Ken Myers grew up in a conservative Christian household in Beltsville, Maryland, during the 1960s. When he was in tenth grade, two important things happened to him.<\/p>\n
His high school music teacher introduced him to the music of Bach, taking eight months to teach Myers and the rest of the boys\u2019 choir how to sing the motet Jesu, meine Freunde. And he fell upon a copy of the Saturday Review.<\/p>\n
Saturday Review is pretty much forgotten today. (A number of people still remember Bach.) The magazine began in the 1920s and flourished in the postwar years. Its writers ranged widely over the arts, from music and literature to painting and drama, cultivating a readership of strivers\u201d\u2039\u201d\u201d\u201d\u2039professional and college educated, if not brainy by nature\u201d\u2039\u201d\u201d\u201d\u2039who were eager for self-improvement and a kind of intellectual diversion that was sophisticated and accessible. The magazine was edited by a windy polymath named Norman Cousins, a model of the kind of well-meaning and high-minded public intellectual they don\u2019t seem to make anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone else in high school was discovering recreational drugs,\u201d\u009d Myers told me not long ago. \u201cI was discovering Norman Cousins.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n