“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” On the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, The New Yorker has republished John Hersey’s 1946 piece on Hiroshima.

+ Digg: Essential reading on the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima.