Jack Hitt
Hitt was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where he attended the Porter-Gaud School. He got his start in journalism as editor of the "Paper Clip," the literary magazine of Porter-Gaud's first through fifth grades. According to his biography, he published "some of the finest haiku penned by well-off pre-teens in all of South Carolina's lowcountry".
Since 1996, Hitt has also been a contributing editor to This American Life. He contributed a story about a production of Peter Pan in an episode entitled “Fiasco”. Other pieces include his life growing up with one of the earliest transgendered women (“Dawn”), an hour long program on a group of prisoners in a maximum security prison putting on a production of Hamlet (“Act V”, #218), a segment on voter fraud in the 2008 American Presidential election ("Cold-cock The Vote.", #276), another episode about his life in a New York apartment building in which his superintendent turned out to be the head of a death squad in Brazil (“The Super”, #323) and more recently a segment on the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay called “Habeas Schmabeas” (#331) This last program earned him the Peabody Award in 2007.
Since 2007, Hitt has been one of two regular US correspondents on Nine to Noon, hosted by Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand National. Jack is currently performing in a one man show he wrote called "Making Up The Truth" about his childhood and the outlandish characters he's met in his life.[3]
Was also a consultant in the movie "Hackers" regarding techniques of cyber crime of that day and age.
“...most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.”
“The main idea of personal happiness at that [Colonial] time was not some hedonistic notion of pleasure but the other, more philosophical, kind. The Greek philosophers believed that discovering one's own talents and then taking the pleasure of exploiting them (finding out that you had a singing voice, could write well, start a company, or invent new things), that was the deeper pleasure the founders had in mind and the freedom they sought.”
“..the universe is not plagued by intentions and purpose.”
“Evolution has one big rule: If there's no pressure on the system to change, then it doesn't bother.”