Ziam is real, people. Ziam is real.
This makes more sense than it should.
NBC
Walt Disney Studios / Loryn Brantz / BuzzFeed
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When peeing on the subway seems preferable to facing the rats in your toilet.
1. Bed bugs.
2. Hot, steamy summer trash piles.
3. Someone who could be a new neighbor or an axe murderer asking to be let into your lobby.
4. Getting puked on in the subway.
5. Being the puker.
7. Electrically charged/exploding manholes.
8. Moving. At all.
9. But especially with broker fees.
10. Dooring a cyclist on your way out of a cab.
For years in America, I tried and failed to replicate the Nepali dishes my parents made. I was doing it wrong.
Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed: Traditional Nepali Goat Curry
I learned to peel garlic and ginger from my mother. As a boy growing up in Nepal, I watched her in the kitchen—especially on Saturdays when we cooked an elaborate curry. She would grate ginger with a razor-sharp knife and smash garlic under her palm. Then she would pile the garlic and ginger on a silauta — a flat stone used like a mortar — add cumin and coriander seeds, and crush the mixture with a lohoro, a round stone that works like a pestle.
She didn't measure spices with tablespoons and teaspoons — everything was calculated in pinches, sprinkled from her fingers. Every ingredient that went into every dish was freshly prepared — or as they say in America, from scratch — and then cooked under low heat for hours. I learned to embrace my parents' meticulousness. It brought our whole family of four into the kitchen, each of us assigned a task.
But when I moved from Nepal to America for college in 2003, I went four years without eating a proper curry. Instead, I was introduced to all kinds of odd American culinary inventions: Daytona Beach Style Wings at Hooters, Bacon Angus ThickBurger from Hardee's, and the Corn Dog in the college cafeteria. Goat curry started to sound like the name of an English punk band, and its taste, a memory from another life.
It wasn't for lack of trying: I landed in Tennessee with a pressure cooker and big plans. Less than a week into my freshman year at Tusculum College, I fired up the pressure cooker and made my first meal with my friends: chicken curry with jarred pre-minced garlic and ginger paste and diced tomatoes from a can. The evening ended with the police at the door—a neighbor had made a noise complaint—and a mediocre curry that tasted like chicken soup boiled with a little cumin and turmeric.
After that, I would occasionally cook at a professor's home for a get-together on the final day of a class. But the spices just weren't doing it. I could never find fenugreek seeds, cumin and coriander powder lacked freshness, the paprika was an embarrassment, and the curry powder was weak. I died every single time I had to open a jar of curry paste. No matter how many times I cooked, and how many different places I bought the spices from, the food lacked something — that something that made my brother and I pop our tongues, and say "ah-haa," over the dishes our parents cooked.
I realized I was doing it all wrong. I had forgotten the lessons of my family's kitchen. I was buying supermarket, ready-made ingredients and expecting the dish to taste like home. I had forgotten the basics. I had forgotten my family's goat curry.
Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
Imagine what turkey means during Thanksgiving, or a brisket during Passover — that's what goat curry meant to my family, especially during Dashain, a 10-day Hindu festival celebrating the victory of awesome gods over wicked demons. For the celebration, as many as 30 relatives always gathered at my grandfather's house in a remote village in western Nepal. It was a seven-hour ride on a rickety bus on a windy road followed by a four-hour walk through two forests, across two rivers and up a hill. But what waited there was worth the trek: A big beautiful black goat with patches of white hair and perfectly aligned horns, which my grandfather had raised for the entire year, feeding it green leaves and rice balls mushed with ghee. "We have to fatten him up," he'd say.
On the seventh day of Dashain, my grandfather butchered the goat. My father was the self-appointed chef because he knew how to prepare every single part of the animal, including testicles. My cousins and I, known to be most mischievous grandchildren, would steal smaller pieces of meat from the neck, ears and tongue and take them down to the river, where we'd start a fire in a small pile of sticks and hay, and roast the stolen bites.
Back inside the kitchen, my mother and rest of the women in the house piled up mountains of peeled garlic and ginger. Cumin and coriander seeds soaked in a tub of water, before being ground into paste on a silauta the size of doormat. My grandmother would throw in a palmful of green chiles she picked from the garden. "This is not going to be spicy at all," she would say.
