What remains

Jennifer Steil

On September 11, 2001 I was in a yoga class in midtown Manhattan, envisioning a peaceful universe, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

But it wasn’t until I had raced through a shower and was heading out of the locker room that I knew. Oddly, I cannot remember if someone told me or if it simply emanated from the chaos in the room. As I left, I saw that Philadelphia, the woman who handed me my towel every morning, was crying. “Her daughter is in one of the towers,” another woman told me. “On the 102^nd floor.” Others had their arms around Philadelphia, so I ran. I ran down the stairs and out into 43^rd street. I ran past 9^th Avenue, towards Times Square. In the middle of the square I stopped and looked up. Everyone was looking up. It was around then that the second plane hit. I stared up at the television screen above me for a few stunned moments before breaking into a sprint toward my office, dialing my phone as I ran. My friend Marie was working downtown and I thought she might be in one of the towers. Her line was busy. I rang and rang and rang, but could not get through.

I was in tears in the elevator at work as I kept trying. “None of the phones are working,” a woman in the elevator car told me. “Your friend is probably fine, but no phones are working.”

In the offices of The Week magazine, everyone was standing, staring in silent disbelief at either the television or the smoke rising from downtown. A wall of windows in our 6^th Avenue and 40^th street offices faced south. I don’t remember a single word being uttered until the first tower began to visibly shudder. “Oh my god, it’s going to come down,” said our editor, Bill Falk. Those may not be his exact words. He may have said, “Holy fuck they’re going to come down.” But it was something like that.

And they came down. We watched as the news anchors told us about the other two planes, the one that hit the Pentagon and the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. This is it, I thought. This is the end of the world. I thought it would keep happening. That buildings all over the country would collapse in fiery infernos. That we would be next. I was certain, for the first time in my life, that we were all lost.

“All right,” said Bill, breaking us out of our paralysis. “Let’s have a meeting. We’ve got work to do.” Obediently, we assembled ourselves around the table, half of us in tears or trembling with fear. September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday, the day before our weekly magazine was due at the printer. So with less than two days before deadline, we tore up the entire issue we had written, and started anew. There were entire sections we eliminated: arts, theatre, film, anything humorous. And there were sections we added, like the profile of Osama bin Laden I was assigned. I have never, in my entire life, been so grateful to have a job, to be working.

Bill had given us the option of leaving, but only a couple of staff members had fled. The rest of us couldn’t think of what else we should be doing. Going to a bar? A movie? A restaurant? Unthinkable. Even if public transportation had been running. Even if the bridges hadn’t been closed. We had no desire to be alone with our thoughts. So we worked.

It was an interrupted day. In between stories, everyone tried frantically to reach friends or family in the buildings. Our phone lines were down but our email worked. Our building received bomb threats, as did many others around midtown. They were all were hoaxes, but back then, what did we know? We hadn’t thought planes could fly into the towers either. We took turns leaving the building. I stumbled outside to find Bryant Park and the streets around it empty of traffic and full of pedestrians. But what made the scene so eerie was that people were milling around. They had no sense of direction, there was no urgency to their steps, because they had no idea where they were going. They couldn’t get home and they didn’t know where else to go. I’d never seen New Yorkers so helpless, so slow. I joined them, walking dazedly around the block several times before heading back to my desk.

I am writing this from memory. Several years after this day, the IT men at The Week accidentally lost everything I had written about September 11 while installing a new system on my computer. They lost the emails I had written to my family and friends. They lost the hundreds of emails I had received from friends all over the world. They lost my journals. They lost all of it.

But for the things I write here, I require no paper memory.

Earlier this week I attended a panel discussion on the impact of September 11, 2001 sponsored by the Frontline Club here in London. I suppose I was hoping it might shed some light on what had happened on that day, what had begun. Maybe I was hoping we had actually learned something, that there had been some point to it all.

At the start, chairman Paddy O’Connell asked the audience, “Who knew on September 11, 2001 that there was going to be a war? Who knew, on the day itself, that this meant war?” Nearly every hand in the room shot up. My own hand was even up for an instant, before I realized I had misunderstood the question.

And then I thought, No. I did not know that there was going to be war. And I would be surprised if there were many people in New York City that day thinking of anything other than how to find their loved ones, get home, and cope with the enormity of loss. Our minds were not on war. We were, perhaps unusually for many of us, in the moment.

Here is where my mind was in the days following September 11, 2001. When not writing, I spent my time at work slowly turning the pages of The New York Times and the Daily News, looking at the photos and profiles of every single person who died that day. It took months for the papers to run all of those photos, all of those stories. For months, I read. I felt an obligation to feel each loss in all of its particularity. I couldn’t grasp the death of some 3,000 people all at once, but I could let them break my heart one at a time.

When I had reached my daily limit of grief, I left the office and walked the blocks around my office crying until I calmed down enough to return to work. I did a lot of crying. I cried for days, weeks, months. I cried like it was my job. Every night I called my parents just to cry over the phone. They listened. I have never been very good at calling my parents regularly. Months would often pass without speaking to them. But after September 11, for the first time in my life, I rang them almost every night.

One morning that September, I hadn’t had time to buy the newspaper in my dash to the A train. But the man next to me, a Dominican man in his 50s or 60s, was slowly turning the pages of the Daily News, looking at the faces of the dead. When he felt me reading over his shoulder, he shifted his paper so that he was holding it directly between us. We read the paper together like that, with him waiting for me to look up before turning each page, for 160 blocks, not exchanging a single word.

Several months later, I was reading the newspaper on the same train when I felt someone reading over my shoulder. Next to me was the same man. We looked at each other briefly in recognition, and I moved my newspaper between us so that he could see it. And again we read together, all the way to midtown.

