The contrarian mind

I’m within striking distance of the end of Hitch-22, the reading of which has ended up being far less joyful than I anticipated when I bought it. I’ll write more on it soon, somewhere. But in the meanwhile, there’s a survey of Hitchens’ intellectual evolution by Michael Weiss in The New Criterion that is far better than anything I could manage. I especially liked this bit, remarking upon Hitchens’ notorious contrarianism:

Depending upon one’s taste, this mode of intellection indicates either a dazzling mind that can only think at 45-degree angles or a fetishist of counterintuition, in which case his weekly perch at Slate magazine seems foreordained.