Oops She Did It* Again (Taylor's Version)
Plus, a new "Wuthering Heights" trailer has the lit girls crashing out
*It = Announced her engagement at the exact moment I was filming a video about whether she would get engaged!! She is out to get me!!
Ciao! I realize it has been a full decade since Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, and we’re all sick of it already, but I got some shit to say, and I was on vacation all last week, so I’m gonna say it now!
Yep, I just got back from a friend-trip to Italy, and since I — like Dua Lipa — respect the sanctity of vacation, even Taylor Swift engagement reactions couldn’t tear me from a morning eating my very first maritozzo in Rome. Breakfast carbs > > > > Engagement.
Anyhoo, here’s a Google Maps list of Italy recommendations I gathered from friends, foodies, locals, and Stanley Tucci!
I also have some amazing, amazing, amazing personal news: My mom is officially in remission. I can’t even use exclamation points because they seem too flippant, and that’s how serious my feelings of relief, joy, gratitude, grief, fear/other things my therapist is helping me name are. Thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with us. We continue ahead with more tests every few months and doctor’s visits to make sure the cancer stays gone. Once she gets past six months to a year, the outlook gets even better for long-term recovery.
💜
OK, whiplash! It’s time to talk about pop culture!
In the News: Not Your Mama’s “Wuthering Heights”
Before I get to Taylor, I must spare a moment to discuss the batshit crazy trailer for the new “Wuthering Heights” movie, which is, as far as I can tell, Georgian-era soft porn [complimentary] if a Tumblr girlie wrote it while on an acid trip [derogatory].
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star, Charli XCX is somehow involved musically, and the queen of stylishly violent psychosexual thrillers, Emerald Fennell,1 is writing and directing. This is not your mother’s “Wuthering Heights”; this is a mad lib of the trendiest names they could get to return their calls.
The literary girlies are absolutely melting down and not in a good way! As an actual English major [side-eye at Taylor Swift, who called herself an English teacher but only has a homeschool GED 👀], I can tell you that the book is a critique of racism, classism, and sexual suppression. The movie looks like the opposite: a bodice-ripper fever dream for classically attractive whites!
…But I still think Emily Brontë and her weirdo gothic ass would love that shit! No??? Is this where I forfeit my English degree?
That it’s transgressively unlike the original is the point, I presume. Like, the title of the movie has quotation marks around it on the poster [also a reference to “Gone With the Wind”]. Let a kooky artist play with her paints!
My question for you: Are you a purist when it comes to adaptations? Do you enjoy a reimagining? I would say I’m a bit of both, but then I’ll drink two glasses of wine and deliver a lecture about how the 2005 Pride & Prejudice misunderstood Charlotte Lucas completely!
Taylor Swift’s Engagement is a Rorschach Test
What you see in her announcement is what you see in yourself. I don’t make the rules.
The original title of this post was “Men Will Really Ask Their Girlfriend Why She Cares So Much About Taylor Swift’s Engagement and Then Punch a Wall When Harrison Butker Misses a Field Goal,” but it was too many characters.
Taylor’s engagement has been dissected to death, so I’m not here to give you news about the grape-sized vintage ring, the Ralph Lauren dress, or how Travis’ dad blabbed the engagement date.
I’m here to dissect our reactions, ourselves. Want your thoughts in the comments!!
I’ll start with a personal angle.
Raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George Taylor Swift. (🙋🏻♀️)
In Taylor Swift’s world, I am nobody. I am nothing. If she is the protagonist in the play, I am not a supporting character, not an extra with no spoken dialogue, not a prop, not a stagehand — not even an audience member really, because I’m not even in the theater; I am on a different planet, not making sourdough bread. Even the most robust theory of the butterfly effect could not trace my cause to her effect. I am indistinguishable from the faceless firmament of friendship-braceleted fans and non-friendship-braceleted losers. In the Swift universe, I am but an orbiting speck of dust and rock and organic molecules.
And yet.
Every new announcement from her feels like a weapon formed against specifically me.
Last time, it was me scheduling a post speculating about an album announcement and then her announcing the album an hour before it sent.
This time, it was me standing on the corner of Cornelia Street — made famous by Taylor living on it and writing a song about it — filming a video speculating about whether Taylor would get engaged, when suddenly my coworker Morgan stops filming and goes, “Shit. She got engaged.”
There are 8,760 hours in every year, and Taylor chose the exact one I needed her not to!? Either Taylor Swift and I are cosmically connected,2 or I am doomed to be constantly outmaneuvered by the mastermind herself.
Anyways, Taylor Swift got engaged, and Hannah Vanbiber had to rewrite a script. See if you can catch the line I added in the video:
Yes, Swifties are in a bonkers parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift, but may he who doesn’t have a single parasocial hangup cast the first stone
Men to their Swiftie girlfriends: “I don’t get why you’re so happy for a complete stranger.”
