| The sky over New York City was a cloudless blue this morning, much as it was twenty-three years ago today, on September 11, 2001. In lower Manhattan and across the country, Americans solemnly remembered the attacks that took place that morning, the deadliest ever carried out on U.S. soil. While the commemorations largely focussed on the victims and survivors, Americans were inevitably also thinking about the mastermind behind the attacks. For almost a decade after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden eluded pursuers, occasionally taunting or excoriating them in videos and audio recordings released from whereabouts unknown. His long run of impunity would end on a moonless night in May, 2011, on a one-acre compound in a remote part of Pakistan. Three months later, The New Yorker’s Nicholas Schmidle published the definitive chronicle of those final hours, which also documented the intensive preparations that preceded them and how the operation nearly went wrong. Half a world away, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others watched from the White House Situation Room, with Vice-President Joe Biden holding a rosary. “Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th,” Schmidle writes, “an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life.” | 
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