The Fines

How did some remains of those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks end up in what was once the world's largest landfill? In this episode: the battle that continues to this day over what some see as a pile of dust, and what others see as the remains of the dead. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 0:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Pushkin.

• 2:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not long ago, my producer Lucy Sullivan visited one of the largest parks in New York City. Not Central Park, not Prospect Park, Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island. Lucy was there with Ben Nadaf Haferi, reporting for our latest series, The Staten Island Problem. And while she was there, Lucy uncovered a mystery. There was one part of the park, one section, that she wasn't allowed to visit. Why? Because of what's buried there.

• 2:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Today, the park is rolling green hills, a beautiful and peaceful place. But Fresh Kills, as you may know, used to be the world's largest landfill. Mayor Rudy Giuliani closed it in the 90s, and the last barge sailed to Staten Island in March of 2001. Or so everyone thought. Six months later, in September of 2001, it had to reopen. Fresh Kills became the site of a giant operation to sort through the rubble from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The last thing brought to the landfill was what remained of the Twin Towers and all the people who perished there. A giant pile of dirt and dust.

• 3:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Today, Lucy Sullivan has a story about that pile of dust and the battle over where it should go. As the saying goes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But when are we no longer ourselves? When do we become dust? It all began with a promise.

• 3:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's Lucy.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Charles Hirsch rushed downtown to the site of the Twin Towers. Hirsch was the city's chief medical examiner. He knew his team had to move quickly. They would need to set up a temporary morgue. When the North Tower collapsed, Hirsch was hit with debris and badly injured. Mayor Giuliani spoke to the press.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Dr. Hirsch was injured and had to be treated, but he's organized in his office, and they are ready to deal with thousands and thousands of bodies if they have to.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Leaving ground zero, Hirsch was caked in dust. Later, he reached into his pockets and found fistfuls of it. He told The New York Times, that's when it dawned on him. If concrete was pulverized into dust, it wasn't much of a mystery what might have happened to people. It wouldn't be thousands of bodies, but thousands of body parts. So he made a promise.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Charles Hirsch, the medical examiner, says, "We will never rest until all remains are identified."

• 5:07Speaker 03

  This is Jay Aronson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote a book called Who Owns the Dead: The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  These kinds of issues are a daily occurrence for people in war zones. I wanted to kind of bring that home to Americans. I wanted Americans to understand what people in other parts of the world go through on a regular basis, particularly in conflict zones.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  9/11 was the first time in modern history that Americans were dealing with this scale of dismemberment on US soil. And right then, DNA technology had evolved to be able to identify the dead in a way that was never possible before.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  Really, in the context of the Balkan wars, scientists needed to develop ways of dealing with decayed and degraded bone and tissue to match very degraded DNA samples to family samples. And so that early work was really coming to fruition right when 9/11 happened.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  This meant, on the one hand, that there was a chance that anything with a trace of the victims could potentially be identified for families. But it also meant that the promise Charles Hirsch made, to identify every remain found and not to rest until they did, would lead to big expectations from the public.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  That, I think, affirms the view in some families' minds that all of the remains are sacred, that the goal isn't just to positively identify in a forensic sense the presence of a particular individual at the site at the time of the attacks, but that there was something sacred about each and every bit of their body, and that all of the bits, all of the pieces that could be associated with a particular person should be returned to that family or should be handled in a particular way.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  There were rumors in those first few days that tens of thousands of people might be missing or dead. Up to 200,000 people visited the World Trade Center complex each day, and 50,000 people worked there.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Matthew Horning worked as a database administrator on the 95th floor of the North Tower. He was 26 years old.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  On hot July day, I drove out to New Jersey to speak with his parents. Hello, how are you?

• 7:37Speaker 06

  I'm Lucy.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  I am, nice to meet you.

• 7:38Speaker 06

  Kirsten.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. His mother Diane and I settled onto the couch. His father Kurt showed me a picture of him. Matthew had light brown hair and a goatee. This is why we're in law. Yeah. That's a picture of my son. In your wallet. Yeah, in my wallet, they carry it all the time. As Diane told me, Matthew was just getting started.

• 7:58Speaker 06

  Matthew was...

• 8:03Speaker 06

  I mean, he was wonderful. He had great friends. He was good to me, he was good to the family. He was not flawless, but he didn't think of himself as anything super special. In fact, his email address was iamacog, because you would ask him, "What's your job?" He was in IT. "What do you do?" He says, "You know, those little pieces that if one kicks off the whole cog, the wheel doesn't turn? I'm one of those. I'm a cog in the wheel."

