{"id":876085,"date":"2026-08-29T18:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/876085\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T18:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:02:09","slug":"why-dont-celebrities-go-away-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/876085\/","title":{"rendered":"Why don’t celebrities go away anymore?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do me a favor. Picture MTV\u2019s \u201cTotal Request Live\u201d at the height of its powers<\/a>. Carson Daly shouting to be heard over an audience of excited adolescents. Feuds stoked daily between teenyboppers like NSYNC<\/a> and teenymoshers like Limp Bizkit<\/a>. Overflow crowds standing on Broadway to scream at the slightest glimpse of a chart-topper in the second-story window of New York City\u2019s One Astor Place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, imagine all that delirium, sign-waving and call-in voting was in service of pushing Art Garfunkel<\/a> to the pinnacle of the premier music video countdown. Ridiculous, right? Garfunkel\u2019s tender folk couldn\u2019t be farther from the chrome-coated zeitgeist of the turn of the last century. The musicians who supplanted the East Village folkies<\/a> were by that time dinosaurs themselves, having been rendered extinct by pop permutations several times over. Daly\u2019s daily countdown was about an eternal present, a shiny go-go now that had no time for the dour, mildewy Neil Young worship <\/a>of the early \u201890s, to say nothing of the decades prior.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that chorus of screams for the latest from Garfunkel, the man behind \u201cAll I Know,\u201d shouldn\u2019t sound so odd to us. After all, we\u2019re about as removed from Destiny Child\u2019s first hit<\/a> (1997\u2019s \u201cNo, No, No\u201d) as the \u201cTRL\u201d audience was from \u201cBridge Over Troubled Water.\u201d The seismic shifts in pop culture made something like Garfunkelpalooza feel silly, while culture publications and the wider social internet will regularly reshape entire weeks<\/a> around the release of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s latest album.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She\u2019s not unique in that regard. Taylor Swift launched a years-long stadium tour<\/a> nearly two full decades after her first chart-topper. Before it ended in December 2024, the \u201cEras Tour\u201d rearranged cities<\/a> that it visited and rejiggered the way that pop fans discussed album cycles and stylistic shifts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The advent of streaming in the late 2000s replaced syndication with on-demand, binge rewatches, extending the half-life of television toward the infinite. Even the smallest side characters were gifted their own spin-offs in the streaming service-boosted age of marketable intellectual property. Disney got to work making spin-offs of spin-offs<\/a> of stories about a bounty hunter who had around 10 minutes of screen time in the original Star Wars trilogy.\u00a0 Small-screen stars leaned into the long tail of their most-famous roles, launching rewatch podcasts for everything from \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cThe Office\u201d to \u201cBeverly Hills, 90210\u201d and \u201cHot in Cleveland,\u201d further extending their 15 minutes of fame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Simon Reynolds was one of the first commentators to notice<\/a>, and pathologized the backwards-looking, stalled-out culture as \u201cretromania\u201d in 2010. Over a decade later, the New York Times thought the problem hadn\u2019t been resolved, wondering whether we were living through a cultural \u201cstandstill.\u201d<\/a> Critic W. David Marx, looking to sum up the curiously stagnant opening decades of the 21st century, cribbed a phrase from one of its enduring icons for the title of his book \u201cBlank Space.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The last 20 years, Marx said, have been one big \u201clowest-common-denominator fight for attention,\u201d meaning it was easier than ever to remain a public figure and make money off the resulting eyeballs. He accused the forces of financialization and social media for creating a world where \u201cfame and infamy\u201d were \u201cindistinguishable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where prior players would be happy to head home and count their money, popping up on occasion in documentaries to discuss the difficulties of guarding Lebron James, Freedom and Royce have delayed their natural decline into trivia by staging a transgender panic around the WNBA.<\/p>\n

In 2026, you can see this play out most obviously via former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White. Picked near the top of their respective drafts, both men crafted passable but underwhelming careers in the league. Where prior players would be happy to head home and count their money, popping up on occasion in documentaries to discuss the difficulties of guarding Lebron James, Freedom and Royce have delayed their natural decline into trivia by staging a transgender panic<\/a> around the WNBA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Freedom and White clearly see a post-league career in playing into the worst of conservative media\u2019s impulses. To that end, they\u2019ve both become outspoken advocates against trans athletes playing in the WNBA. Realizing there are no trans athletes<\/a> in the WNBA currently in the WNBA or entering the draft, they resolved to become the issue and declared themselves women who wish to play in the league. In the weeks since, Freedom has taken to his role as a supposed protector of women by verbally harassing current WNBA players<\/a> while sitting courtside. Knowing that Freedom won\u2019t be deterred from his second-act as a bigot no matter how many arenas he\u2019s thrown out of, it\u2019s hard to get past the idea that we\u2019re playing these arguments out in a void.<\/p>\n

Politics as a whole is hardly exempt from these decades of wheel-spinning. The oddly elongated two term-presidency of Donald Trump, a petty man who rarely fails to bring his old grudges, has turned U.S. global and national politics into one big score to settle. The president never got over his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, and the Democrats never got over theirs to Trump four years before. New wars and new horrors carried out by the Trump administration can\u2019t shake the feeling that we\u2019re having the same old arguments.<\/p>\n

As the 2028 election cycle draws near \u2014 if recent history is a guide, candidates are likely to begin officially declaring their candidacies in early 2027 \u2014 many of the Democratic Party\u2019s contenders can draw a direct line to the presidency of Barack Obama. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Kamala Harris look all but certain to join the race . . . again. Expect them to run along similar moderate lines as before, pitching themselves as the sensible choice and avoiding too much chatter about their previous losses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter<\/a>, Crash Course.<\/p>\n

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo didn\u2019t serve in the Obama administration, but as New York\u2019s former governor during the bulk of the Obama years, he is inextricably tied to the era. Despite his loss in the 2025 New York City mayoral race and credible allegations of sexual harassment, he is making unsettling noises about the race, and is apparently hoping to represent the party\u2019s establishment wing, even though his constituency now amounts to almost no one.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is old enough to collect Social Security. But reports say he\u2019s stress-testing campaign staffers\u2019 tolerance for colorful language in the hopes of running as a bulwark against candidates who oppose U.S. aid to Israel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All this is playing out as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is capping a career of failing to meet the moment by hanging on to his seat and leadership position for dear life \u2014\u00a0and hamstringing the party\u2019s progressive youth movement in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An older, careerist Democratic Party creates a perspective problem that\u2019s hard to overcome. Each passing year carries office holders further away from the median age of their voters and further calcifies their opinions on the way politics gets done. You can see it every time Schumer rolls over for the Trumpist GOP, operating as if the mutual back-scratching vibes weren\u2019t saged from the Capitol Dome the second it was breached by Trump-supporting rioters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But away from the party\u2019s power center, the first flashes of something exciting and new have begun to appear.<\/p>\n

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and his seemingly supernatural competence at both city management and marketing, has laid a blueprint for kitchen-table progressives looking to bust out of the Trump-era holding pattern. The Florida Democratic Party might be running an ex-Republican for governor again, but the Senate candidacy of democratic socialist Angie Nixon gives some hope for forward-thinking campaigns going forward. Any honest rundown of 2028 hopefuls has to include first-wave Sanders-ite Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the strongest indication yet that we might break free from the long shadow of 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A better world, where we never have to type out a name as unpleasant as Gavin Newsom again, just might be possible. <\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

by Alex Galbraith on culture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do me a favor. Picture MTV\u2019s \u201cTotal Request Live\u201d at the height of its powers. Carson Daly shouting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":876086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-876085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}