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the poem began jiggling the doorknob,
pushing its way in on the taxiride home from my nightshift

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Razaak Eniola on Instagram: "before Prince was Prince 

Prince was weird

Before Erykah badu was erykah badu 

Erykah badu was weird 

before Marc Rebillet was Marc Rebillet 

Marc was weird 

we live in a culture that loves a final product 

…. everybody loves to clap at the end
and most of the time 

we are clapping for the wrong reasons

The etymology and meaning of the word weird is - “one who is able to control their own fate” 

that seems pretty cool to me.

Drawing ASMR 6/13/26
“It’s okay to be weird. 

As long as it it is rooted  in what is true and sincere”"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
6,875 likes, 231 comments - razaakeniola on June 13, 2026: "before Prince was Prince 

Prince was weird

Before Erykah badu was erykah badu 

Erykah badu was weird 

before Marc Rebillet was Marc Rebillet 

Marc was weird 

we live in a culture that loves a final product 

…. everybody loves to clap at the end
and most of the time 

we are clapping for the wrong reasons

The etymology and meaning of the word weird is - “one who is able to control their own fate” 

that seems pretty cool to me.

Drawing ASMR 6/13/26
“It’s okay to be weird. 

As long as it it is rooted  in what is true and sincere”". 

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View this post on Instagram

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How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed

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Differences between “essential vocabulary” lists, 1953 vs. 2023

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The 2022 World Cup final was a nail-biting affair, decided by a penalty shootout after Argentina and France were evenly matched with three goals apiece. Argentina subsequently won 4-2 on penalties, taking the title.

Even outside penalty shootouts, a single spot kick can easily decide the outcome of a game at a World Cup, making any advantage in taking a penalty crucial. So what can we learn about the best strategy for penalty kicks from statistics and research?

Go first, or at least win the toss

One of the best things a team can do is to win the shootout coin toss. Research based on shootouts at major competitions including the World Cup, European Championship and English domestic cups between 1970 and 2003, shows the team taking the first penalty wins 60.5% of the time. In later research which covered matches after the 2003 rule change that allowed the coin-toss winner to choose between going first or second, it was more beneficial to win the coin-toss, rather than kick first per se. About 60% of teams that won the toss were able to win the shootout, compared with a win rate of 51% for teams that shot first.

While France won the choice of going first or second in the 2022 World Cup final, Argentina won the choice of ends. Photograph: Carl Recine/Reuters

Importance of a good run-up

One of the studies with the largest sample - more than 1,700 penalties across four seasons from 2015-16 to 2018-19 - is a 2020 paper published in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport.

The lead author, Mikael Jamil, and his colleagues compared the effectiveness of a wide range of techniques and other factors on penalty success across the top men's divisions in England, Spain, Germany and Italy. One of the most interesting findings was that effective techniques actually varied depending on the country - for example, shots down the middle were statistically associated with successful penalties in the Premier League, but in La Liga, the bottom-left and bottom-right corners were the hotspots.

A long run-up (more than six steps) was associated with a successful penalty in all four leagues. In everywhere except Italy a medium run-up (two to five steps) was was also successful. Short run-ups were not a significant advantage anywhere.

Power v placement

A 2002 paper with a small sample of penalty kicks suggests, unsurprisingly, that shots with less power are more likely to be saved, shots with a lot of power are more likely to miss, and that the sweet spot is in between the two, with the authors suggesting shots at about 75% of maximum power have the highest success.

In Jamil's 2020 paper, the authors categorised shots based on kicking action - those taken with the inside of the foot were considered to be placed, while those taken with the instep were considered to be powerful shots. Both types were associated with successful penalties in Spain, Italy and Germany, but in England only placement was significantly associated with success.

Again we see different approaches in different countries: placement preferred in the Premier League and Serie A, power in La Liga and the Bundesliga. Panenka-style chips were not favoured or significantly successful anywhere.

Shot position

Several papers have looked at the area of the goal targeted by the penalty taker to try to determine if there is an optimal strategy. Researchers divided the goals into a grid, and coded where penalty kicks were aimed as well as if the shot was saved, missed, or scored.

Here, you can see the results from a 2016 study by Carlos Almeida and co-authors, published in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport:

Heatmaps showing the percentage of goals scored, percentage of goals saved, and penalties missed for each area of the goal based on a sample of 536 spot kicks from the Champions League and Europa League, with the total number of kicks in each area in brackets

The results from Almeida's paper, and others, confirm what many footballers (and fans) know - there is a trade-off between risk and reward when it comes to shot placement.

Simply put, shots towards the upper section of the goal are much harder to save, but are more likely to miss. And, even though shots aimed high are harder to save, it is much more common for players to go low. Analysts suggest that this is because many players would prefer to have a shot be on target, with the risk of being it saved, rather than miss the goal entirely.

Looking back at shootouts at the 2022 World Cup bears this theory out, with very few shots aimed at the upper part of the goal.

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While not the case in Almeida's 2016 paper, other studies and statistics suggest shooting centrally can be a good strategy - but again, it may depend on the league.

A 2009 paper analysing 311 penalties from various men's professional leagues around the world found shots down the middle were less likely to be saved than shots aimed for the corners. Premier League stats from Opta say shooting low left has a 77.2% success rate and low right 80%. But aiming high down the middle has a 97.8% success rate, and there's a success rate of 80.2% for a low shot to the middle.

Jamil's 2020 paper also looked at shot placement, and found shooting towards the middle of the goal was associated with successful penalties in the Premier League, but in other leagues aiming for the bottom corners was also associated with successf.

In part, the success (or not) of shot placement is down to ...

Goalkeeper behaviour

Several papers also track the movement of the goalkeeper during penalties. Given the speed of penalties, it's rarely possible for a goalkeeper to wait and react to the direction of the kick. Instead, the goalkeeper makes a guess at which way to go based on body language and their knowledge of the player's past penalties.

However, one interesting stat shows up in several papers: goalkeepers almost always dive left or right, even though anywhere between 20% and 30% of shots go down the middle.

An analysis based on a sample of 286 kicks from various men's professional leagues worldwide comparing the shot direction of the penalty-taker and the direction the goalkeeper moved in

Various researchers suggest goalkeepers have a bias towards action - that is, they would rather be seen to be actively diving to save the ball, even if they get the direction wrong, than stay in the centre and see a ball go into the corner. There are some exceptions, such as Andrew "The Grey Wiggle" Redmayne correctly predicting a Panenka from Brendon Santalab in the 2019 A-League Men grand final, or Édouard Mendy doing the same to Brahim Díaz in January's Africa Cup of Nations final.

Unpredictability

Even though some of these stats suggest the goalkeeper rarely stays in the middle, and shots down the middle can therefore have a decent success rate, there is an element of game theory to penalties. Goalkeepers are often briefed on, or have studied the penalty-taking habits of their opponents, and if everyone started shooting towards the centre more, goalkeepers would respond accordingly. Therefore, researchers argue one of the best strategies for a penalty taker is to be unpredictable, and for players to change their approach to spot kicks regularly.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
World Cup glory could all come down to penalties. What's the best strategy?

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As the knockout stages begin, penalties are inevitable. What do the stats say about the best ways to take them?

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Explore 9 generations of Pokémon. Filter by type and stats, and scout any Pokémon by using the interactive visualization.

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Eras. Easter eggs. Masters. Monoculture. It has been 20 years since Swift released her debut single, setting in motion a career so extraordinary, it permanently redefined the concept of pop stardom. Not only did her fight to own her music educate a generation of fans in how the music industry works, she also bent that industry to her will, outwitting the competition and defying norms to reset its terms. This is how she did it

Fri 12 Jun 2026 02.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 12 Jun 2026 04.21 EDT

Where it all began

How Taylor Swift's debut single has defined 20 years of her pop stardom - video

Released 20 years ago, Taylor Swift's debut single is, on the surface, a tribute to the power of music, and about how hearing a song by your favourite artist can send you back to the memories associated with first hearing it. She named Tim McGraw after one of her favourite country singers, with a sentiment aimed at a former boyfriend who had left her behind: "When you think Tim McGraw," she sang, "I hope you think of me." The power of Swift's songwriting and the immediate force of her presence as a pop star mean that that is what most of us think when we think Tim McGraw. From day one, we could see Swift's power to remake culture in her own image, a talent that has - two decades on - made her one of history's biggest pop stars.

The sleek 36-year-old showgirl we know today may seem a million miles from that country teen with her corkscrew curls and cowboy boots. But if you look past the slightly hokey southern twang on her debut single, that song contains almost everything we know about Swift as an artist today. The fundamentals are there: no 21st-century pop star has written about romance better, and she conjures her setting with what would become her trademark intimate detail - the "little black dress" that would make way for that scarf she left at an ex's sister's house; the moon on the lake that foreshadowed all the kissing in the rain; the cars parked down back roads where the young couple had secret trysts lit the way for hitting the brakes too soon. But we can also see her assured sense of rewriting tired narratives. From the first line, when she recalls her lover telling her"the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame", she tells him: "That's a lie."

Swift knows she tells better stories than everyone else. From day one, she also knew the power of being the person who gets to tell the story. Here she rewrote small-town southern romance; years later she undid the man-eater archetype on Blank Space and gave life to the spectre of the "mad" woman on The Last Great American Dynasty. In Tim McGraw, once the guy has left, she writes him a letter that tells him how he should think about their time together, and leaves it on his doorstep - the bold author of her own fate. He may have gone, but in extremely Swiftian form, it's her who is having the last word: the foes who would later inspire songs such as Mean, Bad Blood and Look What You Made Me Do never stood a chance. She also knows how to make time work for her, backflipping around the chronology of their relationship - from past memories to present pain to future nostalgia - to take complete narrative control of a situation. You might hear a song from your past and get a vague warm, fuzzy feeling. Swift is a beautiful freak who remembers it from every angle, all too well.

From the beginning, Swift showed us exactly who she was, revealing the innate focus that helped create the defining pop songs of our time - as well as a career that wrote her into legend, making her the lens through which we understand so much of pop, pop culture, womanhood, the music industry, and much, much more. Here are the 20 ways she remade the world in her own image. Laura Snapes

Image credits: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Big Machine Records

She escaped growing pains

Growing pains have always been a rite of passage for teen-girl pop stars - as much as the No 1 singles and big-budget videos. In a more manufactured era, obsolescence was built in: inevitably you would rebel against the system that controlled you, and, inevitably, it would spit you out.

Swift understood that maintaining control would protect her. She knew that writing her own songs would create an authentic personal relationship with fans - one that she assiduously deepened IRL - that no label would dare mess with. From 2008, when she released her second album, Fearless, her management became a family business. Being the flagship success of a small label, Big Machine, also gave her the agency to grow on her own terms; label head Scott Borchetta even encouraged it, suggesting that 2010's biting Speak Now shouldn't be named Enchanted, after a lovestruck song of the same name, because she was no longer writing about "fairytales and high school". Every corkscrew curl, princess dress and bowler hat was her own choice; she marked her growth in her genre evolution, from country to emo to sleek pop. As she said in 2015: "As far as the need to rebel against the idea of you, or the image of you: like, I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this."

You could argue it came at a cost. Interviews with the teenage Swift reveal someone acutely aware of the price of stepping out of line: in high school, she characterised her refusal to party as a choice "between being popular or not messing my life up"; she didn't drink until she turned 21 ("I knew I couldn't get away with it until then") and knew that after you mess up once, "people are going to be waiting for you to mess up again". In 2009, one profile writer noted: "Self-preservation is one of Swift's favourite phrases." Several of the older, unreleased songs she resurfaced as the bonus "From the Vault" tracks on her Taylor's Version re-recordings dwelled on her anxiety about being replaced by younger models. That level of control and perfection is just as unsustainable as, say, pretences over Britney's virginity; you could see how it may have contributed to the disordered eating Swift experienced in the mid-2010s, and how unbearable it would have been when she lost control of the narrative for a few years around then.

Yet, Swift made it to youngadulthood without directly creating scandal or revolt. You suspect her unmatched polish may have sent the press, as her ingenue status faded, searching for any stick to beat her with and coming up with ... her very normal boyfriend count. The pathetic nature of those charges underscored a rigged game no amount of perfection could beat - but Swift got further than most, and opened up a slipstream for her successors to self-define. LS

Image credits: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

She made the traditional vanguard

If you want to understand Swift, just think about Apple - yes, the computer company. Apple, famously, has rarely invented anything. Its reputation for quality, intuitive products has almost made it anti-innovation; when gizmos such as touchscreen smartphones or tablets were first introduced to the market, Apple didn't rush to release its own competitor. Instead, it waited until said products were familiar, and then released best-in-class versions.

Swift works in a similar fashion. She tends to change slowly. When it comes to producers, she started out working with Nashville stalwart Nathan Chapman before making a few songs on her 2012 album, Red, with Max Martin and Shellback, two of the era's super-producers: together they incorporated tinny synths and light dubstep drops, the sound du jour of a few years earlier. On 2014's 1989, she worked mostly with Martin and Shellback, but made a few songs with Jack Antonoff, a then-unknown who had notched a megahit, We Are Young, with his band Fun a few years earlier. In 2017, Reputation was another Antonoff/Martin and Shellback split, but on songs such as Ready for It and I Did Something Bad, she essentially presented a more mainstream-friendly version of the harsh electro sound that her then-nemesis Kanye West, now Ye, had worked with on his culture-shifting 2013 record Yeezus.

Versions of this story recur throughout Swift's career. With each record, she almost always inches her sound forward, but she's rarely, if ever, the first to work with a new face or a new style. This is, in many ways, an inversion of how pop stars as big as Swift used to work. Madonna and Michael Jackson - two of the only musicians who have ever achieved the same level of cultural saturation and interest - tended to look to the underground for inspiration, in terms of music, fashion and aesthetics, and make those underground styles commercially viable. (Think Madonna turning the ballroom culture that her backing dancers came from into Vogue, one of her most indelible hits.) Swift's strategy is deeply reflective of her time: one in which it pays to be risk-averse and give the people exactly what they want, when they want it. Shaad D'Souza

Image credits: Matt Sayles, Invision/AP

She reclaimed cringe

In the run-up to the 2020 US election, an entire news cycle was dedicated to speculating on whether Swift would endorse a presidential candidate. She confirmed her support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the cutesiest way possible: with a tray of homemade cookies. Swift is cringe, but she is free: self-directing corny videos, selling references from her own songs - cardigans and red scarves - as merch, hosting fan parties at her house and writing the worst Instagram captions known to mankind. (She saved one of the most groan-inducing for her engagement announcement, writing: "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.") And while it feels incongruous for Swift, a noted fan of a sourdough starter, to make "wine moms" the butt of the joke in songs, perhaps it only adds to her bona fides: there's nothing cringier than a lack of self-awareness. Owen Myers

Image credits: Instagram/taylorswift; Startraks/REX/Shutterstock

She made competency a flex

While Swift's songs are full of wayward emotions, she runs her career with military precision. As a kid, when her friends were watching the Disney Channel, she studied episodes of VH1's Behind the Music and deduced that artists went off the rails when "they lost their level of self-awareness". It made her hawkish about ambition and execution: as a teenager, she outwitted Nashville stalwarts, challenging them on industry norms and understanding exactly how to play the game to get ahead. When she was criticised for her singing or dancing, she skilled up. When foes came for her, she wised up: "I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time," as she sang on Look What You Made Me Do. From big-picture concepts to the finest details, Swift is a one-woman panopticon on her own career.Of course, all-encompassing professional excellence is also a very Beyoncé trait - but she doesn't show her hand the same way. Swift wrote the 21st-century playbook on elite pop stardom, and she wants us to know it. LS

Image credits: Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

She bent formats to her will

Swift understands streaming better than almost any of her contemporaries. Although she was late to warm to the format, in the 2020s she has proved herself a master of the form: deluxe editions of 2022's Midnights and 2024's The Tortured Poets Department, each essentially doubling their length, were released mere hours after the originals. Streaming is a volume game when it comes to breaking records; adding tracks in this way encourages repeat listens, without the threat of fans getting tired or bored. And it's an extremely linear medium: Tortured Poets and The Life of a Showgirl each had their single placed as track one, so that it would notch up the most consumption and become the default hit.