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Diane said Matthew could be funny. He had just started dating a nice girl who he hoped to marry someday. He liked to play Dungeons and Dragons with his friends, and he wanted to be a fantasy writer. He was signed up to take a writing class on September 12. He lived the way most guys in their late 20s do.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  As we used to say, he lived in a place that everybody used to want to move out of.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  His roommate, you'd go, and you'd just go, "Okay, is this how I raised you?"

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Kurt and Diane Horning reminded me a lot of my own parents. They live in the same house they raised their children in. They've been married for 56 years, and they've lived here for 53 of those. They have another child, a daughter, and grandkids now.

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Show you this.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  In the corner of the room, there's a makeshift memorial to Matthew. Diane took a wooden bowl off of a bookcase and emptied it onto the couch.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  This is his wallet. His wallet was... These are all the things that were in his wallet.

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Who's this? And when they found these things, they sealed them and put them, you know, like they sealed. This was the money that was in his wallet, and it was sealed in this packaging that was found at Fresh Kills.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  During the sorting operation at Fresh Kills, victims' families could schedule visits to see what was going on there. Diane doesn't remember when exactly she first visited, but she remembers what she saw. She showed me some pictures she took on one of her trips. This looks like just a crack in the earth and some grass with hay, maybe?

• 10:20Speaker 06

  Yep, that was something I put on top of it, but you could see pieces of the fire hose.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Oh, wow, yeah. It's like a fire hose in the dirt with some flowers on it.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Yep. You could see pieces of the building. You could see this, which was a huge piece of cloth. We found shoes. They said everything to a quarter of an inch has been sifted out.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  They did not sift down to a quarter... They lied.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Diane was shocked. Fresh Kills was not supposed to look like this. Something didn't seem right to her. This was the beginning of a fight for the Hornings, and other families too, over what exactly Charles Hirsch's promise meant and where the remains of the dead should go.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 12:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do,

• 13:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 13:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Dennis Diggins was the superintendent of the Fresh Kills landfill. He was in charge of overseeing its closure and then its reopening in the early morning hours of September 12, 2001.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  So we got the first load out to Fresh Kills. I guess around 2 o'clock in the morning. And then I just shot home. And I look like somebody dumped a load of saccharine on my head. So I actually got undressed in the garage and right into the shower. And then I was back at Fresh Kills the next morning by 7 o'clock.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Diggins helped manage the cleanup for the sanitation department. City officials started meeting at a school down the street from Ground Zero. It became the de facto command center.

• 14:45Speaker 05

  You went in and you saw all these top engineers from all over the city sitting on these little, little seats. They were like kindergarten seats. And you knew once those, once those egos were checked and sitting there, you knew we were going to get through this. But it was still a daunting experience.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  The world's largest garbage dump was now an active crime scene. The sorting and searching operation was all going to take place at Fresh Kills.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Which really made the most sense because Fresh Kills is a, it's a city-owned facility. It's secured, it's fenced in. It's a marita loading facility. So if you want to barge material there, you can barge material. And again, we had 170 acres of flat plateau to work off of.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  At first, they were sorting through the material by hand with shovels and rakes. And by the way, someone I spoke to for this story made clear that "material" was the best word to use, not debris, the word I'd been using. Eventually, they brought in these sifting machines, which could take the material and separate it out through screens to pieces that were a quarter of an inch. That's about half the size of your thumbnail. Everything else that passed through was considered inconsequential dirt and dust, leftovers. Whenever human remains were found, and they were found often in those first few months, they were immediately sent to the office of the chief medical examiner. They found lots of personal items, too. Wallets, ID cards, watches.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  The men and women who worked at Fresh Kills were never trained for anything like this. Tractor operators who were moving material around in the sorting fields, I mean, they saw human remains on a daily basis. And you would see it as you were walking by. They would walk by with a pail and you knew it was inside. But I think everybody stepped up and did what they had to do and treated it with the utmost respect.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  There were certain kinks to work out in the searching process. One of them was getting the speed of the sifters right so that people could catch things without getting motion sick. Another was accounting for the fact that people were working around the clock, 24/7. They didn't take a day off until Thanksgiving of that year. And then there were the seagulls. An NYPD official said they knew which piles of material had lots of human remains because seagulls would circle above and they'd have to fight them off. By July 2002, the city thought the operation at Fresh Kills was finished. It ended ahead of schedule and under budget, rare for a government project. All told, they sorted about 1.5 million tons of material from Ground Zero.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  That's about 600 Olympic swimming pools worth of stuff. But then there's this fact of the fines. What are the fines?

