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Charlotte Clymer @charlotteclymer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This piece by Colson Whitehead is one of my favorite things ever written. I've shared it many times with folks over the years. It was published two months after 9/11, and I believe it's one of the greatest things ever put to pen about grief, memory, and time. www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/m...

I started building my New York on the uptown No. 1 train. My first city memory is of looking out a subway window as the train erupted from the tunnel on the way to 125th Street and palsied up onto the elevated tracks. It's the early 70's, so everything is filthy. Which means everything is still filthy, because that is my city and I'm sticking to it. I still call it the Pan Am Building, not out of affectation, but because that's what it is. For that new transplant from Des Moines, who is starting her first week of work at a Park Avenue South insurance firm, that colossus squatting over Grand Central is the Met Life Building, and for her it always will be. She is wrong, of course -- when I look up there, I clearly see the gigantic letters spelling out Pan Am, don't I? And of course I am wrong, in the eyes of the old-timers who maintain the myth that there was a time before Pan Am.

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Emily Murdock Baker @embeditorial.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My own personal ritual is to read this every year on 9/11. It's perfect.

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