Alexander Cockburn, trenchant political writer and former Voice columnist, has died of cancer in Germany at the age of 71, announces his friend and collaborator, Jeffrey St. Clair. "He didn't want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done," writes St. Clair at their mutual endeavor, CounterPunch. "Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end."

Eulogies and obituaries for Cockburn are turning up now, written by his friends and his enemies, and there's a lot of tell about his long, eventful career. But what comes most strongly to my mind is the huge impact of the column Cockburn started took over at the Voice, Press Clips -- in its way, the granddaddy of the kind of press criticism that's now all over the internet (for good or ill).

Born in Scotland and raised in Ireland, Cockburn moved in 1972 to America and was quickly snagged by the Village Voice, where he worked until 1984, when a disagreement over a grant he'd received from the Institute of Arab Studies led to his suspension. Shortly thereafter Cockburn launched his "Beat The Devil" column at The Nation, which he kept up till his death. In the meantime he also contributed to big-time magazines and papers, e.g. Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal, and smaller leftist pubs, including CounterPunch, edited by himself and St. Clair. He also wrote and edited books, many with St. Clair.