Nine out of 10 Black Friday offers are cheaper or the same price at other times of the year, Which? finds.

Among the details on Target’s product page for the official Taylor Swift Eras Tour commemorative book—256 pages; 500 images and personal reflections written by Swift—was one unusual tidbit buried under the header “Specifications.” Most of Swift’s fans surely glossed over the section, which provided information less relevant than the book’s cost ($39.99) and release date (in stores on Black Friday and online the next day). But the book industry noticed: Her publisher is listed as “Taylor Swift Publications.” The superstar is bypassing traditional publishers and releasing her book herself. This perhaps isn’t so shocking—she loves to cut out a middleman. Swift issued her Eras concert movie directly to AMC Theatres and began rerecording her early albums after an ownership dispute; she also has a long-standing retail relationship with Target, which will be the book’s exclusive retailer.

For the companies that produce and sell books, this could be interpreted as a warning sign, because every dollar spent on what is sure to be a massively successful product (Swifties are such prodigious spenders that economists feared her tour would trigger a surge in European inflation) is a dollar that publishers are missing out on. Instead, her decision is less a bellwether for a big-name-oriented industry than a sign of the times—a symptom, not a cause, of a shift in the relationship between these businesses and the famous.

The day after Swift announced her book, David Shelley, the CEO of Hachette, one of the “Big Five” book publishers, said something at the Frankfurt Book Fair that got far less attention: He shared that Hachette will focus on introducing readers to an author’s existing catalog, in order “to have a business that isn’t super reliant on hits.” Best sellers, established tentpoles of the industry, were now “icing on the cake,” he explained. The book industry still welcomes the hype and sales that a star can bring, but more and more, publishers also rely on what they already have: generations’ worth of older titles—what they call the backlist.

Shelley’s sentiments reflect longer-term trends for celebrity authors. Swift isn’t the first star to finesse her own advantageous publishing situation. Lately, various writers with meaningful personal resources—money, followers, notoriety—have struck out on their own or made nontraditional arrangements. Colin Kaepernick and Donald Trump have released books through their own outfits. In 2022, Brandon Sanderson, a prolific and popular sci-fi and fantasy writer, raised millions of dollars through a Kickstarter to self-publish four of his novels. Colleen Hoover, the mega-best-selling author of genre fiction, has continued self-publishing books even after entering into a relationship with Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (along with signing contracts for forthcoming titles with two additional publishers).

But despite the profit incentives of doing everything yourself, it seems unlikely that every celebrity will follow in Swift’s footsteps. Publishing a book is hard and expensive, and requires more than just publicity know-how. Few stars, especially those merely looking to burnish their personal brand, will have the stamina or interest to source editors, lawyers, designers, proofers, rights specialists, and all of the other professionals required to create, distribute, and sell a book. The editing process in particular is useful to many people “regardless of their stature,” Jane Friedman, who reports on the publishing industry, told me. Plus, the less glamorous parts of publishing—How do you get your title into a local bookstore in Des Moines, or Munich? What happens if your shipment of books falls into the sea?—are better left as someone else’s problem. Many celebrities less enthusiastic than Swift about building an empire may think, as Friedman put it, “Do I really need to futz around with this?” (Swift, with her Target relationship and merchandising expertise, is well equipped to futz around with it.)

If the value that publishers bring to authors can vary, the value that famous people bring to publishers has traditionally been significant. Shelley, the Hachette CEO and a self-professed Swift fan, told me that “obviously, I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be my dream for us to publish a Taylor Swift book.” A big best seller can buoy a business. At the 2022 antitrust trial over the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, executives explained that “publishing is a portfolio business, with profitability driven by a small percentage of books.” This setup means that a lot of resources are still marshaled toward projects for established authors, many of them famous.

But “celebrities are not some financial saving grace of traditional publishers,” Friedman told me. They can be meaningful contributors to a company’s bottom line, she said, but “they require as much work to sell well as most titles.” Simply slapping a famous name on a book doesn’t always move product. Sometimes, celebrities parlay their name and following into big-time sales and hype—though, of course, not all of them (or their projects) are created equal. Britney Spears’s 2023 book, The Woman in Me, sold nearly 1 million copies, according to Circana Bookscan, which tracks sales numbers. In other cases, performance is less spectacular—see Billie Eilish’s self-titled 2023 book, which sold only about 81,000 copies. Readers want something new and compelling to dig into, especially when they can see endless images and posts from their favorite stars online anytime. That sales variability for even big-name authors is part of why publishers have been doubling down on their new (old) stream of revenue.

