Seen & Heard: Taylor Swift gets a doctorate from NYU

CALL HER DR. SWIFT
NYU awarded Tribecan Taylor Swift (who finished her high school degree on tour, homeschooled by her mother) an honorary doctorate at its commencement ceremony this afternoon at NYU (maybe she actually got to stay at her house here) and she thanked them for “making me technically, on paper, a doctor — not the kind you want to have around in an emergency, unless your specific emergency is that you need to hear a song with a catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section.”

I listened in for a bit today, and her speech was great. “I’m 90 percent sure the reason I am here is because I have a song called 22,” she said. “Not a single one of us here today has done it alone. We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, who have shown us empathy and kindness …who have told us we could do it when there was actually no proof of that… Someone who answered questions like, ‘why can we eat salad and not grass?'” She continued, “I know that words are supposed to be ‘my thing’ but I will never find the words to thank my mom and dad and my brother Austin for helping me go from singing in coffeehouses to where I am today.” And told her fellow grads, that effortless is a myth, you have to want it, and “Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.”

PINE STREET SCHOOL WILL ADD MIDDLE SCHOOL
Pine Street School, which currently operates an early childhood through 5th grade program on Pine and Nassau, will expand to include middle school starting in September 2023. They will start with 6th and grow one grade each year. The school is run by Green Ivy Schools and follows the Common Ground Collaborative Learning Ecosystem curriculum — created by an international collective of schools that follow guided inquiry with a digital toolkit. See more info here.

FLAWELESS ON WHITE STREET
Tribecan Christine Cole (who has run Taste of Tribeca for a couple years — that’s her below with the TOT nails) has taken the storefront at 12 White as a studio and shop for her hospitality company Flaweless. More details TK soon, but in the meantime, the idea is to have live and virtual classes for all things hospitality — think Italian wine tasting (upcoming on May 25), sourdough baking classes and flower arranging.

And re: the nails, this from Christine: “This time and every time at Vanity Projects in Chinatown. I always go to the nail artist Ayumu who hand painted our Taste logo so incredibly, right?!”

 

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3 Comments

  1. NYU has officially gone to hell. She doesn’t belong on the list of people who have gotten doctorates. John Lewis, Aretha Franklin, Bill Clinton and many others who were more deserving. What has she done? She described the songs she’s written and if you listen to all of them, they sound like the words came from a 15 year old’s diary and they all sound the same – met a guy, fell in love, he dumped me, I wrote a song. Just because you sing, doesn’t make you a singer.

  2. Ouuuch…a bit hurt…are we?

  3. Sara, what has she done? Well, for one, Swift is one of four artists to win the Grammy for Album of the Year three times, alongside Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon. Pretty esteemed company, and certainly becoming of an honorary doctorate, not to mention her many other accomplishments. To quote TS:

    “Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
    And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.”

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