‘Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,’ Gladwell favours old-school narrative techniques where performance is concerned.‘PowerPoint has destroyed storytelling, so I pledge there will be no PowerPoint. It’s going to be very 19th century, like how Mark Twain would come to England in the 1880s or Charles Dickens would go to America.’

Here’s the whole interview

At unphotographable it is tenderly shown how moving writing can be.

This is a picture I did not take of a man running in front of mid-morning freeway traffic, his right hand clutching a closed, plaid umbrella, his left hand gripping the handle of a hamster cage (complete with spinning-wheel and water bottle) in which the hamster’s attempting to scale one of the cage’s walls, and in doing so, throws the cage off-balance, which tilts the cage in the man’s grip, forcing him to adjust as he dodges the traffic, his plaid umbrella arm higher to compensate for the shifting hamster who’s getting close to the cage’s ceiling, and closer to the man’s left hand, gripping the handle of a hamster cage amid honking traffic on a mid-morning freeway off-ramp.

Unphotographable: a text account of pictures missed

This is how it should be done…
Beautiful. Thoughtful. And exciting.

• Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
• These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
• By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn: Scientific American

Zelf schreef hij dat poëzie overleeft door zich stil te houden, door ‘niet volledig begrijpelijk te zijn, geen sociale veranderingen te beïnvloeden, niemand tot last te zijn’. Poëzie kan afwachten. ‘Poëzie moet liggen en hoe langer zij ligt des te bijzonderder van binnen zij wordt.’

Willem Jan Otten

Books Published: The size of each territory shows the number of new book titles published each year*

“Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses.” *Books titles published, number per million people, 1999.

From – The Atlas of the Real World

His new book is coming out (hooray).

Go watch it.

Bas

Oh well.

I completely agree with The New Yorker’s Richards Brody – although his ‘clever’ remark on having or telling  stories is a bit academic.
Read the NY Times article here.

Bas

P.S. I do hope CFS teams up with initiatives on investigating new storytelling from for instant the perspective of a game…