Sometimes, a person enters the public spotlight and is such an embodiment of an established stereotype that it seems impossible for him or her to be a real person. If Tom Wolfe wanted to capture the essence of arrogant, alienated progressivism, he would reject NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as too unbelievably on point.

The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.