Having bookmarked it when it appeared, I finally read Sam Anderson’s very good meditation on Garrison Keillor, which includes this interesting gloss on Keillor’s New Yorker career:

Though Keillor is associated with the Midwest, his sensibility comes largely out of New York City. He began his career in the early ’70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine’s Golden Age aesthetic: sophisticated plainness, light sentimentality, significant trivia. He was inspired to create A Prairie Home Companion, in fact, while researching a New Yorker essay about the Grand Ole Opry, and we might think of the radio show as his own private version of the magazine, transposed into a different medium. The “News From Lake Wobegon” is basically an old-style Talk of the Town piece about the Midwest.

I also love this line, which is as subtly evocative as one of Keillor’s own: “When he speaks, blood pressures drop across the country, wild horses accept the saddle, family dogs that have been hanging on at the end of chronic illnesses close their eyes and drift away.”

Speaking of which, R.I.P., Dakota, you good, good dog.