Washington DC "journalist" dead of apparent suicide at 44 years old

The body of Harvard Yale graduate, husband and father of two Blake Houndshell was found by police at the base of a bridge on Tuesday.  Houndshell suffered from depression, his wife reported, and had worked in the Middle East and written about America's foreign policy since the early George W. Bush war days:

He founded a foreign policy blog, called “American Footprints,” and wrote for the American Prospect’s blog in an era where Prospect hosted many of the nation’s hottest emerging voices, like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, and the site’s unique voice was helping to pioneer a new style of journalism in Washington, D.C.

With little journalism training and background, Hounshell wove and wrote his way into the field primarily by devouring news and hoovering up more information than anyone around him, eventually landing a role at Foreign Policy. 

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"Mamas, don't let ya babies grow up to be... self-trained journalists... Cuz they'll never stay home and they're always alone, even w/someone they love..."

RIP.  The ethics of an Ivy League man, with a self-trained journalism/business background. It's real people, not just the war dead and America's reputation as a "good-guy international policeman", that are lost when we gave up the system of "checks and balances" in news reporting, and went to the free-wheeling days of ... anything goes.

[I think Joe Biden too was a better politician back in the 1980s when he was continually called out on his mistruths, and nobody would have thought his career would reach the heights it did, with the country suffering his leadership today, because our press would have been providing everyday news-reading American workers and voters with honest reporting... The tide will turn.  Meanwhile, RIP Houndshell.  Call the above number if you are thinking of taking your own life.  It's sad how the article above is so flip ... from the headline down, about the father his children lost here.  His foreign-born wife is left to raise them...]

Life matters most of all.  We don't understand that in America anymore. Heaven help us.

Sometimes, you really do need a good check.  (No, not that kind... I suspect he died with plenty of money in his bank account, but ethically and morally depeted given America's international wars of late...  These aren't "good wars" anymore, and not just the military is complicit in our killings for profit anymore.)

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The NYT mourns one of their own.... "popular, influential, courageous, gifted, indispensable, insightful"... dead at 44.  ("and you shake your head, hm, and say it's a shame... ~Tull):

Blake Hounshell, an influential political journalist who was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a top editor at Politico before joining The New York Times and overseeing its popular newsletter “On Politics,” died on Tuesday in Washington. He was 44.

His family said in a statement that he had died “after a long and courageous battle with depression.” The police in Washington were investigating the death as a suicide, a police official said.

Mr. Hounshell, who joined The Times in 2021, wrote “On Politics” out of Washington, incorporating contributions from other Times correspondents. The newsletter appears five days a week and is regularly read by an estimated half-million paying subscribers.

Mr. Hounshell “quickly distinguished himself as our lead politics newsletter writer and a gifted observer of our country’s political scene,” Joseph Kahn, the Times’s executive editor, said in a memo to the staff, adding, “He became an indispensable and always insightful voice in the report during a busy election cycle.” ...

David Halbfinger, The Times’s politics editor, said on Tuesday that Mr. Hounshell was endowed with “the kind of wide-ranging intellect that made it possible for him to explain anything to anyone.”