A million things like this made New York to me dearer in the days following September 11 than it ever had been before. The small and large kindnesses I saw every single day were all there was of my hope in humanity.

There was almost something golden about that time, those first few months. We all spoke to each other on the subway. We spoke to each other everywhere. Crying in public was no longer shameful. September 11 had given every one of us—in the most diverse city on earth—common ground. When months later we started going to parties again, the first thing anyone asked was, where were you that day? There was no one in the entire city who did not have a story.

My father tried to get me to go to Vermont, where it was safe. But it was impossible to think of leaving New York. Impossible to be away from the people who shared this experience, the people who like me had been breathing the smoke from the incinerated buildings for months, the people who now felt part of me. To leave New York would almost be like leaving my body.

I lost contact with many friends outside of New York that year. When they sent me chirpy emails about their gardens and children just a month after the attacks, emails that didn’t even mention what had happened, I couldn’t relate. Don’t you know the fires are still burning? I wanted to ask them. Don’t you know the missing posters are still up because no one has the heart to tear them down? Don’t you know that this scale of grief doesn’t abate in a month?

To New Yorkers I didn’t have to explain anything.

Many things fell away. I stopped going to the gym. I certainly didn’t go to yoga. I stopped eating. I stopped going to movies, plays, or restaurants. I stopped mailing out my headshots in hopes of getting an acting job. It felt insanely narcissistic and irrelevant.

What was left were people. My friends, my then-boyfriend Paddy Ryan, and my colleagues. These people were what mattered. These who were left. I wrapped myself around them as tightly as I could. I remember that on the night of September 11, 2001, Paddy had been afraid to touch me. Are you sure? He said to me in bed. Maybe you don’t think it’s appropriate?

Paddy, I said, there is nothing else in the world that makes more sense to me right now.

On the subway on my way home from work each night, I got in the habit of offering a secular prayer to the universe. This was during the anthrax scare, when you could clear an entire subway car by eating a powdered sugar donut. Every time I climbed onto the A train, I thought it might be my last trip. “Please,” I would say to the No One who was listening. “Just let me see Paddy once more.”

But while the attacks drew Paddy and me closer than ever, they also took him away. The subsequent crackdown on foreigners meant that Paddy and his friend Niall, who had overstayed their tourist visas, had to go. And they could not come back. I remember standing naked in the doorway of my apartment, my hair in two messy braids, weeping as Paddy left for the last time, leaving me anchorless.

I fell apart. I fell apart and people kept putting me back together again. When one night at work I became so paralyzed by sorrow and despair that I could not get myself to the subway, my friend Marie came and got me and walked me where I needed to go.

I made friends with a young man who had worked on the 13^th floor of one of the towers and gotten out in time. He struggled to live with the guilt. I spent a St. Patrick’s Day in the Bronx with a firefighter nicknamed Downtown Bobby Brown, because he had been there that day. We slow danced to a song on the jukebox in an Irish bar and he told me that what hadn’t made it into the press was how many firefighters were committing suicide. More every day, he said. We sat down to eat but he just steered a fork through his mashed turnip and potato. The following summer, I became involved with a firefighter who had been at the towers that day. He was one of the only survivors in his unit. He drank to cope with the guilt and loss, and then checked himself promptly into therapy. He had a cat. He wouldn’t have made it through without the cat, he told me. One night, after we’d stumbled back to his apartment in the early hours of the morning, he took a video out from under the bed. “My shrink told me maybe it would help to watch it,” he said. We sat on his bed, motionless, watching the men of his unit filing into the World Trade Center. I don’t know who took it. “I had breakfast with those guys,” he said brokenly. “I had breakfast with them.”

These are the things that spring to mind when I remember that day. Not war, not anger, not retribution. But the people I loved in the aftermath and the people who loved me. The feeling that every minute spent alive, no matter how shot through with pain, was extraordinary.

But the panelists speaking about September 11 were focused on the much bigger picture. They discussed the motivation of the terrorists, the misguided response of George Bush and his administration, the terrible wars that followed. The United States had done everything wrong, they said. “They tried to reorder the world as if it were a chessboard, when in fact it is a Jackson Pollock painting,” said former UK diplomat Carne Ross.

The thing was, I agreed with nearly everything that was said. No one is more anti-George Bush than I am. I agree that the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 was ridiculous. I agree that the war in Iraq was started for the wrong reasons. I agree that US foreign policies have created floods of more terrorists than existed before we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. I agree that my country has been walking backwards for a decade.

So why did I feel so alienated from the conversation? And why was I plagued by a ghostly anger?

There was the fact that I cringe every time people say “America” and really mean “the Bush administration.” George Bush was not my president. I don’t think he was legitimately elected and I want nothing to do with him or his criminal administration. So it is painful to hear all of us Americans spoken about in one breath. As if we were a homogenous entity. As if we are all of us responsible for these decisions. We are a diverse country, and most of us did not support Bush or the Iraq war. At the same time, I recognize that this is simply how people talk about countries and governments. But it still distresses me.

I had a few questions. When Maajid Nawaz said that the majority of terrorists come from non-religious backgrounds, I couldn’t help but think of Yemen. There are no (or very few) nonreligious people in Yemen. Yet plenty of terrorists are made there. Perhaps Egypt and Yemen have slightly different recipes for creating terrorists. Nawaz is certainly more of an authority on the topic than I am, and understands why people are drawn to terrorism far better than I ever will. But I am curious about this contention.

Sitting in the audience, listening to the British rail against my country, I felt a deep sense of shame. And a longing for an administration I could defend. It isn’t all of us who think that way, I want to tell them. We are not the America you see in your newspapers.

