But is Brill’s Content a good magazine? That is, is it a magazine you’ll want to read rather than feel you should read? And is it shallow to think that that matters?

Brillian disclosure: 1) The current issue (December-January) has an extended dialogue on Salon’s Henry Hyde controversy; 2) as a media columnist, I’m clearly writing about the competition here. And yet if I’m biased in any way, it’s that I want Brill’s to succeed, partly for idealistic reasons (truth in reporting = good), partly for mercenary reasons (for a media writer, commercial success of media writing = ka-ching!) and partly because of the unseemly, perhaps nervous, glee with which journalists, perversely eager to prove their own irrelevance, have anticipated its failure. But try saying this with a straight face — and put down any hot liquids before you do it: “I just read this article in Brill’s that blew me away.“

I’ve read every issue of the magazine since it came out, and I can’t even imagine it. I am a bad, bad man.

Even Steven Brill, in fact, admitted to the New York Times yesterday that the magazine has too often read like “homework.” And indeed, it’s only appropriate the name of his magazine sounds like “Gray’s Anatomy”: It’s essentially a textbook, a dry primer that takes a fascinating, sprawling subject and stultifyingly reduces it to empirical analysis, statistics (the magazine is full of checklists, numeric tables and percentages) and labels (an October feature on TV newsmagazines stamps a list of broadcast reports with “Fair” or “Unfair” ratings — complete with actual smiley and frowny faces) at the expense of wit, depth and cultural awareness.

Now, there’s something admirable about Brill’s resolute dullness, stolidly opposing the breezy, refined-beyond-comprehension insiderism that characterizes much media reporting. While Vanity Fair and New York magazine’s arch medialebrity pieces can practically require a copy of the social register and a map of the Hamptons, Brill’s profiles small-town news editors and cable-system programmers in prose as hip as the Farmer’s Almanac’s. While Feed and Salon offer airy cultural-studies feuilletons, Brill’s offers us just the facts. While the New York Observer drops names and downs Manhattans at Balthazar, Brill’s Content has a glass of milk and goes to bed at 9:30.

But Brill’s country-mouse seriousness is not just a froufrou aesthetic issue. Content isn’t a snooze because its writers can’t write — in fact, at earlier gigs staffers like Lorne Manly (the Observer) and Noah Robischon (Netly News) have amply proven they can turn a phrase. Brill’s dullness, I believe, is a direct result of its editorial philosophy. The problem: Brill’s Content is above all concerned with matters of fact. Period: “We see this as the one black line in everything we are going to write about: Is it true?” At best, this motto has been responsible for some outstanding investigations. But it’s a sadly limited approach, because the most interesting issues concerning the media go far beyond “did they get their facts right?”

The result is a narrow, legalistic devotion to facts, of which Brill’s Content’s bland prose is just a telltale sign. A strong October piece, for instance, on “Dateline NBC’s” exaggerated claims that its reports have sent people to jail reads: “To ape a bit of ‘Dateline’s’ rhetorical style: A Brill’s Content investigation has uncovered the shocking real story.” Now, that would be a clever enough little flourish — if it weren’t for that clumsy “To ape a bit …” clause, which totally kills the joke. Nit-picking? Maybe. But having read a half year of Brill’s, I don’t think that gloss was an accident. Without it, you see, someone could misread the sentence. Someone could believe that Brill’s Content — Brill’s Content! — was brazenly engaging in the same sort of overblown hype that it was criticizing “Dateline” for. Hypocrisy! Perfidy! The magazine is edited as though any unglossed sarcasm or dry humor is misleading, dangerous and possibly unethical. Likewise with its famously bloated features, like Steven Brill’s endless “Pressgate” article on the Monica Lewinsky feeding frenzy in the premiere issue; the magazine seems so suspicious of gatekeeping that it regards editing as dishonest.

This follow-up to American Lawyer is a lawyerly magazine, devoted to exhaustive detail and, above all, facts and figures. You can count on Brill’s to give you features like “Credentials”: bios of media professionals that say, for instance, how many criminal cases various TV legal analysts have tried to a verdict — implying that you can put a numeric figure on a talking head’s qualifications. But is George Terwilliger III seven times more deserving of our attention than the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin because he leads 75 to 11? What effect does their omnipresence have on the political culture? How can networks better serve people’s obviously vast interest in legal information? Tellingly, on its last page, the soul of a magazine — where other publications showcase art or photography or columnists — Brill’s closes with a Harper’s Index-style list of stats.

