The Skyscraper And The Airplane Summary

Goodheart’s essay “The Skyscraper and the Airplane” describes the fragile world of modernity and technology that humans have created, and the risk we place ourselves in during our daily life. Moreover, Goodheart also strives to prove how disaster in our increasingly modern world is inevitable. Foremost, Goodheart meticulously chose to publish his article during the winter of 2002. Following September 11th, droves of authors and writers began furiously analysing the event. Similar to the myriad of writers following September 11th, Goodheart also strove to analyse the event, only Goodheart published his analysis almost one year after the event. He likely wanted his readers to processes the event for themselves before reading his article. Moreover,
Goodheart writes to share his reflection of 9/11 with adult Americans, and to show how fragile our world is and how easy disaster can strike. To accomplish this, Goodheart takes the reader through the history of both Airplanes and Skyscrapers to show their rise to prominence. Likewise, he draws parallels between the development of Skyscrapers and Airplanes to show how they both become facets of modern life, and yet can lead to disastrous events.