This week was busy with the launch of our podcast, Celebrity Intelligence: The Lowdown, and Hollywood waking up after a sleepy summer with lots of action. I spent the weekend playing a brilliant new game with friends to wind down from the long days reporting and writing for you folks. It's an amazing, simple card game called THE MIND that bonds you as a team and has amazing highs when you're successful. I couldn't recommend it more as we head into cosy fall nights. No celebrity angle here, it's just good.

Meanwhile, two women had very different weeks in the business of being famous, and put side by side, they tell you a lot about how fame converts into money, or doesn't. Sydney Sweeney has the fame, she's one of the few new stars you could argue is bordering on A list. What she seems to be finding out, seven months into her own lingerie line, is that fame gets you the opening weekend, not all of the reorders needed to keep her brand going. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, is showing exactly how it's done, a decade-old exit from country music, timed and worked and walked back into with the precision of someone who has never once left anything to chance. Also below: the actual five day chain of events that led to the world finding out Lady Gaga had a baby, and news on the birth of a new offshoot of the Nepo Baby term into the zeitgeist.

In this edition we also cover:

If you have any celebrity tips or story ideas you’d like me to investigate, please reply to the email. Enjoy!

In January, Sydney Sweeney launched SYRN, her own lingerie line, and it sold out in hours. The kind of launch every DTC founder dreams about and almost none of them get. Seven months on, the story might have changed. A source close to the brand told In Touch that things inside SYRN are "a disaster." In Touch is a tabloid, proudly so, but it's also the outlet that broke the Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck split and Taylor’s Madison Square wedding news. So worth taking seriously, then. Still, "disaster" is one unnamed source's characterization, not a filed number out of SYRN's own books, and a PR for Sweeney did not return Celebrity Intelligence's request for comment on the story's accuracy.