The righteous response, I guess, is that facts speak for themselves. But they don’t always speak best. Take the September feature on “This American Life,” Ira Glass’ public-radio hour of long-format personal narrative, the last third of which weirdly fixates on whether “TAL’s” precious tales are factually reliable. Brill’s notes that Stephen Glass (gasp!) did three pieces for the show — though two were retellings of New Republic articles that weren’t shown to be fabricated — then gives essayist David Sedaris the white-glove test, revealing, shockingly, that some humorists are given to exaggeration. In Sedaris’ radio story about his sister Amy wearing a “fatty suit” on a visit home to mortify her weight-obsessed father, “Amy revealed to her distraught father that the fat was fake on the morning of her departure, even though in reality she let her father in on the joke about seven hours into the first day of a three- or four-day visit.” (So was it three or four days, Mr. Sedaris? — if that is your real name!)

Ultimately, Brill’s gives the program its pious, sternly qualified approbation: “Brill’s Content checked two seemingly outrageous stories that have aired on the show — a finger puppet opera written in Italian that tells the story of Chicken Little and a workshop that teaches women how to act like men. Both were accurate.”

Well, thank God. Now, maybe it’s unfair to critique a relatively brief (for Brill’s — it’s two full pages), light profile this way, when Brill’s has used the same exacting approach in many excellent investigative reports. But the magazine itself doesn’t make that distinction, and that’s why it comes off so prim and absolutist. Like Kenneth Starr, with whom Brill has famously squabbled, Brill’s Content seems to believe that there is no such thing as a little lie.

It’s that “one black line” of truth again. Thing is, there is no one black line; there are sometimes more important questions than empirical matters of fact, and Brill’s does not seem to know how to deal with these. Even granting that “This American Life’s” militantly winsome narratives might contain a whopper or two, does Brill’s have nothing better to do than sleuth out finger-puppet operas? It could, like Suck, look at the show’s appeal to “stylish hipsters who secretly enjoy hearing ‘Most interesting character I ever met’ stories, but wouldn’t be caught dead with Readers Digest.” It could examine the cultural significance of the memoir craze that fuels “This American Life,” or look in depth at the difference between “TAL” and the rest of middlebrow public-radio programming.

But these are subjective questions, and Brill’s has no truck with speculative hooey that you can’t back up with numbers. As a result, Brill’s is like a music magazine that writes only about lyrics, a media-criticism magazine without criticism. In its current feature looking at 24 hours in the life of the cable news channels, what should have been a rich, provocative topic instead becomes eight chart-laden pages of math in lieu of analysis (“MSNBC devoted 235 minutes to the president … the Kenyan bombing got 22 minutes on Fox … from 9:47 to 9:54 … total minutes … zzzzzz …”).

Brill is right to tell us that nobody is above the truth — but there’s more to truth than facts. If Brill’s continues to wear its Consumer Reports plainness like a badge of honor, it will be the death of its mission. For Brill’s Content is its own test case: the first magazine edited according to the principles of Brill’s Content. By churning out one soporific doorstop after another, it is effectively telling editors that if you follow Dr. Brill’s Patented System for Quality Journalism, you will produce a boring magazine. Is Brill’s Content a good magazine? Indisputably. So far, it is too damn good for all of us.

Marcus isn’t the only journalist to swoon over Gross — other colleagues speak of her with reverence, as do her listeners, many of whom say “Fresh Air” is their favorite part of the day or the only thing that gets them through a long commute. And her guests declare her unrivaled among interviewers. An icon of the intellectual elite, Gross elicits great new information from overinterviewed celebrities and public figures. She’s a sympathetic, intelligent listener who can also push hard when necessary.

Through Gross’ intimate show — which is part autobiography, part documentary and part kaffeklatsch — her fans come to feel as if they know her. Her voice is vivid, her emotional range so vast that it is possible to imagine the hand gestures and facial expressions of her and her guests. Through her inflections, giggles and curiosity, she manages to sound more human and sincere than most television broadcasters look. And it is her humanity — the sense that she is insecure and fallible just like the rest of us — that one is struck with upon meeting her.

Gross is not glamorous or gregarious, and she is not warm — at least not
right away. When we talked at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a guest lecturer in the spring, she
was somewhat stiff until the tape recorder was turned off. While she is terribly reflective about her work and at times quite revealing about
her personal life, she seems deeply uncomfortable with — in fact, barely tolerant of — being asked the questions. “Often real life is boring and problematic,” she told one Berkeley audience. “I love the edited version of it.”

About 5 feet tall, rail thin and bony, Gross is a wisp of a
woman. Her jewelry and clothes — black pants and a blazer — are fashionable but simple, as if to avoid drawing attention to
herself. With her cropped gray hair and sharp features, she
has almost a birdlike quality.

