Finally finished a long Samantha Power profile from December. (Not that I've been reading it since December -- I ripped it out of an issue before recycling and added it to my stack of single articles and have been reading it off and on for at least a week -- it's pretty long.)
Anyway, I would say the interest level of the article is pretty closely correlated with a reader's preliminary interest in Samantha Power. In other words, if you don't start with some, this piece will not change that. I was somewhat interested in her (how can you not be interested in a woman who writes a Pulitzer-winning book about genocide, critiquing the U.S. response -- at age 32?) so the article was somewhat interesting.
Unlike, say, the profile of Brian Grazer from a few years back, which turned someone I had absolutely no interest in into probably my favorite film producer. (Before that, I didn't even have a favorite film producer. I barely could have could have named any film producers! Louis B. Mayer? Irving Thalberg? Actually, Irving Thalberg was my favorite until then -- glamorous wunderkind, roman-a-clef hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's posthumously published "The Last Tycoon" -- but he died 79 years ago, at age 37.)