Outside, my father put a giant copper pot over a wood fire. Into the pot: mustard oil, homemade dried chilies, cinnamon sticks and fenugreek seeds, and finally cubes of goat meat, from the thigh, shoulder and ribs. Then he'd stir the mixture with a giant wooden ladle twice the length of his arm, biting his tongue between his front teeth. Every half hour or so, he would taste a piece of meat from the pot and say, "This is going to be first class."
Three or four hours later, when the goat was ready, we lined up carrying plates woven from flat leaves from the trees in my grandparents' backyard. We took a scoop or two of aromatic, slow-cooked curry with a fistful of rice and a scoop of ghee.
That goat curry—the making of it, the celebration of it—summed up what it was like growing up in Nepal. Is it any wonder that jarred curry paste made me sad? If I cook Nepali food, I have to do it the Nepali way—no shortcuts.
Matt York / AP
America's surging student loan debt — which now totals more than $1 trillion — has been driven by older, low-income students at for-profit schools and two-year community colleges who enrolled in droves during the recession, according to a report released today by the Brookings Institution.
Many anecdotes suggest that the student debt crisis, and rising rate of student loan defaults, has been built by skyrocketing tuition costs and $100,000 loan tabs at America's priciest four-year universities. But the report shows that the crisis is largely the result of a sharp rise in enrollment at for-profit colleges and community colleges, and that it is built by much smaller balances — many of just $8,000 or $15,000.
More troublingly, the report found, for-profit and community college students are defaulting in higher numbers — since 2011, more than a fifth defaulted within two years, more than double the number for borrowers at four-year universities. Many such borrowers, unable to make any payments, have only seen their loan balances swell since they left school.
The report marks a dramatic shift from fifteen years ago, when borrowing was dominated by graduate students and young people at four-year universities, mostly large public schools. In 1999, 70% of new borrowers were students at nonprofit four-year schools. But between 2009 and 2011, students at for-profit schools and community colleges made up almost half of all borrowers, some 45%.
That change is reflected starkly in the list of schools whose students owed the most federal loans. In 2000, just one of the top 20 schools was a for-profit, the University of Phoenix; 16 were public universities. In 2014, 13 schools were for-profits, including 8 of the country's top 10 schools with the highest loan balances, and just seven were public universities.
The amount owed by students at the University of Phoenix grew 1500%, from $2.1 billion to $35.5 billion.
Brookings Institution / Via brookings.edu
The borrowers at for-profit schools and community colleges are older, poorer, and more high-risk: more likely to drop out without finishing their degrees and poorly insulated from unemployment. They are the students who, the report found, are defaulting on their loans in increasing numbers.
Those borrowers, the report said, are "mired in a system where they are unlikely to have the resources to repay their loans in full, and yet generally have no way to have those loans discharged."
As the economy strengthens, the report said, there has been a sharp decrease in students enrolling in both for-profit and community colleges, which is likely to eventually improve loan default rates.
But the Brookings report also highlights a growing "gray area" among borrowers: students at a small cluster of non-selective, "unconventional" four year schools that "share many of the characteristics of for-profit institutions." Those schools have high borrowing rates and poor employment outcomes, the report said — and have only seen their enrollments increase since 2011.
FOMO has never been this bad.
Warning: You might not be able to handle the bass drop.
Don't worry, people. This is pretty much how Nagesh introduces himself IRL.
....what.
That is literally the best “how it all began” story I have heard in my life.
Make this new year the sweetest one yet.
Jenny Chang // BuzzFeed
Serve with crackers, or just go at it with a fork. Recipe here.
Brianne Izo / Cupcakes And Kale Chips / Via cupcakesandkalechips.com
Get the recipe here.
Alex Overhiser / Via acouplecooks.com
The tastiest way to survive your relatives. Recipe here.
Daisy / Via daisysworld.net
Blah blah blah, this is the best.
Dem candles, doe.
This was not her first go-round as officiant for a wedding. She married two of her female friends in California three years ago.
There’s smart, and then there’s Honey Lemon smart.
Disney
Disney
Disney
Disney
It’ll be an educated guess.
HERE ARE THE TOP STORIES
The new target to resettle 10,000 more Syrians fleeing a long-running civil war — up from 1,500 people — by September 2016, while a step in the right direction, isn’t enough according to leading advocacy groups and U.S. lawmakers who represent communities with the largest populations.
