I occasionally encounter someone who asks: Who would follow a celebrity on Instagram? Lady, I WOULD. I do! I follow celebrities who I actually like and celebrities who I find weird and complicated (Gwen Stefani, hi) and celebrities I wrote about or profiled at some point in the last ten years and now know all about their workout routines (hi, Brie Larson). But I didn’t follow Kevin Bacon — until a reel of him dancing, back-lit in his barn, to “Footloose” (in celebration of the end of the Actor’s Guild Strike) took over my field. Over the weeks to come, I let the posts of a man fundamentally at ease wash over me. Here was Kevin Bacon, playing me an LP from his collection. There was Kevin Bacon, slow-dancing with his wife of many decades (Kyra Sedgwick) in their modest farmhouse kitchen. There he was, with his shaggy graying hair and well-fit jeans, just effortlessly existing, seemingly free of the anxiety of public social media performance.

Of course, I’ve studied stars long enough to know there was something more complicated going on — in the performance of a particular kind of masculinity and progressive semi-agrarian whiteness and heterosexual romance and so much more. So I asked Sarah Mesle, one of my favorite culture analysts (also, crucially, a Gen-Xer like Bacon and a practitioner of “hair studies”) to come on the pod to unpack it all.

• KEVIN BACON’S INSTAGRAM, DUH

• I mention my favorite theorist of stardom, Richard Dyer — his canonical book is Stars, but I find Heavenly Bodies more accessible outside of academic context

• Sarah references Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant

• A movie poster for Quicksilver accidentally (?) stayed up in the NYC subway for 36 years

• Follow Sarah Mesle on Instagram, and stay tuned for her forthcoming book Tangled: American Racism and White Women's Hair

• The weird TikTok trends on your specific FYP

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• Sephora Teens and teen skincare/makeup culture

• How we talk about the royals today

• Beyond Ballerina Farm [and is there such a thing as too much tradwife discourse? How do we critique but also not celebritize?]

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)