Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from ( Read more... )

Well, blow me down.

Just got confirmation that my letter to The Atlantic Monthly -- which I sent on Sunday, 12 June 2005 in response to Christopher Hitchens's essay on Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) -- was printed in the October 2005 issue (Vol. 296, No. 3). (It's got a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln on the cover ( Read more... )

Because one of the great pleasures of reading "literature" is to relate it to current events and/or your own life (basically a euphemism for: "-- quote passages from it out of context in an attempt to make yourself look far wiser than you really are..."), herewith I offer yet another passage ganked from Thackeray's Vanity Fair:

"If every person ( Read more... )

Christopher Hitchens' column for Slate on Tuesday, 7 September 2004 ("Murder By Any Other Name," with the subhead reading: "The rest of the world may be tiring of jihad, but The Nation isn't") takes to task, beginning with its penultimate paragraph, Naomi Klein's column in The Nation's 13 September 2004 issue (posted on 26 August), which covered ( Read more... )

This was inspired by ezrael's post of Wednesday, 28 July 2004 at 2022, titled "PoliticsNuance is certainly not fashionable in these times, as in so many -- too many -- others.  Nuance is time-consuming.  Nuance requires that one think before one speaks, or applies one's digits to one's keyboard.  Nuance by its very nature almost never offers a simple ( Read more... )