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And here's my thread from Friday:

Link here:

If it seems excessive to put the last 3/4 of this paragraph in parenthesis, well. it is. Also, you should read my dissertation.

Sam Abt was not always an easy person to work with, but that's because he fiercely guarded what he valued above all else: high journalistic standards, a deep respect for true writers, and his personal freedom to cover cycling. RIP to a giant of journalism .9/9.

Of course, Sam Abt wasn't copy editing when he was writing about cycling. He took off for a month just to cover the Tour de France. When budget cuts came, he even used his vacation time just to go cover the Tour. that's how much he loved it. 8/x.

One longtime IHT editor, who worked with him for two decades, told me, Sam was "one of the most talented line editors I’ve ever known. I never saw him make a change that wasn’t justified." . This is high praise for that long of time in a fast-paced newsroom. 7/x.

In several ways, he was a call back to an older era of journalism. Several IHT colleagues do remember him chomping on a (non-lit!) cigar walking around the office. But he also was a stickler for standards. 6/x.

As I found in my oral history interviews, afterwards Abt didn't talk about his role in the drama—one of the most important stories ever published in the history of American journalism. His colleagues at the IHT couldn't remember him bringing it up. 5/x.

Notably, Abt was a copy editor of the Pentagon Papers. When the Nixon administration sued the New York Times to get them to stop publishing the top secret papers that showed the government had lied, Sam was one of the named defendants in a case which went to the Supreme Court 4/x.

That was working out of the Paris offices of the International Herald Tribune (the subject of my dissertation), where he worked for four decades. But before Paris, he was a copy editor for the New York Times, working on some of the most high profile stories in its history. 3/x.

Sam was a pioneer in cycling journalism. We all know what the Tour de France is today, but that wasn't the case back in the 1970s, when Sam started covering it. Few people in the English-speaking world did more to put cycling on the radar than Sam. 2/x.

You've probably never heard the name, but today Sam Abt died. I got to know him a little while working on my dissertation on the IHT, where Sam worked for decades. A few thoughts. 🧵 .

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Happy to see ⁦@mattyglesias⁩ has found the ⁦@CatherineProj⁩. I have been leading groups of one kind or another with it for four years now and it has been one of the best things in my life over that time.