Could Taylor Swift Hide Her Wedding Pics Forever?

I've been traveling through Europe this past week, catching up with friends, family, and contacts in Saint Tropez and London, and honestly it's been the best kind of working trip, equal parts poolside in the south of France and laptop open in an English garden, escaping into the celebrity world in between. Every story in today's issue is really about the same thing: what famous people choose to hide, and what it costs them either way. Katie Holmes is running her decade-old playbook on discretion again, giving us just enough to speculate and nothing to confirm. Taylor and Travis are twelve days into a media blackout so tight even People had to write around it. And on the other end of that same spectrum, Mick Jagger and Millie Bobby Brown are doing the opposite, opening up about what five decades and five years of fame, respectively, actually do to a person's mind. Plus a Howard Stern retreat that says a lot about where legacy media is headed, and Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen on why nobody can talk to their own partner about sex. Enjoy it all!

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Speaking to The New York Times’ The Interview podcast, Mick Jagger, 82, gave one of the most candid accounts a rock star this famous has offered about what the job actually does to a person. Asked about comedian John Mulaney’s old bit suggesting decades of adoring crowds had made him not “nice,” Jagger didn’t dodge it. “Obviously, it’s not normal,” he said. “It is not like most people’s lives. It does affect you. You can become disassociated. From other people.” He described how performers end up sealed inside an industry bubble, “a lot of people in show business only hang around with people in show business,” which quietly cuts them off from what he called “real life.” He said he actively fights it, going for ordinary walks, buying his own newspaper, but admitted the effort only goes so far. “That’s only temporary, because psychologically your actual state of mind is permanently damaged,” he said, adding that the twenties and early thirties are the most dangerous years for anyone in the business, since the job demands a huge ego to survive it, and the people who don’t have one “have to manufacture a completely different personality.” He even admitted a friend jokes that he behaves at dinner parties the way he behaves onstage.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Hearing one of the most famous people on the planet lay out the choice, either build an ego big enough to survive fame or manufacture a separate personality to cope, is a startling admission. It also tracks with the research. Media psychologist Dr. David Giles, who has studied fame extensively, has written about a character-splitting effect between the celebrity self and the authentic self, exactly the divide Jagger is describing between his onstage persona and dinner-party self. It’s a real warning for anyone chasing this kind of career: the psychological cost isn’t hypothetical, and even fifty years on, Jagger says it never fully goes away.

Katie Holmes, 47, was spotted holding hands with New York artist Jason Bard Yarmosky at a screening of “The Invite” in East Hampton on July 10, her first public outing with someone new since her 2022 relationship with musician Bobby Wooten III. An onlooker tells People the pair “seemed very easy together,” noting Yarmosky whispered in Holmes’s ear throughout the night and that she rested her head on his shoulder during the film. The two later mingled with friends at the afterparty at The Boat House..

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The date itself is minor. What’s worth watching is the choreography. Holmes has spent nearly a decade and a half perfecting the barely-there romance, and this fits the pattern exactly, the hand hold, the head on the shoulder, the no-photos-together posture, the same low key playbook she used with Jamie Foxx for six years and with Wooten in 2022. That discretion has long fueled tabloid speculation about a restrictive dating clause tied to her Cruise divorce, though the settlement was never made public and the claim has never been confirmed.

Howard Stern has laid off around a dozen staffers from his SiriusXM show and is preparing to cut back to just one new episode a week after Labor Day, with archive tape filling the rest of the schedule, Page Six reports. Staffers got the news over Zoom on Monday and were sent home immediately, per the outlet’s sources. His previous five year contract was worth a reported $500 million.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Stern isn’t alone in feeling this squeeze, even at the very top. Legacy broadcast stars have spent the last couple of years absorbing real pay cuts as their industries shrink, digital media simply doesn’t concentrate audience and advertising dollars the way linear television and radio once did. Anderson Cooper stayed at CNN but reportedly took a haircut from his old $20 million deal to do it. Gayle King’s $13 million contract came down when CBS renegotiated, and her role there has been in question ever since. Hoda Kotb left Today rather than accept a similar cut to her own salary. If it’s this hard for the headline names, it’s harder still for the production staff underneath them, the people who don’t have a personal brand to fall back on and are competing for fewer jobs in a shrinking market. What Stern has actually managed to do, that a lot of his peers haven’t, is find a graceful way to wind down on his own terms rather than have the decision made for him.

