Column for Washington Post on that time when "that time when" took over the internet:

There’s something ersatz about our weird online nostalgia for very recent events. In that sense, “that time when” is extremely useful, hugging the recent past and a speaker’s audience close in a way not many other phrases do. And yet it heightens the disturbing slipstream effect of Internet time, where we never feel quite in the moment, instead always observing it through various mediating devices, recording it, time-stamping it, commenting on it, as it fades away as surely as one of Taylor Swift’s boyfriends. “That time when” will, despite our best efforts, eventually be forgotten.