But perhaps most significantly, I could not bear to see that day—that month, that year—reduced to a mere trigger for the cascade of mistakes that came after. For the whole miserable decade. Nothing that the panel discussed touched my experience of September 11 or the years that followed. With every word uttered by the panelists, I lost a bit of hope in the future. In America’s future, in mine, in my daughter’s. But everything that happened in New York in those first few post-9/11 moments and years gave me more hope than anything else ever has. Hollowed out by grief, we filled each other back up again, one atom at a time. We reached outside of ourselves, we loved, we mourned, and we (eventually) celebrated our continuing life.

LONDON – The grass-carpeted grove of trees just inside the Rosary Gate of Battersea Park is known as the American Ground. When the park was first created in the 1850s, it was planted with North American trees and shrubs.

Yesterday, they were joined by another piece of America, a 28-foot twisted tower of steel once part of New York City’s Twin Towers.

The three enmeshed girders and steel plate have been transformed by New York Artist Miya Ando into a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. Titled “After 9/11,” the artwork was commissioned by the 911 London Project, an educational charity dedicated to helping students understand what happened 10 years ago.

“I wanted to create something that would give light back to into the community,” said Ando. She meant it literally as well as figuratively. While she left the warped steel in the same shape and condition in which she found it, she spent six months polishing and sanding the steel plate until it was mirror-smooth. “I thought it was a poetic way to express transformation,” said Ando. “No only are we having the piece stand upright in a gesture of resilience but to create something serene and light.”

Kat Callo, who lost her cousin, New York firefighter Dave Fontana, in the attacks, said he would have appreciated the memorial. “He was a Renaissance man, a sculptor who made large sculptures out of wood and welded steel,” she said. “This is something he so would have loved.”

The original plans to erect the memorial in Potters Fields between Tower Bridge and the City Hall were suspended earlier this year after opposition from community members and victims’ families, who found it too jarring. Mayor Boris Johnson said it is still possible the sculpture could be moved there, but its future has not been decided.

Families of the British victims were not represented at the unveiling. Hannah Ali, who lost her sister in the attacks and who last year said that it was inappropriate to use the World Trade Center steel in the artwork, said she was unaware of the unveiling. Other family members of victims did not return requests for comment.

Ando said that all she had wanted to do was honor the victims. “The families have suffered the most, and it was my intention to make something for them,” she said.

Thomas Von Essen, CBE, the Fire Commissioner of New York at the time of the attacks and who lost 343 men in the towers, fought tears as he gazed at the memorial. “I look at it and I don’t see beauty. I see pain,” he said. “I see steel that destroyed a lot of lives.” Yet he feels it is important to remember, despite the grief that comes with it.

Johnson, who unveiled the memorial yesterday morning in front of some 150 people, reminded the crowd that September 11 was not a purely American tragedy. Sixty-seven British people died in the attacks – more than have died in any terrorist attack in the UK.

“This was not just an attack on buildings,” he said. “But on our two cities and what they jointly represent.” It is vital to remember what happened on that day to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again, he said.

This is why he is supporting the 911 London Project’s program to bring 9/11 studies into UK schools. “We need controlled demolition of all of the rumors and conspiracy theories about September 11,” he said.

The educational program is the brainchild of Peter Rosengard, chairman of the 911 London Project. After reading a newspaper story mentioning that 2,000 recovered pieces of the Twin Towers were being kept in a giant hangar at the John F. Kennedy airport, he thought perhaps London could get a piece to create a memorial. So he texted the mayor. To his surprise, Johnson texted back immediately and enthusiastically, “YES!!!”

The unveiling of the memorial marked the launch of the educational program, created by the Institute of Education at the University of London. Its website gives teachers the resources to explore the causes, experiences and consequences of 9/11. It is designed to be used across the secondary curriculum through subjects including English, History, Art, Citizenship and Religious Education.

Nat Ogborn, a history teacher at Walworth Academy in Elephant & Castle, taught a pilot class using these materials to his 12-year-old students in July, at the end of last term. “It helped turn the kids away from conspiracy theories they read on the Internet and toward the facts,” he said. He and his students discussed why people kept artifacts from September 11 – receipts from things they bought that day, a teddy bear found near the towers, a firefighter’s hat. They then talked about the timeline of events and assessed the global impact of the attacks.

“The tools were excellent,” said Ogborn. “Before this project my students didn’t know anything about the attacks. It really helped to give them a context for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

His students were mere toddlers in 2001, and have no emotional memory of the attacks. Listening to personal narratives and testimony can help give them both an emotional connection and a sense of the September 11′s significance, said Jeremy Hayward, a lecturer in education. “One day, children will inherit a world shaped by those attacks. It’s important that they learn about it.”

A dozen or so of Ogborn’s students attended the unveiling, dressed neatly in school uniforms and clutching American and British flags in their small fists. Patrick Lowney, 12, said he found the class on September 11 very interesting. “It helped me to understand,” he said. “I was only a baby when it happened. I had never seen the video of the attack before.”

His classmate Humayra Parvin, 12, said she knew nothing about the attacks before Ogborn’s class. Listening to a woman whose son died in the towers speak “made it real to me. It was just quite shocking.”

A survey conducted by Rosengard’s organization found widespread ignorance of the attacks among school children. One child said, “September 11? Wasn’t that retaliation for Afghanistan?” Another thought the attacks were “about trade.” 9/11 wasn’t being taught in any school because the teachers didn’t know how to teach it but 90 percent of those surveyed said they very much want to include it in their curricula.

“Our program is about telling young people ages 11 to 16 what happened – its causes, its consequences,” said Rosengard. “Children have to understand that it wasn’t a video game. It could have been their mums, their dads, their brother or sister murdered by terrorists.”

