THE PELT The Hitch

Ian Parker's profile of progressive apostate Christopher Hitchens in this week's New Yorker (which, sadly, is not online) may be the funniest thing to run in the magazine since Adam Gopnik compared the smell of Ground Zero to smoked mozzarella.

Selected highlights:

• "Hitchens wore a pale jacket and a shirt unbuttoned far enough to hint at what one ex-girlfriend has called 'the pelt of the Hitch.'"

• "During the ride, he had discussed with the Pakistani-born taxi-driver the virtues and vices of Benazir Bhutto, while surreptitiously using a bottle of Evian to put out a small but smoky fire he had set in the ashtray."

• "Alexander Cockburn told me, 'Between the two of them, my sympathies were with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Calcutta, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?'"

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