Historian Tony Judt has passed away at the age of 62. Suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), Judt had recently published Ill Fares the Land, a call for the US to adopt social democratic policies. [more inside]
posted by dhens on Aug 7, 2010 - 60 comments

Poverty is an abstraction, even for the poor. But the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will. These shortcomings are so endemic that we no longer know how to talk about what is wrong, much less set about repairing it. And yet something is seriously amiss.

Historian Tony Judt, dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, makes a passionate call for a new New Left. [Previously]
posted by Sonny Jim on Apr 10, 2010 - 59 comments

Historian Tony Judt has been the subject of MetaFilter posts before. He has also written an essay on his struggle with ALS that has been debated here. However, it may have taken an article in the mass-market magazine New York to put his race to complete his latest book into perspective.
posted by huskerdont on Mar 9, 2010 - 6 comments

"This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable." Tony Judt, in the advanced stages of ALS (aka motor neurone disease) begins a series of short pieces for the New York Review of Books with a reflection on how he spends his unmoving nights.
posted by holgate on Dec 29, 2009 - 41 comments

Tony Judt's acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize: "Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls 'the Holocaust.'"
posted by anotherpanacea on Jan 29, 2008 - 30 comments

Dreams of Empire, by Tony Judt. Via the indispensable Arts and Letters Daily, an excellent liberal-left critique of current American thought on foreign policy. In the past I've not been a huge fan of Judt, but events have proven him right more often than not, and these days I take him very seriously indeed. And he's an excellent writer.
posted by mojohand on Oct 19, 2004 - 6 comments

Over the last few years, Tony Judt has been writing some brilliant commentary on the world political situation in the NYRB. His latest is one of the best pieces I’ve read for ages. Sanity, reason, non-shrillness, etc – and it’s only the first of three articles.
posted by Mocata on Mar 17, 2003 - 8 comments