Golden Hour in Iowa

@elonmusk Ambient air is often overlooked.. Very impressive use of air with the Roadster!! Cumulus pulls nitrogen from the air for amazing nitro coffee, no tanks needed! Trade you a Cumulus for a Roadster? 😂 Ours ships today or pick one up at @Target 🎯

Flying cars and the Brewers swept the Dodgers. What a night!

It is 2026. Why doesn’t @goodreads have a dark mode on iOS??

Happy First Day of Fall! Ghostly greetings in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story:

Today is the 21st of September.

His trumpet gave out in front of 48,000 fans so he just started singing the National Anthem instead

A beautiful surprise

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a streaming service in possession of a good fortune must be in want of another Pride and Prejudice.

South Tower Collapses - view from Fulton St 2024 / 2001 #neverforget #twintowers #september11th

Every year on 9/11 I take the kids to ground zero to write down names engraved in the memorial. Then we go home and look them up to talk about their stories. Today, my youngest was writing a name when a woman walked up and asked her what she was doing. When she explained, the woman gently asked “will you write down my son’s name too?” We spent the next few minutes talking to Morton Frank’s mother about his life. He was 31. When I asked her how she was holding up on the 25th anniversary she teared up and said, “same as every other day.” #neverforget

Twenty five years ago today, six firefighters slowed down for the slowest person in the stairwell, and that is the only reason any of them are alive. Josephine Harris was 59 years old. A widow and a grandmother from Brooklyn. A bookkeeper for the Port Authority who worked on the 73rd floor of the North Tower. When the building was hit she started walking down. She was still recovering from an accident and her legs were bad, and she was descending a smoke filled stairwell with thousands of other people. She made it more than fifty floors on her own, which is an achievement most people reading this could not manage on a good day. Somewhere around the 20th floor she stopped. She could not go any further. She was exhausted and crying and people were flowing past her. Captain Jay Jonas and Ladder Company 6 were going the other way. They had climbed to the 27th floor when the South Tower came down at 9:59, and Jonas understood immediately what that meant for the building they were standing in. He turned his men around and started them down. Then they found Josephine Harris. They could have gone past her. They had every operational justification. The building they were in was going to fall and they knew it, they had their own men to get out, and she could barely stand. Instead Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulders and they went down at her pace. Step. Rest. Step. Rest. Six firefighters in full gear, descending a skyscraper they expected to lose, at the speed of a 59 year old woman with bad legs. They got to the fourth floor and she stopped completely. She could not take another step. They were still trying to move her when the North Tower came down at 10:28 in the morning. One hundred and ten stories collapsed on top of them. And a short section of Stairwell B, right there in the core, between roughly the second and fourth floors, did not collapse. It held. Fourteen people inside it lived. Jonas and his men, Chief Richard Picciotto, Port Authority officer David Lim, firefighters from other companies, and Josephine Harris. They were buried, in the dark, listening to the building settle. Bill Butler got a call out to his wife to tell her where they were. After a while the dust began to drift and clear, and sunlight came down through the stairwell from above, which is how they finally understood that there was no longer any building over their heads. They were pulled out hours later. Here is the arithmetic those men have lived with ever since. Ladder 6 was moving fast. If they had not stopped for Josephine Harris, they would have been in the lobby or out on the street when the tower came down, and the lobby and the street were killing fields. Her exhaustion held them in the exact place, at the exact minute, where the building chose not to fall. They had a jacket made for her. It said Josephine, Our Guardian Angel, with the Ladder 6 patch. It is in the 9/11 Museum now. She stayed close with those men for the rest of her life. When she died in 2011, the firefighters of Ladder 6 carried her casket. Three hundred and forty three firefighters died that day running toward people they had never met. Six of them lived because they refused to leave one woman behind, and she saved them right back.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Howard Lutnick was supposed to be at his desk on the 105th floor of One World Trade Center, running Cantor Fitzgerald. Instead, he was taking his five-year-old son, Kyle, to his very first day of kindergarten. That tender fatherly milestone saved his life, but it came at a staggering cost. At 8:46 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower right beneath Cantor Fitzgerald’s headquarters. In an instant, 658 of his employees, 67% of the company's workforce, including his brother Gary, were trapped above the impact zone. Every single one of them died. Lutnick rushed to the scene just as the towers collapsed. Surrounded by dust and devastation, he found himself facing a horrific double reality: he had survived, but he was now CEO of a ghost company. His friends, colleagues, and entire executive team were gone. In the emotional days that followed, the media aggressively questioned whether Cantor Fitzgerald would simply file for bankruptcy. To make matters worse, Lutnick faced intense backlash when he froze payroll days after the attack. However, he quickly clarified the brutal reality: the firm was bleeding cash, and if it went under, there would be no money left to help the families of the fallen. Driven by a profound sense of duty, Lutnick made a quiet promise: Cantor Fitzgerald would survive, and its success would belong to the families left behind. Over the next five years, the surviving staff worked around the clock under extreme emotional pressure. Lutnick pledged 25% of the firm's profits directly to the families of the victims and guaranteed their healthcare for a decade. Through this initiative, Cantor Fitzgerald distributed $180 million to those affected. But he didn't stop at financial restitution. Lutnick made a legendary promise to every single child who lost a parent in the attacks: when you grow up, you have a job waiting for you at Cantor Fitzgerald. Years turned into decades. True to his word, as those children reached adulthood, the doors of the firm opened for them. To date, 57 children of the victims have walked through those doors, joining the very company where their parents once worked. Every year on September 11, Cantor Fitzgerald holds its annual Charity Day, donating 100% of its global revenues to various charities worldwide, turning one of the darkest days in human history into an enduring beacon of hope, resilience, and loyalty. Before rebuilding Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick experienced profound personal tragedy early in life: his mother died of lymphoma while he was in high school, and his father passed away during his freshman year at Haverford College. Facing sudden hardship, the college president and dean granted Lutnick a full scholarship to complete his degree, a act of institutional generosity that Lutnick credits as the foundation for his later philanthropic pledge to support the families of his fallen 9/11 team. #archaeohistories

