The smartest gossip show ever made

In life, you learn that there are certain areas of information you are inherently more facile with. Growing up, while my friends read Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver, I read Entertainment Weekly. Which is to say, my tastes have always run toward pop culture, in whatever form it takes. The fancy end (I have read the books and given a Ken Burns documentary a full two hours of my life) and the distinctly less fancy end (I lost a number of summers to Big Brother, and I still cannot tell you how many cumulative hours of it air per week, but wow, it is a lot). I read all the celebrity gossip sites too, because I found the whole apparatus fascinating. RIP Gawker, RIP.

So I say this with some authority: I am good (enough) at this. I know who people are. But a few years ago I noticed that, more and more, I didn't. I would see a face on a magazine cover, clearly a big deal, paparazzi having clearly lost their minds over this person, and just draw a blank. I could name the specific celebrities now, but I feel that doesn't necessarily help them or me.

But you know who you are. And I still love you, and the system that created you, the one we now all bask in the warm, radiating glow of.

Somewhere along the way I stopped minding the blank, because it turns out the blank is where all the fun lives. This week's pick celebrates exactly the celebrities who sit on the line between known and unknown, a line that grows thinner and more porous every day, perhaps every hour, perhaps every fifteen minutes if fame is feeling literal.

Yes, I see what I did there. And not only did this week's hosts build a show about these people, they built the vocabulary for them.

The pick is Who? Weekly, hosted by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber, two writers in Brooklyn who have been running the same beautiful bit twice a week since 2016: everything you need to know about the celebrities that you... don't. If you have ever stood in a checkout line looking at a magazine cover and thought, “Who is that, and why does everyone seem to know?” this show is the answer to that question and, quietly, a theory of how fame actually works these days.

Keep reading for the theory, because the theory is why this is the pick and not just two funny people you'll like (though you will).

Pix Plus subscribers get Steve's pick for this week, plus three podcasts you'd never find on your own.