The Dish

Andrew Sullivan searches for spirituality

It was daunting preparing to meet Andrew Sullivan, considered one of the cleverest, most fearless journalists of his generation. There is the academic pedigree: the scholarship at Oxford — where he was also president of the union and a celebrated actor — followed by the PhD in political theory at Harvard, where he produced an iconic treatise on the work of British mid-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, performed the entirety of Hamlet all by himself — "a whacked-out mid-1980s" version — and modeled for Gap. And there is the journalistic firepower. At twenty-eight, in 1991, Sullivan became the youngest ever editor of the New Republic, America's most august political magazine.