
Taylor Swift website crashes after album announcement
Shortly after announcing her new album 'The Life of a Showgirl," some internet users experienced difficulty accessing Taylor Swift's website, potentially due to heightened traffic.
00:35 - Source: CNN
Vertical Trending Now 16 videos
Taylor Swift website crashes after album announcement
Shortly after announcing her new album 'The Life of a Showgirl," some internet users experienced difficulty accessing Taylor Swift's website, potentially due to heightened traffic.
00:35 - Source: CNN
Insect crawls on J.Lo during European tour
Singer, dancer and actress Jennifer Lopez was performing in Almaty, Kazakhstan when an uninvited guest joined her on stage. She casually dismissed the intruder, a long-legged insect, and thanked her fans.
00:28 - Source: CNN
Meet the winner of 2025's World's Ugliest Dog Contest
The World's Ugliest Dog Contest named Petunia, a hairless bulldog, the winner of this year's competition in California on Friday. The prize was $5,000 and a merchandise deal with Mug Root Beer.
00:30 - Source: CNN
A relic of the 90s and early 2000s, AOL ending its dial-up internet service
AOL, an internet pioneer that brought millions of Americans online for the first time, is discontinuing its dial-up service next month. AOL posted a statement saying it 'routinely evaluates its products and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet' on September 30, ending more than three decades of operations.
00:33 - Source: CNN
Masked thieves steal $7,000 worth of Labubu dolls
Masked thieves stole about $7,000 worth of Labubu dolls from a Los Angeles-area store on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department are investigating the incident.
00:44 - Source: CNN
Intense storm rips roof off prison
Hundreds of prisoners from the Nebraska State Penitentiary were displaced after a violent storm damaged two housing units on Saturday, according to the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. No injuries were reported, the department said.
00:27 - Source: CNN
Paris locals say tourism surge is 'an invasion'
Paris is no stranger to tourists taking photos of its historic landmarks. Tourists taking photos of themselves in front of the landmarks for social media? Well, that's changed the game. As the French capital sees a surge in international tourism, CNN's Melissa Bell spoke with locals in Montmartre who told CNN they worry that the large crowds are leading to the 'Disney-fication' of their neighborhood.
01:27 - Source: CNN
Meet the oldest panda living outside of China
At 35 years old, Xin Xin is a legend as the oldest giant panda living outside of China. CNN's Valeria León visited Mexico City's Chapultepec Park Zoo – where Xin Xin lives – to see why thousands of people visit the panda each day.
01:14 - Source: CNN
See what happens when a robot competes with courting fiddler crabs
Researchers test fiddler crab mating strategies by introducing a robot with a waving claw, dubbed 'Wavy Dave.' CNN speaks to one of the scientists about the study and some surprising moments caught on camera.
01:50 - Source: CNN
Harry Enten samples new ketchup smoothie
CNN's Harry Enten gives a taste test for the ketchup smoothie collaboration between Heinz Ketchup and Smoothie King.
00:52 - Source: CNN
See statue unveiling for Tom Brady at Gillette Stadium
The New England Patriots unveil a statue for seven-time Super Bowl champion and retired quarterback Tom Brady at Gillette Stadium.
00:32 - Source: CNN
Dinosaur footprints found after Texas floods
Videos and photos show dinosaur footprints uncovered in the Sandy Creek area in Travis County, Texas following the catastrophic July 4th floods. Experts say the creek where the prints were found is usually dry but rose to 20 feet during the floods, and that the prints are approximately 110 to 115 million years old.
00:51 - Source: CNN
Water slide malfunction on Royal Caribbean cruise
Videos show a hole in a broken water slide on the Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas cruise ship. Acrylic glass broke as a guest passed through the slide. A spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the guest is being treated for injuries.
00:26 - Source: CNN
CNN contributor sounds off on the big issue of sex toys thrown at WNBA games
CNN Contributor Cari Champion says that WNBA players deserve respect in the wake of sex toys being thrown on the court during games.
