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The Hidden Wisdom of Cookbooks
The author Ruby Tandoh argues for the freedom to cook—and eat—for pleasure.
theatlantic.com
Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend
Taylor Swift performs during the Eras tour at the National Stadium in Singapore on March 2, 2024. | Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management The Tortured Poets Department sees Swift tormented by her boyfriends, her haters, and even her fans. Taylor Swift has spent the past two years on top of the world. Her worldwide Eras tour is the highest-grossing music tour of all time. It’s made her a billionaire. Her 2022 album, Midnights, won Album of the Year at the Grammys, making Swift the solo artist with the most wins of all time in that category. Her high-profile romance with football star Travis Kelce has delighted her fans while keeping her in the spotlight. She’s defeated all her haters; her fans are legion; practically everyone admits, now, that she’s very good at the job of being a pop star. Right now, Taylor Swift exists at a pinnacle of fame and success that few can ever even dream of reaching. Yet Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, leaves listeners with the distinct impression that Swift is not entirely content with her current high status. The album suggests nothing so much as Swift chafing furiously against the limits of the image that’s taken her so far — and even, perhaps, her beloved fanbase. Decoding the storyline of The Tortured Poets Department The Tortured Poets Department sees its central character reeling from two breakups: one with a long-term lover whose depression has begun to drag the narrator down (“So Long, London”), and one a brief fling with a tortured bad boy who no one seems to approve of (“Fortnight”). As the album goes on, the narrator veers between teenage infatuation with her new bad boy (“Down Bad”), resentment with everyone who tells her they shouldn’t be together (“But Daddy I Love Him”), the slow, grudging realization that perhaps there are some problems with the relationship (“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”), and fury when he eventually leaves her (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”). The narrator’s despair over her love for the lost depressed boyfriend threads its way through the whole album (“loml,” “The Black Dog”). Sometimes, imagery associated with him ends up in a song about the bad boy (“Fresh out the Slammer,” which ends on an ambivalent line about “imaginary rings”), like an intrusive thought. At times, her heartbreak over both breakups is so intertwined it becomes impossible to tell who, exactly, she’s singing about (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”). Albums aren’t autobiographies, but Swift tends to play with the blurry line between song and fact, and that tendency is on full display here. Famously, she writes songs about her real life and encourages her fans to make connections between her lyrics and her biography. Here, the depressed ex-boyfriend lines up with actor Joe Alwyn, who Swift dated for six years, and the tortured bad boy seems to mirror 1975 frontman Matt Healy, who Swift dated for a controversial few weeks shortly after her breakup with Alwyn. It’s the controversy that gets particular airtime in The Tortured Poets Department. The very brief but very controversial story of Taylor Swift and Matt Healy In terms of public image, edgelord Healy was always an odd match for good girl Swift. He’s the kind of provocateur who comments on the far right by doing ironic Nazi salutes onstage, while Swift apparently has to fight her team to make any political statement at all, provocative or otherwise. In February 2023, before news of their relationship broke, Healy appeared on a podcast where he laughed through a series of racist jokes from the host and cracked one of his own about watching violent, racist, and misogynistic porn. Swift’s fans were outraged. They launched a hashtag, #SpeakUpNow, under which they begged her to break up with Healy and not to tarnish her name and her brand by associating with someone who would make such racist jokes. How, they demanded, could she show such poor judgment? How could she use her platform to elevate someone who has said and done such hurtful things? Was she simply lashing out after her breakup with Alwyn? What was she thinking? In The Tortured Poets Department, Swift suggests that she did not particularly care for the outrage or the concern about her dating choices. “I’ll tell you something about my good name,” she sings in “But Daddy I Love Him:” It’s mine alone to disgrace I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing God save the most judgmental creeps who say they want what’s best for meSanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never seeThinking it can change the beat of my heart when he touches meAnd counteract the chemistry and undo the destiny There’s a certain layer of irony to the lyrics here. This is the section of the album in which the narrator is feeling particularly defensive about her relationship with her tortured poet, and the tongue-in-cheek song title and over-the-top hysterics of the chorus suggest that she shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously. In later songs, the narrator will conclude that her tortured poet was bad news after all — that he is “the smallest man who ever lived” and that her desire for him stemmed from self-destructive urges. Still, at no point does the narrator suggest that all the people who warned her about her boyfriend were correct, or that she’s glad they spoke up, or that she feels she should have listened to