Rich Text

Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album. And after almost a week of listening and relistening to the album, following the critical reactions to it, and stewing in the public debates raging about it, we decided we were ready to wade in.

But not without help! For this conversation, we’re joined by writer, critic, and Taylor Swift scholar B.D. McClay, (BDM ),who has written some of our favorite pieces of Swiftian criticism. You can find her work at outlets like The New Yorker, The Baffler, and Commonweal, as well as on her Substack, Notebook, which we highly recommend. Her Substack piece on “TTPD” is excellent, and helped us clarify our own reactions to the album:

There’s no doubt that “TTPD” is a huge amount of music to sift through — and that’s before accounting for the lore, the Easter eggs, the references, and how the entire work plays with and against her ubiquitous public presence and well established brand. At the moment this album came out, after months of being on top of the world, selling out massive shows for her international Eras tour and holding a nation rapt with her public romance with Super-Bowl-winning tight end Travis Kelce, Swift was overexposed and hovering at the precipice of an almost inevitable backlash. Then she announced “The Tortured Poets Department” by working it into a Grammy’s acceptance speech, a move widely perceived as crassly commercial. The name of the album and the promotional materials around it (including an odd library installation in Los Angeles featuring Spotify-branded, faux-aged papers with misspelled lyrics draped over typewriters) fed into a narrative that the album would be cringe, a long-form dark academia TikTok full of adolescent pretension. There was so much discourse about this album before it even dropped.

When it did drop, the reactions were far from uniformly laudatory. Many critics have noted that the album is overly long, unedited, a bit shapeless perhaps. The lyrics can veer into the goofy and embarrassing. The musical motifs seem to echo her recent past albums. There’s merit to a lot of the critiques. And yet… we found a great deal to love on the album as well. And the longer we sit with it, the more we relisten, the more we find irresistible hooks hidden away in the back halves of songs, glimpses of dry humor, and moments of profoundly lovely lyricism.

In this conversation, we tried to cover as much ground as we could in just a couple of hours, discussing our favorite songs, what we think about the angry and vulnerable Taylor who appears on this album, what stories and themes she’s exploring in it, whether it’s fair to read her newer works as emotionally stunted songs about boys and bullies, and why she keeps flooding us with so much new music.

“Taylor Swift Still Isn’t Your Friend,” B.D. McClay’s 2023 Slate essay about the controversy surrounding Taylor’s relationship with Matty Healy

“Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome with B.D. McClay,” Know Your Enemy pod

"Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood," Ann Powers, NPR

“Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet,” Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

"Taylor Swift's Tortured Poetry," Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker

"The Tortured Poets Department / Anthology" review, Olivia Horne, Pitchfork

“The Performative Poets Department,” Craig Jenkins, Vulture

“The Real Reason Taylor Swift Dresses Like That,” Cathy Horyn, NYMag

“Is ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Taylor Swift’s Most Controversial Album Ever?,” Every Single Album pod, The Ringer

“Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend,” Constance Grady, Vox

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It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.*

David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. High-profile writers like Lyz Lenz, Leslie Jamison and Maggie Smith were all releasing memoir (or memoir-adjacent) books about their respective divorces. And then… there were the trad wives. The trad wives, who it felt like were following us around TikTok and Instagram, homesteading and baking in dresses and posting about the failures of feminism.

Even on reality television, it feels like there’s been a distinct uptick in storylines involving the dissolution of longterm relationships. On Bravo we’ve been watching a spate of splits and their aftermaths unfold: Ariana and Sandoval, Tom and Katie (VPR), Jax and Brittany, Michelle and Jesse (The Valley), Lindsay and Carl (Summer House).

As we dive headfirst into wedding season, marriage — and the end of it — is on the brain. And after our last episode about Grazie Sophia Christie’s viral essay in The Cut urging college-aged women to marry older and richer stat, we realized we had a whole lot more to say on the subject.

For this episode, we looked at some of the major research that has come out in the last year about marriage and its correlation to self-reported happiness. Claire read Lenz’s divorce-as-liberation polemic, “This American Ex-Wife,” and Emma watched way too many lectures by Brad Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” (Yes, his book title does indeed sound extremely fascist-coded.) We brought our own lived experiences as a married person and a not-married-but-partnered person into the conversation.

And we asked ourselves a bunch of questions: How should we be thinking about marriage and divorce? Is it okay to want marriage? Is divorce the only logical answer to marriage’s gender inequities? What sorts of policies could transform the boundaries of these conversations altogether? And what would a world look like with marriage as an option rather than a central organizing principal?