01:21 - Source: CNN
Iconic astronaut of Apollo 13 dies at 97
Famed NASA astronaut Jim Lovell, who commanded the harrowing Apollo 13 mission that was forced to abandon a lunar landing attempt in 1970, has died. He was 97.
00:45 - Source: CNN
Kelly Clarkson's ex-husband Brandon Blackstock dead at 48
Brandon Blackstock, a talent manager and former husband of singer Kelly Clarkson, has died following a battle with cancer. He was 48.
01:11 - Source: CNN
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
PDC darts superstars - Jonny Clayton career highlights, key facts and top stats to know
Jonny Clayton is a multi-major winning darts player from Wales in the UK. Despite what might be considered a late start to his PDC career he the 50-year-old has stepped up remarkably quickly. For his first few years on the elite tour the Welshman refused to give up his full time job, as a plasterer, in order to keep him grounded and show his children the benefits of hard work. Name: Jonny Clayton Nickname: The Ferrett Born: 04/10/1974 Country: Wales (Pontyberem) Lateral: Right Handed Highest PDC Ranking: 5 Darts: 23g Signature range by Red Dragon Double of Choice: 20 Walk on Tune: "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry Jonny first came to the notice of some in the sport in the early 2000s when he began to win some local events and had limited success in those organised by the now defunct British Darts Organisation (BDO). Clayton soon showed that wearing a Wales shirt brought the best out of him as he was part of the team to win the World Darts Federation's (WDF) European Cup in 2014. He surprised many by switching the PDC soon after. SIGN UP FOR A DARTS WORLD MEMBERSHIP TODAY! The Ferret began to succeed immediately, gaining a tour card and getting to the latter stages of the non Pro Tour events. By 2016 he had cemented his place on the tour and was rising swiftly up the rankings. That year also saw Jonny claim the prestigious Red Dragon Champion of Champions event which seemed to boost his confidence to another level. JONNY CLAYTON CAREER STATS: Read the full breakdown on The following year saw Clayton win a Pro Tour event and reach his first major final. He maintained this pattern until breaking through again by winning The Masters in 2021 and qualifying for the Premier League - which he duly won on debut! JONNY CLAYTON REACTS TO WINNING THE PREMIER LEAGUE: Post 2021 event interviews Since then Jonny has won the World Grand Prix and (with Gerwyn Price) won the World Cup of Darts twice and the World Series of Darts finals. Other significant finals and wins on every available tour have seen him rise as high as 5 in the world rankings. For the full stories and more in depth coverage of everything darts, together with the latest issues of their legendary publications, head on over to Darts World subscriptions options include Print, Digital and All Access packages, as well as exclusive products and competitions
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘I'm the one to beat': is Taylor Swift's Showgirl era set to propel pop megastar to even greater heights?
