Stream of Consciousness: Hunter Harris ’16

In a world where everyday people go viral on TikTok and celebrity is reported ruthlessly on sites like TMZ, Hunter Harris ’16 is an outlier.

She chronicles pop culture the old-fashioned way, through journalism. Harris writes Hung Up, a Substack newsletter with nearly 100,000 pop-culture–obsessed subscribers and a comments section livelier than the Golden Globes after too much champagne. She also hosts the Lemme Say This podcast with Emerson friend Peyton Dix ’16. They bring curation and intellectualization—glossed with gleeful fandom—to topics ranging from Taylor Swift to Love Island.

Cultural curiosities abound these days, so Harris applies her editorial acumen and insatiable appetite for gossip to the week’s news, coupled with a natural rapport with readers and listeners.

“I’m not a generalist. I think that’s where the strength is,” she says. “Readers don’t come to me for the Kardashians.”

Instead, she earns the trust of her audience with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture that simmers just
below the radar.

“I made one reference to a scene from Charlie Wilson’s War. There’s one scene I’m obsessed with, where Julia Roberts is separating her eyelashes with a safety pin. People were like, ‘I’m just as obsessed with that! It’s just so glamorous!’ Finding those commonalities between people is what the newsletter thrives off [of],” she says.

It’s an interesting time to cover entertainment. The proliferation of streaming services has fragmented audiences; there are more niches and fewer mainstream blockbusters.

“We’re seeing fewer genuine phenomena, because every audience is so staggered. There’s not the monoculture that there was whenever Brad Pitt and George Clooney were the most famous men in the world,” she says.

Meanwhile, hard news is often depressing. So people want to go deep on their loves, driven by escapism. For Harris, it is The Real Housewives of New York City, the original version, now nearly 20 years old. Breakout star Ramona Singer might be an unusual idol for some; Harris thinks she’s brilliant.

“I think I wrote this in a newsletter: The person who discovered Ramona, the casting director who just struck gold, needs to be sent directly to the Hague but also given a Presidential Medal of Freedom. There’s never been any other human being alive that is equal to her absolute mania,” she says.

It’s this hyperbole that keeps her followers engaged. But Harris wasn’t always a writer. She came to Emerson from Tulsa, OK, intending to study film and television with an eye on screenwriting. But it turned out that she was instead drawn to journalism classes.

“Students were so willing to collaborate and actually make creative projects together. I was working with my best friend on a magazine or being edited by my friends on the paper,” she says. “I met Peyton during week one of college, because we were in the same History of Media Arts class. Now we have a podcast together on exactly that.”

Harris also interned at Boston.com and at Boston magazine, stacking up an impressive resume that led to a quick hire at Refinery29 a week after graduation. Next was an associate editor job at New York magazine’s Vulture culture site, an ambition she had since high school.

“Since I was 14, I would read their Gossip Girl recaps. It was my dream,” she says. It was also a grind. Sometimes, she’d write five blog posts a day, interviewing celebrities, conducting red-carpet interviews, or writing oral histories.

“It feels very scary when you’re 24 to walk up to anyone and not be intimidated….Everyone I worked with was so smart. I wanted to impress them every single day. But I did get a lot of free food, which was nice,” she says with the levity her fans love.

At New York, she also developed a knack for asking questions others might overlook, such as a 2019 red-carpet encounter with Julianne Moore. Beyond the usual chitchat, Harris wondered why a character in The Kids Are Alright, a movie Moore had made a decade earlier, was named Laser.

“I’d always wondered, ‘Where did the name come from? Was it an actual name? How did it all come together?’ She told me the director knew someone whose son was named Laser and liked it. That’s the kind of thing–when, even if 15 people are like, ‘OMG! I’ve wondered that and never knew!’– that’s more valuable than anything, because of my own curiosity,” she says.

Harris also developed a reputation for irreverence, even drawing the ire of certain celebs.

“I’d read that Aaron Sorkin, for the movie Molly’s Game, went to 1 OAK, the nightclub, for 30 minutes. He just needed to see what went on there. I wrote about how funny it was that Aaron Sorkin was at 1 OAK for research. He got so mad about it. He brought up in another interview how pissed he was that someone had made fun of him. Only Vulture could write about something like that,” she says.

Now, in between the newsletter and the podcast—and a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod for her work—she’s crafting a TV pilot, building on roles as a writer for HBO’s Gossip Girl reboot and Showtime’s Ziwe. And, while she acknowledges that the entertainment world could be construed as shallow in contrast to world affairs, it’s also not frivolous.

“I think celebrities are the way we work out ideas, in the public sphere, about our own desires and anxieties,” she says. “I’ve had so many good conversations about love, marriage, and relationships, just starting with, ‘Oh my god. Have you seen the Bennifer thing?’ Celebrity is an entry point into larger conversations.”