{{current_date_full}}

Dear {{first_name | Reader}},

You subscribe to this newsletter for entertainment, and I've decided to actually give you that.

Going forward, you're getting the latest directly from me.

Every Wednesday we'll dig into entertainment, pop culture and gossip: my chats with celebrities, conversations with colleagues about Hollywood and whatever else feels worth talking about. For the Culture is about to actually be for the culture.

Thanks for subscribing. Now scroll down, because we need to talk about a few things. (Namely Disclosure Day. What was that?)

H. Alan Scott is Newsweek’s Senior Editor for Entertainment, host of the celebrity interview podcast ‘The Parting Shot’, and author of the entertainment newsletter For The Culture. Follow H. Alan Scott on Twitter and Instagram at @HAlanScott.

Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor star in it, but you wouldn’t know it from the marketing. Steven Spielberg’s name is the only one above the title. No actors, no co-billing, just the director. 

That says everything you need to know about where he sits in the culture.

Name another filmmaker who can sell a movie that way. Christopher Nolan comes close, but it is still a very short list. And Spielberg built it.

With Disclosure Day, Spielberg returns to aliens, his most reliable and beloved obsession. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., War of the Worlds. He has been asking the same question for 50 years and audiences have never stopped answering. Each one a classic, each one a massive cultural moment that outlasted its release.

What Spielberg understands better than almost any filmmaker alive is that the alien story is never really about the aliens. It is about us. It has always been about us. And if Spielberg’s cinematic history is any indicator, Disclosure Day is the film of the summer. (At least until Nolan’s The Odyssey shows up next month.)

Read more: Why Steven Spielberg Alone Is Enough To Sell ‘Disclosure Day’

This week, I chat with Newsweek’s Lauren Giella about what makes Spielberg singular—and why his alien stories have never really been about the aliens. Watch here ➜

The Duffer Brothers gave voice to a group of young outcasts with Stranger Things, and now they have set their sights on a group of retirees in their new Netflix series The Boroughs. (Do not worry, monsters still lurk in the shadows. It is the Duffer Brothers, after all.) 

I recently spoke with Geena Davis, who stars as Renee Joyce in the show alongside Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman and others, and she had a lot to say about what the show is actually about underneath all the genre chaos.

For Davis, the appeal was never really the monsters. It was the woman she got to play.

“Renee feels free to be herself, and she is herself,” Davis told me on The Parting Shot podcast. “For me, the journey to becoming my real self has taken a long time, and Renee has found that.” 

The monsters are fun, and there are plenty of them, but what The Boroughs is really asking is a simpler and more interesting question: What happens when a generation that refused to be defined by anyone else’s expectations finally has the time to prove it?

Read more: Geena Davis Says TV Show ‘The Boroughs’ Is Redefining Retirement

Urban Dictionary describes “stunting” as “a person who is showing  off or trying to get attention by performing an elaborate act or stunt and being someone they aren’t.” So when celebrities start wearing tennis shoes you and I can actually afford, you know someone is stunting, and likely being compensated to do it.

Take Kendall Jenner, recently photographed in Alo sneakers. Alo is certainly not cheap, retailing between $100 and $200, but a shoe in that price range somehow feels wrong on the feet of a multimillionaire. Jenner has a reported net worth of around $60 million. She is not shopping for value. She is performing accessibility, and there is a difference. 

But it is not just Alo, and it is not just Jenner. Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, has been spotted wearing Veja shoes, which retail around $150. Is she being compensated? Almost certainly not. Is it all for show? Almost certainly yes. There is something very deliberate about a future queen of England choosing a shoe that a middle-class shopper might also own. It’s relatability as costume, and it is a very old trick dressed up in new sneakers. 

Then there are the Adidas Sambas, which have become the unofficial shoe of celebrity stunting at this point. Bella Hadid, Brad Pitt, Olivia Rodrigo and Rosé have all been snapped in the classic silhouette, a shoe that has been around since 1950 and retails for around $100. When enough famous people wear the same affordable shoe, it stops being a coincidence and starts being a strategy. 

The irony, of course, is that the moment a celebrity wears something the rest of us can afford, we can no longer afford it. The latest Samba is already nearly impossible to find. Stunting works, and that is the most annoying part. 

Read more: How Celebrities ‘Stunt’ Us With Their Sneaker Showboating

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].