Blake Hounshell, an accomplished political journalist who was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a top editor at Politico before joining The New York Times and supervising its popular newsletter “On Politics,” died in Washington on Tuesday. He was 44.

In a statement, his family claimed he died “after a long and valiant fight with depression.” A police spokesman in Washington said the death was being investigated as a suicide.

Bernard Blakeman Hounshell was born in California on September 4, 1978, and raised in Delaware and Pittsburgh. In 2002, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale University. After studying Arabic in Cairo, he began his journalism career.

In 2011, he was a finalist for the Wallace House Center for Journalists’ Livingston Awards for Young Journalists for his reporting on the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010s.

Blake Hounshell cause of death and age

Hounshell passed away on January 10, 2023, at the age of 44. The Associated Press, citing a Times obituary, reported that authorities discovered his corpse near the Taft Bridge and are investigating his death as a suicide.

Hounshell died “after a long and valiant fight with depression,” according to his family.

Following his death, The New York Times’s Joe Kahn and Carolyn Ryan said, “He was a committed journalist who swiftly distinguished himself as our lead politics newsletter writer and a gifted observer of our country’s political environment.”

Blake Hounshell wife and children

While working in Cairo, Hounshell met musician and consultant Sandy Choi; they came to Washington D.C. in the 2000s, married, and had two daughters.