• 17:48Speaker 05

  What are the fines? The fines were the material that came through the sifter. After it was searched out to a quarter of an inch, those fines were then taken. Everything that was landfilled was put into an area that about 45 acres on the western side of the landfill. So that it was determined that, at the end of the day, we would be able to cordon off this area that was all World Trade Center material.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  The fines, F-I-N-E-S. Unidentified dirt and dust. The last stuff to be left at Fresh Kills. Not garbage, not debris, but nothing to be salvaged, at least from the city's point of view. Of course, not everyone saw it that way.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  They treated my son like garbage. This was the largest garbage dump that had been recently closed. So while the people who killed my son, I have certainly an animosity for them. I have a huge animosity for the people who were running New York and running our federal government also, who allowed my son to be put in a garbage dump. Now we've got to do this fast, clean it up, and get it out of our sight. Out of sight, out of mind.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  When I went to visit the Hornings in New Jersey, the first thing I noticed was a bumper sticker on their car out front. I had Diane read me what it said.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  The Fresh Kills garbage dump is no resting place for the WTC 9/11 victims. We need your help.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Before Matthew was killed, Diane said she was not an organizer, not especially political. But in the face of insurmountable grief over losing her son in a terrorist attack, she decided to fight the only people she really could, the city of New York.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  The Hornings had one demand. Do not leave the remains of our son in the Fresh Kills garbage dump. From their kitchen table, the Hornings started a group called WTC Families for a Proper Burial with others who had lost loved ones. They were fighting to have the fines, that big pile of dust left over from the sorting operation, moved out of the landfill and into a more dignified place. The group met every month at the Union Library in New Jersey. They attended public planning meetings and protested at others.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  So I became the spokesperson because I wasn't afraid to speak. So you could say, well, we're going to meet the mayor. I don't care. You know, that's okay. I'll talk to anybody.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  And they did meet the mayor. Kurt and Diane told me they had a private, one-on-one meeting with Mayor Bloomberg.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  He was on his way to a basketball game, so we had to make it fast. And he said, well, I'm giving my body to science, so burial doesn't matter to me. We said, we think that's great. That's your choice. But we need a choice too. And our choice is to bury our children.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  On May 30, 2002, a ceremony was held at Ground Zero, marking the end of the recovery effort there. But then, a couple of years later, during a construction project, additional human remains were found, across the street from the towers on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building. This kicked off a new effort, which led to the discovery of over 1,000 bone fragments, human tissue, and other remains over the next few years. Some were discovered by accident, like when con ed workers were digging in a manhole. It was clear that certain areas had been missed. The WTC Families Group thought there was a chance that things might have been missed at Fresh Kills, too. After all, Diane had taken those pictures

• 21:49Speaker 03

  of stuff larger than a quarter of an inch, like the fire hose. In 2002, a bill was introduced in the New Jersey Legislature that would have required officials to remove the finds from Fresh Kills and place them into containers to be stored at Ground Zero. The bill never really went anywhere. The finds were determined to be somewhere between 360,000 and 480,000 tons. If you picture it, that's about one football field in length, piled 200 feet high. Promises were made to the families by city officials, saying that the finds would be dealt with somehow, that they wouldn't be forgotten. But those well-intentioned promises sent the Hornings spinning in circles.

• 22:32Speaker 06

  They sent us to the coroner's office. He was a wonderful man, by the way. But the person we had to deal with was Barbara Butcher. And then they send us to-

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Wait, sorry, that was her name? Her name?

