Alan Jacobs

Andrew [Sullivan’s] writing is not and never has been much about making sense in this way. Andrew is a man of enormous feeling capable of reacting to public figures with ferocious hostility or flushed adoration. His reactions are often completely unhinged, wildly inapposite, and rarely stable over time. Andrew falls in and out of love like a bipolar fourteen year-old diarist. Yet he proceeds — and this is as maddening as it is riveting — as if he were not an overheated, fickle instrument, as if his vehement mutable passions about public persons made perfect sense, were the unimpeachable output of a judicious internal process of cool analysis sensitive only to the objective features of his subjects.