Millie Bobby Brown told Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast that she and her security team were pursued by a group of strangers for a “traumatizing” twenty minutes, she never specifies who they were, only that it left her badly shaken. Afterward, she recalled stepping into an elevator, facing the corner of the wall, and feeling something “switch off” in her mind. The anxiety cycle that followed lasted three months, until a trip to Kyoto with husband Jake Bongiovi and a group meditation session with monks finally broke it. “It took me out of the cycle,” she said, growing emotional. “I needed it.”

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Two things worth sitting with here. One, Brown is talking openly about a downside of fame that most stars keep firmly behind the scenes, the genuine fear of being followed and how it lingers long after the chase itself ends. Two, she’s talking just as openly about the mental health fallout, which does real work in chipping away at the stigma, and she goes a step further by generously naming what helped her and handing readers something they can actually use.

I loved this movie. Genuinely brilliant. I also spent a solid chunk of the runtime wanting to run out of the theater, because it is uncomfortable and confronting in a way most relationship dramas don’t have the nerve to be. Turns out that discomfort was very much the point, according to Wilde and her co-star Seth Rogen, who sat down for a candid conversation on A24’s podcast about what two years of shooting a marriage drama taught them about intimacy, and none of it was the kind of thing either would say to their own partner over dinner.

1. People will tell their friends everything about their sex life except the one person they’re actually sleeping with. Wilde credited this directly to Esther Perel, the couples therapist who consulted on the film, who told her that couples talk about their sex lives to everyone but each other. The entire movie, Wilde said, is built around forcing that exact conversation into the open.

2. Rogen thinks the premise of most relationship dramas doesn’t hold up. He pushed back on the idea that two people would ever just stop having sex without a reason, calling it a basic plot hole, which forced the writers to get specific about why it happens to their characters instead of treating it as a vague, unexplained rift.

3. Nobody wanted to put a number on it, and that was the hardest part of the script. Rogen and Wilde said the writers’ room spent ages avoiding stating an actual amount of time or frequency that counts as “enough,” because making that declarative left them exposed to their own opinions on screen.

4. Desexualized intimacy is its own kind of realism. Wilde pointed to the mirror scene, where the couple gets undressed in front of each other without a flicker of tension, as the moment audiences recognize themselves in most, the specific numbness of having seen someone naked too many times to notice anymore.

5. Humor is the real barometer for a relationship, not sex. Wilde’s theory, which Rogen agreed with instantly, is that the moment you stop laughing at your partner’s jokes is the moment contempt has already set in, well before anyone admits the relationship is in trouble.

6. Confronting an actual fantasy out loud, on camera, was more unsettling than either expected. Rogen said he found the film’s confrontation scene “terrifying,” even while being grateful to have done it, describing the gap between what people privately imagine and what happens when someone actually asks for it.

Twelve days on from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s July 3 wedding at Madison Square Garden, fans still don’t have a single official photo of the actual ceremony, the dress, or the couple at the altar. What they do have are scraps: a leaked shot of the aisle and the venue’s transformed interior published by the Daily Mail, a glimpse of Swift’s new wedding band and engagement ring from photos taken at teammate Juju Smith-Schuster’s wedding a week later, and confirmation from Dior itself, who custom built the gown with designer Jonathan Anderson, that Swift will be the one to post the first real photos, whenever that turns out to be. A spokesperson told The New York Times plainly that they “weren’t sure when that might be.” Guests were required to sign NDAs and hand over recording devices at the door.

