RIP Matthew Power

3QD friend Matthew Power died yesterday. He will be missed. This is Noam Cohen in the New York Times:

Matthew Power, a celebrated journalist whose writing took readers down the Mississippi with modern-day hobos, to the scenes of international disasters and inside the Lower East Side apartment where Allen Ginsberg spent his last days, died on Monday in Uganda. He was 39.

He was reporting on an explorer who is walking the length of the Nile when he was overcome by the heat and died, presumably of heatstroke, his wife, Jessica Benko, said.

A contributing writer at Harper’s Magazine, Mr. Power also wrote for other publications, including GQ, The New York Times and Men’s Journal, which had sent him to Uganda. His articles were in annual anthologies like “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best American Spiritual Writing,” and he was a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting.

For two Harper’s articles he visited the scene of incidents abroad that captured the attention of most Americans only briefly: the destruction of Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2000, and the collapse of a mammoth garbage dump in Quezon City, the Philippines, during heavy rains, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people living in shanties nearby.

More here. Harper's Magazine has made all his writings for them available for free here.