Amusement park ride injuries in the US

Somewhere in the vast machinery of human activity, the number of Indians watching certified films and the number of Americans getting flung through the air at considerable velocity have decided to move in perfect synchronisation, which is either a profound statement about global entertainment appetites or the universe's way of reminding us that we will correlate anything with anything. Between 2014 and 2022, as Bollywood churned out more movies, Americans became proportionally more likely to have their afternoon ruined by a malfunctioning log flume. One wonders if the directors knew.

Two global entertainment industries both hit the same wall in 2020. Amusement parks shut their gates for much of the year — injuries plummeted because the rides weren't running — while Indian film production stopped so completely that certifications fell to near-nothing. Neither industry had a bad business model; they just had the wrong year.

This is how Spurious works, really: two completely unrelated phenomena discovering they've been dancing to the same distant drummer all along, which tells us almost nothing except that the world is vastly more interconnected than it appears and that correlation, as everyone keeps saying, is definitely not causation. Yet we cannot stop looking. The films and the injuries were just moving through time together, proof that sometimes the most elaborate patterns we find are simply what happens when two different human appetites grow fat on the same economic meal. Neither one knew about the other.