Yemen has been in a state of serious upheaval since January, with protesters demanding the ouster of the president, violent clashes displacing thousands of people, and famine sweeping the country. Yet every time I ring Zuhra via Skype to ask how she is doing, her answer is always the same: “I am fine! I am good, I am happy.”

And she is. While she is deeply disturbed by the plight of her country, she has also found a new sense of purpose. Every day she joins her husband Kamil in Change Square, where the protestors have been camped for the past eight months. A lawyer and human rights activist, he has been a leader of the protest, and has vowed not to leave Change Square until President Ali Abdullah Saleh is gone for good and Yemen has achieved certain democratic reforms.

Were it not for her one-year-old son, Zuhra might be living in Change Square herself (she does spend a couple of nights there a week with her husband). Never in her wildest imaginings did she think that a peaceful, thoughtful protest could occur in Yemen. Nor did she imagine that she would see Yemenis en masse begin to question the status quo. “This is the first time to have this happen,” she said. “It’s the first time Yemenis have seen all kinds of media and it stirs up critical thinking. Yemenis feel a psychological obedience to media but now they say they have to learn their own minds.”

In Change Square she has found a kinder, more egalitarian Yemen—more accepting of women, of diversity, of nonviolence. “Women’s participation has become better and there is more respect for women,” she said. “I am surprised that most Yemenis are listening to them when they speak. Of course some of the Islahi people try to ignore them, but we become very insistent on our rights and try to tell them. We want a free state.”

Zuhra has had to move out of the apartment she shared with Kamil, as she felt too vulnerable living there alone. Kamil has received death threats as a result of his activism. So Zuhra and her son have moved in with her mother and sisters.

Life has gotten much more difficult for her and her family. Electricity, water, and gas are scarce. Food is barely affordable. And her son sees his father only rarely, when Zuhra feels it is safe to take him with her to Change Square. But she doesn’t complain. She is one of the luckiest people, she says, because she has a job and support.

Since leaving the Yemen Observer around the same time I left in September 2007, Zuhra has held several jobs. When she returned from her fellowship in Mississippi, she began working for HOOD, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human rights. She kept her hand in journalism, however, reporting and writing freelance pieces for several foreign publications.

After a brief stint as a press officer at the British Embassy, Zuhra got a job as a monitoring and evaluation specialist with USAID in Sana’a. She has been working there since June 2010. While it’s not journalism, the job has taught her many transferable skills. “It’s like investigative journalism,” she told me. “You are digging and examining evidence, and it is good to be skeptical. I’ve also learned leadership skills and how institutions work.”

She has just accepted a new job within the organization in communications, which she hopes will take her closer to journalism.

Zuhra still wants to start her own newspaper some day, although that dream has been deferred. She recently tried to get a bank loan to buy a car so that she could have the mobility necessary for a journalist/editor. But she hasn’t been able to secure any money. “And newspapers need money,” she said. At least, unlike most Yemenis, she has an income. Someday, perhaps, she will have enough to launch a paper.

While Zuhra has always had a particular passion for human rights, she has a newfound interest in children’s issues. Since her son was born, her capacity for empathy has grown, she told me. She worries not only about the children dying from starvation every day and those exposed to violence, but about how the entire society is raising its children. Few organizations are working on childhood issues, she said. “Children in our society really, really need care.”

Of all of my reporters, Zuhra is the one with whom I have remained the closest. We often talk on the phone via Skype, exchange photos of our children, and pick apart the latest news from Yemen together. She has been my eyes and ears in Yemen, connecting me with sources and helping me report on her country.

She has done an incredible reporting job herself. Zuhra’s journalism career this year reached new heights when she had reporting bylines in The New York Times. (My former reporter Nasser al-Arrabyee has also had several bylines in The New York Times). When I first met Zuhra, would I have guessed that her work would someday appear in The New York Times? Yes, yes I would have.

Things are quiet in Sana’a at the moment, as Sanaanis celebrate Eid and wait to see whether President Saleh will indeed return. Protesters in Change Square have thinned out. Those who remain are increasingly frustrated with their exclusion from the political process.

But Zuhra still returns, day after day. Because unlike so much of the world, she has not given up hope in her country. She also has little choice. She is Yemeni. She must go on living there. And she must find a way to make that bearable.

The most shocking thing about the recent News of the World phone hacking scandal is that the Brits are pretending to be shocked. Our precious tabloid newspapers? Behave unscrupulously? We’re stunned!

Come on, people. For decades, the UK’s tabloid press has been renowned for paying for scoops and unscrupulously digging up dirt on the famous and infamous. Fleet Street overall has a global reputation for shoddily sourced stories that may or may not be accurate. The News of the World’s most recent bad behavior—hacking into the phones of murder victims, celebrities, and the families of dead soldiers—is perfectly in line with the overall ethics of Britain’s tabloids. These sleazy rags appear to exist solely to inspire gleeful Schadenfreude and indulge the basest, most reptilian parts of our nature. Nothing delights them more than to tear apart a famous person (or even an ordinary person) and needlessly ruin lives. They are shamelessly exploitative.

I’ve always been taught that news should be either important or interesting. Or, ideally, both. But the stories I see blaring from the covers of the tabloids are neither. All that matters is that it be possibly scandalous and appeal to the very worst part of their readers’ natures. I would go so far as to say that tabloids encourage society’s worst impulses. They do not make us better citizens. They do not offer intelligent analysis or imaginative writing. They tell us we are right to resent the successful and long for their downfall. They tell us we have a right to know intimate details of a crime victim’s love life or an actor’s health problems. They encourage us to wallow in the misery of our fellow humans. Worst of all, they lie to us.