Her humor and penchant for self-deprecation are two of Gross’ traits that come across more strongly off the air than on. She was almost apologetic about her appearance on several occasions during her stay at Berkeley. “I am literally smaller than life,” Gross told one audience. “I am an unextraordinary-looking person. I’ve seen
people trying to hide their disappointment when they meet me, and I have to
watch them get over it.”

The idea of invisibility is one that Gross returned to at several appearances that week. “I work in a medium where I get to be totally invisible and I get great pleasure from that, being a pretty self-conscious person,” she told a roomful of journalism students. At the beginning of her career, Gross even refused to have her photograph taken, as a way of honoring the invisibility of her craft. “I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have,” she told one interviewer. “Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.”

Eventually, though, Gross was forced to give in. As “Fresh Air” grew into a daily, national program, journalists began requesting interviews, and the public wanted to know more about the woman who, some journalists argue, has the best job in the profession. “Finally [I accepted] the reality that I wasn’t living in a closet, that I was actually living in the world and that people would see me,” she says. “I think I also started to accept myself more. That even if I contradicted a listener’s view of who I am they would have to live with it. That I am who I am, for better or worse, and we’ll all get over it.”

Yet, for the most part, Gross is granted her invisibility. The people she keeps company with every day on her show — musicians, actors, playwrights, authors, politicians — rarely come face-to-face with her. “They can’t expect a smile or a nod to convey anything to me,” she says. “Anything we need to convey to each other has to be in the voice, so the listener will hear it too. In the best of all possible worlds, our voices will carry as much information as possible because it’s the only dimension we have to communicate.”

While guests sit in a remote studio, Gross sits in her “little box” at WHYY in Philadelphia — a setup that provides a kind of faceless intimacy not unlike that of confession or psychoanalysis, where the patient and practitioner face away from each other, under the theory that the obscurity will allow thoughts and fantasies to flow more freely. Perhaps that is what lures her guests into such a revealing mode. Or perhaps it’s simply because she does her homework.

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In May, Gross taped a live show in San Francisco with sleight-of-hand master and actor Ricky Jay. “So, you were once arrested by a sheriff for doing your act,” she commented.

“What have you been reading?” Jay gasped. “Where did you find that out?”

“Compared to other people in broadcast who make a living talking to people, she does what she does better than anybody I can name,” says William Drummond, who teaches radio journalism at Berkeley and is an NPR correspondent. “There are only a few people in journalism who actually read the books before they interview the authors.”

Gross does indeed read the books, watch the movies and listen to the CDs — usually the evening before she conducts an interview. “My feeling is that I don’t have to be an expert on the subject, I can’t possibly be the expert on the subject,” Gross says. “What I need to do is frame the subject so that the expert will have a good structure. If I can’t do a good job in framing it, we’re going to have a jumble of information.”

Gross has different rules for different guests. If you’re an artist, she will tell you off-air to tell her if you are uncomfortable answering a question, and she’ll back off and move on. “I respect their right to draw that line,” she told a group of journalism students. “And by doing that I have the right to ask them anything because the ball will be in their court to tell me when I’ve transgressed.” If a guest blabbers on and their point becomes muddled, Gross allows them a chance to clean up their mess. “It is my job to help them be as coherent as possible and as true to their thought as possible. If I can give them tools to do that, then I want to.” While no hard-nosed reporter would agree to such an arrangement, Gross does not see herself or her show as being about “gotcha” moments and scoops, but about the arts and the mind.

Yet she can also play hardball — mostly with politicians, those trained to be media savvy and sound bitable. And then the rules change dramatically. “I’m always afraid that politicians will take advantage of me,” she says. In a now-famous interview with Nancy Reagan, who was on tour promoting her ghost-written autobiography, Gross pushed the former first lady to discuss social issues, such as AIDS and homelessness, that languished during her husband’s presidency. Reagan, clearly unprepared to answer questions that didn’t deal directly with her book, was left nearly speechless.

“You seem to be talking a lot about AIDS and drugs and not about my book,” Reagan stammered. “I’d be happy to talk about my book, but I will not talk about politics.”

“I thought she would have been so well-coached for the interview,” Gross recalls, “but she was just falling to pieces. She was totally unprepared to answer questions, particularly challenging ones. I later read in her daughter Patty’s book that she had a really bad — I think it was Valium — habit, and I really had the feeling that she had neglected to ‘just say no’ before the interview.”

Because she keeps herself relatively concealed and makes few television appearances, what people gather about Gross’ personality is detected through her distinctive — and some say delicious — voice. “Before I met her, I was convinced that at some point in her life she was close to someone who was an alcoholic because she questioned alcoholics with such sensitivity,” says Ira Glass, host of NPR’s “This American Life.” “In fact, I think she hasn’t been, but you try to piece together her life from her voice.”

