Similarly, the epistolary romance has been reborn in the age of the search. Two people meet in the comments of an obscure wiki page, or they are pen-pals in a letter-writing app that explicitly prohibits profile pictures and tags. Their romance develops in the absence of categories. They have to build a model of each other slowly, sentence by sentence, without the shortcut of a “favorite movies” drop-down menu. When they finally meet, the drama is explosive: will the physical, categorical body (height, weight, appearance) match the uncategorized soul they have come to love? The story’s climax is a test of whether love can survive the translation from the search-free zone to the categorized world.

He breached the file, expecting the worst kind of high-society scandal. Instead, as the data decrypted, his HUD filled with images. They were kittens. Actual kittens.

Every day, millions of pet lovers go online looking for kittens. They type phrases like “cute kittens for adoption,” “fluffy kittens near me,” or even playful nicknames like “my sexy kittens.” But the latter, especially when combined with “All Categories,” can take you down confusing — and sometimes inappropriate — paths on the web.