Taylor Swift Teases ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Debut

“Hustle culture has no future,” an op-ed on the Forbes website proclaimed not so long ago. But Forbes-official billionaire Taylor Swift and her consort, three-time Super Bowl champ turned game show host (more on that in a minute) Travis Kelce might disagree. The star couple has day jobs that don’t require their attendance for a bit, but both are rising and grinding in their own ways.

Swift’s Eras Tour is on a break until May, when it heads into four months of stops across Europe and the U.K. Kelce is back on the clock even sooner than that, as the Kansas City Chiefs—for which he plays tight end—will hold its first official workout on April 15. Team activities rev up in May, and certain workouts will have mandatory attendance as of June. 

But both are packing in work during their limited downtime, with Swift announcing via an Instagram story on Saturday that her new album is less than two weeks away. In the now-expired post, a manual typewriter tapped out the words “13 days until the TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT.” (The footage was black and white, so it’s unclear if the typewriter in question was the same Searing Cutlass from her “All Too Well” short. Let the Easter egg hunt commence!) The LP, which Swift announced from this year’s Grammys stage in her album of the year acceptance speech, has a release date of April 19.

At the same time, Kelce is, per Us Weekly, in the middle of taping “several episodes” of the game show Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity, on which he is not a celebrity but the far-less-intellectually-questioned host. 

The show, which is reportedly shooting episodes back-to-back, started filming in early April and is expected to continue through next week. The series is a reboot of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, a Jeff Foxworthy-hosted game show that pitted an adult contestant against three tween kids and ran from 2007-2011, with one more season in 2015. The show then moved to under-new-scrutiny network Nickelodeon for a John Cena-hosted season in 2019.

In the new, Kelce-hosted iteration, the fifth graders have been swapped for as-yet-unnamed celebrities, who may or may not be smarter than their civilian competition. Perhaps one of their challenges can be to figure out how Kelce can complete tapings, get in his NFL-mandated workouts, and still join Swift—as he’s publicly promised—for the European leg of her blockbuster tour.

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