Michael Hastings, a contributor to Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, died on Tuesday morning in a car crash in Los Angeles at the unforgivably young age of 33. He is best known, rightly, for his 2010 Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who as commander of the U.S.-led force in Afghanistan was the face of the war that Hastings saw as misguided and poorly managed. His profile, “The Runaway General,” portrayed McChrystal as a loose cannon so sure of himself and his strategy for the war that he and his staff openly derided their civilian overseers, including Vice President Joe Biden. President Obama dismissed McChrystal over his comments in the story.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage's administration will no longer comment in stories published by the Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, all owned by MaineToday Media, his spokeswoman said Tuesday. The policy follows an investigation published this week by the Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram that found LePage’s Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Patricia Aho, a former industrial and corporate lobbyist, has scuttled programs and fought laws that were opposed by many of her former clients in the chemical, drug, oil, and real estate development industries.

One year ago, about 200 now-former employees of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, including almost half the newsroom, learned they would lose their jobs and that their newspaper—175 years old, but still lively, potent, and deeply interwoven into the life of a great American city—would be seriously diminished. A former T-P reporter writing a book about the failed grassroots effort to save daily paper surveyed employees who were fired and those who remain and found widespread unhappiness.