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This week, The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth account of a 2008 fire on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot that hadn’t previously been understood as the cultural calamity that it truly was. Thousands of masters of recordings by artists ranging from Al Jolson to Yoko Ono, Patsy Cline to Tupac Shakur, had been incinerated.

As Jody Rosen, a contributing writer to the magazine, put it in the piece: “Had a loss of comparable magnitude to the Universal fire occurred at a different cultural institution — say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — there might have been wider awareness of the event, perhaps some form of accountability.”

I asked Jody to tell us a little more about how the story came together:

The Universal fire was dramatic event, a story of flames consuming buildings, of precious artifacts going up in smoke, of historical loss on a vast scale. But the story first came to my attention in the most banal form imaginable: in the dry bureaucratese of legal documents and company reports.

About five years ago, I obtained a bunch of paperwork related to the fire. It took me some time to orient myself and begin to wrap my head around what those documents were saying. It took me even longer to find people who knew about the fire and the master recordings that were destroyed in it — and it took longer still to persuade those people to speak to me, both on and off the record.