Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” was published on March 10, 2014, the day after the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” aired on Fox and its sister networks.Salon
The fact that both men have captured the public imagination at the same time is at least partly due to that simple fact. There’s also the matter of professional ripeness, behind the appearance of fresh fame: Piketty had been around for some time, publishing papers and collaborating on constructing the Top Incomes database along with Emmanuel Saez, but he’d never published anything remotely as sweeping as “Capital” before. Similarly, Tyson had long been a prominent science communicator as well as astrophysicist, appearing as a guest on numerous shows, including both “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” as well as hosting PBS’s “Nova ScienceNow.” But he’d never hosted a commercial TV show before.
Yet, the two men’s sudden popularity is rooted in some deeper similarities as well — an empirical hunger, and a desire to think big in shaping the future, are two that come readily to mind....
Rise of the myth busters: Why Piketty and Tyson are the icons America needs
Paul Rosenberg | senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English
No comments:
Post a Comment