Jack Hitt is an American author. He is a contributing editor to Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and This American Life; he has also written for the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca, and his work frequently appears in such publications as Outside Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Wired. In 1990, he received the Livingston Award, along with Paul Tough, for an article about computer hackers who gained access to the New York telephone system.. In 2006, a piece on the racist subtexts of a study on the first Americans was selected for Best American Science Writing, and another piece about dying languages appeared in Best American Travel Writing. Another piece, on the existential life of a superfund site, was included in Ira Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction. In 2017 he cohosted the Gimlet Media podcast Uncivil along with Chenjerai Kumanyika.
Biography
Early life
Hitt was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where he attended the Porter-Gaud School. He graduated from in 1975. 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".
Writing and journalism career
Since 1996, Hitt has also been a contributing editor to the radio series This American Life. He contributed a story about a production of Peter Pan in an episode entitled "Fiasco". Other pieces include "Dawn", about his life growing up with Dawn Langley Simmons, a 12-minute piece in episode 216, titled "How America Actually Got Its Name", an hour-long program on a group of prisoners in a maximum security prison staging a production of Hamlet, a segment on voter fraud in the 2008 American Presidential election, 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, and more recently a segment on the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay called "Habeas Schmabeas". This last program earned him the Peabody Award in 2006. 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.
Film
Hitt was also a consultant for the movie Hackers, regarding techniques of cyber crime.