Also men:
Far be it from me to ridicule anyone who is getting personal joy from this engagement! If people feel like their best friend just got engaged, that’s how they feel! Stop yucking their yum!
I personally don’t feel like my best friend got engaged3 but I love a monocultural event. This is like the Olympics of celebrity relationships!
Taylor Swift knows what Shakespeare and Jane Austen before her did: Audiences love a wedding. Taylor is spinning us a rom-com loosely based on her own life, and who doesn’t love a rom-com that ends in a wedding? This headline again: Taylor Swift Got Engaged, and 80 Percent of the Internet Turned into Mrs. Bennet.4
Do you think it’s just a PR relationship?
As I said in a post back in 2023 when Taylor and Trav first stepped out together: Why can’t it be both? Love and marketing! Passion and brand development! Nothing is more 2025- and also all-of-human-history-coded. The two most ancient human ideas are:
Does God exist?
Relationships are an economic proposition.
Taylor Swift understands this. So much the better if she fell in love, too! We will never — and I mean NEVER — be privy to Taylor’s real, unfiltered life, and I see that as a good thing. She dated Joe Alwyn for SIX YEARS, and there’s barely a single photo of them on God’s internet! We are getting curated lore, not vulnerable life-sharing.
Taylor + Super Bowl Halftime Show = Yes
Let’s get one thing straight: I’ve heard too many men people say some version of: “This is all a ruse to get the Super Bowl Halftime Show.” I’m sorry, but that’s like saying the Ring of Power had to fake an engagement just to get Gollum to put it on his finger. Be so serious! They’ve been drooling for this for 15 years at least. All she had to do was exist, and the Halftime Show wants her.
But yeah, I do think she will be the Super Bowl Halftime performer.
Swifties have pointed out so many clues, but the easiest to explain is the bread thing. Remember how much she talked about sourdough on the “New Heights” podcast? She said she thinks about sourdough bread "60 percent of the time.”
Which city is the “sourdough city”? San Francisco.
Which Super Bowl are we on? 60.
Which city is hosting the 60th Super Bowl this February? Say it with me: San Francisco.
This isn’t a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle; it’s the Wordle when you get four greens on the first try.
It’s America’s Royal Wedding, and I say that with excitement and cynicism in equal measure!
Many are showering gratitude on Taylor for giving us something to feel joyful about right now. An opinion piece in The New York Times was titled “Thank You, Taylor and Travis. I Needed This.”
It was wedged between one titled “Trump is Building His Own Paramilitary Force” and another titled “No Matter How Hopeless It Seems, We Should Press for Better, Stricter Gun Laws.”
Talk about the whiplash of the global digital age. It can be argued that we love this fun, joyful distraction exactly because of those other things going on. It can be just as convincingly argued that we don’t need this right now, exactly because of these other things going on.
Royal weddings have been famously used throughout history to appease the public — providing distraction, quelling unrest, etc. Is celebrity gossip the modern version of that? I daresay!
As someone who once got up at 4am Eastern Standard Time in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, so I could lug a laptop and coffee pot to my college dorm lobby and watch Kate Middleton marry Prince William, I’m not one to cast the first stone!
If they’re going to let us eat cake, I guess I’ll have a slice?
A final note/thought while we’re on the subject of distractions from all that’s going on in the world…
If you’re someone who feels like the whiplash is too much, I hear you. This is as good a time as ever to reshare places you can donate or support programs aiming to ease the pain in the world:
Inara is getting food to families in Gaza who have no means of otherwise accessing it. You can donate here (Click on ‘Rapid Response in Gaza’).
World Central Kitchen is providing meals pretty much EVERYWHERE and you can help fund them here.
The Shameless Fund raises money to support LGBTQ+ non-profits. You may have heard that “Wicked” star Jonathan Bailey is stepping back from acting for a while to focus on this organization. 💜
That’s all! I’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions, gripes, outrage, excitements, or even places you like to donate! Join the convo in the comments or drop a heart. :)
[Her former works include “Promising Young Woman” — a pulpy, verve-y thriller about female vengeance that was widely praised and I thought was excellent — and “Saltburn” — the widely panned one where Barry Keoghan humps a grave and drinks *that* bathwater, but I admit I thought it was a silly wicked little romp!]
[Her birthday on December 13th is my half-birthday, so you do that numerology math!]
[Nor do I get that excited by engagements in general since I was raised in a culture where people joked about sending their daughters to college for an “MRS” degree, so you could say my acting disinterested in engagement rings/weddings/marriages is a little daily practice of resistance/being a bitch about it.]
[“The business of her life was to get her daughters married.”]
Because I’m simply too emotional to say anything real (or a thank you for plugging) about Jose Andres or starving children all over the world … that Charli song in the trailer is a monster. A monster bop.