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Tag: time magazine person of the year

  • Taylor Swift is Time’s Person of the Year, to absolutely no one’s surprise – National | Globalnews.ca

    Taylor Swift is Time’s Person of the Year, to absolutely no one’s surprise – National | Globalnews.ca

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    Time magazine’s Person of the Year is Taylor Swift — because in this era, who else could it have possibly been?

    The magazine announced its 2023 pick on Wednesday. The 33-year-old singer beat out Barbie, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and even King Charles III for the spot (though Swift, too, is undeniably royalty in her own right).

    Swift told Time the honour — which has been previously bestowed to politicians, world leaders, activists and more — made her “the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt.”

    Swift graced the Time magazine pages with a powerful photoshoot that saw the Anti-Hero singer pose in her signature red lip shade. In one snap, Swift posed with one of her cats, Benjamin Button, around her neck.

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    Just in case the coveted title wasn’t enough of an accolade, this week Swift was also named People magazine’s Most Intriguing Person of the Year and Forbes’ Most Powerful Woman in Media and Entertainment for 2023.

    Swift’s Time magazine feature, written by Sam Lansky, is a more in-depth look at the notoriously tight-lipped star than her fans are often used to. The interview is sweeping, covering topics from her Eras tour to when Kanye West interrupted her on stage at the 2009 VMAs and even her much-buzzed-about romance with football player Travis Kelce.


    Click to play video: '‘The Swift Effect’ being felt in Canada'


    ‘The Swift Effect’ being felt in Canada


    Swift reminisced about the highs and lows of her career, and said she’s often been “given a tiara, then had it taken away.”

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    Though Swift captured the hearts of her dedicated fan base over a decade ago, she said this year has felt like “the breakthrough moment of my career.”

    She’s not wrong. Swift reached even higher heights of success this year. Her highly praised The Eras Tour, which concluded its 2023 run in São Paulo last week, is anticipated to bring in an impressive US$4.1 billion (about C$5.5 billion), according to the Washington Post.

    Swift broke Grammy records this year when she earned her seventh Song of the Year nomination, surpassing Sir Paul McCartney and Lionel Richie, who have six each.


    Click to play video: 'Grammy Award nominations: Best Pop Solo Performance'


    Grammy Award nominations: Best Pop Solo Performance


    She also released two heavily anticipated albums this year, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version), as well as her Eras Tour movie.

    On Spotify, Swift dethroned the longtime champion, Bad Bunny, as the platform’s most streamed artist globally. According to Spotify, international Swifties have listened to her music 26.1 billion times since the start of the year — which, for the record, is over three times more than there are people on the planet right now.

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    Swift told Time that the infamous incident involving her and West (who has since changed his name to Ye) shaped her to be the artist she is today. As Swift was awarded Best Female Video at the 2009 VMAs, Ye stole the mic to insist Beyoncé had a better video that year.

    “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me,” Swift said, noting that 2009 was around the time she began to transition away from country music. “I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.”

    Years later, after she’d recovered her pride from being upstaged by Ye, he wrote a vulgar lyric about her in his song Famous. As the track blew up, Ye’s then-wife Kim Kardashian released a recording of an alleged phone call in which Swift seemingly consented to the lyric about her. Swift has denied ever consenting to the lyric and told Time the video of the phone call was doctored.

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    Swift said the fallout felt like a “career death.”

    “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me,” she said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.”

    As the world called her a snake, Swift said she moved to a foreign country and shut herself out.

    In the years since, Swift has undeniably bounced back (and even embraced the “snake” identity in her 2017 album Reputation).

    Swift has had a cultural impact even beyond the entertainment world. When she attended an NFL game in October to cheer on her boyfriend Kelce, a tight end with the Kansas City Chief, the game became the most-watched match of Sunday football since the Super Bowl.

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    “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift told Time.

    Kelce told his audience that he tried to gift Swift a friendship bracelet at her show but was unable to meet the star.


    Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have dinner at Waverly Inn on Oct. 15, 2023, in New York City.

