The slowest moment in my whole life was the time between when the World Trade Center fell next to me, and when someone broke a window and I climbed in to get air. In my memory this time span is about fifteen minutes. But from the historical record, I know it was about one minute.
I [...]

I was standing at the bottom of the Word Trade Center when it fell. I was standing so close that I didn't know it fell. I thought earthquake, until I couldn't breathe. Then I thought nuclear bomb.
Now, when I let my head go back to that day, there are two moments I most easily go [...]

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. At each anniversary that passes I write my story, and each year it changes a little. This year, I have been thinking about that moment when I accepted death.
I was at the corner of Liberty and Broadway when the first tower fell. I was too [...]

The most conflicted memorial just got more conflicted. The New York Times reports that the relatives of those killed on 9/11 will not endorse the World Trade Center memorial plan unless the names of the dead are categorized by where they were working. Relatives don't just want the company name, though. They want the tower [...]

The footage from New Orleans reminds me of my own experience at the World Trade Center. The first couple of weeks after the hurricane are just the beginning. So much of the rest of the story is about asking for help, and it ’s one of the hardest things in the world to do; at [...]

For most people, September 11 has come and gone, but the anniversary will always be important to me because I was a block away when the first building fell. The people I have met who were at the World Trade Center that day never stopped associating the event with their work, and I am no [...]

There’s nothing like forty bombs on a Middle-East metropolis to make you feel like your weekly widget report is meaningless. But we can’t bring the economy to a screeching halt. If nothing else, we need to eat, we have to get paid. So we find ourselves making judgments each day about what is in poor [...]

In New York, a town where one third of the workers worked downtown, and more than one third were affected by the twin tower attacks, one of the best places to network is at trauma groups.
You have to interview to get in a group. Not because they’re exclusive, but because peoples’ experiences are so different [...]

My husband takes the subway to work every morning and gets off right in front of the NBC building in Manhattan. That subway stop – Rockefeller Center – is huge and very busy in rush hour, and I’m sure the stop has come up in conversation among insane but unfortunately still-crafty terrorists.
I have asked my [...]

My earliest memory of Yom Kippur is one of my dad writing a note for me to give to my second grade teacher: "Please excuse Penelope from school tomorrow. She is Jewish."
Maybe if there had been other Jews at my school, the note would have had more context. But my dad was apoplectic about the [...]

I was one who wanted a better look. I wanted to get closer. And the price I paid was leaving my shoes in the middle of a pile of suffocating bodies. At the Wall St. train stop people were covered with papers. A plane crash. That's what everyone said. Then a boom. Everyone ran. I [...]