’Tis the season to recall Christopher Hitchens. One decade ago this month, the Anglo-American journalist died of esophageal cancer at age 62. Commemorations and tributes have marked the sad occasion. Hitchens has been remembered, variously, as “a giant of letters and of social criticism,” as an “artist” who “dwarfed his canvas,” and as a writer who “delighted readers and listeners with the sense that one could be both educated and epicurean, both cosmopolitan and combative, both bookish and bombastic.” But he also has been described as a public intellectual who “chose his crucial causes poorly, winning pyrrhic victories that mostly deepened decadence, and left that same civilization more unhappy, endangered, and internally divided than before.”
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