“I’m sincerely hoping this is a typo, I hope the president forgot a digit,” Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, told BuzzFeed News. “It just shows no leadership in this area, it’s not even enough to be a symbolic gesture.”
Gokhan Sahin / Getty Images
BuzzFeed News also reached out to 15 U.S. Representatives elected in districts with the largest estimated Syrian-born communities. “Census information showed Syrians in the U.S. were scattered across the country, but lived predominately in parts of Los Angeles, Detroit, Brooklyn, and Chicago,” Tamerra Griffin and David Mack write.
“At least 11 representatives, both Democrat and Republican, said they supported a strong increase in the intake of refugees from Syria, but many were reluctant to offer precise figures,” Griffin and Mack write.
“The majority of escaped Syrians have entered primarily through Germany, Austria, and Greece, while France and the U.K. have agreed to take 24,000 and 20,000 refugees, respectively, in the next two years. Germany has pledged to admit 500,000 a year. The U.N. Human Rights Commission said Tuesday that it estimates 400,000 refugees will enter Europe by the end of 2015,” BuzzFeed News’ Ema O'Connor writes.
Here’s what the U.S. presidential candidates have said about the Syrian refugee crisis.
Senate Republicans wanted to pass a resolution disapproving of the deal six world powers reached with Iran in July, but Democrats got enough votes to keep the measure from moving forward. In other words, they blocked the block. (Most bills in Congress involve votes to approve, but with the Iran deal, Congress votes to disapprove.) Obama said he would veto the Republican resolution if it had passed.
Yesterday’s procedural vote means it won’t come to a veto, though House Republicans are still considering ways to derail the deal during Congress’ 60-day period to review the agreement. It’s on track to be formally adopted on Oct. 19.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois answer questions for reporters following the Senate vote on the Iran nuclear agreement on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., yesterday.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo
That the Iran deal is likely moving forward without interruption from the U.S. Congress is “an improbable win by Obama in the face of unanimous opposition from Republicans who control Capitol Hill, GOP candidates seeking to replace him in the Oval Office and the state of Israel and its allied lobbyists in the U.S.,” the Associated Press writes.
Debate over the deal divided Democrats, four of whom voted against Obama in the Senate, and “Republicans will use Obama’s triumph — as they did with the health care law — as a means to attack Democrats in anticipation of next year’s election,” according to the New York Times.
For more, here are some key reasons why opponents hate the Iran nuclear deal and here are the lawmakers who are against the deal.
WE’RE KEEPING AN EYE ON
The state’s labor commissioner approved a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his support for the move at a rally yesterday. He said he’ll work to make $15 an hour the minimum for all industries. The current minimum wage in New York state is $8.75 per hour.
“Though the proposal for a statewide minimum wage increase is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled legislature in Albany, the symbolic significance is enormous for the national Fight for 15 movement to raise pay for low-wage workers, which began in New York City three years ago,” BuzzFeed News’ Cora Lewis writes.
Vice President Joe Biden, center, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, second from right, at a labor rally, yesterday in New York.
Mark Lennihan / AP Photo
The minimum wage raise for New York fast-food workers will come in phases. It will happen over three years in New York City and six years in other parts of the state. Vice President Joe Biden, who was at the rally with Cuomo yesterday, predicted New York’s move will have a “profound impact" across the country.
Some West Coast cities have already approved raising their minimum wages to $15 an hour, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.
If you want the latest news and stories, download the BuzzFeed News app for iOS. (We also have a ~super secret~ Android version, so if you want to be a beta tester, send us a note.)
DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?
“America’s surging student loan debt has been driven by older, low-income students at for-profit schools and two-year community colleges who enrolled in droves during the recession, according to a report released today by the Brookings Institution,” BuzzFeed News’ Molly Hensley-Clancy writes.
“The report shows that the crisis is largely the result of a sharp rise in enrollment at for-profit colleges and community colleges, and that it is built by much smaller balances — many of just $8,000 or $15,000. More troublingly, the report found, for-profit and community college students are defaulting in higher numbers — since 2011, more than a fifth defaulted within two years, more than double the number for borrowers at four-year universities,” Hensley-Clancy writes.
For more, check out NPR’s series on the value of a college education and their coverage of why students chose a private school or community college.