St Louis Art Museum and Art Hill.  Over 7,000 flags each with a picture and a name, nearly all fallen veterans of the Global War on Terror.

I'd like to suggest that promoting child marriage, stoning, halal animal torture, wife beating, sharia courts, and other behaviour contrary to British values, should now be referred to as Anglophobia

Random public high school required reading list from 1978

Van Gogh painted this in one of the darkest years of his life, and it might be the most hopeful thing he ever made... The painting is Almond Blossoms, made by Vincent in 1890. Branches of white blossom open against a clear blue sky, and there is nothing sad in it anywhere, which is remarkable, because of when he painted it. His brother Theo, the person who had loved and supported him his whole life, had just had a son, and named the boy Vincent, after his struggling uncle. When the news reached Van Gogh, he started painting right away. He chose almond blossom on purpose. In the south of France the almond is the first tree to flower, sometimes as early as February, breaking into blossom while winter is barely over. It is the tree that announces that life is starting again. For a new baby carrying his own name, Van Gogh painted the most beautiful symbol he knew for new life. He was, at that very moment, seriously ill. This was the period of his breakdowns in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and not long after finishing the picture he suffered one of his worst attacks and could not paint for weeks. And yet what he made for his nephew has no shadow in it at all. He gathered whatever strength he had and poured all of it into something joyful, a gift for a child he wanted to welcome into the world. Theo and his wife hung it above the piano in their home, and it stayed one of the most treasured paintings the family owned. The baby it was painted for, Vincent Willem van Gogh, grew up, kept it safe, and went on to found the museum in Amsterdam that holds most of his uncle's work to this day. This, to me, is what makes the painting extraordinary: a man at the limits of his strength, who would be gone within months, looked at a new life just beginning and painted hope. He reached past everything that was breaking in him and made, for a baby, a picture that says the same thing the almond tree says every year: winter does not get the last word. Something is starting again…

In the latest Sonos update, we can now tap the volume number on the right, and plus and minus signs appear for small adjustments. Tapping the speaker icon on the left mutes it.

Mao Zedong was responsible for so many deaths in China that you can see it on a chart of global life expectancy