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We know Taylor Swift all too well. Her ubiquity makes her familiar, and familiarity breeds merch, memes, and multipart documentaries such as NBC’s The Swift Effect, a sustained exercise in fake wonderment that is now in its second season and forever in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell, where flatterers are submerged in human excrement.

There’s a well-known line from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” But Thompson was talking about the TV business. Other people changed the target of his contempt and desire, and then added the punchline. This is about as music business as it gets: a collective celebration of parasitism and copyright theft.

Taylor Swift is the apogee of both the old-time music business and its replacement. This gives people two reasons to resent her. Her success and wealth add two more. We live in a resentful age in which we are spoiled for choice. But T-Swift is generous. She has given her life to her art. A one-woman Brill Building, her product pours forth in cornucopian plenitude. Twelve hit albums in 19 years are the longest winning streak in the history of pop music.

Swift’s closest peer business-wise is J.K. Rowling. Each crawled up the ladder of a long-standing industry by the conventional method: advances and royalties, an album or book every year (every two years when you make it), and the face-aching grind of the endless promo. But as they climbed, digitization dissolved each rung of the ladder beneath their toes, as in a fairy tale or nightmare.

Swift and Rowling are now firmly lodged at the top of trees that no longer exist. They made it in the businesses of sounds and words, just ahead of the hostile takeover by the business of images. Harry, Hermione, and Ron, like Taylor Swift’s teenage persona, were child prodigies in an age of demographic decline. The marketing machinery threw them to us as throwbacks from the lost common culture of the 20th century, the age of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Johnny Cash and June Carter.

Harry lives forever in the neverland of childhood fantasy. In Potterland, a boy can swap his embarrassing suburban parents for a boarding school and acquire magical powers of social prestige, without getting molested by his housemaster. The Harry Potter franchise also developed, in the old-school manner, film adaptations and theme parks. When the stars of the movies disowned their lost selves by disowning Rowling for stating the adult obvious that a man is not a woman, they confirmed their unreality and their non-maturation into those familiar figures, child stars become childish adults.

Taylor Swift is the apogee of both the old-time music business and its replacement.

Swift was smarter. The naïf behind the adult-sized acoustic always understood that in show business, show merely modifies business. Born with Swifty Lazar’s head on her young shoulders, she extracted her copyrights and then made an adult reckoning with her biographical “eras.” Five continents, 149 shows, and more than $2 billion later, the Eras tour confirmed Swift as the last of the old-time barnstormers and the pioneer of a new, personalized mode of show business.

The 20th-century teenager was just Swift 1.0. To find peers for the creative fury of full-strength Swift, the one who broke records and molds with the Eras tour, we must go further back, to the age of American giants. Swift is a titan of industry, one of the great American capitalists that Ralph Waldo Emerson called “monomaniacs,” the creative spirits whose “speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain of the world.”

“Whence came all these tools, inventions, books, laws, parties, kingdoms?” Emerson asked in Natural History of Intellect. “Out of the invisible world, through a few brains.” Out of the invisible world of her brain, Swift has conjured a drama of personal continuity amid epochal change, and biographical coherence in an age of broken images. When Bob Dylan did this in the 1960s, other men called him a genius and then gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Emerson believed that “the supply in nature of railroad presidents, copper-miners, grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-annihilators, etc., is limited by the same law which keeps the proportion in the supply of carbon, of alum, and of hydrogen.” Swift believes that “karma is my boyfriend,” and also a cat. T-Swizzle and the Sage of Concord both detect a cosmic balance. Perhaps they are trying to understand how it tipped in their favor. Regardless, they tell us something important about life, and American life in particular.

“Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms, and should pluck his living, his instruments, his power, and his knowing, from the sun, moon, and stars,” Emerson said. His musical and astrological motifs are Swiftian. And Swift’s long-armed defiance and instrument-plucking optimism are Emersonian: “We’re getting stronger now, found things they never found,” she sang on “Change” in 2008. “They might be bigger, but we’re faster and never scared.”

Swift rerecorded “Change” as “Change (Taylor’s Version)” in her campaign to recover copyright on her musical autobiography. Most big acts eventually pursue a Trumpian renegotiation of the bad deals that got their foot in the door. Swift’s 2005 terms with Big Machine Records, the sale in 2019 of her master tapes, artwork, and videos to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, and Ithaca’s resale of them to Shamrock Capital in 2020, were typical of a predatory business that treats artists like sausage meat. Swift countered with a brilliant strategy. She retained the copyright to her songs. By rerecording her early albums, she ensured that the royalties went to “Taylor’s Version,” not Shamrock Capital, and depressed the value of the tapes that Shamrock held. In 2025, Swift bought back the masters of her first six albums from Shamrock for an undisclosed sum.

