“Things are moving, so there’s an unpredictability that makes covering the news very exciting,” says Rachel Maddow, whose nightly MSNBC show is appointment TV for anyone even halfway interested in the surreal theater of American politics amid the surging tide of anti-Washington sentiment. Maddow, a wry, mischievous counterweight to the brawling style of her rivals on Fox, is proof that not all political debate has to be reduced to schoolyard taunts, perhaps because she’s more interested in the concept of change. She’s described herself as having been “a weird, depressive little kid” who thought she might grow up to be an Olympic athlete. Instead, thanks to a series of injuries, she found herself engaged in a different kind of sport—politics. The trigger was AIDS. Growing up in the Bay Area in the late l980s, Maddow was galvanized by the unfolding tragedy and inspired by the philosophy of AIDS activism. “I came up in that movement, in which there’s not only a sense of community, but people frantically trying to document their community that is dying, that is disappearing, and trying to make the country understand the importance of what was being lost,” she says. “It gave me a more nuanced appreciation of which political tactics work and which don’t that I wouldn’t otherwise have.”
