Fame ...

... Press Man: Why They Wept for Hitchens - Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... by the time of his death last December, Hitchens had achieved a measure of wealth and fame that no other Washington columnist for the Nation could ever have hoped for. How famous was he? He died on a Thursday, and by the weekend admirers had begun a little shrine outside his apartment in Washington. It was set up Princess Diana–style, with flowers, cards, bottles of liquor, handwritten poems and messages of thanks, the words bleeding melodramatically off the paper in the December drizzle. Justin Bieber shouldn’t expect as much.