Actor Robert Hegyes, one of the stars of the 70s sitcom “Welcome Back Kotter”died today of an apparent heart attack.

Hegyes was best known for his role as the Puerto Rican-Jew on that show — Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein. Epstein for short.

Hegyes reunited with John Travolta and the rest of the Sweathogs last year to accept TV Land’s 35th Anniversary Award.

He also co-starred on the hit drama, “Cagney and Lacey.”

Hegyes was in his New Jersey home this morning when he suffered the heart attack. He died at JFK Medical Center in Edison, NJ. He was 60 years old.

I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.

As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.

Throughout his life, he remained a man of the left, but he had no patience for orthodoxy and groupthink (the first night I met him in person, we ended up bonding over a softness for the early Oliver Cromwell, of all people). Not surprisingly, his biggest rows came among his political and ideological compatriots. A devout atheist, he abjured abortion and was no fan of Martin Luther King, Jr. He made a huge break with the supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the book-length indictment No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. In the years leading up to but especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he had nothing but righteous contempt for those he perceived as soft on religious terrorism and ended up leaving his longtime perch at The Nation partly as a result.

It’s easy to mistake his thoroughgoing iconoclasm – this is the guy, after all, who wrote jeremiads against Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa - for a reflexive, even juvenile cynicism, but there was far more than that going on. Whether the target of his scorn was much-beloved (he thought Gandhi a great villain for the way he lionized poverty and preindustrial living practices) or thoroughly hated by the wide world (Saddam Hussein, for one), Hitchens was never a cheap-shot artist.

Rather, his positions, attitude, even his jokes stemmed from what can only be recognized as a great Enlightenment belief in Progress with a capital P, rational debate, and the great marketplace of ideas. While I don’t share his contempt for religion (he was puzzled by my “apatheism,” or indifference to the whole matter), his stance grew out of his conviction that some methods of thought were more advanced and liberatory than others. But because he was committed to rational and public discourse (however caustic at times), you could always argue with him. Which is exactly as things should be. I didn’t always agree with him (his positions on the invasion of Iraq, for instance, and his admiration of the awful I.F. Stone leave me scratching my head) and he certainly wasn’t infallible. But he was a true public intellectual, giving better than he got, sure, but always up for conversation large and small.

Sometime last night, upon hearing the news of Hitchens’ death, Matt Welch tweeted that he was “a startingly generous man in person,” which is an understatement if anything. Hitchens was especially generous to Reason over the years. A few months before the 9/11 attacks, we had an intern call him to do a short interview about his forthcoming book Letters to a Young Contrarian. The conversation extended into a couple of hours and was the basis of a long-form interview that is still fascinating to read. It presaged his break with much of the left that would come after the 9/11 attacks and shows that Hitchens was not simply a contrarian but a serious thinker who was constantly rechecking his math:

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Nick Gillespie.