“If it bleeds, it leads.” –Journalism cliché

I read a lot of news. 75% of news stories I read have at least one death in them. 50% have at least six. 3% have thousands of deaths. So I’ve become a connoisseur of death in the news. I’ve noticed that reporters vary widely in covering death. Some stories pull away from death—say, a massive suicide bomb in Iraq—and use the occasion to elaborate the geopolitical situation surrounding the destruction. They develop the plot.

Other stories focus in on a block, or a building, or a person and painstakingly explore the weird and complicated ways in which they have been destroyed. There’s no plot, just a moment of calm, followed a moment where things blow up or fall down and bodies are torn apart. And a moment where things come to rest in places they shouldn’t be. Those are the stories I like to read best.

Today I woke up, made a cup of coffee, read a New York Times blog post by an Australian photojournalist who witnessed a suicide bomb in Afghanistan. Here he is writing about his buddy, a journalist named Paul, who was badly injured in the attack:

“He’s got five holes in the back of his head, two the size of golf balls. There’s a bone fragment stuck inside one. They don’t know if it’s his or somebody else’s. They think it may be pushing up against his brain, affecting his vision. I’ve talked to him and he seems O.K., except for the vision and not hearing from his right ear. They think he may have punctured his eardrum.”

I like reading this. I like the phrase “They don’t know if it’s his or somebody else’s.” The absurd understatement of the sentence is beautiful and also sad. Because, if you think about it, these couldn’t have been the words that ran through the photojournalist’s mind when he learned his friend might have a piece of a stranger’s body inside his brain, making him blind. But these are the words required for the Times to put the story on the Internet. And in that way they are words required by me, because I like to read plain sentences about terrible things.