The Wall Street Journal (September 11)
Remembrance ceremonies were held around the United States to honor those who fell 10 years ago. “For such loss, the 9/11 ceremonies yesterday lifted the national spirit. It wasn’t easy.” September 11 remains a day of great pain and profound loss, but “10 years have washed away the worst of that morning and kept the best, an indomitable national spirit.”
New York Times (May 29)
NASA has given up the search for Spirit, the Mars Rover whose 3-month mission in 2004 grew into 6 years of plentiful data gathering. “This is not like calling off the search for a missing human explorer. And yet it feels similar, even though Spirit is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle….it is strangely easy to personify Spirit. Over the years, it has seemed intrepid, valiant, determined. It has no consciousness, but there has been something self-knowing in the photographs it has taken of itself, with Mars in the background.”