letting Go Again
So, like ten years ago, I’m letting go. Trying not to project my feelings onto this anniversary, just quietly remembering that morning and how it felt. My son asked me a couple of months ago, “I heard there was another World Trade Center before this one?” and I had to find a version of the story that I could share with him. In this telling, losing those towers was unimaginably sad and showed that there are incredibly hurtful people in the world, but there are still so many good people, and they can make wonderful things together.
In 2016 Fifteen is the Past:
I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them.
What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now.
In 2015, Fourteen is Remembering:
For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.
In 2014, Thirteen is Understanding:
There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.
From 2013, Twelve is Trying:
I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact.
But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.
In 2012, Eleven is What We Make:
These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.
In 2011 for the 10th anniversary, Ten is Love and Everything After:
I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.
In 2010, Nine is New New York:
[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City. Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.
And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.
In 2009, Eight Is Starting Over:
[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.
Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.
In 2008, Seven Is Angry:
Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.
In 2007, Six Is Letting Go:
On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.
In 2006, After Five Years, Failure:
[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.
We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.
In 2005, Four Years:
I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.
In 2004, Thinking Of You:
I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.
In 2003, Two Years:
I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.
In 2002, I wrote On Being An American:
[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.
In 2001, Thank You:
I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse…
I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.