The Organist's Verbal Virtuosos

Radio storytelling has a way of getting you to ingest complicated ideas without quite realizing what’s happening — like stuffing a pill into a glob of peanut butter to get your dog to swallow it. (In this example, the peanut butter is narrative, and you are the dog.) But ideas and arguments don’t need to be slathered in story to be appetizing. There’s another variety of verbal virtuoso, a person Oscar Wilde called “The Critic as Artist”: she is an explainer whose explanations become as beautiful, strange, or rewarding as the very things she’s explaining. Here, then, is a wee pantheon of some contemporary masters of the form: explanations of things are as beautiful (or strange, or rewarding) as the very things they’re explaining.