The Electric State, starring Millie Bobby Brown, has had scathing reviews - but Netflix won't mind.

Some TV shows catch on because they are great art. Others catch on because they offer soothing distractions from a hectic world. And some catch on because they cause people to text their friends, in a frenzy, “Please watch this immediately because I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOU!!!”

When I get texts like that, I almost always oblige: I will take any opportunity to be a good friend by watching bad TV. That is how I came to The Traitors, the hugely popular reality show that has just streamed its third season on Peacock. It is also why I have begun sending my own “Please watch this!” texts to friends. When they ask for more detail, though, I find myself stumbling: How can I explain why they should watch the show when I’m not entirely sure what it is? It’s a reality competition, I might begin, that brings together a group of reality stars. (In a castle! In Scotland!) And they play a version of the party game Mafia, so everyone is sort of scheming against one another. Some people are “killers”—those are the “Traitors”—and they try to “murder” the “Faithfuls,” and anyone might be “banished” …

At this point, sensing that I am confusing my audience rather than convincing them, I might switch gears: So the show’s host is Alan Cumming, the actor and international treasure. He wears glorious outfits that are basically characters themselves. And he’ll casually quote Shakespeare and Tennyson? And he pronounces murder like “muuuuurder.” And the whole thing is definitely camp. But it’s satire too?

The Traitors plays like a live-action Mad Lib. And it is not one show, in the end, but many. It was adapted from a BBC version that was itself adapted from a Dutch series. It collects its cast from the far reaches of the reality-TV cinematic universe: Think The Avengers, with the heroes in question joining forces not to save the world but to win a cash prize of “up to $250,000.” Contestants live together (as on Big Brother) and are divided into tribes (Survivor). They participate in physical “missions” and vote one another off the show via weekly councils (Survivor again).

The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it’s derivative in a winking way. It doesn’t merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It’s not just reality TV—it’s hyperreality TV.

Earlier iterations of the show were slightly more traditional than the current one: They featured noncelebrity contestants. The most recent, though, benefited from the second season’s genius pivot: It took an upcycle approach to its casting. And so it unites the infamous (Tom Sandoval of Vanderpump Rules; Boston Rob of Survivor), the semi-famous (several Real Housewives), and those who are tangentially connected to fame (a Britney Spears ex-husband; Prince Harry’s distant relative; an influencer known first for his abs and second for being Zac Efron’s brother). Some are gamers—players who, having come from competition-based shows, are well schooled in the art of televised manipulation—and others are personalities. Some come to the show having met already, bringing old rivalries into a new context: Danielle and Britney from Big Brother, Sandoval and Chrishell Stause (the Vanderpump and Selling Sunset stars have long-standing crossover beef). For the most part, though, the contestants are 23 strangers, picked to live in a castle and have their lives taped.

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

Three of those players, initially, serve as the show’s Traitors: the conspirators who bring murder and mayhem, and who manipulate much of the action. The first three Traitors are determined by Cumming, who serves as master of ceremonies and chief agent of chaos. Cumming is, like the contestants, playing both himself and a character: a Scottish laird with a sadistic streak, part Cheshire cat and part jungle predator, prone to purring lines rather than simply delivering them. When he selects his Traitors—the game’s most consequential decision—his rationale is as opaque to viewers as it is to the players.

In short order, though, the contestants are treating their game as a morality play. Those who seem “good” as people are assumed to be Faithfuls. Those who do not (Sandoval, Boston Rob) are assumed to be Traitors. Factions form. Mistakes are made. Faithfuls are banished; Traitors perform innocence so well that they earn other people’s trust. People who have played themselves on TV are now playing other people who have played themselves on TV. “I swear to God—to God!” one competitor says, as he assures his fellow contestants that he is not a Traitor. (He is a Traitor.) Another serves up an Oscar-worthy breakdown after a Traitor’s identity is revealed. (The “shocked” contestant is, yes, a fellow Traitor.) Loyalties, betrayals, manipulations: These are the terms of Mafia as a parlor game. These are also, The Traitors knows, the terms of reality TV.

I should note that all of this melodrama is taking place against an aesthetic of “Castle” and a series of references to … Guy Fawkes? (I think?) The show features literal cloaks and daggers; Cumming repeatedly wears the capotain hat associated with the 16th-century British rebel; Fergus, the castle’s silent assistant, at one point carries a barrel labeled GUNPOWDER. This is another feature of the show: It blurs the line between reference and allusion. It explodes Poe’s Law as effectively as Fawkes tried to explode the high house of the British Parliament. What, actually, is the show getting at with these Fawkesian hints? Is the connection simply that Fawkes was executed as, yes, a traitor? Is the show making a broader point? Is it making any point?

