Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens has some drinking advice for you: order by brand. [P6]  read more »

Christopher Hitchens, the British-born journalist-turned-American citizen circa 2007, stopped by New York University’s journalism building recently. After class my friend Sophie and I tailed him to the elevator, where he was chatting with Steve Wasserman, former book review editor of The Los Angeles Times, and a lissome brunette with a book contract: stiff competition.

“Mr. Hitchens, I just want to tell you what a fan I am,” said Sophie, extending her hand. Catching her London accent, he smiled and said, “Well, you’re a long way from home. Would you like a drink?”  read more »

Inspired by the onset of the "annual culture war about the display of cribs, mangers, conifers, and other symbols on public land," secular ringleader Christopher Hitchens gets all hot-headed in Slate and writes about Hannukah as the celebration of "Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore... 'oldtime religion.'"  read more »

It was a little after 7 p.m. on Wednesday night and Christopher Hitchens was having a whiskey on the 6th floor balcony of the Marriot Marquis hotel. He was there for the National Book Awards (see post below), and because he’d been nominated for best non-fiction book of the year, he was wearing a shiny medal around his neck.

The awards ceremony would not start for another half hour, and Mr. Hitchens was talking about how he was thinking of writing a memoir.

“I’m not sure I should be doing one yet, but I realized that I have started thinking about how I would do it,” he said. “I’m just realizing that I’m remembering things I’d forgotten. I’m thinking about the past.”

What had Mr. Hitchens remembered so far?  read more »

Last night at the Society for Ethical Culture, the big question was: whose body count is bigger? Atheism's or Christianity's?

In one corner was Christopher Hitchens, a leading contributor to American intellectual dyspepsia and the author of God is Not Great; in the other was Hoover Institution and former young Reaganite Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity. (If the war between the two were to cause any collateral damage, a look around the packed auditorium put the number of civilians in the line of fire in the hundreds.)

The Salem Witch Trials killed just eighteen, said Mr. D'Souza. And the Inquisition killed only 2,000 in 300 years! Whereas atheists could claim Stalin, Mao... his list went on.

"Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history," he declared triumphantly. "I think Hitchens by the end of the day should be chanting ‘Thank God for Christianity.'"

Earlier Mr. D'Souza had opened the debate, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and The King's College on the topic "Is Christianity the Problem?" on a rather more lighthearted note.

"I don't believe in unicorns," he said drily, "but I haven't written a book on the subject." This was a dig at the "militancy" of the "new atheists:" Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Mr. Hitchens.

He charged that the values claimed by atheists-individual dissent, personal dignity, equality, antipathy to oppression, compassion as a social virtue-actually "came into the world from Christianity," thank you.

Mr. Hitchens took the podium with a plastic glass of dark-colored liquid and thanked the "alarmingly polite and wholesome faculty, staff and students of King's College."

(His alarm no doubt partly consisted in speaking before this particular audience: The King's College's mission is to educate its students from a "commitment to the truths of Christianity and a Biblical worldview.")

To Mr. Hitchens, those truths have a deeper origin even than that, because "human solidarity predates monotheism."

God, as Christians describe him, he said, is a "celestial dictator" who will "continue to judge and persecute us even after we are dead."

It is "very fortunate," he concluded, "that we posses no evidence of this."  read more »

At different times in New York on June 1, Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan, literary giants whose close friendship has been much remarked upon in the press, were discussing each other in separate venues.  read more »

After reading Christopher Hitchens’ polemic, God Is Not Great, I’m left with one question. What does God have to do with any of the crimes, abuses, brutalities and other atrocities which Mr. Hitchens offers as proof of heavenly mediocrity?  read more »

At today's luncheon for the American Society of Magazine Editors, on the second floor of The Princeton Club and starring the former editors of Spy magazine, a Q&A session got complicated.

Susan Morrison--a former Spy editor, and so friendly with former co-worker Graydon Carter, and now an editor at the New Yorker--made a wee gibe about a new piece by Christopher Hitchens, which was just published in Mr. Carter's magazine, Vanity Fair. That piece explains why women aren't funny.

Salad and chicken and a roll were served, as well as a fluffy cheesecake.

The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar was seated at a table with Conde Nast's director of public relations, Maurie Perl. Mr. Carter was talking about how it was difficult to grow up, and become friendly with people, and still manage to make fun of them. It was easier when we were young, he was saying, and when you're older, you find people are people.

Rachel Sklar had her hand up and, in preface to her question, made a seque comment about women being people too.

She wanted Graydon Carter to tell her why Vanity Fair had published the article that Mr. Hitchens had written.

"You just proved my point," Mr. Carter told her, according to people who were present. He meant that she was humorless.