them, or that she shouldn’t have taken the brand hit for dating him. By the end of the album, she still seems fairly annoyed with the people who thought they got a say in her love life, even if they think they want what’s best for her. What happens if Taylor Swift decides she’s tired of being her fans’ best friend? Swift built a not-insignificant amount of her fame on bringing her fans into the story of her romantic choices. Her most potent artistic weapon is her ability to write lyrics about her own life that read as totally vulnerable and totally honest. Then she seeds Easter eggs into the liner notes, inviting her fans to match the heartbreak of each song with a real-life ex. She invites her fans over to her house for homemade cookies and secret album-listening sessions. She sends them Christmas packages. Swift’s star image is built around the trope of the best friend, the girl who lives next door to you and tells you everything about her life. In The Tortured Poets Department, it’s starting to sound as though Swift is not completely satisfied with living out that image anymore. She resents that her fans begged her to dump her boyfriend. She resents that dating a bad boy put unsustainable stress on her good girl image. She seems to resent, to a certain degree, that she feels compelled to keep existing at the pinnacle of pop perfection she has finally achieved. “I’m miserable, and no one even knows!” she crows in a spoken interlude at the end of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” the song where she brags about being able to smile her way successfully through the Eras tour while dealing with her breakups. As the song fades out, she adds, “Try and come for my job,” with an exhausted sigh. Swift seems proud of reaching the top of the world, but all the same, she doesn’t exactly seem to be enjoying her time there. Throughout Poets, she ruminates obsessively on the past. The surprise second half of the album features songs about that old Kim and Kanye feud (“Cassandra”) and even Swift’s middle school bully (“thanK you aIMee”) (unless that’s just Kim Kardashian again — see those capital letters?). In “The Manuscript,” she goes back over a tortured affair she had in her 20s with an older man (referring plausibly to either Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer or both) and realizes, with a sweet wonder, that turning the story into art can redeem it. “Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward,” she sings. Sure, but if Swift keeps looking backward at her old betrayals, when does the moving forward part start? There are other signs that Swift might feel stuck. Sonically, Poets does not move significantly forward from the dreamy synth pop of Lover and Midnights, with Swift’s primary collaborator Jack Antonoff going back once again to the sound he developed for Lana Del Ray’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019. Swift used to make a point of developing a new sound with different albums, but Poets is treading the same musical ground she’s been exploring for a while. Swift’s clothes, too, have been static lately, although she used to switch up her looks dramatically as she moved between album eras. The Cut’s fashion critic Cathy Horyn recently described Swift’s style as “self-conscious” and suggested that the many vocal critics of Swift’s fashion choices are “probably bored” with her college-girl-next-door outfits, which are beginning to come off as a little disingenuous on 34-year-old Swift. “It’s worth remembering that Taylor Swift has always been older and wiser than her years,” Horyn noted. “The girl can’t be discovering herself forever.” Swift has discovered herself and rediscovered herself in tones of girlish wonder in albums for over 20 years now. She’s taken that girl-next-door image as far as she can take it, farther than almost anyone ever has before, to the very tip top of where mainstream pop can carry her. She capped that portion of her career off with the Eras tour, and now, it seems as though she’s in search of something new. When Swift won that record-setting Grammy for Album of the Year in February, she said something unusual in her speech. Historically, Swift has made no secret of how much award recognition means to her and how much she craves it. This time, however, she suggested she was ready to move past that desire. “I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life,” Swift said, “but I feel this happy when I finish a song or when I crack the code to a bridge that I love or when I’m shotlisting a music video or when I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or getting ready to go to Tokyo to play a show. For me, the award is the work.” One way to think about The Tortured Poets Department is as an announcement that Swift is no longer so interested in the people-pleasing, high-achieving, best-friend image she has spent her whole career thus far perfecting. In which case, the big question becomes: What next?
vox.com
Drew Barrymore Says Studio Told Her She Looked “Too Unattractive” In ‘Never Been Kissed’: “I Was Very Stressed”
Barrymore said she was "forced to tone it down a little bit."
nypost.com
Murrieta board defies state, will keep policy to tell parents about LGBTQ+ transitioning
State officials had ordered Riverside County district to drop its parent-notification policy — and administrators were going comply — but school board rebels.
latimes.com
British comedian sparks debate after mocking his pregnant wife’s walk
“She looks like she’s just come out of Wetherspoons (a pub), 10 Stellas deep on the pub grub."
nypost.com
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Flips, Twists, and Kudos: Was Season 16 a Flop?
