NPR accidentally posts a nice story about a cat instead of more nightmares from the real world

Yesterday was a uniquely unpleasant day to be sentient in America, the news cycle a braid of nightmares playing out in real time. And while NPR is, generally speaking, one of our firmest bastions of steady, measured journalism, and so a source of stability and unlikely comfort as we look for information and meaning in those moments, they inadvertently peppered their Facebook updates yesterday with this post:

That’s right: It’s National Public Radio chiming in with some updates on Ramona the cat and the wily shit she gets up to. Apparently this was the work of swing editor Christopher Dean Hopkins, who intended it for a personal account, a fact which he quickly updated the post to say:

But you can’t exactly put the cat back in the bag, as they say, and underneath the post is currently an endless string of people pleading for more Ramona-related content. (Nobody tell them that the internet is 70 percent cats already.) NPR has willingly obliged with something of an internal history of Ramonagate, which has turned into a series of hashtags (#ramonaupdates, #bringbackramona, #ramonaforever, if you’re interested) and a petition for more Ramona stories.

Included almost as an aside in NPR’s recap of Ramona fever is the tiny detail that Ramona is not, in fact, a cat, but rather a human who was interacting with a cat. Nobody ever said something needed to be real to go viral.