All celebrity is projection: The Retro Report, vol. 34

Did you hear: Taylor Swift got married last weekend????? I feel like the news of this was even louder than the days-long military plane flyovers that ravaged the airspace above my beloved Washington, DC. And I wasn’t even in Washington. I was in Chicago where (among other local thrills) I stopped by a several fantastic local bookstores to sign copies of Retro!

Get your autographed edition while supplies last at Exile in Bookville, Women and Children First, Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, and Madison Street Books. Indies! We love them!

Of course no matter where in the world you are, you can buy Retro wherever you get your books! (And here’s that UK link for my European readers.) I hear the library waitlists are getting very long :)

I had a fantastic time in conversation with Chris Richards at the excellent Wonderland Books in Bethesda last night. I signed a bunch of books for the store so if you couldn’t make it in person, you can still get a signed copy if you get there fast! And come and see me at my next tour stops:

• I’ll be at Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, NJ on Tuesday, July 21.

• Then I am heading to New York City, baby! Come through to Books Are Magic - Montague Street with The Fountain author Casey Scieszka on Wednesday, July 22. This is a cozy shop so get your tickets ASAP to make sure you have a spot!

• Not to rush the summer but I am very excited to spend a beach day at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth on August 24!

My Caro year is on a bit of a pause because Master of the Senate is too big to take on tour.1 I AM AWARE THAT EBOOKS EXIST but does it shock you to know they do nothing for me?? However: in the spirit of my Caro year, I am talking about public transit all the time because of my beloved Retro Metro!

I loved being on City Cast DC this week to give the full story on how the real Metro inspired my time-traveling one. (We also discussed DC nostalgia. Marvin’s rooftop mentioned! The city before Uber! We remember it all!) You can listen to the full podcast at the link above and watch a video clip—complete with an animated Retro Metro map!—here.

And don’t forget to visit the official Retro Agency site! Plan your trip, get your Pastport, apply for a job and actually get a response: it’s so much better than real life!

Speaking of escaping our real lives: Let us discuss the love lives and weddings of the rich & famous!

Personally I am intrigued by the contrast between Taylor’s wedding—both what we know about the event itself and the public reaction to it—and Dua Lipa’s wedding(s) (a civil ceremony in London, a weekend-long reception in Sicily) just a month prior.2

The way people responded to their respective knot-tyings feels very telling about Where We Are Now and what people want from their celebrities (glamour, fun, intellectual curiosity, taste) versus the paradigm that’s always worked for Taylor but has, of late, fallen out of fashion: be the biggest, shout the loudest, dominate everything all the time.

These days, Taylor operates more like an athlete—collecting stats and trophies—and less like an artist, with a willingness to experiment and be unusual in the pursuit of something beautiful and unique. (Travis’ influence?!) This puts her at odds with the way culture is swinging now, where it feels like even the money people are finally, actually catching on to the idea that audiences have franchise fatigue and crave originality (see: the box office success of Obsession, the Emmy noms sweep of uncategorizeable-horror-comedy Widow’s Bay3; some of the most buzzed-about TV shows of the year starring total unknowns).

All celebrity is projection and Taylor is our biggest screen, so no surprise that people are reading what they will into her mega-nuptials. The most aggressive takes range from “this is the ultimate happy-ever-after for the woman who has been pining to be swept off her feet by a football player since she was fifteen years old 💘 it’s a love story baby just say yes!!” to “so it’s literally a MAGA dog-whistle for her to do this on this July 4th, aka America 250, and by the way did you notice that the guy who owns a for-profit ICE detention center4 made the guest list?” Taylor is just one of those stars now—like Meghan Markle, speaking of celebrities whose wedding was a whole to-do—about whom people cannot be normal.5

Setting aside those two extremes, though, it’s very telling about the cultural moment we’re in that a not-uncommon response to the scale and spectacle of it all was, at best, annoyance, and frequently something closer to disgust: Yet another billionaire commandeering a public space for personal use, the people’s need for holiday weekend transit and/or access to their daily jobs and lives be damned; an obscene use of electricity during a heat wave while thousands lost power (nearly 10,000 in Queens alone) and New Yorkers were told to keep their A/C to a toasty 78 degrees in a we’re-all-in-this-together gesture; a tacky and tasteless business merger masquerading as a romantic extravaganza with a guest list so long it was less of a who’s who and more of a “who? who?”