The Traitors raises many such questions. Why, for example, does it do so much to establish its torch-lit, wrought-ironed aesthetic only to adorn its flame-flickered dungeon with sleek camping lanterns that could have come from Bass Pro Shops? Why does one episode feature Epcot-esque re-creations of the moai heads from Easter Island? Why does another feature a wedding? Why does another involve coffins? Why do some of the show’s most climactic scenes—the revelations about who has been muuuuurdered—take place over brunch?

Reality TV has, at this point, schools: the romantic realism of The Bachelor, the impressionism of the Housewives, the Dada of Love Island, the pop art of The Masked Singer. The Traitors references all of them—their structures, their tropes, their tones—but also the world at large. It teases and provokes without offering further explanation. It merges truth and simulation, until the two are indistinguishable. That is how the show turns reality into hyperreality—and “reality” into art.

Reality TV enjoys some of the same affordances that art does. If The Traitors wants to include cloaks that evoke Eyes Wide Shut and clowns that evoke Stephen King and incredible tartan numbers that may or may not reference the suit that Cher Horowitz wore in the 1995 movie Clueless—if it wants to send new players to the castle in wrought-iron cages, or set a physical challenge within a Viking boat carved to resemble a dragon—the show does not need to justify its decisions. The alchemy that turns “reality” into entertainment ultimately makes reason itself somewhat beside the point.

But then: Where is the line between catching a reference and inventing one? The Traitors is not using only reality-TV shows as its source material. It is also using literature. A physical challenge involves a game of human chess (Through the Looking-Glass). Cumming describes revenge as “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson). He teases upcoming muuuuurders by announcing, “Something wicked this way comes” (Macbeth). He punctuates the revelation of the latest muuuuurder by way of Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince.”

But the obvious references—obvious in the sense that they can be Googled and otherwise sourced—blend with the references that merely insinuate. One of the show’s physical challenges involves bugs. (A reference, maybe, to Survivor? Or Jackass?) Another requires players to dangle from an airborne helicopter (The Apprentice?) and sway on a single tether as they attempt to drop things into a space that has been designated the “Ring of Fire” (Johnny Cash? Circuses? Plate tectonics?). The Survivor-like councils that determine which contestants will be banished take place around a piece of furniture dubbed the Round Table (Camelot? Pizza?). Cumming introduces an early meeting by saying, “It is time to sentence one of you to a fate worse than death: democracy” (ummm?).

[Read: Reality TV’s absurd new extreme]

Contestants, too, can carry those ambiguities. Ivar Mountbatten, a real-life lord, is the only contestant who hasn’t come from the world of entertainment. You could read his presence as an embedded joke about the British monarchy, that ancient version of reality TV. You could wonder whether he is somehow connected with the Scotland and the Guy Fawkes of it all, since both have sought, in their own ways, to challenge the power of the Crown. Or his presence could be a matter of expedience—whether commercial (Netflix’s historical drama The Crown and its documentary series Harry & Meghan have given the name Mountbatten new recognizability, and he recently became a tabloid name in his own right) or logistical (perhaps his agent knows The Traitors’ producers?).

The hall of mirrors, once entered, is difficult to navigate. And soon enough, the questions can compound. Where do the references end? easily gives way to: Where does the appropriation begin? Although scholars can only speculate about what the moai heads of Easter Island meant to the people who created them, we can pretty safely assume that they were more than mere jokes. Here they are, however, re-created in a vaguely plasticine form, as tools in a challenge that might help lower-firmament reality stars get closer to their full $250,000.

In another context, this might look like an insult. On The Traitors, though, it becomes a question—about the permissions and limits of reproduction. Cumming, at one point, wears a shimmering pale-green suit, accessorized with a spiked tiara. It gives “Statue of Liberty” but also “Catholic saint.” The tiara-meets-halo might connect to Fawkes, whose Catholicism drove him to fight the Protestant power structure. Or it might connect to debates about iconoclasm, with their questions about religious iconography. Or maybe it’s simply a great accessory? Maybe those “connections” are not connections at all?

Camp is its own reference without a source—a term, and a sensibility, claimed and reclaimed so steadily that it has entered the realm of “you know it when you see it.” But one of camp’s features, in most definitions, is performance as a form of resistance: expression and idiosyncrasy serving as a rejection of a stifling status quo. It is queerness, refusing to be constrained. It is authenticity, refusing to apologize. It is absurdity. It is joy.

