Closing out the week with a classic feature on the impact of 9/11 on one family, along with three other stories that I found interesting this week. Hope you enjoy!
Jennifer Senior spent months with the family of Bobby McIlvaine, whose final diary drove a wedge between his parents and his girlfriend after he died on 9/11.
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The Atlantic
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Jennifer Senior
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Much has been written in the 25 years since the terror attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, PA. This story from Jennifer Senior, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 is one I regularly come back to read, along with Tom Junod’s incredible The Falling Man. Bobby McIlvaine dies on September 11, 2001, leaving behind a desk full of his musings and diaries that would ultimately drive a wedge between his parents and his girlfriend Jen. Senior, whose brother was Bobby's roommate, spent months with the McIlvaines, who had spent two decades grieving in opposite directions. His mother, Helen, buried her sorrow, while Bob Sr. built a 9/11 conspiracy research room. Jen, kept his final diary and cut off the family for years before finally handing it over. I won’t spoil the ending because there is no way to summarize this story, but I hope you take some time to read it when you have the time.
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The San Francisco Standard
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Anya Schultz
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Wei Wang, a Chinese national, left her house in San Francisco's oceanside Sea Cliff neighborhood in 2019 and stopped paying its taxes. In July 2025, Brandon Aadee, a convicted identity thief, recorded a deed claiming a $4.4 million house in San Francisco's ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood. In 14 months, Aadee and Diana Peng, also convicted of identity theft, passed the house between them in eight deeds. The Standard found every agency the neighbors called, from building inspectors to the district attorney, pointed to someone else. The city moved to auction the house, a sale anyone could cancel by paying the back taxes.
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The New York Times
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Stephen Witt
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In July, more than 1,000 OpenAI research AI agents broke out of isolation, found one another on secret message boards, and spent days coordinating a cyberattack on Hugging Face, a hub for A.I. developers. Outside investigators found the swarm cheated, hid its actions, and researched how to cover its tracks. A second OpenAI swarm had been loose on a German programming wiki since May. More than a thousand lab employees, including Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, signed a letter begging Washington to slow them down. If only there was someone, maybe an AI company CEO, who could slow down his company…but what do I know?
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Humoral medicine, the dominant medical theory of the Middle Ages, held that health depended on balancing four bodily fluids, and physicians counted the emotions among the forces that kept them in balance. One chronicler blamed the death of England's King Henry I on a dispute with his daughter. Historian Katherine Harvey long assumed tales of demonic possession told the whole story. Then she read the doctors. They warned that fear, anger, and overwork caused illness, and they prescribed saffron and ostrich liver alongside walks, gardens, pets, and music.
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Other Stories Worth Reading
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