Taylor Swift Easter eggs are more than a puzzle — they’re a lifestyle

polygon.com:

Everyone knows Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, but only a select few know what she’s really thinking. Much like an Instagram story that’s secretly meant for a crush, Swift is always subtly putting herself out there, hoping you’ll notice. At least, that’s how fans tell it. For these fans, “Mastermind” isn’t just a single off her new album — it’s Swift’s entire modus operandi.

Just in the last few months, fans have claimed that Taylor Swift was writing a memoir (she wasn’t), writing a play (she isn’t), and, if that weren’t enough, she’s apparently orchestrating the world’s most elaborate coming-out moment (TBD). You might even believe that Taylor Swift is the world’s best English teacher after witnessing fans debate the hidden meaning of a single punctuation mark. These signs — Swift subtly signaling her next career move, or giving fans windows into her personal life via code — are everywhere, and the “proof” gets millions of views on TikTok every day. At this point, Swift’s leaning into the appetite for secret codes: Last week, she tasked fans with solving 33 million Google puzzles before she revealed the five vault tracks for 1989 (Taylor’s Version). The game was such a resounding success that fans briefly broke Google.

It’s easy to tie this obsessive brand of fandom to the fact that Taylor Swift is, in 2023, surpassing her existing supernova-level stardom. With the Eras Tour, she’s fueling entire economies. She’s starting earthquakes. Her historic tour has been posted thousands of times to TikTok, whose adroit algorithm brings fans together with the force of the Large Hadron Collider. And the more fans speculate, the more headlines she gets, and the more demand there is for her tour. The pre-orders