Hope you enjoy our winding conversation. Xo

“Take A Wife… Please!,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

“Is (Heterosexual) Marriage A Diet?,” Virginia Sole-Smith, Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

“Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure Of Divorce,” Emily Gould, The Cut

“To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career,” David Brooks, New York Times

“The All-Or-Nothing Marriage,” Eli J. Finkel, New York Times

“Blue Marriage And The Terror Of Divorce,” Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

“Splinters: Another Kind Of Love Story,” Leslie Jamison

“This American Ex-Wife,” Lyz Lenz

“What’s So Great About Marriage?,” Plain English with Derek Thompson

“The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals,” The Ezra Klein Show

“What Relationships Would You Want, If You Believed They Were Possible?,” The Ezra Klein Show

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Last week, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an all-time banger of a hate read — which is saying something, considering the run they’ve been on recently (from the “$50k in a shoebox” piece to the “tried to leave my husband and then realized I was just having a breakdown” piece). Grazie Sophia Christie’s floridly written and smugly framed essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” argues, with all the wisdom and certainty earned through 27 years on earth and 4 years of marriage, that leveraging youth and beauty to marry an older man is a cheat code for women, who are otherwise condemned to years of miserable labor alongside insufficient same-age partners. In her case, as she contends, it seems like a lucky jackpot: her husband, a handsome French count just 10 years older than her, is wealthy and came into the relationship mid-career, with a thrice-weekly housecleaner and polished manners. Basically, she’s figured out that marrying a rich man can come with some material benefits.

It’s little wonder this opus, despite its unoriginal thesis, ignited an old-school Twitter discourse cycle. Feminism is in a time of struggle and retrenchment, while women jaded by its failures have begun to succumb to the nostalgic appeal of traditional gender roles. Trad wifery is on the rise. Hot girls are craving a soft life and romanticizing everything. For all its faults, Christie’s essay has its finger firmly on the pulse.

So we decided to talk through what the piece argues explicitly and what it signals implicitly, what feelings it brought up in us, what it signals about the state of women’s progress, and what a feminist movement should offer as an alternative to everyone giving up and trying to marry the richest men we can. And like the original essay, our conversation ended up being far less about age gaps than it was about class, gender politics, and the costs of tying women’s worth to their youth… while they have it. We also referenced a couple fellow Substackers’ thought-provoking responses to the essay: B.D. McClay’s “Here’s the deal” and Kelly Johnson’s “On being a woman in America.” Hope you enjoy! xo

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One of the first things you notice about “Irish Wish,” the latest output of Lindsay Lohan’s deal with Netflix, is just how… saturated the colors are. The pink accents in her plaid knee-length dress look a little too pink. The green grass of the Irish countryside is a little too green. The blue of the water is a little too blue. Are we in Ireland at all, you start to wonder? Is that real clothing? Are those real human beings? Is this all a simulation? And why in god’s name is Ayesha Curry there?

For the uninitiated, “Irish Wish” stars Lohan as book editor Maddie (you know she’s bookish and romantically awkward because she wears glasses!!!!), who has been harboring a secret crush on her star client, Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos). Well, it’s a secret from her besties, Emma (Elizabeth Tan) and Heather (Ayesha Curry), not from her mom, Jane Seymour, who clearly only agreed to film for one day and did not want to be in the vicinity of the rest of the cast, so she mostly appears on FaceTime. At the red carpet (!!!!), paparazzi-stalked (!!!!) book launch (!!!!) for Paul’s latest novel, he connects with Emma over their shared interest in false lashes, and a few short months later, Maddie is being whisked off to Ireland for their wedding, all the while wishing that she was marrying Paul Kennedy. Luckily, a mystical fairy Catholic saint lady appears and grants Maddie’s wish. Suddenly she’s in an alternate reality, about to get married to a man who would wear a PLAID SUIT TO HIS OWN WEDDING. But there’s also the “cheeky English guy” (Ed Speleers) she met at the airport…. Hijinks ensue!

We needed reinforcements to properly unpack why this movie shook us to our cores and also made us laugh so very much. Luckily, Nora McInerny of She Tried and Terrible, Thanks for Asking was game to talk it all through. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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UPDATE: On the afternoon of March 22, Princess Catherine announced that she is undergoing treatment for cancer. Our thoughts are with her and her family, and we wish her a swift recovery. This discussion primarily focuses on what the public reactions to her stepping back from public life say about the culture / the role of the royal family.

