With his hat low over his eyes, and the sharpness in his voice sheathed, Eminem seemed slightly less than amped to be at the Kamala Harris campaign rally last Tuesday in Michigan. In a minute-and-15-second speech with nary a punch line or pun, the 52-year-old rapper saluted Detroit, voting, and freedom, and closed with all the passion of an HR professional giving a benefits update: “Here to tell you much more about that, President Barack Obama.”

Obama took it upon himself to play the part of the showman. Summoning his goofiest dad energy, he hooted the words of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” claiming he was so nervous that he had “vomit on my sweater already / mom’s spaghetti.” This line shook me to my Millennial core. It echoed the time at a North Carolina rally in 2008 when Obama cited Jay-Z lyrics by brushing some metaphorical dirt off his shoulder—a moment that christened an era in which Democratic politics and pop culture were brazenly intermingled. Partisanship and hipness seemed, ever so briefly, compatible. But as Eminem’s anti-performance had just indicated, we are now so far from then.

With veteran public idealists such as Bruce Springsteen and the West Wing cast on the trail for Harris lately—and with Donald Trump touting old allies such as Kid Rock alongside recent converts from hip-hop—it can be easy to overlook just how much celebrity culture’s relationship to political culture has shifted over the past few cycles. Mainstream entertainers have, as is typical, lined up for the Democrats—but they have, as is less typical, not tried to make much fuss about their participation. They seem to understand that the nature of celebrity itself has changed, and that praise from the glitzy class can be a liability.

Revisit, if you dare, the 2008 Will.I.Am music video “Yes We Can,” which featured a motley cast of stars—Scarlett Johansson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Herbie Hancock—speaking, singing, and piano-playing along to Obama’s soaring rhetoric. The video’s earnestness, so cringeworthy today, gives the lie to the summer hype about Harris recapturing Obama-mania. Moreover, it embraces an obsolete—and always shaky—cultural vision: “the arts” as represented by one unified team of dreamers whom voters tend to admire rather than despise.

The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, leaning on star-studded concerts and a sitcom cameo, learned the hard way that this vision had started to die out in the 2010s, because of both technological and political shifts. Chopping the prime-time-viewing masses into factions, social-media and streaming platforms turned out to be resentment-making machines; it is, simply, annoying to be told that an actor is important and popular when you, in your own media consumption, never encounter his or her work. Trump was a perfect champion for the resulting and widespread sense of cultural dislocation. He was an entertainer, sure, but an entertainer who humiliated other entertainers on his TV show. When Hollywood began pumping out resistance-themed entertainment early in his presidency, it produced little art of lasting significance, but it did bolster Trump’s claims to be aligned with the people rather than the elites.

Eight years later, after the pandemic spread yet more disunity and QAnon spread conspiracy theories about what goes on inside Hollywood’s private corridors, mistrust of celebrities seems to be at a high. On talk radio and TikTok, one of the hottest cultural topics of the moment is the sexual-abuse accusations against Sean “Diddy” Combs. The stories articulated in the federal indictment and dozens of civil suits against him are chilling (Combs denies them), but the chatter they’ve inspired on social media tends not to be focused on sympathy for the victims. Rather, many commenters seem gleeful with hope that the investigation into Combs will take down the many stars who attended his White Parties—events that, for years, symbolized the height of aspirational excess in pop culture. Trump used to brag about his closeness with Combs, but that hasn’t stopped him and his surrogates from continuing to tag Democrats as the party of celebrity decadence. Trump shared a fake image of Harris with the rapper; Elon Musk recently posted on X, in response to Eminem’s presence at Harris’s rally, “Yet another Diddy party participant.”

Mass antipathy toward celebrities does not mean, however, that stars don’t matter anymore. Quite the opposite. This is the age of stans—a word partially coined by Eminem, which now refers to internet-enabled superfandom. Stans are not just loyal to particular entertainers; in many cases, they’re monomaniacal and tribalist, rooting against rivals just as much as they root for their faves. At the same time, the rise of influencers—a term that can refer equally to a TikTok goofball and a philosophy podcaster—is helping further break down the border between entertainment and media. An influencer’s job isn’t merely to amuse; it’s to spread ideas and opinions. We’ve evolved into a polytheistic celebrity culture, worshipping countless mini-idols that command a different form of adulation in each household.

