“It is February 9, 1964,” Cass Sunstein writes, opening the prologue of his new book, How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be. “About 73 million Americans are huddled around their television sets”—and already, unavoidably, the difficulty of fame as a subject rears its four shaggy heads: nobody needs to be told what happened when the Beatles went on The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s famous!
But what is fame, and how does it happen? In a world where the host of The Apprentice ended up in control of the nuclear football, and might get it again, it’s worth thinking about how fame is achieved and expanded on, or thwarted. Obviously—everybody knows!—there’s chance involved, and conditions that could be called luck but are less flexible.