default Taylor Swift's podcast interview with her American football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce, this week yielded plenty of tidbits for fans. Across two hours of loose chat on New Heights, the show Kelce helms with his brother Jason – also a football player – Swift revealed she was obsessed with sourdough and lurked on baking blogs. The couple spent the summer with her family, caring for her 73-year-old father, Scott, after he had a quintuple heart bypass. She gave Kelce a lesson on Hamlet and taught him how to avoid internalising speculation about their two-year relationship. You could call them the tentpoles of the 35-year-old pop star's brand: literary passions and professional self-awareness. One surprising revelation came near the end. Until the record-breaking 149-date Eras tour that Swift mounted from 2023-24, she said she had 'never allowed myself to say: 'You've arrived. You've made it.'' Being the only artist to win the Grammy for album of the year four times hadn't done it; not the records broken, the acclaimed shifts from country to mainstream pop to indie. Nor her staggeringly successful campaign to re-record her first six albums to devalue their master recordings, sold by her first record label to an industry nemesis, and then on to a private equity company. 'But the Eras tour,' she said, 'I was like, this is nothing like what I've experienced before. It was so much better than anything else.' Eras leapfrogged becoming the first billion-dollar tour to become the first $2bn tour. That would be plenty of cause for celebration and a good long rest. So would, as Swift announced in May, finally owning the rights to those first six albums, having successfully negotiated to buy the asset outright. (It ended her re-recording project: her 2006 debut is done and waiting, and she barely started 2017's Reputation.) Her legacy isn't just culturally assured, but materially secure. But Swift evidently isn't ready to let that feeling of having 'made it' go. She appeared on New Heights to announce her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, arriving just 18 months after its predecessor and 10 months after Eras concluded: she is apparently congenitally incapable of rest, with a lot to process. The public will – correctly – have long assumed that Swift has well and truly made it like no one ever has. But the record's promised contents, intentions and release strategy are set to make Swift – and Kelce alongside her – hysterically famous at a new level, capitalising on and shifting industry norms in a way that may leave her detractors researching bunkers in which to hide from it all. *** Swift's new album does not arrive until 3 October, but this week's edition of the industry newsletter Record of the Day led with a tongue-in-cheek congratulations to 'everyone at EMI and Taylor Swift on her latest No 1 album The Life of a Showgirl'. Supernova success is a foregone conclusion: last year's introspective The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) was the first album to pass a billion streams in its first week, reaching 1.76bn. Swift is beloved on an unfathomable scale. She is one of the last monocultural pop stars. You suspect she could have toured Eras for five years and still sold out every night. Her devout Swifties, casual pop fans and curious rubberneckers will likely propel Showgirl past TTPD's record, such is the critical mass behind her, no matter what it sounds like. Her reign, says Annie Zaleski, the author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs, is unprecedented because 'she's so consistent and continuing to evolve'. But on the podcast, Swift sounded surprisingly aware of the limitations of TTPD – too wordy, too long, too downbeat – and keen to course-correct. That project, she said, had been about 'catharsis', 'mess' and 'rawness' following an apparently humiliating fling with the 1975's Matty Healy. TTPD comprised 16 songs; and on release day, Swift dropped a previously unannounced 15-track sister album, The Anthology. For Showgirl, she said she craved 'focus and discipline': just 12 songs going behind the scenes of her Eras life, with 'melodies that were so infectious you're almost angry'. She made a surprising admission about her recent quality control: 'Keeping the bar really high is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time.' Swift recorded Showgirl with the Swedish co-producers Max Martin and Shellback in Stockholm around Eras' spring 2024 European run. The second of her three dates in the Swedish capital was the 89th date of the Eras tour: she named her fifth album, partly produced by the Swedes, 1989 after her birth year. Given the endless number games she plays, sowing numerology clues for fans setting up her future movements, you can assume the scheduling was no accident. Martin and Shellback co-produced Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017), homes to her biggest pure-pop smashes, among them Style, 22, and Blank Space. Her first subsequent album without them, 2019's playful Lover, was regarded as ending that imperial period. Since then, Swift's music has grown more muted and experimental, often in collaboration with the producers Jack Antonoff and the National's Aaron Dessner, as if she were trying to carve out a sustainable future for a 30-something songwriter: 2020's folksy Folklore and Evermore, the dusky pop of 2022's Midnights, TTPD. They spawned no comparable radio hits; her biggest in recent years is Lover's Cruel Summer, never officially released as a single but adopted as a fan favourite. Swift now seems to be framing those records as a phase – her art school years. The Showgirl era seems to be an attempt to recapture the kind of musical ubiquity where little kids yell your lyrics at birthday parties, as they did with 2014's Shake It Off and now do with songs such as Chappell Roan's Hot to Go! 