Howard Fineman, the longtime Washington scribe who mastered a multitude of different mediums over the course of several distinguished decades in journalism, died Tuesday evening at 75 after a two-year-long fight with pancreatic cancer. The news was announced by his wife, Amy Nathan.

Howard was likely a familiar figure to you all. Not only was he a ubiquitous presence on MSNBC and a prolific writer for Newsweek magazine during its golden age, but he also played a prominent role at HuffPost, having served as the sites global editor for a time.

Global is a good way to describe Howard. He had a gravitational pull about him. He was a man in perpetual motion, reporting and writing and pundit-ing seemingly unsatisfied unless he was contributing to the days conversation.

Ive gone from the manual typewriter to Twitter, he told me of his career when we spoke for this piece. Ive done everything but skywriting.

Stricken with terminal cancer, he said hed try it in his remaining time. It was a joke, of course. But at that moment, it wasnt hard to envision him up in the plane. There were few stories he wouldnt chase.

I first met Howard as a researcher for his book, The Thirteen American Arguments. It was a lofty project, trying to distill roughly 250 years of history into an arbitrary number of neatly tailored, binary disputes. He would confide later that it was classically overwrought. Nonetheless, it was a best-seller.

From there, Howard played an outsized role in my professional life, helping me get into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (where he had also gone) and Newsweeks internship program. He then joined me at HuffPost, where I served as politics editor at the time.