Lloyd Schwartz, “Fresh Air’s” classical music critic, says he is asked often what Gross looks like. “I didn’t meet [Gross] until about a year after I started doing the show, but I loved her voice — it is real, with a very distinct timbre that didn’t sound like she’d been to broadcasting school. I had a very vivid image of her, of someone very tall, with dark short hair, very bright eyes and a very sensuous mouth. When I finally met her, I was surprised. I liked what she looked like, but it was quite different. And it wasn’t until I met her two or three times that my old image faded. There is something about her voice that goes to the imagination — that even the reality of meeting her didn’t erase the image.”

“She has an extraordinarily sexy radio persona,” adds Timothy Ferris, author of “The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report,” who has been a “Fresh Air” guest several times. “I’ve never met her, though I feel like she’s a friend. But when you are in that booth and her voice is being digitally beamed into the studio — well, it is an incredibly sensuous experience.”

Gross, of course, is characteristically self-deprecating on the subject of her intoxicating voice. “Early on I was sure — and I am still sure — that I was able to stay in radio in spite of my voice,” she says. “In my early days in radio, when I was really nervous, I think I sounded a little bit like Minnie Mouse doing a feminist program.”

Gross tells of a classified ad in a San Francisco newspaper that read: “My ideal woman combines Juliet Binoche and Terry Gross. Ages 27-33. Must be stylish, fetching and funny. Nice eyebrows a plus.” “I thought it was very funny that they were using me to define their ideal and yet I didn’t fit any of their qualifications,” Gross laughs. “I’m in my mid-40s, and I’m not stylish and fetching. You can be the judge of the eyebrows.”

On the air, Gross may be like Oz — an invisible, powerful and enigmatic voice — but like him, she is a person most at home behind a curtain. In an interview with Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, an expert on China and a frequent “Fresh Air” guest, Schell asked if she ever longed to escape her little booth, to explore the world instead of hearing about it from her guests. “I like to debrief people coming back from adventures,” she said. “Physically, I’m a coward. I like a comfortable chair, a decent bed, my own bathroom.” Though the evening was billed as “a conversation” between the two, she clearly had trouble relinquishing control and took every opportunity to lob questions Schell’s way.

In the more than 10,000 interviews Gross has conducted during her career, a few guests have been offended by her frank questions. Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner walked out on her when she asked him if it was true that he had inflated the number of subscribers in the magazine’s early days in order to lure more advertisers. When she asked the notoriously curmudgeonly Lou Reed how he felt “transformed” in middle age, he shot back: “As one middle-aged person to another, what can I tell you that you don’t already know?” When Gross tried to move on, asking Reed whether they could listen to and then discuss some of his early recordings from his Velvet Underground days, Reed said, “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any of that shit. This isn’t working, OK? I’ll see ya.”

“Lou Reed is someone I’d wanted to talk to for years,” Gross sighs. “I felt bad that I had done something that had managed to bug him so much that [he] walked out. On the other hand, I truly don’t think I did anything wrong. He didn’t want to talk about anything. I don’t think he really wanted to be interviewed. I think his publicist probably bullied him into it.”

Gross’ radio career began in 1973 at a small public radio station at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she attended college. With other women, Gross hosted a feminist radio program on rarely discussed topics such as childbirth and menstruation. From Buffalo, she headed to WHYY, where “Fresh Air” began in 1975, airing an exhaustive three hours a day, five days a week. When the show went national in 1985, it was scaled back to an hour.

Yet the daily schedule is still tiring. “The biggest strain in my life is having to keep up with all that information. Sometimes I really resent having to keep up with so much. I have to know a little bit of everything. Sometimes it’s thrilling and exhilarating, and sometimes it’s like, Do I really need to know what’s happening in that part of the world today?”

One of Gross’ great strengths as an interviewer, says fellow interviewer and New York Times contributing writer Claudia Dreifus, is that she chooses great subjects. “And she doesn’t let her own ego and personality overwhelm the subject,” Dreifus adds. “With some broadcast interviewers, who shall remain nameless, the interview is really about them.”

Occasionally, however, even Gross can’t hold back her ego and bias, such as during an interview with “Northern Exposure” actor John Collum, whose elderly television character was dating a young woman. “For some reason she got on a track with him about what it was like being paired with this young blond chick,” says someone who heard the interview. “I don’t think she approves of May-December romances. And she kept trying to get him to admit he did something wrong.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m two different people. I’m the person I am regularly. That person tends to be shy and self-conscious,” Gross says. “And then I’m the person I am when I’m functioning in my professional capacity with my microphone, and that person tends to be a lot more forward and bold and willing to ask nearly anything if it seems appropriate.”