Britain’s tabloids have just a glancing acquaintance with reality. Toby Young claimed in a recent editorial that tabloids are important because they “speak truth to power.” Really? Truth, you say? I beg to differ. I have lost count of the stories I’ve seen that are absolutely false, or at very least misrepresent the truth. For me, if a newspaper makes up even one tiny detail of a story—something the tabloids here do with regularity—they destroy their credibility. Even a misplaced semi-colon arouses my mistrust. If a paper can’t even get its grammar and punctuation right, what else isn’t it getting right? Tabloids also regularly run stories devoid of any sources whatsoever. Had I turned in even one story like that I would never have made it through journalism school.

I haven’t quite figured out how British papers get away with the constant libel. So far I’ve got two theories. First, the tabloids (especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch) have had plenty of money to defend themselves from libel suits, dragging them out until they bankrupt the plaintiffs. Second, many of the people they libel (celebrities aside) simply cannot afford to sue.

I also found Young’s description of journalists as empathy-challenged hacks who would lie, steal, or manipulate to break a story appalling. He seems to think that it’s a conflict of interest to be a decent person and a good journalist. I disagree. While we cannot let emotions keep us from reporting a story well, we still have them. And we should. We’re human beings, not robots. Interviewing the families of dead children, visiting refugee camps, and covering accidents has always been excruciating for me. But I think that it should be.

Any journalist who covers murdered children year after year and never feels an emotion is neither psychologically healthy nor a better journalist. Cruel indifference doesn’t make for brilliant writing or reporting. A good, empathic reporter can draw a more interesting story from a source than a callous hack, and write it up more movingly.

There’s also the fact that hacking into phone lines isn’t merely illegal—it’s cheating. It may be harder to get a story without taking illegal shortcuts, but it’s likely to result in better and more ethical journalism. After all, it takes much greater journalistic talent to build a relationship with a source and convince her to spill her story on the record than to hack into her phone. And you’d probably get better quotes. Tabloid hacks are lazy, unwilling to do the work it requires to get real stories.

If, as Young contends, all tabloid hacks break laws if it means getting an exclusive, then I say get rid of all the tabloids.

Don’t misinterpret me. I am an enthusiastic fan of our First Amendment, and I do not want to see the UK passing any new laws to restrict freedom of speech. This is not necessarily a legal issue for me; it is an ethical one. I’d like to see British papers develop actual standards and write thoughtful, engaging stories on things that matter. I would like the British people to question their appetite for a constant diet of sleaze, which is about as healthy for the mind as chips are for the body. The vast readership of the News of the World is monumentally depressing—so many people panting after soul-deadening trash. I wish Britons develop some standards and hold their papers accountable for what they print and the illegal methods they use to get stories. None of this requires new legislation.

I am tired of hearing the hackneyed defense that once in a while tabloids do some useful investigative reporting. Well, so do legitimate papers. Aggressive investigative journalism and integrity are not mutually exclusive. Besides, I would be far more likely to believe an investigative piece I read in Salon, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Miami Herald than I would believe anything at all written in a tabloid. Because they destroy their credibility daily.

It’s not that we don’t have trashy tabloids in the US. We do. But we don’t make the mistake of taking them seriously. I was astonished when David Cameron appointed Andy Coulson as his communications chief. A tabloid hack, working for a prime minister? He couldn’t be serious. That would be like an American president appointing the editor of the National Enquirer as press secretary—a joke. I couldn’t believe the Brits accepted that choice. But they did, and I imagine they have lived to regret it.

I’m so revolted by the kind of reporting these papers do that even the merest of glimpses of their covers near the supermarket checkout line leaves me feeling polluted and nauseated.

So I confess to feeling a bit of Schadenfreude myself right now. For years, my heart broke every time Rupert Murdoch bought a paper, because I knew he would destroy it. Whenever he has purchased a paper, he has immediately dumbed it down, destroyed its writing and reporting standards, and turned it into something only fit to line a gerbil cage. When he bought The Wall Street Journal, he made such appalling changes that several of the papers top journalists fled in disgust. And I stopped reading it.

So forgive me for dancing as he goes down. I only hope that his comeuppance inspires the public to demand decent journalism. But I’m not holding my breath.

It was one of the more memorable days of my life. I was stretched out on a narrow hospital bed, gazing raptly at the tiny person in the bassinet next to me. After spending the first few hours of her life studying the world around her with wide-eyed awe, she finally succumbed to exhaustion. I had only a couple of hours before my alarm would go off, reminding me to nurse her. Given that I’d been up for three nights, I figured I should nap.

That’s when I heard it. The canned laughter of a studio audience. The false joviality of a reality show host. The first few bars of a saccharine pop hit I didn’t know.

The woman in the next bed had switched on the television.

Twelve of us shared the maternity suit: Six newborns and six mothers in mixed states of fatigue, joy, and panic over our new roles. Between our beds were curtains so flimsy we could hear each other breathe.

So when one mother made the choice to turn on the television, she made that choice for all of us.

One mother’s inexplicable desire to watch an utterly insipid reality television show just after one of the biggest moments of her life kept the other five of us from getting the rest we needed to properly care for our new charges.

When I asked a nurse what time televisions had to be turned off at night, to ensure we could all rest, she said there was no limit. Apparently it was completely fine for a woman to leave the set on all night, keeping all of us awake, accosted by inanities.

You must be joking, I said. If any wing of the hospital was in need of regulated quiet hours, this was it. I mean, families weren’t even allowed most hours, but televisions, which make much more noise, are fine?

