So here’s the setup. I’ve been feeding old blog posts into an AI as part of a voice-training exercise — trying to teach the thing what I sound like when I sound like myself, which turns out to be harder than it looks and also, occasionally, embarrassing in ways I didn’t expect. (You’d think reading two decades of your own writing would be like flipping through a yearbook. It’s more like watching home movies of someone you used to date. Cringe in some places, tenderness in others, and a low hum throughout of was I really like that?) And I came across a post I wrote the week after 9/11 that I haven’t thought about in a long time, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.
The thing that pulled me back in wasn’t the grief, exactly, though there’s plenty of that in the post. It was an image. I’d written about walking home from the theater a few nights after the attacks and hearing a cricket in a tree on Spruce Street, and how the sound of it had hooked into me wrong — because in the news coverage in the day or two after the towers came down, you kept hearing about these little beepers the firefighters wore, the ones that chirp so they can find each other in the smoke. They were a constant presence in the reporting that week. And I wrote, on Spruce Street, that I’d never hear a cricket the same way again. That the association would fade eventually, sure, but I wondered how long it would take.
That was the passage that pulled me back in. Not the grief itself, but the specific way grief had rewired a sound. And reading it now, I realized I wanted to know what the cricket sounded like to me in 2025. Whether the rewiring had held, or faded, or — the possibility I hadn’t considered when I was twenty-five-year-old me writing it — been overwritten by something else entirely.
But I want to come back to the cricket, because there’s another passage in that post that’s been sitting on my chest harder, and I need to walk through it first. After the cricket, I wrote about seeing two guys on the sidewalk that same night, about to get into a fight over something miniscule — drunk-guy stuff, threatened-manhood stuff, the kind of fight you’ve seen a hundred times — and a little later I passed three kids trashing a shopping cart with beers in their hands, and they had a kind of casual rage about them that scared me. And what I wrote about it, in 2001, was that all the people I knew who were good and decent and liberal and appropriately appalled by the policies that had brought us to that week — myself absolutely included — were full of shit. Because we had the government we had, and the policies it had, because we allowed it. All of us. Wrapped up in our personal existences. Always needing to be right.
Twenty-five-year-old me thought that was the harshest thing he could say. Reading it now, it sounds almost cozy. Quaint, even. Because the diagnosis assumed there was still a we to be indicted. A collective civic body that could, in principle, wake up. The whole moral weight of the passage rests on the idea that we were sleepwalking — that we could have been doing better and chose not to.
I don’t think that’s the right diagnosis anymore. I think we are, in fact, doing exactly what we are now built to do, and the building is the problem.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though, before I get to the hard part. There was a window that week — call it ten days, maybe two weeks — where the country had access to something it almost never has. Strangers held doors. People asked each other if they were okay and meant it. The flag stuff got embarrassing fast, and the racist subset of the flag stuff got dangerous even faster, but a lot of what was happening at street level was, I think, sincere. The cricket on Spruce Street really did sound like a beeper. Everybody was hearing the same cricket.
And then we lost it. That part isn’t surprising. I said in the original post that we’d lose it — We are who we are, and we’re built the way we’re built — and we were and we did. What I didn’t see coming, and what I don’t think most of us saw coming, was the shape of how we lost it. The reasonable expectation in September 2001 was that the unity would just fade. We’d drift back to the pre-attack baseline. Arguing about Bush versus Gore, watching Friends, ignoring the wars after the first six months because the wars were happening to other people. A return to civic indifference. That’s the prediction I would have made if you’d asked me, on the cricket-sounds-like-a-beacon night, what the country would look like in twenty-five years.
That’s not what happened. We didn’t drift back to baseline. We accelerated past it, in the other direction, at a speed nobody clocked at the time.
I was on a subway escalator a few months back — one of the long ones, the kind that gives you ninety seconds to contemplate the back of the head in front of you — and two strangers who’d brushed shoulders getting on were now four steps apart and escalating. Not yelling yet. That stage just before yelling, where the voices are tight and the words are getting selected for maximum payload. Something about who’d bumped whom and who needed to watch where they were going and who exactly the other guy thought he was. And what I noticed, what I keep noticing, was the rest of us. The whole escalator full of people doing the small physical choreography of pretending we weren’t there. Phones up. Eyes down. The woman in front of me took one careful step to the side so that if it went sideways, the geometry would put someone else between her and it. I did a version of the same move without thinking about it. We all did. A whole vertical column of New Yorkers silently negotiating sightlines and exit vectors, and nobody — not one person — said anything. Not hey, easy. Not come on, guys. Nothing. We just ran the threat-distancing algorithm and waited to see if we were going to need to be witnesses.
