It’s a dark and stormy night on the Taconic State Parkway, in upstate New York; snaking along the path of the Hudson River, the road is usually scenic but tonight is draped with rain and headlight glare. A voice from North Country Public Radio calls off a list of names, frenetically free-associating about Dominick Calsolaro and Lucinda Hannon and Mary Perrin Scott and all the other generous people who donated to the station to keep public radio alive, and the time they recorded an interview with Howard Zinn on CD as a thank-you gift for supporters, and how incredible it was, and so on. The radio host sounds like a carnival barker, a hawker fleecing pigeons on the boardwalk, an auctioneer, or an old friend excitedly retelling a story you’ve heard a million times.
Social scientists call the relationships we have with figures in the mass media “parasocial”—the way we...