a taylor swift studies emergency broadcast

the tortured substacker’s department

The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis

We’ve called Taylor a lot of things in this substack—mostly (loving) variations of “dork.” But one thing we’ve never really gone into is that Taylor is a little troll who likes to scatter little clues around like she’s Martin the Warrior from the Redwall books. She calls this “Easter egging” but I prefer my version. And the other thing that Taylor knows is that everybody, and I mean everybody, is slavering for reputation (taylor’s version). It is, without question, her most anticipated re-record. The crowd was chanting “reputation! reputation!” in Brazil. Brands are constantly tweeting things like “reputation (taylor’s version) tonite queen????” to get attention. She knows.

So on Grammys day—when she knew everybody would be paying even more attention to her than usual—she switched her profile to black and white, and then she took down her website and displayed an error message that featured an anagram of “red herring,” and everybody and everyone w…