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The Meme From 2016 That Explains 2026
All times are interesting times, but the summer of 2016 was especially interesting. That July, as a Twitter user named Katie Loewy tried to make sense of mass shootings, Brexit & the rising political power of the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, she proposed a theory. “I’m not saying that David Bowie”—who had earlier died that year—“was holding the fabric of the universe together,” she wrote, “but ∗gestures broadly at everything∗.”
The tweet promptly went viral, partly for what it said—the idea of #Bowie as cosmic load bearer was, as explanations go, absurd & amusing & plausible—but mostly for what it didn’t. ∗Gestures broadly at everything∗ was a punch line to a joke that was all too familiar. It turned #overwhelm into a knowing melodrama. Soon, people…were posting, emailing, & texting their own versions of Loewy’s stage-whispered aside: [gestures wildly at everything]; <gestures vaguely at everything>; [gestures around].
The meme’s brackets & asterisks—never has punctuation been so eloquent—seemed to step in where words failed.
Recent years have been boom times for #language that is inarticulate on purpose. *Vibe* has become a diagnosis; *chaos* has become an all-purpose condition. Dictionaries have highlighted, as their words of the year, *brain rot* & *post-truth* & an emoji caught between laughter & tears. But [gestures around] might be the term of the decade.