This is The Traitors too. Yet the series performs freedom not just by rejecting the past but also by embracing it—and, possibly, reclaiming some of it. For the aforementioned wedding challenge, Cumming wears a white suit studded with red flowers. The outfit reads like a declaration about the sanctions of marriage and the rites that shape modern society. An outfit he wears in another challenge—a sequined suit in a military style, with neckwear that suggests a Medal of Freedom—does a similar thing. Most reality shows offer escapism: the relief of alternate and insular worlds. But The Traitors is all too aware of the world it is streaming into—one where hard-won rights are threatened, where expression is being curtailed, where a new bit of progress is being banished every day.

That awareness serves the show’s satirical edge. It also expands the permissions of camp to The Traitors’ audience. People on Reddit threads puzzle out the references, trying to discern what the allusions might mean—or whether they are allusions at all. They analyze. They debate. Every reality show has a version of that digital second life; The Traitors, though, inspires conversations that stretch far beyond the show’s limits. They bring Hamlet and Tennyson and Alice in Wonderland’s human-chess game to new audiences, in new forms.

Along the way, they offer embedded reminders that art is itself a wink to be enjoyed and a mystery to be solved. It is always evolving, reclaimed, and reinterpreted. The works that are venerated today as “high culture”—the stuff of capital-L literature, of exclusivity, of snobbery—began, very often, as works of pop culture. They offered respite, community, wonder. “To be or not to be,” Hamlet said, his angst both performed and very real. He would come to capture, for many, something true and essential about modernity. Before that, though, Hamet was just a guy on a stage, being messy and dramatic, living out his era’s version of a reality show.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.)

Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.”

If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.”

Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings.

Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter.

Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies.

After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire.

Related:

The Tesla revolt The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. DOGE is courting catastrophic risk. Don’t trust the Trumpsplainers.

Today’s News

In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods. The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza. The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office.

Evening Read

Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux

The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs

By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The FAA’s troubles are more serious than you know. Academia needs to stick up for itself. The Iranian dissident asking simple questions Throw Elon Musk out of the Royal Society.

Culture Break

Netflix / Everett Collection

Watch. There’s nothing else like Mo, Hannah Giorgis writes. The Palestinian American sitcom (streaming on Netflix) is the first of its kind—and takes its humor very seriously.

Read. “As much as I love the [sci-fi] genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time,” Bong Joon Ho, the director of Mickey 17, told David Sims in an interview.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On Mo, the Netflix dramedy about a family of Palestinian refugees living in Houston, national labels are of deep importance. Throughout the series, Mohammed Najjar (played by Mohammed “Mo” Amer) struggles to hold on to employment—and any sense of security—because he’s not yet a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. His situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the American government, and many people he encounters, doesn’t recognize his family’s homeland as a legitimate state.

Early in the show’s second and final season, which premiered at the end of January, this sense of placelessness manifests in a frustrating conversation with a powerful diplomat. Mo, who is undocumented, has inadvertently traveled to Mexico and can’t legally return to Texas; he gains an unlikely audience with an American ambassador who offers to help him. But when the politician tries toasting to “your safe return and a peaceful end to the conflict,” gesturing toward unrest in Palestine, Mo can’t stop himself from challenging the nebulous characterization. His indignation gets him thrown out of the ambassador’s house, all but guaranteeing that Mo won’t get home in time for the Najjars’ long-awaited asylum hearing. After two decades spent in legal limbo, Mo once again has to come to terms with his indefinite future as a stateless person. Despite how naturally he seems to inhabit and move between multiple identities—Palestinian, American, racially ambiguous Texan—he can’t lay claim to any of them under the law.

This toggling sense of identity is crucial to how the characters of Mo see themselves—and in a recent conversation, Amer (who co-created the semi-autobiographical series with Ramy Youssef) told me the tense exchange with the ambassador is one of his favorites. The disagreement confirms Mo’s character: He’s steadfast in his Palestinian identity, but he’s also brash and prideful in ways that routinely get him in trouble. As Amer put it to me, “He’s willing to ruin his own life to make sure that he’s staying true to it, trying to stay true to himself.” The moment is just one example of how Mo tells an honest, complicated, and, most important, funny story about a Palestinian American family—and the territorial limbo that shapes their lives, even as they live thousands of miles away.

[Read: On Mo, it’s either God or therapy]

Shows about undocumented people are still rare, and Mo was the first American series to fully focus on a family of Palestinian protagonists. But the newest episodes were made in a particularly fraught climate. Mo’s writers started working on the second season a month before the dual Hollywood strikes began in May 2023. They reconvened that October, just days before Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. The mounting death toll in Palestine put the show’s writers in a difficult position. Some viewers may have felt that Mo had a responsibility to address the escalating violence; others could be reflexively uncomfortable with hearing the words settler or occupation, language that pops up periodically in the show’s dialogue, sometimes in heated debates that Mo then defuses with humor.  

