Some sad Christmas day news, famed dramatist Harold Pinter died yesterday at age 78.  The cause was cancer of the esophagus.  Pinter was best known for creating work that looked at the second half of of the twentieth century and all the stresses and uncertainties that defined it.  From the New York Times:

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years. His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

In honor on Pinter, takepart with the ACLU to promote and protect free speech.  And watch the clip below from Pinter’s 2007 Charlie Rose appearance - it seems quite fitting in its own way: