Springtime at the end of the world. Winter lasted sixteen months this year, these years, this chaotic decade nested in a minute like a city in a frosted snowglobe. But with the cold weather finally broken, and vaccinations fully in play, America is thawing. Businesses are open, mass-remote work culture is looking more endangered by the day, and awoken like the kraken comes the most powerful force in the world: single people who want to get laid. The mass psychological shift has been almost palpable, and not only in our newly-beloved Lamborghini Kingdom of Quantum Beach Miami, loud and alive and growing in an almost defiant display of celebration. Even New Yorkers and San Franciscans, newly vaxxed and overtaxed, are slipping off their full-body Puritan Halloween costumes and touching each other again. Laying in a field of flowers in Golden Gate Park, light mushroom vibes, we’re licking strangers on the face again, and there’s absolutely nothing Gavin Newsom can do about it. But human happiness, while good news generally, tends to be disastrous for the business of news.

From the largest and most influential media companies to popular fan-fiction networks like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, ratings have plummeted, and while the most overtly anti-Trump press was hit hardest — with CNN gutted after Twitter’s eradication of their beloved orange bogeyman — the trend away from media fixation appears to be both deep and broad. This is mostly a good thing. It isn’t healthy to spend as much time inside the news as Americans have these past few years, and we should probably all be focused on more important things like spending time with our families and friends and Tinder matches (America has a baby shortage, people, It’s Time to Birth). But while we are finally and mercifully all feeling lighter, I do think it’s worth noting that nothing has materially changed in America other than our vaccination game, which seems to be going incredibly well. Like, while I am genuinely struggling to care about this more than my dating life at the moment (absolutely killing it btw), the last few weeks have been technically quite insane.

The bangers: