Richard Seymour has a new book out:
Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. It is reviewed in
In These Times:
Christopher Hitchens Stands Trial That said, Hitchens’ later years and the enormous celebrity he enjoyed during that period are a case study of just how handsome the rewards are for those willing and able to serve as attack dogs for the dominant powers of their place and time. Hitchens’ main service to the American elite was to employ a combination of innuendo and character assassination to cast aspersion on virtually every high-profile figure critical of American foreign policy after 9/11—a roster that includes Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Michael Moore, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Oliver Stone and Gore Vidal.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jan 21, 2013 -
140 comments
A Charlie Rose discussion about the life and work of author Christopher Hitchens with his friends and fellow authors: Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, James Fenton & Ian McEwan. Also featuring past Hitchens appearances on the show.
(1 hr SLVideo)
posted by beisny
on Apr 16, 2012 -
39 comments
‘Whatever you do—hang on to your childhood!’ He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers. -
Christopher Hitchens writes about Charles Dickens in his last Vanity Fair column
posted by beisny
on Jan 7, 2012 -
8 comments
Trial of the Will. "Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: 'Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.' Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Dec 8, 2011 -
27 comments
The Crimes of Col. Qaddafi An original essay by Christopher Hitchens, that starts:
In George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, his narrator, George Bowling, broods on the special horrors of the new totalitarianism and notices "the colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons," but also, less obviously perhaps, "the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke."
posted by growabrain
on Aug 26, 2011 -
57 comments
"A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare."
-Christopher Hitchens
stands up for the King James Bible
posted by beisny
on Jul 14, 2011 -
70 comments
Topic of Cancer. "One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir,
Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at
The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer." Christopher Hitchens writes about his cancer.
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Aug 4, 2010 -
94 comments
In other news: prominent Iraq war supporter and atheist writer Christopher Hitchens
caught in street brawl with
Syrian nazis in Beirut, Lebanon, after defacing the group's poster with
"No, no, Fuck You". The assault occurred on the eve of a
lecture held by Mr. Hitchens at the American University of Beirut, on the subject of "Who are the revolutionaries in today's Middle East".
posted by Anything
on Feb 19, 2009 -
99 comments
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.
Christopher Hitchens, Iraq War supporter, militant atheist, and now
volunteer subject of waterboarding. With
video.
posted by orthogonality
on Jul 2, 2008 -
133 comments
The Four Horsemen: Just in time for holidays, enjoy a pleasant chat between the world's most famous atheists - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.
posted by empath
on Dec 23, 2007 -
79 comments
The Vietnam Syndrome. "In the 1960s, the United States blanketed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the poisoned legacy lives on in the children whose deformities it is said to have caused." Photo essay by James Nachtwey,
written essay by Christopher Hitchens.
[Previously discussed here and here, via C&L.]
posted by homunculus
on Sep 1, 2006 -
31 comments
Victor Serge is one of the missing links in 20th-century history; in at the beginning of the Soviet Union, he saw before almost anyone what a nightmare it was going to be, wrote some prescient books, may have invented the word "totalitarian," knew everybody who was anybody, and was forgotten. Christopher Hitchens
tries to remind us (quote and acknowledgment inside).
posted by languagehat
on Nov 18, 2003 -
6 comments
The God Squad Christopher Hitchens gives (another) one to organized religion, and reminds us of the important role that the Islamic world played in preserving Western Civilization.
posted by Ty Webb
on Apr 3, 2002 -
7 comments
"I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I’m thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think." Christopher Hitchens says that intellectuals of the left who seek to understand the new enemy are no friends of peace, democracy or human life. Two different versions of the same article
here and
here. Along the same lines, a piece from
The Economist arguing that "Whatever its mistakes,
the idea that America brought the onslaught upon itself is absurd."
posted by aaron
on Oct 2, 2001 -
57 comments
