The New York Times profile piece, which will appear in print this Sunday, is as good as Rush Limbaugh could reasonably expect.

As for the rest of us, there are some fun surprises. One is that the writer couldn’t seem to find many liberal critics, although a number are interviewed. Rush has been accepted as part of the landscape, a mountain that cannot be moved to improve the view. Another: The writer doesn’t seem to wonder why Rush makes more money that the top three nightly news anchors combined. Is it that he is serving an large audience that they have neglected? It is strange that the writer doesn’t wonder about this. Maybe he was afraid of where that thread would lead.

Still, it is well worth reading. Here are two interesting nuggets:

Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners.”

Limbaugh’s audience is better informed than NPR’s? That’s got to be a surprise on the Upper West Side.

And Limbaugh’s take on Bill O’Reilly: “The man is Ted Baxter.”

As for the writer’s incessant baiting him on Sean Hannity, it reeks of editor-inspired bear poking.

Still, I suspect, that the full story about Rush is yet to be told. He has some 20 million listeners but is deeply private. He is breezily ebullient on the air but almost modest in person. He is an intellectual and a jokester. He went from being Hillary’s most effective critic in the 1990s to her biggest booster in 2008. He is the wealthiest man in the history of radio but still keenly feels his decades of loserdom.

There remains a biography to be written.