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When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity
by Bobby Finger, Lindsey Weber
A sharp, funny examination of fame in the digital era and what makes our hunger for it equally alluring and embarrassing—from the podcasters behind Who? Weekly.
While being photographed in 1966, Warhol reportedly said, "Everyone wants to be famous." (To which his photographer Nat Finkelstein responded, "Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.") Warhol was right then, and he's right now. Fifteen minutes be damned, all you need is the drive—or desperation—and a singular spark. But if you're not careful, you'll end up a Who.
Who is a Who? In I Want to Be Famous, Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber, the journalists behind the pop culture podcast Who? Weekly, distill celebrity into two categories—Whos and Thems—transcending the snarky, antiquated judgment of the "A-listers" to "D-listers." If you come across an allegedly famous face you've never seen before and are compelled to utter "Who?", well, there's your answer. (Can you picture Rita Ora, Ava Max, or Hilaria Baldwin without googling them?) If the subject elicits something along the lines of, "Oh, Them," there you've found the opposite (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise). It's the fundamental binary of fame.
And yet, as more Whos spawn, the path to Themdom narrows. We've entered an era where accessibility to fame is within everyone's grasp, though only a select few can crack the algorithm and hold our ever-diminishing attention spans. Celebrities have taken desperate measures to stay relevant—from the makeup, supplements, and alcohol they peddle to the Notes app apologies they post—as the media who cover them compete with celebrities breaking their own news on social media and as PopCrave decides who "stuns" next.
Blending juicy pop culture history with the authors' signature wit, I Want to Be Famous argues fame no longer means ubiquity and examines what the future holds for those seeking our collective attention.
"An entertaining examination of how streaming and social media have splintered the public's attention span and, with it, the hierarchy of fame ... Packed with pop culture history and sharp analyses, this is a definitive account of contemporary stardom." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"I Want to be Famous cements Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber as two of our most astute and thoughtful critics—and it's a genuinely laugh-out-loud experience. Their grand theory of modern celebrity encompasses so much—stardom, yes, but also the death of the monoculture, the commercialization of everything, the end of shame, the bizarre contemporary media ecosystem." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
"I Want to Be Famous is a hilarious deep dive into the evolution of celebrity, from untouchable gods and goddesses to a morass of 'just like us' strivers (who manage to have more cultural currency than anyone with millions of dollars of studio backing behind them)." —Karina Longworth, author of Seduction and host of You Must Remember This
This information about I Want to Be Famous was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber are the hosts of Who? Weekly, the podcast that tells you everything you need to know about the celebrities you don't. Finger is the author of Four Squares, The Old Place, and We Are Gathered Here Today. Weber is a freelance writer and editor who spends the majority of her free time at the beach in the Rockaways. They both live in Brooklyn, New York.
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