Postscript to American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
American Ground was originally an Atlantic series, and an attempt to respond usefully to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As it became clear that the magazine was committed to a long and heavily charged project about the deconstruction of the World Trade Center ruins, I wanted to take some emotional distance from the tragedy, and to approach the narrative as if I were looking back on current events from several decades into the future. The result would be, I hoped, like a “history in the present tense.” It was a formulation that came often to mind as I proceeded.
