Every morning, we run The Narrative Machine on the past 24 hours worth of financial media to find the most on-narrative (i.e. interconnected and central) stories in financial media. It’s not a list of best articles or articles we think are most interesting … often far from it.
But for whatever reason these are articles that are representative of some sort of chord that has been struck in Narrative-world.
Americans Rely on Public Restrooms [Press Release]
This is among the weirdest press releases I’ve ever seen. Any time you kick it off with stats about the relative public bathroom proclivities of different demographics, you’ll make the list.
So why publish a press release like this? Like any other PR piece – even one as weird as this – the entire aim is to create Common Knowledge, to make the reader change what he or she believes everyone else knows about a topic by presenting something as news. And yes, that’s true for the non-bathroom things people do in the bathroom, too. This manufacturer of commercial bathroom fixtures wants everyone to know that everyone else knows that people like to go to the bathroom and cry sometimes.
All that being said, I will leave you, dear reader, to consider why crying in a bathroom stall is so connected to financial news.
The economy is going down the toilet.