Not all of Taylor’s versions are better than the originals. The band usually sounds better, but she no longer has the young girl’s voice of her early songs, which are about being a young girl. But this is not the most important thing about them.

When the media talk about “Swiftonomics,” they mean the dividend that local businesses gain when the Swift circus comes to town. These profits are part of Swift’s Emersonian generosity, and also epiphenomena of her core business. But Swiftonomics has also included Swift withholding her 1989 album from Apple Music when Apple wanted to give it away for free—and forcing Apple to surrender, to the benefit of all musicians. And when Swift regained control over her past, she acquired the rights to her present and her presentation. Emerson could have had Scooter Braun and the armies of music managers in mind when he wrote, “In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and persevering.” The music business is set up so that property usually rushes from the industrious and brave to the idle and imbecile. Swift’s perseverance sets a precedent for fairer terms.

In our age, we take everything personally. Swift’s lyrics are full of candid and ironic admissions that she will never forgive or forget. No other musical artist has cultivated such a sincere personal bond with her audience. Young men used to decode Bob Dylan’s lyrics for political pointers, but Dylan despised their literalism. John Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus” to mock his interpreters by setting them a nonsense puzzle. “The men are all drugged with this liquor of thought and thereby secured by their several works,” Emerson wrote.

Meanwhile, in the 21st century, Taylor Swift avoids drugs and liquor and hides “Easter eggs” in her lyrics, videos, and social media posts as gifts for her fans—the legions of Swifties. These works have no pecuniary value, but they secure her and her fans in mutual affection. Never before in the history of the music business has its biggest star held all her own copyrights. Never before has a star held all her audience in such high regard.

Of course, the haters are gonna hate. Hating idols is part of the projection of passion. In a time when so many young people fail to launch, some are bound to resent an artist who launched like Artemis II and completed the great circle of career and life with impossible precision. Swift has restored unity amid pixelated images and fragmented micro-audiences. Emerson believed that “the interest of petty economy” is “the symbolization of the great economy.” When Swift affirms that romantic love and character arcs are still possible, she affirms the great economy of collective experience, too.

In 1932, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit to paint the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The murals he did there show shadowy figures toiling by the fires of blast furnaces, men with their heads bowed at spiraling production lines, and others heaving trolleys laden with engine blocks. Rivera was inspired by the Ford Motor Company’s vast River Rouge Plant, which at its height covered over 1,000 acres and employed over 100,000 men. Fifteen miles of roads and a hundred miles of railroad track snaked in and out of the plant’s 93 buildings, which guzzled hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Detroit River. Coal, iron ore, and limestone arrived at the plant’s docks to make steel. The metal was then rolled out and turned into parts for cars, which were assembled in a day.

It was a marvel of vertically integrated manufacturing and the greatest expression of Henry Ford’s philosophy of mass production and mass consumption. But for many of its workers, it was dehumanizing work. Ford liked to hire recent immigrants, as they were less likely to complain about their conditions. Rivera was a Marxist. His frescoes, immense, ominous, and admiring, capture the moral complexity of Fordism. The photographer and painter Charles Sheeler had a very different response to River Rouge. He was captivated by its geometry and efficiency, and painted it as if it were a quaint New England port, serene and stripped of human strain.

Among America’s greatest entrepreneurs, there are those whose achievements, however great, are difficult to grasp. What will ultimately be left of Bill Gates’s Microsoft or Larry Ellison’s Oracle besides the wealth they generated? Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is a financial concern, holding stock in companies whose hard assets were built and are controlled by others. There are great financial traders like George Soros, masters of capital flows; and technologists like Mark Zuckerberg who conjure clouds and streams of invisible connection. Then there are the titans who change our physical world: the Builders.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

It’s Wednesday, April 29, and the United Arab Emirates has announced its departure from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As the group’s third-largest producer, the move is monumental. By way of comparison, it is akin to a permanent member of the Security Council leaving the United Nations—except, of course, the world actually cares about what OPEC has to say.

To understand why this has huge implications, here’s some context.

OPEC was formed in 1960 by Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, ostensibly to ensure the global stability of the oil supply, but fundamentally to act as a cartel to fix the price of oil at a level that benefited the members. As their charter states:

“The principal aim of the Organization shall be the coordination and unification of the petroleum policies of Member Countries and the determination of the best means for safeguarding their interests, individually and collectively.”

