Yesterday morning I listened to Ira Glass. Yesterday evening I listened to Bill McKibben. And I reflected:
1. Bill McKibben wrote a whole book, The Age of Missing Information (1992), about the malign influence of TV. He spent a year watching a single day’s output of the 100-odd channels of one cable company. TV makes people self-centered, he decided.
2. Ira Glass said we are living in a Golden Age of Television and listed a handful of current shows — including The Wire, The Daily Show, Colbert, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway, Entourage, House, and “anything with Ricky Gervais” — in support of his claim. He has just spent a year starting a TV version of This American Life.
3. Bill McKibben wrote an article (in The Nation) praising This American Life to the skies.
I think of McKibben and Glass as the two Boy Geniuses of American intellectual life. (Curiously I cannot think of any Girl Geniuses.) Both of them did great work while really young. When McKibben was in his twenties, he wrote a long series of editorials in The New Yorker that were inspiring. (They were unsigned. I found out who wrote them by writing to the magazine.) His first book, The End of Nature (1989), about global warming, was prophetic. I think it was the very first general-audience book on the subject. As for Glass, This American Life was terrific right from the start, twelve years ago. He was 36 when it started.