The 25th anniversary of 9/11 lands on Erev Rosh Hashanah. A new year's message about this industry, the building I used to work in, the people who got me through the year, and a few jokes I owe people an apology for.

Tomorrow is September 11. Twenty-five years. At sundown tomorrow, Rosh Hashanah begins and the Jewish calendar rolls over to 5787. Nobody at the calendar committee asked whether the timing worked for me. In fairness, the calendar committee last met in the fourth century.

I've already marked this anniversary once. On the Hebrew calendar, 9/11 fell on 23 Elul, and that date came around last Shabbat. So this week I'm doing it twice, once by the moon and once by the Gregorian calendar, which is roughly how Jews do everything that matters: in two calendars, because one was never going to be enough.

In 2001 I worked out of 7 World Trade Center, ninth floor, the U.S. Secret Service's New York office. I was a civilian, one of the early members of the New York Electronic Crimes Task Force. On the morning of September 11 I was in my car, driving in for a meeting.

The meeting never happened. Late that afternoon, 7 World Trade came down too.

Here's what people don't expect me to say. I already knew there were bad people. That was the job. At 21 I was working the case against John Gotti Jr., and I was one of the people who helped put him in prison. I had sat across from real evil and helped build the file on it. Bad people were a caseload. You caught them, you did the paperwork, you went home, and the world went back to being a basically safe place with some criminals in it.

9/11 ended that. Almost nothing in my life has hurt me as much. It didn't teach me that bad people exist. It taught me that the floor itself could go. The people I knew in federal law enforcement in those years, the ones who went back into that neighborhood the next morning and the morning after that, are a big part of why I do what I do now. I wanted to be useful. I still do.

But I've also learned what twenty-five years of vigilance costs.

Pain makes you perceptive. It also makes you less available.

You get very good at spotting the lie, the cover-up, the guy whose deck doesn't match his invoices. You get worse at noticing the people quietly doing the right thing.

You get worse at noticing yourself.

The secular new year is a party with a countdown. The ball drops, somebody kisses somebody, and the resolutions last about as long as the January gym rush.

Rosh Hashanah is a trial. It's called Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment. The books are open, the whole world passes before the Judge one by one, and the verdict gets sealed ten days later on Yom Kippur. And what do we do on the morning of our trial? We eat apples dipped in honey. We wear good clothes. We have a nice lunch. That's not denial. It's confidence, not in our innocence, but in mercy.

It's also not the birthday of the universe, strictly speaking. By the Talmud's count, creation started five days earlier. Rosh Hashanah marks day six: the day people showed up. God spent five days on infrastructure and shipped the product on day six. We celebrate launch day.

And the product shipped with a bug. The midrash says Adam was created, sinned, stood trial and was pardoned all on that first day, and God told him this would be a sign for his children: as you stood before me today and walked out forgiven, so will they, every year, on this date. The very first Rosh Hashanah was the first screw-up and the first second chance. Same day. Same calendar entry. I find that enormously comforting. The system was designed for people who mess up. There is no other kind.

How long has this been going on? The Torah calls it a day of remembrance and the blast of a horn, so, over three thousand years.

The count says 5787. The Greeks, banned it. Rome made it so dangerous to announce the new month that the rabbis finally published the math, so nobody would ever need permission again.

Unlike most standards in this business, it got adopted. Rome had better roads and a much bigger budget.

The Roman Empire is now a gift shop. Judaism is not.

That calendar also solves a problem this industry still can't. The moon and the sun don't agree. A lunar year runs about eleven days short of a solar one, and left alone, Passover would drift into winter. So seven times every nineteen years, the calendar adds an entire extra month. Openly. With a name. It's called Adar II.

Think about that the next time your DSP and your SSP are double digits apart and everyone shrugs and blames methodology. The rabbis had two ledgers that didn't match, admitted it in public, and wrote the adjustment into the calendar where every child could see it. The discrepancy isn't buried in a fee line. It gets its own month.

When your calendar is 5,787 years old, perspective comes cheap. A quarter is a rounding error. A holding company is a very recent event. The upfronts are a local custom.

The Hebrew word for year, shanah, shares a root with the word for repeating and the word for change. The rabbis read that as a dare. The year is going to repeat. The question is whether you do.

This industry, mostly, repeated. But not entirely, and the exceptions deserve their names.

We watched the FTC and 22 states take Amazon to court over alleged manipulation of its ad auctions. We watched a federal judge decline to break off Google's AdX. We watched The Trade Desk cut 15 percent of its people, and I watched a lot of you reach out to those people the same day, with job leads and warm intros and no press release. We asked six holding companies four plain questions about principal media disclosure. We found ad dollars flowing to inventory hosting child sexual abuse material, which should be the one thing in this business nobody needs a working group to figure out. And when we reported it, some of the companies named fixed it inside a week. That counts. I'm writing it down so it counts.

