Obituary

It’s probably inevitable, as Henry says below, that coverage of Aaron Swartz’ tragic death will focus narrowly on the story of Aaron as persecuted hacker. My main debt to him is almost entirely outside the tech sphere in which he made such big contributions. Early on in my blogging career, I came across the rightwing myth, that bans on DDT, inspired by Rachel Carson cost millions of lives. In fact, this was one of my first encounters with the rightwing parallel universe with which we are all familiar nowadays. At the time, most people hadn’t woken up to this, and the DDT myth was promulgated with great success. Tim Lambert and I spent years fighting the myth, ending up with this piece in Prospect. Along the way, we discovered the surprising fact that the myth was originally pushed by the tobacco industry, as a flank attack on public health bodies like WHO, which were trying to fight tobacco, and had (quite correctly) scaled back use of DDT, after early campaigns were defeated by the growth of resistance.

A crucial piece of the puzzle came from Aaron, who pointed out the central role of Roger Bate, an all-purpose anti-science activist based at the American Enterprise Institute (he’s largely moved on from DDT these days and is now fighting “counterfeit”, that is, unlicensed, versions of patented drugs). The DDT myth lives on in various corners of the blogosphere and still pops up from time to time in the mainstream media, but it’s now at least as easy to find refutations.

I honestly can’t imagine how someone could pack so much achievement into 26 years. Aaron’s loss is a tragedy for all of us, and the vindictive campaign against him by the Massachusetts prosecutors office (whose head, Carmen M. Ortiz, is regularly mentioned as being destined for higher office) was a crime.

I don’t want to write about the circumstances of his suicide – it’s too raw. I do want to write about who he was. I suspect that the media will turn this into a story of Aaron as persecuted hacker, which gets at only one part of him. He was one of the kindest, sweetest, and most generous people I ever knew. He made a lot of money at a very young age, which would have ruined most people (including me). It didn’t ruin Aaron. He used it to live an itinerant life, jumping from project to project, all intended to work towards creating a better world. His enthusiasm was boundless, as was his generosity. When Crooked Timber had big server problems a few years ago, he immediately jumped in to offer to host us (we ended up finding hosting elsewhere). He saw that Rick Perlstein didn’t have a website, back before Rick Perlstein was Rick Perlstein, and he built one for him. He gathered together everything he could of the old Lingua Franca, preserving it and making it available. A skilled techie, he helped put together the revived Baffler, a journal noted for its discontent with things technological. Aaron’s life was a struggle against the forces of entropy, decay and political corruption. He never saw a good cause, but he wanted to adopt it, and do everything he could for it (if a criticism could be made of him, it was that he moved on too quickly from project to project). I knew he had been in a dark place the last few months, because of what was happening to him, but I didn’t know how dark. I’ve lost a dear friend, but American politics and intellectual life has lost someone who did many good things for many people, often quietly, but always to good effect. Other CTers may have other memories of him; those are mine.

Update: “Aaron’s family and current partner”:http://rememberaaronsw.com. “Quinn”:http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644 Also, “Cory Doctorow”:http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html#more-205376, “Larry Lessig”:http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40331489608/aaron-rip, “Mark Bernstein”:http://www.markbernstein.org/Jan13/AaronSwartz.html, “James Fallows”:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/aaron-swartz/267110/, “Brewster Kahle”:http://blog.archive.org/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz-hero-of-the-open-world-rip/ , “Carl Malamud”:https://public.resource.org/aaron/, “The Baffler”:http://thebaffler.com/blog/2013/01/aaron_swartz. By request, “Aaron’s guest-posts here at CT”:https://crookedtimber.org/author/aaron_swartz/. Scott McLemee’s “story on Aaron from a few years back”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee117 is here.

Update 2: “What Larry Lessig Says”:http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully.

bq. For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.” In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

The last time I saw Aaron, we didn’t talk about the JSTOR incident itself, for all the obvious reasons. We did talk about the Kafkaesque nightmare he had landed in, where literally _anything he said_ could be taken grossly out of context and used against him by a prosecutorial apparatus apparently more driven by vindictiveness, stupidity and politics than by any particular interest in justice or the public interest. He told me how, when the police finally came around to search his apartment, some weeks after the charges had been laid, he jokingly asked them what had taken them so long. Of course, he then found these words being twisted by the prosecutors to suggest that he had effectively admitted he was guilty.

I just woke up to the terrible news that Aaron Swartz took his own life yesterday. He was twenty six years old. I don’t have much else to say at the moment other than that I am so, so sorry. Aaron was such a force for good in the world.

News via Dani Rodrik on Twitter. He was a great economist, whose influence was nonetheless far greater outside his academic specialization than inside it. I am almost certainly unworthy to comment on his work, but here you go anyway. _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_ is the book that will be remembered, but his essays gathered in _Rival Views of Market Society_ and other volumes glistened with insights and were wonderfully written to boot. His book on _National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade_, which turned his empirical work on how the Nazis reshaped trade relations to their own advantage is less widely read than it deserves to be, because it is so hard to get, but nonetheless had substantial influence on the field of international relations. I don’t know enough to say much about his work on development, except that people who know more than me took it seriously. He deserves a good biography – his life was nearly as extraordinary as his thought.