• 22:45Speaker 06

  And then we go to Fresh Kills and we deal with Dennis Diggins. And there were other names like that. We're going, what is going on here? We felt like we were in a Dickens novel. We really did. And if we didn't laugh, we cried. We laughed a lot. We cried a lot.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Dennis Diggins, the person in charge at Fresh Kills, remembers the last meeting he had with the Hornings in his trailer. It didn't go so well.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  At one point in one of the meetings, he says, well, who ultimately told you to come and bring this material to Fresh Kills? So I said, well, it was determined by the mayor and the Office of Emergency Management determined that it should come here. So he said, so you just blindly followed orders like Nazis? You just followed? And at that point, I just said, listen, this meeting's over. I said, if you're going to equate the work that we're doing here to Nazi Germany, I says, I'm done. I'm not talking to you people anymore.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  The Hornings got some politicians to sign letters of support for their cause. Plans were starting to be made for what the memorial would be, and the city held sessions for the public to attend and share their input. Diane wanted to make one thing clear. A landfill could never be a memorial in her eyes.

• 24:09Speaker 06

  I remember going to one of these symposiums, and I took a box and put garbage in the box. And then I gift wrapped it, got all pretty bow and whatever. And then I opened it and I said, I put it in a pretty box, but it's still garbage.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Soon, a judge would weigh in on this fight. That's after the break.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Around the middle of the 4th century B.C., the dog philosopher Diogenes was chatting with friends about what should be done with his body after he died. Here's cultural historian Thomas Leckert.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  You know, he's called the dog philosopher because dogs live naturally. Diogenes's view of dogs, well, they do all this stuff in public that I'd like to do in public. He was sort of famous in antiquity as being sort of a truth-telling, street person.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Leckert is author of the book, The Work of the Dead. It begins with the story of Diogenes, a man who lived in a barrel on the street and was opposed to all that was decent. He thought that humans should be able to masturbate and defecate in public the same way we eat in public. And so, when Diogenes was talking about what should happen to him after he died, he said that he'd like to be thrown over the city walls and disposed of like debris. I'm paraphrasing here, but the story goes that his friends pleaded with him, saying animals would dismember his body. Diogenes said, okay, then put a stick in my hand so that I can fight them off. His friends said, well, you wouldn't be able to use the stick because you'd be dead. To which Diogenes replied, exactly.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Diogenes is right in that a human body is in no material way different from an animal body, which can eaten by vultures and dealt with in the ordinary course of ecology. And he's also right that he won't notice it. So it's nothing to him, what happens to his body.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  But of course, Diogenes is very wrong. For thousands of years before and for thousands of years after, humanity has rejected his logical proposition. Although we know we can't use a stick to fight off vultures when we die, most people would never throw someone out like trash.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  There are only four ways you could get rid of the dead, right? Air, fire, water, and earth. So you bury them in the earth, you burn them with fire, you throw them in water, or you leave them in the air. So all of these have, all of these have been done.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  The place of the dead has always mattered. Starting in the 8th century, to be a church was to have the body of a martyr or a relic from one. And the worst fate imaginable for the faithful was to not be buried near them in the churchyard. Then, of course, there's the public cemetery, cremation, open caskets, scattering ashes in the river.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  The general point is that no one throws them away.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  To Diane and Kurt Horning, it seemed like the city was doing just that, throwing away the remains of their son in a landfill. In the best-case scenario, WTC Families wanted the finds taken out of Fresh Kills, moved to Ground Zero, and incorporated into the memorial there. If that wasn't possible, WTC Families had other suggestions: Governor's Island, or maybe a section of Fresh Kills that was not on top of garbage. In 2004, the city finally said outright, the finds would not be moved from Fresh Kills. I asked Dennis Diggins about this. To me, it seemed logistically challenging, but not totally out of the question to move the finds somewhere else.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Was it purely a logistical impossibility to put the finds somewhere else, like to make a cemetery somewhere or to put them in a place that was not Fresh Kills? Like, why was that not possible?

• 29:09Speaker 05

  Well, at the time, finds were just another product of the material itself. There was never any thought that this material should be brought somewhere else and treated somewhere else. Just didn't enter into the equation.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Because it would look, would the finds just look like a pile of dirt to someone who didn't know what they were?

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  After years of meetings and sessions and bills that went nowhere, WTC Families for a Proper Burial sued the city. They hired legendary civil rights attorney Norman Siegel to represent them. In August of 2005, they filed their two-count complaint, alleging that leaving the finds in Fresh Kills violated their 14th Amendment right to due process. They claim it also violated New York burial laws, which state that family members have certain property rights when it comes to their dead.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  At some point, the Hornings reached out to Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner. They wanted information about what remains had been found and where. Hirsch sent Diane Horning a letter in response. He wrote, "Due to the close physical resemblance between cremated bone fragments and pulverized concrete, I believe it virtually certain that at least some human tissue is mixed with the dirt at the Staten Island landfill." But the problem was, none of the plaintiffs could prove that the ashes of their loved one specifically was mixed in with that dirt. Nearly three years after litigation began, the judge in the case issued his decision. He ruled that the plaintiffs lacked a constitutionally protected right

• 30:51Speaker 03

  to what amounts to, quote, "an unidentifiable mass of dirt." He wrote, "All human remains that could be identified were identified. Only dust remains."

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Almost 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001. Over 20,000 fragments of human remains were found. Families didn't just receive one notification that their loved one was among the dead. Some of them received visit after visit, phone call after phone call, each time a new body part or piece of tissue was identified as a match. But there are still over 1,000 people whose remains have never been identified. Charles Hirsch passed away in 2016, but the city is still looking for ways to match the remains they keep to the dead. In 2025, forensic scientists had a breakthrough and identified three new 9/11 victims.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  DNA matching technology continues to get better. It's possible this process will never end. Diane and Kurt Horning have received a few notifications over the years. Small fragments of Matthew. They buried what they were given, but pieces of their son are not enough. Toward the end of our interview, I finally asked Diane a question I'd been wondering since I walked in. I haven't asked about your pin. Tell me about your pin you're wearing.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  Um, these are, we, we got these, somebody wrote, and I wish I could remember.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  It was a picture of the towers with a heart in the background, the same image I'd seen on the Horning's car when I was walking up. I assumed she'd put it on because I was coming.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  I swore I'd wear it every day until he was out of the dump, and he's done out of the dump, so I'm wearing it.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  You wear it every day?

• 32:43Speaker 06

  I wear it every day. My husband wears his every day, too.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  The finds are still at Fresh Kills. The city has already begun converting the whole place into a park, and plans are in the works for a 9/11 memorial there. The Horning's say they'll never go. The story began with a very well-meaning promise, a commitment to honoring what remained after a massive tragedy. A promise that Charles Hirsch hoped could give comfort to thousands of families who were never going to see the person they loved again. But it was always going to be an impossible promise to fulfill. And I think the reason why can be found in a personal story the cultural historian

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Thomas LeCure told me about his father, his grandfather, and maybe himself, too. LeCure's father, a Jew, had to flee Germany in the 1940s. He and his family settled in Virginia. He was a doctor, a pathologist. His father thought of the dead how any pathologist would, in a detached, medical way. When he died, he was cremated, and his ashes were spread in a flowerbed next to a lake in Virginia. 10 years later, LeCure was invited to give a talk in Germany, and his wife suggested that maybe he should take some of his father's ashes with him and spread them over his grandfather's grave in Hamburg. The two were very close, both doctors. One problem.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  I literally, I had no ashes. What I had was the dirt in this flowerbed, which had been fertilizing over the years. So there were his ashes, the phosphorus, the nitrogen, and so forth, but there was also the stuff you buy in Miracle-Gro or whatever in this, in this bed. I realized that my father would have said this was complete nonsense. My father was a man of science.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  But LeCure did it anyway. He traveled with a Ziploc baggie in his carry-on and emptied it onto his grandfather's grave in Hamburg.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  And I felt this was actually kind of an emotional, meaningful experience. It felt, felt like I was connecting them again. I felt, you know, I brought them together, you know, and, but if you ask me, what was meaning, did I think I'm, if you ask me, did you take your dad's ashes and put them on your grandfather's grave? Let's be kidding.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Humans care for the dead. It's what we do, even though we know better. LeCure borrows a quote from the art critic David Hickey, calling it "a magic we can believe in."

• 35:19Speaker 02

  In other words, I'm a modern person. I don't believe that any fragment of anyone has any particular relevance. My father's ashes differ in no way from the fertilizer we put in, but I act as if I do.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  At a certain point, things become something else. Alive, dead, a body, dust, two buildings, rubble, ashes, Miracle-Gro, a garbage dump, a park. But there's always this period in between, the transition, when two things are true at once. Provisionist History is produced by me, Lucy Sullivan, with Ben Natta-Faffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Sam Rusik.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Original music by Luis Guerra and Stellwagen Symphonette. Mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. Special thanks to Robin Nagel, Marty Ballou, and Norman Siegel. And thanks, of course, to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Lucy Sullivan.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in lifesaving scientific research until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers only at blockers.fm.