31 Days of Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce Mania in Kansas City

I don’t mean to brag, but I saw the “seemingly ranch” photo before you did. I was sitting in the stands at Arrowhead Stadium watching my hometown Kansas City Chiefs play the Chicago Bears — the first time that both Taylor Swift and I got to see Travis Kelce, on whom we had different but equally strong crushes, play football in person. The picture of Swift in a luxury suite with several Chiefs fans and a glob of unidentifiable white sauce on a paper plate was taken early in the game; sometime in the first quarter, hours before it became a viral tweet, the photo came to me via a text from a friend, who got it from his friend, who got it from his sister, who said that one of the women in the photo was her “best friend’s husband’s best friend’s ex-girlfriend.” Elsewhere in town, a friend told me she was watching the game with a group from high school when “all of us started getting that picture from different people — someone’s sister, or a college friend, or a co-worker. It was like you could see a map of it going around the different social circles of Kansas City.” In one of my group texts, filled with men in their 30s who mostly yak about sports, someone wrote that he looked at the woman standing next to Taylor Swift and realized, “Hey, I know her.”

Finally, some good news: Paddington 3 has a release date. What happens when one partner is training for a marathon and the other isn’t. Iceland’s first full-day women’s strike in 48 years takes place tomorrow with the prime minister participating. Thirty-one-year-old (or 217-year-old, in dog years) Bobi has crossed the rainbow bridge. The Victoria’s Secret rebrand was an admitted failure, so the brand’s doubling down on sexy. NBA referee Che Flores on becoming the first out trans and nonbinary ref in American pro sports. Twenty spooky short stories you can read online for free. Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs. And you can now watch Britney Spears’s audition tape for The Notebook.

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