“If I was at a dinner party with John Updike, I wouldn’t be talking to him about his stutter and his psoriasis and the language he uses to discuss sexuality,” she goes on. “If I’m interviewing him, it’s all fair game. In a way I have a lot better time talking to someone in the interview and I’ll ask much more personal things. In fact, when I was at a dinner party with John Updike before an interview, we talked very politely about this and that. But then onstage, I had him read this very explicit sexual passage from his book and had him talk about sexual things.”

In fact, Gross is one of the few interviewers who approaches sex without sounding like a voyeur or a clinician. Her frank discussion of pornography with Hustler publisher Larry Flynt led to the most unusual compliment of her career: “You really did a terrific job on those questions about the genitalia,” Flynt told her after the taping.

Gross says she is lucky that her passions — jazz, film, literature — are intertwined with her work, especially since she rarely has free time to enjoy them. She and her husband, jazz critic Francis Davis, live surrounded by her material for the show. At home, she is almost always at work. “I often have not found balance in my life,” she admits. “When I found radio, I wanted it so badly I thought, I will do anything to stay here and keep this. And it’s meant giving up a lot of personal life.”

“I was interviewing [fashion designer] Isaac Mizrahi — luckily he couldn’t see how shabbily dressed I was — and at some point he said something about ‘a nice, fun black dress for when you come home and you’re going to be going out,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘What planet are we talking about? I don’t even own a dress anymore.’ He said, ‘Surely you must! It’s not possible.’ I never come home and dress up to go out again. I put on sweat pants or a T-shirt and then I get to work.”

As a result, Gross says, she lives a very insular life. “If I’m preparing for tomorrow’s interview and a friend calls, I’m going to have to hang up on them in a few minutes so I can prepare for the interview,” she admitted to one Berkeley audience. “The paradox of my life is that while I’m home preparing to be a sensitive interviewer, I’m a lousy friend.”

What keeps Gross going at such a frenetic pace, what keeps her show, well, fresh after 25 years? “There are some things we don’t really tire of — like food, good conversation,” she says. “A good mind is something that never loses its value, no matter how many good minds you have the luxury of encountering.”

Onstage in San Francisco, in a faux living-room setting, Gross sits beside Ricky Jay in an armchair, looking positively Lilliputian beside his rotund, imposing frame. She holds notes in her lap, shuffling them nervously throughout the evening. In person, Gross seems more therapist than journalist, especially when she asks Jay to tell her about his childhood. Jay seems genuinely surprised at the memories her questions are eliciting. “Here’s a story I haven’t thought about for years and years,” he says. Gross’ eyes crinkle in concentration and she leans forward to listen.

“When I was young, people would come up to me and say, ‘What’s wrong, dear? You look lost,’” Gross admits. “I seem to have that kind of face. When I’m not laughing, when I’m just listening — which is what you do if you’re an interviewer — I’m just kind of not in my body. I’m just a big ear.”

He loves preschool — partly for the teachers, somewhat for the other children, but mostly for its wonderful selection of tutus, fancy party shoes and pretend jewelry. His grandmother (my mother) received the shock of her life when she went to pick him up one day and he was wearing a blue tutu with beaded gold slippers. The other mothers laugh and tell me he is such a thespian. The teacher tells my husband and me that he is “highly in touch with his feminine side.”

If we only had to worry about preschool, life would be fine — but his grandparents (on both sides), his aunts and uncles, his baby sitter and just about everybody else are up in arms. “Boys should be playing baseball, not Barbie,” my mother-in-law exclaims. “I was so embarrassed,” complains my mother after the harrowing tutu incident. “He keeps taking my daughter’s Cinderella slippers!” my neighbor told my other neighbor who told me. The older siblings of his friends have called him an oddball, a weirdo and generally not normal. Adults tend to be more subtle with questions like: “So when do you think he will grow out of it?” or “How does your husband feel about it?”

I have tried to explain to each of them that my son approaches life with a unique flair. While he loves soccer, he often plays it wearing a silk cape that flutters in the wind when he runs. Playing with his cars takes on new dimensions when he acts out both the “damsel in distress” and the “sheriff to the rescue” role, alternating hats to represent each character. My husband can’t wait for Little League to start because he sees a little slugger in our son who can already hit the ball out of our relatively large backyard. Our son also can’t wait to play baseball, but for a different reason: He says that cleats “are just like tap shoes.”

