“He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.” Esquire’s Tom Junod looks back at 9/11 with an examination of one of its most enduring images: The Falling Man.

+ “You had an unreal sense of time that whole day. I don’t know whether it was 10 seconds or two minutes. Then he said, ‘You have my authorization.’ Then he listens for a while longer. He closes off the conversation. He turns to us and says that he’s just authorized the shoot-down of hijacked airliners.” The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.