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'The Letters of Samuel Beckett'

The publication of Beckett’s letters, both brilliant and humanly forthcoming, is an elating cultural moment.

• Times Topics: Samuel Beckett

'Tunneling to the Center of the Earth'

Things explode in Kevin Wilson’s stories: parents, body parts, cows, emotions, expectations.

Histories of Sex and Censorship in New York City

Two books examine vain efforts to keep a lid on the seamy, steamy side of New York.

• First Chapter: 'The Forbidden Apple,' by Kat Long

New Visual Books

Books on vintage New York City storefronts, advertising illustration, early photojournalism, fashion photography and Bollywood film posters.

'Dear Husband'

These noirish stories imply that American family life is no protection against the horrors lurking a block, a click, a phone call away.

• Times Topics: Joyce Carol Oates

'Under Their Thumb'

How a teenage fan joined the Rolling Stones’ entourage.

• Times Topics: The Rolling Stones

'Judas: A Biography'

A rich account of the ways — many grim and nauseating — that the Christian imagination has vented its wrath on the disciple who betrayed Jesus.

'The Glister'

In this novel, teenage boys start vanishing in the infected woods of a postindustrial Scottish town.

• First Chapter

'A Daughter’s Love'

A study of Sir Thomas More and his daughter, who defended his views and preserved them for history.

'Africa’s World War'

A history of the civil war in Congo, a truly continental disaster that has sucked in neighbors and killed millions of people over the past 12 years.

• Times Topics: Congo | Rwanda

'A Legacy of Liberation'

A biography of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second president, a man who has been a puzzle to many observers.

• Times Topics: Thabo Mbeki | South Africa

'Ruins'

In Achy Obejas’s novel, a faithfully patriotic Cuban is ground down by the relentless harshness of life under Castro.

'The Missing'

This novel’s protagonist survived his family’s massacre as a child, and now he searches for a missing girl.

'Mainly on Directing'

Still going strong, Arthur Laurents looks back at a Broadway career of writing and directing musical theater.

• Times Topics: Arthur Laurents

Hardcover Fiction

Hardcover nonfiction, paperback trade fiction, paperback mass-market fiction, paperback nonfiction, hardcover advice, paperback advice, children’s books, graphic book lists, all the lists ».

Got Poetry?

Memorizing poetry in this day and age may seem eccentric, not to say masochistic. I recommend it anyway.

• Go to Paper Cuts Blog »

Book Review Podcast

Featuring The Times's columnist Susan Dominus on New York's long history of sex and sin and the critic Adam Kirsch on the life of Judas.

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Up Front: Joseph O’Neill

O’Neill, whose novel “Netherland” was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2008 by the Book Review, was born in Ireland and raised in the Netherlands.

Inside the List

Mark R. Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 1 this week.

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Recently reviewed books of particular interest.

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Inside the Ordinary | Reviews

NYT Sunday Book Reviews

The New York Times Sunday Book Review section appears in the weekend edition of the “paper.”  It’s the literary high point of some weekends;  most reviewers are quite capable authors themselves.  At times they are able to focus their talent in ways that crystallize some aspects of the books they review.  While not necessarily better than the books themselves, the reviews are bite-size morsels that the busy (or lazy) can readily digest.

• Liesl Schillinger on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

David Gates on Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer

Tom mccarthy on clancy martin’s how to sell, tom barbash on howard jacobson’s the act of love.

• Chris Hedges on Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier’s (tr. by Alexis Siegel) The Photographer

Laura Miller on Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy

Jess row on anne michael’s winter vault, jack pendarvis on frederick barthelme’s waveland.

• Robert Sullivan on Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta

David Orr on Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009

******************************

Liesl Schillinger on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table ( 14 October 2011 )

“Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image. . . ”

“. . it looks ahead to Mary Gaitskill’s sense of a vivid inner ferocity: ‘When Grace studied Philip’s eyes she could feel at the back of her mind the movement of sliding door opening to let out small furry evil-smelling animals with sharp claws and teeth.'”

