After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

Tonight, the Empire State Building tower lights will turn to a pink sparkle at 9:25 to honor the late Dolly Parton. Dolly was a global cultural icon whose seven-decade career reached generations of fans. Beyond entertainment, Dolly leaves a significant philanthropic legacy through the Dollywood Foundation and Imagination Library, which has provided hundreds of millions of books to children worldwide. At Nine-Two-Five tonight, we celebrate her and her legacy 💖

We want your pee. Please give us your pee.

A mash up with Kristen Bell and Derek Klena? Yeah, that will do🤩

My ex cheated on me. I was devastated. Friend: You should send her something petty. Me: Like what? Friend: Flowers. But make it WEIRD. I found a florist in Nakameguro. Florist: What's the occasion? Me: Revenge. Florist: eyes light up, Tell me everything. I explained the situation. Florist: I have the PERFECT arrangement. He made a bouquet of: - Dead roses - Wilted lilies  - A single cactus - Card that said: "Hope your new relationship goes as well as these flowers" Me: This is beautiful. Florist: I've been WAITING for a customer like you. Week later: He texted me. Florist: "Did she get them?" Me: "Yes. She's furious." Florist: "Excellent. Tell your friends." Month 2: I recommended him to a coworker going through a breakup. Coworker: He made me a bouquet of ONIONS. Me: Why onions? Coworker: "To make your ex cry as much as they made you cry." Coworker: It was GENIUS. Month 4: The florist had a WAITLIST. All revenge flowers. His shop window sign: "Flowers for Every Occasion - ESPECIALLY Bad Ones" Month 6: He went VIRAL on Japanese Twitter. A celebrity ordered revenge flowers for her ex. Posted a photo. The florist got 500 orders in a week. News article: "Tokyo Florist Specializes in 'Spite Bouquets'" Month 8: He opened a SECOND LOCATION. Hired staff specifically trained in "emotional damage floral design." Me: You've created an empire. Florist: I'm just helping people express their feelings. Me: With dead plants. Florist: With THERAPEUTIC dead plants. Month 10: Someone ordered revenge flowers for ME. Delivery guy: Package for you. Inside: Beautiful fresh flowers. Card: "For inspiring the pettiest business in Tokyo. Thank you. - The Florist" Me: crying Month 12: His shop expanded to "revenge gifts." - Chocolate that says "Sweet like the lies you told" - Teddy bears with VERY passive aggressive messages - Cakes that spell out "I'm over you (but also fuck you)" Revenue: ¥15 million/month. Present day: The florist is opening locations in Osaka and Kyoto. He offered me a partnership. Florist: 10% equity. You were the first revenge customer. Me: I just ordered flowers! Florist: You INSPIRED me. This is your legacy. I took the deal. I now own 10% of Japan's largest spite-based floral company. My ex sent me a message last week: "I can't believe you started this." Me: I didn't start it. I just ordered flowers. Her: You've created a MONSTER. Me: *looking at quarterly profits* A very profitable monster. Revenge is a dish best served with wilted roses apparently.

No one was prepared for this Nearly 400,000 in the Ticketmaster queue!!! Your patience is so appreciated This is crazy THANK YOU! - Team Garth

Thank you @taylorswift13 and @tkelce for your generous $2M gift to Feeding America! Your support brings us all closer to a future where everyone has the food they need to thrive. So grateful to have partners like you in the movement to end hunger. 🧡

Dear Joe, I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that. And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand. My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment. The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for. This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it. But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is: “This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.” The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy. The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar. The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker. The President is our servant. Not our Caesar. Respectfully, Hunter P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.

Stephen Colbert got his band to play licensed music during his final show so CBS would be sued for using the music illegally. “Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!”

Taylor Swift, one of the most recognizable names in entertainment, is moving to protect her world famous image and voice. abcnews.link/0V3RKNL

A jury has ruled that Live Nation and Ticketmaster held an illegal monopoly in the ticketing market. (nbcnews.com/business/consume…)