On a personal level, I was shocked that any woman could think about crap TV at a time like this. And I couldn’t believe anyone could be so insensitive to the needs of the sleep-deprived and stressed out women around her. But more importantly, I was taken aback that the National Health Service would spend its money on, of all things, televisions for new mothers.

These were not second-rate televisions. These were smart sets, with remote controls and the works. Why are British hospitals spending money on this kind of technology?

Televisions are not an essential. They save no lives. They have, in fact, a deleterious effect on health. They are luxury items that have no place in a public hospital wing where patients share space.

It is possible, I suppose, that the NHS makes back the cost of the television sets by charging women to view them. But the fact remains that hospitals are funding minority rule. I was in the hospital for a (very long) week, and during that time there was never more than one person out of six who turned on a television. But all six of us were forced to listen.

I suggest the NHS save themselves the headaches of buying sets, installing them, maintaining them, and trying to recover their cost by simply selling the lot and using the proceeds for research or improved treatments. Think of the savings—not just of capital, but also of time, labor, and peace.

More importantly, new mothers would instantly have better care; they’d be able to sleep.

It held such promise. A conversation between controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and outspoken Slovenian philosopher Slovaj Zizek—how could that be anything less than sizzling? Plus, it was moderated by Amy Goodman, hard-hitting, award-winning host of Democracy Now! It had to be hot.

Yet sparks failed to fly at The Troxy in London Sunday evening. Assange was an insomniac’s wet dream; he lisped in a slow, uninflected monotone, as if hoping to put us into a trance. Slovaj (who has been referred to in the press as “the Elvis of cultural theory” and “the most dangerous philosopher in the west”) was at least entertaining, telling jokes and using colorful metaphors. But the total lack of friction or even a real conversation between the two left me feeling cheated and dismayed.

So what went wrong? Well, the moderation, to start with. There wasn’t any. Sure, Goodman asked a few good questions, but she allowed both men to digress wildly, wandering completely off topic, never reining them in or forcing them to actually answer the question asked (which they seemed averse to doing). She also failed to press Assange to answer any difficult questions.

Things started off promisingly. Goodman gave a powerful introduction about the 400,000 Iraq documents made public by WikiLeaks and spoke movingly of the unconscionable number of civilian deaths that went unreported. Some 15,000 Iraqi civilians have been murdered in the course of the United States’ military operations—and those deaths were not reported anywhere. Not in the US press, not in the Iraqi press, not anywhere. Yet these deaths were recorded by the US military.

This sucked me in. I’m of the opinion that even one civilian death is too much collateral damage. And the mention of a dead child makes me borderline hysterical. Perhaps motherhood has made me soft. But those murdered civilians each had a mother and a father whose lives were made a living hell by the loss. I think the public needs to know the true cost of war.

I was also riveted by the descriptions of the classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff—released by WikiLeaks.

This is information of vital interest to the public. But what neither panelist addressed in any way was whether all information should be indiscriminately made public, as seems to be Assange’s contention. Are there truly no pieces of information to which the public should not have access? What about the exact position of our troops in enemy territory? What about battle plans? If I were a member of the military, Assange would make me nervous. He seems without any concern for the effect of the release of certain information. I would really like to hear him speak about whether he believes in any limits at all to free information. And if he does not believe in any limits whatsoever, I would like to hear the justification. I would like, in short, to hear vigorous intellectual debate on all of the issues surrounding the release of information indiscriminately.

Goodman (and much of the audience) seemed to take it on faith that everything Assange is doing is Noble and Good. While she did quote criticisms from noted Assange-haters, she didn’t dig into the substance of such criticisms, or even press Assange to defend himself. The critical quotes were simply laughed off as the rantings of mad men “frightened of the history coming forth.”

Assange veered off into rants against the Grand Jury system in the United States and the unfairness of the extradition process in Europe, which might be of interest to some, but that is not why I attended.

I had hoped to discover an Assange who was at least charismatic. Or crazy. Or provocative. But he was none of those. He was… tedious.

As for Slovaj, he seemed to be there simply to agree with Assange, laud his righteousness, and then toss off a colorful anecdote or two. He certainly wasn’t called upon to challenge Assange, or engage him on any level. So why was he there? Comic relief?

It must be said that the best quotes of the evening came from Slovaj—mostly in the context of sexual jokes. He repeatedly used the word “bullshit” despite having been warned by Goodman that obscenities could not be broadcast. He also said that the problem is not simply that information is not in the public domain; the problem is that even when it is in the public domain, people are informed so obliquely that it’s easy for them to ignore it.

An interesting point, though not necessarily related to what was being discussed. He also pointed out that what is implied is just as important as what is said. Again, not sure how this applies directly to WikiLeaks, but it is an opinion with which I agree. Another gem was, “We should not fetishize the truth as such; the truth must be contextualized.”

Indeed. Would have loved it if Assange had actually addressed that issue. Given that the information leaked by WikiLeaks is often without context. (This is what newspapers are for—at least one reason. To give us not just raw data, but context and analysis.)

For the record, I am not among the crowds calling Assange “an information terrorist.” We’ve gotten a bit too loose with the word terrorist as of late. I neither demonize Assange nor idealize him. What I cannot understand is why we cannot treat Assange as grey rather than black or white. Yes, he is doing some very noble work. And yes, he also comes off as dull, arrogant, creepy, and unwilling to accept criticism.

But whether people call him a terrorist or treat him as a saint, they are doing the same thing: effectively shutting down any sort of interesting discussion of what he is doing and what it all means.

