GOOD EVENING!

This is OUT OF SCOPE, your weekly intel to fuel your water cooler conversations, delivered to your inbox every Monday. If someone forwarded you this email, be sure and subscribe here. 

LUNCH BREAK

five consumption recs for the time between meetings

1. PIZZA COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE. Hegseth ponders ordering Domino’s in the name of national security.

2. DE-MOM-CRACY. Two Oklahoman mothers are the new hot voices in political podcasting. 

3. MW'S LLM. Merriam Webster was the first to ever do it. 

4. HOW YOU DOIN’? The latest on gossip’s greatest. 

5. BAA-SILICA. St. Patrick’s Cathedral welcomes its rising class of lamb-scapers.

are taylor and charli frenemies with benefits?

The bloodlust that drew crowds to gladiatorial showdowns is well-preserved in the human psyche centuries later – and nowhere is that more evident than on Twitter/X. It’s been a big week in the digital colosseum: last week, we gathered to watch two sets of power players face off in back-to-back brawls. 

The opening act was a classic: yet another trough in the sine wave of Nicki and Cardi’s relationship. The two traded blows in a series of caps-heavy tweets that – while at times a little juvenile for two people with media teams and fully developed frontal lobes – did leave us with some great one-liners (“your son’s favorite color is 5”). Say what you will, it’s always fun watching professional wordsmiths go at it. 

The main event spun out of Friday’s premiere of Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl.

(The album’s broader reception is worth its own deep-dive: haters and fans alike wondered if Swift contracted airborne CTE from her himbo beau; some reviewers put up so-called dictator election numbers, others were decidedly nonplussed.)

The album’s 7th track, “Actually Romantic,” was arguably its most controversial. The song was quickly understood to be Taylor’s response to Charli xcx’s “Sympathy is a Knife,” (which has long been rumored to be about Swift). 

Musical stylings aside, Taylor’s song was fairly tone-deaf. She seemed to wholly miss the point of the inciting song – a raw, abrasive reckoning with the insecurities of second-string stardom that saddled Charli’s image for over a decade before her Brat breakout. Swift’s response waded in the shallow end of ad hominems and petty burns – disappointing for an artist known for her lyrical nuance, and a major missed opportunity to dig deeper into the draining realities of superstardom (supposedly, Showgirl’s central tension). 

Charli has yet to publicly respond, but “Actually Romantic” has played in her favor: the cultural conversation has looped back to Brat’s excellence. 

Fresh off last week’s OOS about the efficacy of ragebait, we can’t help but pick up a whiff of it here. A diss track is a surefire way to coax some curious streams out of Charli stans – we wonder if there’s truly any bad blood here, or if this was just a way to rev up the discourse engine. 

Some celebrity feuds – Nicki and Cardi, for example  – seem to be more genuine rage than calculated bait, but either way, the heated back-and-forth makes for some powerful engagement-farming. Celebrity feuds are, at the end of the day, an act of mutually-assured publicity.

TREND RAPPORT

viral vocab of the week 

HIMBO (n.) –  A man who’s more looks than brains.

STAN (n., v.) –  A particularly zealous fan, or the act of engaging with a celebrity in a particularly zealous fashion. The term is pulled from the Eminem track “Stan,” which centers on an obsessive fan. 

-FARMING (suffix) –  Indicating repeated action that builds up a specified resource.

SEE YOU NEXT MONDAY!

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