By the time I boarded a return flight a week later, the next issue of the Atlantic Monthly was on the stands, bearing on its cover an image of embattled pop tart Britney Spears; it sat next to a new issue of US Weekly, whose cover bleated news of an interview with presidential candidate Barack Obama in which he refused to say whether or not he wears boxers or briefs; a few days later, US published an online interview with Camille Paglia, in which she held forth on Howard Wolfson, Harold Ickes and Hillary Clinton’s “60 Minutes” appearance.

What the hell has happened to our national gossip business?

In the past decade, the rag trade had exploded, bringing vaguely shameful joy to millions of transatlantic travelers, subway commuters, grocery store shoppers and those languishing in doctors’ offices. But now it seems a confluence of events has changed the manner in which America gobbles its vapid information about celebrities. The pleasure we take in snurfling through the trash bins of those more rich and famous than we seems to be waning, leaving me a little sad — bereft of mindless reading material when hanging out in major transportation hubs — but perhaps, at the end of the day, just a little less dumb.

So what has changed about America’s relationship to celebrity gossip? Lots. First, there’s the pull of a political season too compelling to ignore, a contest so heated that it’s leading us — mirabile dictu! — to step away from the celebrity crack pipe and focus, at least briefly, on the race for president. Then there’s the eagerness on the part of traditional news sources — places that, historically, have been too journalistically prudish (or legit) to wallow in the messy detritus of the stars — to start dealing a little of the crack themselves. We can now get our Hollywood hearsay from the New York Times and CNN, weakening the control the glossies have on the market. Perhaps the biggest shift in how we ingest our gossip, though, is the feeling of over-saturation and over-stimulation. We have gorged ourselves on nip-slips and sex tapes and divorce proceedings to the point of queasiness at the idea of consuming another morsel of celebrity meat. Or maybe that’s just me.

Except it’s not. Three years ago, at the height of the celebrity weekly craze, there were eight titles battling to break news about Lindsay Lohan’s late nights or Kevin Federline’s Vegas vacations. At least two of those magazines — Celebrity Living and Inside TV — have folded. And according to Audit Bureau of Circulations statistics, sales of four others — In Touch, Life & Style, Star and People — leveled off or declined in the second half of 2007. Only US Weekly — chronicler of Obama and his underwear — and OK! continued to grow.

And two weeks ago, venerable gossip Liz Smith ended one of her syndicated newspaper columns by quoting a producer of a celebrity-driven television show as observing, “There’s nothing going on in celebrity land. There’s no news, no gossip, no scandal. The Oscars showed how dull things are. People are only interested in politics.” Smith herself wondered if the slackening appetite for star news wasn’t also about the fact that “we are being dished up loads of stuff about people we have never heard of and don’t care about.”

Surely some of Smith’s befuddlement — and, to a degree, my own — comes from aging out of a pop culture sweet spot. As a tidal wave of young people make their way through high schools and into the magazine-buying readership, their idols are naturally inscrutable to us. But the age differential doesn’t tell the whole story; after all, I may not care about Miley Cyrus or Zac Efron or the Jonas brothers, but I have some idea of who they are. The same cannot be said for the unnavigable armies of interchangeable beauties who have sprung from reality shows or cable. Brittany Snow! Colbie Caillat! Audrina Patridge! Julianne Hough! Who?

* * * * *

There has been a market for entertainment gossip ever since there has been entertainment. Whether it came packaged by the studios in Photoplay, or prettied up by People, or presented uncut and dangerous by true tabloids like the National Enquirer, America has long nourished a culture of celebrity voyeurism.

But for a period after the advent of television and cable and the fall of the studio system, Hollywood became a primordial soup, in which a slew of midlevel actors might hoist themselves into the pages of People magazine for having a splashy wedding or opening a movie, or get tarnished in a local column like Page Six, but in which they were only likely to make really juicy national headlines if they did something incontrovertibly nutty, hopefully in front of a wandering photographer: Julia Roberts ditching Keifer Sutherland before their wedding, Rob Lowe bedding an underage chick at the Democratic convention, married Bruce Springsteen cavorting in his skivvies with the girl in his band on a Rome rooftop.

But soon after the new millennium dawned, Bonnie Fuller took over an ailing US Weekly and kicked off what would turn out to be the salad days of empty-calorie celebrity consumption.

The US Weekly formula, which was soon mimicked by copycats like Life & Style, In Touch and Star (an old-style tabloid that Fuller revamped after leaving US in the capable hands of evil genius editor Janice Min), was to turn the world of a few movie, television and music stars into a roiling tableau of soap-operatic narrative, with a few lucky matinee idols tapped to play lead roles in the public performance of their private lives.

Week after week, these magazines doled out installments about the love affairs, breakups, real estate deals and party habits of an appealing group of characters. There were the schmoes who were just happy to be included (Ben Affleck), the ravishing sirens (Angelina Jolie), the leading men (Brad Pitt, George Clooney), the girlfriends (Jennifers Aniston and Lopez), the sweet-kid couples (Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, Jake Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst), and the empty-headed bad girls (Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Lindsay Lohan).

There they were, dating, dancing on banquettes, and buying soy milk on a stage that had its own landmarks and signifiers: Bungalow 8 and the Ivy and Ralph’s and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. The serialized narratives might turn on photos of them emerging from each other’s apartments in the morning, avoiding eye contact at a movie premiere, wearing blousy shirts that left room for us to wonder what — extra weight, or progeny? — they might be hiding under there.

Every once in a while a slam-bam terrific plot development — Pitt’s abandonment of Aniston for Jolie was probably the apotheosis of celeb-weekly euphoria — would shake up the whole tableau, allowing the character descriptions to become fluid: stud could transform into cuckold; nice girl into tramp; a blood-obsessed, tattooed husband-stealer could even become a mother earth figure.

These narrative high points thrilled and titillated us, sure, but the distinguishing quality of this revivified gossip culture was that it didn’t need a weekly denouement. It just needed photos, and tantalizing interrogative headlines: “Heading for a breakup?” “Baby on the way?” “Together again?” Hell, it didn’t matter that the magazines didn’t offer answers to these questions; the questions alone were enough to entice readers to flip through the pages, absorbing and speculating about the meaning of whatever new images and information had been presented — They’re adding an extra room to the house! She wasn’t drinking on a recent vacation! He didn’t thank her in his acceptance speech! The weeklies turned a nation’s worth of readers, male and female (but mostly female), into a sewing circle, kibitzing about the wombs, ring fingers and marital intentions of people they’d never met. So engaging were these tales that every once in a while, a magazine would run a photo of, say, Affleck and Lopez eagerly reading the yarns about themselves.