And we asked event organizers four questions about how they actually enforce their codes of conduct: what happens when the accused is the biggest sponsor, whether the policy covers the after-party, who investigates and what comes of it. Most answered with a link to the code of conduct, or not at all. Rob Beeler answered in detail, and women in this industry had already named his events as a safe place before I ever asked him. One organizer did the work. One is a floor, not a ceiling. The invitation to join him is open, and I would love nothing more than to report that the number went up.

Now the part I've been circling.

This year, people called me out. Some of my comments and jokes about people crossed from sharp into distasteful, and they said so, some of them publicly. They had a point.

I took it seriously, and I'm deeply sorry.

I want to explain where it came from, and I want to be clear that the explanation is context, not an excuse. A lot of this year was spent taking calls from women about what powerful men in this business did to them. Investigators, cops and agents all learn the same bad habit early: when the material is unbearable, you turn it into a joke, because the joke is a place to put it.

That's how I got through a lot of rooms in the nineties. It's not how I should be writing in 2026. Being right about someone's conduct doesn't make every joke about them right. Gallows humor works in the break room. It helps with my PTSD.

In print, it lands on people who never signed up to be part of the bit, and some of them were already carrying more than I knew.

Judaism has a very specific protocol for this, and it's kinder than it looks. Maimonides breaks teshuvah into steps: name what you did, actually regret it, and commit to not doing it again. A hashtag doesn't count. A Notes-app screenshot doesn't count. And the Mishnah adds the part that makes Yom Kippur so inconvenient: the day atones for what you did against God, but for what you did to another person, not until you make it right with that person. You can't outsource your apology to the Almighty. You definitely can't outsource it to a comms team.

So here's the commitment. The sharpness stays aimed at conduct, institutions and money. It comes off people. And to the people who told me directly, sometimes at real cost to themselves: thank you.

That was a favor.

Neither of us enjoyed it, and I'm better for it.

On my desk sits the Brooklyn College seal, the school my father ran and I attended, with its motto: Nil Sine Magno Labore. Nothing without great labor. I used to think that was about work.

It turns out it's mostly about repair.

The most honest prayer I know gets said on Rosh Hashanah. It's called Unetaneh Tokef, it's roughly a thousand years old, and it lists the ways people will die this year: who by fire, who by water. It was written by people who knew exactly how unsafe the world is. They didn't need a 9/11 to tell them.

And its answer is not "stay safe." Its answer is teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah: return, prayer and charity remove the severity of the decree. Not the decree. The severity. That's the fine print, and it's the most realistic line in all of religion. We don't control what happens. We control what we bring to it.

That's what I missed for a lot of those twenty-five years. 9/11 taught me the world wasn't safe. Rosh Hashanah had been trying to tell me it never was, and that safety was never the point. The point was the meal, the phone call, the stupid joke that doesn't wound anyone, the quiet drive home. Being alert to evil is a skill. Expecting it everywhere is a wound. The first one makes you a good investigator. The second one makes you a worse friend and, it turns out, a worse writer. I'd like to be a better friend this year. The writing will follow.

And here's the detail from this year's calendar I can't get past. The first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, and on Shabbat we don't blow the shofar. The sages decided long ago that the alarm waits. So the 25th anniversary of the worst morning of my life ends at sundown, and the first thing my tradition asks of me is not a siren. It's candles. A meal. The people at the table. Rest.

The shofar comes Sunday. Maimonides said its sound means wake up, sleepers, from your slumber. This year we get the rest first and the wake-up call second. I think that's the right order. It might be the right order for this whole industry. You can't wake anybody up if you've never once sat down with them.

Transparency isn't just for supply chains. We demand it in fees, in measurement, in principal media. Demand it in conduct too, starting with your own.

Access isn't character. Neither is revenue, a keynote slot or a very nice dinner. Character is what someone does when nobody's buying.

Listen when someone tells you harm happened. The instinct to protect the deal is the same instinct that protects the guy. You can override it. People did this year.

Wit without care turns into cruelty. I'm writing that one down for myself first.

Reconcile like the rabbis. Admit the discrepancy. Name the adjustment. Put it where everyone can see it.

Build trust slowly. It's the only asset in this business that doesn't come with a make-good. It's also the only one that compounds.

Notice the people doing it right. They rarely send a press release. Send them a note anyway.

People can be terrible. I've been in the rooms, I've read the files, and the building I worked in is gone. But don't let knowing that stop you from noticing how much good still depends on your choices. That isn't soft. It's a discipline. And it is, honestly, the most hopeful idea I know: that the part of the world you touch can be made more truthful, more decent and more humane, starting tonight, starting with you.

May this be a year of truth without cruelty, accountability without performance, courage without arrogance, and repair wherever repair is possible.

May the people who called me out this year be written into a good one.

May the people who called me to tell me what happened to them find peace, and find that it mattered.

Tomorrow I'll remember. Tomorrow night I'll light candles. Sunday I'll hear the shofar. And Monday, God willing, I'll go back to asking your company the questions it doesn't want to answer, a little more carefully, and a little more kindly, than I did last year.

Ksiva v'chasima tova. May you be written and sealed for a good year. Shana tova u'metuka.

Pesach