Constance Grady

Taylor Swift is done pretending she doesn’t absolutely love this life Taylor Swift used to try to hide her ambition. In Life of a Showgirl, she’s done with that.

To me, the most interesting thing about Life of a Showgirl is how plainly it features Taylor saying that actually, she loves being famous. I wrote about it here www.vox.com/culture/4637...

I did not expect Taylor to sing the lyric “it’s kind of making me wet,” but it does seem right that she sings it wrt petty vengeance, her truest love

I forget how good Trilling is and then I read his essay on Mansfield Park. These bars! www.unz.com/Pub/Encounte...

how ur always turning back too late from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light!!!!! 😭😭😭😭

oh no I remembered the existence of the song Finishing the Hat and now I am useless for the afternoon

Tombs of Atuannnnnn

Sameeeee

girl …

All these think pieces about how the acotar and related are actually revolutionary because they're the "only" fantasy to center women and their desires makes me so angry. Like women don't deserve the ALREADY EXTANT fantasy novels that center them and their desires AND have decent sentences.

A political violence scholar explains what the furor over Charlie Kirk’s killing is missing What studying hundreds of political assassinations has revealed.

I talked with a criminology scholar on why focusing on the political leanings of an individual assassin is a red herring www.vox.com/culture/4618...

How Jimmy Kimmel became Trump’s nemesis The former Man Show host has gone from the least political voice in late night to a victim of the war on woke.

I delved into the history of Jimmy Kimmel's feud with Trump, and how the guy from The Man Show became the guy pissing off the president www.vox.com/culture/4619...

Trump wants to be a cultural tastemaker. The CIA did it first. The CIA spent decades selling American art to European intellectuals.

I spent a couple weeks researching the cold war CIA and came away ready to believe that absolutely anything can be a CIA front www.vox.com/culture/4612...

The New York Times rolls over its Sodoku lineup to the next day too early, every single day

Only Connect finally offered a mild critique of Connections in-episode and the nerds are buzzing

Whatever else The Paper is, it's a nice reminder of how good The Office crew is at keeping their internal worldbuilding to the pacing of a documentary. Especially after so many years of other mockumentary sitcoms forcing sitcom beats into a talking head format.

And after everything, the punchline was basically incomprehensible

otoh, the tweak to the technical format this season is very good and seems to involve a lot less random guessing than usual

my god, the cold open of this season of GBBO is truly unbearably long

I do respect Prue's masterful refusal to commit though

genuinely never been more excited to hate watch a movie

I demand a movie about this operation

You guys are being such dicks about those influencers in the whimsical funhouse. Some things can just be whimsical and charming!

The Tragedy Of “Stomp Clap Hey” | Defector In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs tried to imagine a time when the music of the recent past would seem alien. Projecting himself into the old age he would never reach, he pictured his future...

this essay on stomp-clap-hey is poignant enough to make me feel old defector.com/the-tragedy-...

The weird lie animating the right-wing womanosphere Former Trump official Katie Miller says there’s no podcast for women like her. What?

I listened to the Katie Miller podcast so you don't have to www.vox.com/culture/4595...

Kind of charming that very clearly his entire ring buying plan was to buy the biggest diamond he could find, ugliness be damned

It’s incredible how every time Julian Fellowes makes anything it is slightly worse than the last thing he made, up to and including seasons of the same show

Highest 2 Lowest: what a bizarre and beautiful movie. The second half is an absolute blast—kinetic, ballsy, brilliant. The first half is so strange and draggy (that score!) that I am certain it is pastiching SOMETHING, but it’s not exactly jumping off the screen.

Study Finds 20-Year Drop in Reading for Pleasure A new report from researchers at the University of London and University of Florida found that only 16% of adults read for pleasure on a given day in 2023, the lowest rate in the 20-year period covere...

An interesting detail: even though book sales went up during Covid, there's no corresponding 2020 spike in the rates of people reading for pleasure. That suggests it was just people who already read buying more books, not non-readers getting into the hobby. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

The scandalous literary classic we’ve never stopped arguing about The novel published 70 years ago that still explains America.

This year is Lolita's 70th birthday, and I have a theory that this is the book that explains the culture wars www.vox.com/culture/4584...

Well that was the queerest production of Twelfth Night I have seen yet (complimentary). A play with that much gender play should frankly always end with a drag show.

I collect Twelfth Nights. The best one I have seen was the one where Mark Rylance played Olivia in white face, but I have also seen Derek Jacobi (in a completely different production than the rest of the cast), and a traveling production that went around a churchyard. There is always something new!