The “Vegas” model of betting on a few big titles each year is receding in favor of a focus on what a company has already published (or obtained by acquiring the backlist of a competitor), Thad McIlroy, a publishing-industry analyst, told me. Long a smaller concern of publishers, interest in backlists accelerated as Amazon and social media scrambled the way books are sold and discovered. (See Chris Anderson’s 2006 book, The Long Tail, published by Hachette, for more on that phenomenon.) Early in the pandemic, people were buying lots of books, many of them old, and this accelerated the shift: In 2020, two-thirds of book sales were backlist titles, and by 2022, that number was closer to 70 percent. Shelley reaffirmed to me what he’d said at Frankfurt: Although one-off wins are “always fun,” an emphasis on the backlist and working with authors across multiple books is central at Hachette. TikTok in particular, he added, has “fundamentally altered” the way people find books, allowing decades-old works—he cited the late sci-fi author Octavia Butler’s novels as an example—to find new and engaged audiences online.

Nothing happens very quickly in the publishing world, and a sudden break from big hits is unlikely. Swift’s new book is more likely to become a memento than a classic; in the coming years, a more conventional project from the singer could well result in the kind of traditional book deal any publisher would be delighted to make. Already, the industry is awaiting her next work—Memoir? Long-rumored novel?—and guessing, or at least hoping, that she will turn to them.

Even so, one of the most likely (and most prudent) courses for the Big Five over the longer term may be to spend less energy chasing big names. Maris Kreizman, an author with deep experience in the industry, told me that she was optimistic about the change in priorities. “I hope that this would take some of [publishers’] attention away from landing the celebrities,” she said. “The amount of time and energy they spend on those kinds of books could be used to help other books grow and find an audience.” This virtuous cycle can happen only if publishers place the same kind of faith in other authors that they've been placing in famous figures; with fewer celebrities in the picture, perhaps they can focus on the weird, vibrant work of smaller authors. That sort of exodus, far from casting a chill through the book world, might actually make it more interesting.

The clearest candidate for America’s favorite fairy tale might be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The author L. Frank Baum set the novel, published in 1900, in a fantasy land that shares core American values: self-sufficiency, personal reinvention, the exploration of wider frontiers. The book’s young heroine, Dorothy, is whisked away to Oz, where she befriends magical creatures, thwarts a witch, and leans on her newfound strength and friends in order to return home. For Dorothy, it is a land of empowerment and possibility; for Baum—who perpetuated manifest destiny’s warped ideals in his other writings—and his many readers, it was an otherworldly representation of the American expanse, a place they perhaps wanted to see for themselves.

Baum’s novel and its sequels were major literary phenomena in their day. But Oz persists primarily through the books’ many adaptations, which established the series’ enduring iconography. Baum’s world is best remembered as it has appeared on-screen, especially in the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy: a place bursting with songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and visuals such as the yellow brick road, which have become the franchise’s most memorable features. And with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s 1956 entry into the public domain, allowing for new, noncanonical works, subsequent generations have iterated on these hallmarks to tell Oz stories of their own.

No transformation has been more vital to Oz’s longevity than Wicked, the revisionist origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of Baum’s most recognizable villains. Based on the author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, Wicked’s prominence is up there with that of its source text, and yesterday’s release of the first part of the musical’s highly anticipated film adaptation will undoubtedly broaden its reach. Key to Wicked’s success—and its ability to bridge Oz’s past and future—is its canny understanding of what, exactly, makes that world work so well.

Artists across genres and mediums have, for decades, found great storytelling potential in Baum’s characters and mythology. But the mode that Oz has continued to lend itself to best is musical theater, a genre predicated on suspension of disbelief and thus well suited to conveying Oz’s odd earnestness. The Wizard of Oz’s 1903 Broadway musical debut was a hit, firing up demands for more stories, which prompted Baum to write a total of 13 sequels to his book.

[Read: The Wizard of Oz invented the ‘good witch’]

The Garland film, inspired in part by the success of the musical, cemented Oz’s connection to music, but it was The Wiz that brought it back to the theater, in 1974. The latter was the franchise’s first majorly reenvisioned entry, a celebration of Black culture that took Dorothy’s story to the 1970s. During its four-year run on Broadway, The Wiz earned several Tony wins; the (less well-received) film adaptation notably starred the then-superstars Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, respectively. The Wiz showed that Baum’s novel could be successfully reinterpreted within a contemporary frame, and its story and characters updated accordingly. This transposition didn’t sacrifice the core imagery and themes—Dorothy still fights off flying monkeys and dons magic slippers to make it back home—but instead retained and even grew their cultural power.

