Who’s torturing who here? Sorry, sorry. That isn’t the freshest zinger to zing in the direction of this sprawling new Taylor Swift double album, but please know that after funnelling 19 of its 31 tracks through my headphones on Friday morning, my phone died, as if by its own volition.

Same for any hope I had that the overall mood might improve in the third act of this two-hour hostage situation, a despair made manifest once I located my charger and heard the lyric, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in … I’d say the 1830s, but without all the racists”.

Washington Post