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Retirement Hands a Professor a Taylor Swift Reading List
· New York time
A retired professor has reinvented himself as a scholar of Taylor Swift's lyrics and become a successful podcaster at 72, MarketWatch reports. His niece persuaded him to spend his retirement analyzing the songs. The family suggestion gave an academic habit a new subject. Close reading did not disappear when the professor retired; it found a musical catalog and a public format. The podcast, in turn, gives an audience a way to hear the results of that work. The story offers a different picture of retirement from the familiar promise of a shorter schedule and fewer assignments. Leaving an established career can create room for a new project, but the new project can acquire its own routines and audience. Here, the subject came through a niece rather than a formal departmental plan. The professor's move also makes an amusing exchange between generations. A younger relative supplied the material, while the retired scholar brought the analytical equipment. The result has an audience beyond the family conversation that began it. Retirement was supposed to reduce the reading list. Instead, it gained lyrics, a microphone and listeners waiting for another discussion. The professor has left one timetable behind and discovered that a popular artist can provide an entirely new syllabus without asking a university committee for permission.
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