Results tagged “nathentoff”

After this week, there's even less reason to touch the grimy handle of those ubiquitous Village Voice corner boxes: today is Nat Hentoff's last appearance in the increasingly irrelevant weekly. After fifty years spent doggedly exploring everything from music to human rights for the paper, the 83-year-old columnist was terminated just before New Year's Eve. But instead of using his last column to carpet Phoenix-based Village Voice Media with F-bombs, Hentoff has bowed out with class, looking back on his illustrious history with the Voice, and forward to his work as an author and syndicated columnist. And he promises to keep sticking it to the man by "putting on skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice...See you somewhere else. Finally, I'm grateful for the comments on the phone and the Web. It's like hearing my obituaries while I'm still here."

Screw loyalty; after spending about a half century writing for the Village Voice, 83-year-old columnist Nat Hentoff got fired yesterday, along with Lynn Yaeger, a fashion writer who spent about 30 years at the Voice. Also terminated was Chloe A. Hilliard, who has worked there for two years. Happy New Year! Hentoff is widely regarded for his writing on music (particularly jazz) and his weekly diatribes on human rights and civil liberties issues, with a blistering emphasis in recent years on "the chief rapists of the Constitution since 9/11." Since being acquired by alt-weekly conglomerate New Times Media in 2005, the Voice has laid off about half of its staff, and staffer Tom Robbins tells the Times the Voice is having "serious advertising revenue problems"—which are sure to be solved by shitcanning great writers! Hentoff will continue writing a synidcated column for United Media and contribute to the Wall Street Journal. "I’m 83 and a half. You’d think they’d have let me go silently," he told the Times. "Fortunately, I’ve never been more productive."