He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.

I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.