[Read: The truth about celebrities and politics]

The structure of this new fame ecosystem doesn’t fit neatly with national politics. Authenticity, the feeling that a celebrity is showing their real self, is what attracts fans, and nothing is less authentic than being a partisan hack—especially given the disillusionment spread by the pandemic, inflation, and the war in Gaza. Celebrities who want to talk about the election are probably smart to cultivate an air of reluctance. Take, for example, Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, who gave a lengthy, apologetic explanation to listeners before interviewing Harris on her podcast: “As you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.”

One of the most haunting pieces of media from this election season is The Daily Show’s recent dispatch from the Gathering of the Juggalos, the music festival thrown by the face-painted rap-metal group Insane Clown Posse. The fans (called juggalos) who are interviewed profess all sorts of liberal leanings—about abortion, the economy, trans rights—but also say they’re nonvoters; seemingly as a matter of identity, of pride, they feel outside the system. Violent J, one of ICP’s two members, told The Daily Show that he supports Harris. But really, he didn’t seem to care very much about the election either way; he didn’t even know who Tim Walz is.

Even the most plugged-in stars seem a bit detached. Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of the year, has rejected calls for her to endorse a candidate. After backlash, she clarified in a TikTok video that she would be voting for Harris, but that because of various issues—primarily America’s support for Israel’s war—she couldn’t rightly call that vote an “endorsement.” In September, Taylor Swift gave Harris a much clearer boost, but her Instagram post on the matter was strikingly muted in tone, especially given Trump’s efforts to troll her. She hasn’t weighed in on the campaign since then. (Don’t bet against some crucial, last-minute activism—Swift is, among many other things, a master of timing.)

Then there’s Eminem. The rapper is a pretty prize for any political campaign; more than two decades after his first hit, he still commands a huge following among young men, a demographic that may well decide this election. The news that he’s voting blue isn’t much of a surprise, but he seems to be refining his methods with each election. During the 2016 campaign, he released an anti-Trump diss track; its opening line lives on as a meme-able example of how clunky protest art can be. During 2020, a campaign waged mostly online and in ads, he lent “Lose Yourself”—the ultimate inspirational anthem—to a Biden-Harris commercial. This time, he gave that short, halting speech, and it was, in its way, perfect for this cycle. The video is likely to pop up in the TikTok or Instagram Reel feeds of fans, many of whom might find Eminem’s palpable sense of burnout relatable and his words, therefore, more credible.

This past Friday brought to the campaign trail one of America’s highest-wattage figures: Beyoncé, who spoke at a Harris rally in Houston along with her mother, Tina, and her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland. Beyoncé’s potential involvement in this election has been speculated about for months. Her track “Freedom” became Harris’s rallying song, and fans theorized feverishly—and incorrectly—that she’d perform it at the Democratic National Convention. But when Beyoncé finally joined Harris onstage on Friday, it wasn’t to sing or dance. In a calmly uplifting speech, she focused on the historical nature of electing the first Black, female president. And she added this crucial stipulation: “I’m not here as a celebrity.”

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In our scattered social-media age, a strange little problem has emerged: It is hard to figure out how to invite people to a party. A slew of digital tools is available—Paperless Post, Instagram stories, Partiful, a simple group text—that should theoretically make it easier to reach people. But it also means you have no one way to contact everyone you want to invite, and you’re left sending out multiple emails and posts for a single party. Sending a few extra texts hardly ranks among the world’s most pressing problems, but finding ways to gather people together is a meaningful act during a time when so many Americans—even the ones with friends—deal with loneliness and isolation. The challenge of the modern party invite is the story of the changing web in miniature: In recent decades, everyone seemed to be hanging out in the same few places online. Now people are dispersed widely across platforms, with even more variability based on age and affinity.

If you are loyal to a particular invitation method—or if you simply call your friends when you’re having a party—you may be scratching your head, wondering what I am talking about here. That’s fair enough. But according to my unscientific surveys, I am not the only one living in a dispersed invitation landscape. The other day, I texted a group of family members asking in what formats they get invited to parties. My Boomer mom responded first: Paperless Post, always, she said. My Gen Z sister, scoffing at the idea of receiving an email invite, said she mostly gets invites via the app Partiful, or group texts with friends (“grexts,” as she called them). My Millennial sister-in-law said she usually receives emails or texts from friends. Another, just as unscientific, poll of my colleagues indicated a similarly diverse range of invite approaches.