When it comes to understanding format - and how format relates to commercial dominance - Swift has long been ahead of the curve. Among pop stars, she popularised the practice of selling vinyl records with exclusive covers in order to boost chart positions, previously only the purview of superstar rappers. CD copies of her 2019 album Lover came with an exclusive notebook containing snippets of her own personal diaries - but fans had to buy four copies in order to read all the pages. (Similarly, Reputation's CDs came with one of two exclusive magazines, and 1989's deluxe edition came with a randomised set of Polaroid-style photos.)

Swift was savvy with format early in her career, too. In seeming acknowledgment of the fact that country has a far bigger audience in the US than overseas, she bundled international editions of her 2008 breakthrough album Fearless with singles from her debut, while certain songs from 2010's Speak Now were redone with pop mixes for the international market. She also seemingly took to heart the advertising industry adage to meet your customer where they are, selling copies of her fourth album Red at Papa John's pizzerias.

Of course, all of this paled in comparison to Taylor's Versions, her monumental album re-recording project, which allowed her to reactivate older music in her catalogue and re-market it to new fans. The re-recorded albums also included new, previously unreleased songs, doubly incentivising existing fans to repurchase copies of albums they already owned. In the years since Swift began releasing the Taylor's Versions, other artists in dire contract situations, such as JoJo, have followed suit, while some have simply done it for fun: Hilary Duff packaged her new album with new recordings of hits such as Come Clean. In essence, Swift turned what was once seen as a desperate business move into a shrewd marketing play. SDS

Image credits: Jane Barlow/PA

She set new melodic standards

Once you know about the T-Drop, you'll start noticing it everywhere. The Switched on Pop podcast hosts coined this term to describe Swift's penchant for dropping into her lower register without warning to give a sly sting in the tail to her melodies, particularly when they are already dripping with sarcasm. See her deliciously drawn-out delivery of "drunk and grumbling on about how I ... can't ... sing" in Mean.

Her acolytes love to use the T-drop as a vehicle for their ultra-specific, highly Swiftian imagery, and drippy recent hits from Gracie Abrams, Maisie Peters and Holly Humberstone (pictured) hinge on the device. These singers get Swift's emotion but not her knack for goofy - instantly memorable - imagery that is a little odd, or downright off: "Sexy baby", "grinning like a devil", hell, even "this sick beat". OM

Image credits: Ian West/PA; Roy Rochlin; Viktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu via Getty Images

She made game day for the girls

On 24 September 2023, Swift attended her first ever Kansas City Chiefs game in support of her beau, star tight end Travis Kelce. "It's like these two cultural titans - the NFL and Taylor Swift - were coming together," says Bryan Graham, the Guardian's deputy US sports editor. Swift was no longer on the bleachers, but firmly in the executive suite of stadiums, marking what Ella Brockway, assistant US sports editor, calls "a different level of celebrity in sports to what we've seen before". Swift's entry into the NFL world may have been due to love, but it also didn't hurt that it came with the opportunity for personal brand expansion. OM

What does Taylor Swift mean to the NFL?
BG For years, the NFL has been desperately courting women, back to 2009 when they started celebrating breast cancer awareness month and selling pink merchandise. So when they embraced her with a lot of cutaways to her during games, especially in the 2023-24 season, it made a lot of sense. It felt like manna from heaven for the NFL.
EB The first day [she came to a game] was the most fun. I had a lot of Swift update accounts on my timeline that were sharing things like football explainers for the confused. But the second game was when I realised that this narrative was going to change the NFL season. It was a Monday night game playing the New York Jets, and she brought Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. ESPN was tweeting out highlights of Swift walking through the tunnel at MetLife Stadium.
BG This is the American equivalent of the royal family. I mean, the idea of "the cheerleader and the quarterback" fits into the mythology of her music going back to You Belong With Me. Her relationship with Kelce felt like a real-life actualisation of that fantasy.

Were more female fans tuning in to watch the Chiefs when Swift was at the game?
BGThere was a huge lift in female viewership.
EB The NFL has had a few years of controversy with domestic violence issues among players, and [Swift] helped them to attract a female audience. Swift was wearing all this vintage Chiefs merch to the games, and then the NFL was changing all of its merch and doing partnerships with designers. So if you wanted a Chiefs shirt it could be something that twentysomething women were actually interested in wearing versus like, a Chiefs logo in pink.

Swift's romance with Kelce coincided with her reaching a new peak of superstardom with the Eras tour.
EB She was sly enough to figure out how to own this other world at the same time and penetrate into a new market. There were still some "Brads and Chads", as she put it, who were mad about her being there. But I think the longer she stayed around, the more it was like: "OK, this girl can hang."

Why do you think she chose Travis and Jason Kelce's podcast New Heights to announce The Life of a Showgirl?
BGIt's kind of a flex. It's couple goals: lifting each other up and mutually pointing to each other's projects. I think that was probably the easiest decision of the rollout. It's like: "I have this property in the family already. Why would I go to someone else?"A huge part of American sports business in the last 15 years has been about athletes bypassing traditional media channels and owning their own story.

Will she ever do the Super Bowl half-time show?
BGWell, artists don't get paid to perform, and they generally do it to promote a tour. And she didn't need a lot of help selling tickets for the Eras tour. The NFL absolutely would need her more than she needed it.

The Eras tour was also a showcase of her own athleticism.
EB Travis has said that they were attracted to each other in part because they're both athletes in a sense, and she talked in Time magazine about doing the whole set while running on a treadmill. I don't think she saw herself as an athlete around the time of the Fearless tour, but that's certainly changed as stadium shows have become part of her thing.

Image Credits:Ezra Shaw, Getty Images

She exposed the music biz

As a young pop fan in the late 90s, my knowledge of the music industry extended to: Virgin Records (the Spice Girls' record label) and Simon Fuller (the Spice Girls' manager). That is literally child's play compared with the advanced industry knowhow any tween Swiftie has today thanks to her very public stance on artist rights - particularly her own.

In 2014, Swift removed her back catalogue from Spotify in protest at the idea that music should be free. (She put it back in 2017.) A year later, she was credited with getting Apple Music to back down from declining to pay royalties on music listened to during its free three-month introductory trial period - although independent record labels and trade bodies had also refused to work with Apple's terms, they received no such public credit for their lobbying.

In 2018, Swift left Big Machine, the label she had signed to as a teenager, for Universal Music Group (UMG). The deal allowed her to own the rights to her master recordings; she also demanded that if UMG sold their Spotify shares, the money would be distributed to its acts on a non-recoupable basis - ie not to settle outstanding debts. (As of April, artists are benefiting from that deal.)

In 2019, Big Machine sold the master recording rights to Swift's first six albums to industry executive Scooter Braun. Swift called it her "worst case scenario", claiming that Braun had bullied Swift alongside his clients Ye and Justin Bieber. Soon after, Swift said in a TV interview that she intended to re-record those first six albums to reclaim ownership over them. I confess, when I interviewed her just after this, I didn't ask her about it because it seemed like such a deranged idea. What an idiot.

With note-for-note likenesses, the Taylor's Version re-recordings were blockbuster successes, often charting higher than the original albums (despite generally sounding worse) and inspiring the billion-dollar-grossing Eras tour. They utterly torpedoed Braun's investment - as songwriter on those master recordings, Swift could deny their use in soundtracks and insist that directors use her new versions, and encourage streaming platforms to prioritise them - and they inspired mass awareness of granular music-industry machinations. Thereafter many young female artists signed almost unprecedented debut-album deals that let them own their masters, including Olivia Rodrigo, Ice Spice and Maggie Rogers; Zara Larsson bought hers off her old label to start her own.

But this heightened awareness led to some fans misinterpreting the idea of labels owning master recordings as universally shady, rather than standard practice in exchange for monetary advances. It also gave some artists misaligned expectations, including Rina Sawayama, a British-Japanese pop star, who protested against her label Dirty Hit owning her masters after her label mate (and former label director) Matty Healy of the 1975 laughed as others mocked Asian accents on a 2023 podcast. His comments were widely criticised, but there was also nothing nefarious about a label owning a young artist's music. Swift has exceptional bargaining power: most artists do not make enough money to have that sort of leverage, but may now expect it.

Masters hadn't had so much publicity since Prince protested against Warner Bros owning his in 1995. Swift created the most business-literate group of fans and artists in history, and in turn a bulwark against exploitation. Headlines once confined to music trade publications are now mainstream news. The popularisation of licensing deals means many artists have their rights revert after a certain period. And last May, Swift got her masters back: Braun had sold them to a private equity firm, which sold them to her. Revealing the news, Swift framed the saga as a kind of fateful crusade: "Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I'm reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen." LS

Image Credits: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Ithaca Holdings

She redefined album 'eras'

Swift was hardly the first pop star to reinvent herself with each album, but she was arguably the first to turn the idea of discrete "eras" into a marketing tool. With her Eras tour, she merchandised a concept previously owned by fans and made it a pillar of her business model. Now, she sells the same cardigan in a new colour scheme alongside each new album and reissues old merch with new photos. She even revamped the Eras tour halfway through its run to include a new Era (naturally, the Disney+ film of the tour was also revamped). The concept has since been adopted by countless other artists - turning the dreaded "greatest hits" tour, once a signal an artist was over the hill culturally, into a sign of strength. SDS

Image credits: Matt Sayles/AP; Beth Garrabrant; Xavi Torrent/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

She turned fans into detectives

Since he r 2006 debut, Swift, inspir ed by the (then Dixie) Chicks, left secret cod ed messages about her songs' subjects in the liner notes to her albums. It primed Swiftie s to approach h er work like the Rosetta stone, and sto ked the intim acy between them. F rom 2017's Reputation, Swift swapped the trick from liner notes to the visual real m, peppering her videos, outfits, soci al media posts, tours and interviews with clues about her plans. Although articles decoding Swiftian Easter eggs are now prett y much a cornerst one of entertainment media - the world's biggest ongoing treas ure hunt - they have still retained that sense of intima cy on a mass level. As fans wh o crack the codes feel wildly valid ated for the depth of thei r understanding, the endless speculation is free press out of any marketer's wildest dreams. LS
Image credits: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
She rewired pop criticism

In many ways, 2015 doesn't seem that long ago - until you think about how that year, US indie bible Pitchfork decided to review now-disgraced rock star Ryan Adams' full-album cover of Swift's 2014 album 1989, having not reviewed the original. The concept of poptimism - that pop is as worthy of critical consideration as rock - was a decade old, but the old snobberies were still hanging around. Swift's crossover from country to pop made her unignorable and exposed the unfailing integrity of her songwriting to a mass audience. Emerging young female critics - such as Tavi Gevinson, the founder of Rookie magazine - knew the emotional and technical acuity of Swift's work meant it should be treated like scripture. As her star rose and her fanbase became more vociferous, jaundiced critics knew they had to take Swift seriously if they wanted to be taken seriously.

The bottoming-out of web traffic quickly made Swift coverage a reliable banker for online publications, and amid the frothy celebrity-angled coverage, any negative reviews made targets of their authors. This reached fever pitch when Pitchfork gave Swift's 2020 album Folklore a very high 8.0, which nonetheless brought down the record's otherwise perfect score on reviews aggregator Metacritic. The critic got doxed, creating a culture of fear that prompted US publication Paste to publish their spicily negative review of 2024's The Tortured Poets Department with no byline, citing concern for the writer's safety.

Recently, some high-profile critics have declared all this has made criticism toothless. Frankly, I don't know what they're reading - and speaking from personal experience, I think the Swifties have calmed down - but the idea has caught on: that once critics wouldn't write about her, but now they can't. LS

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She made pop star style normie

In the celebrity world where A-listers are constantly trying to outdo each other with headline-grabbing outfits and museum-worthy archival pulls, Swift's style is an anomaly. Aside from a few memorable blunders (a "This is my fight song" tee paired with leather harness; the Sesame Street palette of ME!), her style is remarkable for its sheer inoffensiveness and apparent lack of consistent taste, as well as her ability to make the most expensive couture looks feel as if they were bought at the mall. Has she ever truly slayed? It's debatable. That's precisely what fascinates Lauren Sherman, a Puck fashion reporter. OM

You once referred to Taylor Swift's style as "Anthropologie girl gone wild". How come?
Taylor Swift didn't have a traditional college experience, and even though she's in her mid-30s she's still wearing what a popular girl in college would wear. Recently she's been wearing more polished clothes and designer brands, but they still feel like a costume. I never really like what she's wearing, even when it's nice.

She wore a couture Schiaparelli gown to accept her album of the year Grammy for Midnights. It looked far less "designer" than it did on the runway.
She's very polished, but she's not sophisticated.

When she announced her engagement she wore a very feminine Ralph Lauren dress. It was $400 and instantly sold out. Why did she choose something so down-home for that moment?
There's been a lot of talk about her not wearing expensive clothes on purpose to communicate that to her fans. I don't know if it's that. I think she might be like: "I wanna buy what I like and I don't care how much it costs because I'm a normal person." I thought that dress was one of the best things she's ever worn.

What are her iconic looks? Does she have a "Rihanna in Guo Pei at the Met" moment?
Certainly not. I think the closest she came was when she wore a red sweater and her hair curly at a Kelce football game. Or when she wore the Area crystal jeans. But she's not a fashion person. I think her clothes brand her in the same way her writing brands her: as a normal girl that you can relate to.

Are there any style risks you would like to see her take?
I would love for her to look a little less costume-y, but I don't know how that happens. I think that's just who she is. She was really deep on SSENSE for a couple of weeks and wore that Jean Paul Gaultier top. That felt like a fashion risk without leaving her comfort zone.
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She thrived on negativity

Other than maybe Drake, no pop star has got richer off making lemons into lemonade. When critics said the teenage Swift didn't write her own songs, she wrote 2010's sublime Speak Now entirely alone. Ye invading her MTV awards acceptance speech made her a household name. The media ragging on her for having too many boyfriends gave us Blank Space. Losing out to West in the public relations game inspired Reputation, her best album. Her industry nemesis buying the rights to her first six albums inspired the Taylor's Versions coup de grace, and in turn the Eras tour, which grossed more than $1bn - affording her to buy the masters herself. I would love to know whether she's ultimately grateful for any of these misfortunes. At any rate, last year she said it outright when critics gave her album The Life of a Showgirl middling reviews: "The rule of show business is if it's the first week of my album release, and you are saying either my name or my album title, you're helping." More recently, she revealed that she tells young songwriters that criticism is a gift: "Make art about it." LS
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She made her publicist a star

In October 2023, Swift was on a red carpet for the premiere of The Eras Tour film. In response to the hordes of photographers clamouring for her attention, she took a beat and pointed to her publicist, Tree Paine. "You see that redhead? She'll tell me what to do."

The idea that any one person could truly control pop's ultimate Machiavelli feels faintly ludicrous. But Paine is the bad cop who lets her employer play at being sunshine and rainbows. For all her open-hearted songwriting, Swift is a fortress with Paine the sole keyholder, and she can pull up the drawbridge at will.

