The World Is on Fire, and You’re Reheating Nachos?

There comes a time in every Old’s life when they wake up, and suddenly it seems like everyone around you is speaking a foreign language.

The Youths have staged an uprising and transported you to some terrifying, unfamiliar modern-day Babel, where they’re all using phrases you’ve never heard in your life and, according to your experience on Earth thus far, don’t even make sense as a sequence of words. And there you are, grinning nervously like Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock, conspicuously trying to fit in: How do you do, fellow kids?

I experienced this over the past week when I showed up to greet my best friends—my social media timelines—as I do every morning of my screen-addicted life, and suddenly everyone was talking about reheating nachos.

Specifically they were talking about celebrities reheating nachos. The celebrities were, apparently, reheating other celebrities’ nachos. Some celebrities were reheating their own nachos. Others rejected the concept of nachos at all. (I guess they’re the ones on diets.)

I had no idea what the heck any of this meant, so I decided to delve into it. And, good lord, trying to figure out what “reheating nachos” meant sparked an existential crisis.

Things were already surreal on this most recent Sunday night. I was working, blogging my boob-brained lil’ thoughts about the Grammy Awards, which happened to, fittingly, hinge largely on one star’s boobs and another’s penis. I was already suffering a dissonance of purpose of several layers, a veritable Bloomin’ Onion of self-loathing.

The Grammys were, in an instance I can’t remember since I was a kid, actually kind of great this year. It was a marathon of spectacular performances. The winners were great (Beyoncé!). There was a touching refocusing of the Hollywood spotlight on the victims of the Los Angeles fires and the heroism of emergency workers. And stars like Lady Gaga, Doechii, and Chappell Roan were meeting the moment, speaking truth to power corruption about issues, rights, and identities that are personal to them and under attack.

And here I was making some jokes about a hot new crooner adjusting his package, for clicks.

Then there’s the fact that, while the telecast was happening, the blizzard of alarming executive orders and DOGE’s playground of malfeasance continued their winter storm of chaos. But, sure, while all of this is going on, let’s give musicians some trophies and participate in an exercise that leads me to thinking things like, “I’m so glad that song ‘Espresso’ is getting its due!”

Listen, every court needs a jester, and I’m happy to oblige in moments like these, when maybe it’s even more necessary. I can burp out some one-liners about the Grammys in times of need. But a jester needs to know the tricks of the clowns he’s competing with, especially if the clowns are younger and more in-the-know. So I vowed to figure out this whole “reheating nachos” thing.

Like most memes, it didn’t make any more sense once I got down to the bottom of it. And, also like most memes, that lack of logic does not matter.

I did not appreciate that the first result of my Google search about this was headlined, “Here’s What The ‘Reheating Nachos’ Meme Means, For All You Millennials Out There.” I know we are in anti-woke times, but I still don’t see a need for such violence against us Olds.

Here’s Buzzfeed’s very helpful explanation. (Yes, I’m so elderly that I still go to Buzzfeed to have memes explained to me.):

“Think of it like this. Nachos are tasty. Everyone wants a bite. When we have leftovers, because they’re so dang good, we try to reheat them. Sometimes they have hints of their prior flavor; sometimes they’re soggy; sometimes you’ll get a good bite; sometimes...they’re just not quite right.

They don’t always taste as they once did...yet, you could say that, still, at heart, they hold the foundations of the original dish. Similarly, when a person or artist is seemingly inspired by someone else (like, say, Benson Boone by Harry Styles, or perhaps the both of them by Freddie Mercury, Prince, or Little Richard), sometimes it’s a hit, sometimes it’s a flop, sometimes it’s done juuust right. Either way, you could say that they’re at least trying to reheat the other person’s nachos.”

I’m not sure I’ll ever grasp this fully enough to contribute to this meme trend myself. But, at this moment, the concept I kind of resonate with.

I’ve been this jester before, blogging my way through silly celebrity happenings while things I believe in and institutions that matter to me were being obliterated, the world around me became unrecognizable, fear and confusion battled for first billing on my daily Playbill, and everything kind of just sucked. Now that it’s all happening a second time, am I, so to speak, reheating my own nachos?

I’d like to think things are different this go-round. I feel different this time. My job feels different this time. What’s happening feels different this time. But it does still have that lingering soggy tortilla chip taste.

I feel like we’re all existing in this monumental game of Jenga, except each of those bricks carry actual stakes. The tower keeps getting wobblier and more precarious. Someone keeps poking at the piece that should make it crumble down, but it hasn’t yet, and each new piece pulled makes the fact that it hasn’t tumbled yet scarier and scarier—and the inevitable crash down potentially even more catastrophic.

But every good game night, even one that involves this particularly traumatizing game of Jenga, needs a good snack. So let me reheat some nachos for us.

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.