One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was walking home from dinner at our house…
Continue reading →Category Archives: journalism
Another Dead Journalist
The first email came on May 31 from London’s Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and…
Continue reading →Reading, Writing, and Rupert
The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that…
Continue reading →Photographers: The First Casualties of War
When journalists die in some foreign field, they die for you. Without them, your knowledge of the world in which…
Continue reading →Murdoch the Media Monopolist
Evidence is mounting that Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire conspired illegally with private investigators to tap telephones and hack into…
Continue reading →I Wish I Were in Cairo
It is hard for an old hack like me to sit still when a big story is unfolding. Not so…
Continue reading →Aging More Gracefully Than England
As I write these words and watch them grow into sentences, I am living the final hours of my fifties.…
Continue reading →On Guarding the Public’s Right to Ignorance and Meeting With Julian Assange
When a journalist disappears in Russia or is murdered in Iraqi Kurdistan, his or her colleagues in safer climes stand…
Continue reading →The Secular Fatwa on Julian Assange
In February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa inciting the faithful to murder author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy. Within a…
Continue reading →Let it Leak: Wikileaks and Patriotic Whistle-Blowing
Spare a kind thought for my old friend Michael Morrell’s oldest son, Geoff, the Pentagon’s Press Secretary. The Defense Department…
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