Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62

He’s the only writer that I’ve ever written a fan letter to. It was a year and a half ago, give or take a couple of months, and I was on the train heading deep into the suburbs of Chicago to visit my parents when I was. Over the years, he had put together some stunning first-person accounts: getting waterboarded, reading his way through the trilogy, and subjecting himself to audiobooks—but nothing like this. Dealing with esophageal cancer, Hitchens kept on doing the only thing he was certain he knew how to do: write. He wrote his way through the disease. Unfortunately, some things, it turns out, are more powerful than words.