Wednesday, September 11, 2002

A list of people killed at the Pentagon with short biographies and, very poignantly, pictures and descriptions of the objects or pets that meant the most to them. A favorite tie, a player piano, a lanyard holding a security clearance tag, a teddy bear given to an AA on Secretaries' Day, a beautifully laid Thanksgiving table, dogs, children's books, paintings, cars, photographs. This is the only kind of coverage I'm really interested in today -- I fall for the Big Retrospective Picture Analysis sometimes, but this seems better right now. Warning: This humanizes the number of causualties in a way I haven't seen done this effectively before, so don't look at it if you're trying to stay away from sad Sept. 11 stuff. For me, though, it was good for once to consider the people who died without the larger context of the situation -- to look at them simply as people who liked this stuff or that stuff, and to see what their families wanted to say about them.

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