PicoBlog

Note: This essay was copyedited and tweaked on April 27. No facts have been changed. Perhaps you woke up Friday to Taylor Swift’s new double (surprise!) album. Or perhaps you’re like me and stayed up Thursday night, to an obscenely late hour for an Xennial, to listen to it. A couple times. My brief review: It’s good. It’s sad. It’s good and sad. I’m a newish fan of Swift’s music (though I was already a big fan of her courtroom testimony) and loved “Midnights.

Writing for you today: Natasha (Red is my favourite Taylor album so even though it’s not my week to write I felt compelled to quickly jump on and share some pre-Poets excitement. pls forgive typos!) Last year we – the four of us who run Swiftian Theory – met for lunch at a pasta restaurant in North London to do a song draft. This involves going round the table, picking your favourite Taylor Songs, writing them down, and trying to get the greatest ones before your friends do so you end up with the best list.

Which sounds like something I’m sharing for clickbait but it’s actually true (you can google it.)Taylor is the first person to own and live in the home outside of three generations of my family. This unusual detail of my backstory used to be a source of self-consciousness— not Taylor purchasing the house—but that I grew up in a mansion suited to the lifestyle of an international star of her circumstances. This was made public when she purchased the house after my dad died in 2015.

As Taylor Swift prepared to bring the Eras Tour to Brazil, she was met with controversy as her fans launched a Twitter battle to get her tour t-shirt projected onto the Christ the Redeemer statue. The priest charged with making decisions about what gets to be projected onto the iconic statue that overlooks Rio de Janeiro received both desperate pleas and angry attacks from Swifties, as some accused him of hesitating to approve dressing the Savior in a “junior jewels” shirt due to his preference for Ariana Grande over Swift.

I loved "The Prophecy" and so many of the other songs too! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the new album and making insightful comparisons between it and other literature. "The Winter's Tale" is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I never would have noticed a connection between "The Winter's Tale" and "THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT" but your comparison makes sense. It's going to take me a while to digest and absorb all of the new songs.

Yes, I’m about to write about Taylor Swift. And about my identity as a still-in-shrink-wrap, blindingly shiny, brand spankin’ new SWIFTIE. For years, I proclaimed that I didn’t like Taylor Swift’s music. Because, well, I didn’t. I formed assumptions about her artistry based solely on my toe-dip into her super pop-y singles. The hype around her current world tour had me thinking “I just don’t get it” and “I’d rather pay for Bey.

In my new role, I have to think a great deal about the impact of trying to improve (or change) something. It’s not something I take lightly. It occurred to me this week that there's a big difference between subtractive and additive change. Subtractive change immediately removes something, and it makes people's lives easier.  Additive change asks people to do more (based on the premise that things might improve in the future).

With everything happening in the Middle East, in particular the Red Sea attacks orchestrated by the Yemen-based Houthi militia group, I wanted to revisit my conversations with the group, which continue via WhatsApp from time to time. (Updated with relevant information, of course). I have spent quite a bit of time going in and out of Yemen at the height of its war there with different parties to the conflict, trying to understand the psyche of the various players and paint a picture that people could understand of this horrible and largely forgotten war.

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