Nearly three months after the last official appearance of Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and following approximately 17 waves of fevered speculation about the cause of her unusually long absence from the public eye, we decided it was time to dedicate an episode to KateGate. Where is Kate? Why has the U.K.’s future queen and preeminent momfluencer — a woman who thrice appeared for photos in heels, a blowout and full makeup mere hours after giving birth — disappeared from view for months at a time? And what does it mean that so many of the public, including American non-royal-watchers like ourselves, have gotten swept into the furor of conspiracy theorizing that has filled the void of her reliable presence?

Sara Petersen of In Pursuit of Clean Countertops joined us to recap the timeline of events since this PR mess first began brewing, to discuss a few of the major theories behind her absence, and — most importantly — to unpack the seductiveness of this particular path down the rabbit hole.

We examine Kate’s role as a momfluencer and a stalwart of the royal family, both of which center around being continuously available for public viewing. We also get into the shaky reputation of the English royal family at this historical moment, and how the well-documented horrific experiences of Princess Diana and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, with marrying into the royal family have shaped our expectations for what scandals must be brewing behind the scenes. And we consider how this particular conspiracy has thrived in a post-truth media climate, in which AI-generated and Photoshopped images make it difficult to trust any visual evidence — and how this plays into our own anxieties about our fundamental replaceability. We hope you enjoy! xo

Ellie Hall’s thorough timeline and analysis: “It’s getting weirder: BuzzFeed News’ former royals reporter on Kate Middleton, Palace PR, and distrust in the media”

Sara Petersen’s “Kate as the ultimate momfluencer” essay

Charlie Warzel’s analysis of how Kate Middleton conspiracy theories are thriving in a post-truth, AI-fueled media landscape: “Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality”

Elizabeth Holmes’s measured Substack coverage of Kate’s health situation and the swirl of conspiracy theories in response to it

Fran Hoepfner’s takedown of the Kate-as-imaginary-revolutionary theories: “Wherever She Is, Kate Middleton Isn’t on Our Side”

Anna Russell’s New Yorker essay on the cultural forces at play in the explosion of conspiracy theories: “The Kate Middleton Conspiracy-Theory Swirl”

Kathryn VanArendonk’s look at the many failures of Kensington Palace’s press team: “The Royals Are So Bad at This”

Madison Malone Kircher’s NYT interview with Heidi Agan, a professional Kate Middleton impersonator who has gone on the record to deny being the woman seen at the Windsor Farm Shop: “This Is Not Princess Catherine”

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It only took six seasons of “Love Is Blind” for Netflix and Kinetic to get Nick and Vanessa Lachey some real media training. At long last, our fair hosts seem to have discovered the power of a follow-up question! (They did seem to basically forget to ask about the majority of Jimmy and Chelsea’s relationship, but… baby steps.)

This year’s reunion had some real production value behind it, was (blessedly) not live, and the Lacheys held some cast members’ feet to the fire — namely Jeramey, Sarah Ann and Trevor. Guess there’s a first time for everything! We also got some (incomplete) clarity on where the broken-up couples stand with each other today, who has regrets, and who did a very campy JCPenney portrait shoot (Amy and Johnny, obvi).

We would have liked to see more from Chelsea and Jimmy, specifically space for Chelsea to reflect on what she may have learned not to do in a relationship from this experience, but all in all, it was a pretty solid reunion episode.

We also did a little (by little we mean more than 40-minute-long) check-in about the conclusion of “The Traitors” season 2. (Skip to 1:32:55 if you just want the “Traitors” discussion!)

We got into Pilot Pete’s fall, the gameplay of our last two traitors, the rom-com-ish final moments of the season, and all the people still holding grudges. (We see you, MJ and Phaedra!) Hope you enjoy! Xo

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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some spoilers for the finale of season 6 of “Love Is Blind.”

The Charlotte-based “Love Is Blind” season that started out so promisingly is looking pretty diminished by the finale — at least when you’re counting couples. Season 6 ended up being as short on weddings as season 5, and similarly gave us more mess than romance.