Clive Dunn is dead. The BBC obit is here. The only man to serve 4 years in a prisoner of war camp but 10 in the Home Guard.
Update: I told my 11 year old girl, after posting this, that Corporal Jones was dead. She was horrified — these guys are as live for her as Katy Perry is, and without the suspicion she has the Katy Perry is a fictional character. I assured her he was very old and lived well to the end, and that he was a lifelong socialist, all of which matter to the midwestern sisters. After looking generally sad she suddenly looked up with a grin said “maybe I should be allowed to listen to Dad’s Army in bed tonight” (usually forbidden on a schoolnight). Sure, I said, and wondered whether, whether, despite my unbelief he is in a position to watch. Because hearing that interaction would remove any doubt he may have had about the worth of his career.This weekend will be All Dad’s Army All Weekend in our house. Just in time for poppy day.

Very sad news. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the 20th century’s great historians, has died. The Guardian has [a report](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-died-aged-95?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038) and [an obituary](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm?intcmp=239). No doubt there will be more obituaries to come. (In fact there’s [a very nice one by Marc Mulholland](http://shar.es/5qeO4) for Jacobin.)

“Locusmag notice here”:http://www.locusmag.com/News/2012/06/ray-bradbury-1920-2012/. His earlier work was better than his later, and his short stories were better than his novels – some of them (especially the ones where over-ripe sentimental Americana turns into horror) are unforgettable. I’ve always had a specific weakness for the handful of stories he set in Ireland (where he lived for a bit, while working on a John Huston film), even though they’re far from his best. His piece, “The Anthem Sprinters,” about Irish cinema-goers’ mad rush for the exits after the film had finished, so as to avoid having to stand for the obligatory rendition of the National Anthem, captures something that America could learn from (I was reminded of it last week during the Chris Hayes disrespectin’ Memorial Day nonsense-kerfuffle). But his Mars stories and one-offs like “The Small Assassin” and “There Will Come Soft Rains” are what I think he’ll be remembered for.

As a young Trot and reader of Intercontinental Press (I’m talking late 70s, early 80s) I was somewhat astonished when people told me about Gerry Foley, who has just died. As Jeff Mackler’s obit on Red Mole Rising says, he could read in 90 languages and was fluent in more than a dozen. There’s lots of bonus detail on the history of American Trotskyism, on McCarthy, and on the extent of FBI surveillance of far-left meetings. Worth a read. RIP.

Via Martin O’Neill on FB, I see that reminiscences of Jerry Cohen by Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Myles Burnyeat, Gideon Cohen and Tim Scanlon are now online (pdf). Enjoy.

Ben Bella is dead, as the charismatic leader of the FLN in the Algerian war of independence, he was one of the great (though flawed) figures of the wave of post-war revolutionary decolonisation. Obituaries and reports in the New York Times , Guardian, Le Monde .

Guardian obit here. Whenever I have written about mysteries on CT, Henry has put in a word for Reginald Hill. Quite rightly: by the late eighties Hill was one of the 3 or 4 best mystery writers in the English language, and, of that group, the most effortlessly enjoyable (the others?: James, Barnard, and, until he died, Symons. Go on, tell me I’m wrong). He is most famous for his Dalziel and Pascoe books, mainly for the combination of complex plotting, interesting delightful characters, and many very comedic moments. The first 5 or 6 are fairly straightforward whodunnit/police procedurals (with the exception of Deadheads which defies one of the central conventions of the whodunnit), but one reason Hill became so good is that he experimented, frequently, in the novels, with style, format, and, increasingly often, convention. Most of his non-series books (his other series about Joe Sixmith, a black detective in Luton, was much more relentlessly humorous) were written in the 70s and early 80’s, often under pseudonyms (he has published under at least 4 names, maybe more), before he got to be really good. But the last two were brilliant, especially The Woodcutter, which is riveting, as good as any of the Dalziel/Pascoe books.

Or as good as any so far. Honestly, I was expecting him to live another 15 years at least, yielding 5 or 6 more, so was sickened when I read my mum’s email this morning, which started “No more Dalziel..”. But, according the wiki page, there is one more to come, which this amazon.co.uk page seems to confirm. So, one more to come.

The Financial Times carries his obituary here. He’s most famous for his St. Trinian’s illustrations, but I suspect that many CTers (and almost certainly Harry) will miss him more for his illustrations of Molesworth. I had just purchased a copy of the Compleet Molesworth last week, having lost my last one, and figuring that the six year old will soon be able to enjoy it. I was especially fond of his work on Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht, which Savoy books has finally reissued again in a more affordable edition (copies of the last were going for $150 and up on the WWW until recently). The first chapter (PDF), with a couple of Searle’s illustrations, is available online, and an illustration from ‘Ten Rounds With Grandfather Clock’ is below.

A couple of commenters have requested less post-mortem commentary on Christopher Hitchens and more on Vaclav Havel. Don’t know what to say about Vaclav Havel beyond that he was mostly pretty great (ill-considered support for the Iraq war: obviously not so great), but if people want to talk about him, here’s your thread. But also – “Russell Hoban”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8957087/Russell-Hoban-dedicated-to-strangeness.html. His death won’t nearly get as much attention as Hitchens’. Still, I’d bet good money that _Riddley Walker_ and _The Mouse and His Child_ will still be read when Hitchens is a Cyril Connolly-esque footnote in cultural histories of the late twentieth century.