my crank theory of cultural longevity

stendahl x taylor swift collab

As far as I can tell, Taylor Swift winning Person of the Year has generated three main discourse points:

• She shouldn’t have been selected for this cover, because it should have been something related to Gaza. I have no quarrel with this point but also nothing to say about it—Time was never going to do that.

• Taylor Swift cannot wear clothes (she does not “serve,” “slay,” and so on). This statement is wrong… but kind of interesting? There’s a lot built into it. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. There will probably be a future post about it.

• How is Taylor Swift so famous while being so uncool?

Now, unfortunately, it’s the nature of online standom that anybody making any of these points, whether they made them well or poorly, got dogpiled immediately by a bunch of crazed seventeen year olds. Here at TSS, we do not engage in such behavior. We believe in letting people not enjoy things, in the virtues of haters, in not being defensive about the success of successful people…