Geography seems to play a part too: My East Coast colleagues, especially those based in New York City, were familiar with Partiful, whereas that name meant little to people in other regions. (Partiful declined to share information about its users’ age and regional distribution with me.) These different experiences mirror the broader feeling of spending time online right now. Compared with a decade ago, when the internet was loosely understandable as a cohesive body, the web now is splintered and evacuated of any semblance of monoculture, as my colleague Charlie Warzel has written. That lack of common practices can breed a sense of disorientation—there’s no one TV show everyone seems to be watching, or one funny post or viral moment of the day. It can also cause logistical headaches.

The party-invite patchwork is especially new to Millennials, many of whom, for years, relied on the trusty Facebook event as their go-to method—one that let hosts be very inclusive about whom they were inviting without needing to have everyone’s phone number or email address. But now the platform has dramatically declined in popularity among younger generations. Hosts, turning to other options, risk inadvertently excluding potential invitees who aren’t on the same apps—especially those outside one’s inner circle. (Meta didn’t respond to my inquiry about its event feature.)

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. Lizzie Post, the great-great-granddaughter of the etiquette doyenne Emily Post and a co-president of her eponymous institute, was far too polite to say as much to me when we spoke on the phone. She did note that although navigating a varied invite landscape is not an entirely new phenomenon, the digital world has introduced novel etiquette questions: For example, if you see an Instagram story about a party, are you really invited?

Post told me that my approach for inviting people to my recent birthday party, at which I served a six-foot sandwich to my friends in Prospect Park, was both clear and “so cool” (not to brag or anything). In addition to my Instagram “close friends” story invite, which stated that anyone who saw it was invited, I sent some personal messages to people who may have missed it, and told other friends about it in person. Was this extra work? A bit. Was it worth it? Absolutely. That our online lives are so diffuse only reinforces the value of in-person gathering. Parties alone can’t fix what my colleague Derek Thompson has called “a hang-out depression,” caused in part by the demands of technology. But, for all the annoyance of our new party landscape, putting in a bit of extra effort to get people together can be a beautiful thing.

Related:

Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out Partiful calls itself “facebook events for hot people.”

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How do you forgive the people who killed your family? It’s time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word, David Karpf argues. Yuval Noah Harari wants to reclaim Zionism.

Today’s News

The longshoremen’s strike has been suspended until January 15, after the union reached a tentative agreement with the U.S. Maritime Alliance. Last month, 254,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy, and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1 percent. The U.S. military launched strikes that hit more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, according to U.S. officials.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s exploration of the art of Edvard Munch is moving and worthwhile, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: What if your ChatGPT transcripts leaked?

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Evening Read

Warner Bros. / Everett Collection

More Evidence That Celebrities Just Don’t Like You

By Spencer Kornhaber

Examples are stacking up: Celebrities just don’t like us. Last year, Donald Glover enlisted his famous friends to make a gruesome TV show about a killer pop fan. This year, Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of 2024, called her most ardent admirers creepy. Now Joker: Folie à Deux offers a tedious lecture about the challenges of fame. Audience members may walk out feeling punished for the crime of wanting to be entertained by a comic-book-inspired movie-musical starring some of the most successful performers on Earth.

Read the full article.

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Lithium is making a comeback. We’re entering uncharted territory for math. Amir Tibon: “How my father saved my life on October 7”

Culture Break

Simon Ridgway / HBO

Watch. Ever feel like your life is determined by powerful forces beyond your reach? Industry (streaming on Max) is the show for you, Zachary Siegel writes.

Read. “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” a short story by Lauren Groff:

“On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many meats on my six-foot birthday sandwich was capicola. This cured meat has long been a staple of my Italian sandwiches, so I was tickled to see it among the words and phrases Merriam-Webster added to its dictionary this year. It is in good company with touch grass and nepo baby.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Examples are stacking up: Celebrities just don’t like us. Last year, Donald Glover enlisted his famous friends to make a gruesome TV show about a killer pop fan. This year, Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of 2024, called her most ardent admirers creepy. Now Joker: Folie à Deux offers a tedious lecture about the challenges of fame. Audience members may walk out feeling punished for the crime of wanting to be entertained by a comic-book-inspired movie-musical starring some of the most successful performers on Earth.