Instead of taking on the news directly, the season follows a main arc that Mo’s writers began developing back in April 2023, Amer told me. It continues a storyline from Season 1, when Mo’s widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), started a small olive-oil business called 1947—after the last year before the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians after the state of Israel was created. Yusra was born in Palestine, but spent much of her life away from it. After settlers took over her parents’ land in Haifa, her family fled to the West Bank, where many of her relatives still live. Yusra later left for Kuwait with her husband; when the Gulf War broke out, the couple moved once more, to Texas. Whenever Yusra talks about the olive oil she bottles in Texas, her longing for home is obvious—but so is her commitment to creating something from the pain of the protracted separation from her relatives, whom she hasn’t seen in decades.  

When we spoke, Amer recalled an aunt in Palestine shipping him some homemade olive oil and apologizing for not sending more; settlement blockades had prevented the family from accessing some of their olive groves. Still, he said, it was important to her to send what she could. That same sentiment is palpable when the Najjars finally make it to their family’s groves in Burin in Season 2, where they sing, eat, and commune with their loved ones under the shade of the olive trees. Despite the ever-present threat of violence from settlers and military authorities surrounding the groves, they rejoice because they’re together on the land. It’s one of the show’s most affecting scenes, and an uncommon representation of life in this region. Warm snapshots of life in Palestine are a rare sight in American media and pop culture, where images of Palestinians most often circulate alongside chronicles of conflict and devastation.  

[Read: A Saturday Night Live monologue that felt more like a prayer]

To the extent that Mo’s depiction of violence in the West Bank or the pains of refugee life feels especially timely, it’s largely a reflection of how much American awareness has shifted since October 7. But Amer has also said the creative team’s personal griefs are sublimated in this season, in a way that enhances the show’s resonance. This season, Yusra and her daughter, Nadia, lovingly disagree over the former’s constant attention to harrowing news back home—a dynamic that is incredibly familiar to Cherien Dabis, the Palestinian American actor who plays Nadia. In October 2023, Dabis, who is also a filmmaker, was in Palestine working on a historical drama about a family displaced from Jaffa in 1948. She was forced to evacuate, and to put the feature on hold, all while overwhelmed with fear about what would happen—so the news was always on. As she explained at a recent Mo screening in New York City, “The show was like a container for so many of us to come together and talk about what we were feeling during that incredibly intense, horrific time that is not over and didn’t just begin.”

The show’s portrait of the Najjars conveys the existential stakes of their statelessness, but it also highlights the beauty of the relationships they’ve been able to forge. Because the people who love him take Mo—and the Najjars’ struggles—seriously, they aren’t afraid to point out that Mo doesn’t always wind up in hot water because he’s valiantly defending his heritage or standing up for justice in the world. Sometimes, Mo really does seem to be crumbling under the pressures of life in a country where neither his heritage nor his local bona fides are respected. But he’s often just being an impatient, inconsiderate jerk. One of the delights of watching Mo is how clearly the series engages with all of its characters’ complexities—Palestinians, the show’s blundering protagonist included, don’t have to be perfect to hold our attention.

Actor and comedian Mo Amer explains why he avoided mentioning the 7 October attack in the show's storyline.

This week also sees the third season of The Wheel of Time come out, and WWE 2K25 is finally being released.

The Duchess of Sussex launched With Love, Meghan on Tuesday.

Remember Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video? Apologies for dredging up this piece of regrettable pop culture, but back in March 2020, the Wonder Woman star recruited a gaggle of her famous friends to film themselves singing—no, butchering—John Lennon’s “Imagine” to boost morale as people began to quarantine amid the rise of COVID. The resulting clip, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber put it at the time, “somehow made a global pandemic feel even more hopeless than it already does.”

Public figures often attempt to move their fan bases, only to inspire a collective cringe instead. In 2022, the actor AnnaLynne McCord, then best known for starring in a reboot of Beverly Hills, 90210, taped herself reciting a poem she’d written to Vladimir Putin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; it begins with the line “I’m so sorry that I was not your mother.” After posting it to social media, she was roundly mocked by online commenters. In January, Selena Gomez cried in an Instagram video as she discussed the mass arrests of migrants within the first week of President Donald Trump’s new term. The issue is personal to Gomez—the multihyphenate celebrity is the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants and executive-produced a Netflix docuseries on the subject—but her plea, too, drew the internet’s ire. Conservative pundits, perhaps unsurprisingly, criticized her message (and its emotional delivery); other commenters chided her for the seeming theatricality of filming her distress.

