"Liam Payne was just 14 when he took his first shot at the big time, trying out for the hit star-making show, 'The X Factor.'"

"He was 17 when the show’s judges teamed him up with Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson — all young, handsome, telegenic-but-relatable singer/dancers — and created One Direction, one of the biggest boy bands in history. They released five studio albums and 17 hit singles and went on four world tours, traveling with a portable recording studio so they could put together one album while promoting another.... Mr. Payne was 31 years old when, on Wednesday, he died after a three-story fall from the balcony of a Buenos Aires hotel. Fans reacted with an outpouring of grief, along with... revulsion for the fame factory that had shaped him to its dictates, just as it had done to former child stars like Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, who struggled in adulthood, and Amy Winehouse and the K-pop megastar Moonbin, both of whom died in their 20s... As long as there are fans to be monetized and young people willing to feed themselves, body and soul, to the pop music machine, there will be producer-built girl groups and boy bands, their members thrown into the stratosphere as teenagers, old news by 25, gone before they’ve had a chance to grow up."

Writes Jennifer Weiner, in "There Is No Safe Way to Turn Teenagers Into Megastars" (NYT).