Todd Phillips’s 2019 smash, Joker, connected because it used the extraordinary trappings of the Batman universe to explore the plight of an unextraordinary person. Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck had a mental disorder that caused uncontrollable laughter and some rather involved delusions, but otherwise he was just a soft-spoken dude who kept getting stepped on by other people. Like many of us, he was both enamored with and resentful of the smiling stars he saw on TV. Eventually, Arthur painted his face, started calling himself Joker, and took vengeance on the culture, including by killing a celebrity on air. The fervency of acclaim that the movie spawned—$1 billion worldwide at the box office and a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars—suggested, somewhat chillingly, that the masses found catharsis in this tale.

In the sequel, Arthur is now famous for his crimes, and he finds fame to literally be that thing celebrities always say it is: a prison. Or rather, it’s a mental institution, staffed by abusive guards infected with the madness that comes with power and impunity. He meets another inmate-patient, Lady Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, who’s a huge fan of his. She says his murderous stunt made her feel, for the first time in her life, like she wasn’t alone. Arthur is smitten, or flattered, or both—maybe they’re the same feeling. When prosecutors announce that they’ll try him for the death penalty, his mind is still on Lee, and he breaks into a sweet, rasping tune: “For once in my life, I have someone who needs me.” The song he’s singing, made famous by Stevie Wonder, is one of many 20th-century classics Arthur and Lee will perform, moving back and forth between colorful dreamspace and bleak reality.

[Read: Yes, ‘Joker’ is a very serious drama. No, that’s not a compliment.]

The ensuing courtroom drama investigates a philosophical question: What’s the difference between a person and a persona? Arthur’s attorney pursues an insanity defense, positing that Arthur has a split personality and that Joker is another entity that lives inside his head. Lee encourages Arthur to embrace his villainous side; she even insists on painting his face with clown makeup before they have sex. The movie clearly argues, however, that the Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit invoked by Arthur’s advocates is a dangerous fantasy. The belief that he sometimes transforms into a braver, wilder creature—thereby excusing his sins—inspires his followers to don masks and cause havoc. He eventually disavows the notion that he and Joker are separate, but it’s too late: The myth has gone viral, and Arthur himself could become one of its victims.

This is a pretty strange angle on fame. Lots of celebs who adopt stage names insist that they’re basically two different people; Roan, for example, calls herself a drag queen and says that snooping fans violate a boundary she intentionally set between her public and private selves. Gaga, however, has long tried to resist the idea of a bifurcated identity. The brilliance of her early-career self was that she was all surface, all meat dress. About a decade ago, somewhere between her albums Artpop and Joanne, she flipped the routine and started acting earnest in public. “There was a time in my career when I … spoke in an accent in interviews or told lies, but I was performing,” she recently told Vogue. “Now it’s a much more palatable mixture of authenticity and imagination.” This new approach is apt for an era in which internet-enabled confusion has created a hunger for realness. Performance is always artificial, but stars, more than ever, need us to believe they’re not BSing. Joker: Folie à Deux critiques the impulse to figure out who our idols really are—not because that quest is impossible or even because it’s invasive, but simply because it’s not that deep. An evil clown is an evil clown.

Whatever one might think of that idea, Joker: Folie à Deux has all the ingredients to make for a lively, goth-chic bit of metacommentary. Phillips renders the asylum as a convincingly tactile, gray-brown fortress. He selects golden-era-Hollywood musical numbers whose cheerfulness has a poisoned edge, such as “That’s Entertainment!,” a sing-along, from Fred Astaire’s 1953 film, The Band Wagon, about the public’s thirst for big-screen mayhem. But something’s amiss. Folie à Deux is both overlong and empty, padded out with copious shots of characters walking down hallways or staring out of car windows. The romantic storyline develops too quickly, mostly off-screen, and then just stagnates. Themes get stated and restated in didactic, circular dialogue. I liked one performance, “Gonna Build a Mountain,” set in a nightclub where Gaga pounds the piano and Phoenix tap-dances. But otherwise, the musical performances are underpowered, lacking much movement, personality, or surprise.

[Read: Want to see a snake eat its tail?]

In fact, the film’s problems are so glaring that one can’t help but wonder about what happened behind the scenes. Phoenix has a reputation for prickliness on set. Gaga had some strong moments in A Star Is Born, but as an actor, her main asset is a hard-set pout that’s best suited for generating campy reaction memes. The two have no chemistry on-screen, and the movie feels as though it’s been edited to minimize their interactions. But—there I go, acting like the leering, demanding celebrity-obsessives who are Folie à Deux’s true villains. Hollywood has trained us to look past the facades of what it sells us, to seek the story behind the story. But it resents us for wanting more razzle-dazzle than the stars are always willing or able to give.