In the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with the twin towers vanished from Manhattan's skyline, a poem by W.H. Auden could have been the song of a wounded nation. "September 1, 1939," written on the eve of World War II, seemed eerily prescient: I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid . . . The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night. Now, a series of experiments offers empirical evidence in support of another passage from the same poem: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn Those to whom ... (more)