Life in the Valley of Death, Scott Anderson, The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 2014 (h/t Lucy Kafanov)

Of all the atrocities committed throughout Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, the one that compels Masovic the most is Srebrenica. In some respects, this is hardly surprising: Srebrenica has come to symbolize the Bosnian war’s unspeakable brutality and the international community’s colossal failure when confronting it. Located in a tiny valley in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the site of one of the war’s most desperate contests, a marooned enclave in which a couple of thousand government soldiers, along with as many as 40,000 mostly Muslim refugees, held out for three years against a siege by Serb separatist fighters.

For more than half that time, Srebrenica was under international military protection, one of six United Nations-designated “safe areas” established throughout the country in 1993. That status proved meaningless when the Serbs launched an all-out assault in July 1995. Instead of resisting, the U.N. Protection Force in Srebrenica stood down, and over the next few days, the Serbs hunted and killed more than 8,000 men and boys, most of whom were trying to escape the enclave by foot. It was the worst slaughter, and the first officially recognized act of genocide, to occur on European soil since World War II.

Why does anyone care if celebrity gossip is ‘clickbaity’? Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, June 3, 2013

There is a strain of purists on the internet with a certain set of rules that they want people like me to abide by. One of which is that they want all headlines to give away all the pertinent information in the article so that they don’t have to “click” on it or, rather, read it, in order to know what’s going on. This is not always possible, if only because we just can’t actually make headlines that long. Which is why we write entire articles rather than just headlines. The point of the headline, truly, is to get you to read the article. This is not a big secret or conspiracy.

Photo credit: By Maurits90 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.