You May Be Able to Get There From Here

Although some argue he’s going mad, Chris Hitchens in still a lucid writer.

In Vanity Fair, Hitchens has written a two-part piece on the physical self-improvement industry:

There now exists a whole micro-economy dedicated to the proposition that a makeover is feasible, or in other words to disprove Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Objectives: to drop down from the current 185 pounds, to improve the “tone” of the skin and muscles, to wheeze less, to enhance the hunched and round-shouldered posture, to give some thought to the hair and fur questions (more emphasis perhaps in the right places and less in the wrong ones), to sharpen up the tailoring, to lessen the booze intake, and to make the smile, which currently looks like a handful of mixed nuts, a little less scary to children.

Read the full article at Vanity Fair .

This week, Eurozine responds to the recent success of books like Chris Hitchen’s  God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkin’s The God Dellusion:

We should begin by recognising that the “New Atheism” is not really new. Its distinctive themes – religion as the enemy of science, of progress and of an enlightened morality – are in a direct line of descent from the eighteenth-century enlightenment and nineteenth-century rationalism. The “new” movement is better seen as a revival, a reassertion of the values of rational thought and vigorous argument. It has struck people as new because it has given new life to old disagreements and debates and done so with great panache and style. But we need to beware of fighting old battles in a world which has moved on.

Read the full article at Eurozine.