Happy Friday, everyone!

This week, a lot of you must have seen the news that NotebookLM has started Featured Notebooks, where they curate content from respected authors, researchers, publications and nonprofits around the world (including The Economist and The Atlantic) on subjects from in-depth scientific explorations to practical travel guides to advice from experts. I got a close look at that and other NotebookLM features this week at an event in London where Tirthankar Bose, Google EMEA’s Gemini Product Marketing Manager, gave live demos and answered questions about the tool, as well as giving us a sneak peek into upcoming product features. I will say the new features look very exciting and I can’t wait to try them out. Steven Johnson, who co-founded NotebookLM and with whom we worked years ago on How We Get To Next, has also written about Featured Notebooks more over here.

A reminder that we would still love input from anyone working in the social or narrative change fields (including, but not limited to, climate justice, abolition, antiracism, disability rights, LGBTQI+ rights, housing rights, migrant justice, political education and more) on this survey that will help us shape an exciting new project. It will take no more than 10 minutes, and any help you give will be appreciated! Please share with relevant folks.

We’ve been having some exciting conversations this week with potential new B2B clients on content formats and production. If this is you, drop us a line to see how we can help you.

On to the links below - hope you have a lovely summer wherever you are, as any remaining schools that haven’t yet, shut down in the UK today. Parents - stay strong!

Anjali

The Magic Of Jacquemus Fashion Show Invites (40-second Threads video)

Reading List: The Playbook For Cultural Hitmaking (4-min read)

Medium’s Recap, Financial Turnaround And Difficult Path Back To Health (18-min read)

The Return of Brand Marketing (6-min read)

Immersive Quarries: How Van Gogh Became The Poster Child For A Certain Type of Immersive Experience in the 2010s (14-min read)

Temporal Realness Is The Hottest Commodity (5-min read)

Attention Is All You Need: Why Reading Expands Our Context Windows (10-min read)

Dads Getting Emotional To Aphex Twin (10-min read)

This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read By An Ancient Internet Protocol (5-min read)

NASA Ames Research Center Archives (image gallery)

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The Magic Of Jacquemus Fashion Show Invites (40-second Threads video)
This newsletter is all about creative ways of thinking, and some of luxury brand Jacquemus’ fashion show invites are definitely creative.

Reading List: The Playbook For Cultural Hitmaking (4-minute read)
Related to the previous link, we love a nice reading list at Storythings. This one curated by Ana Andjelic, author of Hitmaking (whose book does feature in the list) and consultant Barr Balamuth, has some great long-reads and book recommendations about brands that have made a mark on culture in some way, including Nike, Liquid Death, Loewe, Telfar and product studio MSCHF.

Medium’s Recap, Financial Turnaround And Difficult Path Back To Health (18-min read)
We used to be big fans of Medium back in the day - the original home for our Gates-backed publication How We Get To Next was actually Medium. But then things happened, it lost its way, became awful to use and we, along with a lot of others, left. In this honest read, current CEO Tony Stubblebine (also an avid and long-time Medium user, even before his tenure there) writes about the company’s journey from almost dying to being profitable again.

The Return of Brand Marketing (6-min read)
The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey has a conversation with an Anonymous Brand Marketer (ABM for short - which is not, as I initially thought, a reference to Account Based Marketing!). It’s always validating to hear from brand marketers that AI content has its limits: “….most AI content today is boring. It can surface information, but it rarely delivers any kind of point of view. And that’s what brand marketers still want: not just reach, but resonance. Storytelling still matters. “Are you just looking for information, or are you looking for a perspective? Are you looking for an experience?””

Immersive Quarries: How Van Gogh Became The Poster Child For A Certain Type of Immersive Experience in the 2010s (14-min read)
Friend of Storythings Marie Foulston has done an incredible piece of detective work looking at the rise of immersive exhibitions in 2010s (Van Gogh being the poster child), and how they had their origin in a brilliant series of art shows in a disused French quarry. A fascinating story that starts 50 million years ago, and reaches the modern day via legal battles in French courts.

Temporal Realness Is The Hottest Commodity (5-min read)
We’re big fans of New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka, whose book Filterworld we hand out to many people, and in his latest newsletter he zooms in on why the return of physical experiences is something to note: “Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time.”

Attention Is All You Need: Why Reading Expands Our Context Windows (10-min read)
Kevin Munger is an professor and Chair of Computational Social Science at European University Institute in Florence, so this piece is slightly academic but makes a good point on ‘context windows’, how they operate in AI and whether our own context windows are being shrunk because we are getting used to reading less, thanks to LLMs.

Dads Getting Emotional To Aphex Twin (10-min read)
I admit I shed a tear or two while reading this: Kevin Maguire of The New Fatherhood on a piece of ambient music that seems to resonate with fathers the world over.

This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read By An Ancient Internet Protocol (5-min read)
This is very cool. Cara Esten Hurtle, an artist and software engineer, co-founded New Session, a digital zine, in 2021 along with Lo Ferris, while searching for something to do with her retro computers. The zine can only be accessed online via ‘the ancient-but-still-functional internet protocol Telnet’ and each piece of content adapts based on conditions like what time of day you access it or how many times you’ve viewed it. It’s a wonderful antithesis to the AI-enabled content factories online. For Hurten, as the piece says, “the project isn’t just retro novelty—it’s a radical rejection of the addictive social media and algorithmic attention-mining that have defined the modern day internet.”

NASA Ames Research Center Archives (image gallery)
A look at the rich history of images (and the world’s largest wind tunnel!) housed at the NASA Ames Research Center in San Francisco.

And so we get to the end of this newsletter, where I now can’t help but learn some trivia to share. On this day, July 18th, in 1925, Adolf Hitler published ‘Mein Kampf’ (originally called ‘Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice’ (just awful). And in 1976, today’s date is when gymnastic legend Nadia Comăneci (14) achieved a perfect 10 score for the first time in Olympic Games history, going on to do that 7 times.

We love seeing people say nice things about this newsletter. That could be you, to one of your friends, so do spread the word! And see you next week.

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings

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