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at the “Hessians” as they headed for America 250 years ago. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

The French have a term for the feeling that naturally follows from reading recent newspaper headlines about Germany “reinventing” its economy around manufacturing weapons for Europe. The term is déjà vu, and it’s not just about the two world wars. Long before unifying into a nation, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire made a business of supplying their European neighbors with not just arms but also entire armies.

As April 1776 gave way to May, American patriots were discovering the specifics behind reports that King George III of Great Britain had outsourced some of his fight against them to foreign troops. Though hailing from several different German states, these soldiers would go into the history books under the shared name of “Hessians,” for the principality that furnished most of their numbers: Hesse-Kassel. The first of the approximately 30,000 who served in America during the Revolutionary War set off across the Atlantic around this time 250 years ago.

It’s Wednesday, April 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on the problems with the Comey indictment. Will Rahn talks to the retired Navy admiral who is convinced that aliens are real. Emmet Penney has the details of the Trump administration’s plans to make nuclear power great again. Rafaela Siewert talks to Rachel Goldberg-Polin. And much more.

But first: Ben Shapiro on how to fix American institutions.

There was once a time in American society when fierce political differences didn’t preclude a shared moral foundation. Our core, foundational ideas—that violence is bad, that freedom of speech is paramount—were unquestionable, baked into the ethos of our nation.

It’s getting harder to argue that we still live in that kind of society. As we’ve written in recent days and weeks, the divisive tenor of public discourse seems to be reaching a fever pitch—with increasingly severe consequences.

The latest reminder of that came this weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

How did this climate take shape?

Ben Shapiro’s answer is simple: “Our institutions are failing.” In his piece today, adapted from a recent speech at the University of Austin, he explains how plummeting trust in what were once the foundational pillars of American life—church, government, academia, science—is at the root of our social unraveling.

Read Ben’s essay for his view on what went wrong—and what Americans can do to fix it.

• A New York Times investigation revealed this week that the U.S. Mint’s “100 percent American” gold coins may actually contain gold sourced from cartel-controlled mines in Colombia. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he will investigate.

• The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday it is exiting OPEC after more than 50 years in what will likely be a blow to the powerful alliance of big oil producers. The departure comes amid souring relations between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and will make it tougher for OPEC to control output and prices.

• Per new Gallup data, 55 percent of Americans say their financial situation is worsening. That’s the largest percentage in the last 25 years, including during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The cheapest cars in America may soon vanish from showrooms. Foreign automakers including Nissan, Hyundai, and Toyota have privately warned the Trump administration they may withdraw their most affordable models from the U.S. market if the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal favoring foreign car production in North America, is not renewed or materially weakened. Trump’s tariffs charge 25 percent on the non-U.S. content of vehicles that previously qualified as duty-free, making entry-level models unprofitable.

• The Justice Department announced criminal charges Tuesday against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former top aide at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), accusing him of suppressing information about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The indictment alleges David Morens boasted he had “learned the tricks” to disappear emails and skirt public information disclosures from a friend who ran the NIH FOIA office.

• Amid tensions between the U.S. and UK over the war in Iran, King Charles urged cooperation before Congress, calling the story of the two nations “a story of reconciliation, renewal, and remarkable partnership.” A loud bipartisan round of applause erupted when Charles mentioned “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

“There is nothing like the feeling of putting someone you carried for nine months inside of your body into the ground wrapped in white fabric. I was burying part of myself. Not just my DNA and my soul, but my essence, my identity, my Before, my mouth, my personality, my breath, my rest of my life. Me.”

These are the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin in her new memoir, When We See You Again.

Many will recognize Rachel as the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted by Hamas from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

Hersh survived 328 days in captivity. And during that time, Rachel and her husband did everything in their power to bring him home—traveling to Davos, meeting with Pope Francis, addressing the UN, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, and making countless trips to Washington, D.C.

And still, after nearly a year in captivity, Hersh was murdered, shot six times at close range by Hamas. There was gunpowder in his hair when he was found.

“And after all of that torture, misery, agony, burning, searing, battering, and torment,” Rachel writes, “I now found out: that had been the good part. He had been alive. . . . Hersh let me prove how much I loved him by letting me go into the arena to battle without training or armor, just with my tiny fists of primal love. He gave me hope that I could save him by wrestling with the world. He kept breathing so that I would be motivated; he kept me motivated so that I would keep breathing. I was, and I still am.”

I sat down with Rachel to discuss her new book, a firsthand account of her fight to bring Hersh home and the grief that followed. In it, she reflects on why she is grateful for the days she spent fighting for her son; what it meant to grieve so publicly; what she learned from former hostage Or Levy, who met Hersh in the tunnels; and how her faith deepened after Hersh’s death.