Since Swift hired her in 2014, Paine has emerged as a mastermind behind the mastermind. As well as only granting very selective Swift interviews to the media, Paine is acutely tapped into internet chatter. She played a key part in the Taylor v Kim v Ye feud, but no crumb of gossip is too small for Paine to go to war over: she didn't just clap back at DeuxMoi for posting rumours that Swift and her ex Joe Alwyn, an actor, were secretly married, she accused them of causing "pain and trauma". When Swift seemed to ignore Céline Dion on stage at the 2024 Grammys, Paine and team reportedly "scrambled" to snap a picture of the singers together, smoothing over controversy. At the Eras tour, she was in the pit every night telling photographers how to shoot the singer: over-the-shoulder.

Along with Beyoncé's omnipresent longtime publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, Paine has become a star in her own right, reflecting a time where fans are increasingly aware of those who help to craft the image of their favourite celebrities (see Law Roach, Terrence O'Connor, Aidan Zamiri). Fans gag at Paine's designer outfits, no-nonsense attitude and assured composure; a picture of Paine fetching Swift water has nearly a million views, while the Wall Street Journal has dedicated more than 2,000 words to analysing her strategic genius. She has a good claim to being pop's biggest power publicist since Liz Rosenberg simultaneously represented the diva trifecta of Madonna, Cher and Stevie Nicks in the 80s and 90s. The difference is that Paine's eyes are trained on just one. OM
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She co-signed the competition

Some time around 2014 - when her 1989 album made her the biggest pop star in the world for the first time - Swift stopped being pop's favourite ingenue and was finally acknowledged as the artistic and commercial titan she had been for years. With that shift, Swift accepted her role as someone who could boost careers: she big-upped fledgling pop stars such as Troye Sivan and took Charli xcx and Camila Cabello on her Reputation tour, performing Shake It Off with them each night. Call it a magnanimous version of the infamous "Drake co-sign" - wherein, during the 2010s, the rapper would remix songs by unknown artists and make them hits, thereby giving him the ability to take some credit for the artist's success. Swift's Midas touch might be a little more beneficial in the long-run, and is therefore hugely coveted: many of the artists who opened the Eras tour, such as Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams, now sell out arenas themselves. SDS
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She canonised millennial dating

For years, Swift was known as pop's card-carrying romantic, a woman who would be so audacious as to re-write Romeo & Juliet with a happy ending, or write an entire song of Kennedy family fanfic (Starlight) while dating a Kennedy and then perform it for the Kennedys. As time went on, her relationship with love in her music became more complicated: although she sang of new love on 2017's Reputation, she also wrote about feeling doomed to single life forever because of impediments she couldn't control, and on 2020's Folklore wrote about missed connections with exes who she still thought about.

By 2022's Midnights, Swift seemed ambivalent towards the traditional ideas of "settling down" she had once aspired to in song. On multiple songs from that record, she expressed uneasiness about the idea of getting married at, potentially, the expense of her own autonomy. And she bemoaned the idea that the cultural idea of womanhood was still so narrow: "All they keep askin' me / Is if I'm gonna be your bride," she sang on Lavender Haze. "The only kind of girl they see / Is a one-night or a wife."

This arc - from one-true-love fairytales to wondering if marriage is even in the cards at all - mirrors that of a lot of women I know who are roughly Swift's age. Although Swift has almost certainly never been on a dating app, the bleakness of Midnights - and its follow-up, The Tortured Poets Department, which came after the end of her longest relationship, and on which Swift confesses she's "down bad crying at the gym" - feels of a piece of the grim way in which many of my single female friends speak about their romantic lives. For many years, Swift's was pop's ultimate heteropessimist, putting a pin in romantic ideals she had helped create.

In a sense, the romantic crash outs of Tortured Poets created a new facet of relatability in Swift's work, which had become increasingly insular over the preceding years - suddenly, she was a romantic newbie just like many of her fans, trying to work out why what felt like true love had curdled so quickly. And then she took another step that reminded me of my mid-30s friends. In what felt like the blink of an eye, she found a new jock dreamboat in American football player Kelce, to fulfil the romantic fantasies that seemed so out of reach a few years earlier. Swift's romantic path is one fairly specific to millennial womanhood, in that she could have chosen a marriage-less path but ultimately decided not to; in capturing that path in song, she essentially memorialised the millennial dating experience on a mass scale. SDS
Image credits: YouTube/Taylor Swift
She spiced up the charts

Every new Swift release arrives alongside a swathe of CD, vinyl, cassette and digital variants, all of which help her maintain her career-long chart dominance. Many artists do this, of course, but Swift, who drops limited releases through a complex system of timed windows and exclusive retailers - itself a bugbear to many devoted fans - has mastered the art of gaming the charts, often to others' detriment. When it looked like Billie Eilish might unseat Swift's The Tortured Poets Department in 2024, Swift released three digital variants to hold the top spot; Charli xcx's Brat nearly did the same in the UK, so Swift released six UK-only album variants within the last few hours of chart eligibility and stayed at No 1. Lana Del Rey has said that Swift once told her she "wants [success] more than anyone" - and it's clear she knows how to get it. SDS
Image credits: OfficialCharts.com/PA
She broke the indie/pop binary

Swift has always been as mainstream as they came. Her earliest records were big, bright pop-country smashes that referenced blue-chip stars (Tim McGraw) and the literary canon (Romeo & Juliet, on Love Story). The first signs of experimentation in her career came on 2012's Red, when she began incorporating synths into her music - and even that record included a dig at an ex who liked listening to indie music. Centrism was her brand; when she wrote an album about her glamorous new life in New York City, 2014's 1989, she made sure to root her pop sound in the music of the 80s, as if to keep less adventurous listeners onside.

But 1989 had an unlikely effect. Its monumental success forced basically everyone to pay attention to Swift, even alternative music fans who weren't used to keeping up with the Billboard charts. As Swift got older, her own hang-ups around alternative music seemed to fade too - slowly at first, then all at once. In 2019, Lover featured nods to Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, Chromatics, Lana Del Rey and Blood Orange.

Then, during the pandemic, came indie Swift. Her 2020 records Folklore and Evermore, produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, received rave reviews and fully legitimised Swift as a songwriter in the eyes of more highbrow fans. It made Dessner an A-list producer overnight: he's since produced music by a new generation of pop stars including Gracie Abrams, Laufey and Noah Kahan, as well as established musicians such as Ed Sheeran and Florence + the Machine; meanwhile Swift made music with the National, Phoebe Bridgers and Hayley Williams of Paramore. Swift stopped positioning herself in opposition to the indie world and found a way to absorb it into her own universe - opening up an entirely new market for herself in the process. SDS

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She set the narrative

Like many other stars of her ilk, Swift rarely does traditional interviews any more. Almost all information about her life and career released into the world comes through Swift's official channels, and she's trained fans to understand that her word is gospel. When she does make media appearances, it's calculated: she spoke to Variety, a Hollywood trade magazine, about her ambition to become a director; she announced last year's The Life of a Showgirl on New Heights, a podcast hosted by her fiance Kelce. In each interview, Swift doled out information specifically designed to position herself and her career at that point in time.

Sometimes, what she shares is contradictory: when Swift released a 10-minute version of her 2012 song All Too Well in 2021, she told fans it originated from a jam session with her band where she basically ad-libbed the song on the spot, even though the song's co-writer Liz Rose had said there was never officially a 10-minute version; instead, she and Swift had pared the song down from an abundance of ideas Swift brought to her. Plus, ATW10 bears the clear marks of Swift's post-Folklore songwriting style, as well as a mention of a keychain bearing the phrase "Fuck the patriarchy", hardly common in 2010. But it's tricky to argue the narrative when Swift keeps things so tightly bound. Call it Public Relations (Taylor's Version). SDS
Image credits: Julien de Rosa/AFP/Getty Images; YouTube/New Heights
She resuscitated monoculture

Streaming and social media have siloed the watercooler entertainment age. What seems like the biggest thing in the world to you - Marvel movies, Joe Rogan - might mean nothing to the person next to you on the bus scrolling K-pop fan cams. Swift has transcended mass fragmentation to become the default pop star.

You could argue that's because her career predates this new cultural reality, but plenty of old-school pop stars failed to leap that Rubicon. Swift's enduring song craft, strategy and gossip factor kept her star bright. She is maturing on her own terms, but remains relevant to new, young fans: the Taylor's Version re-recordings let Swifties who were too little to remember their original releases feel a sense of participation and ownership. The ensuing Eras tour, showcasing (almost) every Swift album, innately reflected the poignancy of how many generations of fans had grown up alongside her work. Her music is universally accessible (and, crucially, approved by parents). Infants can bop to it. It's a ready-made belief system for young fans discovering themselves. It's so detailed it commands Zapruder-level analysis from hardcore stans; so well-crafted that even old, classic rock dudes respect her. I am often stunned at how casual music fans who otherwise don't participate in fandom culture refer to themselves as Swifties.

Her presence and influence have made her so powerful that streaming platforms and international governments alike have to kiss the ring. It means she can set the terms of engagement. To see the music video for last year's The Fate of Ophelia on its weekend of release, you had to shell out for a cinema ticket, making Swift a Disney-like conglomerate unto herself. It is Swift's world, and we're very much living in it. LS
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The next 20 years?

Guardian writers on what the next 20 years might look like for Taylor Swift

Few A-list female pop stars have sustained an A-list pop career for as long as Swift has, and far fewer have made it beyond that point. (Even Madonna's imperial period faltered just over 20 years in.) So what do the next 20 years look like? Swift's nuptials to Kelce are, as they say, impending. Maybe her song for the Toy Story 5 soundtrack suggests a hankering for an Oscar - or tees up her fans' hankering for her to return to country music. She's not likely to mount an Eras-scale tour again anytime soon - but maybe that creates opportunities for looser, more intimate live showcases. Our critics look at what they think Swift will do next - and what they want her to.

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Where it all began

How Taylor Swift's debut single has defined 20 years of her pop stardom - video

Released 20 years ago, Taylor Swift's debut single is, on the surface, a tribute to the power of music, and about how hearing a song by your favourite artist can send you back to the memories associated with first hearing it. She named Tim McGraw after one of her favourite country singers, with a sentiment aimed at a former boyfriend who had left her behind: "When you think Tim McGraw," she sang, "I hope you think of me." The power of Swift's songwriting and the immediate force of her presence as a pop star mean that that is what most of us think when we think Tim McGraw. From day one, we could see Swift's power to remake culture in her own image, a talent that has - two decades on - made her one of history's biggest pop stars.

The sleek 36-year-old showgirl we know today may seem a million miles from that country teen with her corkscrew curls and cowboy boots. But if you look past the slightly hokey southern twang on her debut single, that song contains almost everything we know about Swift as an artist today. The fundamentals are there: no 21st-century pop star has written about romance better, and she conjures her setting with what would become her trademark intimate detail - the "little black dress" that would make way for that scarf she left at an ex's sister's house; the moon on the lake that foreshadowed all the kissing in the rain; the cars parked down back roads where the young couple had secret trysts lit the way for hitting the brakes too soon. But we can also see her assured sense of rewriting tired narratives. From the first line, when she recalls her lover telling her"the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame", she tells him: "That's a lie."

Swift knows she tells better stories than everyone else. From day one, she also knew the power of being the person who gets to tell the story. Here she rewrote small-town southern romance; years later she undid the man-eater archetype on Blank Space and gave life to the spectre of the "mad" woman on The Last Great American Dynasty. In Tim McGraw, once the guy has left, she writes him a letter that tells him how he should think about their time together, and leaves it on his doorstep - the bold author of her own fate. He may have gone, but in extremely Swiftian form, it's her who is having the last word: the foes who would later inspire songs such as Mean, Bad Blood and Look What You Made Me Do never stood a chance. She also knows how to make time work for her, backflipping around the chronology of their relationship - from past memories to present pain to future nostalgia - to take complete narrative control of a situation. You might hear a song from your past and get a vague warm, fuzzy feeling. Swift is a beautiful freak who remembers it from every angle, all too well.

From the beginning, Swift showed us exactly who she was, revealing the innate focus that helped create the defining pop songs of our time - as well as a career that wrote her into legend, making her the lens through which we understand so much of pop, pop culture, womanhood, the music industry, and much, much more. Here are the 20 ways she remade the world in her own image. Laura Snapes

Image credits: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Big Machine Records

She escaped growing pains

Growing pains have always been a rite of passage for teen-girl pop stars - as much as the No 1 singles and big-budget videos. In a more manufactured era, obsolescence was built in: inevitably you would rebel against the system that controlled you, and, inevitably, it would spit you out.

Swift understood that maintaining control would protect her. She knew that writing her own songs would create an authentic personal relationship with fans - one that she assiduously deepened IRL - that no label would dare mess with. From 2008, when she released her second album, Fearless, her management became a family business. Being the flagship success of a small label, Big Machine, also gave her the agency to grow on her own terms; label head Scott Borchetta even encouraged it, suggesting that 2010's biting Speak Now shouldn't be named Enchanted, after a lovestruck song of the same name, because she was no longer writing about "fairytales and high school". Every corkscrew curl, princess dress and bowler hat was her own choice; she marked her growth in her genre evolution, from country to emo to sleek pop. As she said in 2015: "As far as the need to rebel against the idea of you, or the image of you: like, I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this."

You could argue it came at a cost. Interviews with the teenage Swift reveal someone acutely aware of the price of stepping out of line: in high school, she characterised her refusal to party as a choice "between being popular or not messing my life up"; she didn't drink until she turned 21 ("I knew I couldn't get away with it until then") and knew that after you mess up once, "people are going to be waiting for you to mess up again". In 2009, one profile writer noted: "Self-preservation is one of Swift's favourite phrases." Several of the older, unreleased songs she resurfaced as the bonus "From the Vault" tracks on her Taylor's Version re-recordings dwelled on her anxiety about being replaced by younger models. That level of control and perfection is just as unsustainable as, say, pretences over Britney's virginity; you could see how it may have contributed to the disordered eating Swift experienced in the mid-2010s, and how unbearable it would have been when she lost control of the narrative for a few years around then.

Yet, Swift made it to youngadulthood without directly creating scandal or revolt. You suspect her unmatched polish may have sent the press, as her ingenue status faded, searching for any stick to beat her with and coming up with ... her very normal boyfriend count. The pathetic nature of those charges underscored a rigged game no amount of perfection could beat - but Swift got further than most, and opened up a slipstream for her successors to self-define. LS

Image credits: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

She made the traditional vanguard

If you want to understand Swift, just think about Apple - yes, the computer company. Apple, famously, has rarely invented anything. Its reputation for quality, intuitive products has almost made it anti-innovation; when gizmos such as touchscreen smartphones or tablets were first introduced to the market, Apple didn't rush to release its own competitor. Instead, it waited until said products were familiar, and then released best-in-class versions.

Swift works in a similar fashion. She tends to change slowly. When it comes to producers, she started out working with Nashville stalwart Nathan Chapman before making a few songs on her 2012 album, Red, with Max Martin and Shellback, two of the era's super-producers: together they incorporated tinny synths and light dubstep drops, the sound du jour of a few years earlier. On 2014's 1989, she worked mostly with Martin and Shellback, but made a few songs with Jack Antonoff, a then-unknown who had notched a megahit, We Are Young, with his band Fun a few years earlier. In 2017, Reputation was another Antonoff/Martin and Shellback split, but on songs such as Ready for It and I Did Something Bad, she essentially presented a more mainstream-friendly version of the harsh electro sound that her then-nemesis Kanye West, now Ye, had worked with on his culture-shifting 2013 record Yeezus.