Please, Ru, let the twists twist!
nypost.com
Ivanka Trump Graduation Photo Shuts Down Donald Trump Rumor
An old photo shared by Ivanka Trump has countered allegations that her father wasn't present for her milestone celebration.
newsweek.com
How to care for your teeth if you can’t see the dentist: experts
Brushing up on your dental hygiene at home could keep you healthier for longer. 
nypost.com
We made a freaky discovery while cleaning the toilet in our 700-year-old home
UK couple Rory and Tracy Vorster realized every child's worst nightmare after discovering a "monster" underneath the toilet of their 700-year-old home.
nypost.com
Owner Adopts Dog, Cat Makes Feelings Very Clear: 'I Think She's Mad'
If you thought cats and dogs couldn't live together, you were wrong, as studies show they can become best of friends.
newsweek.com
Bella Steals ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Episode 6 With Her Tearful Goodbye to Her Parents
The young woman's pleas and tears will weigh heavy on the hearts of viewers.
nypost.com
A timeline of Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian’s feud that led to ​​’thanK you aIMee’
The Grammy-winning singer fanned the flames of her and the reality star's years-long feud with a diss track on "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology."
nypost.com
Top Russian Officer Killed in Ukrainian Storm Shadow Strike
Colonel Pavel Alexandrovich Kropotov, commander of Russia's 59th Guards Communications Brigade, was killed in Luhansk on April 13.
newsweek.com
Bird flu virus now found in milk, is of “great concern” to WHO
Cases of avian flu in humans are extremely rare in the US, but concern is growing.
nypost.com
Environmentalist ex-colleagues urge RFK Jr. to drop out of 2024 race to ‘honor our planet’
Dozens of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former colleagues at an environmental advocacy group have demanded he drop out of the 2024 race to “honor our planet” — fearing that his campaign will sweep Donald Trump back into office. The activists’ grievances with the 70-year-old Kennedy will be aired in an ad sponsored...
nypost.com
French Olympic athletes to receive mental health protection in response to heightened cyberbullying
French athletes participating in the Paris Olympics and Paralympics will receive mental health support to combat online harassment and cyberbullying, officials said.
foxnews.com
Lara Trump's Response to Being Called 'Stupid' Takes Internet by Storm
Lara Trump has defended herself against those who call her "stupid" during an episode of her show "The Right View with Lara Trump."
newsweek.com
EU commission president urges unity as Finland closes Russian borders over migration surge
The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has voiced the significance of Finland's decision to close its border with Russia due to a surge in migrants.
foxnews.com
Income Tax Cut for Millions of Americans
The new tax rate in Georgia will take effect in 2025 for returns filed for the 2024 tax year.
newsweek.com
Why Swifties Are Convinced ‘The Alchemy’ Is About Travis Kelce
Taylor Swift fans have pored over the lyrics to the track off her 'The Tortured Poets Department' and deduced that it's about her current boyfriend.
time.com
Inside the Courtroom, Trump’s Fame is Balanced by Judge Merchan
Fame creates its own gravity and Donald J. Trump is usually the center of it. But in his courtroom, Justice Juan M. Merchan also has pull.
nytimes.com
Pickleball is coming to Central Park’s iconic Wollman Rink
CityPickle is heading to a dazzling set of courts in one of the world's most famous parks -- and it will remain there seasonally in a long-term deal.
nypost.com
Internet Amazed As Dog Swims With 'Harmless' Shark
"Thanks for teaching us something nice," said one user.
newsweek.com
Why smoking pot gives you the munchies, according to cannabis research
The munchies are real — even science says so.
nypost.com
Ukraine Aid Bill Clears Critical Hurdle in the House as Democrats Supply the Votes
Democrats stepped in to support bringing the aid package to the floor, in a remarkable breach of custom on a key vote that paved the way for its passage.
nytimes.com
Female college student fights back against armed robber and yanks magazine from gun
Wild video shows a female University of Chicago student fighting back against an armed robber, amazingly yanking the magazine out of her attacker’s firearm — as a man sitting feet away watches without helping. The heroic 21-year-old economics senior, only identified by the first name Madelyn, was one of three students from the university held...
nypost.com
Debt consolidation vs. debt settlement: Which is better?
