It's a shortcut for a certain personality type—Princeton has the preppiest/douchiest rep of all those schools mentioned by far. Chicago is nerdier, Yale is artsier, Stanford is more relaxed, and Harvard is for neurotic overachievers. Penn might be a good second choice to convey those characteristics, but its academic…

Louis Prima! We used to play him while making Christmas cookies when we were growing up.

I saw the movie and also thought they were seriously underplaying the grayness, though. It's definitely there, but if you haven't read the books/been told to look for it, I doubt you'd interpret as actual moral grayness rather than just "those characters certainly are stoic" or whatnot.

It's a civil suit, so I'm sure he'll just settle again, and we'll get to hear more blathering about how we shouldn't be holding him accountable for things "he was never found guilty of."

Is there "a huge age difference"? The youngest was 15, the vast majority seem to be in the 18-to-20 range, and the oldest that I can find was 30 (Constand, the most recent rape, when Cosby himself was in his 60s). That hardly seems like a major difference to me, especially considering that the rapes allegedly occurred…

She writes songs about her relationships. Nowhere has she ever claimed that she defines herself by them. If you're claiming that a woman can't write about her relationships without being defined by them, it sounds like the sexism is coming from you.

You're missing the point. The point is that we don't need more artists like Mitchell or Baez*. Their ground is covered. Swift covered a completely different ground which has largely gone untouched in popular music, which is the experiences of teenage girls through their own words. (It's silly to suggest that she's…

It's worth checking out just for the sheer excess of it—I swear every single scene has its own enormous, multi-million-dollar set that is never reused—but as an actual movie, it's not particularly interesting.

There's a ton of it that's not, but most of it's not being made into movies.

Personally, I don't really care if people like Taylor Swift or her music or not. I just want to get us to the point where 90 percent of the commenter backlash against her is not couched in explicit or coded sexism.

But that's the entire point this article is making. It's absurd to compare her with Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell, because Joan Baez (who's 73) and Joni Mitchell (who's 71) are grown-ass women with lifetimes of experience behind them, writing about the interests and concerns of grown-ass women. There is no reason Swift…

No. There's a statute of limitations for civil suits as well.

Many of those artists are great, but none of them are singing about being a teenage girl for more than a few songs of their catalog, so it still kinda misses at least half the author's point that "authentic teenage girl music" isn't being represented in any serious way. They were artists I loved when I was a teenage…

Her co-writers basically say that they work more as "editors" with her music than writers (LINK), and the bulk of it is coming from her, though. (A direct quote from that article: "The writers that did try to mess with her lyrics? She didn't write with them a second time.")

The difference between Swift and Tiffany/Avril Lavigne, though, is that Swift wrote her own lyrics rather than relying on middle-aged people (mostly men) to write lyrics for her, and marketed herself as an actual teenage girl rather than as a middle-aged man's fantasy of a teenage girl. (I have a hard time reconciling…

That settlement was the only one that could have resulted in money. The rest of the crimes were committed too long ago—the statutes of limitations on them have all expired, so none of the rest can sue him.

Also, keep in mind that she's married to a man we know was abusive and manipulative to other women. It's fairly unlikely that she escaped being on the receiving end of those traits herself.

I don't think Swift is "radically inclusive" of every population, but I do think she and her music are inclusive—in a radical way—of a population that has heretofore been denigrated and ignored and whose opinions/interests/concerns have heretofore been denigrated and ignored. Of course she doesn't, as you pointed out,…

I think people who don't listen to or appreciate pop music a whole lot tend to radically underestimate how hard it is to write a great pop song. It's easy to write a shitty pop song, but it's hard to write a great one. It's a lot harder to write a great pop song than to write a great rock/folk/etc. song, because that…

The evidence just doesn't back that up, though. Everyone who has worked with her has talked about how her career is mostly self-driven. The songwriters who have worked with her have all said that it's her ideas and lyrics that are being presented. The people who work at her label talk about how she comes to them with…