Versions of this story recur throughout Swift's career. With each record, she almost always inches her sound forward, but she's rarely, if ever, the first to work with a new face or a new style. This is, in many ways, an inversion of how pop stars as big as Swift used to work. Madonna and Michael Jackson - two of the only musicians who have ever achieved the same level of cultural saturation and interest - tended to look to the underground for inspiration, in terms of music, fashion and aesthetics, and make those underground styles commercially viable. (Think Madonna turning the ballroom culture that her backing dancers came from into Vogue, one of her most indelible hits.) Swift's strategy is deeply reflective of her time: one in which it pays to be risk-averse and give the people exactly what they want, when they want it. Shaad D'Souza

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She reclaimed cringe

In the run-up to the 2020 US election, an entire news cycle was dedicated to speculating on whether Swift would endorse a presidential candidate. She confirmed her support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the cutesiest way possible: with a tray of homemade cookies. Swift is cringe, but she is free: self-directing corny videos, selling references from her own songs - cardigans and red scarves - as merch, hosting fan parties at her house and writing the worst Instagram captions known to mankind. (She saved one of the most groan-inducing for her engagement announcement, writing: "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.") And while it feels incongruous for Swift, a noted fan of a sourdough starter, to make "wine moms" the butt of the joke in songs, perhaps it only adds to her bona fides: there's nothing cringier than a lack of self-awareness. Owen Myers

Image credits: Instagram/taylorswift; Startraks/REX/Shutterstock

She made competency a flex

While Swift's songs are full of wayward emotions, she runs her career with military precision. As a kid, when her friends were watching the Disney Channel, she studied episodes of VH1's Behind the Music and deduced that artists went off the rails when "they lost their level of self-awareness". It made her hawkish about ambition and execution: as a teenager, she outwitted Nashville stalwarts, challenging them on industry norms and understanding exactly how to play the game to get ahead. When she was criticised for her singing or dancing, she skilled up. When foes came for her, she wised up: "I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time," as she sang on Look What You Made Me Do. From big-picture concepts to the finest details, Swift is a one-woman panopticon on her own career.Of course, all-encompassing professional excellence is also a very Beyoncé trait - but she doesn't show her hand the same way. Swift wrote the 21st-century playbook on elite pop stardom, and she wants us to know it. LS

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She bent formats to her will

Swift understands streaming better than almost any of her contemporaries. Although she was late to warm to the format, in the 2020s she has proved herself a master of the form: deluxe editions of 2022's Midnights and 2024's The Tortured Poets Department, each essentially doubling their length, were released mere hours after the originals. Streaming is a volume game when it comes to breaking records; adding tracks in this way encourages repeat listens, without the threat of fans getting tired or bored. And it's an extremely linear medium: Tortured Poets and The Life of a Showgirl each had their single placed as track one, so that it would notch up the most consumption and become the default hit.

When it comes to understanding format - and how format relates to commercial dominance - Swift has long been ahead of the curve. Among pop stars, she popularised the practice of selling vinyl records with exclusive covers in order to boost chart positions, previously only the purview of superstar rappers. CD copies of her 2019 album Lover came with an exclusive notebook containing snippets of her own personal diaries - but fans had to buy four copies in order to read all the pages. (Similarly, Reputation's CDs came with one of two exclusive magazines, and 1989's deluxe edition came with a randomised set of Polaroid-style photos.)

Swift was savvy with format early in her career, too. In seeming acknowledgment of the fact that country has a far bigger audience in the US than overseas, she bundled international editions of her 2008 breakthrough album Fearless with singles from her debut, while certain songs from 2010's Speak Now were redone with pop mixes for the international market. She also seemingly took to heart the advertising industry adage to meet your customer where they are, selling copies of her fourth album Red at Papa John's pizzerias.

Of course, all of this paled in comparison to Taylor's Versions, her monumental album re-recording project, which allowed her to reactivate older music in her catalogue and re-market it to new fans. The re-recorded albums also included new, previously unreleased songs, doubly incentivising existing fans to repurchase copies of albums they already owned. In the years since Swift began releasing the Taylor's Versions, other artists in dire contract situations, such as JoJo, have followed suit, while some have simply done it for fun: Hilary Duff packaged her new album with new recordings of hits such as Come Clean. In essence, Swift turned what was once seen as a desperate business move into a shrewd marketing play. SDS

Image credits: Jane Barlow/PA

She set new melodic standards

Once you know about the T-Drop, you'll start noticing it everywhere. The Switched on Pop podcast hosts coined this term to describe Swift's penchant for dropping into her lower register without warning to give a sly sting in the tail to her melodies, particularly when they are already dripping with sarcasm. See her deliciously drawn-out delivery of "drunk and grumbling on about how I ... can't ... sing" in Mean.

Her acolytes love to use the T-drop as a vehicle for their ultra-specific, highly Swiftian imagery, and drippy recent hits from Gracie Abrams, Maisie Peters and Holly Humberstone (pictured) hinge on the device. These singers get Swift's emotion but not her knack for goofy - instantly memorable - imagery that is a little odd, or downright off: "Sexy baby", "grinning like a devil", hell, even "this sick beat". OM

Image credits: Ian West/PA; Roy Rochlin; Viktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu via Getty Images

She made game day for the girls

On 24 September 2023, Swift attended her first ever Kansas City Chiefs game in support of her beau, star tight end Travis Kelce. "It's like these two cultural titans - the NFL and Taylor Swift - were coming together," says Bryan Graham, the Guardian's deputy US sports editor. Swift was no longer on the bleachers, but firmly in the executive suite of stadiums, marking what Ella Brockway, assistant US sports editor, calls "a different level of celebrity in sports to what we've seen before". Swift's entry into the NFL world may have been due to love, but it also didn't hurt that it came with the opportunity for personal brand expansion. OM

What does Taylor Swift mean to the NFL?
BG For years, the NFL has been desperately courting women, back to 2009 when they started celebrating breast cancer awareness month and selling pink merchandise. So when they embraced her with a lot of cutaways to her during games, especially in the 2023-24 season, it made a lot of sense. It felt like manna from heaven for the NFL.
EB The first day [she came to a game] was the most fun. I had a lot of Swift update accounts on my timeline that were sharing things like football explainers for the confused. But the second game was when I realised that this narrative was going to change the NFL season. It was a Monday night game playing the New York Jets, and she brought Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. ESPN was tweeting out highlights of Swift walking through the tunnel at MetLife Stadium.
BG This is the American equivalent of the royal family. I mean, the idea of "the cheerleader and the quarterback" fits into the mythology of her music going back to You Belong With Me. Her relationship with Kelce felt like a real-life actualisation of that fantasy.

Were more female fans tuning in to watch the Chiefs when Swift was at the game?
BGThere was a huge lift in female viewership.
EB The NFL has had a few years of controversy with domestic violence issues among players, and [Swift] helped them to attract a female audience. Swift was wearing all this vintage Chiefs merch to the games, and then the NFL was changing all of its merch and doing partnerships with designers. So if you wanted a Chiefs shirt it could be something that twentysomething women were actually interested in wearing versus like, a Chiefs logo in pink.

Swift's romance with Kelce coincided with her reaching a new peak of superstardom with the Eras tour.
EB She was sly enough to figure out how to own this other world at the same time and penetrate into a new market. There were still some "Brads and Chads", as she put it, who were mad about her being there. But I think the longer she stayed around, the more it was like: "OK, this girl can hang."

Why do you think she chose Travis and Jason Kelce's podcast New Heights to announce The Life of a Showgirl?
BGIt's kind of a flex. It's couple goals: lifting each other up and mutually pointing to each other's projects. I think that was probably the easiest decision of the rollout. It's like: "I have this property in the family already. Why would I go to someone else?"A huge part of American sports business in the last 15 years has been about athletes bypassing traditional media channels and owning their own story.

Will she ever do the Super Bowl half-time show?
BGWell, artists don't get paid to perform, and they generally do it to promote a tour. And she didn't need a lot of help selling tickets for the Eras tour. The NFL absolutely would need her more than she needed it.

The Eras tour was also a showcase of her own athleticism.
EB Travis has said that they were attracted to each other in part because they're both athletes in a sense, and she talked in Time magazine about doing the whole set while running on a treadmill. I don't think she saw herself as an athlete around the time of the Fearless tour, but that's certainly changed as stadium shows have become part of her thing.

Image Credits:Ezra Shaw, Getty Images

She exposed the music biz

As a young pop fan in the late 90s, my knowledge of the music industry extended to: Virgin Records (the Spice Girls' record label) and Simon Fuller (the Spice Girls' manager). That is literally child's play compared with the advanced industry knowhow any tween Swiftie has today thanks to her very public stance on artist rights - particularly her own.

In 2014, Swift removed her back catalogue from Spotify in protest at the idea that music should be free. (She put it back in 2017.) A year later, she was credited with getting Apple Music to back down from declining to pay royalties on music listened to during its free three-month introductory trial period - although independent record labels and trade bodies had also refused to work with Apple's terms, they received no such public credit for their lobbying.

In 2018, Swift left Big Machine, the label she had signed to as a teenager, for Universal Music Group (UMG). The deal allowed her to own the rights to her master recordings; she also demanded that if UMG sold their Spotify shares, the money would be distributed to its acts on a non-recoupable basis - ie not to settle outstanding debts. (As of April, artists are benefiting from that deal.)

In 2019, Big Machine sold the master recording rights to Swift's first six albums to industry executive Scooter Braun. Swift called it her "worst case scenario", claiming that Braun had bullied Swift alongside his clients Ye and Justin Bieber. Soon after, Swift said in a TV interview that she intended to re-record those first six albums to reclaim ownership over them. I confess, when I interviewed her just after this, I didn't ask her about it because it seemed like such a deranged idea. What an idiot.

With note-for-note likenesses, the Taylor's Version re-recordings were blockbuster successes, often charting higher than the original albums (despite generally sounding worse) and inspiring the billion-dollar-grossing Eras tour. They utterly torpedoed Braun's investment - as songwriter on those master recordings, Swift could deny their use in soundtracks and insist that directors use her new versions, and encourage streaming platforms to prioritise them - and they inspired mass awareness of granular music-industry machinations. Thereafter many young female artists signed almost unprecedented debut-album deals that let them own their masters, including Olivia Rodrigo, Ice Spice and Maggie Rogers; Zara Larsson bought hers off her old label to start her own.

But this heightened awareness led to some fans misinterpreting the idea of labels owning master recordings as universally shady, rather than standard practice in exchange for monetary advances. It also gave some artists misaligned expectations, including Rina Sawayama, a British-Japanese pop star, who protested against her label Dirty Hit owning her masters after her label mate (and former label director) Matty Healy of the 1975 laughed as others mocked Asian accents on a 2023 podcast. His comments were widely criticised, but there was also nothing nefarious about a label owning a young artist's music. Swift has exceptional bargaining power: most artists do not make enough money to have that sort of leverage, but may now expect it.

Masters hadn't had so much publicity since Prince protested against Warner Bros owning his in 1995. Swift created the most business-literate group of fans and artists in history, and in turn a bulwark against exploitation. Headlines once confined to music trade publications are now mainstream news. The popularisation of licensing deals means many artists have their rights revert after a certain period. And last May, Swift got her masters back: Braun had sold them to a private equity firm, which sold them to her. Revealing the news, Swift framed the saga as a kind of fateful crusade: "Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I'm reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen." LS

Image Credits: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Ithaca Holdings

She redefined album 'eras'

Swift was hardly the first pop star to reinvent herself with each album, but she was arguably the first to turn the idea of discrete "eras" into a marketing tool. With her Eras tour, she merchandised a concept previously owned by fans and made it a pillar of her business model. Now, she sells the same cardigan in a new colour scheme alongside each new album and reissues old merch with new photos. She even revamped the Eras tour halfway through its run to include a new Era (naturally, the Disney+ film of the tour was also revamped). The concept has since been adopted by countless other artists - turning the dreaded "greatest hits" tour, once a signal an artist was over the hill culturally, into a sign of strength. SDS

Image credits: Matt Sayles/AP; Beth Garrabrant; Xavi Torrent/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

She turned fans into detectives

Since he r 2006 debut, Swift, inspir ed by the (then Dixie) Chicks, left secret cod ed messages about her songs' subjects in the liner notes to her albums. It primed Swiftie s to approach h er work like the Rosetta stone, and sto ked the intim acy between them. F rom 2017's Reputation, Swift swapped the trick from liner notes to the visual real m, peppering her videos, outfits, soci al media posts, tours and interviews with clues about her plans. Although articles decoding Swiftian Easter eggs are now prett y much a cornerst one of entertainment media - the world's biggest ongoing treas ure hunt - they have still retained that sense of intima cy on a mass level. As fans wh o crack the codes feel wildly valid ated for the depth of thei r understanding, the endless speculation is free press out of any marketer's wildest dreams. LS
Image credits: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
She rewired pop criticism

In many ways, 2015 doesn't seem that long ago - until you think about how that year, US indie bible Pitchfork decided to review now-disgraced rock star Ryan Adams' full-album cover of Swift's 2014 album 1989, having not reviewed the original. The concept of poptimism - that pop is as worthy of critical consideration as rock - was a decade old, but the old snobberies were still hanging around. Swift's crossover from country to pop made her unignorable and exposed the unfailing integrity of her songwriting to a mass audience. Emerging young female critics - such as Tavi Gevinson, the founder of Rookie magazine - knew the emotional and technical acuity of Swift's work meant it should be treated like scripture. As her star rose and her fanbase became more vociferous, jaundiced critics knew they had to take Swift seriously if they wanted to be taken seriously.

The bottoming-out of web traffic quickly made Swift coverage a reliable banker for online publications, and amid the frothy celebrity-angled coverage, any negative reviews made targets of their authors. This reached fever pitch when Pitchfork gave Swift's 2020 album Folklore a very high 8.0, which nonetheless brought down the record's otherwise perfect score on reviews aggregator Metacritic. The critic got doxed, creating a culture of fear that prompted US publication Paste to publish their spicily negative review of 2024's The Tortured Poets Department with no byline, citing concern for the writer's safety.

Recently, some high-profile critics have declared all this has made criticism toothless. Frankly, I don't know what they're reading - and speaking from personal experience, I think the Swifties have calmed down - but the idea has caught on: that once critics wouldn't write about her, but now they can't. LS

Image credits: Erika Goldring/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

She made pop star style normie

In the celebrity world where A-listers are constantly trying to outdo each other with headline-grabbing outfits and museum-worthy archival pulls, Swift's style is an anomaly. Aside from a few memorable blunders (a "This is my fight song" tee paired with leather harness; the Sesame Street palette of ME!), her style is remarkable for its sheer inoffensiveness and apparent lack of consistent taste, as well as her ability to make the most expensive couture looks feel as if they were bought at the mall. Has she ever truly slayed? It's debatable. That's precisely what fascinates Lauren Sherman, a Puck fashion reporter. OM

You once referred to Taylor Swift's style as "Anthropologie girl gone wild". How come?
Taylor Swift didn't have a traditional college experience, and even though she's in her mid-30s she's still wearing what a popular girl in college would wear. Recently she's been wearing more polished clothes and designer brands, but they still feel like a costume. I never really like what she's wearing, even when it's nice.

She wore a couture Schiaparelli gown to accept her album of the year Grammy for Midnights. It looked far less "designer" than it did on the runway.
She's very polished, but she's not sophisticated.

When she announced her engagement she wore a very feminine Ralph Lauren dress. It was $400 and instantly sold out. Why did she choose something so down-home for that moment?
There's been a lot of talk about her not wearing expensive clothes on purpose to communicate that to her fans. I don't know if it's that. I think she might be like: "I wanna buy what I like and I don't care how much it costs because I'm a normal person." I thought that dress was one of the best things she's ever worn.

What are her iconic looks? Does she have a "Rihanna in Guo Pei at the Met" moment?
Certainly not. I think the closest she came was when she wore a red sweater and her hair curly at a Kelce football game. Or when she wore the Area crystal jeans. But she's not a fashion person. I think her clothes brand her in the same way her writing brands her: as a normal girl that you can relate to.

Are there any style risks you would like to see her take?
I would love for her to look a little less costume-y, but I don't know how that happens. I think that's just who she is. She was really deep on SSENSE for a couple of weeks and wore that Jean Paul Gaultier top. That felt like a fashion risk without leaving her comfort zone.
Image Credits: Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
She thrived on negativity

Other than maybe Drake, no pop star has got richer off making lemons into lemonade. When critics said the teenage Swift didn't write her own songs, she wrote 2010's sublime Speak Now entirely alone. Ye invading her MTV awards acceptance speech made her a household name. The media ragging on her for having too many boyfriends gave us Blank Space. Losing out to West in the public relations game inspired Reputation, her best album. Her industry nemesis buying the rights to her first six albums inspired the Taylor's Versions coup de grace, and in turn the Eras tour, which grossed more than $1bn - affording her to buy the masters herself. I would love to know whether she's ultimately grateful for any of these misfortunes. At any rate, last year she said it outright when critics gave her album The Life of a Showgirl middling reviews: "The rule of show business is if it's the first week of my album release, and you are saying either my name or my album title, you're helping." More recently, she revealed that she tells young songwriters that criticism is a gift: "Make art about it." LS
Image Credits: Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management; Christopher Polk/Getty Images
She made her publicist a star

In October 2023, Swift was on a red carpet for the premiere of The Eras Tour film. In response to the hordes of photographers clamouring for her attention, she took a beat and pointed to her publicist, Tree Paine. "You see that redhead? She'll tell me what to do."

The idea that any one person could truly control pop's ultimate Machiavelli feels faintly ludicrous. But Paine is the bad cop who lets her employer play at being sunshine and rainbows. For all her open-hearted songwriting, Swift is a fortress with Paine the sole keyholder, and she can pull up the drawbridge at will.

Since Swift hired her in 2014, Paine has emerged as a mastermind behind the mastermind. As well as only granting very selective Swift interviews to the media, Paine is acutely tapped into internet chatter. She played a key part in the Taylor v Kim v Ye feud, but no crumb of gossip is too small for Paine to go to war over: she didn't just clap back at DeuxMoi for posting rumours that Swift and her ex Joe Alwyn, an actor, were secretly married, she accused them of causing "pain and trauma". When Swift seemed to ignore Céline Dion on stage at the 2024 Grammys, Paine and team reportedly "scrambled" to snap a picture of the singers together, smoothing over controversy. At the Eras tour, she was in the pit every night telling photographers how to shoot the singer: over-the-shoulder.

Along with Beyoncé's omnipresent longtime publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, Paine has become a star in her own right, reflecting a time where fans are increasingly aware of those who help to craft the image of their favourite celebrities (see Law Roach, Terrence O'Connor, Aidan Zamiri). Fans gag at Paine's designer outfits, no-nonsense attitude and assured composure; a picture of Paine fetching Swift water has nearly a million views, while the Wall Street Journal has dedicated more than 2,000 words to analysing her strategic genius. She has a good claim to being pop's biggest power publicist since Liz Rosenberg simultaneously represented the diva trifecta of Madonna, Cher and Stevie Nicks in the 80s and 90s. The difference is that Paine's eyes are trained on just one. OM
Image credits: Emma McIntyre/AMA2019/Getty Images for dcp
She co-signed the competition

Some time around 2014 - when her 1989 album made her the biggest pop star in the world for the first time - Swift stopped being pop's favourite ingenue and was finally acknowledged as the artistic and commercial titan she had been for years. With that shift, Swift accepted her role as someone who could boost careers: she big-upped fledgling pop stars such as Troye Sivan and took Charli xcx and Camila Cabello on her Reputation tour, performing Shake It Off with them each night. Call it a magnanimous version of the infamous "Drake co-sign" - wherein, during the 2010s, the rapper would remix songs by unknown artists and make them hits, thereby giving him the ability to take some credit for the artist's success. Swift's Midas touch might be a little more beneficial in the long-run, and is therefore hugely coveted: many of the artists who opened the Eras tour, such as Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams, now sell out arenas themselves. SDS
Image credits: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for dcp
She canonised millennial dating

For years, Swift was known as pop's card-carrying romantic, a woman who would be so audacious as to re-write Romeo & Juliet with a happy ending, or write an entire song of Kennedy family fanfic (Starlight) while dating a Kennedy and then perform it for the Kennedys. As time went on, her relationship with love in her music became more complicated: although she sang of new love on 2017's Reputation, she also wrote about feeling doomed to single life forever because of impediments she couldn't control, and on 2020's Folklore wrote about missed connections with exes who she still thought about.

By 2022's Midnights, Swift seemed ambivalent towards the traditional ideas of "settling down" she had once aspired to in song. On multiple songs from that record, she expressed uneasiness about the idea of getting married at, potentially, the expense of her own autonomy. And she bemoaned the idea that the cultural idea of womanhood was still so narrow: "All they keep askin' me / Is if I'm gonna be your bride," she sang on Lavender Haze. "The only kind of girl they see / Is a one-night or a wife."

This arc - from one-true-love fairytales to wondering if marriage is even in the cards at all - mirrors that of a lot of women I know who are roughly Swift's age. Although Swift has almost certainly never been on a dating app, the bleakness of Midnights - and its follow-up, The Tortured Poets Department, which came after the end of her longest relationship, and on which Swift confesses she's "down bad crying at the gym" - feels of a piece of the grim way in which many of my single female friends speak about their romantic lives. For many years, Swift's was pop's ultimate heteropessimist, putting a pin in romantic ideals she had helped create.

In a sense, the romantic crash outs of Tortured Poets created a new facet of relatability in Swift's work, which had become increasingly insular over the preceding years - suddenly, she was a romantic newbie just like many of her fans, trying to work out why what felt like true love had curdled so quickly. And then she took another step that reminded me of my mid-30s friends. In what felt like the blink of an eye, she found a new jock dreamboat in American football player Kelce, to fulfil the romantic fantasies that seemed so out of reach a few years earlier. Swift's romantic path is one fairly specific to millennial womanhood, in that she could have chosen a marriage-less path but ultimately decided not to; in capturing that path in song, she essentially memorialised the millennial dating experience on a mass scale. SDS
Image credits: YouTube/Taylor Swift
She spiced up the charts

Every new Swift release arrives alongside a swathe of CD, vinyl, cassette and digital variants, all of which help her maintain her career-long chart dominance. Many artists do this, of course, but Swift, who drops limited releases through a complex system of timed windows and exclusive retailers - itself a bugbear to many devoted fans - has mastered the art of gaming the charts, often to others' detriment. When it looked like Billie Eilish might unseat Swift's The Tortured Poets Department in 2024, Swift released three digital variants to hold the top spot; Charli xcx's Brat nearly did the same in the UK, so Swift released six UK-only album variants within the last few hours of chart eligibility and stayed at No 1. Lana Del Rey has said that Swift once told her she "wants [success] more than anyone" - and it's clear she knows how to get it. SDS
Image credits: OfficialCharts.com/PA
She broke the indie/pop binary

Swift has always been as mainstream as they came. Her earliest records were big, bright pop-country smashes that referenced blue-chip stars (Tim McGraw) and the literary canon (Romeo & Juliet, on Love Story). The first signs of experimentation in her career came on 2012's Red, when she began incorporating synths into her music - and even that record included a dig at an ex who liked listening to indie music. Centrism was her brand; when she wrote an album about her glamorous new life in New York City, 2014's 1989, she made sure to root her pop sound in the music of the 80s, as if to keep less adventurous listeners onside.

But 1989 had an unlikely effect. Its monumental success forced basically everyone to pay attention to Swift, even alternative music fans who weren't used to keeping up with the Billboard charts. As Swift got older, her own hang-ups around alternative music seemed to fade too - slowly at first, then all at once. In 2019, Lover featured nods to Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, Chromatics, Lana Del Rey and Blood Orange.

Then, during the pandemic, came indie Swift. Her 2020 records Folklore and Evermore, produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, received rave reviews and fully legitimised Swift as a songwriter in the eyes of more highbrow fans. It made Dessner an A-list producer overnight: he's since produced music by a new generation of pop stars including Gracie Abrams, Laufey and Noah Kahan, as well as established musicians such as Ed Sheeran and Florence + the Machine; meanwhile Swift made music with the National, Phoebe Bridgers and Hayley Williams of Paramore. Swift stopped positioning herself in opposition to the indie world and found a way to absorb it into her own universe - opening up an entirely new market for herself in the process. SDS

Image credits: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

She set the narrative

Like many other stars of her ilk, Swift rarely does traditional interviews any more. Almost all information about her life and career released into the world comes through Swift's official channels, and she's trained fans to understand that her word is gospel. When she does make media appearances, it's calculated: she spoke to Variety, a Hollywood trade magazine, about her ambition to become a director; she announced last year's The Life of a Showgirl on New Heights, a podcast hosted by her fiance Kelce. In each interview, Swift doled out information specifically designed to position herself and her career at that point in time.

Sometimes, what she shares is contradictory: when Swift released a 10-minute version of her 2012 song All Too Well in 2021, she told fans it originated from a jam session with her band where she basically ad-libbed the song on the spot, even though the song's co-writer Liz Rose had said there was never officially a 10-minute version; instead, she and Swift had pared the song down from an abundance of ideas Swift brought to her. Plus, ATW10 bears the clear marks of Swift's post-Folklore songwriting style, as well as a mention of a keychain bearing the phrase "Fuck the patriarchy", hardly common in 2010. But it's tricky to argue the narrative when Swift keeps things so tightly bound. Call it Public Relations (Taylor's Version). SDS
Image credits: Julien de Rosa/AFP/Getty Images; YouTube/New Heights
She resuscitated monoculture

Streaming and social media have siloed the watercooler entertainment age. What seems like the biggest thing in the world to you - Marvel movies, Joe Rogan - might mean nothing to the person next to you on the bus scrolling K-pop fan cams. Swift has transcended mass fragmentation to become the default pop star.

You could argue that's because her career predates this new cultural reality, but plenty of old-school pop stars failed to leap that Rubicon. Swift's enduring song craft, strategy and gossip factor kept her star bright. She is maturing on her own terms, but remains relevant to new, young fans: the Taylor's Version re-recordings let Swifties who were too little to remember their original releases feel a sense of participation and ownership. The ensuing Eras tour, showcasing (almost) every Swift album, innately reflected the poignancy of how many generations of fans had grown up alongside her work. Her music is universally accessible (and, crucially, approved by parents). Infants can bop to it. It's a ready-made belief system for young fans discovering themselves. It's so detailed it commands Zapruder-level analysis from hardcore stans; so well-crafted that even old, classic rock dudes respect her. I am often stunned at how casual music fans who otherwise don't participate in fandom culture refer to themselves as Swifties.

Her presence and influence have made her so powerful that streaming platforms and international governments alike have to kiss the ring. It means she can set the terms of engagement. To see the music video for last year's The Fate of Ophelia on its weekend of release, you had to shell out for a cinema ticket, making Swift a Disney-like conglomerate unto herself. It is Swift's world, and we're very much living in it. LS
Image credits: Emma McIntyre/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

The next 20 years?

Guardian writers on what the next 20 years might look like for Taylor Swift

Few A-list female pop stars have sustained an A-list pop career for as long as Swift has, and far fewer have made it beyond that point. (Even Madonna's imperial period faltered just over 20 years in.) So what do the next 20 years look like? Swift's nuptials to Kelce are, as they say, impending. Maybe her song for the Toy Story 5 soundtrack suggests a hankering for an Oscar - or tees up her fans' hankering for her to return to country music. She's not likely to mount an Eras-scale tour again anytime soon - but maybe that creates opportunities for looser, more intimate live showcases. Our critics look at what they think Swift will do next - and what they want her to.

Image credits: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

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Since 2021, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been one of the best hitters in the league. As we enter June, he has just three home runs and his worst power numbers for several years. At this pace, he will finish with nine homers - the same as he managed in the shortened 60-game season in 2020. His top-20 average ADP has resulted in returns that barely put him in the top 20 at first base, and that poses the question: Can this regression be explained?

What could ring some alarm bells is the drop in his barrel rate, which has halved from 12.2% to 6.9% so far in 2026. Hard hit rate is down over eight points from 50.7% to 42.2%, and his SLG has dropped nearly 90 points year over year from .467 to .379. These are not small fluctuations and should be points of concern for fantasy owners. The HR/FB rate tells the same story, sitting at just 5.6% compared to a considerably higher career norm. When a hitter of Guerrero's caliber sees his barrel rate halve and his hard hit rate drop by more than a tenth, theories of some more permanent regression are going to be talked about.

What is interesting is that the zone breakdowns clearly show where he has struggled so far this season. Guerrero's attack angle and bat path allow him to attack all areas of the field, but when he is not barreling the ball at the rate expected of him, the holes can start to appear in clear areas of the zone, especially when compared to last season.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member

The most glaring drop-off is in zone 2 at the top of the strike zone. In 2025, that was arguably his most productive area - a SLG of .879, wOBA of .533, and ISO of .455. In 2026, those same numbers read .286, .239, and .000, respectively. The ISO of .000 is pretty telling - he has generated zero extra base power in zone 2 this season. While mechanically there is no regression or difference in attack angle, tilt, or any of these metrics, he is simply not squaring up balls at the top of the zone, and it is resulting in more pop-ups and ground balls. His squared-up contact rate in this top zone has dropped 17 points from 40% in 2025 to 23% in 2026. Meanwhile, his pop-up rate has jumped 8 points, and his ground ball rate has also increased 10 points. The fly balls and line drives that were producing that .879 SLG in 2025 are simply not happening - the bat is getting under the ball or rolling over it rather than driving through it. He has yet to barrel a single ball in zone 2 in 2026, compared to elite barrel production in that zone last season. Compounding this, pitchers have identified the vulnerability - his In Zone % is down 5.9 points in 2026 while his Out of Zone Swing % has jumped 9.5 points, meaning he is seeing fewer hittable pitches and chasing more outside the zone.

We can see this reinforced in the squared-up tool - Jack Dorfman wrote an excellent piece explaining the tool in relation to the struggles of Fernando Tatis Jr, which I would recommend reading for a deeper dive into this metric.

In 2025, Guerrero's orange dots tracked close to or above the league average curve in the 10-35 degree launch angle range - the window that produces line drives and home runs. In 2026, the blue dots fall consistently below the league average in that same range, and the largest circles - representing his most frequent contact - are concentrated below 10 degrees, in ground ball and weak fly ball territory. When he is hitting fly balls, there is a big gap between the orange dots, showing his inability to square up those pitches this season.