Brookings Institution / Via brookings.edu
Yes, Apple’s event on Wednesday “wasn’t all that flashy — but that’s the point,” BuzzFeed News’ Charlie Warzel writes. “If Google’s vision is predicated upon the idea of seizing you by the collar and taking you into a future you’ll (hopefully) soon be able to access, Apple’s vision is to suggest that the future is here right now, thanks to subtle, gradual tinkering. If Google is about where we are going, Apple is, by and large, about where we are.”
Apple
“For years in America, I tried and failed to replicate the Nepali dishes my parents made. I was doing it wrong,” BuzzFeed News’ Anup Kaphle writes. “I had forgotten the lessons of my family’s kitchen. I was buying supermarket, ready-made ingredients and expecting the dish to taste like home. I had forgotten the basics. I had forgotten my family’s goat curry … If I cook Nepali food, I have to do it the Nepali way — no shortcuts,” Kaphle writes.
Come for the story, stay for the gorgeous photos and all the recipes.
A cook-like-you-mean-it Nepali feast featuring traditional Nepali goat curry, cumin rice, sautéed mustard greens (saag), potatoes with black-eyed peas and fermented bamboo shoots (aloo tama bodi), fried cauliflower (bhuteko cauli), and spicy tomato chutney (poleko golbheda ko achaar).
Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
At least 23 people are missing and three people have died following unprecedented floods and landslides in Japan. (Reuters)
Venezuela sentenced Leopoldo Lopez, the most public face of the country’s opposition, to nearly 14 years in prison. (BuzzFeed News)
Northern Ireland wades deep into political crisis as the head of its government resigns. (New York Times)
Russia has lifted its objections to a U.N. investigation into chemical attacks in Syria, clearing the way for the probe to begin. (The Guardian)
Singaporeans went to the polls on Friday for the country’s first general election in four years. Analysts say the vote is a referendum on the performance of the governing People’s Action Party. (New York Times)
The next primetime Republican presidential debate, which will air on CNN next Wednesday, will feature 11 candidates (including Carly Fiorina). Five others will participate in an earlier debate. (CNN)
An update from the Canadian federal election, which is halfway through its 78-day campaign. (BuzzFeed Canada)
Millions of dollars will be allocated to law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to test the massive backlog of neglected rape kits. (BuzzFeed News)
The Hungarian video journalist who was fired after footage emerged of her tripping and kicking refugees as they ran past apologized. (BuzzFeed News)
For the football fans: 50 things to watch for this 2015 NFL season. (USA Today)
A rainbow was captured emerging from New York City’s World Trade Center yesterday, a day before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (BuzzFeed News)
WEEKEND READS
We are all about that multiplatform life at BuzzFeed and huge fans of podcasts. This week’s special guest is BuzzFeed Audio Editor Julia Furlan, sharing some of her favorite podcast episodes recently.
#translivesmatter. This show is a gorgeously intimate anonymous exploration of the relationship between a transgender child and her mom. This episode, How to Be a Girl - Meeting Laverne, is the story of mom and daughter meeting Laverne Cox, and of the gigantic implications of visibility and representation for trans kids like this one. (Listening Time: 21:30)
Nailed it. The Kitchen Sisters are goddesses of the audio medium whose work has more heart than you can know what to do with. This piece, Fugitive Waves - The Long Shadow of Shirley Temple, predates the big New York Times investigation into the nail salon industry. (25:14)
You are not alone. Advice is everywhere. Choose wisely. In The Struggle Bus - Extra Long Super Bonus Episode, Sally Tamarkin (ed. note: the BuzzFeed fitness editor!) and her co-host Kate Heller answer reader questions and share their travails in self-care. They are witty and generous hosts who guarantee that all listeners will feel heard and understood. (56:18)
Zzzzzzzzzzz. I don’t care who you are, you need more sleep. This podcast and app, Meditation Oasis - Relax Into Sleep, has 50 episodes in its catalog to guide you through different kinds of meditation with Mary and Richard Maddux. Mary’s gentle, soothing voice will make sure you won’t even hear the end of this show. (18:16)
But if you really want to show your love for podcasts, subscribe to BuzzFeed's podcasts Rerun, Internet Explorer, and Another Round!
