i deeply admired christopher hitchens, and regarded him as a model: for his extreme erudition (often in unusual corners), the sharpness and quantity of his writing, his absolute refusal of any conventional wisdom. now some stuff you should recall: he spent years trying to discredit mother teresa, for some reason; he hated hated the clintons, especially hillary, and eviscerated them in essay after essay over a couple of decades; he supported the iraq invasion. in short, he had tremendous perversity and was always trying to shock and anger people who would otherwise be thought to be more or less people like himself. these are things i also admire, though i disagreed often. don't judge a writer by how much you agree; judge him by how well he writes, how bold he is, how much he knows, how intensely himself he is.
a writer who provokes and irritates you is better for you, and more interesting to read, than a writer who confirms what you already believe. i can't imagine why leftists keep reading krugman, or conservatives krauthammer. you could write that shit yourself. the leftists should be reading krauthammer and the rightists krugman, obviously. the audiences of fox news and msnbc need to switch. they would be more entertained. all the 'echo-chamber' shows is that that you believe you need authorization even to think. you'd be thinking more, and more clearly, if you sought out a challenge. hitchens challenged a lot of people, and was actually pretty unpredictable (although also obsessively repetitive with regard to his eccentric preoccupations), which has mere ideologues like krugman or krauthammer beat all hollow.
people indicate that it was lovable that he drank scotch all day and chain-smoked. i imagine that the vices were a little less amusing in reality than in theory - a little less charming up close than from far away - and that they killed him.
