Theoretically Available

Scarlett Johansson was single in late 2012, which is one of those facts that lands somewhere between amusing and genuinely destabilizing. She’d split from Ryan Reynolds the year before—already an event that felt like a cosmic misallocation of resources—and now she was technically unattached, theoretically available to anyone, in roughly the same way a Vermeer is theoretically available for purchase. The gap between "theoretically" and "actually" has never yawned quite so wide. There’s a specific philosophical quality to that kind of unreachability, the sort that doesn’t make you feel bad about yourself so much as quietly resigned to the whole arrangement of the universe.