His fly ball squared-up rate has dropped from 62% in 2025 to 50% in 2026, sitting 18 points below the league average of 68%. When he does get the ball in the air, he is making quality contact on only half of those batted balls, which explains the increased pop-ups and ground balls. With one of the flattest bat paths in the league, he has very little margin for error on elevated pitches. When he is on time, he can still drive them, as the 2025 orange dots show. When the timing is slightly off, the flat path produces pop-ups rather than line drives and fly balls. On the flip side, his ground ball squared-up rate is up from 60% to 65% and above the league average of 63% - the contact quality on low launch angle balls is intact and improving.

While this all sounds like a hitter on the precipice of decline, it is this ability to maintain his ground ball contact quality despite the absence of home runs that is helping him retain his value as an elite hitter. His flat bat path allows him to hit to all areas of the park, and while he still has elite bat speed at the 94th percentile, his xBA is elite, and his xwOBA remains very respectable. All this while having a maxEV of 116 in his locker with no sign of declining bat speed.

We can see the impact of decreased power correlating with his wOBA, but following a pretty significant drop, there has been a clear recovery trend in the last 10-15 games. Both lines are trending back toward and above the seasonal average, suggesting he was suffering from a dip in form rather than a fundamental decline - and if that trend continues, the power numbers may not be far behind. Even if this season is a down year in terms of home run production, he still has the skillset to have significant value this season and remains one of the best bats in baseball. The power will not stay suppressed indefinitely for a hitter with a maxEV of 116 and bat speed at the 94th percentile - the only question is timing, and the rolling average suggests that timing may be sooner rather than later, suggesting no need to worry about his top-end value, and remains a strong buy-low if attainable.

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There's a reference in this piece to "Crying in H Mart" - an excellent essay in its own right that you can read here: Crying in H Mart | The New Yorker

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Some of us are crying in H Mart; some of us are mourning in Costco.

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Jason Hernandez on Instagram: "First kick flip on Wednesday, 4 days later kick flipped a three stair. “I believe in myself”"

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290 likes, 36 comments - heyfilmthis on May 11, 2026: "First kick flip on Wednesday, 4 days later kick flipped a three stair. “I believe in myself”". 

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View this post on Instagram

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A job that changed me: At 14 I was a basketball musician. If someone missed a shot, I’d drop in a ‘du-ba-dum’

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On | Shape of Dreams, starring Zendaya. Written and directed by Spike Jonze.

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Meta glasses are absolute game changers for the blind community — this isn’t special pleading — they are completely revolutionary and though expensive they are in relative reasonable reach in a way a lot of disability tech is not

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The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences: [contains quote post or other embedded content]

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This Story is Against Resilience, Supports Screaming As Needed by Jen Ferguson

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How a 7-year-old in my swim class shifted my perspective on accessibility

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Lily Hua describes the challenges she faced when teaching swimming lessons to an autistic boy, and how she learned to help him. #firstperson

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Amber Allen, Kate Cayley, Larah Luna, Carrie Mac and Andy Stefan have made the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist.

Their nominated works are:

The winner will be announced on May 7. She will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

The remaining four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.

All five finalists now have their work published on CBC Books. You can read their stories by clicking on the links above.

The longlist was selected from nearly 3,000 submissions. Submissions are processed by a two-tiered system: the initial submissions are screened by a reading committee chosen for each category from a group of qualified editors and writers across the country.

Each entry is read by two readers.

The readers develop a preliminary list of approximately 100 submissions that are then forwarded to a second reading committee. It is this committee who will decide upon the approximately 30 entries that comprise the longlist that is forwarded to the jury.

This year's finalists were selected by a jury composed of Maria Reva, Terry Fallis and Tracey Lindberg. They will also select the winner.

Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style. For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.

Last year's winner was Dorian McNamara for his story . You can read the entire shortlist here.

The shortlist for the French-language competition has also been revealed. To read more, go to the Prix de la création Radio-Canada.

If you're interested in other writing competitions, check out the CBC Literary Prizes. The 2026 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. The 2027 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2027 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.

Get to know the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize English-language finalists below.

Amber Allen is an academic librarian who grew up in Fergus, Ont., and now lives with her family in Guelph, Ont. Her story Leftovers appeared in Existere and she previously served on the board of directors for Pulp Literature.

She studied creative writing at the University of Guelph, the University of Toronto, York University and Humber College.

"I've taken a lot of creative writing classes, and inevitably the CBC writing contests are mentioned as the most aspirational venues for short form writing. I am also a member of the Canada Writes Facebook Group and have seen how CBC creates a welcoming community for Canadian writers and champions the winners of their contests.

"I hemmed and hawed for a few weeks before convincing myself it was time to put myself out there again, with this piece that is particularly meaningful to me, so I am delighted that it resonated with the readers."

Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, playwright and poet. She has published a novel, Property (Coach House Books), two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, Lithub, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Walrus. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their children.

Cayley previously longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2016 and the CBC Poetry Prize in 2013.

"It was definitely a joke and the rest of the story is completely imaginary, and has changed over the years, but I rewrote it almost from scratch last year. The initial inspiration, the image, has been with me for decades, changing as I have aged, married, had children myself. The final story is very different from where it started, but that memory was the beginning.

"I have rewritten this story many times over many years and finally felt like I got it to a point where I wanted it out in the world."

Larah Luna is a communications and marketing professional who divides her time between Vancouver and Winnipeg. Born in the Philippines and raised in Manitoba, she grew up surrounded by prairie landscapes that continue to shape the emotional settings of her fiction.

Living between two places, she often finds inspiration in the rhythms of landscape and migration. While much of her writing career has focused on storytelling through strategic communications, she has long written fiction privately. A Season of Crows marks her first public literary recognition.

Why she wrote : " A Season of Crows began with my memories of the prairie sky in late fall, when the fields are quiet and the only movement is the slow gathering of birds overhead. Now living in Vancouver, I've also been fascinated by the Burnaby crows and their daily migrations across the sky - thousands of birds travelling together toward evening roosts. Watching their patterns of movement made me think about how landscapes hold memory and how nature sometimes carries the emotions we struggle to name.

"The story was also shaped by my own experience of grief after the loss of my mother, and the sense that it doesn't simply disappear, but settles into the world around us. From there, the story grew into an exploration of how memory, loss and place become intertwined.

"Although I write professionally in communications, fiction has always been a quieter and more personal form of storytelling for me. Last year, after a career transition, I found myself with the rare gift of time and the chance to travel on my own for the first time. That experience gave me the space to return to creative writing with renewed clarity. The CBC Literary Prizes felt like a meaningful place to share that work for the first time, particularly because the prize celebrates stories rooted in Canadian landscapes and lived experience."

Carrie Mac's novel, Last Winter, was a Canadian No. 1 bestseller. Her short stories and creative non-fiction have been published Prism, Room, Event, New Quarterly, Geist, subTerrain and Hippocampus, among others. Her accolades include a B.C. Book Prize and an Arthur Ellis Award.

Mac won the 2015 CBC Nonfiction Prize for if you have a good seal, the chest will rise. She mentors authors at Humber School for Writers and lives with her two kids in East Vancouver.

"These garishly lit, roadside hubs are intersections for human ley lines, populated by a constantly shifting, colourful citizenry. Rich fodder for people-watchers like me, I can't imagine spending even two minutes in one without coming away with a story."

Andy Stefan is an ecologist with MSc in biology. Her scientific work has been published in academic journals and she has contributed nonfiction articles on Canadian species to the Canadian Encyclopedia. She spends much of her time in and around rivers and forests thinking about how ecosystems respond to stress and change. Her writing grows out of that perspective, exploring the overlap between ecological and human experience.

"A friend told me he was submitting, which pushed me to revisit this idea I'd been turning over for some time. After the summer of 2025, when the water was lower than I had ever seen it, I decided it was time to stop thinking about it and actually submit."

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5 writers make the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist | CBC Books

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Read the five works contending for $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a Banff Centre writing residency. The winner will be announced on May 7, 2026.

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AI doesn’t lower my cortisol - The Observer

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How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration)

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Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations — spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.

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Intended for desktop + headset, adapted for mobile.
read more about the work ▾

Singing light explores metaphysical reality from a indigenous sámi worldview. It consists of sound and visuals, as well as three connected stories, all set in a coded frame.
A House of Wild Water project. -->
Commissioned by HTML review.

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Intended for desktop + headset, adapted for mobile.

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Fascinated by the vulnerability of humans, she passes her time to push the boundaries of what is intimate. Her series “Au coin de ma rue”
where she entered bit by bit in the private life of strangers. Or her project 7AM/7PM where she invited these same strangers to sleep at
her house to capture the innocence and fragility just as they wake up. Her series “Bath” where she captured the moments of quiet solitude
characterize her quest for innocence and the beauty in imperfection. Since her return to Brussels, she has retreated into her own world where
she lives like a hermit working on her new project KATALOG. It’s the first time she uses her private life as a case study.

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A pair of birds dart across your narrow field of vision on the screen. The last user had left the telepresence machine near the bed closest to the door before disconnecting, with the camera and monitor pointing at the open window so that you, the next user, would not have to stare into the face of a dying stranger. Hard to tell if this was an act of kindness or shame.

You nudge the thumb stick to turn around, gingerly; the motion is smooth but slow, as though impeded by some viscous fluid-most operators are as inexperienced as you, and the slowness adds a measure of safety.

The hospital room is clean, with three beds. She's in the middle, an unmoving husk under the thin blanket. You hear a few moans from the bed on the far side, but the microphone doesn't pick up much detail.

The bright sunlight from the window behind you makes you think the room is warm. You imagine the breeze coming through the open window, suffused with the smells from the food vendors on the street below: herb-grilled lamb skewers, peanuts roasted over an open fire, yams baked in ovens made from oil drums-foods you haven't tasted in more than two decades.

You think the room isn't big enough for three beds, certainly not by the standards of America, but the nurse had explained over the phone that this is the best-equipped ward in the hospital-the machine you're in is proof of that.

The caretaker you pay every week stands up and introduces herself. You can see she's used to talking to a head floating in a TV screen perched on top of a squat robot. You suppress the impulse to explain about vacation days, the difficulty of asking for leave when you're at this stage in your career, the uncertainly of taking a transoceanic trip when you don't know when...it will be over.

"I'll wake her up," she says.

It has been so long since you've conversed with anyone other than your mother in the language of your childhood that you struggle to find the right register, the correct phrases with the appropriate level of politeness. "Doesn't she...isn't that...do you think she needs to sleep more?"

She looks at you with pity. You act like a foreigner.

She moves over to the bed and pats the face of the sleeping woman. "Wake up! Wake up! Your son is here!"

Her shouting wakes up the women in the other two beds, who grumble. Then she uses her hands to pry open your mother's eyes. She turns your mother's head so that the eyes are directed at you.

For a moment, you are shocked by the way she's handling your mother, and then you wonder if this is, in fact, the only way to reach through the haze that has claimed her; you wonder if your reaction is a result of the delicacy of your Americanized sensibilities or something else, something darker, related to how the caretaker is here while you remain on the other side of the ocean.

The eyes are cloudy and you wonder if she even knows you're here or if she just perceives indistinct patterns of lights and shadows.

"She's happy to see you," the caretaker says. "See how keeps her eyes open even when my hands are off? That never happens."

Self-conscious, you lean in. "I'm here." You wonder how this is any different from watching you on the screen of a computer monitor. You wonder what it is you're paying for.

The pattern of wrinkles on her face stays still like a carved mask. The paralysis from the stroke is complete.

Lifting off the blanket, the woman begins to change your mother's diaper. You want to look away and then realize that not looking would only be a way to lie to yourself. You're startled by the thinness of her legs in the air-pale, spotted skin wrapped around bones-and you hold your breath.

But of course there is no smell. You do not detect the excrement, the shame of your mother's helplessness, the odor of disinfectant and rot and death. The physicality of her condition does not touch the delicate membranes of your olfactory cells. Civilization is the process of constructing ever more elaborate lies to shield us from the reality of death. You are still divided by an ocean.

The woman works efficiently and quietly. She throws the soiled diaper into the bucket next to the bed and wipes your mother clean with a washcloth. Then she lifts the legs again and puts a fresh diaper in place. You take a deep breath.

One of the other patients speaks. "You live in America?"

You turn your head around; it takes thirty seconds but feels like an hour. Then you see her, a middle-aged woman whose face is full of curiosity. You nod.

"So far away," she says. "She must think of you often even though she can't talk. You should come back."

You resent her rudeness and presumption. You want to tell her about your responsibilities, the mortgage and the young children. You want to explain it isn't easy to make it in America, to hold onto a job, to make enough money to pay for a caretaker because you can't be here and you don't want your mother to lie in her shit and piss for hours in the under-staffed hospital. You want to say that you've been trying to convince her for years to come and join you, but she does not want to move to a foreign land. You want to accuse her of trying to lash out at you because her own children have left her here to die while visiting her only as ghosts embodied in a machine. You want to bring up the point that a life of opportunities in that new, distant land, for you and your children, is what she wanted.
Instead you just nod again and you turn your face back, another thirty seconds.

The caretaker hands you a pair of nail clippers. They click securely into the manipulators at the end of your arm. "Why don't you trim her nails?"

You are flustered. You haven't ever tried to cut someone else's nails.

"It'll make you feel better."

You are surprised by the kindness in her voice.

Your fingers are shaking, afraid to hurt her, but the robot has been programmed for this. You just have to nudge the thumb stick this way and that, to squeeze the handles when the screen tells you to, and the waldos do all the rest. The safety routines ensure that you do not injure her while giving you the illusion of doing something for her. As you watch the remote manipulators hold one of your mother's hands, you imagine how cool the skin is, how weighty the desiccated muscle and skin wrapping the rheumatic joints feel.

Her eyes remain open the whole time.

You visit her every night. You become more skilled at driving the robot and they give you more control, to allow you more speed and degrees of freedom. You learn to change her diapers, to wipe her down, to sit next to her bed for hours and watch her face for imagined signs of movement. You listen to the soap opera playing on the TV in the background and you get to know the patients rotating through the other two beds. You do not meet their visitors, who timeshare your body.

These robots are built for the guilty, for those too far away and with too many excuses. Despite your awareness of the illusory nature of your presence, of the lie technology helps you to tell yourself, you do feel better.

You disconnect and find yourself unable to cry.

The nurse's words echo in your mind.

She went to sleep last night and did not wake up.

The thought that you might actually be relieved to no longer have to make the visit every night makes you turn away from the mirror over the dresser.

You try to think about how characters in movies react when this happens, and then you think what is wrong with you that you have to emulate fiction.

"Is everything all right?" your wife asks.

"I don't want to talk about it," you snap.

Your daughter comes to you.

"My nails are too long," she says. Your wife usually takes care of this kind of thing, but today she's out, grocery shopping.

You hold her in your lap and pick up the nail clippers. You smell her hair, fresh lilac and sweet jam-she's just had some toast with strawberry preserves. You wonder if she'll like herb-grilled lamb skewers.

You think about how strange it is to describe what happened as losing someone when the real loss happened years ago, so gradually that you weren't even aware when it happened. You can't remember the moment you decided you would not go back. You can't remember the moment you accepted that she would not come to join you. You can't remember when you became American. You think about how a thousand small decisions add up to irrevocable changes, how not deciding is the same as deciding. You think about how people expect you to act a certain way when they don't know anything about you.

Your daughter squirms in your lap, making herself more comfortable.

You think about how to describe to her the grandmother she has never seen. You think about how to explain yourself to her, how to justify your choices, when she is old enough to understand. You think about the price you pay for a new life on another continent, an ocean away.

You think about absolution that will never come because the judge is yourself.

You wait to squeeze the nail clippers because your eyes have grown hot and wet and it's hard to see.

