Arguably
For nearly four decades, Christopher Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles -- the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization -- principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. Here, in Arguably, he invites readers to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. Astute, vivid, and uninhibited, Hitchens sets a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges in this indispensible volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice. [][1]
Stats for nerds
4recommend
4mentions
4people
2013–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A lot of riders will tell you it's as good or better, which when you think of some furtive or regretable drunk hookup vs. an epic and enlightening experience, they're not far off.
Re the blog, thank you, and counterpoint is very accurate. I don't know that winning at blogging would be satisfying, and I'm sort of holding out for a new online form that captures the good parts of the long format that books like Hitchens' "Arguably," Amis' "Einstein's Monsters," and short stories like Ted Chiang or Julian Barnes did. Doom scrolling an essay muddles the ideas, and e-readers don't do it for me. The things I'd like to write are from that time, where you would spend an afternoon with a book and then have a drunken row in a pub over it with an old friend afterwards. In dispensing with the object of a book, we have lost the objective point of discussion, where we used to talk about ideas as just things that were contained in other things full of pages, but now they are expereinces from a screen, and inextricably personal.
Ideas aren't things anymore, they're identities, and blogging just hasn't escaped that yet. I like a few bloggers' ideas, but I don't follow them. The only reason I read them is because their substacks show up in my inbox. I've spoken to editors, but everyone in publishing now is on reddit anyway, so there isn't a way for them add value the way they might once have. Publishing is broken, and maybe that's the real opportunity. Thanks, certainly food for thought.
- - The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
- Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
- "Arguably Essays" by Christopher Hitchens
"Letters to a Young Contrarian" by the same.
and "Unpopular Essays" by Bertrand Russell.
- For any who care, Christopher Hitchens had a delightful essay on Borges. It was reprinted recently in his collection "Arguably".