The actor Hunter Schafer, however, seems to have avoided a similar fate. In a nearly nine-minute-long TikTok she posted late last month, the Euphoria star, who is trans, recounted receiving her new passport and seeing that she is described as “male” on it. The change came in accordance with the Trump administration’s recently issued executive order stating that the federal government recognizes only biological sex, not gender identity. (Schafer, who is 26 years old and has used the female gender marker since her teens, explained that she had her passport stolen while working abroad last year; she then needed to, upon her return to the United States in February, replace the temporary emergency document she’d received.)

[Read: For celebrities, apathy can be a form of political credibility]

Schafer described her shock; although the switched gender marker doesn’t affect her self-perception, she said, she was dismayed by “the difficulty that this brings into real-life shit,” including going through customs and “having to out myself to border-patrol agents.” Yet unlike Gomez, McCord, and the “Imagine” crew, Schafer has not received much mockery online. Instead, her video has been extensively shared across social media as a frank example of how the new policy has begun to affect Americans.

That relative lack of blowback is telling. Celebrities have come to seem more accessible than ever on the internet, with multiple platforms available for them to communicate intimately and directly with the public. But the motives behind their words face greater public scrutiny too. If celebrities can use social media to show off parts of their personal life—the average person can see inside their home or monitor their romantic relationships—to endear themselves to the public, their activism can come off calculated rather than authentic.

This changing relationship explains why Gadot’s and McCord’s efforts were seen as tone-deaf, too staged to be taken seriously. Gomez, meanwhile, was clearly sincere, admitting as she sobbed that she didn’t know how she could help those being detained and deported, but her demonstrative message led viewers to focus on her delivery rather than her intent. Fans and passive followers alike seem to be swayed by neither raw emotion nor rehearsed performances. So what do people actually want from celebrities today, when they try to respond to wider issues?

Schafer’s video offers a clue. Crucially, she clarified that she had no expectations for how people might receive her recording. “I’m not making this post to fearmonger or to create drama or receive consolation,” she said. “I don’t need it. But I do think it’s worth posting to note the reality of the situation, and that it is actually happening … I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.”

It’s a remarkably blunt statement from a celebrity, especially at a time when few industry figures are making such appeals. (Hollywood seemed much more vocal at the start of Trump’s first term.) Schafer was also not encouraging her millions of followers to act. She presented her anecdote straightforwardly, walking her viewers through her experience. She was unrehearsed but not unprepared; at one point, she referred to the notes she took about the executive order that resulted in the change to her passport. And over and over, Schafer declared that this was, most of all, a “harsh reality check” for her. “I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented,” she said. “We start to normalize the circumstances we’re under.” She expressed anger at the administration but ultimately focused on conveying a simple message: that the label for her identity was changed without her consent.

[Read: The celebrities are saying the loud part quietly]

Perhaps as a result, Schafer’s video has generated headlines for exactly the reasons she intended. Viewers who might not be keeping tabs on the political news of the day are learning that the Trump administration has enacted policies with material impacts on transgender people. Relatively few people appear to have made condescending comments or hyperbolic criticism about her video, and I suspect that’s because Schafer made her articulation unassailable: She was so direct, so transparent, and so measured that if any commentators did try to condemn her tone, they’d seem histrionic in comparison.

After Gomez took down her video, she shared a note saying that “apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people”—which she later also deleted. But if the overall response to Schafer’s experience is any indication, empathy isn’t what made most viewers bristle at Gomez’s tearful musings; her overwhelming emotion, and the implicit assumption that it would be compelling to viewers, was. Schafer actually considered deleting her video too; in the caption for her TikTok post, she wrote that she’d thought about replacing it with “a more concise/well spoken thing” but decided against doing so. By talking plainly and taking time to explain her intentions, Schafer showed that she understood the shifting dynamic between celebrities and their followers online—that she couldn’t assume their interest or support, let alone demand anything from them. She could, however, capture their attention by telling a concrete story. Separating a performer from their performance has become difficult—and appealing to logic, not pathos, may be the only way to cut through the noise.

The new series of Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive captures the moment Red Bull team principal Christian Horner learned of alleged messages between himself and a female colleague.

Much of the discussion around tariffs has been about the negative impact they’re likely to have on consumers and their purchasing power. But some companies, if not consumers, could see an upswing in business due to a trade war.

Read more...