11-Sep

How a meeting with Muslim youth leaders led me to realize I had cynically underestimated a slogan’s power.

Do atheists have a case?

The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.

Did you hear the one about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral?

Ten years on, as the experts who pushed for a disastrous war remain experts, it remains unclear why it ever happened. Was it just racism? Who, after all, does not plan for the day after a war? I plan out what I am going to do when I drive up to New York to see friends and family. Maybe the rest of the world decided to move on while we floundered about, amazed that just because we dreamed something, it could not come to pass.

A new document sets the record straight (though you won’t find anything on the president).

How did a B movie get rendered into Arabic, then used to justify an attack on American sites overseas?

*headdesk* Right. Cute dog videos it is, then.

Lower Manhattan has long been a proving ground for American ideals.

RD talks with journalist Amy Waldman whose first novel, The Submission, presciently imagines a controversy, set in post-9/11 New York City, in which the design of a Muslim-American wins a contest to build a 9/11 memorial.