Names are a powerful memorial in our culture. Michael Kimmelman ponders the likelihood of some sort of list of names at the World Trade Center site as a memorial. “The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require that the design ‘recognize each individual who was a victim’ on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked. It’s a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote ‘memorial,’ just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the names can be inscribed.”