When Jennifer Steil accepted a job running an English-language newspaper and teaching journalism inYemen for a year, she must have known that her experiences would yield a droll story or two. An unattached 37-year-old from Manhattan, she liked drinking beer (“I love bars, everything about them,” she writes) and flirting with strangers on subways. The ancient city of Sana would be her new home, in a harsh and poor Islamic land that required her to cover up in public and never meet the gaze of a man.

What she couldn’t have imagined is that her actions there would spark a diplomatic crisis, uproot several lives (her own included) and result in this completely winning account of her adventures as a feminist mentor and boss.

Yemen is an unlikely country in which to preach the gospel of a free press. Mocked by the Arab world as so backward that Noah would still recognize the place, it has no radio stations and a largely illiterate populace. The owner of the newspaper that Ms. Steil is hired to oversee was educated in the United States but works as a media adviser to the president and keeps the paper afloat with advertorials. Her students have been taught to value neither objectivity nor accuracy. The paper is a joke at the United States Embassy for its misprints: a headline about Yemen’s “Ministry of Tourism” came out as its “Ministry of Terrorism.”

The professor has less success whipping her staff into shape than in lifting the curtain on a society hidden from Western eyes or caricatured as an outpost for Al Qaeda. Without ignoring the terrible restrictions on intimacy faced by her students in their daily lives — in a country where, she notes, homosexuality and adultery are punishable by death — Ms. Steil manages to form a series of touching, often hilarious friendships with young men and women who do not let their wariness of her thwart their curiosity.

More personal than historical, her book doesn’t claim to plumb the depths of Yemeni culture. Her contacts were mainly among the English-speaking elite. And some sections seem too brazenly aimed at disabusing American readers of stereotypes of Muslim women. (The opening scene is a wedding in which a Yemeni bride searches in a panic for her birth control pills.)

Only in the last chapters does the author briefly discuss her romance with the married British ambassador to Yemen; and nowhere is there mention that she had a baby with him, or that the London tabloids pilloried her as a temptress. These episodes in no way detract from — and in some ways only enhance — her riveting tale of a life’s journey that reads as if it will need a sequel.

Annie recently spoke to American journalist Jennifer Steil who accepted a job in Yemen as a newspaper editor- a rare role for a women in that part of the World- let alone a Western woman!

Jennifer talked about why she chose the role and the challenges and triumphs she faced and how differently the community reacted to her new role.

You can listen to the full interview below.

Jennifer Steil

Lively, crafted with care, engagingly detailed, paced smoothly, this reads as if invented rather than fact. In 2006, Steil enters Sana’a, dons the veil, and mutes (slightly) her New York sass.

This is not Sex in the City 2—there are no shopping mall sprees in Abu Dhabi. On the other side of Arabia’s peninsula, women vanish into black ghosts, rarely seen in the light. Steil dons this garb, and begins her transformation. Her pale blue eyes mark her to all—men in public, women in private—as a newcomer.

Initially, she comes to advise for three weeks the hapless staff of the Yemen Observer daily paper. How this seasoned journalist adjusts to life in Yemen and how its men and women adjust to her turns into a frenetic adventure. This feels more like a novel than an autobiography. Steil’s knack for recounting dialogue that characterizes cultural clashes and common bonds energizes this episodic account of the year she decides to devote to running the paper.

Arriving in the capital, Steil sees its women draped entirely in black, its men in white. “This was a world before color, before fashion, before the rise of the individual,” she reflects. Tribe, class, piety, status, income: these emerge in the telling subtleties of an embroidered border of an abaya or the engraving on a jambiya‘s handle.

She adjusts “to become someone else,” not meeting a male’s gaze, lowering her eyes. She wonders if she will ever cease being their curiosity, their “object of study”. Yet, she will become a mentor for Yemeni journalists, especially her female staff.

I learned a lot about the country, and if not as much about the countryside, it’s due to Steil’s own reliance on guides and mediators within a nation that can be daunting for a Westerner and moreover a woman with little Arabic with which to navigate. For she explains, she was a “third sex” there, as if a “giraffe”. That is, she enjoyed the freedom a Western man could not to move between male and female realms.

A purple vibrator, peanut butter cups, and green pills all make cameo appearances. These unexpected perspectives, as she works with women who have had to struggle greatly for their status alongside her, and the men who have often had to do little for their status, compelled me to follow her story as a mentor and a resident of this unfamiliar society.

Coming to the English-language, if grammatically-challenged, paper, she fantasizes: “I imagined writing pieces that would trigger policy changes, reduce terrorism, and alter the role of women in society.” Laughing later at her naivete, she shows how hard the few women who work publicly must fight to fit in alongside men who get their jobs by mere nepotism. The males “will always find work in Yemen; they will always have society’s approval. My women I worry about. What will become of them after I am gone?”

Given her “third sex” status, she moves into the women’s private life. At a wedding, she notes how mottled the women’s skins are due to lack of sunlight, how pale they are when uncovered from their confinement. “The dresses resemble the most shameless of prom gowns or things a stripper might wear for the first 30 seconds of her act.” When the cameras flash for the bride, “a black rayon wave ripples across the room as the women cover themselves with scarves to keep from getting caught on film.”

At another wedding, she gets a henna decoration up her arms as “the tattoos tighten around my wrist like ethereal handcuffs.” Then, the filigreed women must “be basted with Vaseline and patted with flour before getting wrapped in plastic, to preserve the design.” At such privileged moments, Steil directs us into scenes we would likely never otherwise witness.

She does seem hemmed in by watchful Sana’a, despite her love of its bustle. Her visit to the island of Soqotra matches in its feel for a very isolated existence that told by Tim Mackintosh-Smith in Yemen.

