@maxkutner
23 SKIDOO: The bomb that exploded on 23rd Street in Manhattan was one of several devices authorities believe the suspect planted in New York and New Jersey.
WILLIAM EDWARDS/AFP/GETTY
ON A WARM Saturday night in September, around 8:15, Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, left his Manhattan apartment on 26th Street and Sixth Avenue and headed to a grocery store a few blocks north. “The street was normal,” he says. “I saw some firetrucks down on Sixth Avenue and thought, Well, it’s New York.” When he got home, he turned on the television and heard the news: While he was grocery shopping, on September 17, a bomb had been detonated three blocks south of his apartment building, injuring approximately 31 people. Soon, to his surprise, friends around the world began texting him, asking him if he was safe. “There [weren’t] guys running around with Kalashnikovs,” says Goldsmith. “It did not feel dangerous at all. It’s not Paris. It’s not 9/11.”