A Fortress Against Fear

Decorated Chinese athlete He Jie had been stripped of his Beijing half-marathon win Friday after an investigation found that the three African runners who competed alongside him had “actively slowed down” to let him cross the finish line first during the race on Sunday, April 14. He won the 21 km.

Spoiler alert: This article discusses all episodes of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. A woman walks into a London bar, crying softly, her eyes on the floor. She claims to be a powerful lawyer, but she also says she can’t afford a cup of tea. So the bartender, intrigued by this suddenly chatty enigma, gives her one on the house.

Among the four major American sports leagues, the National Basketball Association alone leans heavily into politics, openly embracing social justice as part of its core mission. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That wasn’t always the case: in 1980, commissioner Larry O’Brien painted an image of a league where race barely mattered. “I don’t think that the owners think in terms of color,” O’Brien told reporters.

For most of The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift puts the focus on her breakups with longtime partner Joe Alwyn and short-term boyfriend Matty Healy. But on “The Alchemy,” one of the (first part of the) double album’s final tracks, she seems ready to get back in the dating game.

When it was announced, in early February, that one of the songs on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department would be called “Clara Bow,” entertainment writers and Swift fans sprang to action with the alacrity of roaring-twenties newshounds leaping to their typewriters. The simplest assumption to make was that Bow, one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s, had inspired Swift because she too was a radically independent and ambitious woman, as well as a hugely successful star whose private life had received undue scrutiny.

A bonus track on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has listeners theorizing that the singer is talking about Kim Kardashian. The track “thanK you aIMee” is stylized so that the capital letters spell out the name “Kim” and the track “Cassandra” seems to reference the night that she got “the call” from Kardashian and Kanye West. Swift begins the song singing, “When I picture my hometown, there’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you,” which can be interpreted as a pointed reference to Kardashian’s deep tan.