There's a pretty good piece in The New Yorker about the New York Times biographical sketches of victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The features, entitled "Portraits of Grief" were short, but insightful and cathartic.

Otherwise, as Jan Hoffman, who began working on "Portraits of Grief" during its second week and eventually wrote almost seventy of them, noted the other day, "The hardball rules of journalism went out the window. You can never presume to say, 'I know how you feel.' Because you don't.

"I did all my reporting over the phone," Hoffman went on. "For most of the people I talked to, I think that was liberating. It's almost like they're on the couch talking to a shrink. They don't have to look at your face, they free-associate, and when they hear a long silence they rush to fill the space. The way in which the reporter is not really a shrink, though, is that you cry. I have never wept so much while working. I would often cry before the person I was speaking with would. It was the crispness of their memories, the way they described these poignant, funny, heroic moments. I can't emphasize enough how humbling this work was. As a reporter, you have to be patient enough to keep probing until you have that click where you can see the person and how they moved on the planet.

"I made a call the other day that I resisted because it was the parents. I usually don't get much from parents. But this was one of the more enthralling interviews I had. It was a fireman, and he was the ninth of their ten children. The parents were exuberantly articulate. They were blunt. They said, 'You know, he wasn't a saint. He was a giant pain in the ass.' But they told me these stories about him in such a way that I couldn't help myself. I fell in love with the guy."

I understand what reporters like Hoffman had to go through. When I was working at my college paper, I had to make a similar phone call once to a father whose son had just died. It was one of the toughest things I've ever had to do.