This is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

After its first indictment of James Comey was dismissed in November, the Justice Department is back for another round. This time they are charging the former FBI director with two counts related to threatening the life of the president.

That may sound like a grave accusation. But the actual “crime” described in the indictment is a joke. The indictment says Comey posted a photo on Instagram “which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47.’ ” The indictment then says a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret [this] as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

For University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, Iran is winning the war. Never mind the decapitation of its military and political leadership or the destruction of the country’s navy, air force, and nuclear program, and of much of its defense industrial base. Like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all of these military victories are mere flesh wounds for the Islamic Republic. The real story is that when the fighting stops, Iran will emerge as the fourth major world power alongside America, China, and Russia.

This was Pape’s argument in an April 6 op-ed for The New York Times. He writes that Iran does not rival the other great powers economically or militarily. Rather, “its newfound power derives from its control over the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.”

America built the first civilian nuclear power reactor in the world in three years. We started on it in 1954 and were done by the end of 1957. Half a century later, just doing the paperwork to get a reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government body responsible for overseeing this process, took the company trying to build Georgia’s Vogtle reactors nearly four years. That means it took longer to finish the approval paperwork for nuclear power than it did to pioneer it. What happened? Regulatory bureaucracy throttled nuclear. But it’s a new day for the atom. If the Trump administration and a surprisingly bipartisan coalition in Congress have their way, a nuclear renaissance will begin.

Last week, the Trump administration announced the first part in what will be a broad new regulatory scheme that will unleash American nuclear power (again), with new rules on how the NRC approves new projects for so-called “microreactors,” small-scale atomic power plants that, rather than powering a whole region, are small enough to power things like a military base or remote area. These smaller nuclear reactors are a sensible place for the administration to start. They are easier to find sites for and have more applications, and so with the administration poised to roll out a game-changing suite of new regulations over the coming months—undoing the old regime that kept America from building nuclear power for half a century—it’s starting with simple, safe microreactors.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people as I try to figure out what everyday Americans should make of the UFO phenomenon. Most of them try to hedge a little bit and say we need to wait for hard evidence before we make any firm conclusions. But retired rear admiral Timothy Gallaudet is not one of those people.

Gallaudet is a man with serious credentials. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he is the former head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, has worked on anti-submarine warfare, ran the Naval Observatory, and eventually became the acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He’s also one of the most outspoken proponents of the idea that not only are UFOs real, but the government is hiding the truth about them. “We’re being visited by some kind of higher-order intelligence that we don’t understand,” Gallaudet told me. “And it’s happening often, frequently, in our airspace and in our water and in space.”

Gallaudet recalls participating in a naval exercise off the East Coast in 2015 and finding that pilots flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier, were not only seeing UFOs but getting so close that officers like him became worried about a midair collision. These sightings produced the famous GoFast video of a UFO, which the Pentagon later said was an object that appeared out of the ordinary due to an effect called motion parallax.

Gallaudet, who says his correspondence about the object was mysteriously wiped from his computer, is far from convinced by that explanation. And he’s particularly curious as to why so many UFOs appear to be flying over water and in some videos, appear to be disappearing beneath the waves. “If they want to remain unseen,” he told me, “that’s the place they would be.”

As you’ll see, Gallaudet is sincere in his beliefs. He’s testified before Congress about what he’s seen. He and his wife, a fellow oceanographer, are still on the lookout for more proof that UFOs are real. They are true believers, and Gallaudet is not at all shy about expressing his convictions. He says what the government has disclosed so far is “a fraction of the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really seeing day to day.”

In this episode, we also talk about former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who told Congress he regularly encountered UFOs while flying his F-18 fighter jet, as well as the accounts of other military whistleblowers like former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, former Army Colonel Karl Nell, and former Department of Defense officials Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo.

Now, this episode does get a bit freaky. We do discuss, for example, the possibility that Atlantis is not just real but findable. If you want to hear from someone who is a good deal more incredulous about this phenomenon than Admiral Gallaudet, be sure to check out my interview last week with professional skeptic Michael Shermer. You can also watch my interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

But, again, Gallaudet is a serious man and a former flag officer in the U.S. Navy. And he’s coming out with a new memoir about his experiences, Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times. He is worth listening to as we try to get to the bottom of all this ahead of President Donald Trump’s promised disclosure of UFO documents. Watch the video above, or check out a condensed and edited partial transcript of the interview below.