Taylor Swift Person of the Year Honor Deserved. Here’s Why

If you have been living under a rock — or if you are a rock — you might not have heard that Taylor Swift was just named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. I am coolly pleased by this outcome — not only for having predicted it, but because she beat out boy-next-door dictators Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for the honor. (Long live the West!)

Swift’s Time profile, masterfully crafted by Sam Lansky (West Coast editor of Time and ghostwriter of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me), generated plenty of internet fodder. Perhaps no other excerpt from the piece has received more laud or scorn than the following: “As a pop star, [Swift] sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell.”

About the Author

Kayla Bartsch

Kayla Bartsch is a former William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review.

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Taylor Swift

If you have been living under a rock — or if you are a rock — you might not have heard that Taylor Swift was just named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. I am coolly pleased by this outcome — not only for having predicted it, but because she beat out boy-next-door dictators Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for the honor. (Long live the West!)

Swift’s Time profile, masterfully crafted by Sam Lansky (West Coast editor of Time and ghostwriter of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me), generated plenty of internet fodder. Perhaps no other excerpt from the piece has received more laud or scorn than the following: “As a pop star, [Swift] sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell.”