A quick peep at the Vanity Fair website will yield, to the interested seeker, a slideshow of journalist Christopher Hitchens getting his teeth capped and his balls waxed. All this is done in the name of self-improvement and, surely, journalistic pay dirt. But thanks to some strategic towel placement, the slideshow isn’t a crude series of photos by any means – all we really see is Hitchens looking, by turns, Satanic, impish, babyish, clever, and tremendously pained. In the ball-waxing shots, Hitchens lies prostrate on a medical-style examination table, a …

I can see him at his drafting desk, silver hair sticking out over his ears, empty blue pens cast to the floor, glasses pushed up, measuring each wall with perfect ruler accuracy. His daughter bounces in, disturbs him, bumps his arm and his pen starts out one unplanned time, a mistake. She tells him whatever she had so desperately to say; she lost a tooth or needed a shoebox or could a friend stay for dinner? He stares at the mistake line long after she leaves. He doesn’t want to …