Conflict is the one precondition of a story. For there to be a narrative at all, something unforeseen must happen. The plot twists in Hollywood lingo; the peripeteia in Aristotle’s naming. “Everybody agrees that a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things,” writes Jerome Bruner, the pioneer of narrative psychology. “Something goes awry, otherwise there’s nothing to tell about.” The story is the tool to resolve this breach. A central finding of my conversations—and for me an unnerving one—is that the frequency with which these disturbances are popping up these days is
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