Here, I fixed my viral article

I found a way to make everyone happy. It sucks.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Last week, I wrote a piece for Bustle called “I Know Where You Were Last Night,” and it went viral. It’s a funny trend piece about something I assumed we were all at least mildly familiar with: the rise of location-sharing in relationships. But not everyone was familiar with this phenomenon. And no part of me had any inkling I was writing something that was about to make people not just mad, but inspire hundreds of tweets calling me a psycho, just as my piece about the millennial pause did in 2022. 

Hell hath no fury like a Millennial scorned

Over the years I’ve had to get used to the fact that once my work is published, I have no control over how people will interpret it or what they will choose to interpret about me from reading it. If writers tried to account for the many ways their work could be misread or attempt to make sure it addresses every single hypothetical reader’s lived experience, their work wouldn’t just suffer—it would be unreadable. 

In order to confirm this, I decided to annotate an abridged version of my location-sharing piece with the caveats that would be required to prevent people from looking me up on Instagram in order to insult me in comments. My additions are in bold italics. Thank you to the Hairpin classic “What If a Women’s Magazine Editor Edited a BBC News Story About Syria?” for the inspiration. Enjoy :) —Kate

Hello! You are about to read a reported article based on a trend observed online. It’s possible you haven’t noticed this trend or that it doesn’t apply to your life. You can rest assured it went through multiple editors whose job it is to be confident in the relevance of the things they’re publishing.