What we forget when we remember 9/11

A politics professor reflects on the 25th anniversary of September 11, noting that about 100 million Americans have been born since the attacks and have no personal memory of that day.

The piece traces how commemoration, from name-readings to memorial lights, has kept the human loss in view even as the event's meaning gets pulled into arguments over war, surveillance, and presidential power.

The author argues that forgetting parts of an event is a normal feature of collective memory, not a failure, while the core experience of shared vulnerability competes for space with everything that followed, from Katrina to January 6.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.