Sept. 11

I'm going to keep a running list of the good stuff to come from this anniversary. Please drop your links if you see something we should read.

UPDATES: Wow. Wow. Wow. Read Gary Smith on Pat Tillman here.

* Read Deborah Sontag's six-month investigative narrative, Broken Ground.

* The best documentary video I've seen related to Sept. 11 came a few days later at Union Square Park. Watch the clip here. Click on the first video. It's only a few minutes, but it's something powerful.

* Dan Barry's story: A JAB, and then another, and another and another, almost like the riveting of bolts at a construction site. When the jabbing stopped an hour later, the two towers were soaring again from the Manhattan bedrock, their windows forever tinted red by the evening sun, their majesty forever set against a sky's lavender sighs.

This is how the World Trade Center always looked, at least from the dusky vantage point of a Starrett City rooftop in Brooklyn, at least in Jason Audiffred's memory. He would leave his family's sixth-floor apartment, ascend to the top of the building, and gaze west. Nothing like it, nothing in the world.

Now, at least, this special place had been restored, bolted with ink to Mr. Audiffred's beefy left bicep by an artist called Coney Island Vinny. The large and arresting tattoo, of course, means that the central catastrophe of our time is a part of him, always, in ways he can never escape.

* Ralph Blumenthal's story: The flag that covered his coffin lies boxed on the television set with shell casings from the salute fired in his honor. His medals shine from a display case, along with the grinning portrait that sat beside his empty combat boots, inverted rifle, helmet and dog tags the day his Army buddies in Iraq filed past to say goodbye.

Two and a half years after he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad, Specialist Scott Quentin Larson Jr. still fills the modest home of his parents, Scott and Mary Larson, and their three other children in the northwestern suburbs of Houston.

The city has suffered the greatest number of American deaths — 27 as of Sept. 7, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks military casualties — in the two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that are consuming a newly terrorism-aware America.