Today, he is filling a void - not to mention op-ed columns. Piketty’s economic argument may be, he is the newest version of a familiar, if not exactly common specimen: the overnight intellectual sensation whose stardom reflects the fashions and feelings of the moment.Ī month ago only economists and policy wonks had heard of him. Bloom included, by surprise.Īll of which is to say that however original Mr. There was (must it be said?) no Twitter in 1964, when Susan Sontag lit a match to the aesthetic establishment with her essay “Notes on Camp” (“hot” would seem the probable consensus), and no “Morning Joe” hosts to banter with Christopher Lasch in 1979, when his book “ The Culture of Narcissism“ itemized the many shortcomings of “American life in an age of diminishing expectations.”Īnd in 1987, Allan Bloom was denied, or spared, the opportunity to check the Amazon list every five minutes to watch the unstoppable rise of his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” which bottled the zeitgeist, and the emerging culture wars, in a way that caught everyone, Mr. But he may be the first to see his ideas - and his headshot - go viral. Piketty is by no means the first intellectual to have attained celebrity.

Piketty, boyishly handsome at 42, and inviting the verdict “hot or not.” One devoted fan had even set up a Twitter feed, consisting of images of Mr. Piketty, fresh from a triumphant visit to Washington (where he met with members the Obama administration) was in New York, being shuttled from MSNBC to NPR. “We have six printings on the way,” the book’s publicist said - two each in the United States, England and India. Piketty’s publisher, Harvard University Press, plainly caught off-guard, scurried to meet the demand. Last week, Amazon notified readers its cavernous cupboards were bare.

Sped into production in February, “Capital” has jumped onto the New York Times best-seller list. Piketty has written the big-think book of the moment. It is unclear how many people have actually read Thomas Piketty’s treatise “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” - 577 pages of text and graphs plus 78 pages of notes and, for added clarity, an appendage called “Contents in Detail.”īut there is little doubt that Mr.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander