HAPPY FRIDAY!!!

I’ve been in London a lot this week for all sorts of interesting events. First up was the Leaders In Sport Attention Seekers event, discussing content formats and attention with lots of really interesting people, including the Head of MLB Europe, and the content team from Tottenham Hotspur; which as a baseball and Spurs fan meant I was in heaven. Then I was at a client summer party, and on the way back I jumped out at Oxford Circus in time to see Rachel Zegler do her balcony performance of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina at the London Palladium. I’m not a big Andrew Lloyd-Weber fan, but it was an extraordinary moment of street culture - if you’re around Argyll St before 9pm, it’s well worth a detour. The crowd was huge though, so get there earlier if you can. Finally, last night I was in Peckham for the UAL Creative Computing Institute Summer Festival. I’m a Governor at UAL, and as part of my brief I look after CCI, so it was fantastic to see the brilliant, creative uses of technology from this year’s graduates. I know we’ll be seeing more from all of them in their future careers.

London was great, but I missed the cool breeze of Brighton Beach. If you’re sweltering in Soho, get on the train and come down for some relief from the heat and a paddle in the sea. Drop me a line if you’re coming, and if I’m free, I’ll join you for an ice cream/beer:

Right then. It’s Friday, so it’s time for ten creative links from our team at Storythings (read to the end for a bonus link to the first ever coffee advert).

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are!

Matt

How Steven Johnson Uses AI In His Book Research (8-min read)

An App To Help You Create Vertical Video From Your Stories (5-min read)

Ten Meter Tower (16-min video)

Narcissism at Work (podcast)

The Dangers Of Relying On Platforms (3-min read)

Why Do So Many Illustrations Look Like Rubber Hoses? (2.5-min TikTok)

How To Kill Your Darlings (8-min read)

New Video For Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer (4-min video)

Why You Should Push Back Against Teams That Resist Experimentation (5-min read)

An Incredibly Stressful Game About Delegation (I didn’t last 5 minutes)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

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How Steven Johnson Uses AI In His Book Research (8-min read)
Steven Johnson’s books are brilliant narrative histories that weave together stories from all sorts of diverse research. He also consulted with Google on the development of NotebookLM, so I loved reading how he uses the product in his research: “There is no replacement for reading the core primary and secondary texts if you are writing nonfiction journalism or history. Generally, I don’t think of NotebookLM as doing the reading for me; it’s more like Notebook is doing the reading with me.”

An App To Help You Create Vertical Video From Your Stories (5-min read)
Talking of writers building their own AI tools, this NiemanLab article describes a really interesting new app called Sophiana, developed by British Journalist Sophia Smith Galer. The app will take an article you’ve written, create headline hooks, and then automate a short script and take you to your camera app to record a vertical video version ready for TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Youtube Shorts. It’s in its early stages, but this is a great example of a tool by writers for writers, not replacing writers. I hope it succeeds!

Ten Meter Tower (16-min video)
Jason Kottke linked to this brilliant video from 2017 in a post earlier this week. It’s a short documentary recording different people as they decide whether or not to jump off a ten meter tower into a swimming pool. There is no narration, just the dialogue as people decide whether or not they can do it. But the real storytelling is in the body language - the film is the purest distillation of what doubt feels like that I’ve ever seen.

Narcissism at Work (podcast)
Other Box, the award-winning, leading DEI consultancy revolutionising workplace culture since 2016, have produced their first podcast series under a new audio arm, AT WORK. The series, Narcissism At Work, launched on 23 June 2025 and unpacks one of the most misunderstood psychological terms of our time: narcissism. Produced by Storythings’ very own Chris Mitchell, this bold new series explores how narcissistic traits and behaviours thrive in workplace culture and what it really costs employees and companies.

The Dangers Of Relying On Platforms (3-min read)
Substack is apparently trying to raise funding at the moment, which has triggered a flood of articles about whether they’re a sustainable business, and whether relying on a platform has ever worked out for independent creators. My favourite was this short piece by Robin Sloan, who has long championed creating and owning your own tech stack: “There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?”

Why Do So Many Illustrations Look Like Rubber Hoses? (2.5-min TikTok)
I absolutely loved this short video from our friends at It’s Nice That, exploring why so many illlustrations seem to reference 1920s cartoons. It’s a great argument, well researched, and brilliantly executed in just 2.5mins.

How To Kill Your Darlings (8-min read)
In the latest edition of my series for our Attention Matters newsletter on how to build a prototyping culture in your organisation, I looked at how to decide when a prototype format isn’t working, and how to stop a format in a positive and celebratory way. Because killing prototypes isn’t failure - the only failure is never starting anything in the first place.

New Video For Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer (4-min video)
What’s this? A new video to celebrate 50 years (!) of Talking Heads’ first single Psycho Killer? Directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan? YES PLEASE! This really reminded me of the kind of arty videos I used to see on Channel 4’s Ghosts In The Machine in the late 80s. Which was one of the things that made me want to go and study art.

Why You Should Push Back Against Teams That Resist Experimentation (5-min read)
I’d literally just hit send on the Attention Matters episode about prototyping above when I got an email from Jacob Donnelly’s excellent A Media Operator. This post is a really good explanation of why you need to build a prototyping/experimentation culture in your organisation: “Our industry is fundamentally changing. I view the arrival of AI to be equivalent to the arrival of the web browser. What the internet did to print media, AI could do to digital media if we are not careful. That means we need to foster a culture where doing things differently is not only okay, but celebrated.”

An Incredibly Stressful Game About Delegation (I didn’t last 5 minutes)
WARNING! If you want to go gently into the weekend, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK. Anjali posted this in the Storythings Slack earlier this week, and the immediate response was that it is extremely stressful. It’s a satirical web game that lets you simulate working in a tech or content agency, giving you very short deadlines to make decisions and delegate to your team. Like all good satire, it’s too close to reality for comfort. So, if you want to raise your blood pressure, go right ahead. I’m going to close that particular tab and go for a walk on the beach instead.

So that’s your ten links for this week! As you’ll know if you read this far, we like to give a treat for our favourite subscribers, so here’s a bonus link for you - the first ever coffee ad, published around 1652. No ChatGPT detected.

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings