Photographs by Sasha Arutyunova
Like most New Englanders of a certain generation, my parents viewed New York City with distrust. They associated their neighbor to the south with “The Bronx Is Burning,” Bernhard Goetz, blackouts, bankruptcy, and the famous New York Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. The heart of Manhattan was a decadent playground for the wealthy, while outlying neighborhoods were plagued by desperate poverty and violence.
Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on September 9, 2026
Where were you on 9/11? Every American old enough to remember the day has an answer to that question. President Trump has several.
At a ceremony honoring first responders and victims’ families yesterday, Trump offered an elaborate account of where he was in the hours and days after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed.
Is Donald Trump trying to help Republicans win the midterm elections? The obvious answer to this question is yes, of course, simply because all political leaders benefit from their party winning elections. Yet several of Trump’s actions throw this normally perfunctory question into at least some doubt.
Traditionally, candidates laboring under the burden of an unpopular president seek to detach themselves from the national brand. Trump is making this impossible.
The attacks on September 11, 2001, unleashed a wave of Islamophobia in the United States that resulted in widespread harassment and persecution of Muslim Americans. In addition to vigilante attacks targeting Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim, there was also state repression including police roundups, community surveillance, prosecutions on often flimsy terrorism charges and mass deportations.
Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unsealed more than 170,000 pages of records that offer new insights into how the city responded to the disaster. Some of the papers indicate that officials lied about the hazardous toxins that burned and remained near ground zero for months afterward, even as the government assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe and rushed to reopen Lower Manhattan for business.
Red states claiming “sovereign injury” seek to impose nationwide restrictions.
Williamsburg’s gentrifiers are being gentrified.
Silicon Valley’s acquisition frenzy hits a new peak with Nvidia’s massive deal with Hugging Face.
His plan to bury the film blew up in his face like a stick of dynamite.
A look at the growing industry of buying and selling dinosaur fossils.
It’s inspired robberies, counterfeits, and multimillion-dollar sales.
A county coroner confirmed the death. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had raised the possibility Josh Shapiro’s staff made it up.
Theresa Long is one of a few advisers to the health secretary examining whether the government covered up vaccine side effects.
Hospitals have launched a lobbying blitz to stave off Trump administration rules they say will lose them hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Trump administration is touting deals with nine drugmakers ahead of the midterm elections.
Political roles are way up. Career staffing is way down, despite a push to hire after last year’s downsizing.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
The Louisiana Republican’s comments come as both Democrats and Republicans have been forced to find ways to address the backlash against data centers.
The new Fed chair will have the spotlight at the central bank’s high-profile conference in Jackson Hole. He should use it.
Vice President JD Vance’s visit marked his second to Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in four months.
For as long as ChatGPT has existed, Americans have been asking it, “Could that funny little spot on my toe be cancer?” And as AI has advanced over the past few years, doctors have begun to use specialized models to ask much the same questions in clinics. In the face of these developments, professional medical societies have presented a unified front: Doctors must always have the final say in clinical care.
We disagree.
Breakfast-cereal boxes are a window into both the politics of food and American culture. As a particularly timely example, since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office last year as secretary of health and human services, he has called for the removal of artificial dyes from breakfast cereals. On Fox News in 2024, he lamented that the bright colors in Froot Loops are “literally poisoning our kids.” (How exactly these dyes interact with human health is complicated.
This past June, a Virginia mother named Karyann Parkinson took a bike ride with her 5-year-old son and stopped by a pond inside their gated community to collect goose feathers from the grass. The two of them rode back home, whereupon Parkinson’s son asked his mother if he could walk back to the pond by himself to fetch a few more feathers. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, studying for the bar exam, and—perhaps most pressing—making lunch, agreed.
This story was updated at 6:12 p.m. ET on September 8, 2026.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch plans to retire from the institution at the end of this year, bringing to a close a tenure marked by unprecedented pressure on the museum complex from a White House keen on controlling how to tell the nation’s history.
The human brain has a method for dealing with the intrinsic fear of death. Terror-management theory, which builds on the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, explains that the psyche handles this fear in a variety of ways. Many people either escape reality or adopt a belief system that promises immortality: so on the one hand, sex, drugs, or entertainment; on the other, religion, fame, or careerism.
Bob Hennelly, general manager of WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York, broadcast live during the September 11 attacks in 2001 and has been covering developments ever since. He says officials rushed to reopen the city after the disaster, despite the health risks from toxic air and debris around ground zero. “There was no Zoom back then,” Hennelly says. “People were ordered back to their desks in Lower Manhattan, which turned out to be a death sentence.