Thankfully his preschool teacher has assured us that he is simply “evolved.” “I wish all of my children were as well-balanced as your little boy,” she told us at our first parent-teacher conference. “I love the way he plays cowboys and Indians wearing his favorite ballet slippers.” She credits our “nonjudgmental and accepting parenting” for his creative expression. Frankly, I was a little relieved. So he is not a weirdo — he is “evolved.” I wish I could take credit for this, but it is all of his own creation.

Interestingly, no one seems the least bit disturbed about our friend (I will call her Gillian). At 5 and a half years old, she refuses to wear dresses, plays T-ball and soccer and is proving quite skilled at climbing trees. She has more cuts and bruises as a result of roughhousing with her older brothers than my husband claims he ever received playing varsity college football. Gillian, I am told, is a tomboy. “Isn’t she cute,” a friend exclaimed to me when we were at Gillian’s house for a Sunday barbecue. (My son was inside watching “Pocahontas” with two girls.) And my son is not cute when he dresses up and reenacts the glass slipper scene from “Cinderella”?

If Gillian is a tomboy because she likes to do boylike things, what then is my son who likes to do girl-like things — a janegirl? As far as I can tell there is no equivalent in the English language (at least there is not one in my Webster’s Dictionary). More important, there is no acceptable behavioral equivalent.

I have begun to ask myself what is normal? My son loves trucks, cars and trains. He plays for hours with his Brio train set while wearing his sister’s striped dress. He is very affectionate and will frequently tell his friends he loves them with a hug. Last fall, during those terrible twos, he was accused of being a bully because he bit a girl at the playground. How can a child go from bully to sissy in a mere nine months?

I am coming to realize that while our sex-role stereotypes have expanded for girls, they have not for boys; there seems to be no acceptable cross-gender equivalent. A gay friend of mine claims all of the uproar is a homophobic response to my son’s actions. “I remember loving to dress up and put on makeup, too,” my friend tells me with a knowing glance. He is only 3 and a half years old, I remind my friend — a little early to be defining his sexual preferences.

The feminist revolution appears to have successfully helped foster an environment that makes it “cool” to be a girl. Much research is being done to ensure that girls are encouraged to excel in math and science, overcome the repression of adolescence and, with luck, one day be more than tokens on boards of directors across the land. I am thrilled. Trust me; I have a 1-year-old daughter. I want her to understand and respect her power, her opportunity, her femaleness. But what about my son? I would like him to be able to respect his power, his opportunity and his maleness even as he explores his feminine side.

It’s not just in my house that the days of “boys will be boys” are over. A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article that claimed prescriptions for Ritalin were at an all-time high and increasingly, boys are expected to be less rambunctious and more docile (that is, more girl-like). And a guest commentator on an NPR program about youth violence expressed concern that the rise in the births of boys would result in a coming “deluge of testosterone-laden young men” creating havoc in our society. My mind reels: Is the conclusion that a 3-and-a-half-year-old should be more like a boy but a 12-year-old should be more like a girl?

I have to admit, sometimes I am embarrassed by my son’s behavior. His declaration to my father-in-law that he wants to be a ballet dancer when he grows up almost created a family feud. When the father of one of his preschool classmates unintentionally called him a girl (he was wearing the favorite blue tutu, mind you), I cringed just a little. And I am often confused about the messages I’m sending him. I don’t mind if he wants to wear lipstick to a birthday party — “Mom, you wear lipstick when you dress up!” he reminds me — but how do I protect him from the inevitable taunting that will occur as he ages?

I come back to my original question: what is normal? Sadly, my husband and I are learning all too early that the constraints of normality are very narrow indeed. Happily, my son, who at the moment is pretending to be Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” adorned with his favorite pearl necklace and earring ensemble I gave him for his birthday, does not yet know this. With luck and a little parental intervention, he won’t for a very long time.

“The Lunch-Box Chronicles” is a sequel of sorts, the story of a day in
Winik’s life as the single mother of Vince, 6, and Hayes, 9. It’s a fairly conventional life: Since Tony’s death, she has evolved into a bill-paying, football-loving earth mom whose idea of big fun is an occasional cigarette and gin martini. Her boyfriend is a heterosexual golfer with two children of his own, “a whisky drinker, something of an old-fashioned guy on gender and lifestyle issues … A person who would never, for example, pierce his ear.” “Lunch-Box” is Winik’s progressive attempt at the frazzled woman’s domestic comedy in the tradition of Bombeck.

