Katherine Dee

Ten years ago today, Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people in Sandy Hook, Connecticut: his mother, six educators, twenty first-graders. Then he shot himself. Speculating about what might have motivated Lanza to commit an atrocity of this scale was difficult in 2012. What information was available about Lanza was sparse; what we did have was difficult to make sense of. A bug-eyed photo of him. A single mother who loved guns. A crazy, isolated kid — maybe it was the medication? There was very little to weave a story out of. It was haunting; it was horrifying; but it made no sense. There was no ready-made narrative for a twenty-year-old who could step into a first-grade classroom and open fire. There was nothing we could compare it to. Mental health, probably. Guns, probably.

Everyone’s ringing the alarm bell: is witchcraft the new religion for Gen Z? If #WitchTok, the named used to describe witchy content on TikTok, is any indication — no. #WitchTok is a digital fortune-teller; it’s a place to find aesthetic inspiration; it’s sometimes a stand-in for political engagement. For some, it’s even a hobby. But it’s not a replacement for religious faith. On TikTok, witchy content falls under three broad categories. There is predictive content like tarot card readings, manifestation instruction and “good luck” videos, and there’s #WitchTok. The first two categories of video almost exclusively cater to people who are looking for something — usually good news.

In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States. After nearly 30 years of hiding — first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) — ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream. For a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone. Reporters took notice. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each.