I don’t want to tease or disappoint you, but there’s a great article by Adam Gopnik in the 7 September New Yorker that isn’t available online (except by digital subscription). It’s a profile of Michael Ignatieff, former writer and thinker and now likely next Prime Minister of Canada.

Near the start of the article, Gopnik, who has known Ignatieff for years, reflects on the change that has come over his friend as he has gone into politics:

The new vocation, it seemed, had already changed him – over six feet tall, and good-looking in a lanky way, he now had the smooth inner glow of someone who has been dining for years on innards. The ironic-apologetic look by which writers signal to each other intelligence and powerlessness had been replaced by a look of slightly slant-eyed, amused self-possession – just inflected, I thought, by the beleaguered caution of someone who opens the morning paper knowing that somewhere in it will be a snide put-down of something he said the day before. The wistfulness of the sidelined philosopher was already turning into the wariness of the professional politician.

A good deal of that will be Gopnik seeing the transformation he wants to see in his friend, but I can imagine that wary and beleaguered are natural states for a politician.



Link to original post