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Presence. Short story by Ken Liu. Uncanny Issue One.

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When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story

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When the yogurt took over, we all made the same jokes – “Finally, our rulers will have culture,” “Our society has curdled,” “Our government is now the cream of the crop,” and so on. But when we wer…

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Sorry, you have been blocked from accessing Edublogs. If you feel this was done in error please contact support@edublogs.org and include the information shown below. Public IP: 45.55.215.24 Ray ID: 9e91acda6befc337

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What’s the most painful sting in the world?

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Top contenders for the nastiest sting range from bullet ants to warrior wasps and tiny jellyfish.

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Has Nintendo Solved Its Princess Problem?

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As the company releases the sequel “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” the need for narrative has meant a new focus on its sparse cast of female characters.

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I am drawing a map from the sea to the sky.

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I first heard about the Baekdusan in a book my umma would read to me as a child. Each page was illustrated with myths, stories, and songs that she remembered from her own childhood in a mountain village near Gwangju, a city in the south of Korea made famous by the bloody protests that took place there in 1980. She had bought the book after the 1988 Olympics, the first time an international event had taken place in her homeland, a glimmer of what eventually became the hallyu wave. Appropriate for the type of patriotism it was intended to inspire, the book was titled “I Love Korea!”, exclamation point included.

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FROM MINE TO YOURS: PATHS, SOUNDS, AND INNER MONOLOGUES COLLECTED BY QUEENIE WU FOR THE HTML REVIEW

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'Mistakes' (New Zealand road safety advert)

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Baseball is my favorite thing in the world, man. And I’m so honored I get to play it with the Jays and in Toronto.

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I Got Straight A’s. I Never Learned to Think.

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You were told you were smart. You were actually just obedient.

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Visuals by The New York Times, Text by Stephanie Goodman

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Actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael B. Jordan talk about the thought process behind their nominated roles. 

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Navigating deafness in a hearing world | Rachel Kolb | TEDxStanford

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Viewfinders: 10 Y.A. Novelists Spin Fiction From Vintage Photos

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The New York Times invited Asian-American authors to choose photos from our archives and write short young-adult fiction inspired by them.

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A very subversively funny Oscar-nominated short film. Interestingly, you could easily make a case to file this in persuasion or exposition - it's very clever.

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JANE AUSTEN'S PERIOD DRAMA / 2026 Oscar®-Nominated Short Film

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A college student’s perspective on using AI in class

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Instead of banning AI, why don’t schools teach students to use it critically? College freshman Maximilian Milovidov shares what he has learned in an “AI writing” course at Columbia University.

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A caution here that the regular version has some colourful language and imagery, but you can choose an entirely classroom-safe version at the top of the page if you prefer

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We need to talk about naked mole rats - The Oatmeal

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This is a comic about naked mole rats, aka tube goblins.

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Mapping 100,000 moments of human happiness.

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100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped

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but the state stole all my good metaphors

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The Great Planet on Instagram: "For decades, the golden rule of travel was simple: share the beauty you find. Today, that same generosity is destroying the very places we love.

In Japan, authorities were forced to erect a massive black net to hide Mt. Fuji from swarming crowds. In Iceland, the Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon survived the ice age but could not survive a single Justin Bieber music video. Within months of the release, thousands of years of fragile moss were trampled into mud, forcing the government to close the ecosystem indefinitely.

We have traded discovery for consumption.

A new ethic is quietly emerging among modern travelers. It is called Digital Silence. It is the conscious decision to share the art and the emotion of a place without giving away its exact coordinates. What the internet often dismisses as gatekeeping is no longer about elitism. It is a radical act of conservation. It is the realization that some sanctuaries need our silence much more than they need our geo-tags.

Perhaps the ultimate form of respect for a destination is to leave no digital footprint at all.

Where do you draw the line between sharing and protecting? Swipe through the case study and join the debate in the comments.

Curating the world’s culture.
@thegreatplanet"

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53K likes, 749 comments - thegreatplanet on February 19, 2026: "For decades, the golden rule of travel was simple: share the beauty you find. Today, that same generosity is destroying the very places we love.

In Japan, authorities were forced to erect a massive black net to hide Mt. Fuji from swarming crowds. In Iceland, the Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon survived the ice age but could not survive a single Justin Bieber music video. Within months of the release, thousands of years of fragile moss were trampled into mud, forcing the government to close the ecosystem indefinitely.

We have traded discovery for consumption.

A new ethic is quietly emerging among modern travelers. It is called Digital Silence. It is the conscious decision to share the art and the emotion of a place without giving away its exact coordinates. What the internet often dismisses as gatekeeping is no longer about elitism. It is a radical act of conservation. It is the realization that some sanctuaries need our silence much more than they need our geo-tags.

Perhaps the ultimate form of respect for a destination is to leave no digital footprint at all.

Where do you draw the line between sharing and protecting? Swipe through the case study and join the debate in the comments.

Curating the world’s culture.
@thegreatplanet". 

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View this post on Instagram

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LOOP - Mejor Cortometraje de animación en los 37 Premios Goya

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This Is How Ancient Egyptians Carved Hieroglyphs in Stone 🪨⚒️ Khufu Cartouche | How Was It Made?

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f i t 4 a

with Jan Diehm

I remember once being that teen girl shopping in the women's section for the first time. I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I'm stuck with the countless ways that women's apparel is not made for the average person, like me.

Children's clothing sizes are often tied to a kid's age or stage of development. The idea is that as a young person grows older, her clothes will evolve with her. Youth styles tend to be boxy and oversized to allow room for kids to move and grow. By early adolescence, apparel for girls becomes more fitted. Junior's styles have higher waistlines and less-pronounced curves compared to adult clothing lines. In short: clothes for tweens are made for tween bodies.

By the time most teenage girls can wear women's clothes - around age 15 - their options are seemingly endless. But the evolution in clothing sizes that followed girls throughout childhood abruptly stops there.

This is the reality I find myself reckoning with today: Women's clothing - designed for adults - fits modern teen girls better.

Waistline in Inches

XXS XS S M L XL XXL

Size range:

Letter size:

Numeric size:

Waist size: "

I once believed that change was inevitable and sizing problems would become a relic of the past. If it wasn't some scrappy upstart that promised to revolutionize the sizing system, then at least the major fashion conglomerates would be well-placed to modernize and tap the full potential of the plus-size market. But that progress never fully materialized. And I got tired of waiting.

A few years ago, I started learning how to sew. Somehow it felt more practical to make my own clothes than count on meaningful change to happen on its own. Getting started was easier than I thought. The first sewing pattern I ever completed - a boxy, drop-shoulder style that could turn into either a shirt or dress - was free to download. It included a 29-page instruction manual with photos and illustrations documenting every step.

From there, I started learning how to draft my own sewing patterns from scratch. That's when I realized the truth behind my sizing struggles: Clothing sizes are optimized for mass production and appeal - not women's bodies. Nothing represents this more than a size 8.

Fashion designers often use body measurements for a size 8 as a starting point when creating new design samples. Manufacturers then use a mathematical formula to determine each next size up or down the range in a process called grading. The effect is like a Russian doll. Each size up is incrementally larger than the last.

The uniform shape makes it easier for factories to mass-produce garments, however it comes with several tradeoffs. It's hard to scale up to larger-sized clothing before the proportions become distorted. It also becomes impractical to make multiple versions of a single item to accommodate varying body shapes or heights. That means most women's clothing is derived from a single set of proportions - a size 8. According to U.S. health data, fewer than 10% of adult women have waistlines that fit the standard sample size or smaller.

I, like the vast majority of women, do not fit the standard mold. Instead I took an old pattern-making textbook often taught in fashion design schools to start making clothes to fit my own unique proportions. I gathered and recorded over 58 different body measurements in order to get started and from there, I could make my own custom base pattern, known as a bodice block or sloper.

Once I compared my personalized sloper to commercial patterns and retail garments, I had a revelation: clothes were never made to fit bodies like mine. It didn't matter how much weight I gained or lost, whether I contorted my body or tried to buy my way into styles that "flatter" my silhouette, there was no chance that clothes would ever fit perfectly on their own. Finally I understood why.

s i z i n g f o r

The fashion industry thrives on exclusivity. Luxury brands maintain their status by limiting who is able to buy or even wear their clothes. If few women fit the "ideal" standards, then products serving only them are inherently exclusionary. Size charts become the de facto dividing line determining who belongs and who doesn't.

This line of gatekeeping is baked into the foundation of virtually all clothing. The modern sizing system in the U.S. was developed in the 1940s based on mostly young, white women. No women of color were originally included. The system was never built to include a diverse cross-section of people, ages, or body types. It has largely stayed that way by design.

In its 1995 standards update, ASTM International admitted that its sizing guidelines were never meant to represent the population at large. Instead body measurements were based on "designer experience" and "market observations." The goal was to tailor sizes to the existing customer base. But what happens when more than half of all women are pushed to the margins or left behind?

It doesn't have to be this way. Teenage girls shouldn't be aging out of sizing options from the moment they start wearing women's clothes. A woman does not need hourglass proportions to look good, just as garment-makers do not need standardized sizes to produce well-fitting clothes.

There are no rules forcing brands to adopt any particular sizing system. There is no such thing as a "true" size 8, or any size for that matter. If brands are constantly developing and customizing their size charts, then it makes little sense to perpetuate a broken system. Sizes are all made up anyway - why can't we make them better?

Methodology

To highlight the median body proportions of the adult women in the U.S., we relied on anthropometric reference data for children and adults that is regularly released by the National Center for Health Statistics within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

For this story, we pulled data on the median waistline circumference of women and girls that was gathered between 2021-2023. For girls and women under 20 years old, measurements were recorded in two-year age ranges (ex: 10-11 years, 14-15 years), with a median of 141 participants per age range. For women over 20, measurements were recorded in nine-year age ranges (ex: 20-29 years, 30-39 years) and collectively for all women 20 and older. Each nine-year age range had a median of 465 participants. Overall, measurements were recorded for 3,121 women ages 20 and older. Those who were pregnant were excluded from the data.

HHS also provides a breakdown of measurements within set percentiles for each age range, which includes figures for the 5th, 10th, 15th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 85th, 90th, and 95th percentiles. We then used that percentile data to extrapolate the waistline measurements of all women and girls within each respective age group.

We also compared figures to those recorded by HHS from 1988-1994. There, 7,410 women ages 20 and older participated in the study. Measurements were originally recorded in centimeters, so we converted to inches.

Brands included in the size chart comparisons represent a diverse cross-section of popular apparel brands and retailers in the U.S., including a mix of mass market, fast fashion, premium and luxury labels.

For each brand, we focused on collecting body measurements for "regular" or "standard" size ranges, as well as "plus" sizes when available. Sizing information for "petite," "tall," or "curve" clothing lines were not included. Size charts reflect the body measurements for garments categorized as general "apparel." In a select few cases where that category was unavailable, "dresses" were used as the default garment type.

Within each size range, we focused on collecting three main body measurements: Bust, waist, and hip. Some were presented as a range from minimum to maximum values, while others were single measurements. All numeric U.S. women's sizing labels and descriptions were recorded, as well as their corresponding alpha sizes, when available.

Size chart data was last manually captured in July 2025 and may not reflect a brand's current size chart. Brands frequently change their size charts, and more often than not, shoppers aren't even aware when measurements or sizes are updated.

The standardized size charts refer to ASTM International's regular release of its Standard Table of Measurements for Adult Female Misses Figure Type. The 1995 release (designated as D 5585-95) reflects sizes 2-20. ASTM updated its standards in 2021 (designated as D5585-21) to include sizes 00-20.

Ransom note letters are from Indieground.

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The inter-generational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women

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An interactive story about the birds that capture our curiosity, told through data, visuals and illustrations

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There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

From Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Graywolf Press (January 7, 2014).

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There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer...

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One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

MARGINALIA

Two of my dear friends, both poets, are celebrating their birthdays today. I am not religious, but their presence in my life makes me feel blessed. Their friendship means so much to me.

But this one is especially for you, S. You're lovely. Thank you.

ABOUT MARY OLIVER

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Oliver's poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017). Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound,... (more)

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The Journey by Mary Oliver * Read A Little Poetry

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"But little by little, / as you left their voices behind, / the stars began to burn / through the sheets of clouds, / and there was a new voice / which you slowly / recognized as your own..." - Mary Oliver

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A caution here that this performance references recent acts of violence in Minneapolis.

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This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Nash Is Here For It

nashishereforit.bsky.social

did:plc:3eueg42gb4r6qbjxderbvyk7

Wow.

2026-02-17T03:59:50.455Z

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Nash Is Here For It (@nashishereforit.bsky.social)

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Nash Is Here For It (@nashishereforit.bsky.social)

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“Being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore,” writes Chanté Joseph. “It is no longer considered an achievement and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.”

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By Ashley Cai, Weiyi Cai, Malika Khurana, Victor Mather, Bedel Saget and Jeremy White

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Big Air, Big Tricks. How Kira Kimura Won Snowboarding Gold.

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Kira Kimura clinched the top spot on the podium after landing two tricks with five and a half rotations.

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A Love Letter to the Grand Romantic Gesture

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In honor of Valentine’s Day, our readers shared moments when they felt truly swept off their feet.

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I want to get back there again, whatever it takes.

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This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Post

David Atkinson

davidatkinsonpoet.bsky.social

did:plc:lmvyxubtjirkzmhqeblaxg2i

I find myself nodding in agreement. Not everyone is left standing the war has ended & also the notion that some of those left standing have been irrevocably changed by their experience But there is hope for a better future and an urgency to fight for what we might never see #poetry #poemoftheday

2026-02-09T22:16:47.257Z

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How a youth movement is keeping the Air Jordan 11 as popular as ever - Andscape

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Andscape sits down with Terrance Harvey, the young creative tasked with refreshing Michael Jordan’s favorite shoe and rewriting history.

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Since Australia's social media ban for under-16s began eight weeks ago, more than 235,000 people in the United Kingdom have written to their MPs calling for a similar ban, and last month the House of Lords backed such a move. Malaysia plans to implement a proposed ban by July and, in France, president Emmanuel Macron has declared the brains of the country's children "are not for sale", calling for legislation to be fast-tracked to ensure a ban for under-15s is in effect by the start of the school year this September. Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany are also considering restrictions on social media use. Australia's bold initiative is being closely observed.

While optimistic about the policy's capacity to reduce some harms in the short term, the Australian government has been clear that no one should expect it to be a magic bullet or an overnight success. As the first report from the e-Safety Commissioner was released last month, stating that 4.7 million accounts have been flagged and deactivated across the affected platforms, commissioner Julie Inman Grant was quick to remind sceptics the policy is about "resetting cultural norms" and the benefits "may take years to fully manifest".

Meanwhile, what has really changed for teens?

As the restrictions loomed in December, the Guardian spoke with five teenagers about the ban. Nearly two months later, some were still yet to have their accounts disabled, while others had taken pre-emptive steps to ensure they were never flagged. Re-emerging on platforms as "adults", some were shocked with the content they were greeted with. Others have simply chosen to pivot to alternative apps for messaging and accessing content that's available without an account, but say their screen time hasn't been reduced.

Most say while the restrictions are an imperfect inconvenience, there has been some positive impact on their IRL lives as subtle cultural shifts begin to take place.

'I'm a bit out of the loop sometimes' - Emma Williams, 15

I turn 16 in a few weeks and most of my friends are older than me so it hasn't interrupted my life much. I haven't tried to get around the ban because it's such a short time. In the meantime, some of my friends save up reels to share with me in person, which is quite fun. We can have a good laugh together then and I prefer that over getting it sent to me and laughing alone. It's more fun.

