let's write some ocd-worsening atlantic headlines
Disclaimer: This article is intended as a parody, and I do not wish to accuse The Atlantic — a publication for which I have tremendous respect — of deliberately compounding mental illness or to impugn their journalistic integrity. The headlines you are about to see and the events they describe are purely fictitious as of March 22nd, 2023.
The Atlantic (originally known as The Atlantic Monthly) is a magazine founded in 1857 by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood to further the cause of abolition. Early editions featured writings by such legendary authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. These days, it’s a subscription-based online publication discussing politics, culture, business, world affairs, and what have you. It also wants me fucking dead.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder wherein an individual experiences disturbing intrusive thoughts over which they obsess until they perform some sort of compulsion to relieve distress. Contrary to popular belief, it has nothing to do with a preference for order and tidiness, unless one’s compulsive behaviors happen to manifest as such.
What’s an intrusive thought? I’m so glad you asked. Basically, it’s your brain going, “HEY. You have cancer,” for no reason, and if you have OCD, you will not be able to dismiss the possibility until you’ve been screened for every form. With zero hope of material gain, your own mind will be like, “There was probably poison in that rice pilaf you just ate,” and then you have to make yourself throw up to feel normal again. And those are just the implausible ones. Sometimes you unplug your space heater, leave for therapy, (I do go to therapy!) and then think, “Did I unplug the space heater?” So your only options are to turn around and check, or spend the entire appointment worrying that your house is on fire. And here’s the thing: you know you unplugged it. If you were taking a polygraph test, you’d say so. You’d testify in a court of law that your space heater is unplugged as fuck. But what if it isn’t?
I’m not a subscriber, but I often use up my monthly five free Atlantic articles due to the nonstop barrage of horrors that is being alive in America. I mean, I’m tuned into pretty much every news purveyor, but in contrast to something like CNN, The Atlantic is first and foremost a magazine, and is therefore meant to be more cerebral in tone. I’m not saying they never do any straightforward reporting, (they’re the ones who broke the story about Donald Trump referring to deceased soldiers as “losers” and “suckers”) but they tend to run opinion pieces on current events, rather than just neutral recounts of them — a practice dating back to their Civil War days. Which allows them to title their articles much more provocatively.
I’m not an idiot, I know how journalism works. Neither of those things are true; I just lied twice in row. But I know that headlines have to be concise and attention-grabbing in a way that the actual content of a piece almost never is. Nobody’s going to waste one of their five free articles on “Newest IPCC Report Says Warming Mitigation Efforts Largely Ineffectual”; everybody’s going to click on “Climate Scientists Confirm Civilization FUCKED.” Which, I concede, is the kind of news you want as many eyeballs on as possible. Like, this is fourth grade English class shit. I have no business being as bothered by it as I am. But by pure coincidence, writers at The Atlantic consistently manage to replicate the exact syntax of my intrusive thoughts when titling their articles, unintentionally lending both parties a sort of bad faith, mutual credence.
Two examples have been poking me in the brain for years now: a 2018 piece by science journalist Ed Yong called “When the Next Plague Hits”, and a 2021 piece by retired US Naval War College professor Tom Nichols called “Afghanistan is Your Fault.” And I’m not the only one; Yong’s article on the United States’ (lack of) pandemic preparedness was understandably mentioned quite often when COVID hit almost two years later, and Nichols’s article went moderately viral on Twitter because of its incendiary title. Note Yong’s appeal to confirmation bias and humanity’s natural tendency toward pessimism — there’s going to be another plague. Obviously, he couldn’t have known, but the timid prey animal part of my brain that’s perpetually on the hunt for any sort of constant through which to understand the world (read: disordered) can’t help but wonder how things would’ve shaken out if this guy had published his work somewhere other than the Scare The Shit Out Of Ashton website. If it was simply titled “America Is Unprepared for a Global Pandemic.” Would this have prevented COVID? Of course not. But I can’t get the possibility out of my head. I am obsessed with it.
(For Nichols I have only one suggestion: just take out the fucking Y!)
So many Atlantic headlines are like this — bad things are inevitable and they are going to happen to you personally — and at the beginning of the pandemic, when I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with OCD and didn’t understand why my brain was doing that was brutal. Like everyone, I was desperate for any concrete information whatsoever, so I squandered my free February and March articles before I had the opportunity to dip into really ominous-sounding pieces like James Hamblin’s “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” and Juliette Kayyem’s “The US Isn’t Ready for What’s About to Happen.” All I got were pop-ups enticing me to subscribe for “uncompromising quality” (I’ll allow it) and “enduring impact.” YEAH, I KNOW. I’m writing this three years after the fact. The impact has endured.
I want to be clear: no Atlantic article I’ve ever read in its entirety has been even half as scary as its title. The information can be scary, but it’s phrased normally, with much less of a YOU’RE NEXT vibe. Again, I know why they do this. Everyone does this. It’s just that no other publication does so in an eerily perfect imitation of The Disorder. Do I want them to rebrand to accommodate my specific neuroses? No. I don’t have to read any of this. I’m not even a subscriber. I’d rethink the pittance of monthly free articles, though, considering right-wing propaganda is free to read and always will be. Maybe giving Fox’s otherwise captive audience something normal to chew on might help slow the unchecked spread of radicalization. Plus, I guarantee I would’ve been much kinder to articles I could actually read!
Until then, there is a tried-and-true method to countering things that are terrifying: making fun of them. And since I am cursed with have the power to think in Atlantic headlines, I’m going to use it to clown.
So here they are: spoilers for the real May 2023 edition!
“Ten Public Places to Avoid Until After Your City Has Its Inevitable Mass Shooting”
“I, the Author of This Piece, Have Infected You With COVID. Here’s Why You Deserve It”
“The Supreme Court Just Overturned Your Right to Breathe Oxygen”
“You Can’t Prove You Weren’t Jack the Ripper in a Previous Life”
“Your Weekly Reminder that Your Blood is 98% Microplastics”
“Have You Noticed That the Ghost Girl from Grave Encounters is Behind You Yet?”
“What Previous Mass Extinction Events Can Teach Us About the 2050s”
“A Suspiciously Long Time has Passed Since the Last Major Aviation Disaster”
“You Will Die on January 14th, 2061 at 7:05 P.M.”
“We Saw What You Wrote About Us on Your Substack and We’re Suing You for Libel”
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