You know what sucks? Dying the same week as John Updike. The obits are like Updike this and Updike that. To be overshadowed in death is the bitter fate of the wonderful journalist Malcolm MacPherson

MacPherson, who spent most of his career at Newsweek, died on January 17 but he didn't get his Timesobit until yesterday. (Talk about burying the lede!). MacPherson was a former Marine, orphaned at eleven, lived in a treehouse in Kenya and chased war wherever he found it. He covered the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey for Newsweek and, most recently, the aftermath of the Iraq War for Time magazine. He is also the author of a book about a mathematical genius, an Israeli who tracks down his family's killer and our last dumbshit president George Bush.

If the end of Updike—along with the death of Mailer and Studs Terkel seemed to draw the curtain on a certain type of all-chips-are-in novelist, the death of MacPherson ends an era gestalt journalism. If the life of Mailer seemed to read best as a novel, so too did MacPherson's. He didn't simply immerse himself for a few months in whatever his interesting subject matter was before heading back to his brownstone to drink Harney & Sons tea (the Sencha is great!) and Twittr about how nice it is to be back in civilization but how annoying alternate side parking is. This is a man who turned down a cushy job in San Fran with Newsweek to live in a tree-house in Kenya and he will be missed.