Oz hasn’t translated as well into dramatic, adult-oriented settings, despite numerous writers’ and filmmakers’ efforts. The 1985 Disney film Return to Oz reintroduced the world by utilizing lesser-known characters from Baum’s later books; although it exhibited Oz’s compelling peculiarities, such as sentient furniture and disembodied human heads, it was a critical and box-office failure, deemed too dark for young viewers. Science-fiction authors including Robert Heinlein, Philip José Farmer, and even Stephen King wrote stories incorporating Oz that received mixed reviews. The Syfy miniseries Tin Man and NBC’s one-season flop Emerald City also mostly failed to resonate. Only Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—a tale laden with adultery, murder, and slavery—has taken hold of the popular imagination. Wicked has become the contemporary Oz text, perhaps even superseding Baum’s work: It carries forward the original novels’ mix of campy magic and violent spectacle while bringing in modern literary themes. Maguire’s biggest change was recasting Baum’s antagonist as the antihero, reframing a straightforward villain as a woman misunderstood by her peers—an experience likely more relevant to today’s readers than Dorothy’s simpler tale of good versus evil.

Wicked used Oz’s whimsy and weirdness to deepen Baum’s seemingly unambiguous world, one strictly divided between right and wrong. The basic premise was a powerful one: What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t so bad after all, and what if the Wizard—and the seemingly perfect society he oversaw—was the real threat? In his retelling, Maguire, an Oz fan since childhood, named Baum’s one-dimensional and green-skinned villain Elphaba Thropp; he also gave her a complicated parentage, a soapy romantic arc, and a dorm room. She attended Shiz University alongside a diverse spread of colorful, slang-talking Ozians. And, developing a darker side to Baum’s fanciful creation, Maguire also gave Elphaba a political motivation for wreaking havoc on her homeland: the oppression of its talking animals. But Maguire’s most important addition was the college friendship between Elphaba and Glinda the Good Witch (one of the Wicked Witch’s sworn enemies in Baum’s novel); the musical turns that bond into its emotional core.

[Read: Hollywood’s new crown prince of musicals]

The 2003 Broadway adaptation lent some of the Garland-led film’s sparkle to Maguire’s story and made it appropriate for an all-ages audience. By foregrounding Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship, the musical emphasized Baum’s thematic interest in friendship and self-discovery. Theatergoers could relate to Glinda’s perkiness and craving for popularity and Elphaba’s fish-out-of-water awkwardness the same way they could, in watching The Wizard of Oz or reading Baum’s novel, imagine themselves in Dorothy’s shoes, searching for home. By simplifying Maguire’s plot, the musical better captured the fairy-tale feeling of Baum’s novel. Since its opening, its appeal has proved universal—Wicked has become the second-highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time.

Its success has also translated offstage in a particularly generative fashion. Wicked is now the jumping-off point for numerous fanworks—a meta development, because the show itself is a fanwork of a fanwork. Fan fiction based on the musical has become a genre unto itself; many works imagine a queer relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. Showstoppers such as Glinda’s bubbly “Popular” and Elphaba’s anthemic “Defying Gravity” are well-orchestrated articulations of the show’s ethos, inspiring amateur and professional renditions alike. Enamored artists and theatergoers often reimagine and revisit Wicked, as do budding Broadway lovers who haven’t attended an in-person production: An abundance of bootleg recordings has made Wicked one of musical theater’s most accessible entry points. It’s also a gateway into the broader world of Oz. Wicked and its own iterations—including its long-awaited film adaptation, which has already become a cultural event—work for the same reasons Baum’s original story did: They conjure a world that is buoyant, relatable, and unforgettable.

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Let us extend our ethic of care to our celebrities, and in particular white celebrities, so many of whom contributed their time and talent to the Kamala Harris campaign. These people understand both justice and mercy, and their greatest concern is neither fame nor fortune, but the plight of America’s—and the world’s—most disadvantaged. Consider Mark Ruffalo.

The day before the election, he posted on Instagram a comedic short to “help Trump go bye-bye,” a compilation of clips of Donald Trump saying “Bye” or “Bye-bye.” The day before that, he’d posted a video of two young Native American people worried about the upcoming election: “We need a superhero,” one of them says and, just like that: Mark Ruffalo! “It’s scary,” he says. “Trump does not care about the Native people.”

He also posted a video he’d made with Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American who is a World Economic Forum “Exceptional Woman of Excellence.” Ruffalo, however, was the star. The video was intended for voters so angry about the war in Gaza, they were considering a protest vote for a third-party candidate over Harris: “If you’re thinking of voting for Jill Stein, please take a listen,” Ruffalo said, in his compelling, patronizing way. “I understand how devastated and angry you are,” he said. “For over a year now, many of us have been on the front lines of calling for the end of the genocide in Gaza and now the killing in Lebanon.” Who is “us”? And where was the “front line”? West L.A.? Studio City? (Ruffalo, needless to say, has not spent the past year sharing his outrage over the Hamas attacks of October 7 that took 1,200 lives and precipitated the conflict.)

