Taylor Swift got married in the middle of Manhattan, inside the most famous arena in the country, while thousands of fans stood outside knowing they would see nothing at all. That gaudy spectacle of privacy got me thinking about the strange unwritten contract between famous people and the rest of us.

In this episode I trace 70 years of fan culture, from a girl mailing a letter into the void in 1955 to a generation that can no longer tell whether the door is really open, and ask how we went from admirers to something closer to shareholders.

Along the way: what the quiet comebacks of Louis CK, Scott Rudin, and Mel Gibson say about how long our outrage actually lasts, why Bill Burr's Saudi gig bothered me more than I can defend, and what the Nate Bargatze backlash reveals about the versions of people we author in our own heads. And the ...