Time’s Person of the Year: Who else but Taylor Swift?

The Berks County native is the first woman to be selected twice as Time’s Person of the Year, and the first to be selected for an achievement in the arts.

After you sell out stadiums across the world, bolster local economies wherever you play, start a relationship with a high-profile athlete, and generate more Spotify streams than any other artist, all that’s really left to accomplish is being recognized as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

Berks County native Taylor Swift checked that box on Wednesday when the magazine named her Person of the Year for 2023.

Swift was picked from a group of nine finalists that included Barbie, King Charles III, Vladimir Putin, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, among others.

“While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force,” Time said about her selection.

Swift is the first woman to appear twice on a Person of the Year cover since the franchise began in 1927. Swift was recognized with a group dubbed the Silence Breakers as Person of the Year in 2017, for inspiring women to speak out about sexual misconduct.

Swift is also the first person to be selected because of her achievement in the arts, and is only the fourth individual selection who was born in the last 50 years. As the first woman to be recognized more than once, Swift joins a small group of repeat designees, alongside several US presidents and world leaders.

“This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” Swift told the magazine in her Person of the Year profile. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.” Here, she adopts a booming voice. “Are you not entertained?”