The book begins ’90s-style, as Winik collects her sons at school in her sport utility vehicle: “I can’t wait to see them, to repossess them, to get them back on my territory, whole, healthy and breathing.” The narrative follows the family through the next 18 hours: the Shake ‘N Bake pork chop dinner, the bedtime struggles, the microwaved bacon and cartoons in the morning. It ends as Winik drops them back at school: “I bet this is what it’s going to be like when they leave for good, too. I bet you never get your kiss,” she writes. “I bet they never even say goodbye.”

It was one of the great strengths of “First Comes Love” that Winik could describe herself as an out-of-control mess — chasing Mr. Wrong because he was just so damn pretty — and still come off as enviably sane. There is something singularly cheerful about her that bursts through in her writing. This is no neurasthenic, victimized memoirist: Winik is a sanguine and gutsy survivor, a little bemused by her reckless past, if unashamed. While this upbeat style helped ground the memoir of her funky marriage, it’s only partly successful here. One of the conventions of the domestic comedy is the cultivation of a sense of wry ambivalence on the part of the harried mom: the trying quirks of the kids, the husband who won’t change a toilet paper spindle. For all the lip service Winik pays to the madness of child-rearing, she never appears even faintly ambivalent.

Maybe because she was once so wild, she can’t repress a palpable love for the ordinariness, the rhythms, the casual sensuality of children and domesticity. She revels in her sons’ physicality: “Until Hayes was 7, we still took baths together, slipping and sliding around the soapy tub. At night, both of them would toddle, later tiptoe, into my bed, clinging like barnacles to the mamaboat until dawn,” she writes. “I had mixed feelings about this practice, as Vincie had the habit of wrapping his little hands around my neck, rhythmically clutching and unclutching, and Hayes would often wake me with a hot stream of pee.” Gross? A little, but Winik makes it seem practically cozy.

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Winik is at her best when she’s writing frankly and vividly about subjects that would make other writers — and parents — squeamish. Like how to talk to kids about sex and drugs. She devotes a chapter, “Our Bodies, Their Selves,” to parental nudity. When her older son asks to touch her vagina, she is flustered, but not for long. “Well, durn, Hayes, as they say down here in Texas, I don’t think so,” Winik writes. “In fact I’m quite sure not.”

Winik’s candor is fresh and attractive. She is up front with everything from her children’s sexuality to her own PMS-fueled anger. This is not a woman with deeply buried “issues.” Winik slaps her son when he’s driving her nuts, burns with shame — and forgives herself. She’s aging hard and can’t find the time to moisturize — but heck, that’s OK too. She prefers one of her boyfriend’s daughters to the other — but that’s life. She is an intelligent woman who can no longer focus on the New Yorker at the end of the day — and happily picks up a collection of Erma Bombeck instead.

Which brings us to the question of how Winik measures up to the woman on whose
work she has modeled her own. If you, like me, haven’t read Bombeck lately (if ever), it will come as a surprise. Bombeck of the frosted hair and cheesy book titles (“Family: the Ties That Bind … and Gag!”) was sly, subversive and stunningly smart. She could find dramatic tension in the most humdrum household event; she could evoke the humor, loneliness, boredom and pleasure of parenthood in the course of a single sentence. Yes, Winik has written an easygoing, likable book. But where is the dramatic tension? Where is the conflict? Where is the bite?

Winik can’t hide her delight in her children; Bombeck didn’t even try to
disguise a certain restlessness. Of her postnatal depression, Bombeck wrote: “Had it not been for ‘As the World Turns’ and pacifiers, I’d have slipped into humming and braiding my hair. Every day I’d put a pacifier into whatever part of his face was open, get a plate full of buttered noodles and sit in front of the TV set and watch someone who was worse off than I was.” It’s hard to tell if she’s kidding or not, but it’s that very ambiguity — is this funny? is this sad? — that brings it breathtakingly close to the truth.

Although Bombeck also wrote eloquently on the joys of motherhood, she defended working moms and frequently wrote about the fact that when the kids head
off to school — if not sooner — it’s time to start having a life. “My excuse for everything just got on that bus,” she writes of a woman’s anxiety when a child starts school. “My excuse for not dieting, not getting a full-time job, not cleaning house, not re-upholstering the furniture, not going back to school, not having order in my life, not cleaning the oven.”

Kids as an excuse not to face the world? That’s just one of the many complicated things children can turn out to be, and Bombeck wrote about them all. Reading Bombeck in tandem with Winik points up what is missing from the latter. Winik is warm, appealing and personal; Bombeck was cool, universal and wickedly funny. For all her wild youth, Winik comes off as literal-minded, earnest and slightly square; Bombeck was always just a little badder than you’d expect. The issue in the end is not that Marion Winik is too edgy to wear Erma Bombeck’s crown. She isn’t edgy enough.