The only thing I've noticed is that I'm a bit out of the loop sometimes, mostly just with references friends might make to viral content that I've missed.

I have missed out on some holiday snaps friends posted and spent more time watching Netflix on my phone instead of scrolling. Overall though it's pretty much business as usual.

'Getting around the ban was so much easier than expected' - Sarai Ades, 14

The restrictions didn't interfere with me and my friends' interactions via social media at all. We all just deleted some of our old accounts a couple of days before the restrictions kicked in and created new ones with fake birthdays about a week after. I've got new accounts on TikTok and Snapchat, and Instagram hasn't flagged my old account as underage yet. It was so much easier than we thought it would be.

No one I know was even subjected to facial recognition when they started a new account. I'd noted down everyone who I wanted to stay in touch with, made a username people could recognise me by and just started fresh.

Now that the platforms think I'm over 18 I have completely unfiltered access to all the content that might have been previously left out of my feed because of content restrictions. I definitely have more videos coming up on my feed around geopolitical instability and more violent coverage. It was really shocking at first and I wasn't at all prepared. Sometimes I set my own restrictions to avoid sensitive content because it gets a bit much.

I try to follow trustworthy sources and fact-check information from less credentialed accounts, but all this new content I'm seeing means I go down more rabbit holes trying to verify it.

My screen time has definitely increased because of that, but my time on social media is probably about the same. Social media and the internet generally has definitely become a lot more interesting for me because I now see more content about political issues and debates. I also watch more content from accounts I disagree with just so I understand their points of view better.

I'm more inclined to open social media now because of all the new information and opinions I have access to. I think it's really positive because I can find more like-minded people to have productive conversations with and also have better conversations with my real-life friends because they are also seeing all this new stuff.

I feel like our horizons are expanding, and that's positive. There's a comfort in learning that there's so many other people out there who feel the same; are worried about the state of the world and want to do something about it. Being exposed to this new content has inspired me. I really want to push more progressive, inclusive, compassionate ideologies in my life.

More people I don't know try to connect with me online now, and sometimes that's a bit concerning. I never share personal information and try to be careful but I have started some friendships with people who care about the same issues as me. On a real-life level I have also seen a lot of school friends revealing their political positions through reposts and things and that has strengthened our connections in real life.

We all knew circumventing the ban was going to be possible, but it was so much easier than we could have expected. No verification, no ID, nothing. It was comedic how many times I saw a new account pop up of one of my friends.

Now I have unrestricted access I can do what I want with social media. On TikTok, I don't really post any videos, at least not yet. I'll probably wait until I'm 16.

I wasn't really impacted by the restrictions because I only use WhatsApp and Pinterest. I don't get involved with any WhatsApp groups that aren't direct messages to my real-life friends and I can still use YouTube without an account. I haven't noticed any change at all in the way my friends and I interact online or what we do while we're offline either.

When I was younger, social media was definitely something that I was eagerly waiting for but now I don't really care because I can see that I'm able to connect with my friends without it. Any online content I want to see I can access without accounts. The only platform I might join when I'm 16 is Instagram and that would only be because lots of older people in my family are already using it, so it would be to stay in touch with them.

'When the ban was first announced everyone was like CODE RED!' - Ewan Buchanan-Constable, 15

On the whole nothing much has changed. I have three accounts on YouTube, only two of those were flagged. Normal watching hasn't been affected because you don't need an account for that. I can't even remember if I put in my correct birthday when I opened the surviving account so it might never be flagged. I have noticed some videos now require age verification to watch them now.

A couple of my friends have lost their social media accounts on TikTok, etc. They've just made new accounts, no problems. Some people have been asked for facial recognition, but it seems really unreliable and inaccurate.

Because there was quite a bit of uncertainty on how or if it would work, on the last day of school everyone was exchanging phone numbers. Before the restrictions, giving your phone number seemed quite intimate, but the bans seemed to break that barrier down a bit. It means I have been able to develop closer friendships with people I was just acquainted with, because before I was one of the only ones without social media and was left out. But that's really just a happy accident, not a real consequence of the ban I don't think.

When the ban was first announced everyone was like CODE RED! Thinking of ways to get around it and stressing out. But it was easy to get around if you wanted to. People still talk about it, but it's not a big deal any more. At worst, for kids who want to be on the socials, it's an inconvenience.

What upsets me most is the waste of resources that has gone into this whole thing. That money should have been spent figuring out ways to regulate the platforms rather than trying to regulate kids. Or at least put towards educating kids and parents on the best ways to avoid online harms. Over Christmas I saw so many little kids spending so much time on screens - their parents let them.

'It doesn't feel like a big deal at all' - Grace Guo, 14

The social media ban only prevents us from making accounts; I can still search things on YouTube. The ban has made me realise that we sometimes depend on social media a bit too much and there are different ways to communicate and get entertainment.

Without access to apps like Instagram, there are still ways to socially connect and to express ourselves. I've switched from Instagram to texts and WhatsApp for messaging and I don't use technology as much since the ban came into effect. As someone who didn't really use social media to showcase things I was doing, I haven't noticed any change. Maybe I connect through face-to-face interactions more.

I haven't heard many people even talking about the ban since it happened. It doesn't feel like a big deal at all.

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Five young teens on life under Australia's social media ban: 'It's not a big deal any more'

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Nearly two months after age restrictions for under-16s were introduced, we revisit five teenagers on how they're experiencing - or getting around - the ban

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Hosting an Olympics usually results in a boost in medals - but it's not always the case, as Italy discovered the last time they hosted the Winter Olympics in 2006.

They had won 13 medals in 2002 in Salt Lake City but only managed 11 in Turin - although they did win five golds as opposed to four in the USA four years previously.

The Italian Olympic Committee has set a minimum target of 19 medals, which is one short of their biggest haul of 20. That was achieved in 1994 - including a record seven golds - when their team included the likes of skiing greats Alberto Tomba, Deborah Compagnoni and Stefania Belmondo.

Italy's 2026 hopes have already suffered a few setbacks, with flagbearer Federica Brignone and freestyle skier Flora Tabanelli both fighting fitness battles while another alpine hope, Marta Bassino, has already been ruled out.

But there are others with golden credentials, including speed skater Davide Ghiotto, snowboarder Maurizio Bormolini and curling pair Amos Mosaner and Stefania Constantini.

And there's always Arianna Fontana - at the age of 15, the short track skater won bronze in Turin in 2006. Now 20 years later, she is Italy's most successful Winter Olympian, and aiming to win a medal at a sixth consecutive Games.

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2026 Winter Olympics: What you need to know in six charts

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We are days away from the start of the 2026 Winter Olympics - here's what you need to know in six charts.

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In any classroom in Zimbabwe, you are likely to find children with a mix of names—indigenous names in Shona, Ndebele, Tsonga, Venda or any one of the numerous other ethnic groups. You will most certainly come across European names, such as Primrose, possibly one or two Janets, a Ruth, a number of Peters, Gilberts, and

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Have you got what it takes to go to the Moon?

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When the Artemis mission lands on the Moon, its crew will have to grapple with a challenging environment and extreme isolation. What will it take to thrive in a lonely Moon base?

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Marlanda Dekine is a Black, queer, freshwater Gullah descendant. She is the author of two poetry collections, including Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press, 2022). A social worker and consultant, she lives in Georgetown, South Carolina, on Chicora, Waccamaw, Sewee, Pee Dee, and Catawba land.

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Memory Poem - I am a child / of wonder again and

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My analogue month: would ditching my smartphone make me healthier, happier – or more stressed?

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When I swapped my iPhone for a Nokia, Walkman, film camera and physical map, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But my life soon started to change

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This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Post

Nikita Gill

nikitagill.bsky.social

did:plc:hyyqshfmzarjhybykciopfw6

And I think about Eric Garner's last words so often, I have this beautiful poem by Ross Gay memorised:

2026-01-26T01:31:25.780Z

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And I think about Eric Garner’s last words so often, I have this beautiful poem by Ross Gay memorised:

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Is Educational Technology All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

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This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Post

Nikita Gill

nikitagill.bsky.social

did:plc:hyyqshfmzarjhybykciopfw6

I wrote this poem as an homage to Baldwin and to hear it being sung across the world or read in protests has been my own guiding light of hope.

2026-01-18T20:45:43.429Z

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I wrote this poem as an homage to Baldwin and to hear it being sung across the world or read in protests has been my own guiding light of hope.

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 “Making physics fun with snacks.” - Encyclopaedia Britannica (@britannica.com)

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When a container of mixed nuts is shaken, the largest nuts rise to the top. This phenomenon is known as the ‘Brazil nut effect,’ and there are a couple of mechanisms at play. Or: “Making physics fun with snacks.” 🧵⬇️

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What does your car say about you? A global portrait of people and their rides, from Shanghai to Santa Monica

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You can tell a lot about someone from the vehicle they drive, as Martin Roemers’ collection of photographs show. Introduction by author William Boyd

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In the car today with my son, age 20!, & he punched me on the shoulder & shouted ‘yellow car no return’, a game we hadn’t played in years Got thinking about all the other stuff we used to notice & exclaim when they kids were younger Reminded me of this. Don’t stop noticing x #poetry
#poemoftheday

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These are the photographs that capture the year

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Best sports photos of 2025: The stories behind the images

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From the bottom of the swimming pool to the top of the pole vault bar, photographers reveal the stories behind these amazing shots. And a bonus point if you can spot the photographer in their own image.

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The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. We’re hungry for more, but we have more than we need. We’re hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. We’re hungry and we don’t have words to articulate why. We’re hungry, and we’re lacking and we’re wanting. We are

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Readers reply: what is – or was – the best-ever internet meme?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

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New year, new looks: Jays covering all angles in building '26 pitching staff

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When AIs become consistently more capable than humans, life could change in strange ways. Here we look at how the era of artificial general intelligence might feel

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The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want - The American Prospect

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Ryan Coogler’s bloodsucker blockbuster is all about Black creative freedom. No wonder the industry saw it as a threat.

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600 Readers Told Us About the Best Gifts They Ever Got. These Are the Top 13.

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The 52 Best Breakup Lines (Said in Real Life) 

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How Reese's Peanut Butter Cups Are Made In Factory

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Photographs and Video by Paul Kooiker and Interviews by Amy X. Wang·

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We Asked 10 of the Year’s Best Actors How They Conjure Feelings on Cue

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Teyana Taylor, Liam Neeson, Rose Byrne and more of our best actors on how they summon the emotions that move us.

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‘He didn’t change one bit’: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander remains Oklahoma City’s humble superstar - Andscape

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Shai Gilgeous-Alexander filled his own to-go box with orange chicken and Chow mein after scoring 38 points against the Golden State Warriors. He could have asked someone from the Oklahoma City Thunder to do it for him, as some star players are known to do. The newly minted $285-million man then patiently […]

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stickertop.art - Discover Laptop Sticker Art

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Discover a unique collection of laptops adorned with creative stickers from around the world. Each laptop tells a story through its stickers.

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JUSTIN CHARITY: Four generations of fans have spent nearly half a century relitigating the question of what Star Wars should ideally be. A power fantasy about the Force? A soap opera about the Skywalkers? An immersive metaphor for fascism? Rogue One and Andor both represent the third outlook, clearly, and while vehicles for the other approaches-the mainline movies, The Mandalorian-have run aground in recent years, Andor really does seem to be the only thing keeping the dream of this dark and sprawling universe, haunted by endlessly regenerating jackboots, vivid and alive. "Who Are You?" is the proof positive-an episode that renders the empire utterly soul crushing, paranoia inducing, and inevitable, no matter how many jokes we, from the comfort of our galaxy so far away, will continue to make about the aim of its stormtroopers.

BEN LINDBERGH: Far be it from me to find fault with "Who Are You?," the culmination of the second season's Ghorman arc and the first and, probably, best burst of Andor's nothing-but-bangers sprint to the series' end. You're right that the massacre in the square makes the Empire appear implacable, but Star Wars is a space opera that starts with A New Hope; its core can't be soul crushing. The blockade at Palmo Plaza may be impassable, but in a larger sense, there's always, well, one way out: the hope rebellions are built on. Which is why "One Way Out," an episode that centers on a more successful uprising, is the essence of Andor: It doesn't shrink from the darkness, but it still allows space for the light. Even if one of the Rebellion's builders has to make his mind a sunless space.

Also, come on: the monologues.

CHARITY: What you're getting at is, I suppose, an age-old tension in the appeal of Star Wars: between the awesome feats of classical heroism in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, as you say, and the darker notes-the long shots of Star Destroyers, the sunless duel of The Empire Strikes Back, and the palace intrigue of the Galactic Empire and its predecessor Republic. It's those darker notes that have always drawn me to Star Wars, in so many forms over the years, much as a fool is lured to the tutelage of the Sith.

Perhaps I'm being too much of a stereotypical critic about it-I don't think that all of Star Wars needs to be a relentlessly demoralizing meditation on the baddies, by any means-but I will note the contrast between the success Andor has found in fleshing out the Empire and the weakness of the sequel trilogy in (among many failures, admittedly) barely attempting to give any coherence to the First Order.

LINDBERGH: About this, there is no conflict: The best Star Wars is definitely dark. Expanded Universe stories about the unsettling or unsavory side of Star Wars-stuff like Dark Empire, Dark Forces, and Shadows of the Empire-helped hook me on the franchise. I'd argue that the darkest movie in each of the Star Wars trilogies- Revenge of the Sith, Empire, and The Last Jedi-is also the best. And I don't think it's a complete coincidence that of the five Disney-era Star Wars movies, the one with the highest average user rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb is Rogue One, in which virtually all of the good guys die.

As I detailed back in 2022, there's been a decades-long debate about whether Star Wars is for kids and what kind of content its family-friendly reputation permits. (It was news when The Force Awakens was rated PG-13.) Andor deepened the franchise's tolerance for twisted evil: Torture has been part of Star Wars since the start, but Disneydoesn't get darker than Dr. Gorst. Still, the series resists despair. Take a character likeNemik: His idealism doesn't save his life, but Andor reinforces that he's right to have hope-even if that reinforcement manifests in the form of an adversary's suicide. In "One Way Out," Kino Loy leads a revolt in a prison he can't escape, and Luthen Rael fights the fascists by flirting with becoming one. Victory is costly. But that only makes it more inspiring.

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The 100 Best TV Episodes of the Century - The Ringer

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Ranking the 100 best television episodes of the 21st century, from Mad Men to Succession to Game of Thrones.

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Can Magnus Carlsen Beat a Noob with 30 Queens?

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Spotify Wrapped is taking over our feeds, but you don’t have outsource your relationship with music to AI | Liz Pelly

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The streamer’s annual charts are just another version of the tech that’s alienating us from our inner lives. Hold on to your musical memories and reclaim ownership of your taste

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This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is.

Post

David Atkinson

davidatkinsonpoet.bsky.social

did:plc:lmvyxubtjirkzmhqeblaxg2i

We all had teacher like Mrs Nelson. This is a gentle reminder of the life lessons grown into There is a great irony in the title, the wisdom being shared on the one day the poet was absent The line 'The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence' is a poem in itself #poetry #poemoftheday

2025-11-29T10:34:52.932Z

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Have you agreed to give a speech at your best friend’s wedding? Are people expecting this speech to be funny? Are you realizing that engaging in extemporaneous humor and delivering jokes are not the same thing? Have you spent the months leading up to the big day waiting for comic inspiration to strike, but still