Remembering Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, ended one of the greater intellectual careers of the last 40 years. Born in Portsmouth, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens started his career as a Trotskyite at The New Statesman, working along with noted authors, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who would become his lifelong friends. In the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2007, and began working for liberal magazine The Nation, writing some of his earliest attacks on the conservative government and American foreign policy.

A prolific author, Hitchens left behind a massive body of critical writing, with more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays targeting everyone from the British Monarchy to Bill Clinton to George Orwell to God, usually with wit and more often than not, vicious and cutting remarks. Even those who hated his politics could not help but admire his skill as a writer and ability to craft a sharp turn of phrase, and many called him a friend.

Perhaps his most famous book was The Missionary Position, a scathing attack on Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity church, an organization that he called a cult. Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a “fraud” and accused her of glorifying poverty to enrich herself and the Catholic church, rather than truly helping the poor. The book infuriated Roman Catholics around the world, as well as politicians and celebrities who he claimed had used the charity and her reputation to mask their own evil deeds.

A later work, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, accused the former Secretary of State of “war crimes,” and argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” for his involvement in atrocities in Southeast Asia and Central America. As a critic of the Bush administration’s use of torture, Hitchens filmed himself being waterboarded to demonstrate the cruelty of the practice. Hitchens claimed that, “The official lie about this treatment … is that it ‘simulates’ the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.”

Hitchens had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s New Statesman and then made its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from The Atlantic and Harper’s to Slate and The New York Times Book Review. He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit, could debate just about anyone on anything and won innumerable awards.

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker and was a gift, if it dare be said, from God.

Read much more about the life and enviable work of Christopher Hitchens in The New York Times here, in The Atlantic here and in Vanity Fair here.

The Immoral Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

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The Immoral Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded

Photo-Gallery: Remembering Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

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September 11: Never Forget

The disaster that occurred on September 11, 2001 was the worst in the history of New York City. Not only were nearly 3,000 people killed in Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on that morning; they were victims of a premeditated act of mass murder that pioneered the use of hijacked passenger jets as suicide bombs and then reordered and distorted the decade that followed.

For those in the immediate vicinity, the horror was immediate and unmistakable; it occurred in what we have learned to call real time, and in real space. Those farther away, whether a few dozen blocks or halfway around the world, witnessed the horrors through the long lens of television.The sense of grief and shock, a terrible roaring in the mind of every American, made it impossible to assess the larger damage that Osama bin Laden and his fanatics had inflicted, the extent to which they had succeeded in shattering our self-possession. In the years after 9/11, many still can hardly erase the vision of the wreckage of the two towers, the twisted steel and sheets of glass, the images of men and women leaping from ninety-odd stories up and the knowledge that thousands lay beneath the ruined buildings.

The New York Times has assembled and posted more than two hours of military, air traffic, and airline radio communications, some of it never before heard in public, from the morning of September 11, 2001. Threaded into vivid narratives covering each of the four doomed airliners, the multimedia document contains 114 recordings of air traffic controllers, military aviation officers, airline and fighter jet pilots, as well as two of the hijackers, stretching across two hours of that that morning. It is depressing, but totally engrossing and fascinating. Viewers may listen to the complete audio collection here.

How September 11 Unfolded

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A Look Back at How September 11 Unfolded

Remembering Father Mychal Judge, The Saint of 9/11

On Sunday, September 4th, marchers turned out by the hundreds in New York City to honor the memory of the Rev. Mychal Judge, the beloved FDNY chaplain killed on 9/11. Firefighters and their families, friends of the Franciscan priest, and well-wishers from near and far, all came together for a four-hour Walk of Remembrance through the streets of Manhattan. Father Judge, commemorated as The Saint of 9/11, was killed while giving last rites to a firefighter at the World Trade Center. The group walked from midtown to Ground Zero, stopping at firehouses and police precincts along the way to pray and read the names of the 9/11 dead.

The Saint of 9/11 (Full Version of the Movie)

Photo-Gallery: September 11/Never Forget

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