I. Among The Beastmasters

There are simply too many cute animals, so the Beastmasters are trying to cull the herd. Jack Shepherd, the original Beastmaster, sits at a computer monitor working on a post titled "The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year," pausing at each cute thing to gauge the reactions of the three women circled behind him. He scrolls past a video of a corgi twerking in Japan, and then a photo of an improbably, fantastically obese hedgehog named Regina. The other Beastmasters’ reactions range from aww to awwwwwww. Jack clicks serenely past a capybara wearing a flannel blanket and pauses at a photograph of a gumball-sized bird perched in the valley of a spoon. "I dunno, man," he asks. "Are birds cute?"

"I think it’s really cute," says BuzzFeed managing editor Summer Anne Burton, whose other official designation is Beastmaster

2: Through the Portal of Time. "It’s super tiny."

Chelsea Marshall, Beastmaster 3: The Eye of Braxus—she won the job last May over hundreds of other candidates; back then, BuzzFeed was calling the position "associate animals editor"—is more skeptical. "I’m writing it down as ’Maybe chop,’ " she says. Sami Main, BuzzFeed intern and apprentice to the Beastmasters, is indignant: "Oh, don’t say that about birds!"

Next, they contemplate a photo of a deer nuzzling a rabbit. I am astonished. Jack is not. "Standard interspecies," he says dismissively, hitting delete. After it goes live tomorrow, "The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year" will be clicked on close to a million times.

Before we go any further, I want to postulate that Jack and Summer and Chelsea and Sami are real people approximately my age, 31, and that BuzzFeed of course is a real site—by one measure, the fourteenth-most-read site on the Internet—and in many ways not so different from, say, GQ, in the sense that BuzzFeed and GQ both employ writers and editors who come to work daily in a newsroom and have ideas meetings and so on. So my apologies to the Beastmasters and to BuzzFeed for the following, which makes it sound a bit like I took a hot-air balloon to Laos in order to embed with four magical lambs trapped in an amusement park run by butterflies drunk on turtle tears, rather than what I actually did, which was take the subway to an office building just off Madison Square Park. But I saw what I saw.

The Beastmasters’ lair is in the far left corner of BuzzFeed’s offices, past a football field’s worth of open-floor-plan desks. You walk a while just to get there—past a room full of candy, Milky Ways and Twizzlers and Starbursts in inviting glass jars; past yellow pod chairs, massive egg-shaped recliners with li’l legs sticking out of them and whimsical labels affid: PODERDICT PODERPATCH, HARRY PODDER. The company’s conference rooms are named for famous Internet cats: Maru, the Japanese-born Scottish Fold whose reputation springs from his panache while fitting himself into cardboard bos; Henri, star of a series of black-and-white French existentialist YouTube videos (sample subtitles: "My thumbs are not opposable.... Yet I oppose everything"), one of which was deemed by Roger Ebert to be the "best Internet cat video ever made"; "I Should Buy a Boat" Cat, about which your guess is as good as mine.

Summer has cool librarian glasses, yellow tights, and a black suit jacket with several photos of cats pinned to its lapel; Sami, their intern, is improbably tiny, like she was born inside the Internet and was only recently raised to human size within the confines of this brightly colored office. She is wearing a red BuzzFeed sweatshirt over a T-shirt with a line drawing of a dog on it. Jack and Chelsea are boyishly and girlishly handsome, respectively; both have the kindly, innocent look of pet-owning vegetarians, perhaps because they are both vegetarians who own pets. (Jack is in fact vegan.) All four of them are super nice.