How did we get here? My sense is this wave has been building since 2024, just over a year into the Eras tour, with the release of The Tortured Poets Department. The combination of Taylor’s juicing of the numbers for TTPD—the endless new variants6 so that her fans would feel compelled to buy dozens of the exact same album, inflating sales numbers in a way that arguably did not accurately reflect the public’s enthusiasm for the music; releasing deluxe editions at times that, to a conspiratorially-minded observer, would appear to exist for the sole purpose of keeping other artists with actually new, popular music from sitting atop the charts for their day in the sonic sun—and the underwhelming offering, released just 18 months later, of Life of a Showgirl, which came with its own battery of promotional grift (such as: a premiere day “original movie” that was literally just the entire album’s lyric videos, as they would appear on YouTube, bookended with minimal footage of Swift making the video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” which was showed in full… twice7) felt, to many, like a real tipping of the hand.

A Defector review summed it up like so:

It has no heart, no purpose, no emotional core. And it is transparently clear why that is: because Swift clearly cared more about producing something—anything—that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying. It’s not an album. It’s a product for sale, and it sounds like one.

A key to Taylor’s success is that her business instincts and her artistic instincts are totally aligned and equal, a rare circumstance more common among corporations8 than individuals. Most artists are either so business-brained their art hardly feels like art at all OR they are capable of extraordinary art but less-than-savvy about how to market or position themselves, frequently finding the act of selling themselves to be repulsive and therefore impossible. At this stage of her career, Taylor’s business brain seems to be running the show(girl), minting money off the artistry that came before.

If the work were better, she’d get away with more—see: TRR vol. 8: work is an absolute defense against gossip—which is why she could ride out any number of potentially vibe-derailing news cycles during the Eras tour, where (say what you will about Taylor!) she consistently delivered on the promise of the ticket purchase, putting on over-the-top, three-plus-hour shows in arenas the world over. But in public-memory terms, that was ages ago, and it’s been too long since the average person—not Swifties, just normies—has seen work from her that occupies as much cultural real estate as her personal life.

Gossip is the monoculture: The Retro Report, vol. 8

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December 5, 2025

This has been a banner few weeks for media gossip, as many of you already know, and if you don’t know, here is the most entertainment and thorough primer on the situation at hand—and also, wow… not knowing anything about this… the BLISS that conjures in my mind! What is

Dua Lipa, at the moment, represents an alternative to this—and again, it says a lot about the state of pop stardom that the artist behind the biggest bop from Barbie scans, culturally, less like Warner Brothers and more like A24. My bias is that I have actually met and had a real conversation with Taylor—a fantastic story I am saving for another day!!!—but/and I am squarely in the target demo for Dua The Celebrity, as is anyone who believes that, were we to one day become fabulously wealthy, we would use our wealth to be fabulous.

While Taylor is an extreme case of a get-that-money millennial for whom the concept of “selling out” simply does not exist, Dua’s personal brand is that she works hard but not so hard that she cannot also be frequently on vacation, trips she documents in a way that advertises a voracious appetite for all that is worthwhile in this life (food, wine, art, dancing, sex). Her book club selections skew toward avant garde and/or unexpected choices, and her interviews with authors are quite thoughtful.

I have heard people refer to Dua’s wedding vibe as “effortless” which is frankly hilarious and obviously absurd, but there is an ease to Dua’s extravagance, evident by the fact that plenty of candid shots and videos from the wedding made their way online in real time, that has been absent from Taylor’s output from the start.9

If Taylor is a big box store—actually: Taylor is Amazon—Dua is the boutique your best-dressed friends know about. Taylor is for people who love Jimmy Fallon (not incidentally: he was at her wedding); Dua is for people who get Kate Berlant and John Early. Etc. Paris: I find that I miss it!

This newsletter is already too long (says Substack) so you will have to wait a week for more retro recs. I promise the next letter will be FULL of recs for what to read and watch as you bask in the high point of summer.

UNTIL THEN: If you missed it or didn’t yet make it through the full list it contained, now is a good time to revisit my TRR on all things weddings (for my newer readers: this includes the objectively-correct counsel on how to give a proper toast!) so you can make the most of the ones you’re attending this season.