“We’ve been outraged at the Biden administration’s complicity and inhumanity as the invasion has spread to Lebanon and marches closer and closer towards a forever war,” he said, and offered the weirdest political pitch in history: Show up for Harris because “we can and we will hold her accountable on her first day in office.” Even for those voters who might have shared his premises, it was a bizarre theory: Vote for a war criminal so we can frog-march her to American Nuremberg as soon as she climbs down from the podium.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

This is one of the things that white celebrities do best: forge a bond with members of a marginalized community, and then tell them what to do. But this time, it didn’t work. What’s a superhero to do when he learns that at least half of Native Americans voted for Trump? (“Long time coming,” said a former vice president of the Navajo Nation, Myron Lizer.)

What about the gut punch of almost half of Latino voters choosing Trump? That’s something the white celebrities weren’t prepared for, and it hurt. But they had to put on a brave face. As Brad Pitt told Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Let us respect the privacy of the white celebrities at this difficult time. Three-tenths of Black men under the age of 45 voted for Trump. There’s no one with whom white celebrities assume greater common cause than young Black men. The Black Lives Matter protests were their Tiananmen Square.

The minute it became clear that Harris had lost, reporters and panelists began offering explanations—explanations so obvious that you had to wonder why they hadn’t seen the loss coming. Of course they were correct: The results proved that millions of people don’t want to see an apparently endless flow of undocumented immigrants entering the country; they loathe the way DEI absolutism empowered an army of bureaucrats to mete out mysterious punishments for ridiculous offenses. They don’t want to hear anyone’s pronouns; they don’t want to be told that crime is down when they’re busy getting carjacked; and they never, ever want to watch The View again.

These various social causes helped win Trump the election. His narrative didn’t pass most tests of logic or economic theory and yet it was constructed on a foundation of grievances that rang true to millions of Americans, and Democrats met it with no narrative at all. It was as though the party had spent a quarter century running a very large tab, and on Election Day, the whole thing finally came due. I couldn’t really attach that vague sense of the problem to any of its component parts, so as I always do when I’m confused about the Democratic Party, I called Noah Redlich.

“How did this happen?” I asked him, and he said something that not a single aggrieved commentator or anyone on the Topanga front line had said.

“When I heard J. D. Vance say that he was in fourth grade when Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, I said, ‘We’re screwed!’”

Noah is a second-year law student at Fordham University. I’ve known him since he was 5. At 7 he could tell you the name of every U.S. senator. It wasn’t just a party trick—as he grew older, his interest in politics grew into a strong belief in the Democratic Party’s potential to improve the lives of the working and middle classes. I spend a huge amount of time talking to Democrats, some of them extremely well versed in the party’s positions on various topics. So why do I trust Noah more than these mandarins? Because more often than not, they’ll break into an argument that requires me to accept that various facts on the ground don’t exist. Noah has worked or volunteered on many campaigns, and when he would come back from a red state he would never say “Those Republican voters are scum.” He would come back saying “These voters are concerned about …”

“When Vance talked about NAFTA,” Noah said, “it had a visceral connection with a lot of people who continue to be deeply affected by it. Even the name of that agreement has deep resonance for a huge number of people from Appalachia and across the Midwest, because they saw their manufacturing jobs disappear.”

Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.

“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”

Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead  to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with—and benefit—the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.

Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.

And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”

“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”

And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey—in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.

She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.

For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.

One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.

“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”

He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?

Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.

But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created—in the country of opportunity—a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.

Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.

Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

In a populist moment, the Democratic Party had the extremely rich and the very famous, some great music, and Mark Ruffalo. And they got shellacked. Now a lot of people seemed stunned by what happened, sobered by it.

Cuban scrubbed his X account of all political posts, declared himself on “political vacation,” and joined Bluesky, where, if not absolution, then at least a less political position could be staked out. He made a bad bet (why does Bezos make all the right moves?) and now needs to retool the factory.

Ruffalo appeared at a long-scheduled awards dinner for the ACLU of Southern California five days after the election. He got a little choked up, asked everyone to stand up and hug it out, and admitted that it had been hard for him to come to the event at all—which was a relatable position, because everyone hates the Beverly Hilton, but surely it was an easier gig than the front line?

But it’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things—and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt—but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.

And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?