The same is true of cities. San Francisco and Boston have natural harbors, and New York is built on the Hudson, but you don’t need good geology to attain geographic celebrity. Indianapolis, for instance, is the metropolitan equivalent of Kim Kardashian. Just as Kardashian can’t act in the traditional sense, the nation’s 13th most populous city is devoid of conventional geographic merits, such as a major waterway or safe harbor. The city came into prominence for reasons nobody could have predicted, any more than Moshe Adler could have guessed that he was describing the future life of Kim Kardashian. Famous for being famous, Indianapolis provides an opportunity to appreciate why cities in general are so special. [...]
Of course the former Fall Creek settlement also called for a grand new plan. To lay out the town, the legislature appointed Alexander Ralston, who’d previously assisted Pierre L’Enfant to design Washington D.C. As L’Enfant had planned D.C. to resemble Versailles, Ralston planned Indianapolis to resemble Washington. Four avenues radiated from a central circle, intersecting a grid of 18 streets at a 90-degree diagonal. One of these, named in honor of George Washington, was designated to convey the new National Road from Cumberland, Md., through the middle of town. [...]
In 1968, Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Last year some researchers at McGill University and Stony Brook University decided to find out if he was right. To rigorously test whether fame is fleeting, they compiled a database of approximately 100,000 names appearing in 2,200 English-language newspapers between 2004 and 2009 and looked for patterns of recurrence over that five-year period. They also looked at patterns in The New York Times between 1988 and 2008. What they found in both cases is that the famous stay famous. For instance, 96 percent of names with 100 or more mentions were already garnering newspaper attention three years before reaching 100 mentions per year. According to co-author Eran Shor, “even the Kim Kardashians of this world stay famous for a long time. It doesn’t come and go.” In that respect, fame (even in the realm of tabloid celebrity) is equivalent to other systems in which status is extremely pronounced, from the military to the classical musical canon. Just as Moshe Adler argued in the ’80s, there’s a positive feedback loop that keeps on looping, ensuring a few big winners and many, many losers.
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