Taylor Swift may be able to shield flight information under a new FAA law. What to know about Section 803. Happy Poetry Month! 113 poets come together to write pieces on Swift songs. An interview with the mastermind behind the project. A new walking tour in New York City has fans searching 13 stops for a sound they haven’t heard before. One of the Eras Tour songs joins the “Billions Club” at Spotify. And we reveal the Harvard professor with a new book about Swift coming out this fall.
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I’m Bryan West, the Taylor Swift reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Let’s connect on Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Facebook or X: @BryanWestTV.
Fly like a jet stream
The Federal Aviation Administration implemented legislation making it harder to track private jets.
Last year, then-President Joe Biden signed the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 into law. The 410-page document contains Section 803, outlining data privacy.
Private aircraft owners, like Swift, may submit an electronic request to the FAA asking to withhold registration numbers for non-commercial flights. The administration can also withhold names, addresses, phone numbers and emails from public view.
Swift can also apply for a new aircraft identification code used for identifying aircraft in global air traffic systems.
The complete breakdown over the new law is found here.
Tying invisible strings
If Taylor Swift is the chairman of “The Tortured Poets Department,” there’s a case to be made that author Kristie Daugherty is on the board of directors after amassing 113 poems, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, Instapoets and New York Times bestselling poets.
“I went after my heroes,” she told me over Zoom pointing to the shelves over her shoulder inundated with literature. “I went to my bookshelves and started writing down names of my dream writers.”
Every poem in the book corresponds to a different song from Swift’s vast discography. The weekend the book was published, Daugherty flew to Vancouver, Canada, where she hand-delivered a copy to Swift’s mom, Andrea. Read how here.
‘Welcome to New York’
A GetYourGuide tour in New York has been waiting for you.
The global marketplace company cast a bedazzled net last May hoping to find Swifties to lead a tour through 13 stops associated with the singer.
Alison (spelled like Taylor’s middle name) Hagan applied.
“I saw this on Playbill,” Hagan says. The 23-year-old moved to the Big Apple after graduating from the University of Utah hoping to make it as a musical theater actress. “I was looking for side hustles, and Taylor Swift has been my favorite artist since I was 6 years old. When I applied, I was like, ‘I talk about her enough for free, might as well see if I can make some money,’ and here we are. It worked out really nicely.'”
Public tours are $40 per person or private tours with groups of three or more are $65 per person. I took the tour last month. To see the video and read more, click here.
From the West End: revealing Stephanie Burt’s book cover
Stephanie Burt is the Harvard professor who went viral for teaching a Taylor Swift-inspired class in 2024.
She is the go-to expert that global news networks seek out to put the singer’s lyrical prowess into historical context. I spoke to Burt’s Harvard class last year and witnessed firsthand how she seamlessly weaves the singer’s discography in and out of literature written by the greats.
Burt is publishing a book in the fall, “Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.”
And we are revealing the cover in “This Swift Beat.”
“I love this cover because it tells you what my book hopes it can be: not just my version of Taylor, but — if I listened generously enough, and did my research clearly enough — the version that Taylor has shared with so many of us,” Burt says.