“. . . she’s overwhelmed by the metastasizing of ordinary comportment.”

“At one point Martin deploys the rhetoric of full-blown Heidegerian phenomenology, having an avuncular figure say to Bobby: “Time, Grandson. . . . A watch puts you in the middle of the stuff of ordinary being.” Quentin’s section of “The Sound and the Fury,” perhaps the greatest of all American novels (or, for that matter, of all novels), begins with an almost identical passage. But there’s a vital difference: reading Faulkner, I’m struck with the exhilarating awareness that immense questions are working themselves out right before my eyes; reading Martin, it’s all too evident that commonplaces, worked out already and elsewhere, are being drafted in, or soldered on, to lend philosophical gravitas to what is, at base, a quite straight-up, noirish moral potboiler.”

“The novel succeeds because, for all his insanity, ­Felix knows both too much and not enough about his own and Marisa’s emotions.”

Chris Hedges on Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier’s (tr. by Alexis Siegel) The Photographer “All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants cry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself . . . The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefevre, are often rendered speechless . . . How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd?”

“Like many memoirs [it] combines penetrating shrewdness with remarkable blind spots. . . . He has the satirist’s cruel knack for conjuring and dispatching an individual in a single line, like the ‘computer whiz’ described as having ‘all the characteristics of a bad stutterer without the stutter itself.’ . . . [The memoir] betrays the roots of this skill in a wobbly notion of the self as a void encased in a posture.”

“Their [Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje] fiction might be described as an attempt to bring together the practice of the lyric poem — density of language, intense sensory observation, a skilled suspension of time — with the novelist’s brick-by-brick construction of drama in time, and, more important, in history. [They] . . . are not novelists of contemporary life but archivists and re-enactors who use poetic immediacy to make the past present — not as an orderly narrative but as a series of fragments or snapshots linked by a kind of dream logic, a hallucination that is neither entirely past nor present. . . Occasionally, in the midst of all this careful composition, these lovingly burnished surfaces, the howl of a very different kind of novel comes through. . . It shatters its own dreamlike stillness.”

“A book-length fascination and loathing culminates in Vaughn’s rapt litany of all the television he could spend the rest of his life watching in bed: ‘news and sports and those incredible game shows and ‘Lost,’ which seems to have a lot of sex in it, and HGTV, all those house-buying shows, . . . a blown-up building one night and a mother killing her children the next.’  To which Greta, the unlikely voice of reason and the heart of this bittersweet, conciliatory comedy says, ‘Uh, no.'”

Robert Sullivan on Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta

The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And at the very middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primevil glory — the visual denouement of a decade’s research — feels a little like a centerfold.

“. . . he’s an exhilarating and unsettling writer who is very good at saying things that can seem rather bad. When a Seidel poem begins, ‘ The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks ,’ it’s hard to know whether to applaud or shake your head.”  . . . ‘This combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel’s most remarkable technical achievements; he’s like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall. [Quoting Siedel’s The Cosmos Trilogy] :

It is time to lose your life, even if it isn’t over. It is time to say goodbye and try to die. It is October .

Starwhisperer

• Many Voices of Marian McPartland Now Silenced A musical voice can refer to a singer like Tony Bennett. Or it can refer to a voice in an orchestra of voices -- like Arturo Sandoval's trumpet. In the case of the late Marian McPartland, several voices that have sung together in perfect harmony have been silenced.  It is a big loss in our […]
• Nadeem Aslam: "The Opposite of War is Not Peace" The Blind Man's Garden The full quotation from Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden (@AAKnopf):  "The opposite of war is not peace but civilization, and civilization is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war." The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviewer judges the writing to be "visceral but exquisite, emotionally affecting yet unsentimental." An excerpt: "Rohan […]
• Ex-Situ: The Violin Promo for "The Violin" by Anna Clyne and Josh Dorman As part of New York City's River to River Festival, the Original Music Workshop presented "The Violin." The Original Music Workshop describes such events as those that: . . .take place in unexpected spaces, away from the Williamsburg site where OMW is constructing its heralded […]
• Violinist as Orchestra Symbol The 10 June 2013 issue of the New Yorker featured a photograph by Gabriele Stabile of musician Erykah Badu and a violinist. In the periodical's "Goings on About Town," the violinist is unnamed, anonymous, but represents the Brooklyn Philharmonic with whom Badu was to play later in the month.
• Very Short Fiction as Poetry? So suggests the New Yorker's James Wood in a review (pay wall) of Jamie Quatro’s book of short stories (New Yorker 3/11/13). He writes: Short fiction is closer to poetry than to the novel, and very short fiction is even closer. Quatro has a poet’s compound eye for small forms, passing phrases, useful repetitions, fleeting images. […]

