Ochberg describes a three-act process that occurs in the development of a heavy international story. In “Act One,” the traumatic event is identified and described; for example, the Nigerian girls go missing and news stories pour forth with all the known details. People begin to care. A lot. A hashtag carries things forward. For a little while, at least. In “Act Two,” people “return to normalcy after great upheaval.” Here there are more contemplative dimensions to the international response: coverage of the victims, of trauma and recovery (for instance, the New Yorker piece about Sanya, in which faceless girls were made more three-dimensional). In “Act Three,” there is “unrequited loss, pointless suffering, persistent evil.” People do not have the ability to easily tolerate this dark final act: the realization that there may be no happy resolution to reach, no transcendent truth, no meaning. So in an attempt to preserve ourselves emotionally, humans circle back to the parts of a story — a new story — that are more easily digestible: the shock of an event, the personalized follow-up, the urgency of wanting and demanding to know what happens next.

“Our species does remember certain things ‘in our bones,’ and we have deep resonance with personal tragedies and with societal traumas,” Ochberg says. “[But] our species is also forgetful and easily bored. So no wonder we lose interest in a calamity and go on to the next ‘Act One’ of a news cycle.”

Right now, the story of the Nigerian schoolgirls is in Act Three. There is nothing good to report. There is not even very much to report at all; the Nigerian government has been virtually silent on what it is doing to rescue the girls.