VF & CH Win National Magazine Award in “Columns and Commentary”

Vanity Fair

Fair won a 2012 National Magazine Award at a ceremony held by the American Society of Magazine Editors last night, in recognition of the late author Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant columns and commentary. Hitchens’s three essays—“When the King Saved God,” “Unspoken Truths,” and “From Abbattabad to Worse”—touched on the topics of politics, religion, and dealing with the diminishing effects of chemotherapy. 

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/05/vanity-fair-christopher-hitchens-win-2012-national-magazine-award

Related
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Magazines_22/New-York-leads-National-Magazine-Awards.asp 

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/time_new_york_and_new_yorker_stampede_b74Wuty3HfOfwtl5Ej3MZP 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/national-magazine-awards-christopher-hitchens-honored-posthumous-ellie-121746582.html

Christopher Hitchens Memorial

By Vanity Fair

In part one of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, Graydon Carter welcomed attendees and speakers James Fenton, Lawrence Krauss, Edwin Blue, Patrick Cockburn, Max McGuinness, Aimée Bell, Michael Zilkha, Victor Navasky, and Tom Stoppard. 

UPDATE: More parts added. Watch the videos here.

Christopher Hitchens’s Memorial

By Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens’s Memorial: Sean Penn, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Others Pay Tribute

 “To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in his June 2011 column, “Unspoken Truths,” for Vanity Fair. Today, at a memorial service in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, in New York, many of Hitchens’s friends and admirers did just that.
Read more
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/04/christopher-hitchens-memorial-vanity-fair

Related links

Christopher Hitchens' wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/20/christopher-hitchens-memorial-new-york

Christopher Hitchens Memorial: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Olivia Wilde Remember Writer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/christopher-hitchens-memorial_n_1441508.html?ref=new-york&ir=New%20York

Christopher Hitchens Is Memorialized With an Irreverence That Would Please Him http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/20/christopher-hitchens-is-memorialized-with-an-irreverance-that-would-please-him.html

Christopher Hitchens remembered at memorial service in NYC http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/christopher-hitchens-remembered-at-memorial-service-in-nyc/2012/04/20/gIQA1usIWT_blog.html

Hitch remembered with wit http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/hitch_remembered_with_wit_6q4Tmuvhb8rZsSZRPqEggL?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Page%20Six

REMEMBERING CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/remembering-christopher-hitchens.html

Vanity Fair to Host Christopher Hitchens Memorial

Vanity Fair will host a memorial for the late Christopher Hitchens this Friday, April 20, at noon in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. Scheduled to pay tribute in New York are Stephen Fry, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Christopher Buckley, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/04/christopher-hitchens-memorial-april-20-vanity-fair

Read also "A Memorial, Ribald and Reverent, for Christopher Hitchens" http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/a-memorial-both-ribald-and-reverent-for-christopher-hitchens/

Birthday, Memorial and a Tribute

It's April 13th. Some want to call it Christopher Hitchens Day. I agree with Staks Rosch: "While some atheists will be raising a glass of Johnny Walk Black in his honor, I think the time for that solute is over. Now is the time to share his wit and wisdom with others in celebration of his life. So pick up your copy of God Is Not Great or your Quotable Hitchens and share a quote or three on your social networks and with your friends and family on his birthday. Read more (examiner.com)
Then again, why not do both?

There's also a Hitch day facebook event http://www.facebook.com/events/328324723893296/

Ephraim Hardcastle asks "What would Christoper Hitchens make of his Vanity Fair memorial arrangements?" It's an invitation-only event at Cooper Union school in New York, on April 20.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129092/What-Christoper-Hitchens-make-Vanity-Fair-memorial-arrangements.html#ixzz1rtRRmk94

Then we have the PEN World Voices Festival, New York City, with a Christopher Hitchens tribute on Monday, April 30.
With Graydon Carter, Victor S. Navasky, George Packer, and Katha Pollit. Moderated by Ian Buruma.
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/6380/prmID/2206

No word yet on a possible London, UK memorial.

Oscars 2012: Christopher Hitchens honored by Vanity Fair

LA Times / Ministry of Gossip

Writer Christopher Hitchens, who died in December, will get a fitting tribute from Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor, at the magazine's star-studded Oscars party.
Read more http://lat.ms/waQatW

Each place setting at the party has an engraved Zippo lighter with a Christopher Hitchens quote..
https://twitter.com/#!/VanityFair/status/173948927542968320/photo/1

A Jigger to Hitchens and a Toast to the Man

Vanity Fair February 2012
By Graydon Carter

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died 10 days before Christmas at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. His was a true life of the mind, and, in this respect, he towered over his contemporaries in Washington, New York, and London.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2012/02/graydon-201201

Charles Dickens’s Inner Child

Vanity Fair February 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

Those who study Charles Dickens, or who keep up the great cult of his admiration, had been leading a fairly quiet life until a few years ago. The occasional letter bobs to the surface, or a bit of reminiscence is discovered, or perhaps some fragment of a souvenir from his first or second American tour.

Read more http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/hitchens-201202

Trial of the Will

Vanity Fair | January 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.
Read more.

Hitchens orbits Mars, Jupiter, and Earth.

Asteroid Named for Christopher Hitchens
By Juli Weiner | Vanity Fair

An asteroid discovered by Ted Bowell, the former director of the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, has been named after Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/Asteroid-Named-for-Christopher-Hitchens

Widow of Opportunity

Vanity Fair December 2011
By Christopher Hitchens

If you were to set a competition for the headline most unlikely to appear in an American magazine, the winning entry would surely be jackie tacky or tacky jackie. In her life and even posthumously, it always somehow fell to Jackie Kennedy to raise the tone. An exacting task in her case, and exquisitely so when one appreciates that she had to raise the tone without ever actually admitting that the tone could use a bit of raising.

Read More
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/hitchens-201112

V.F. Portrait: Joan Didion

In The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 best-seller, Joan Didion dissected the trauma of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. With Blue Nights, to be published in November by Knopf, she agonizingly explores the heavier blow that followed: the death of their daughter, Quintana Roo.

Christopher Hitchens contemplates a tragic achievement.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/10/joan-didion-201110

The Accidental Institution

By Christopher Hitchens

"At whose expense comes the mild irony when, this fall, the cheaply produced scandal sheet Private Eye will have an exhibition of its cartoons and pictorial covers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a building consecrated to taste and restraint?"

Read More (Vanity Fair)

Award winning columns and favorite authors

Vanity Fair


Christopher Hitchens Wins National Magazine Award for Columns About Cancer http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/05/christopher-hitchens-wins-national-magazine-award-for-columns-about-cancer.html

Audio: Christopher Hitchen’s Favorite Authors
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/05/unspoken-truths.html

Unspoken Truths

Vanity Fair, June 2011
By Christopher Hitchens

"Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down."

Read more (vanityfair.com)

When the King Saved God

By Christopher Hitchens

"After she was elected the first female governor of Texas, in 1924, and got herself promptly embroiled in an argument about whether Spanish should be used in Lone Star schools, it is possible that Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson did not say, “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.” I still rather hope that she did."

Read More (Vanity Fair)

What I Don’t See at the Revolution

By Christopher Hitchens

"When anatomizing revolutions, it always pays to consult the whiskered old veterans. Those trying to master a new language, wrote Karl Marx about the turmoil in France in the 19th century, invariably begin haltingly, by translating it back into the familiar tongue they already know. And with his colleague Friedrich Engels he defined a revolution as the midwife by whom the new society is born from the body of the old."

Read More (Vanity Fair)

Don’t Mess With Wisconsin

By Christopher Hitchens

"The governor of Wisconsin evidently speaks in a more unbuttoned fashion than usual when he thinks he is talking to David Koch. Hoaxed into believing that it was the libertarian moneybags on the line, Scott Walker allowed the actual caller (a near-incredulous Ian Murphy of BuffaloBeast.com) to ask him about the possible use of agents provocateurs to discredit the union protestors in the capital of his state:"

 Read More (Vanity Fair)

Tea’d Off

By Christopher Hitchens

"Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project). The poison they’ve helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least."

Read More (Vanity Fair)

Miss Manners And the Big C

By Christopher Hitchens

Ever since I was felled in mid-book tour this summer, I have adored and seized all chances to play catch-up and to keep as many engagements as I can. Debating and lecturing are part of the breath of life to me, and I take deep drafts whenever and wherever possible.
Read article (Vanity Fair, December 2010)