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The Hairbrush

Barbara Keating was 72 when American Airlines Flight 11 carried her into the North Tower. She had spent the summer on Cape Cod visiting her grandchildren, and she was flying home to Palm Springs. On August 7, 2025, the New York City medical examiner’s office gave her name back. Technicians had identified her from minute remains recovered in the trade center wreckage, matched through advanced DNA testing against a hairbrush from her home and samples from her relatives. Her son Paul told reporters that a scrap of her ATM card was the only other trace of her ever found. She was the 1,652nd person identified among the 2,753 killed at the World Trade Center. Her family has buried her beside her husband.

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When the City Becomes the Carceral

In today’s New York Times, there was a depressing story about the ongoing, and strategic, public incarceration of the new “World Trade Center” area before it is even officially open to the public.  Where once the citizenry roamed with wild and interested abandon in the area, the Police State have now taken over with barricades and station houses and checkpoints.

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Air Force One Terrorizes New York City

In a strange and alarming drop into the Panopticon, Air Force One — yes, President Obama’s official airplane as named when he’s actually riding in it — recently terrorized New York City, sans Obama, as it strafed downtown Manhattan for a photo shoot bringing back the good old bad days of the World Trade Center semiotic of airplanes-as-bombs crashing into buildings.

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The World Trade Center Falling on Your Head Meme

The sculpture you see below, believe it or not, was created to honor those that died in the World Trade Center airplane bombing on September 11, 2001.  The fact that many people leapt out of the burning buildings to escape the fire in the sky to quickly find their deaths on the ground below was lost on the artist.

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Word Calluses and the 9/11 Death Pit

Today is the sixth anniversary of the crowning of the Ground Zero Death Pit where the World Trade Center used to stand.

I have written about that life-changing, world-modifying, event every year since the attack and I have come to gruesomely realize there are some dark pits that no words can ever begin to fill.

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Thinking About September 11, 2001 & 2002

On September 11 we commemorate the loss of thousands of people to an unnatural disaster. Every year the human race suffers the loss of thousands of people to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, blizzards, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes — disasters that we have very little chance of avoiding and no one to blame; only Nature.

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World Trade Center: Recreating Towers of Iron & Irony

by Tammy Tillotson

According to discussions at the annual fall meeting of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) held in Boston, Massachusetts on October 3-6, 2001, rebuilding the World Trade Center is already in the preliminary planning stages.

As rebuilding is now a near certainty, the question becomes whether or not the World Trade Center should be rebuilt precisely as it was before, or should it be something entirely different?

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