Albert Einstein, also known as the “king of intelligence”, was loved by the media, which propelled him to media stardom; possibly also because, as C.P. Snow asserted, Einstein was something, perhaps a lot, of an exhibitionist and histrionic, and he often enjoyed the hype he caused.
This does not prevent Einstein from often complaining –privately– about the inconvenience caused by this media harassment. Of course, from time to time he also applied the appropriate dose of sarcasm (see the small pills Hookers, Dung and the University (by A. Einstein) and An Eschatological View of Bureaucracy (by A. Einstein)). Sometimes because of the intellectual level of the discussion:
Reporters asked exquisitely stupid questions, to which I responded with cheap jokes, which were enthusiastically received,
he wrote to a friend after being greeted by a crowd of journalists and cameras when he visited the United States for the second time. At other times he complained about the uncontrollable influence of the media in making a certain subject fashionable or manipulating it: “This world is a funny madhouse,” he wrote to his friend Grossmann in September 1920. “Nowadays even coachmen and waiters argue about whether the theory of relativity is correct or not, and everyone’s convictions on this subject depend on which political party they belong to”; which was true, however, because in Germany, depending on the political leanings of each newspaper, relativity was reported as an apotheosis of science or as a meaningless hoax.
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