Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" Clive Thompson: “Reading poetry shakes up my brain” — The Most Powerful Drug. Clive Thompson’s new book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For the Better, was published in 2013 by Penguin.
He’s a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Wired. We asked him how he writes. What’s the one thing you’ve learned over time that you wish you knew when you started out? That the craft of long-form magazine writing shares a common language with cinema and documentary film-making. I first encountered this idea back in 1998 when I read a profile in the Globe and Mail of Malcolm Gladwell. Long-form magazine writing employs very similar techniques. Why You Should Read More Novels. Bibliophiles are right--a book can change your life.
Immersing yourself in a fictional story can lead to changes in brain function for up to five days, according to a recent study published in Brain Connectivity. Emory University researchers asked student participants to read Pompeii, a historical thriller about a man trying to save the woman he loves from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Over a period of 19 days, the participants came into the lab for fMRI scans of their brain activity. Orange Is the New Black on Road Less Traveled: Show gets Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken" right. Photo composite by Slate.
Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Netflix In “Blood Donut,” the seventh episode of Orange Is the New Black, Taystee Jefferson (Danielle Brooks) makes a passing reference to “the road less traveled,” prompting a brief, agitated lecture from her fellow inmate, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). “You know,” Piper says, “that doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means.” “Ah shit, we’re about to get educated and shit,” Taystee replies. “No, no. David Haglund is a senior editor at Slate. Follow everyone thinks the poem means to break away from the crowd and do your own thing, but if you read it, Frost is very clear that the two roads are exactly the same. Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years.
The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world. Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth's collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for "scarab beetle". The scarab, also known as the "dung beetle", buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs.
Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany. How Twitter Is Reshaping The Future Of Storytelling. Every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world.
Those messages aren’t just being lost in the ether, like the imaginary output of monkeys randomly attempting to produce the works of Shakespeare. Instead, the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America. The archive now includes 170 billion posts and counting. How to Give a Killer Presentation. A little more than a year ago, on a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a 12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story.
TED Talk: A story of survival, resilience, and hope. Hyeonseo Lee's 2013 TED Talk describing her escape from North Korea is one of the most compelling and inspiring talks I've seen on the TED stage in quite a while. I'm not saying it's technically the best TED talk ever, but it's certainly one of my personal favorites. I showed the talk a few times here to my students in Japan and they were amazed and inspired by this young woman's experience and her remarkable story.
There are storytelling lessons to be learned by examining these kind of true-life personal narratives. What makes a great screenplay? Gamification: Insights And Emerging Trends. Editor’s note: Tim Chang is a managing director at Mayfield Fund.
Follow Tim on Twitter @timechange. He’s hosting a workshop on gamification at the Mayfield Fund offices on June 6 and has reserved 10 spots for TechCrunch readers — more details at the end of this post. I have been active in the field of gamification for the past couple of years, working with companies like Badgeville, HealthTap, Gigya, Basis and others on leveraging game mechanics for end user behavior measurement, scoring and shaping. Last week, I participated on an investor panel of at VatorSplash’s Gamification Summit and the group shared several noteworthy points: Gamification is expanding beyond the initial verticals of media and fitness: The next target verticals are education, eCommerce, local retail (example: Belly), and financial services. Gamification and Social often go hand in hand: Just as games come in single-player and multi-player flavors, gamification can be oriented towards solo or social play.