#109: "Just&t married" is so st&tupid

Every day some new bullshit from this lady

Death By Consumption

6/30/26 - 7/6/26

Haters of last week’s lazy vacation email (“You didn’t even try,” my sister said, rudely and correctly) will regret asking for more from me, because this week you’re getting 3000 words about Taylor Swift, a little-known singer who had a small shindig over the weekend. I so wish I could have gone to her wedding, but I unfortunately had to decline, because I spent the weekend in Wisconsin with family, where no one could go into the lake due to a toxic green algae — climate change is the gift that keeps on giving! Speaking of gifts, the thing I most want to know about the wedding is if Taylor had a wedding registry. I feel like the obvious move is for her to do the whole “in lieu of gifts, donate to ____” thing, but I also could see her literally sending out to guests, like, a Nordstrom link. If so, I need to know what the Haims got her! I bet Danielle paid for a caviar tasting on their honeymoon, Alana found some off-registry limited-edition vintage records, and Este got them a ladle. Anyway, this is all to say sorry: it’s Taylor week here at DBC.

This week: I desperately tried but ultimately failed to understand the appeal of Taylor and her wedding that took place in the ninth circle of hell, I changed my mind about Apple TV’s Cape Fear, and I tore through three beach reads and enjoyed two of them!

“You can’t get tickets to this” by Fran Hoepfner — in Vulture

I was out of town for the 4th of July, which is the only reason why I didn’t stand around outside Madison Square Garden in 105-degree heat, desperately hoping for… a three-second glimpse of Lena Dunham getting out of an Uber, I guess? So instead I had to turn to Fran, in which she went boots on the ground for days, giving us some good, old-fashioned scene reporting outside the disgusting arena where our country’s most obnoxious wedding was happening.

I always love an article that’s just “I talked to everyone I saw on the street in NY,” and Fran’s report is full of some beautiful little gems. Some choice moments I especially enjoyed:

I stop what I think is a Swiftie in a flower crown but is actually just a woman in a flower crown. “Flowers have been my thing way longer than they’ve been hers,” she tells me.

A little after three in the afternoon, guests start arriving in tinted SUVs, Sprinter vans, and a few regular-looking Uber minivans. “I just know that’s Bradley Cooper’s car,” says a woman with an Irish accent talking to a friend on FaceTime. She holds her phone up. “Can you see it? Bradley Cooper’s car?”

To be honest, my thoughts about Taylor Swift and her Midtown wedding aren’t that deep. I, like I’m sure many of you reading this, find it tacky and embarrassing, but also: this woman was never going to get married in a normal way. She’s not a human, she’s a human-like entity being piloted by brand deals and corporate synergy, and I suppose we should all be grateful that her wedding was as relatively private as it was. If I had put money on it on Kalshi, I would have bet on her wedding airing live, forcibly broadcast to every single screen in the country — your phone would start streaming the wedding against your will, your Samsung Smart Fridge would suddenly start blasting her vows, and when every Tesla display suddenly started playing Taylor walking down the aisle (to her own song lollll), thousands would be dead in the streets. If the worst that happened is that Taylor shut down Midtown for a few hours during a miserable heat wave, I say we got off easily.

such a GORGEOUS choice of font

“What makes Taylor Swift cool?” by Clare Frances — at Famous and Beloved Newsletter

To be a true hater you must know thine enemy, so I turned to Clare’s pre-wedding post to hear the Swifties’ defense of their queen. And, look, Clare does make a compelling case! For one, her description of Taylor as a “chronic cheater who has huge boobs and drinks a lot” is the first time I’ve actually found Taylor almost cool. And I do think she’s exactly right that this wedding is, at the heart of it, “just something that’s fun for her this month” (though, once the documentary and brand deals and new album and whatever else comes out of this are finally released, I think we have to amend that statement to “something that’s fun and profitable for her”).

Alas, though, I still can’t get over my general distaste for this woman. I’m sorry, she’s just annoying! I know that’s not a cogent argument, or a deep thought, or even an original one, but it is the word I keep coming back to with her: annoying. I will admit I was once Taylor-curious (partly because I’m always susceptible to cultural peer pressure, but also partly because there was a brief period where I did think I could have found her music compelling) but I long ago stopped seeing her as an artist and instead see her as what she truly is: a black hole at the center of our cultural galaxy, swallowing up all the money and attention it can, and never releasing anything of value. There is, of course, no way to escape a black hole other than avoiding them completely, lest you get sucked beyond the event horizon — just look at how many words I’ve already written about someone I say I don’t find that interesting!! So, to vanquish any further thinking about her this week, I turn to one of our nation’s greatest haters:

“Only A Complete Asshole Would Get Married at Madison Square Garden” by Drew Magary — at Defector

Drew Magary gets right to the point here: it’s incredibly stupid to get married at MSG. The only reason to do it is for the publicity and attention, which makes it even more annoying that Taylor’s camp is claiming that they had to do it inside the windowless arena for privacy. Taylor’s wedding was, literally, Olivia Colman in The Favourite screaming, “Look at me! Look at me! HOW DARE YOU! Close your eyes!”