And so Ms. Sklar had inserted herself into the big feminist bear-trap Mr. Hitchens had set. (The game, which dates to at least the mid-70's, is traditionally played like this: You write an article like that, and those who humorlessly complain are then treated as the proof in the pudding of the article. Which doesn't of course make the complainers any less humorless.)

(Oddly enough, the game doesn't work on black people.)

"And I really wanted to hear him talk about why he published that because he's sitting up there as an arbiter of All Things Funny," Ms. Sklar explained later.

Graydon Carter didn't know who she was. They weren't friends. They'd never worked together. "Who are you?" he asked. She told him she'd already written about the Hitchens piece and offered to send him some links. He wanted to know if she was funny for the Huffington Post.

Ms. Sklar called the Hitchens piece "ungood."

Mr. Carter did not in the end answer her question.

Kurt Andersen entered the fray. Someone present noted that people had gotten that look where they're looking at the floor and smiling in an interesting way.

Mr. Andersen asked Ms. Sklar, what was Mr. Carter supposed to do? If a columnist wrote a piece, and if he's supposed to kill it....? Ms. Sklar said she had thought that editors evaluated pieces before they ran.

After the exchange, the next questioner wanted the Spy alums to talk about Separated at Birth, a feature in which pictures of two or more unlikely people who are found to carry some noticeable physical attribute are juxtaposed.

"I always thought we'd bond over being Canadian," Ms. Sklar said later, via Google Chat, of Mr. Carter. "Oh well."

I love Professor Juan Cole's site. He's been a leading voice against the Iraq war, he knows what he's talking about and he writes with sympathy for the Arab world from the standpoint of an international American who cherishes America's best interests. I trust his judgment.

But Cole is doing himself a disservice by getting so worked up about Christopher Hitchens's quotation of his statements about Iran on a listserv, a statement Cole thought to be private. Lately Cole has published his petulant emails to Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate (who brushed him off coolly and correctly). One claim Cole makes is that he was going to publish the statement himself, and Hitchens scooped him, and illegally and unethically deprived him of the value of his work. Yes, Hitchens scooped him, but I don't buy all the violations. I give Cole great credit for the lines that Hitchens printed (and attacked). I will look forward to what Cole has to say at greater length on the question. I think a lot more people will now be tuned to Cole, a good thing indeed. And how much money was he really going to make off these ideas? He says the listserv was a "small" group. How small? And what has Cole done about the real violation, the colleague who emailed his stuff to Hitchens. Give us some facts.

I generally can't stand Hitchens. I think he masks weak and sometimes vicious arguments on the war and related issues with tangential bloviations, self-satisfied turns of phrase and a grandiosity that yes, does seem vinous. On this matter, though, he's right. Someone leaked this stuff to him, he found it interesting and important. Go with it. And no, he doesn't have to call Cole for comment, as Cole demands.

If an idea is so important to you, any journalist will tell you—keep it close to the vest. That's the bottom line here: Cole has a lot to learn more about journalism.

P.S. And another lesson, Cole sent one angry email to Weisberg at 12:31 a.m., per the date stamp. Always a bad idea.

Maybe you haven't followed the on-line feud over whether rightwing columnist Christopher Hitchens's alleged alcoholism led him to publish on Slate a statement by the influential scholar Juan Cole that Cole believed to be confidential. Cole had made the statement on a confidential listserv called "Gulf 2000." He felt violated when Hitchens quoted from it, and mused that Hitchens may have done so because he's an alcoholic. Cole writes

Well, I don't think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Whether or not you think Hitchens is an alcoholic (and what I saw of him years ago would support that belief then), it's great the conversation is happening. It's probably relevant, to begin with. And it's Cole's honest opinion. And it would never appear in the mainstream press. That's because the print press is so monetized. You get paid so much for issuing opinions in the mainstream press, and they make so much off those opinions, that libel concerns encircle every loaded statement. (Let alone the usual social groupthink questions: Unh, can we really say this??) In the blogosphere it's about information and true opinion. Hitchens's friends get to counter the claim or ignore it. There's a free discussion, closer to what intellectuals are saying to one another on telephones and in bars (sorry!), not a stilted and false one.

Though Andrew Sullivan's claim that his countryman was sober at the time—

I was at Hitch's yesterday as he filed the piece. He was stone-cold sober. And on top form.

doesn't seem entirely relevant. As Dan Swanson points out to me, the nastiness and self-centeredness of alcoholic behavior doesn't require having had a drink..

