Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A growing body of evidence suggests the world's most unstable and violent countries are those

where women are mistreated most from near exclusion to out and out subjugation. We travel

to places where the trend is most painfully clear. And there's something funny going on with

hummingbirds. Females of the species often look like the males, but some of them change their

plumage over time. We examine some new experiments aimed at explaining the fleetingly fancy feathers.

But first, tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York City.

All a man hat and his cover, a downtown Manhattan is covered with big white ash and building material.

Both 110 story towers of the World Trade Center had been destroyed and many of the nearly 3000 dead

hadn't yet been found. As exhausted firefighters sorted through rubble still reaped in smoke,

New York's future looked bleak. Two months later, a 16-acre pit was still burning.

Even now, there is a sense of awesome gruesome power. Only the hoses continue to try to damp the

continuous fires beneath. It took more than eight months to clean up, but the attacks spurred

the transformation not just of lower Manhattan, but all of New York City. In some ways, the country

is worse off than it was two decades ago. It sparked a 20-year war in Afghanistan and another one

in Iraq. The country itself is more anxious, more polarized, less trusting. Rosemary Ward is the

economist's New York correspondent. But New York is better. The resurrection of lower Manhattan

acted as a catalyst for rebuilding and rethinking well beyond downtown area that was destroyed that day.

So how did the rebuilding actually carry on? Well, for New Yorkers that were staggered by the

shock of 9-11, rebuilding became a rallying cause. I remember people said, build it and build it taller.

The years after 9-11 proved to be an era of municipal ambition, the likes of which New York hadn't

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