That’s the two guys on the sidewalk in 2001, except there’s no manhood at stake and nobody’s drunk and it’s eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. It’s a shoulder bump. And what’s changed isn’t just that the anger is more available — though it is — it’s that the rest of us have learned to behave like weather forecasters around it. We don’t intervene. We don’t even register surprise. We calculate trajectories and hope it lands somewhere else. And the two guys on the escalator know we’re doing it, and the algorithm running in their heads knows we’re doing it, and the whole transaction proceeds on the shared understanding that nobody is coming. That’s the temperature. Not the rage itself, but the practiced civic shrug that surrounds it.
And here’s the part I want to be careful about, because the easy move is to blame the obvious villains and feel righteous about it, and the easy move is almost always wrong. Yes, social media. Yes, cable news. Yes, the algorithmic incentive structures that reward outrage and punish nuance. Those are real and I’m not pretending they’re not. But the deeper thing, the thing that makes 2001-me’s we sound quaint, is that the two guys on the escalator and the woman who stepped sideways and I are not, in any meaningful sense, living in the same country anymore. We shared an escalator. We don’t share much else. The 2001 version of the indictment — we have the government we have because we allow it — assumes a country in which “we” can in principle look at the same set of facts, agree on what they mean, and apply civic pressure in a coordinated way. That country does not exist now. The two guys on the escalator are watching one cricket. The woman who stepped sideways is watching another. I’m watching a third, and I’m not naive enough to think mine is the real one just because I’m the one writing this down.
Which makes the kind of moral wake-up call I was reaching for in 2001 — pay attention, take responsibility, recognize you’re part of a greater whole — almost incoherent as a request. Pay attention to what? The greater whole that includes whom? You can’t ask people to take collective responsibility for a polity they no longer experience as collective. That’s not them being lazy. That’s them being correct about the structure they’re actually living inside.
And the policy I flagged in the original post, the one I said was making people in refugee camps want to strike at us — unquestioning support of Israel — is, twenty-five years later, almost exactly the same live wire. You could lift that paragraph out of the 2001 post and drop it into a 2025 essay about Gaza and you’d barely need to change a comma. The death toll edit, mostly. The names of the dead, the number of the dead, the children among the dead. Otherwise it’s the same paragraph. Which is its own kind of indictment, I guess. Twenty-five years of the same wound being reopened, and a country whose capacity to do anything about it has, if anything, atrophied.
The cricket. I want to come back to the cricket, because that was the image that did the most work in the original post, and the question I started this whole exercise wanting to answer was what it sounds like to me now.
In 2001 I wrote that the association would fade. That eventually I’d hear a cricket and not think of the beepers, and the only question was how long it would take. And I was right about that. It did fade. Crickets sound like crickets again, mostly. What I didn’t anticipate was that the cricket would, over time, get drowned out by something else entirely. By the constant ambient noise of a country that has decided it would rather be loud than be together. The grief of 2001 had a strange property: it was vast and terrible, but it was shared. It was a thing that happened to all of us at once, and we knew it, and for a brief and unsustainable moment we acted like it. The anger of 2025 is not shared. It’s the two guys on the escalator, and a million pairs like them, each pair convinced their fight is the only one that matters, and the rest of us stepping sideways, calculating sightlines, hoping it lands somewhere else.
I don’t have a tidy place to land this. I noticed when I started writing that I was reaching for one — some kind of and yet, hope gesture, some version of the line about how we’re built the way we’re built and even horrific stuff loses its immediacy — and I want to be honest that I was reaching for it because the shape of the essay seemed to call for it, not because I actually believe it does the work I’d need it to do. The original post earned its small consolations. It had been four days. Of course it reached for something to hold onto. This one, twenty-five years later, doesn’t get that grace. The diagnosis I made then — that we’d go back to being us — turned out to be too generous. We didn’t go back. We went somewhere worse, and we did it to ourselves, and I’m not entirely sure what the shape of going back from here would even look like.
The cricket, though. The cricket’s still out there. I can hear it from the porch sometimes, this time of year. It doesn’t sound like a beeper to me anymore. I’m not sure what it sounds like. I’m working on it.