great article bemoaning the [lack of] importance of stories classified as “breaking news”, via daring fireball.
it’s true. the wedding of tom cruise and katie holmes is not breaking news.
and at the end of the article, there’s a link to a devastating article about the unsealing of a holocaust archive. from the article:
A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder.
In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among the names is “Frank, Annelise M,” her date of birth (June 12, 1929), Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwedeplein 37) and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).
Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.
She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death, one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” written during her 25 months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.
But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to none but their families.
that’s as much breaking news as tom cruise’s frigging wedding. the holocaust story at least deserves to get a tenth of the attention that the wedding will get.
the media could spare a few moments to highlight this, really, if they could tear themselves away from cruise, britney spears, and michael richards for just a moment.