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Poetryandscience.com.

• Fearful Asymmetry: Melancholies of Knowledge Melancholies of Knowledge is a collection that brings together a snapshot of perspectives near the end of the last century on the role of "literature in the age of science." The post Fearful Asymmetry: Melancholies of Knowledge appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Chapter IX: The Functions and Future of Poetry A chapter by FSC Northrop published in 1947 sensed a moral imperative for poetry to embrace the reality uncovered by science. The post Chapter IX: The Functions and Future of Poetry appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• The Subjugated Meaning of “Diversity” Jonathan Cole offers a more powerful sense of "diversity" in university education - and what should be done about it. Interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC 2016-01 The post The Subjugated Meaning of “Diversity” appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Glenmorangie and the New Makers Glenmorangie campaign in 2016-04: An exciting new generation of makers is merging creative ambition with the disciplined rationale of hard science. The post Glenmorangie and the New Makers appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Science Gallery International SNIP from the Science Gallery International portal: Science Gallery International is a non-profit company headquartered in Dublin and charged with supporting the development of the Global Science Gallery Network. Our misison […] The post Science Gallery International appeared first on Poetry and Science.

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The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind Hardcover – October 26, 2010

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A handy, smaller, and more focused version of our popular New York Times knowledge books―organized by weekends and topic Fell asleep during history class in high school when World War II was covered? Learned the table of elements at one time but have forgotten it since ? Always wondered who really invented the World Wide Web? Here is the book for you, with all the answers you've been looking for: The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday is based on the premise that there is a recognizable group of topics in history, literature, science, art, religion, philosophy, politics, and music that educated people should be familiar with today. Over 100 of these have been identified and arranged in a way that they can be studied over a year's time by spending two hours on a topic every weekend.

• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication date October 26, 2010
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.75 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0312571348
• ISBN-13 978-0312571344
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First Edition (October 26, 2010)
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• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312571344
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Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album. Beth Garrabrant /Courtesy of the artist hide caption

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album.

For all of its fetishization of new sounds and stances, pop music was born and still thrives by asking fundamental questions. For example, what do you do with a broken heart? That's an awfully familiar one. Yet romantic failure does feel different every time. Its isolating sting produces a kind of obliterating possessiveness: my pain, my broken delusions, my hope for healing. A broken heart is a screaming baby demanding to be held and coddled and nurtured until it grows up and learns how to function properly. This is as true in the era of the one-percent glitz goddess as it was when blues queens and torch singers organized society's crying sessions. It's true of Taylor Swift , who's equated songwriting with the heart's recovery since she released " Teardrops on my Guitar " 18 years ago, and whose 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , is as messy and confrontational as a good girl's work can get, blood on her pages in a classic shade of red.

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and 50 more albums coming out this spring

Turning the Tables

Taylor swift is the 21st century's most disorienting pop star.

Back in her Lemonade days, when her broken heart turned her into a bearer of revolutionary spirit, Swift's counterpart and friendly rival, Beyoncé , got practical, advising her listeners that while feelings do need tending, a secured bank account is what counts. "Your best revenge is your paper," she sang .

