The Unknown Power of Taylor Swift, Revealed

by David R. Bowne

Taylor Swift is very popular.  No need to cite sources on that one. And with popularity comes power. Her power over the music industry, over the hearts and eardrums of her Swifties is legendary. She makes the popular even more popular, just ask the NFL. Ask them 87 times and you’d get the same enthusiastic response. Heck, she even unified an otherwise dysfunctional and insanely unpopular Congress to tackle a certain monopolistic master of tickets.  But for all her popularity and the cottage industry devoted to tracking her every move, her every fashion statement, her every date, her oh-so elusive belly button, there is one Swiftian power whose existence has eluded everyone. Even Tay Tay herself is likely unaware.  But an obscure professor at an obscure college, one of those private colleges that litter the East Coast like litter on the East Side, made a remarkable discovery, one recently published in the Journal of Applied and Really Important Statistics. A discovery that may very well merit a prize for him, and not some useless Grammy either. A real prize, like a Nobel or maybe a MacArthur Genius. And just what is this newly revealed power of Miss Americana? Simply and amazingly, she controls the physical growth of young girls. Here’s the true story of his remarkable discovery.

He was home. Being a modern husband and father, he was doing a little household cleaning. Some vacuuming, some light dusting, all the while listening to a Taylor Swift playlist on Spotify. As he was grooving to the tunes, yes, grooving; he was a middle-aged dad after all. Anyway, as he grooved and cleaned his master bedroom, he noticed the height chart next to the doorframe. Every house with a child has one. The hash mark and date indicating the growth of a child. A visual display of their progression, from random month to random month, a record of a too fleeting childhood. He confided he saw it every day, even now when it is no longer in active use, now that his children are no longer children but young adults who’ve exhausted both their growth and their willingness to be lined up against a wall, pencil pressed down onto their head. But on this fateful day, he saw it with fresh eyes. As “You Belong with Me” blared in his headphones, he remembered his young daughter dancing with her friends, belting the lyrics with gusto, so fearless an attitude.  It was a long time ago, 2009. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the hash mark of her height in 2009.   Then the playlist spun his under the radar favorite, “Stay Stay Stay.”  But his daughter would not stay, she was moving on. Then another song, “Never Grow Up” from Speak Now. Never grow up. But his daughter was growing up. He could see it written in graphite on the wall.  His daughter clearly grew, as Taylor Swift grew in artistry and wealth. He stood mesmerized in front of the height chart, memories of his daughter flowing fast, transported in a Swift melodious current. And that’s when he had the epiphany.

He dropped the cleaning supplies and rushed to get pen and paper. In a moment of frenzied excitement, he transcribed his daughter’s height and corresponding date from the wall to the paper. He then booted up his computer and entered the data into a spreadsheet. A quick web search revealed the missing piece – Ms. Swift’s net worth, in dollars, for her actual worth couldn’t be reduced to something as inconsequential as money. This figure of her wealth for each year corresponding to the year of his daughter’s height, from 2009 to 2018, he recorded in the spreadsheet. A spreadsheet, the keeper of all that is factual, all that is measurable. He swiftly graphed the data, T-Swift on the X, his daughter on the Y.  A beautiful linear relationship. His excitement grew. Graphs are fine, but he needed to run actual statistics, a simple linear regression, testing the null hypothesis of a slope of zero, of no relationship between Taylor Swift’s money and his daughter’s height. That null got blown out the water. A p-value of 0.000004.   An R² of 0.94, meaning 94% of the variation in his daughter’s height could be explained by Ms. Swift’s wealth. He then ran a simple correlation analysis, resulting in a correlation coefficient of 0.97. So amazingly close to the perfect relationship of 1.0. Could this be true? Could Taylor Swift be so powerful as to control the very physical development of his daughter? But numbers don’t lie. Data do not lie. He possessed unassailable evidence that T.Swizzle caused his beloved daughter to grow in height. Strange, yes, unbelievable, for certain, but it must be believed. It was simply math.  He immediately wrote up his findings and submitted them for peer-review. The Journal of Applied and Really Important Statistics was eager to publish research of this quality and impact.

So, there we have it. Taylor Swift not only rules the music industry, she rules the growth of daughters. Fathers have long since complained of the undue influence of celebrities on their children; an influence most thought unquantifiable. Yet, here this man, in his love for his daughter, discovered the Swiftian truth. An insane power wielded by a single person, a person of so singular a talent that she transcends mere art to manipulate the very fabric of reality. Or at least she did until she went full adult music star, abandoning her adolescent roots. Taylor Swift’s power over his daughter’s height ended with reputation.  Those eras ended, but the effect, like her music, endures.

Author’s Note:

This graph is the actual relationship between my daughter’s height and Taylor Swift’s net worth. The statistical relationship is real, but of course, the interpretation of causation is nonsense. Nonsensical fun.

Author Biography

A scientist by training and a writer by inclination, David R. Bowne, Ph.D. is an associate professor of biology and environmental science at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. When not mucking around in wetlands with students studying turtles and salamanders, teaching courses merging ecological science and creative writing, or enjoying quality time with his wife and two increasing old children, he can be found tapping away in the dark of his basement office. His fiction and creative nonfiction works are published in Hippocampus, The Satirist, The Write Launch, The Thieving Magpie, and The Showbear Family Circus. His scientific articles are widely published in journals with less creative names. The most recent one about population dynamics of Madagascar hissing cockroaches is co-authored with his daughter.