Everyone Has a Little Perez Hilton in Them

Lindsay Lohan is always doing something. Emma Watson at a premiere saying something slightly off. Lily Allen picking a fight with the internet on a Tuesday for no reason. There’s a specific pleasure in tracking these things, in dragging the famous down to your eye level and judging them from the moral high ground you’re occupying while eating cereal at 2 a.m. Call it what you want—there’s a little Perez Hilton dormant in most people, and mine was never very dormant to begin with.

So it didn’t take much convincing when my friend Tanja, who matches my dedication to lowbrow entertainment beat for beat, connected me with the people at BUNTE, Germany’s glossy institution of celebrity coverage. They had a new blog—VIPDIP—and needed voices. Now I’m running it alongside Tina, a sharp collaborator based in Los Angeles, and the remit is exactly what this journal rarely has room for: Lady Gaga’s latest spectacle, Megan Fox being relentlessly attractive and confusing about it, Madonna doing whatever it takes to stay relevant through another decade.

If I’m honest, I took the job at least partly because it seemed like the most plausible route to eventually meeting Nora Tschirner. And if not her—Lena Meyer-Landrut, who just won Eurovision for Germany and is currently unavoidable in the best possible way, would absolutely do for now. Irgendwie, irgendwann, irgendwo. Some plans don’t need to be more specific than that. The celebrity beat calls.