'My business is making music and taking care of my fans and I have ways of monitoring what they want from me and how best to entertain them, which is my job,' she told the Kelces. Eras was divided into segments reflecting each of her albums (except her 2006 debut): imagine it as a 149-night focus group. Swift's monitoring also cannot have failed to note that her brand of hermetically sealed, grown-up pop has been ceding ground to Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx, who have seized culture's centre with less inhibited and far rowdier hits than the exacting Swift has ever made. Or perhaps ever could: one insurmountable difference is that Roan and xcx are unlikely to ever monitor fan desire or cater to it. And Martin, despite being second only to John Lennon and Paul McCartney for having the most US No 1 singles, has waned as a hitmaker. 'I don't think she can get ahead of those artists because she's such a millennial pop star,' said a publicist for comparably superstar acts who asked to remain nameless. 'She can't create trends like those younger artists because they have a lot less to lose.' There is a sense that Swift is catching up: that she's clocked criticisms, read the room. She released 19 physical variants for TTPD, and was accused of exploiting fans and damaging the environment with excess vinyl production, a practice Billie Eilish has called 'wasteful'. Showgirl appears to have a fairly industry-standard four. She is also competing with herself: if there is a tour, says the music business expert Eamonn Forde, it will have to take a significantly different form to Eras – residency-style, perhaps Vegas or in a bespoke venue, as recently done by Adele – to avoid unfavourable comparisons to the biggest tour of all time. *** Swift drew mass media coverage for her appearances at Kelce's games with the Kansas City Chiefs, prompting some aggrieved football fans to boo whenever she appeared on the jumbotron. In a trailer for her episode of New Heights, traditionally a sports show, Swift joked: 'I think we all know that if there's one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it's more of me.' Unluckily for them, the brand-building between Kelce and Swift looks set to make their association unavoidable. New Heights is part of their lore: after Kelce tried and failed to land a meeting with Swift after an Eras show, he told listeners he wanted to meet her. Intrigued, she took him up on it. The synchronicity began. It can be no mistake that Kelce's cover of GQ magazine landed the same week as Swift's podcast. Meanwhile, Swift rarely gives interviews: New Heights offers a mutually beneficial space where the couple wield full control, albeit with a soft touch: giving cute disclosures, such as his love of wild otters or her running to tell him about getting her masters back when he was gaming with the boys. The moment capitalised on the prevailing trend for A-listers to reserve their media engagements for fairly fannish video podcasts, making traditional journalists fear for their jobs as they dutifully write up any news lines. Premiering Wednesday night in the US, the episode livestream crashed; within 24 hours it had 13m YouTube views, not including other podcast platform stats. The value to advertisers is huge, especially in anticipation of future Swift revelations. And Kelce, a comparatively old player at 35, is rumoured to be retiring after the coming season – his 13th year, Swift's lucky number – so will be power-brokering his post-game career. He admitted to GQ he had literally taken his eye off the ball, with underwhelming stats in his past two seasons, because he was chasing other opportunities. 'It's his Steven Bartlett, Diary of a CEO move,' said the publicist. 'It's future-proofing their lives. He can't be a football player for ever; she can't be a pop star for ever. It makes them a unit – look at how it worked for the Beckhams.' After a backlash around 2015-16 resulting from her beef with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Swift managed to convincingly reboot her brand: a dedicated, literary songwriter who fights for artists' rights. To onlookers outside the NFL, Kelce's is ripe for shaping from two years of dating Swift. The couple are clearly conscious of this: Kelce told GQ he had 'become way more strategic in understanding what I am portraying to people', something you may imagine constitutes pillow talk in a business-minded household. 