Let’s say there’s a couple and they love taking lots of selfies in lots of different poses. Nothing wrong with that. Now pretend that their parents loved those selfies so much that they re-created them — and totally nailed it. MooOOoOomm!
Via Emily Musson / Via Twitter: @emilymusson
This letter was edited and brought to you by Laura Davis, Stacy-Marie Ishmael, and Millie Tran. You can always reach us here.
“You’ll ruin your dinner if you eat that”.
Walt Disney / BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed News spoke to student sex workers about how they are treated and the lack of support they feel they receive at university.
Chris Ison / PA
British students working in the sex industry are attempting to fight back against perceived bias at their universities, with some claiming that the lack of support they receive is a major failing.
The Student Sex Work Project (TSSWP), led by Swansea University, reported earlier this year that 1 in 20 UK students work in the sex industry, although secrecy means the number can't be pinned down. Most, according to the study, are simply trying to cover living costs.
BuzzFeed News contacted 18 universities and none, apart from two TSSWP study partners, were willing to discuss their stance on student sex work. The Association of Managers of Student Services in Higher Education revealed that making provisions for student sex workers was not something its members had brought up.
Laura Renvoize, 22, a sex worker and co-founder of the newly launched Goldsmiths Sex Worker Solidarity Society, said the situation needs to change.
Laura Renvoize
Renvoize told BuzzFeed News that reactions at Goldsmiths to her coming out as a sex worker have been mixed. "It can feel like secondary school, with rumours spreading around and people treating you differently," she said. "There's definitely mistrust and misunderstanding within the student body."
She added: "I've only ever heard staff refer to sex work in a victim-criminal dichotomy."
The Goldsmiths Sex Worker Solidarity Society offers support and a platform from which to campaign. Renvoize hopes the model will take off at other UK universities and believes that this type of initiative is sorely needed. Most students coming forward for support are simply trying to cover basic living costs.
Danielle (not her real name), a 25-year-old who's funding her degree by working as a full-service sex worker, dominatrix, and webcammer, told BuzzFeed News: "Sex work was a ruthlessly pragmatic decision for me. High rents and the cost of living meant there was no other option that would bring in a decent income and allow me time to study."
Students selling sex isn't a new phenomenon, but what this generation is doing differently is speaking out about perceived discrimination against those involved in the sex industry, and the Goldsmiths project is part of a growing wave of student activism.
Last year, the National Union of Students (NUS) passed a motion to support sex worker rights; this year, the NUS Women's Campaign voted to support full decriminalisation of the industry. Student unions regularly invite organisations such as the Sex Worker Open University (SWOU) and the English Collective of Prostitutes into universities to hold workshops.
These campaigns discuss safety for all sex workers, but student activists say they have plenty to contend with within their own institutions. In June, researchers from Swansea University and Kingston University revealed that some staff members at Welsh universities believe students who work in the sex industry should face disciplinary action for bringing their universities into disrepute.
Spoiler: It was kind of a shitshow.
Rebecca Hendin / Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
This is us together on date night <3
I would literally change my Facebook status to "married to MAC's lipstick counter" – it is THAT real. We just get each other. But when it comes to finding a "nude"? It's a completely different story.
I mean, same.
Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images
Jason Merritt / Getty Images
Taylor Swift / Via instagram.com
The ASPCA works with the NYPD to rescue animals who are in need and ultimately place them in loving forever homes.
STAN HONDA / AFP / Getty Images
During the noisy, chaotic third week of September 2001, my father wrote letters to the New York Times and the Post, and was published in both, asking simply that the press stop calling his daughter, who'd been murdered on live television a few days earlier, a hero. The heroes ran into the buildings; she was just a person who happened to have gotten to work a little early on a Tuesday morning, and that was horrible and heartbreaking and difficult enough without the extra assignation. On Sept. 21, the day that would have been my sister's 28th birthday, he gave a eulogy to this effect at her memorial, speaking steady-voiced at a podium in front of several hundred friends and relatives and people who read an announcement somewhere and didn't know what else to do with themselves.
