"Spears is living out our ur-nightmares -- showing up naked at school, or arriving at a test that we didn't know we had while everyone chortles and points and we fail. That is actually what MTV set her up to do on Sunday night and since, as we've passed around the video clip of her lameness." - September 12, 2007

"But shame on Spears for cheerfully submitting to our expectations once again, after all these years and all the crap she's taken. I'm willing to believe that she was pushed into show business by a striving mom (a woman whom time, and the arrival of Vampire Mother of the Damned Dina Lohan on the scene, has flattered), molded into a confusing vamp-virgin and told to sing songs about being hit while wearing a schoolgirl outfit..." - September 12, 2007

"There's no denying that these recent chapters of Spears' tale have been riveting in their own way. Her story is so rich that it might serve as a text on which to base a master's thesis about the projections of sexuality on a female body... Of course, we're still in the throes of last week's Babylon narrative, one that ended with a dead body being rolled out of a hotel room under a sheet; that particular body is rapidly decaying as Spears' story unfolds." - February 23, 2007

" It's because it's a great yarn that sparks our imagination. We greedily consume the daily, sometimes hourly, snippets of Spears' tale with precisely the glee we reserve for any salacious narrative. We've always done it, whether it's been about Little Dorrit or "General Hospital's" Luke and Laura. Instead of waiting for next month's installment or tomorrow's episode, we gobble this serialized tale in weekly and daily glossy chapters, but still treat it as a bildungsroman melodrama that titillates and satisfies us most when it takes tragic twists and precipitous turns.

We analyze the scraps of reportage that -- even if they seem shakily fact-based at best -- are most thrilling in their illicit vulnerability. We guess at what will happen next, and wonder and tsk at the motivations of the players, in part because we hope to be the one at the water cooler to correctly guess the outcome, and in part because the draw of an unfolding and dramatic story propels us forward in our fictions and in our lives." - Feb 23, 2007

"For too many years we have sat, paralyzed in the tractor beam of her wall-eyed celebrity, watching mutely as bad things happened to her band of D-list compatriots. We have witnessed the declining personal fortunes and liver health of her rotating cast of skuzzball BFFs, boyfriends and frenemies -- Bijou Phillips, Nicole Richie, Kimberly Stewart, Lindsay Lohan, Brandon Davis, Stavros Niarchos, Tara Reid -- because, really, who the hell were those people, anyway?" - December 11, 2006

"We had almost forgotten her, and the way she and her parents freaked us out and made us sad and beguiled us with empty-calorie news for the better part of a year." - August 18, 2006

"So maybe that's all I want: for the mainstream press to save Whitney [Houston] from the tabloid and reality-TV haze that seems to have enveloped and obscured everything about who she was before. The tragedy here -- in addition to the loss of a talent and the apparent illness of a once-healthy woman -- is the way that loss and illness have sucked dry our well of respect for someone who made an artistic and social impact." - April 12, 2006

"If this year is any indication, we do not have the capacity for boredom when it comes to Jennifer Aniston and her tale of betrayal, loneliness and redemption. So intense has our preoccupation with her been that it's easy to imagine press-shy celebrities like Julia Roberts rapping on the door of Us Weekly: "Um, I had twins? I totally have baby pictures? Anyone?"

How has Aniston managed to hold our attention when so little else -- from the victims of Hurricane Katrina to the bust-up of Renée Zellweger's marriage -- can?" - November 26, 2005

Please, not another instant cultural analysis. Please, spare me the endless contrast of tabloid journalism with "high-minded" and "serious" subjects to which "we" aren't paying attention. In fact, please stop leavening these manic-depressive odes to the supermartket-mag vaccum with the word "we". US Weekly circulates about 1.8 million copies a pop. 1.8 million! The November 15 debate drew 4 million viewers. I understand I'm pitting my anonymous, subjective experience against Traister's, but her (or should I say "their"?) fixations are not mine; if I'm in an airport I'll pick up a newspaper or a Sports Illustrated, but I'm not about to indict an undefined population for participating in March Madness pools while there's a war on.

I wonder if all the hand-wringing and high-flown cultural analysis enables the continued, relative popularity of gossip outlets. By projecting onto, and defending people 1) you've never met, and 2) only understand in a superficial way - about as much as I understand any particular Salon writer - it only gives credibility to the gossipers that they're mining worthy material. The Times doesn't publish crotch shots, but because their readership pretends the broadcasted travails of a half-dozen women is emblematic of some societal problem, writers with more deserving targets get to toss their pens into the pool.

Every few months or so, Traister is good for another compare-and-contrast essay about this year's tabloid princess, the nasty press who won't let her be, and the awful, awful readers who are too smart and good for this kind of thing but can't help it anyway, because gee, we actually have a lot invested in this person, symbolically. I'm all for cultural critique, but there's such a thing as picking your battles. Decrying "our" love affair with celebrity trivia over and over again... thou dost... well, you know.