Good evening from Gangneung, South Korea. I'm here for the week with my mom who, before this trip, hasn't been back home since she left for the U.S. 40 years ago. After 30 hours of travel to get here I weighed postponing the newsletter, but my chat with legendary journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis was too good to let sit in draft mode.

Today's paid newsletter is part two of my chat with Vanessa for our recurring series Rotary, where we talk with the reporters behind the stories that defined the '90s and 2000s. In part one, Vanessa opened up about her iconic 1998 New York Magazine feature, Power Girls. Here, we get to Vanessa's 2008 Rolling Stone cover story, The Tragedy of Britney Spears. The sprawling profile details Vanessa's wild goose chase in Los Angeles to talk to Britney at the height of her legal and personal struggles, including a series of public breakdowns. It's one of the biggest stories of Vanessa's career—and one she still has regrets about nearly 20 years later. I talked with her about the complicated feelings she still carries and the wild backstory behind the profile — including all the seedy characters she had to interact with in Britney's life.

Plus, I have an exclusive on how identity politics might have contributed to BuzzFeed's spiraling bottom line in Seen and Heard and the spiciest reader take yet for I Said What I Said.

This is part two of my conversation with journalist and Vanessa Grigoriadis. Read part one, where we dive into her 1998 New York Magazine feature Power Girls — chronicling the 20-something publicists who ruled Manhattan's nightlife scene and eventually became headline news in their own right.

It's hard to dispute a more scrutinized celebrity of the late 2000s than Britney Spears. On the heels of her divorce from Kevin Federline, a messy custody battle for her two sons and a heavily ridiculed comeback performance at the 2007 MTV VMAs, the paparazzi's fascination with Britney only grew more intense with every public breakdown that followed. Millions of people watched it play out: the head shaving, the umbrella attack on a paparazzi's car, you almost certainly know the story. But Vanessa Grigoriadis, who co-hosts the podcast ‘Infamous: Inside America’s Biggest Scandals,’ had a different view. Yes, she was one of many journalists covering Britney’s every move, trying to get close enough to the star to glean what was really going on. But in that pursuit (which was only partially successful), Vanessa got another side of the story: the circle of people around Britney who claimed to be her protectors, but who were only accelerating her downfall.

Initially, I sat down with Vanessa to talk about her iconic 1998 New York Magazine cover, Power Girls. But Vanessa turned the conversation to her most well-known piece: the 2008 Rolling Stone cover, The Tragedy of Britney Spears. Vanessa spent months posted up at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where the lobby bar had become a de facto operations center for everyone circling Britney — lawyers, paparazzi, operatives. She never got to interview Britney. But she did get something stranger. Through interviews with 13 people, Vanessa documented a seemingly off the rails Britney, largely informed by supposed friends and others close to her. The story was part of a larger narrative at the time, one that we now know to be much more complicated.

I didn't expect how much Vanessa still sat with this story nearly 20 years later. Not tortured by it, but not done with it either. I couldn't let the interview end without asking why.