Christopher hitchens

Sunday

Oliver Wiseman

The afterlife of Christopher Hitchens

In 2011, a terminally ill Christopher Hitchens faced death with droll stoicism: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” he wrote. As his health declined and the end drew nearer, the skeptical Hitchens stuck to his atheist guns, clear-eyed in his confidence that death was final. Hitchens died in 2011, but his work and reputation live on. No paradox there, of course, but just how large Hitchens looms twelve years after his death would surely have surprised even this immodest author. It’s certainly a surprise to me, a reformed Hitchens fanboy. The face of twenty-first-century atheism is having quite the afterlife.

Hitchens

Friday

Neal Pollack

The Greatest Living American Writer on Salman Rushdie

In the late 1990s, author Neal Pollack developed an alter-ego character, "The Greatest Living American Writer," for the McSweeneys website, to satirize a generation of pretentious authors, particularly Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, as well as macho literary journalists. That character formed the basis of Pollack's first book, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. The GLAW has since appeared in numerous other publications,  left- and right-wing and completely apolitical, surfacing and de-surfacing as the times demand. Now he's back in The Spectator World, until we get tired of him.  I have been the Greatest Living American Writer across eight decades of world literature and have seen many shocking acts of violence.

greatest living american writer salman rushdie

Friday

Matt Purple

My roaring thirties

I spent my twenties drinking beer. I spent my thirtieth birthday drinking beer and eating oysters. And I remember thinking how far I'd come. Thirty. That number can blaze with dread in the young adult imagination. For years, it loomed ahead of me like some kind of buzzkill apocalypse, the exact moment when everything I loved would come to a screeching halt. The carousing would stop, the long nights would turn to early mornings, the glittering friends would metamorphose into glowering Dursleys. Thirty meant adulting, as our pathetically adolescence-obsessed culture calls it, and adulting meant not freedom but obligation. Admittedly some of that has come to pass.

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Fall of the godless

No religious season passes without it being insulted by the kind of person who lives in fear that somewhere some believer is not having his faith offended by someone to whom faith itself is offensive. This Eastertide was no exception. On Good Friday, which coincided with the first night of Passover, the New York Times printed an essay by a former yeshiva student proposing that in this year of violence and suffering it would be best to “pass over” God, adding, “Killing gods is an idea I can get behind.” This sort of village-atheist raspberry — which largely disappeared during the twentieth century along with American villages themselves — has enjoyed something of a revival early in the twenty-first century with the appearance of the so-called New Atheists.

atheists

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The undying Christopher Hitchens

Today marks ten years since the death of the writer Christopher Hitchens, one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth and early twenty-first century journalism. He probably would have been amused by the way virtually every sector of political and social thought has subsequently claimed him as their own in his posthumous form. Whether you’re a right-wing demagogue, a left-wing woke activist or a hand-writing neocon, you can surely find the perfect Hitchens quote to suit your purposes. Hitchens died far too young at 62, but then he had already lived the kind of full-throated bacchanal existence that his peers could only look upon in envy. He wrote over thirty books, which alternated between the profound and the provocative, and millions of words of journalism.

hitchens

Monday

Cockburn

Milo Yiannopoulos, fursona non grata

Bill Maher once called Milo Yiannopoulos the 'young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens.' Now a few years removed from his stint as a Breitbart editor and shunned by polite society for some unorthodox comments about pedophilia, the right-wing provocateur is trying to start a new life among furries — a vibrant community of individuals who are interested in anthropomorphic characters and bestial fetishism. According to Yiannopoulos’s Telegram, he has registered for a furry convention called Midwest FurFest. The event site explains FurFest is 'an annual convention which takes place in the west suburbs of Chicago, Ill.…to celebrate the furry fandom, which includes art, literature and performances based around anthropomorphic animals.

Thursday

Will Lloyd

The uneasy legacy of Christopher Hitchens

Winston Churchill looked forward to an expansive lunch. He was in his late seventies, prime minister for a second time, and this cabinet meeting was dragging on. It was nearly one o’clock and they were down to the eleventh item on the agenda, a memorandum on town planning. Wearily, Churchill said: ‘Ah yes, I know town planning, densities, broad vistas, open spaces...give me the romance of the 18th-century alley with its dark corners, where footpads lurk.’ It is possible to have this exact feeling watching cable news today. Somehow, you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, and some bloviating no-mark like Don Lemon or Chris Hayes or Ezra Klein is grimacing through air time.

christopher hitchens