Unfortunately, we know there’s always more to come from this broad, and Drew ends his piece with a guess as to what she’s cooking up next:

When Swift and Kelce first started dating, I thought it was all just one big stunt. Well, this bullshit wedding proves that it really has been a stunt, only one far more extensive, and tiresome, than I’d ever imagined. Join us two years from now, when Swift delivers her first child at Talladega Speedway. Presale starts on August 1.

Cape Fear, episodes 4-6 — on Apple TV

I’ve changed my mind: Cape Fear sucks. At first I praised it, for its campy 90s tone and the pure joy of seeing Amy Adams do her strange Foghorn Leghorn accent again, and my only complaint was that the teenaged characters were a bit annoying. Well, the show clearly does not agree with that assessment, as week by week the kids have become more of the focal point of the show. For some reason, the daughter is just a total asshole, constantly screaming at her parents despite them repeatedly having incontrovertible proof that they’re actually trying to help her, and in recent episodes she’s randomly become a drunk, swigging cheap liquor from bottles while she stares at the internet. This fucking girl has spent several episodes yelling at her parents and skulking around the neighborhood, empty liquor bottles clanking inside her oversized overalls, and there’s no point to any of it. I hate her!

But even worse is the son (apparently played by Kate Winslet’s son? Okay!), whose whole thing is, I guess, acting creepy now? For some reason? While his sister has become Bottles McGee, swigging from paper bags like a railway hobo, this character has seemingly been possessed by a demon of some sort, doing voodoo magic in the attic and staring blankly into the fridge while smiling like a lunatic. None of it makes any sense, and, even worse, none of it is fun. Whenever we get scenes with just the adults I’m still having a pretty good time, but the more we focus on the children of Cape Fear, the more the show is turning into Cape Annoying.

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, by André Aciman (2025) — library ebook

I feel tricked! I started this collection of three novellas on Fire Island because it was written by the guy who wrote Call Me By Your Name, so I was hoping for a sexy little trio of tales of gay longing, and instead they’re all about… straight people? Yuck! Even worse, the stories were mostly just fine — the first of the three was the most compelling to me, about a guy who claims he can see into past lives and that he’s cosmically connected to a random woman at a hotel with him, but the quality of stories quickly dropped from there. I’m not sure if this was the point, but every character in all of these stories is deeply annoying.

The stories mostly consist of two people going out and talking to each other, having the kinds of conversations I only ever had on first dates with guys who were absolutely desperate to prove they had depth. I’m telling you, these characters could not be more obnoxious. This is the type of shit one of the guys says on a date:

“Ironically, it is familiarity that estranges people. We repeat the same things till we run out of new ways to say them, then we grow tired of saying them and of hearing them said, and our guarded silence turns into a way of life until we find ourselves drifting like two rudderless steamboats with their engines off. All it is, is habit — and habit is a shorthand for silence.”

And then the woman this is said to, instead of saying, “Jesus Christ, you’re full of shit,” falls into bed with the guy! This book gave me a very good idea of what it would be like to date André Aciman, and I don’t think I’m up for that challenge, thank you.

The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis (2025) — library ebook

A fun, quick little beach read, though it would also be great in the fall, when you’re feeling witchy. It’s billed as The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides, which pretty much nails it. The story is simple: in an English village in the 1700s, five sisters are rumored to be able to turn into dogs. The book jumps perspectives constantly, giving us a birds-eye view of the village’s feelings about the girls, and, spoiler alert, they don’t like them!!! “The villagers were more afraid of the girls themselves than they were of the dogs,” a character thinks at one point, which works very nicely as a one-sentence summary of the entire book!

The Colony, by Annika Norlin (2025) — library ebook

Apparently this book was a massive sensation in Norway, is already being developed into a TV show, and the author is, I just learned, a Norwegian pop star. (Must be nice to live in a country where your pop stars are writing prizewinning novels rather than throwing tacky parties for attention, but here I am getting sucked into the black hole again!) It follows a woman, Emilie, who stumbles upon a small cult living in the Norwegian woods, and sets up a rather tense outsider-vs-cult dynamic. This is a fun, pulpy little book that feels like it was absolutely written to be turned into a TV show.

Strangely, the book spends about 98% of its length setting up the conflict, before it all unravels in a matter of pages, which left me feeling like it had all kind of just fizzled out. She spends so much time giving us each character’s backstory and motivations, so by the time they’re all together in the woods, you know each of them intimately and you see how and why they’re attracted to the cult, but also where the points of tension might lie. The majority of the book is spent tying this knot of characters together as tightly as possible, and she does a fantastic job at it, before, without warning, pulling a single thread and letting it all unravel instantly. It’s a very strange, sudden shift, and feels almost as if she got 300 pages into the book and then realized she was writing a 600-page book, but knew something closer to 400 pages would sell, so she had to just cut and run. It’s a bit of a disappointing ending, but I did enjoy the rest of the ride, so I’ll give it a pass!