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May 30, 2007

Blurring history

This has been bugging me for the past three days.

On Sunday, the Book Review section of the New York Times gave its cover to Frank Rich's review of a novel by Don DeLillo called "Falling Man." The reference, of course, is to the iconic photo of a man falling from one of the World Trade Center towers on September 11.




The backstory is in an article in Esquire by Tom Junod, called "The Falling Man," which was published two years after the events. The editorial intro to the Junod article starts this way:

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001.
How interesting, then, that the NY Times book review has this altered photo on its cover:


I don't even want to start analyzing the Times's motives for turning this human being, living his final seconds, into nothing but a black spot. It just makes me too ill.