    Gotham/GC Images

    “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple.”

    Swift said she is currently gearing up for the release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version), which like all other Taylor’s Version albums, will feature several tracks from the vault.

    The Time magazine issue featuring Swift includes praise for the singer from Stevie Nicks, Greta Gerwig and more.

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    Last year’s Time Person of the Year was Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.


    Click to play video: 'Taylor Swift fan dies at ‘Eras Tour’ concert in sweltering Rio de Janeiro heat'


    Taylor Swift fan dies at ‘Eras Tour’ concert in sweltering Rio de Janeiro heat


    &copy 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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    Sarah Do Couto

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  • Henry Kissinger, Master Diplomat Under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Is Dead at Age 100

    Henry Kissinger, Master Diplomat Under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Is Dead at Age 100

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    It is not unfair to say that Henry Kissinger, who died Wednesday, November 29, at age 100, owes his role in history to one man: Richard Nixon. It is also not unfair to say that their partnership ranks as one of the most productive, complicated, paranoid, and downright weird relationships this side of Martin and Lewis. At times, each man loathed the other, often for showing the exact same insecurities he himself possessed.

    What would Kissinger have become if Nixon had not telephoned him shortly after winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, and asked him to be on his foreign policy advisory group? Here was Nixon reaching out to a man who not only had been a close adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s rival for the nomination, but who had made no secret of his antipathy for the nominee. And, in fact, Kissinger said no, preferring to advise him personally. How much of that he actually did during the campaign remains murky, since Kissinger also sent friendly signals to the camp of Hubert Humphrey during the general election.

    Humphrey later would tell The New York Times that if he had been elected president, he would have made Kissinger his national security adviser, just as Nixon had. It never would have worked, of course. Humphrey was too happy a person to connect with Kissinger in the way Nixon did. As Walter Isaacson points out in Kissinger, his 1992 biography that remains the best and most definitive account of the man, Nixon himself saw even his own partnership with Kissinger as unlikely: “the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic.” But what the two had in common was a deep love of foreign policy, not just in the way it is discussed at the Council on Foreign Relations, but in the dark and complex ways that diplomacy and force are practiced, complete with stabbed backs and revenge served ice-cold. “My rule in international affairs,” Nixon once told Golda Meir in a meeting with Kissinger, “is, ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you.’” Added Kissinger, with impeccable timing, “Plus 10 percent.”

    This made for a particularly activist presidency, as evidenced not just by the Vietnam War and the endless peace talks and the bombing campaigns (including the secret ones in Cambodia), but by genuine and dramatic outreach, most notably Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and, to a lesser degree, détente with the Soviet Union. There is a much darker side, of course, perhaps best exemplified by the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected Socialist leader, Salvador Allende, in a 1973 coup engineered by the CIA. In Robert Dallek’s astute study, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, he describes the two men discussing the result, with Kissinger complaining about press coverage (as he often did) and Nixon proudly saying that “our hand doesn’t show on this one.”

    We know about this conversation thanks to transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls. As The New York Times pointed out in a 2007 profile of Dallek, “this most secretive of presidencies had gradually become the most transparent” thanks to the gradual release of tapes, transcripts of phone calls, and diaries kept by Nixon, Kissinger, and others. Little of this casts Kissinger in a kinder light, especially in his obeisance to Nixon in person and his mocking of him to others. Mr. “Meatball Mind” somehow does not have the same ring as “Mr. President.”

    The struggle between these two men for credit may be best illustrated by the tussle over who would be Time’s Man of the Year in 1972: Nixon alone, as Nixon unsurprisingly preferred, or Nixon and Kissinger. As recounted in Isaacson’s book, Nixon got wind of talk that Kissinger might be Man of the Year and complimented Kissinger by note; behind the scenes, he felt otherwise, as John Ehrlichman’s notes from a Camp David meeting that fall make clear: “President’s genius needs to be recognized, vis-à-vis HAK.”

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    Jim Kelly

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