Still, this hasn’t kept Glass’s program from attaining a cult following among both public radio listeners and his colleagues in the field. Now heard on 137 stations nationwide, the show features material — long-form documentaries, monologues, fiction, found tape — rarely heard these days on the lower end of the dial. The premise of the show is simple: Each episode centers around a single theme, something that in a bizarre way evokes the gamut of American life. The cruelty of children. Fiasco! Frank Sinatra. An eclectic group of writers and artists — from monologist Spaulding Gray to Salon music columnist Sarah Vowell to TV-harper Danny Drennan to New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell — “take a whack” at the theme (though Glass admits he’ll often come up with a theme just to fit a piece of writing he especially loves). The flexible formula allows “This American Life” to accommodate a dizzying array of voices. One week, you might hear poetic producer Scott Carrier interviewing polygamists in the Utah desert. Next week, it’s wicked essayist David Sedaris describing his boyhood quest for the criminal who wiped his ass on the family’s fudge-colored towels.

But even the best writers and performers can fall flat on the air — the key to the show’s success is Glass himself, a 19-year veteran of public radio who worked his way up from intern to award-winning reporter at National Public Radio. Glass’ perky delivery prompted Current, a newsletter for public broadcasters, to dub him “the public radio listener’s favorite nephew,” and most writers cant help but point out the way his horn-rimmed, boyish looks belie his 38 years. But his casual demeanor also conceals (a little less successfully) the mind of a serious and shrewd perfectionist.

Glass has an obsession with avoiding the typical back-and-forth, sound-bite stories that make up much of public radio’s sound. Instead, he looks for characters, scenes and transformation. “We reject a lot of stuff,” he says, citing a “beautiful” radio essay by assistant producer Nancy Updike that didn’t make the cut recently. “There just wasn’t enough of a narrative arc.”

Within his “traditional” notion of story, though, Glass says he’s constantly trawling for surprises. The Frank Sinatra episode — one of his favorites — originally started with a musicologist telling the story of how Sinatra got his persona, but typically, Glass rejected the segment at the last minute. (“I thought, this sounds like the fucking Discovery Channel,” he muttered in a phone interview after the show came out last February.) Instead, Glass started the program with a freakish 1962 recording of Sinatra, at first crooning beautifully, then launching into a racist barrage of jokes about Sammy Davis Jr. “Your jaw just drops,” Glass says. “And that’s the first four minutes of the show.”

“This American Life’s” relentless irresistibility hasn’t been lost on the bigwigs in the broadcasting world. This summer, the program got a prestigious Peabody Award and a $350,000, three-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And after a bidding war with NPR, Public Radio International won the rights to distribute the program — a remarkable battle for a show so young, and one that, in part, made “This American Life” the buzz of this June’s Public Radio Conference in Chicago.

The buzz isn’t an accident, if you ask Glass. Over the past year, he’s promoted the show incessantly, and now that it’s started reaching a critical mass of stations, he says he’ll do whatever it takes to keep it on the air. Is an episode too racy for some program directors? He’ll send them another program to replace it. Is a station manager obsessed with fund-raising? Glass has been known to hit up potential underwriters, and he already offers some of the funniest and most effective pledge breaks in radio (“Look in the mirror, my friend,” he wheedles in one. “Look in the mirror. You are listening to a pledge drive. You have a habit“).

As someone who works in public radio, I know how important these little team-effort touches can be for the success of a program. But more important is the psychological boost “This American Life” has given the ranks of a creatively depressed system, simply because it’s good radio — the very well-produced, hypnotizing fare we’d all like to be doing if we had the budget and the time. “It has what drew many people to work in public radio in the first place, those in-the-driveway stories,” Doug Fabrizio, news director at KUER, Salt Lake City, says (and it’s true — we want to mesmerize commuters so badly we’ve developed a shorthand expression for it).

Ironically, Washington, D.C., is the only major market where the show doesn’t air — but “This American Life” tapes make the rounds at NPR each week, says “All Things Considered” producer Ellen Weiss. “Ira has a gift for hearing,” she says of her former reporter. “He’s definitely influenced us.”

I hope that influence will result in more than just a surge of “This American Life’s” Brian Eno-esque ambience on “Morning Edition.” What Glass really offers the inertial public radio system is a model for creative survival. As a reporter, he tells me, he tried to give editors what they wanted, just as he now tries to meet the needs of the stations that run his show. But he builds that cooperative framework in order to allow room, a great deal of room, for his own vision — a word he characteristically tries to retract as soon as it’s uttered.

“Not even my vision,” he equivocates. “That makes it sound so grand.” But sometimes a mixed metaphor is the right one. It takes vision to make good radio.