We live in the age of performative academia, is this such a bad thing?

It is relatively rare for social scientists as individuals to break through into the mainstream media. However, in recent weeks, two profiles of successful figures in the worlds of academia and academic publishing have featured in popular publications, in ‘The editor who moves theory into the mainstream’ the New Yorker profiled Duke University Press editor Ken Wissocker and in the New York Magazine, ‘Galaxy Brain How the impeccably credentialed, improbably charming economic historian Adam Tooze supplanted the dirtbag left’ provides a similar profile of the economic historian Adam Tooze. Reflecting on these two pieces, Chris Anderson, discusses what they say about the state of social science, the performance of intellectualism and its relationship to power.