This week's Metro Times has a pair of compelling articles regarding two recent major events that shook our country to it's core. The first is a piece that marks the upcoming 5 year anniversary of 9-11 with a Michigan mother's search for understanding after losing her son in the World Trade Center attacks.
"In the five years since the death of Josh Rosenthal at age 44, his mother has traveled to the Middle East to meet with the family of that young man who murdered him, seeking to understand what motivated a crime that took so many innocent lives. She's obtained German intelligence files on the hijackers, read more books and news reports than she can count, and interviewed sources on two continents to discern the factors roiling beneath one of the most traumatic events in U.S. history."
"A sociology professor emerita at the University of Michigan, Rosenthal, 76, has turned that research into an as-yet unpublished book that compares the arc of her son's life to that of the hijacker's, seeking to explain what brought their two paths to a fatal intersection, the fifth anniversary of which we are about to mark."
Read "In her son's name"
 
The second looks at post Katrina New Orleans with the author challenging and building the piece around the following New York Times quote.
"At one edge of this city's future are the extravagant visions of its boosters. Awash in federal cash, the New Orleans they dream of will be an arts-infused mecca for youthful risk-takers, a boomtown where entrepreneurs can repair to cool French Quarter bars in ancient buildings after a hard day of deal making.
At the other extreme are the gloomy predictions of the pessimists. New Orleans will be Detroit, they say, a sickly urban wasteland abandoned by the middle class. A moldering core will be surrounded by miles of vacant houses, with wide-open neighborhoods roamed by drug dealers and other criminals." — The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2006
Read "Is New Orleans the new Detroit?"
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