Christopher Hitchens's Inability to be Wrong

My great-aunt was a fearsome but fair-minded woman who taught math to a few generations of smart high schoolers in New York City. Like a lot of women teachers in her day, she had the brains and discipline to do something with higher pay and prestige but never got the chance because such jobs belonged to men. For my great-aunt, the upside of this ghetto effect was that she had some very intelligent friends and colleagues, and these friends and colleagues often had remarkably well-known relatives. So at one time or another she happened to share tea and cookies with Adlai Stevenson, Albert Einstein, and, oddly enough, Norman Mailer. The meeting was around when Mailer stabbed his second wife in the back with a pen knife. What did my great-aunt think of Norman Mailer? She shook her head grimly. “He was not a nice man,” she said.