we will never forget

new york magazine: the encyclopedia of 9/11

'with all we now know, how to begin to address the enormity of the event? our solution was not to shrink from its scale but to embrace it. we decided to reach back to an old form that might allow us to account for a wide assortment of what was created in the wake of the destruction: heroes and villains, great and awful ideas, twisted fates, pop songs and myths and wars. the alphabetized jumble of an encyclopedia, with its preposterous aspiration to describe whole cultures and continents and bodies of knowledge in a single place—that, we thought, might be an interesting way to take in the multiplicity of 9/11’s effects.'