[T]here has been a complete scientific study - from Mount Sinai research that shows that at least 70 percent of the thousands who labored at Ground Zero as first responders reported, and proved, that they had awful trouble breathing or worse.
The following press release just popped up in our inbox:
Really, you have to admire the unabashed symbolism.
As September 11 nears its inevitable reappearance on our calendar, Sara Berman at the New York Sun wonders how we'll tell the children. A private school counselor gives her some advice:
The New York City Health Department issued long-awaited instructions to doctors Thursday for treating and detecting 9/11-related illnesses, including a warning that smoking worsens World Trade Center-related diseases.
NBC and its networks will provide a full-court press of coverage on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, calling on current NBC News journalists as well as former anchor Tom Brokaw and former Today co-host Jane Pauley.
Inspired by today's 9/11 anniversary package (Just out of curiosity, how tasteless does a pitch have to be to get turned down at the weekly New York story meeting? And has one ever?), we decided to engage in a little counterhistory of our own. We asked a couple of former New York employees how things would be different had Caroline Miller stayed. For professional reasons, both chose to remain anonymous, but we can tell you that one of them is John Simon, and it took us eight hours to edit out all the homophobic slurs. Anyway our first respondent posits that:
• Five news orgs — including NYT — pay Wen Ho Lee $750,000 to settle his case. Which seems not a not entirely unreasonable amount after mistakenly being labled a nuclear spy. [NYT]
• CBS News Iraq reporter Kim Dozier now off respirator, breathing on her own. [CBSNews.com]
• Charlie Gibson thinks New York's Joe Hagan "is something of a snake" and will never talk to him again. Mind you, this is over a fluffy Q&A. [Chicago Defender]
• Best attack on Judy Miller ever: She could have prevented 9/11. [TAP]
• Time loses Baghdad reporters; New York to lose dapper WSJer Matthew Rose. [NYP]
• Time's Jim Kelly to take sabbatical, visit Statue of Liberty before starting new corporate gig. [MW]
• GMA EP Ben Sherwood quits. Presumably he just couldn't bear not having Charlie Gibson's full attention. [Media Mob/NYO]
Marky Mark Wahlberg "was scheduled to fly on one of the doomed 9-11 planes from Boston to L.A. but changed his plans at the last minute." Had he actually taken the trip, he might have averted the catastrophe. " There were a bunch of us, five or six . . . we were all guys too . . . but I was not traveling with security," says Marky. "We were in first class. We certainly would have tried to do something. I try not to think about it but how can you not think about it?" Whether or not Wahlberg and his funky bunch (the basis, let's not forget, for HBO's "Entourage") would have been able to make the terrorists feel the vibrations is a "what if?" for future historians to ponder, but it sure would have made United 93 a hell of a lot more enjoyable. Especially if Jeremy Piven was on board.
So we were leafing through this week's new Time magazine, and we ended up getting drawn into its arts lede, "Let's Roll...," about the forthcoming film United 93, about the plane hijacked by terrorists on September 11 and crashed by the hostages into a Pennsylvania field so that it could not be used as yet another improvised missile. It's a good and compelling piece, about what sounds like a good and compelling movie, and it's got some interesting insight into how the film was made — all the victim's families approved, scenes were improvised, and it was cast in an unusual way:
New York had nine pages this week on 9/11 conspiracy theories, and, truth be told, a lot of them sounded not entirely ridiculous. (The temperature of a jet-fuel fire is lower that the temp at which steel melts? Not even the experts can explain why 7 WTC fell? Bush's black-sheep brother Marvin worked at the security company that protected the World Trade Center and United and American airlines? Interesting.) But, still, it also seemed to be coming from the usual, if well-intentioned, wackos — you know, overearnest Starbucks-bashing punks and overearnest Birks-wearing old hippies and that East Village priest with a soul patch — and so it was easy, as you sat reading Mark Jacobson's piece, to assume that these people were just a little nuts.
Here's a Christmas-season tale to warm your otherwise black and withered heart. From today's News:
Daniel Libeskind. Despite a last minute wobble, the architect of Berlin's Jewish Museum, is to design the replacements for the Twin Towers, according to AP. Libeskind's a great self-promoter, sports a mean pair of glasses, but some critics said he was emotionally manipulative. And we never liked the 1,776 foot spire, as if the American Revolution was just a magic number.
Final Design Chosen for Future WTC Site [1010wins]
Maybe Daniel Libeskind won't win the commission to rebuild the World Trade Center site, after all. The architect, designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, mounted the most aggressive PR campaign of all the firms in contention. He hired multiple publicists, appeared on Oprah, set off a small trend in spectactle styles, and called for the resignation of the NYT architecture critic. New York may love a showman, but the panel, which makes its decision today, is said to be leaning toward THINK.
Panel Backs Think Team Design for Downtown [NYT]
Finalists for Ground Zero Design Pull Out the Stops[NYT]
As the decision-making deadline draws near, the supporters of the various WTC plans are splitting into their own little gangs of New York. We're not above massive oversimplification, so we'll make it easy for you: The Leftists love Libeskind; the Artists want THINK. From SUVs to bank accounts, bigger is better for the Wall Streeters, so they're going with the Foster Plan. The structural engineers like United because it works mathematically and confuses the hell out of everyone else, and we're not sure anyone likes Peterson/Littenberg.
Urban paranoia [Buzzmachine]
New world trade center site design concepts [LMDC]