Debt consolidation and debt settlement are both popular debt relief options. But which is better? Find out here.
cbsnews.com
Dr. Phil left speechless after real estate agent claims that squatting is justified by colonization
A landlord rejected the idea that 'colonization' can be used to justify squatting on large territories, 'We're not in 1776, we're in 2024'
nypost.com
Mets release City Connect jerseys that pay homage to Queens and New York City
The Mets officially unveiled their City Connect jerseys Friday, featuring New York City-inspired elements.
nypost.com
House readies Saturday vote on $95B in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan aid
The House teed up a weekend vote on $95 billion in US military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as well as other humanitarian funding, after Democrats helped Republicans overcome an effort by rebel GOP members to block the assistance. The lower chamber overwhelmingly approved a rule Friday to clear the way for a Saturday...
nypost.com
US judge denies Trump's bid to halt Jan. 6 lawsuits while he fights criminal charges in 2020 election case
Donald Trump's request to halt lawsuits accusing him of inciting the U.S. Capitol attack has been denied as he continues to battle his 2020 election interference case.
foxnews.com
California fast-food prices rose 7% in run-up to $20 minimum wage — highest in US
California registered the highest rate of menu price inflation in the country in the period leading up to April 1.
nypost.com
Goat's Joy at First Walk With Prosthetics After Losing Legs to Frostbite
Ellie Laks, founder of The Gentle Barn, says the new prosthetics have shown "the real potential for freedom" that Lolli the goat can achieve.
newsweek.com
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav saw pay jump to $50M despite company’s continued losses
The rise in pay was partly related to the loss-making media conglomerate's decision to align its executive compensation to focus more on debt reduction and free cash flow.
nypost.com
Eight Cookbooks Worth Reading Cover to Cover
A certain type of person will tell you that they read cookbooks like they do novels. This usually means they flip through them at night, in bed, perhaps with the help of some gentle, warm light and a hot cup of tea. They pore over the notes and instructions that precede each recipe; they dream up menus the way a fiction reader might picture the furniture inside a character’s home. They might flag dishes they want to cook, or they might not. The point of this practice is pleasure, not pragmatism.Of course, there are some cookbooks that lend themselves particularly well to this exercise, and with the right title, any of us can fall into late-night reveries over bouillabaisse or dumplings. These are not quick-and-dirty weeknight cookbooks, nor are they written to bend to a trend, as with the keto and air-fryer manuals that seem to proliferate like weeds these days. For a cookbook to be a great read, it should be written with a living, breathing (and often busy) home cook in mind, and also elevate and expand the genre. The eight books below are titles you should, and will want to, read front to back. Each is written with care and enthusiasm, not just for the practice of cooking but for the experience of eating. Knopf The Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna LewisLewis’s exemplary Southern cookbook is interspersed with essays on growing up in a farming community in Virginia; many of the recipes in the book unspool from these memories. Lewis, who worked as a chef in New York City as well as in North and South Carolina, writes with great sensual and emotional detail about growing up close to the land. Of springtime, she writes, “The quiet beauty in rebirth there was so enchanting it caused us to stand still in silence and absorb all we heard and saw. The palest liverwort, the elegant pink lady’s-slipper displayed against the velvety green path of moss leading endlessly through the woods.” Her book was ahead of its time in so many ways: It is a farm-to-table manifesto, a food memoir published decades before Ruth Reichl popularized the form, and an early, refined version of the cookbook-with-essays we’re now seeing from contemporary authors such as Eric Kim and Reem Assil. The recipes—ham biscuits, new cabbage with scallions, potted stuffed squab—are as alluring as the prose.