Elise Jordan
Michael Mahon Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and he attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in an ambush, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the insurgency that took her life.
He received the George Polk Award for "The Runaway General" (2010), a Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article documented the widespread contempt for civilian government officials exhibited by the general and his staff and ultimately resulted in McChrystal's resignation. Hastings followed up with The Operators (2012), a detailed account of his monthlong stay with McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan.
Hastings became a vocal critic of the Obama administration, Democratic Party, and surveillance state during the 2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters, referring to restrictions of freedom of the press as a "war" on journalism. His last story, "Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans", was published by BuzzFeed on June 7, 2013.
Hastings died in an automobile crash on June 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. The toxicology report showed evidence of THC (level 12 ng/ml) and methamphetamine positivity (reference LA coroner toxicology report # 2013-04353). Blue Rider Press published his only novel, The Last Magazine (2014), a year after his death.
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