No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.

There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have

something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.

What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.

When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

Some people were very excited to care about Russia again.

Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing. Not just the ideas, but the jeans.

making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was

To future historians, nothing will explain our behavior, except, and hear me out, a mass outbreak of ergotism caused by contaminated rye stores?

“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.

In the past this would have been classed as existential longing, and a French book would have been written about it,

The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when

The way, when she was gone from it, she thought so longingly of My information. Oh, my answers. Oh, my everything I never knew I needed to know.

they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.

She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.

“I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”