It's #100 :) 🎉 🎊 🍻

Milestones matter right? I mean it's still the same ol' newsletter, with the same ol' recommendations. But a century feels special.

I did consider taking a break from the newsletter but decided against it. It's a useful forcing function for me to be disciplined about reading and writing. And it helps me remain connected with all of you wonderful readers!

Here's one idea I had though, to commemorate this milestone (if you feel it would be useful): Do a Zoom call talking about my process for researching and writing this newsletter, and answering any questions that you may have about it.

Would you be interested in attending such a call (say around 60 mins)? Let's call it the '3-2-1 by Story Rules' Newsletter 'behind-the-scenes' call.

If yes, click below and let me know your preferred time slot for the call (along with any questions you have):

Yes, I'm interested!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the hundredth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

This newsletter is one of those habits for me! (No idea about the scaling-up part though...!)

My brother worked in a similar role many years back. Wonder how folks are using the freed-up time now?

(Hat-tip: Ashwin Ramesh)

Haha, we do live in interesting times.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Is Moderate Drinking Okay?' by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic)

You might have read about the warnings against any form of alcohol consumption by the former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic decided to investigate.

Derek starts off with a clear disclosure - in this investigation, he was an interested party:

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

(Boy, do I agree with that Benjamin Franklin quote. Except, replace pilsner with lager or an IPA).

While Derek does acknowledge that excessive drinking is dangerous for our physical and mental health, he is keen to answer the question of whether the same applies to moderate drinking too.

He shares that it was not an easy answer - but he has reached two conclusions:

I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.

Over the rest of the article Derek dives into the history of alcohol ambivalence and how the pendulum seems to have swung from 'red-wine-is-good-for-your-heart' to 'wait-a-minute-any-alcohol-is bad'. The big worry in the second camp is cancer - apparently alcohol increases the risk of certain cancers.

Derek's interpretation seems to be - yes, while it may be bad, the incremental risk does not seem to be so worrisome. Here's his key point:

I’m willing to believe, even in the absence of slam-dunk evidence, that alcohol increases the risk of developing certain types of cancer for certain people. But as the surgeon general’s report itself points out, it’s important to distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” risk. Owning a swimming pool dramatically increases the relative risk that somebody in the house will drown, but the absolute risk of drowning in your backyard swimming pool is blessedly low. In a similar way, some analyses have concluded that even moderate drinking can increase a person’s odds of getting mouth cancer by about 40 percent. But given that the lifetime absolute risk of developing mouth cancer is less than 1 percent, this means one drink a day increases the typical individual’s chance of developing mouth cancer by about 0.3 percentage points.

Derek makes two more points

You can mitigate the ill-effects of alcohol intake with more exercise
Consuming moderate amounts of alchohol, especially in a social setting might be a great way to ward off the ills of loneliness and isolation

I'm sure we haven't heard the last word on this topic.

Meanwhile, I gotta go. That weekend IPA ain't gonna drink itself. :)

b. Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization by Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is the famous author who wrote the 'End of History' essay when the Soviet Union collapsed.

In this piece, he again uses a historian's lens and points out to an unlikely incident as the beginning of the decline of Western Civilisation:

...when historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests.

He claims that the pattern repeated itself in the former Soviet Union countries:

This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (who may return to power this coming year). All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses.

His key point - Elon Musk is following a similar playbook in the US:

Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk. Musk’s purchase of Twitter for $44 billion was derided at the time as a very bad business decision, and with its subsequent loss of market value, it seemed like that was true. But as in the case of Berlusconi and the ex-Communist oligarchs, Musk wasn’t purchasing the platform for economic reasons, nor was he interested in defending free speech as he suggested. Rather, he wanted to buy political influence, which he did in spades.

Provocative point of view!

Next week, I would be sharing a couple of pieces that have a different perspective to the ongoing trends in the US.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'The Story of Your Life' on the Hidden Brain podcast

This is an old episode, but it had come up in a search and the title intrigued me.

The episode talks about how you can cope with personal trauma or loss by writing about it as a story - often as narrative fiction!

(Trigger warning: The episode makes references to suicide, revenge and coping with difficult medical conditions. Listen with caution)

The host Shankar Vedantam interviews a few guests who had gone through personal trauma and how the act of writing about it helped them cope.

After an introductory story, Vedantam talks with psychologist Raymond Mar about how stories can help us imagine and feel experiences we haven’t actually lived:

Raymond Mar: This deep immersion in the story, this deep imagination, draws upon the same emotional systems that we use in the real world. The sadness that we feel when a character that we care a lot about dies, for example, it's not the same as a real loved one dying but it's similar enough that it can produce things like tears and the same sort of psychological symptoms of sadness. And we experience this as sadness.

Shankar Vedantam: Some years ago, Raymond analyzed data from studies in which people were asked to read stories while undergoing brain scans. He found that when we are immersed in a story, our brains respond as if we are part of the fictional world that we are seeing on the page.

Raymond Mar: If you have someone read a very simple sentence about a person kicking a soccer ball, not only will you see parts of the language network become involved, but you'll also see activation in the motor cortex: the same part of the brain that we use to actually move our bodies. More importantly, this activation is quite specific. You'll only see a part of the motor cortex activated related to the body's lower half.

These experiences probably help us in improving our empathy. In his research, Mar found that folks who read more narrative fiction can identify emotions better:

Shankar Vedantam: Raymond came up with a study. He tallied the reading habits of volunteers and then had them take a test. It's called the "Reading in the mind in the eyes test." Volunteers were asked to examine the photographs of people's faces. Specifically, the photos showed only people's eyes. Could volunteers tell what emotion the person in the photo was experiencing using only the expression in their eyes?

Raymond Mar: What we found was that people who were exposed to more narrative fiction did better on this test of understanding what other people are thinking and feeling and what their mental states are. There's a positive correlation.

Vedantam shares the example of an author named Krista Sandor who created a story character based on her harsh middle school music teacher. Because of her abrasive nature, that teacher had extinguished Krista's love of music. Years later, writing about her as a semi-fictional character was cathartic for Krista:

Krista Sandor: It was surprisingly cathartic. I'd never said anything. As a child, I just stopped playing. I never got the chance to say to this woman, "You took something very important away from me and I'm angry about it."

Shankar Vedantam: After she put all her grief and rage into the fantasy, Krista says something amazing happened.

Krista Sandor: I have exposed every raw feeling that I had about that situation and that brings me sort of a peacefulness that it's out there. It almost cleared the way to remember that there were happier memories. It just gave me the happiness that was taken away.

I loved how Vedantam concludes the episode:

Shankar Vedantam: Writing for her (Krista) has been like a cleansing rain, washing away bad memories and hurt. It has put her in touch with all the good things in her life. Many of us never think to put pen to paper, or we sit down and start but then hesitate because we're afraid of what our stories mean, what our fantasies might reveal. But when we do this, we not only miss out on how our stories might transform other people, we miss out on the power of stories to transform us.

Stories do have the power to transform, don't they?

That's a lovely note to end the 100th edition. See you next week :)

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

The Healing Power of Stories (3-2-1 by Story Rules #100)

It's #100 :) 🎉 🎊 🍻

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Why Big Tech went pro-Republican in the US (3-2-1 by Story Rules #101)

Storytelling in Economics with Tim Harford (3-2-1 by Story Rules #99)

The Impact of Family Stories (3-2-1 by Story Rules #98)