A trip to Kamaran Island also allows her a glimpse of another Yemen, apart from her bustling city. Chaws of narcotizing qat while away up to six hours a day for most Yemeni men and many women. This alters, considerably, her New York expectations for a productive staff. Dissension and civil unrest ferment among Yemenis who fight far removed from her city routine. While more of these exotic perspectives might have enriched this book, Steil’s focus on her stint in Sana’a appears to account accurately for most of her Yemen year.

Her personal life emerges gradually. She first has a fling with a much-younger German student; Yemen’s Westerners tend to socialize more with each other. Native women have curfews. Native men tend not to meet up with Western women, at least openly. Steil, at 38, seeks romance. The man she then meets is married. Although the mutual tension which arises appears in her recital to be rapidly smoothed over off-stage, this may attest to her discretion. The author’s credentials on the back give away the identity of the man she finds as her soul mate, but this does not ruin the plot.

However, Steil glosses over another situation that presents wider peril. She’s embroiled in the controversy over the infamous “Danish cartoons”. The paper’s Yemeni editor-in-chief—while condemning the caricatures of Muhammed—nonetheless publishes three of them (all crossed out) on the op-ed page. He winds up in court charged with “insulting Islam”, while peers call for his execution. Given Steil’s role as an editor in all but title (the paper must be run by a Yemeni to fit legal restrictions), she keeps a low profile. This is understandable, but she appears to downplay whatever decisions she did or did not make in her chapter on this incident. The reader may be left wanting more explanation.

Yet, she encourages her reporters to challenge bias against homosexuals. Steil calls for honest coverage of sexuality. She confronts plagiarism and sycophants. She maneuvers between a very narrow press freedom and her own secular values. She stirs up currents that invited more depth.

At times, beneath her identity as a single and sexy New Yorker, Steil appears to have adapted the cautionary camouflage needed to survive in Yemen almost too well. In a regime run by one powerful man and riven by tribal conflict and endemic censorship, she must balance what is boasted to her in public against what goes on in private. Her femininity keeps her off balance in this realm. In this complex hierarchy, some stories will remain as closed off to her as the quarters of one half of the population are to nearly all of the other half.

I found this memoir illuminating, if rather uneven, granted such reporting challenges. Along with Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s erudite travel narrative by a long-time ex-pat, Steil’s account offers another Westerner’s view- – a feisty transplanted New Englander’s—of this much misunderstood, ancient country. (Her audience might check out the British novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday.) In a time when this nation is again in the news, feared for its ideological extremists and shunned by many tourists, it’s refreshing to find this contribution to a short shelf of portrayals of Yemen as a more inviting, less barbaric, and long civilized place.

She was a woman

who fell from the sky in robes

of dew

and became

a city.

Jennifer Steil uses this poetic description of Sana’a, the capitol of Yemen as a frontispiece for her travel memoir, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Until I read the poem, I assumed that Steil was ‘the woman who fell from the sky,’ and in fact she was. The double meaning works perfectly.

Steil is invited to teach the principles of journalism to writers at an English-speaking newspaper in Yemen. Her task is complicated by the fact that few of them can write in English, none have ever studied journalism and they have no idea how to start a story, track down sources, or get both sides of a controversy. Additionally, her boss, the publisher, works as media adviser for the president of the country. No conflict there, he assures her.When it becomes obvious that her short initial stay will not do the job, the boss asks her to come back and stay for a year as editor of the paper.

We, as readers, are immersed in the world of getting out a newspaper when the male reporters are work on their own schedule, and the women cannot go out alone, interview men, or stay at the office after two p.m.

Her job allows her (and us vicariously) to travel to other parts of Yemen and get a fairly good view of life in that country. Although she writes with a reporters verve, I kept slipping into fairy tale mode because this world seems so unrelated to mine.

We share her amazement to learn that underneath the long robes, the women wear skin-tight jeans and sparkling tank tops. I had to wonder as I plunged eagerly through chapter after chapter, if I would have been able to be as even-handed as she, as non-judgmental at the practices she observed. As a Western woman, she dressed very conservatively, and wore a scarf, but the Yemenis considered her, in a sense, sexless. She could go alone on the streets, even at night, although she would be verbally harassed. She could go with men to restaurants where women generally did not go. They even invited her to chew qat (the mildly intoxicating leaves that Yemeni men are never without) with them.

Although I still have no desire to go to Yemen, Steil paints an attractive picture. Describing her first view of the city, she says:

Sand-colored mountains rose from the plain in every direction…Below us stood the fantasia in gingerbread that is Sana’a’s Old City, a cluster of tall, square, cookie-colored homes trimmed with what looked like white frosting, surrounded by thick, high walls. Sabri pointed out some of the more prominent of the city’s hundreds of mosques, liberally sprinkled across the city in every direction, their slender minarets thrust perpetually toward God.

I told readers of A Traveler’s Library early this year that my favorite book of the year would be The Invisible Mountain, about Uruguay. Now there’s a real horse race. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky won my heart in so many ways. I urge you to read it, partly because of the political realities that are important for the rest of the world to understand, but mostly because it is just a darned good book and belongs in a travel library.

I would be remiss not to mention that the book gets a bit gushy at the end. I wasn’t going to give you a spoiler, but for those who don’t care about spoilers, or who love to dish the dirt, here’s an scandal article in the London Mail on line edition. If you read the article, keep in mind they are going on about a section that is less than a tenth of the book and misleadingly make it sound as though it is the main book. They need a coach like Steil to show them real journalism.

The widget above is directly from the Random House site, and they gave me a review copy of the book. Steil is on Facebook, where you can see pictures of her with the love of her life.

Isn’t it interesting that my two favorite books have been of countries that I knew little about and that seemed impossibly exotic? What do you make of that? What destinations make YOUR favorite travel books?