[Read: A 600-year history of cookbooks as status symbols] W. W. Norton & Company The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, by Judy RodgersThis book of recipes from Zuni Café, a beloved San Francisco farm-to-table establishment, is far more accessible and enjoyable than most other restaurant cookbooks. It’s a hefty book and dense with recipes, but Rodgers’s writing—in her headnotes and introductions—is as inviting as the pleasingly early-aughts food photography, which highlights the techniques and ambiance of the café and transmutes them to the home setting. Rodgers, who died in 2013, was a pedigreed chef with a home cook’s sensibility, and that comes through in these pages: You trust her implicitly and want to hang around in her kitchen, eating seasonal, comfortingly traditional food with French and Italian flair, such as spicy broccoli-and-cauliflower pasta, or Rodgers’s famous roast chicken with bread salad. University of Georgia Press Vibration Cooking, by Vertamae Smart-GrosvenorSmart-Grosvenor writes as if she is at the stove, speaking to you over her shoulder while she stirs a pot, adding this and that. She is not one for measurements; instead, she cooks “by vibration,” focusing less on strict recipes than on sensory input, muscle memory, and desire. How you cook is a personal decision, Smart-Grosvenor insists: “The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your business.” Vibration Cooking is part coming-of-age story—she grew up in South Carolina, hopped on a ship for Paris when she was 19, and eventually settled in New York City—and part argument for trusting your own tastes. Her tone is conversational and full of verve: “I would always feed the painters and the musicians and the drunks and anybody that really was hungry. The work was hard but I really dug that brief chapter in my life.” Her recipes contain little detail—many of them span no more than a paragraph or two—but Smart-Grosvener’s confidence is contagious. You’ll find that all you need to make coconut custard pie or Obedella’s Barbecued Spareribs is your own intuition.[Read: When did following recipes become a personal failure?] Vintage Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin If you’ve ever wished you had a bigger, better-outfitted kitchen, Colwin’s Home Cooking will rightfully convince you that ample space is not necessary for making good, satisfying food, even for guests. Home Cooking is more of a memoir in essays than a cookbook, but it’s also a proclamation from Colwin, a novelist who made her meals on a hot plate in a closet-size New York apartment for years. She writes in unsentimental, plucky, joyful prose on how to bake bread “without agony,” host a dinner party with minimal space, or avoid grilling: “I have avoided grilling by broiling, and I have never had to bother myself about getting in a supply of mesquite or apple wood, or old thyme twigs.” The book is studded with occasional recipes—yam cakes with fermented black beans, “chicken with chicken glaze”—the way a pilaf may be studded with fat golden raisins: little treasures to pull from the bounty Colwin has set for us.An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar AdlerThe first chapter of An Everlasting Meal, Adler’s ode to “cooking with economy and grace,” is titled “How to Boil Water.” This may sound like the most bare-bones cooking instruction possible, but it’s the former Harper’s editor’s celebration of boiling and poaching as underappreciated cooking methods, and of water as an invaluable ingredient. Adler is able to find inspiration and culinary value in the tiniest kitchen scrap and the humblest preparation, and she can make you look at a simple pot of water with fresh, eager eyes. The chapters include essays and a few recipes to back them up. “How to Stride Ahead” outlines Adler’s strategy for buying and cooking vegetables each week: blitzing broccoli stems into pesto, turning boiled vegetables into salad, tossing the straggling scraps into a curry over the weekend. Her approach balances pragmatism with sensualism: On the weekly leafy-greens purchase, Adler writes, “This will seem very pious. Once greens are cooked as they should be, though: hot and lustily, with garlic, in a good amount of olive oil, they lose their moral urgency and become one of the most likable ingredients in your kitchen.”Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin NosratNosrat, who once worked as a cook at the Bay Area stalwart Chez Panisse, explicitly designed this book to be read cover to cover: The first recipe doesn’t arrive until the reader is a few hundred pages in. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat takes on the enormous task of teaching the basic, deep knowledge that cooking requires. For Nosrat, that comes down to mastering those four titular elements that balance out a meal. Aided by playful illustrations from Wendy MacNaughton, she outlines the roles that each of these aspects play—the way that a correct measure of salt will make a vegetable taste more like itself, or how a lashing of lemon juice can make a bowl of soup sing. Nosrat’s tone is warm, authoritative, and encouraging, preempting any and every question you’ve ever had about cooking.[Read: The why of cooking]My Bombay Kitchen, by Niloufer Ichaporia KingMy Bombay Kitchen is a perfect example of a cookbook that can simultaneously transport you to another place and offer a deep lesson on food culture, tied up with the comforting pleasures of elegant prose and well-written recipes. King’s family is Parsi, an ethnoreligious group that fled modern-day Iran for the Indian subcontinent more than 1,000 years ago. In My Bombay Kitchen, she shares recollections of her childhood home and the daily staples and holiday feasts that came out of it—beautiful images such as the ghee vendors that walked the streets with vats of liquid gold made from buffalo milk. (King also wants you to make your own: “It’s not much bother, you don’t have to buy more than you can use, and your house will smell heavenly.”) Reading the book frequently feels like visiting a new city on the coattails of a local, learning its tastes and smells and rhythms from an expert. My Bombay Kitchen was also the first American Parsi cookbook written by a Parsi, and it stands as an invaluable piece of art that doubles as an effort toward cultural preservation.[Read: Writing an Iranian cookbook in an age of anxiety] Knopf Cook as You Are, by Ruby TandohOften, we home cooks need permission to be imperfect, impatient creatures—ones unwilling to stir a soup for hours or bake our bread from scratch. Enter Tandoh’s Cook as You Are, a declaration of purpose for those who love good eating but aren’t always willing—or able—to go the full nine Martha Stewart–esque yards. Tandoh, a onetime contestant on The Great British Bake Off, is unfailingly pragmatic and unconcerned with pretense, both as a cook and as a writer. Cook as You Are is designed to be accessible, in a wide range of that word’s definitions. Chapters are divided by need and craving, not by dish style: quick dinners, meals with low effort and high reward, dishes to make when you want to linger over the stove. What makes the book such a joy is Tandoh’s gentle, permissive style; she includes an essay on why, sometimes, you need to make a grilled cheese for dinner. “Although it’s my role as a cookbook writer to help you find your way in the kitchen, I also want to make clear that this isn’t something you necessarily need to do all the time,” she writes. “For ordinary days and ordinary moods, sometimes grilled cheese will do.”
theatlantic.com
Body of unidentified man washes ashore on Ventura County beach
Investigators said the man was in his mid-30s but gave no additional information surrounding his death.
latimes.com
Video Shows MLB Coach in Pilot's Seat on Team Plane, Violating FAA Rules
Colorado Rockies coach Hensley Meulens shared a video of himself sitting in the pilot's seat of a team flight to Toronto. The FAA is reportedly investigating.
newsweek.com
New Trump voter fraud squads begin gearing up for 'election integrity' fight
The RNC and Trump campaign unveiled their election integrity unit in key battleground states to monitor and possibly challenge vote-counting in November's election.
foxnews.com
What Taylor Swift’s ‘Clara Bow’ Does—And Doesn’t—Have to Do With the 1920s Superstar
'Clara Bow,' it turns out, isn’t about Clara Bow the person at all, though it could be said to be about Clara Bow the vibe.
time.com
Swifties troll Kim Kardashian after Taylor Swift calls out bullying on ‘TTPD’: ‘Hey aimee’
The singer eviscerated Kardashian in her song "thanK you aIMee" in which she labeled her a “bronze, spray-tanned” bully her mom “wish[es] were dead.”
nypost.com
CEO Reveals the 3 Things You Should Never Do on Your Work Laptop
"From a security standpoint, it's not the smartest thing to mess around using your work laptop," career coaching company CEO Sho Dewan told Newsweek.