For Swift, the best revenge is her pen. One of the first Tortured Poets songs revealed back in February (one of the album's many bonus tracks, it turns out, but a crucial framing device) is called " The Manuscript "; in it, a woman re-reads her own scripted account of a "torrid love affair." Screenwriting is one of a few literary ambitions Swift aligns with this project. At The Grove mall in Los Angeles, Swift partnered with Spotify to create a mini-library where new lyrics were inscribed in weathered books and on sheets of parchment in the days leading up to its release. The scene was a fans' photo op invoking high art and even scripture. In the photographs of the installation that I saw, every bound volume in the library bears Swift's name. The message is clear: When Taylor Swift makes music, she authors everything around her.

For years, Swift has been pop's leading writer of autofiction , her work exploring new dimensions of confessional songwriting, making it the foundation of a highly mediated public-private life. The standard line about her teasing lyrical disclosures (and it's correct on one level) is that they're all about fueling fan interest. But on Tortured Poets , she taps into a much more established and respected tradition. Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard and literary stars like the Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. And, of course, Swift's reluctant spiritual mother, Joni Mitchell .

Even in today's blather-saturated cultural environment, a woman speaking out after silence can feel revolutionary; that this is an honorable act is a fundamental principle within many writers' circles. "I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have," Natalie Goldberg declares in Writing Down the Bones , the most popular writing manual of the 20th century. When on this album's title track, Swift sings, "I think some things I never say," she's making an offhand joke; but this is the album where she does say all the things she thinks, about love at least, going deeper into the personal zone that is her métier than ever before. Sharing her darkest impulses and most mortifying delusions, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of several much-mediated affairs and declares this an act of liberation that has changed and ultimately strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself; often in these songs, she considers her naiveté and wishfulness through a grown woman's lens and admits she's made a fool of herself. But she owns her heartbreak now. She alone will have the last word on its shape and its effects.

This includes other people's sides of her stories. The songs on Tortured Poets , most of which are mid- or up-tempo ballads spun out in the gossamer style that's defined Swift's confessional mode since Folklore , build a closed universe of private and even stolen moments, inhabited by only two people: Swift and a man. With a few illuminating exceptions that stray from the album's plot, she rarely looks beyond their interactions. The point is not to observe the world, but to disclose the details of one sometimes-shared life, to lay bare what others haven't seen. Tortured Poets is the culmination of a catalog full of songs in which Swift has taken us into the bedrooms where men pleasured or misled her, the bars where they charmed her, the empty playgrounds where they sat on swings with her and promised something they couldn't give. When she sings repeatedly that one of the most suspect characters on the album told her she was the love of her life, she's sharing something nobody else heard. That's the point. She's testifying under her own oath.

Swift's musical approach has always been enthusiastic and absorbent. She's created her own sounds by blending country's sturdy song structures with R&B's vibes, rap's cadences and pop's glitz; as a personality and a performer, she's all arms, hugging the world. The sound of Tortured Poets offers that familiar embrace, with pop tracks that sparkle with intelligence, and meditative ones that wrap tons of comforting aura around Swift's ruminations. Beyond a virtually undetectable Post Malone appearance and a Florence Welch duet that also serves as an homage to Swift's current exemplar/best friendly rival, Lana Del Rey , the album alternates between co-writes with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers who have helped Swift find her mature sound, which blends all of her previous approaches without favoring any prevailing trend. There are the rap-like, conversational verses, the reaching choruses, the delicate piano meditations, the swooning synth beats. Antonoff's songs come closest to her post- 1989 chart toppers; Dessner's fulfill her plans to remain an album artist. Swift has also written two songs on her own, a rarity for her; both come as close to ferocity as she gets. As a sustained listen, Tortured Poets harkens back to high points throughout Swift's career, creating a comforting environment that both supports and balances the intensity of her storytelling.

It's with her pen that Swift executes her battle plans. As always, especially when she dwells on the work and play of emotional intimacy, her lyrics are hyper-focused, spilling over with detail, editing the mess of desire, projection, communion and pain that constitutes romance into one sharp perspective: her own. She renders this view so intensely that it goes beyond confession and becomes a form of writing that can't be disputed. Remember that parchment and her quill pen; her songs are her new testaments. It's a power play, but for many fans, especially women, this ambition to be definitive feels like a necessary corrective to the misrepresentations or silence they face from ill-intentioned or cluelessly entitled men.