Not that I would come down on Cole's side here (as I do on his views of the Middle East). Cole is a very important thinker, for good reason; he has great judgment and knowledge. I gather that Hitchens is not in the listserv. If someone in the listserv passed on Cole's confidential statement to Hitchens, and Hitchens chose to publish it, how different is that, in form, from what the New York Times so nobly did in breaking the story about Bush's illegal wiretaps? Yes, the leaker violated an oath in giving the journalist info; the journalist shared the leaker's view that the info was important, and passed it on to his readers.

The city's Health Department released an open letter from Commissioner Tom Frieden to the Jewish community today, in which he writes that a circumcision practice called metzitzah b'peh is definitely tied to several herpes infections in babies, and one death -- but that the city will not ban the it.

Frieden is not known for his ambivalence on public health issues. Here, public health experts called for banning the practice, while the Chasidic communities involved cried religious freedom. His mixed feelings about the compromise result are on full display in this passage from the letter:

"The Department has reviewed all of the evidence and there exists no reasonable doubt that metzitzah b'peh can and has caused neonatal herpes infection. We have always maintained that it is our preference for the religious community to address these issues itself as long as the public's health is protected. While some medical professionals and others in the Jewish community have called on the Department to completely ban metzitzah b'peh at this time, it is our opinion that educating the community through public health information and warnings is a more realistic approach."

This will come as a relief to many Orthodox leaders, particularly in the Lubavitcher community, but really most of the way across the Chasidic sects, where the practice is common. (Less of a relief to Christopher Hitchens, who wrote against the practice in a piece headlined "Cut It Off: Another Disgusting Religious Practice.")

The softly, softly approach is a bit of a departure for Frieden, a public health hardliner who considers tobacco executives evil. Here, even the case of the mohel most directly tied to the illnesses has been referred to a rabbinical council, which could conceivably permit him to resume the practice. The public information campaign will be in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew; but the Chasids aren't flourishing because of their openness to changing their ways.

People involved in the discussions around the case say the Health Department got legal advice that they could spend years in court trying to ban a religious practice, and might loose on religious freedom grounds. (Though clearly the state has some right to govern the way people treat their children.) There was always a political aspect to the story as well, as Bloomberg aides scrambled to mollify the communities involved in an election year.  read more »

Frieden spokeswoman Sandy Mullin offered another objection to banning something done at private gatherings, brises: "We can't enforce it."

On Wednesday evening, Sept.  read more »

On Wednesday evening, Sept.  read more »

To the Editor:    read more »

The intense, parochial fight over Mayor Bloomberg's careful attempt to intervene in an Orthodox Jewish circumcision practice is one of the most complicated of the campaign, and most of the Democrats have stayed well away from it.

The central point -- and it's kind of a classic "Do you make the Christian Scientist kid take antibiotics?" case -- is that a mohel may have given a fatal case of herpes to a baby, and that Bloomberg is cautiously asserting that this is a case where the government has a right to get involved, over intense community objection.

Christopher Hitchens has a characteristically straightforward piece in Slate, blasting Bloomberg for his caution. It reads in its mildest section:

"I could wish that Bloomberg were always so careful about keeping out of other peoples' business: He has made it legally impossible to have a cigarette and a cocktail at the same time, anywhere in the city. But I'll trade him his stupid prohibitionist ban if he states clearly that it is the government's business to protect children from religious fanatics."

Meanwhile, Anthony Weiner, in the Forward, seems to be leaning toward giving the community more discretion with the health of its children:

"It is not the place of the department of health to be deciding on a religious practice." Weiner tells the Forward. "I am troubled, based on the facts of this case, about whether or not the city has overreached here."  read more »

NOTE: This was not, however, enough to get Weiner the endorsement of the conservative, Brooklyn-based Jewish Press, which just went for Giff.

“George Packer has to live in the world of the readers of The New York Review of Books, The New Yo  read more »

“George Packer has to live in the world of the readers of The New York Review of Books, The Ne  read more »

"I think I'm American in all sorts of essential ways," said the 52-year-old war journalist David Rie  read more »

I'm not sure how I feel at present about all the plays this fall wrestling with the tragedy of Sept.  read more »

Here are three possible stocking-stuffers and, who knows, mind-stuffers as well-books for the season  read more »

So I went up to the antiwar demonstration in Central Park this weekend, hoping to hear some persuasi  read more »

It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, that two expatriateBrits-Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitc  read more »

On the morning of Saturday, Oct.6,  a group of filmmakers, Hollywood  read more »

There I was, at the Peninsula hotel, a little past 6:30 on a recent Sunday evening, up at the roofto  read more »

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton , by Christopher Hitchens.  read more »

Christopher Hitchens is mad again.  read more »

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make swear out affidavits.  read more »

In 1739, public uproar concerning outrages committed upon the person of an English sea captain provi  read more »