Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #narrativedisorder
Most recents (3)
reminds me of the absolutely sanitized annual ritual of People's (Time's? Newsweeks? IDEK) "sexiest man alive" which is always, like, the cleanest whitest most symmetrical except for his hair man we could find and has literally nothing to do with sexiness.
and it's not ONLY visual media either! a lot of written romances lean very heavily on chiseled jaw-broad shoulders to make someone "sexy."
I quit my Sherlock Holmes reread when the racism got to be too much (it was getting pretty repetitive by that point, too) but 1 thing that struck me was the constant emphasis on individuals who are the ONLY ONES IN THE WORLD who can deal with whatever 
Obviously this is often Sherlock, but not always, and anyway it's a really irritating example of the continuing emphasis on a single person being the only possible way to solve a problem, an excuse for that person to martyr themself or otherwise demonstrate unhealthy feats (eg
not sleeping, not eating, working non-stop, etc). narratively it's a lazy sort of stakes-building, but through #NarrativeDisorder it translates into real-world thinking way too often, and it's a problem.
For @ForeignPolicy, I wrote about the fallacy of public panic in disasters, and why elites keep using it as an excuse even though it isn't true. foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/16/tru…
I honestly had to struggle with this assignment not to write "Don't lie to the public about a pandemic because that is stupid" and send that to the editor as the entire piece BUT there really is a bit more to say so I'm glad I had the opportunity to break it down.
1st of all, this article is largely a synthesis of existing research; I'm not the person who came up with these concepts, nor the only one who has tweeted about them (see @SamLMontano's feed, among others).