In the days and years after, this was less a mantra than our only way forward: Find a way to separate what happened from what happened to us, to decline participation in most of the ceremonies and pageantry in favor of figuring out on our own our family's new geometry just like any family that has suffered a loss. Sometimes this works, sometimes it feels like its own form of grandstanding. Others, of course, feel the opposite: The world's attention validated the size of their grief. Their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and husbands and wives and fiancés and friends were worth starting a war over. We understood this and respected this and just chose another, quieter way, at least until my father got sick and couldn't stop blurting it out, over and over, to strangers in parking lots.
Which is why the corner of Greenwich and Liberty on this bright Sunday afternoon, amid a riot of mid-spring tourists with wrinkled maps and exposed knees taking photos of cranes, is the very last place I should be. I am allowed to enter the 9/11 Museum a few days before this week's grand opening for the general public, but why would I want that? Why would I accept an invitation to a roughly $350 million, 110,000-square-foot refutation of everything we tried to practice, a gleaming monument to What Happened, not What Happened to Us? Something snapped while reading about the gift shop — I didn't want to duck and hide, I wanted to run straight into the absurdity and horror and feel every bit of the righteous indignation and come out the other side raw. I call my mother to tell her I'm doing this but that she shouldn't come, and she doesn't disagree. I find the ticket booth, exhale deeply, and say the magic words.
STAN HONDA / AFP / Getty Images
After the full-bore TSA-style security check, complete with body scan, there's a dark corridor with word clouds and photographs projected onto tower-like pillars, while disembodied voices tell snippets of stories about the morning, an overture warning us about the symphony ahead. We are eased into it in a sense, lowered into the maw down a ramp along the original foundation of the towers, a marvel of engineering. Girders and rubble and broken staircases, among the ruins. An impossibly mangled hook-and-ladder truck, showroom parked.
The crowded memorial hall is lined with photos of everyone who died and touchscreen consoles that call up their obituaries; my sister is found, as she has been for 12 1/2 years and will be forever, between Gavkharoy Kamardinova and Howard Lee Kane. The names are read aloud on a loop in the adjacent darkened atrium lined with benches. My sister's profile has incorrect information in it that we'd never signed off on or even seen, and the annoyance is tempered by the realization that nonparticipation in the pageantry has its drawbacks. It also occurs to me that I am the only person here alone.
The main attraction is through a revolving door: a minute-by-minute re-creation of the morning and its aftermath, from video of Matt Lauer's first distracted, furrowed brow at the end of an interview with some author on the Today show and on and on through the top of the spire on Liberty Tower. As claustrophobic as the outer area is cavernous, this part is the haunted house — I wander to a tucked-away corner to find a giant photo of people leaping from the burning building and yell, "Fuck!" like someone jumped out and grabbed me, and no one bats an eye. Frayed nerves are the baseline condition.
Steve Kandell / BuzzFeed
There's a multimedia presentation depicting how, precisely, the towers collapsed. A wing for Pennsylvania and the Pentagon, tape loops of survivors telling how they got out. Smoke and fire and ash and twisted metal and the husk of an ambulance. Tattered flags, handwritten pleas for help, missing persons flyers, screams. Dusty, ownerless Topsiders encased in glass. A soot-coated bike rack, as it was found. Countless personal artifacts, artfully destroyed. The posters for King Kong and Manhattan and Working Girl with the towers, resplendent. The president addressing the nation and vowing steely, determined revenge. Hallways dedicated to tracing the hijackers' timeline and of al-Qaeda's rise and a video wall with people like Hillary Clinton laying out the justification for the unending war on terror, tying grief inextricably, cannily to political ideology in a way that might seem crass if I were able to process it all with a clear head. There is no way out until the end, and it's all so numbing that maybe this is the whole point: The exhibition starts with one shining, unfathomably terrible morning and winds up as all of our lives, as banal and constant as laundry, bottomless. I can feel the sweat that went into making this not seem tacky, of wanting to show respect, but also wanting to show every last bit of carnage and visceral whomp to justify the $24 price of admission — vulgarity with the noblest intentions.The fact that everyone else here has VIP status grimly similar to mine is the lone saving grace; the prospect of experiencing this stroll down waking nightmare lane with tuned-out schoolkids or spectacle-seekers would be too much. There are FDNY T-shirts and search-and-rescue sweatshirts and no one quite makes eye contact with anyone else, and that's just fine. I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else's past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn't feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom's last round of chemo didn't take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend's last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.