So will she release them at all? It’s a fair question given how long the wait has already gone on, but there’s good reason to think she will, eventually, just entirely on her own terms. Here’s how it could play out:

• The Instagram drop, her playbook of choice. This is what Dior has already signaled and what Swift did with her engagement, a curated carousel posted directly to her own account with no press involved. It gives her full control of the image, the caption, and the timing, and it’s proven to break the internet without anyone else’s help.

• A licensed magazine exclusive, but likely not People. People ran its own wedding cover as a write-around, meaning it went to press with reporting and detail but no actual photos, a strong signal the magazine wasn’t part of any plan for official images. That makes long lead titles like Vogue or Vanity Fair the more realistic candidates if she goes the traditional route, both have the production access and prestige to justify Swift eventually handing over a set. It would guarantee a single, polished narrative (I don’t believe she would ask for a payday), but it also hands editorial control to someone else, which doesn’t fit how tightly she’s run every other part of this.

• A slow, unofficial drip. Arguably already happening. Bits and pieces surface through guests, jewelers, and other people’s wedding photos, giving fans just enough to stay engaged without Swift having to confirm or deny anything herself.

• Timing it to something bigger. Given her history of pairing major personal reveals with career moments, a formal release could land alongside a new album or single, turning the wedding photos into part of a marketing moment rather than a standalone story.

• Never releasing the real thing at all. Not as far-fetched as it sounds. Tom Holland and Zendaya just did exactly this with their own wedding, no Vogue spread, no Instagram carousel, nothing. Holland only confirmed the marriage happened months later, almost offhandedly, in an Esquire interview, and to this day there isn’t a single verified photo in circulation. Given how tightly Swift and Kelce have already run this, NDAs, confiscated phones, a media blackout that’s held for nearly two weeks, that option is genuinely still on the table, and arguably the ultimate flex for someone who controls her own narrative better than almost anyone in the industry.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: What Swift and Kelce are doing, and what Holland and Zendaya already did, points to a bigger shift than one couple’s preference. The old deal was that fame came with an expectation of access, attention paid, photos owed. That’s breaking down. Stars with enough leverage are now deciding which parts of their lives simply aren’t for sale, no matter how loud the demand gets. Visibility used to be the price of fame. The biggest names increasingly get to prove it isn’t.

Right, this is a first for us. I’m giving away a copy of Jo Piazza’s new novel, The Parisian Heist, out July 21, and I could not be more thrilled to be the one telling you about it.

Here’s the thing about Jo. She has this uncanny nose for writing the book that arrives about six months before the rest of us catch up to whatever she’s already clocked, trad wives, reality TV, the influencer economy, race and politics colliding in ways nobody else has. She gets there first, every time, and the culture obligingly explodes right on schedule. It’s a little unsettling, in the best way.

The Parisian Heist does it again, and this time she may have tempted fate. It’s an all-female art heist at the Musée d’Orsay, set in 1996, braided together with the true story of Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the woman who spent her widowhood turning her brother-in-law’s worthless paintings into Vincent van Gogh, then got quietly edited out of her own achievement. Jo worked with the man who guards the Isabella Stewart Gardner, home of the most famous unsolved art heist on the planet, to get the mechanics right. Then, while she was finishing the manuscript, a real jewel heist went down at the Louvre. I don’t make the rules. The woman just has a gift.

To enter, just reply to this email and answer the question. The best answer wins. Jo van Gogh-Bonger spent her life getting written out of a story she made possible. Which real woman (celebrity or otherwise) do you think deserves more credit than she gets?

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I hope you enjoyed the stories today and found something to takeaway. Whether they're hiding the wedding photos or the psychological damage, the biggest stars in the world all seem to agree on one thing: the version of them you get to see was never the whole story. See you next week.

Thanks,