“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
Contemporaries Essays
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…
The After Archive: Introduction
After the end, or after the beginning, or after we started to write these essays everything changed. I wait for my ability to imagine a relationship with the past or…
Old Romantics
folklore and evermore revisit the Lake District of first-generation Romantic English authors William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Swift is also influenced by American…
folklore 2: folklore harder with a vengeance
If I were granted a retrospective COVID time travel wish, I would have hibernated through 2020, emerging every couple of months to stock up on snacks and the new Taylor…
Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck
Until evermore, there hadn’t been a truck in a Taylor Swift song since her eponymous debut. On Taylor Swift, she spends a lot of time in trucks. The lost love…
Zelda, Daisy, Taylor: Beautiful Fools?
That Taylor Swift makes two references to The Great Gatsby on her new album is perhaps the least surprising element of this surprise release. F. Scott Fitzgerald is Swift’s favorite…
Spirit Photography
Earlier this year, my partner and I took a day trip to Brighton. It rained the entire time, the storm striping the sky black and grey like a mackerel’s back….
History as Metaphor
In her October Rolling Stone interview with Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift said, “when I was making folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I…
Some New Shit
evermore is Taylor Swift’s most explicit album to date.1 To use my favorite euphemism for profanity, there is a lot of language: six out of the fifteen tracks display the “explicit”…