But the finale was no less rich of an episode because of the smaller number of weddings, opening with a scorched-earth fight between Chelsea and Jimmy and reaching a crescendo with a wedding that was more about the riveting intergenerational drama of Clay’s family than it was about the couple. In this pod, we examine almost every frame of the Chelsea/Jimmy throwdown and each conversation Clay and his mother have with and about Clay’s father. Also, Amy and Johnny’s wedding, which is more of a palate cleanser than part of the action. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Just when we thought things had reached peak insanity on season 6 of “Love Is Blind,” receipts pointing to some questionable off-screen behavior of cast members started popping up all over TikTok.

Full disclosure! We taped our recap of episodes 10 and 11 last week, but then the gossip started pouring out: about Jeramey’s previous engagement, about the serious girlfriend Trevor allegedly had DURING FILMING, about the cast of “Perfect Match” 2, about what really went down between Laura and Jeramey during filming… and we knew that we simply had to hop back on and address it all. So bear with us this week — up top we get into all of the news and rumors that been floating around, and then we get into the meat of this week’s drop.

After watching episodes 10 and 11, we continue to be #TeamLaura, we continue to be deeply concerned about Jimmy and Chelsea’s toxicity (though we did love this sweet IG post and Chelsea’s comment on it), we continue to root for Johnny and Amy, and we continue to feel many mixed emotions about AD and Clay because AD deserves the absolute world and is the undisputed heroine of this season.

But honestly? Mostly we really just feel bad for Jeramey’s mom. Being the mother of grown son fuckboys sounds tough. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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On this week’s pod, we recap episodes 7-9 of “Love Is Blind” season 6, which has begun to take some unexpected twists after a strong opening. Though the first drop of “Love Is Blind” episodes ended in a grim place, with at least two of the five engaged pairs collapsing into conflict within hours of attending their first social function together, their honeymoon in Punta Cana ends with all five couples officially intact. But things are looking precarious as we push past the season’s midpoint this week. By the end of episode 9, a couple has called the whole thing off (and not the couple we expected last week), and almost all of them seem to be on unsteady ground.

Back in Charlotte, the couples begin to examine each other’s homes (Jeramey’s is so far on the sterile side of pristine that it even spooks neat freak Laura) and meet each other’s friends and families. The couples try to coordinate their schedules now that they’re back at work — in Clay’s case, now that he’s back to having a job and a handful of businesses. Johnny and Amy consider getting him a vasectomy for a couple years so they can have anxiety-free sex. Chelsea is rapidly devoured by her insecurities, while Jimmy struggles to become more effusive toward her quickly enough to save their relationship. Jeramey and Laura spend their time with her family showing off their romantic dynamic of tensely needling each other under the guise of banter. Kenneth is joyously reunited with his phone.

In short, a lot of things go wrong in a short amount of time — though we’re still hoping our angels Johnny and Amy figure out that vasectomies are not something you’re supposed to plan to reverse. In this episode, we try to litigate some of these big conflicts; wrap our heads around the most abrupt, low-key breakups in “Love Is Blind” history; and revisit our enemies-to-friends list. Hope you enjoy! xo

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Season 6 of Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” dropped its first six episodes on Valentine’s Day, and (obviously) we binged them all. The verdict? So far, so good.

After an absolutely disastrous season 5, which left multiple lawsuits in its wake, and two couples fully erased from the season, we were wary heading into season 6. But six episodes in, LIB’s Charlotte, North Carolina season is off to a strong start. We spend significantly more time in the pods this season, which lets us really get to know our main players. After 10 days in the pods, FIVE couples get engaged and are subsequently shipped off to the Dominican Republic to figure out if they hate each other IRL or not.

In this first drop of episodes, some themes begin to emerge. There is a distinct ~trad-vibe~ to this season — almost all of the couples seem to highly prize traditional gender roles. (Johnny and Amy seem to be our singular exception.) They talk about their desire to “submit” and “lead,” and they invoke biblical language like “lust” and “lay together.” The women all perform extreme femininity in the pods, while the men look like they just rolled out of bed to mosy on down to the golf course. And one woman, Sarah Ann, gets into her thoughts on abortion: “If two people lay down consensually and have sex, you should take responsibility for your actions,” she says, as if human children should be wielded as punishments. “The option should definitely be there, but I don’t think it should be used as a form of birth control.” (America!)

All this is to say… there’s a lot to unpack. In this week’s Rich Text pod, we dive in head first. We discuss how we think these couples will fare in the real world, the sweet and supportive friendship moments we saw in the pods, and how men will literally go on reality television instead of going to therapy. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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