When they left, I flipped on the TV to quickly check the weather...and was confronted with a split-screen image of both World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on fire. I sat on the edge of my bed trying and failing to understand what I was looking at.
Twenty minutes later, I arrived for War, Peace, and Strategy — in that morning’s chaos, Columbia didn’t cancel classes until after lunch — wearing a walkman to monitor radio news. Seeing my headphones, the teaching assistant asked me to keep listening while he explained the syllabus to the other shellshocked students who’d made it to class, and to raise my hand if I heard important updates.
Over the next few minutes, I stopped class twice — first to relay that fighter jets were still tracking multiple passenger planes and then to confirm that US airspace was closed. That morning, the story could only be processed one small piece at a time.
Back on the street, I looked to the sky for any sign of the still-unfolding horror six miles south, but all I saw was blue. No smoke. I heard no sirens or car horns. All was quiet, except for the sounds of televisions and radios telling the story through open windows on both sides of Amsterdam Avenue.
After a dozen tries, I finally got a call through to my girlfriend, who lived in the East Village, much closer to Ground Zero than I was, and we agreed to meet and try to get as close as we could to what was happening. I still can’t explain why.
We made our way down West Side Highway to a line of barricades within a mile of the site. Cheering and crying New Yorkers lined both sides of the road as cop cars and firetrucks came and went. I remember people, wanting to help, running into the street to pass bottles of water to blackened, exhausted firefighters as they passed. And I remember a procession of empty ambulances returning from the wreckage.
A fear of what might come next settled over the city. After a few days, theaters reopened, and it seemed half the population suddenly needed to go to the movies. I remember sitting in a completely packed house waiting for a film to start. As the lights went down, a man down front abruptly stood up and walked briskly back up the aisle. He’s going to the bathroom, I told myself, but I didn’t relax until he returned three minutes later. I felt sure that every person in that darkened theater was waiting for him too. Is this how we’ll live now? I wondered.
And I remember the flags. I climbed in a taxi one mid-September evening on East 6th Street for a five-mile ride uptown. Within a few blocks I stopped counting the American flags I saw in apartment windows and storefronts.
I’ve now lived in New York City for four decades. Spalding Gray once called New York City “an island off the coast of America.” After all these years, it's hard to capture what it felt like, how much it meant, to know that America supported New York City and that New Yorkers were proud to be Americans. The mix of heartfelt grief, burning pride, nagging dread, and fellow feeling was unlike anything I’ve seen here before or since.
In the days that followed 9/11, a Gallup poll found that public approval of the president of the United States, a man just nine months removed from one of the most controversial election outcomes in US history, had jumped from 51 percent before the attacks to 90% after.
An American president with a 90% approval rating. Imagine.
In our city, in Washington, and across the nation, it felt like everyone had rallied to everyone else. It didn’t last, of course, but it happened. Twenty-five years later, I remember so well how it felt.
That’s one reason I feel such sadness today.
Ian Bremmer, my boss, has asked many times over the years whether another national catastrophe would bring Americans together. You know the answer. In today’s polarized America, nothing, not even an entirely unimagined human tragedy, could recreate the national unity of 25 years ago.
That’s what I’m thinking about on September 11, 2026.
I want to believe that Americans can talk to one another honestly, passionately, and respectfully about all the things on which we disagree. Then laugh together over the never-ending absurdities of partisan politics and acknowledge all that we share.
I know, of course, that many of you reading this are not Americans, and I wonder if you feel something similar about changes in your political culture.
Memories of 9/11 always bring back shock and pain. But with each passing year, I miss the collective human response it inspired just a little more. I’m afraid we Americans can never get that back.
Oh, how I want to be wrong.
