Julie Beck stops to ask why everybody seems to be flipping the bird to 2016 in ‘Fuck You, 2016’:

The way people lament 2016 on Facebook, on Twitter, is not just despairing that it’s been a bad year. They anthropomorphize the year, give it agency, and thus make it worthy of blame for the things that happened in it.  2016 took Prince and David Bowie and John Glenn and Muhammad Ali. 2016 gave us Zika, and Brexit, and so many police killings. “Hasn’t 2016 done enough?” people ask above a link to some new large or small injustice.

(Vereshchagin Dmitry / Potapov Alexander / ILYA AKINSHIN / By-jkphotograph / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / Paul Spella / The Atlantic)