Hollywood's AI Freakout, Email Time Machines, and How Sandwiches Took Over Britain

👋🏼 Hello!

🔔 In last week’s poll we asked you what you spend most of your B2B marketing budget on. Paid media was the winner, but absolutely none of you said ‘seasonal brand campaigns’. Bah Humbug!

💻 This week, I wanted to know a bit more about how people end up working in B2B marketing. This might well be related to a new format we’re prototyping at Storythings right now…

We’d love suggestions from you for next week’s question - if you want to suggest one, drop me an email!

📕 The Short Story

The Realities of Being a Pop Star (6-min read)

WAVE - a Mind-bending AI FX Video (2-min watch)

Excellent End of Year Newsletter Checklist (5-min read)

How The Sandwich Took Over Britain (15-min read)

Inside Hollywood’s AI Freak-out (8-min read)

The Unlikely Story of an E-mail Time Machine (8-min read)

Why a Novelist Bought a Video Games Company (5-min read)

What Is The Right Atomic Unit for Knowledge? (7-min read)

Rosalia’s Subway Takes (14-min watch)

📣 Award-winning MF DOOM Podcast! (53-min listen) 📣

📚 The Long Story

The Realities of Being a Pop Star (6-min read)
Charli XCX has a Substack newsletter, and this very honest, funny and revealing post did the rounds this week. I was going to say it’s rare to hear such honest takes on stardom from celebrities, but actually, it isn’t. One of the table stakes of being a celebrity now is honesty, authenticity and owning your own voice. A post like this wouldn’t have got past the PR team in the 1980s.

WAVE - a Mind-bending AI FX Video (2-min watch)
Anjali shared this in the Storythings Slack, and its a great example of how AI can be a creative tool, not slop. The mind-bending backgrounds remind me of the FX in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. They were state of the art in 2010. Now they’re just a prompt away.

Excellent End of Year Newsletter Checklist (5-min read)
Yet another insightful and practical article from Inbox Collective, giving you great advice on how to improve your newsletter before we all break for the holidays. My favourite is ‘Put together a “stop doing” list’.

How The Sandwich Took Over Britain (15-min read)
This is an old article from 2017 that I saw in a BlueSky thread asking why you can’t get small UK style pre-made sandwiches in the USA (apart from in Pret, of course). The story of how pre-packed sandwiches became our go-to lunch is fascinating, covering social change, food tech innovation, immigration, and lots more.

Inside Hollywood’s AI Freak-out (8-min read)
This is a great gossipy read from Vanity Fair, taking you inside the conversations Hollywood moguls, celebrities, and tech bros are having as they nervously circle each other. As filmmaker David Ayer says “If I was gonna take a general temperature, it’s like a storm’s coming, y’know?”

The Unlikely Story of an E-mail Time Machine (8-min read)
This is just a lovely read. In 2005 Forbes magazine needed an idea for a sponsored series on ‘communication’, and the team suggested a service that let users send themselves emails that Forbes would send back to them in one, three, five, ten or twenty years. Sounds simple? It wasn’t, and the story of how they did it reminds you, in a surprisingly emotional way, how digital technology is only as good as the humans behind it.

Why a Novelist Bought a Video Games Company (5-min read)
Talking of lovely human technology stories, Naomi Alderman, the author of the brilliant book The Power, was the co-founder and writer of the innovative Zombies, Run! fitness app. Her story about why she has bought the company behind it is an important reminder of how easy it is for digital creative work to get lost as companies and platforms change.

What Is The Right Atomic Unit for Knowledge? (7-min read)
Steven Johnson’s latest starts with a potted history of the peer-review system and ends with a prototype for how his Notebook LLM product can not only help you cite sources in AI research, but include them in the Notebook itself. As we need better signals for trust and authenticity in our AI future, this feels really important.

Rosalia’s Subway Takes (14-min watch)
Rosalia’s astonishing new album is hitting the top of the charts everywhere, which is remarkable for such an eclectic, innovative, and religious work. She is a fascinating artist, as this edition of our favourite format Subway Takes demonstrates.

📣 Award-winning MF DOOM Podcast! (53-min listen) Storythings’ own audio wizard Chris Mitchell continues to hoover up all the awards this year, winning GOLD at the APA’s last night for his extraordinary audio drama/documentary about the rapper MF DOOM. Huge Congrats Chris! 📣

💌 Humans of LinkedIn

Thank you to friend-of-Storythings Ian Sanders for alerting us to his great LinkedIn post about how to lead as yourself. It’s got great insights from leaders at Ørsted, Samsung and Microsoft, and perfectly fits our ‘humans of LinkedIn’ format - you need to start by being more human yourself!

“When people see you bring your real interests to your job, they feel safer bringing theirs - teams get more interesting, the work gets better, and it feels less like work and more like fun.”

READ THE FULL POST HERE →

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team