"A great writer can be a dangerous creature, however gentle and nice in person," the biographer Hermione Lee once wrote . Swift has occasionally taken this idea to heart before, especially on her once-scorned, now revered hip-hop experiment, Reputation . But now she's screaming from the hilltop, sparing no one, including herself as she tries to prop up one man's flagging interest and then falls for others' duplicity. "I know my pain is such an imposition," Swift sang in last year's " You're Losing Me ," a prequel to the explosive confessional mode of Tortured Poets , where that pain grows nearly suicidal, feeds romantic obsession, and drives her to become a "functional alcoholic" and a madwoman who finds strength in chaos in a way that recalls her friend Emma Stone's cathartic performance as Bella in Poor Things . (Bella, remember, comes into self-possession by learning to read and write.) " Who's afraid of little old me? " Swift wails in the album's window-smashing centerpiece bearing that title; in " But Daddy I Love Him ," she runs around screaming with her dress unbuttoned and threatens to burn down her whole world. These accounts of unhinged behavior reinforce the message that everybody had better be scared of this album — especially her exes, but also her business associates, the media and, yes, her fans, who are not spared in her dissection of just who's made her miserable over the past few years.

Listen to the album

I'm not getting into the dirty details; those who crave them can listen to Tortured Poets themselves and easily uncover them. They're laid out so clearly that anyone who's followed Swift's overly documented life will instantly comprehend who's who: the depressive on the heath, the tattooed golden retriever in her dressing room. Here's my reading of her album-as-novel — others' interpretations may vary: Swift's first-person protagonist (let's call her "Taylor") begins in a memory of a long-ago love affair that left her melancholy but on civil terms, then has an early meeting with a tempting rogue, who declares he's the Dylan Thomas to her Patti Smith; no, she says, though she's sorely tempted, we're "modern idiots," and she leaves him behind for a while. Then we get scenes from a stifling marriage to a despondent and distracted child-man. "So long, London," she declares, fleeing that dead end. From then on, it's the rogue on all cylinders. They connect, defy the daddy figures who think they're bad for each other, speak of rings and baby carriages. Those daddies continue to meddle in this newfound freedom.

In this main story arc, Swift writes about erotic desire as she never has before: She's "fresh out the slammer" (ouch, the rhetoric) and her bedsheets are on fire. She cannot stop rhapsodizing about this new love object and her commitment to their outlaw hunger for each other. It's " Love Story ," updated and supersized, with a proper Romeo at its center — a forbidden, tragic soulmate, a perfect match who's also a disastrous one. Swift peppers this section of Tortured Poets with name-drops ("Jack" we know, " Lucy " might be a tricky slap at Romeo, hard to tell) and instantly searchable references; he sends her a song by The Blue Nile and traces hearts on her face but tells revolting jokes in the bar and eventually reveals himself as a cad, a liar, a coward. She recovers, but not really. In the end, she does move on but still dreams of him hearing one of their songs on a jukebox and dolefully realizing the young girl he's now with has never heard it before.

Insert the names yourself. They do matter, because her backstories are key to Swift's appeal; they both keep her human-sized and amplify her fame. Swift's artistry is tied up in her deployment of celebrity, a slippery state in which a real life becomes emblematic. Like no one before, she's turned her spotlit day-to-day into a conceptual project commenting on women's freedom, artistic ambition and the place of the personal in the public sphere. As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: her model and musician friends, her actor/musician/athlete consorts, brands, even (warily) political causes. And with her fans, the co-creators of her stardom.

Her songs stand apart, though. They remain the main vehicle through which, negotiating unimaginable levels of renown, Swift continually insists on speaking only for herself. A listener has to work to find the "we" in her soliloquies. There are plenty of songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of " Down Bad " to the click of recognition in " I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) ." But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak for and to anyone besides herself is audible throughout the album. It's the sound of her freedom.

Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk Concert

She also confronts the way fame has cost her, fully exploring questions she raised on Reputation and in " Anti-Hero ." There are hints, more than hints, that her romance with the rogue was derailed partly because her business associates found it problematic, a danger to her precious reputation. And when she steps away from the man-woman predicament, Swift ponders the ephemeral reality of the success that has made private decisions nearly impossible. A lovely minuet co-written with Dessner, " Clara Bow " stages a time-lapsed conversation between Swift and the power players who've helped orchestrate her rise even as she knows they won't be concerned with her eventual obsolescence. "You look like Clara Bow ," they say, and later, "You look like Stevie Nicks in '75." Then, a turn: "You look like Taylor Swift," the suits (or is it the public, the audience?) declare. "You've got edge she never did." The song ends abruptly — lights out. This scene, redolent of All About Eve , reveals anxieties that all of Swift's love songs rarely touch upon.

One reason Swift went from being a normal-level pop star to sharing space with Beyoncé as the era's defining spirit is because she is so good at making the personal huge, without fussing over its translation into universals. In two decades of talking back to heartbreakers, Swift has called out gaslighting, belittling, neglect, false promises — all the hidden injuries that lovers inflict on each other, and that a sexist society often overlooks or forgives more easily from men. In "The Manuscript," which calls back to a romantic trauma outside the Tortured Poets frame, she sings of being a young woman with an older man making "coffee in a French press" and then "only eating kids cereal" and sleeping in her mother's bed when he dumps her; any informed Swift fan's mind will race to songs and headlines about cads she's previously called out in fan favorites like "Dear John" and "All Too Well" — the beginnings of the mission Tortured Poets fulfills.

Reviews of more Taylor Swift albums on NPR

In the haze of 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

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Swift's pop side (and perhaps her co-writers' influence) shows in the way she balances the claustrophobic referentiality of her writing with sparkly wordplay and well-crafted sentimental gestures. On Tortured Poets , she's less strategic than usual. She lets the details fall the way they would in a confession session among besties, not trying to change them from painful memories into points of connection. She's just sharing. Swift bares every crack in her broken heart as a way of challenging power structures, of arguing that emotional work that men can sidestep is still expected from women who seem to own the world.

Throughout Tortured Poets, Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs: how men inflict it on women and women cultivate it within themselves. It's worth asking how useful such a brutal evisceration of one privileged private life can be in a larger social or political sense; critics, including NPR's Leah Donnella in an excellent 2018 essay on the limits of the songwriter's reach, have posed that question about Swift's work for years. But we should ask why Swift's work feels so powerful to so many — why she has become, in the eyes of millions, a standard-bearer and a freedom fighter. Unlike Beyoncé, who loves a good emblem and is always thinking about history and serving the culture and communities she claims, Swift is making an ongoing argument about smaller stories still making a difference. Her callouts can be viewed as petty, reflecting entitlement or even narcissism. But they're also part of her wrestling with the very notion of significance and challenging hierarchies that have proven to be so stubborn they can feel intractable. That Swift has reached such a peak of influence in the wake of the #MeToo movement isn't an accident; even as that chapter in feminism's history can seem to be closing, she insists on saying, "believe me." That isn't the same as saying "believe all women," but by laying claim to disputed storylines and fighting against silence, she at the very least reminds listeners that such actions matter.

Listening to Tortured Poets , I often thought of "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance," a song that Sinéad O'Connor recorded when she was in her young prime, not yet banished from the mainstream for her insistence on speaking politically. Like Swift's best work, its lyrics are very specific — allegedly about a former manager and lover — yet her directness and conviction expand their reach. In 1990, that a woman in her mid-20s would address a belittling man in this way felt startling and new. Taylor Swift came to prominence in a culture already changing to make room for such testimonies, if not — still — fully able to honor them. She has made it more possible for them to be heard. "I talk and you won't listen to me," O'Connor wailed . "I know your answer already." Swift doesn't have to worry about whether people will listen. But she knows that this could change. That's why she is writing it all down.

• Taylor Swift