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. The deeper point here is that variety is crucial. Once I’d grasped this technical point, it not only helped my writing, but helped my reporting, because it made me aware of the need to gather many different types of shots.
This rule isn’t absolute, of course. 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. For the first five days, their baseline activity was recorded, then they were assigned to read the novel in sections over the course of nine evenings. In the mornings after they had finished each section, participants showed increased brain connectivity in the left temporal cortex, a region associated with language processing. The students also showed an increase in connectivity in one of the brain's sensory motor regions. So go grab a book. [H/T: The Independent] 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. 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.
“I will probably kill her in her sleep tonight,” Tricia Miller (Madeleine Bewer), a third inmate, replies. Now, Tricia’s response is not entirely uncalled for, as I’ll argue below. In the final stanza, this speaker looks ahead to the future, and imagines how he will tell people about this day “ages and ages hence.” 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. Eichenseer says the fairytales are not for children alone. 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. The patterns of human life will be stored in this Twitter archive like a form of digital sediment. Every meme and revelation will leave an imprint in the record constructed of posts by half a billion Twitter users around the world (and over 150,000 more signing up every day). How has the future of storytelling been influenced by Twitter? Sparking the Imagination Writer and actor John Hodgman recalls how derisive many people were about Twitter when it first entered the public consciousness. A Future Biography Prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates recently tweeted: 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. His family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest challenges is protecting the animals from lions—especially at night.
Richard had noticed that placing lamps in a field didn’t deter lion attacks, but when he walked the field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he’d been interested in electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents’ radio. He used that experience to devise a system of lights that would turn on and off in sequence—using solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle indicator box—and thereby create a sense of movement that he hoped would scare off the lions. The story was inspiring and worthy of the broader audience that our TED conference could offer, but on the surface, Richard seemed an unlikely candidate to give a TED Talk.
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. In the book Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, author Jack Hart reminds us of what story is: "at its most basic, a story begins with a character who wants something, struggles to overcome barriers that stand in the way of achieving it, and moves through a series of actions—the actual story structure—to overcome them. " And Hyeonseo Lee has overcome a lot. . • (YES) "We made it all the way to the border of Laos.
What makes a great screenplay? Once upon a time, in such and such a place, something happened. " In basic terms that's about it – the very best definition of a story. What an archetypal story does is introduce you to a central character – the protagonist – and invite you to identify with them; effectively they become your avatar in the drama.
So you have a central character, you empathise with them, and something then happens to them, and that something is the genesis of the story. Jack discovers a beanstalk; Bond learns Blofeld plans to take over the world. The "something" is almost always a problem, sometimes a problem disguised as an opportunity. Your character has a problem that he or she must solve: Alice has to get back to the real world; our spooks have to stop a bomb going off in central London; Vladimir and Estragon have to wait. You'll see this shape (or its tragic counterpart) working at some level in every story. The protagonist Normally the protagonist is obvious. But already we encounter difficulties. 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.