The Tortured Poets Department

Tuesday

Veronica Clarke

Taylor Swift’s new album balances glitter with grit

With The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift set out to do the opposite of her previous record, The Tortured Poets Department. Critics had called that sprawling 31-track project “unrestrained” and “imprecise,” and Swift herself admitted it was a “data dump.” This time, she wanted precision: a lean, 12-track pop record where every beat and lyric fit “like a perfect puzzle.” When Swift announced that music industry legends Max Martin and Shellback were producers on her 12th studio album, fans wondered whether this might herald a repeat of her 2014 smash-hit album 1989.

Showgirl

Thursday

Kathleen Willcox

Prosecco goes posh

Compromises are odious. They reek of disappointments both large and small, when no one really gets his way — there’s never a loser per se, but also rarely a winner. But very occasionally, seemingly disparate concepts can come together and create a new thing that is technically a compromise but ends up feeling like more than the sum of its parts, thanks to felicitous, and often impossible to predict, synergies. See: the bánh mì sandwich, the Constitution of the United States, Disney and Pixar. And now: Prosecco. The world’s favorite cheap, cheerful, reliably tasty tipple is dipping its toes into profundity — and the results are surprisingly successful.

Prosecco

Monday

Alexander Larman

Duets, arrests, comebacks and snubs: inside the 2024 Grammys

The various film and TV awards ceremonies so far this year have been a predictable round; there have been few surprising winners, and the events both on-stage and off have largely been well-behaved and respectable. All hail, then, to the Grammys, which has managed to take conventional expectations of what an awards show should be and has subverted them considerably, combining everything from a transcendental comeback by one of music’s greatest stars to one of the night’s winners being dragged off by police in handcuffs. First things first though: the Grammys represented yet another victory for Taylor Swift, a woman who, at this rate, is going to become TIME’s person of the year for a second year in a row.

tracy chapman grammys