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Reason
Reason
Katherine Dee

The Rise of the Non-Celebrity Celebrity

Lindsey Weber TikTok Clavicular Beyoncé Kim Kardashian

I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber, Crown, 256 pages, $33

In the spring of 2025, I started seeing fan-made videos of the same young man everywhere on TikTok. Some were photo slideshows; others were ersatz music videos. They were set to all manner of obnoxious earworms, with captions like "He ascended…." One particularly memorable one compared the kid to Jesus Christ, claiming people "hated him" because he "spoke the truth."

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