How many words does it take to call Zev Chavets' 8,000-word Rush Limbaugh profile in the New York Times Magazine "too long"? 631. That's the length of Hendrik Hertzberg's blog entry on the subject, where Chavets gets derided for misusing his extraordinary access to Limbaugh — the first reporter allowed in his home! — into pages and pages of nothingness.

The fruits of all this access? A few shriveled raisins. We already knew far more than we are told here about Limbaugh’s family background, his early days in radio, his addiction to prescription narcotics, his incipient deafness, and his big cigars, his humongous ratings. We do get some presumably new details about the vulgarity and ostentation of his domestic arrangements—the expensive cars, the new $54 million airplane, the five houses on the Palm Beach oceanfront property. We get some surprisingly mushy therapized psychobabble: Limbaugh blames his drug addiction (which, as Chavets does not note, involved violations of the law) on “my childhood desire for acceptance,” an excuse he’d be unlikely to accept from, say, Kitty Dukakis. And we are told about the terms of his new radio contract—information the Times was sufficiently proud of getting, er, access to that it put the scoop into a separate story on the front page of the business section the Tuesday before. Do you value learning some days or weeks sooner than you otherwise would have learned that Limbaugh will be paid $400 million between now and 2016? Then you owe the Times a hearty thank you. But what if you’re interested not just in what he gets paid for talking but also in what he says?

Then you'll probably have more luck skimming Limbaugh's Wikipedia page than reading Chavets' harangue.