When I saw a WIRED piece on my Twitter feed this week emblazoned with the title “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang,” I assumed that only one of two things could possibly be happening. Either this was a piece of vintage Butti-ganda from circa 2019 that was remaking the rounds, or I had inadvertently bitten into an accursed Proustian madeleine and been swept back in time. But the interview/adulatory write-up on America’s secretary of transportation is indeed, somehow, from the Year of Our Lord 2023.

To call it hagiographic would be something of an undersell. The piece — incidentally penned by someone who in 2016 described Hillary Clinton as “an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself” — opens with two stanzas that similarly make the former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city sound like a fusion of Jesus Christ and Aristotle:

The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring — though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes — neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity — intelligible to me.