newsweek.com
The Tortured-Metaphors Department
This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you’re supposed to feel okay about—she is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling medium—but who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy. (And this opinion is based on the 16 songs of the main album; earlier today, she surprise-released 15 more tracks on top of those). She’s just processing a weird chapter of her life.Depending on how you frame it, that chapter began either before she started dating the actor Joe Alwyn in 2016 or early last year, when they broke up. Though separating fact from fantasy in Swift’s songs is never simple, Tortured Poets’ gloomy visual style and inside-joke title—Alwyn was in a group chat called “Tortured Man Club”—led many observers to assume the music would be about the dark side of her longest relationship. Instead, much of the album seems to fixate on a character whose tattoos, suit-and-tie uniform, and dicey reputation call to mind someone else: Matty Healy, the leader of the rock band The 1975.Till now, Healy seemed to be a footnote in her life. She and he reportedly hung out for a bit in 2014 and then, after the Alwyn breakup, appeared to rekindle passions. A short bout of feverish and awkward publicity ensued—Healy, among other things, apologized for making racist jokes about the rapper Ice Spice—and she soon moved on to the NFL player Travis Kelce. (Tortured Poets features one song that’s unambiguously about him, “The Alchemy,” laden with terrible football puns.) But the album makes it sound like Swift was seriously hung up on Healy, and he broke her heart. The story she spins is about busting out of prolonged romantic confinement and into the arms of a wild child whom she’s long held a torch for—who then uses her and bruises her.It’s a spicy and salacious narrative, but much of the music is cold and inert. The producer and writer Jack Antonoff has proved himself capable of making all kinds of songs over the years, but this album will only feed his notoriety as a purveyor of formulaic, retro synth pop. The mannered orchestration of the album’s other main contributor, Aaron Dessner, isn’t any fresher either. The songs tend to develop through the slow accumulation of stuff—gloomy bass lines, spindly guitars, echoing harmonies—rather than through sophisticated interplay of instrumentation and vocalist. Swift sings in a breathy, theatrical tone that calls to mind better work by her buddies Lana Del Rey and Stevie Nicks, the latter of whom wrote a poem for the liner notes.Both on its own terms and in terms of what she’s already done in her career, this musical approach is boring. But it does serve two purposes. One is to convey the tedium she apparently felt in her previous relationship, with a man who never gave her as much affection as she needed. (“Every breath feels like rarest air when you’re not sure if he wants to be there,” she explains, movingly, on “So Long, London”). The other effect of the production is to provide a neutral backing for Swift’s words, like ruled paper for legible penmanship. She wants us to clearly understand what she’s saying.The problem is that what she’s saying tends to sound more like rambling than songwriting. Already, internet commentators have started mocking the title track, in which Swift says, “You smoked and ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” This is actually a highlight because, on an album full of garbled metaphors, it’s direct and distinct: She’s summoning a very imaginable scene of at-home, intimate bullshitting with a partner. Even funnier, she tells her pretentious boyfriend, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.”[Read: Taylor Swift and the era of the girl]It’s a good line—but it’s also jarring, given that Swift has never discouraged fans from treating her like the Millennial Patti Smith. Perhaps the title and library-themed marketing of The Tortured Poets Department is at last a self-aware prank, meant to acknowledge that her lyrics can indeed be a bit … tortured. But that doesn’t make her careless use of figurative language any less painful to sit through. “The smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a freight train through a small town,” goes one line that I wish I could unhear. In an extended metaphor comparing her relationship to jail, she suddenly brings up wizardry: “Handcuffed to the spell I was under.”The bright moments here work because of feeling, not language. “But Daddy I Love Him” and “Guilty as Sin?” flirt with country and rock, and the combination of live-sounding drums with her keening voice is so perfect that it’s tragic we don’t get more. The album’s other highlights are extreme expressions of rage and petulance. “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” revives the high drama of her 2017 album, Reputation, by pairing warm pop passages with screamed refrains. “Down Bad” also calls back to Reputation with its cavernous dynamic shifts and catchy R&B inflections. On the scathing diss track “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Swift sounds genuinely bewildered by how she’s been betrayed. “Were you writing a book?” she asks. “Were you a sleeper cell spy?”Powerful as such moments are, hearing Swift lay into yet another caddish ex, after a career of songs doing exactly the same thing, is sad, and not in a fun way. She’s casting herself, yet again, in the role of the naive victim who’s been taken advantage of by an irredeemable villain. She leans on stock types—saints and sinners—to present a schematic take on adult relationships. The results aren’t just predictable to listen to; they can seem callous and blinkered. For example, she mentions her partners’ drug use and mental-health problems multiple times—not as traits of a complex human being, but as failings she frustratingly can’t, to use her term, “fix.”I don’t mean to moralize. Pop is an art form of simplification, and Swift deliciously spends “But Daddy I Love Him” torching “judgmental creeps who say they want what’s best for me.” Artists aren’t saviors; they’re flawed people figuring life out as they go along. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets,” Swift said earlier this year, and the results—Swift unleashing unpolished thoughts over lots of rote music—testify to what she meant. Each honeymoon-to-heartbreak story she’s sung about over the years has conveyed the lesson that worshiping another person is a recipe for disappointment. When will it sink in?
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