Four famous sociologists conclude that very famous people are famous for more than fifteen minutes, and that people who are less-than-very famous tend to be famous for only a short time. They published this study: “Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media,” Arnout van de Rijt [pictured here], Eran Shor, Charles […]
Tag: fame
Famous, Fast Approach to Death: Obits in NYT
Some people achieve fame, then live so long that the fame fades and their eventual death goes largely unremarked upon. Those people are not the subjects of this new study: “Death in The New York Times: the price of fame is a faster flame,” C.R. Epstein and R.J. Epstein, QJM, epub 2013. (Thanks to kiltish […]
Becoming famous: A watch-it-happen experiment
How can a person become famous? A man named Aeron Haworth appears to be conducting a personal experiment to answer that simple question. Mr. Haworth’s job title is media officer for the University of Manchester’s Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, so presumably (and by his account, emphatically) he knows what he is doing. A […]
A high school student’s medical prominence
Behold the power of a bacterium and a high school kid and some yarn. Gavi Levy Haskell’s knitted bacterium (mentioned here yesterday, and a few days before that) today is featured on the home page of BMJ, one of the world’s great medical journals.