Osama bin Laden's death has created an atmosphere of hope and change

This article was published in The Guardian 2 May 2011

The young crowd at Ground Zero clearly hopes that the decade of fear inaugurated by 9/11 has come to an end

Some time around 10.30pm I was sitting over dinner at a friend's place on the Upper West Side. I got a new phone yesterday, and was (rudely) fooling around with it under the table. That was when I saw a tweet saying that Osama bin Laden was dead. When I told my friends, they assumed I was joking. We switched on the TV and waited for a while as broadcast news failed to tell us anything and Twitter seethed with rumours. A mansion. A drone attack. Afghanistan, Pakistan. After President Obama's speech confirmed the news, we got in a cab and headed down to Ground Zero.

I remember being there in October 2001, standing on a corner late at night, watching the jagged shards of the World Trade Center towers being dismantled under giant spotlights. I remember being there again on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2008, watching a physical fight breaking out between flag-waving mourners and placard-carrying 9/11 "truthers".