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      Taylor Swift’s New Album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Could Use an Editor: Review

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      Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth?! — is strangely humanizing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist From ‘The Golden Bachelor’ Announce Divorce

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      Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist, the “Golden Bachelor” couple who married in January, announced they will be divorcing three months after their wedding.Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist were the first couple to meet and marry on “The Golden Bachelor,” ABC’s spinoff of “The Bachelor” featuring cast members 60 and older.On Friday, the newlyweds announced that they will also be the spinoff’s first couple to divorce.They made the announcement in a joint appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation, and we’ve come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,” Mr. Turner, 72, said.The anchor Juju Chang replied in shock. “Three months after getting married?” she said. “I mean, what the heck, guys?” she asked later in the interview.Explaining their decision, Mr. Turner said both were dedicated to their families — each has children from previous marriages, as well as grandchildren — and that it made the most sense for them to live separately. Ms. Nist, 70, added that they had looked at homes near family members in South Carolina and New Jersey but that they had been unable to reach a conclusion.The couple, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this article.The franchise had positioned the pair as evidence that invigorating love stories can unfold later in life. Before marrying Ms. Nist, Mr. Turner, a retiree from Indiana, was married for 43 years to his high school sweetheart, Toni. She died in 2017 after a brief illness.“People my age still fall in love,” Mr. Turner told The New York Times after he was announced as the series lead of the first “Golden Bachelor” season. “People my age still have hope, and they still have vigorous lives.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prosecution of Trump in Georgia Hangs in Balance at Hearing

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      Lawyers will sum up their arguments on Friday about whether Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has a conflict of interest and should be disqualified.A judge in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to hear final arguments on Friday on a motion to disqualify the prosecutor who brought the case, Fani T. Willis, on the ground that a romantic relationship she had with a subordinate created a conflict of interest.The presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday. Rather, the hearing, which is scheduled to start at 1 p.m., will allow lawyers from the two sides to sum up their arguments over a salacious subplot to the election case — one that has already caused significant embarrassment and turmoil for Ms. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Details of her personal life have been spilled out in the Atlanta courthouse where she had hoped to put Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants on trial as soon as this summer.The stakes are high: If Ms. Willis is disqualified from the case, her entire office would be, too, and the case would probably be turned over to a district attorney from another jurisdiction. The new prosecutor could choose to continue the case as planned, modify the charges or drop them.Disqualification would reduce the chances that a trial would begin before the November presidential election, in which Mr. Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.The relationship between Ms. Willis and Nathan Wade, an Atlanta-area lawyer she hired in November 2021 to manage the prosecution team, first came to light in January, in a motion filed by a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.The presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday.Pool photo by Brynn AndersonWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      8 Documentaries About True Love and Relationships

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      These movies go beyond examining a relationship to reveal the glories, discontents and more about romance.Romance and love are oddly tricky to capture authentically in a documentary. So much of what fosters real connection — as opposed to, say, “Bachelor”-style performative love — happens away from cameras. Plus, every love story is a bit of an experiment, and the observer effect applies: being filmed tends to change the results.But you can capture something about romance in a documentary. I don’t mean the kind that ends in disaster and a true crime documentary. I mean the movies that reveal something to us about the highs and lows, the glories and discontents, and above all something ineffable about love itself, transcending just romance.You probably have your own favorites, and your list might include one of mine: “Fire of Love” (2022, Disney+), Sara Dosa’s swooner about the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. United in love of one another and, perhaps just as much, love of volcanoes, they perished together in a volcanic explosion in 1991. Their shared interest was a fundamental part of their lives, which made me think of several documentaries about artistic couples, like Daniel Hymanson’s heartbreaking “So Late So Soon” (2021, rent on major platforms) and Zachary Heinzerling’s acclaimed “Cutie and the Boxer” (2013, Vudu), both of which delve into complex relationships that weave together creativity and partnership.Other documentaries tap into the power of love to sustain us across tragedy and hardship. I think of this year’s Oscar-nominated “The Eternal Memory” (Paramount+), directed by Maite Alberdi, about a couple navigating one partner’s deteriorating memory. Or Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s “Flee” (2021, Hulu), in which, on the verge of marriage, an Afghan refugee tells his story of traumatic displacement; his soon-to-be husband has become the only place of safety he can find, but he’s still reticent to trust any home at all. Or there’s “Time” (2020, Prime Video), Garrett Bradley’s gutting film about Fox Rich’s fight to free her husband, Rob, from a 60-year prison sentence. (This was a co-production of The New York Times.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hate Valentine’s Day? There’s a Market for You, Too.

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      Single, anti-consumerist or just not a romantic? From petty heartbreak healers to anti-Valentine’s Day parties, groups are finding ways to resonate with naysayers.Lilly Calman is not in the mood this Valentine’s Day for the flowers, chocolates or a romantic dinner for two, especially after a recent breakup.“I’m very angry,” said Ms. Calman, 26, adding that it had been painful to see all the holiday paraphernalia in store aisles.She found a more fitting outlet for her mood this year: a fund-raiser for the San Antonio zoo that will symbolically name a roach or rodent after an ex and feed it to one of the zoo’s animals.“The visual image of him getting eaten by a Komodo dragon is pretty satisfying,” said Ms. Calman, who donated $25 for the rat option. She is hoping the zoo sends her a video so she can host a screening with a friend. “I love reptiles. I think it’s cool.”The annual campaign has raised over $235,000 since the zoo first ran it in 2020, underscoring the appeal of alternative Valentine’s Day rituals for people who are uninterested in the coupledom of it all.The traditions of Valentine’s Day bring strong feelings, both for and against. Do you appreciate a cute tradition? Or do you hold it in contempt as a consumerist scam? Critics have blamed it for upholding a narrow-minded model of relationships as heterosexual and monogamous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fani Willis Faces Upheaval in Trump Georgia Inquiry

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      Accusations involving her relationship with the lead prosecutor she hired are seen as unlikely to derail the case but could cause serious distractions.Nearly three years after she began investigating former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Fani T. Willis is facing the biggest test of her handling of the landmark election interference case.Ms. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., was accused this week of being romantically involved with the lead prosecutor she hired for the Trump case, a turn of events that has invigorated Republicans and raised a flurry of questions about her conduct and judgment. The prosecutor, Nathan Wade, has reaped more than $650,000 in legal fees.While many legal experts doubt that the accusations — if true — will derail the case, they could present significant problems for Ms. Willis and create distractions around the case. The allegations have already created a firestorm on the political right, with Mr. Trump and his allies accusing her of violating a raft of county and state laws. They have even given pause to some Democrats.“If the allegations are true — and it’s a big if — it’s troubling,” Robb Pitts, a Democrat who is chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in an interview this week. “To have this come up at this point in time, and at this point in this trial, can raise questions.”The allegations, which were lodged without supporting documents or named witnesses, surfaced in a court filing on Monday from a lawyer for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staff member who faces charges in the case along with Mr. Trump and 13 others.The filing suggested that the relationship was the reason Ms. Willis had chosen Mr. Wade, who had never led a high-profile criminal case and had largely worked as a suburban defense lawyer and municipal judge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Wife’s Hand?

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      In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More