Laugh
Celebrity Gossip
Gossip blogs, celebrity databases and the strangely compelling business of tracking famous strangers' heights and birthdays.
14 sites
Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.
- 10 min
Twenty years of forensic argument about how tall film stars really are, with photographic evidence and footwear analysis.
Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.
Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.
Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.
Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.
- 10 min
Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.
- 10 min
Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.
- 10 min
The LiveJournal community that outlived LiveJournal, still posting celebrity news with the comment threads doing the work.
The New York Post's gossip column, now its own site, still running on restaurant tip-offs and unnamed sources.
- 10 min
A British gossip newsletter of blind items and pop trivia, running since 2000 and still legally very careful.
- 2 min
- Not at work
The outlet that breaks the story first and considers taste afterwards, with a documented record of being right.
- 10 min
New York Magazine's pop-culture desk, where the recaps and power rankings are better written than the shows deserve.
A relationship graph of everybody famous, cross-referenced far past the point of reason and updated constantly.
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Celebrity Gossip: questions
How many sites are in Celebrity Gossip?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
14 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 13 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.