There are two recording booths for people to tell their own stories of the day, or remembrances of loved ones who were lost. A man exits one of the confessionals, sees me, shakes his head, and says, "Amazing idea." I enter, sit down, and stare at the screen ahead and say Shari's name and how I was 3,000 miles away that morning and didn't even know she was working there until I got the call at 6 in the morning and that I wish I had seen her more in those last years and remembered more about her and had something better prepared to say and that I wished my kids would have known her and that she'd think it's pretty fucking weird that I'm talking about her to an invisible camera in the bowels of a museum dedicated to the fact that she was killed by an airplane while sitting at her desk and at some point the timer is up.
By the time I finally reach the gift shop, the indignation I've been counting on just isn't there. I stare at the $39 hoodies and the rescue vests for dogs and the earrings and the scarves and the United We Stand wool blankets waiting for that rush and can't muster so much as a sigh. The events of the day have already been exploited and sold in ways previously incomprehensible, why get mad at a commemorative T-shirt now? This tchotchke store — this building, this experience — is nothing more than the logical endpoint for our most reliably commodifiable national tragedy. If you want to bring a coffee table book full of photos of cadaver dogs sniffing through smoking rubble back home to wherever you're from, hey, that's great. This is America, you can buy what you want; they hate our freedom to buy what we want. People will find moments of grace or enlightenment or even peace from coming here, I don't need to be one of them. I'll probably bring my son one day once I realize I won't have the words to explain. It can be of use. It's fine. I don't know.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
There is one small room on the main floor of the museum that is in fact not operated by the museum itself and is not available even to many of the families. Tucked away off to the side, behind an unmarked door, it is overseen by the medical examiner's office. This is called the reflection room.
To get past the door, one must register for an appointment. I have not done this, but I present a case number, which means the official from the medical examiner's office can indeed let me through — just a few days into this museum's existence, and a few days before it's even officially open, and already people have apparently tried lying about dead relatives to get in here. The official's name is Ben, and he walks with me into a small waiting room with a couple of chairs and a large photo of a candlelight vigil, probably from Union Square. Ben tells me softly that no one from the museum is allowed past this part of the room, and even then, only for cleaning. My family is welcome whenever the museum is open.
He points me around the corner to a cramped, dark space but does not follow. A box of tissues sits on a wooden bench and a family huddles silently looking through a window, about 4 feet by 5 feet. They leave almost instantly and I can now see what is through the window: aisles of dark-stained wood cabinets of rosewood or teak maybe, floor to ceiling, lit by small overhead spotlights. I let out a loud, sharp laugh.
Inside these cabinets are the remains that, after nearly 13 years of the most rigorous testing known to man, have not been matched to the DNA of any of the victims. Just drawers and drawers full of...stuff. I wouldn't really want to think too hard about what exactly that stuff is, but given that it's a picture window looking out at cabinetry, there isn't really anything else to think about. This chamber is meant to be a sanctuary, but I cannot ruminate about the arbitrary cruelty of the universe or lament the vagaries of loss and love because all there is to see are armoires packed with carefully labeled bags of flesh too ruined and desiccated even for science. My sister is among the many for whom there have been no remains recovered whatsoever. Vaporized. So there's no grave to visit, there never will be. Just this theatrically lit Ikea warehouse behind a panel of glass.
I remember being at the armory on the east side with my parents, maybe three days after — I was on the very first flight allowed out of San Francisco, a small army of friends mobilized to take care of my dog for however long I'd be gone — to hand over an old hairbrush of my sister's for DNA matching. A nun had my mom swab the inside of her mouth with a Q-tip to help with identification, although the nun said, kindly but nervously, that everything would be fine and none of this would be necessary. My mother comforted the nun and said it was pretty clear that everything wasn't going to be fine, but she appreciated the sentiment.
The presence of the tomb has been a point of contention among families more vocal than ours who want more from a final resting place than the basement of this museum of unnatural history. I don't know how to feel about the matter because to do so would require any of this making even a bit of sense. It's dumb, sure, but what could possibly be less dumb? Where is the right place to store pounds of unidentifiable human tissue so that future generations can pay their respects? I would not wish what's happened to my family on anyone, but I begrudgingly admire its infinite weirdness, still, after all this time. A hushed flute rendition of "Amazing Grace" wafts reverently over the escalators as I head back up to sunlight.
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