An economics think tank argues parasocial relationships are just imaginary friends for adults
AEI, on Farrah Fawcett posters in 1976. It is the least sympathetic framing of the week and the most useful one.
American Enterprise InstituteRead →
Research
Someone traced modern stan behaviour back to experiments from fifty years ago
A long thread on the psychology of fan activity, and every branch of it points at the same postwar lab work.
I love this for a nerdy reason. The panics about fans being manipulated by fandoms turn out to be a fifty-year-old misreading of laboratory work, which is the most hopeful kind of debunk: it is not that the fans were right, it is that the people dismissing them had the facts backwards for half a century. My thesis was about performance and being witnessed. Even that is older than it looks.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
ESSAY
The Binding of Margery Kempe ↗Medieval binding as performance of self. EGSA 2011. Free to read.Sources
The four psychological theories behind oshi-katsu trace back to experiments from half a century ago ↗
note (lesser_p) · 24 SEP 2026
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
Envy, relief, and the two feelings at onceEnvy of the object of the attachment and simultaneous relief that it is not actually being withheld from you - the emotional ambivalence that is…The reality celebrityA person famous for being filmed, with no skill, no work and no release schedule - and an audience that formed anyway.
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And refuses the special pleading that it is only a pop thing.
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Swifties moved units and now there is a chart proving it
Luminate numbers on loyalty as a measurable force. Twenty years of Swift and a data release.
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