'No man has ever said those words,' said the publicist. Related: Eight things we learned from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's marathon New Heights podcast Kelce's image is openhearted romantic. Notably, he is Swift's first significant boyfriend to seem undaunted by her celebrity – her previous six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn took place almost entirely in private. A sweet aspect of the New Heights episode was two beefy jocks being so excited by and supportive of a girly pop star. Swift joked of his public entreaty to date her that 'this is sort of what I've been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager'. The couple riffed on memes questioning Kelce's intelligence – 'it's so hot when she says big words,' he said when Swift called Folklore 'esoteric' – which is in itself very smart: positioning Kelce as lovable and non-threatening. Swift said she immediately warmed to him for not being 'judgmental', describing him as 'a vibe booster in everyone's life … like a human exclamation point'. The implication is that he could pep up your sentences if you let him into your heart. Kelce's post-football business is being everyone's boyfriend, not just Swift's. His pesky family ties to Maga Trumpists won't hurt him in the US; if Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris in the last election, were to be questioned about this, 'her argument can be that she's the leftwing voice in these rooms', the publicist said. Win-win. Although Swift seemed keen to establish some distance from the voluble TTPD era, a song from The Anthology about her and Kelce's relationship seems to outline her present mindset. 'I'm making a comeback to where I belong,' she sings on The Alchemy. 'Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I'm the one to beat … These blokes warm the benches / We've been on a winning streak.' That streak is assured: next year marks the 20th anniversary of Swift's self-titled debut, and she will inevitably release the re-recording to mark the occasion. Showgirl's successor will be her 13th album, a significant moment in her lore. There are rumours of a behind-the-scenes Eras documentary to complement the record-breaking concert movie, extending the moment's IP. Any new tour will once again recalibrate the live industry. Before Swift drops a note of music, or Kelce touches grass, they're the coming season's reigning champions.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Caitlin Clark's Priceless Response to Taylor Swift's ‘New Heights' Livestream Crashing
For at least one night, Caitlin Clark wasn't the face of the WNBA; she was in full Swiftie mode. The reigning WNBA rookie of the year was tuned in to watch Taylor Swift's debut appearance on a podcast. Obviously, since the podcast was Travis Kelce and his brother Jason's New Heights, it's not all that surprising. Even less surprising was the fact that Swift's impressive fanbase showed up in full force, with 1.3 million people tuned into the livestream at one. Roughly an hour and 45 minutes into the in-depth conversation featuring the Kelce brothers and Swift, though, the stream went dark. The New Heights X account posted they had "hit a glitch but will be back shortly." Not long after came their great response to the situation. Caitlin Clark Can See the Future, Had a Perfect Reaction to Taylor Swift's 'New Heights' Episode Crashing While the Swifties and followers of the New Heights podcast may have brought such a crowd that it caused a bit of a technical error, Clark impressively made that prediction earlier in the day on Wednesday, Aug. 13. "Are we sure YouTube isn't going to crash tonight?" Clark joked. In perfect fashion, after the livestream went down, Clark then quote-tweeted her initial prediction while giving a tip of the cap to fellow Swifties. "Swifties so powerful we broke the internet," Clark said. So once again, here's the proof that Clark was just another Swiftie on Wednesday night and surely loved the detailed conversation with Swift about everything from her new album, Swift and Kelce's relationship, football and much more. Even Jason Kelce Couldn't Believe the Turnout for Taylor Swift's 'New Heights' Episode While it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Swift's fans poured in to watch her podcast debut, the incredible turnout did leave Jason Kelce in a bit of shock. The former Philadelphia Eagles seven-time Pro-Bowler posted on X during the show, admitting his own shock before the number of viewers even hit one million. "Oh my God, there's already 976k watching this live, what in the actual f---," Kelce posted. Roughly 19 minutes later, Kelce posted again, quote-tweeting his original message, stating "1.2M" with three exploding-head emojis. Jason had one more viewer update when the number hit 1.3 million. Although Kelce had to expect a big turnout, it apparently even exceeded his own expectations for Swift's episode of the podcast. Not surprisingly, for one of the most beloved podcasts, featuring a guest who's one of the world's most popular names, Wednesday's New Heights episode didn't Clark's Priceless Response to Taylor Swift's 'New Heights' Livestream Crashing first appeared on Men's Journal on Aug 14, 2025 Solve the daily Crossword