For about 18 months there was incredibly disruptive construction going on next door to me. It drove me mad. Like verging-on-a-nervous-breakdown mad. I became obsessed with the history of construction-related legislation in Philadelphia and pitched one of my editors a 10,000-word piece on planning permission and party walls. They looked at me kindly and said “no”.

All of which to say: sometimes you need an editor to rein you in. Sometimes you need an editor to tell you that while it’s OK for you to be weirdly obsessed about something, it might be best if you didn’t go down a rabbit hole on the opinion pages of a national newspaper.

So I mean this in the nicest possible way when I say that perhaps Anna Marks’s editor at the New York Times should have done her a similar favour. Perhaps someone should have told her that it might not be advisable to write a 5,000-word opinion piece advancing the theory that Taylor Swift – who is currently in a relationship with the NFL player Travis Kelce – is secretly a lesbian or bisexual and communicating this fact to the LGBTQ community via coded messages in her music. These codes range from the in-your-face (rainbow artwork on albums) to rather more esoteric references to midcentury lesbian magazines in the Eras Tour visuals.

Anyway, it’s too late for warnings now, isn’t it? The piece (titled Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do) has come out and it’s causing all the backlash and uproar and clicks and conversation that I imagine whoever greenlit it anticipated it would.

To be........

© The Guardian