My Escape from the WTC’s 81st Floor

At 8:48 on the morning of September 11, Michael Wright was a thirty-year-old account executive working high in the World Trade Center. Two hours later, he was something else.

View in Browser      SHOP EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBE     My Escape From the 81st Floor of the World Trade Center Up to that day, I'd had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it's like to have a 110-story building that's been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it's part of my life. There are things I never thought I'd know that I now know. It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day. Read More     The 10 Best Slippers on Amazon Will Keep Your Feet Happy at Home From fuzzy scuff slides to pairs you can wear for a quick coffee run, the internet's Everything Store has it all. Read More     The Best Bomber Jackets Will Make You the Leading Man of Your Own Movie It doesn't get anymore cinematic than this. Read More     Andrew Yang Has Found a New Bottomless Money Pit He's also got a book coming out. These two events are not coincidental. Read More     The 45 Best Gifts for Men You Can Unearth on Amazon Amazon, at times, can be a deluge of piping hot garbage. This is not one of those times. Read More     Tom DeLonge Is Finally Vindicated Tom DeLonge has a lot to say. About life, about music, and—because he's the only rock star to have co-founded a company devoted to the scientific research of unexplained aerial phenomena—about UFOs. "When you study UFOs, you're looking at consciousness," he says over Zoom from the patio of an Encinitas bar on a gloomy late-summer morning. He is not drinking. "You're looking at the history of mankind, like archeology, or archeological evidence, or ancient texts, religious texts. You're looking at national security. You're looking at physics, unified field theory. You're looking at kind of the forefront of quantum mechanics and how the universe seems to be built. And what you start to realize is that the evidence of those phenomena is not at all what people think it is." Read More         The Falling Man Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. Read More     Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection esquire.com ©2021 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019