It was with a lacerating sadness that I received the news of Michael Brooks’s sudden passing earlier this week. In the days before his death, we’d been making plans to discuss his recently published book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right, on my podcast.

Both in style and argument, Michael’s book is a testament to the kind, generous, and inclusive vision of socialism that he championed — one willing to stare down the often overwhelming injustice of the world with grace, irony, and good humor. As I quickly discovered after first meeting him in 2016, Michael embraced this sensibility as an operating principle in both an individual and a political sense, his personal warmth and socialist compassion being intimately intertwined.

Anyone who has spent time in the left media sphere knows that it can sometimes be a dispiriting and humorless place. But in an environment prone to competition and factionalism, Michael’s reputation seemed as ecumenical as his politics, a fact that has been all too clear in the tremendous outpouring of grief that has come in the wake of his death. An ever insightful and well-informed voice on all matters political, he was also a paragon of empathy and comradely behavior.