Tribes, Teens and Long Zoom Stories

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Hugh

What Teens Think Parents Should Know About Mobile Phones (8 min read)

A Blog Post Is a Search Query to Find Your People (2 min read)

Netflix Releases Glass Onion Commentary (4 min read)When Ford Hired a Prize-Winning Poet to Name Their New Car (2 min read)The Enduring Legacy of Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” Speech (4 min read)Three Ways We Enjoy Music (5 min read)Focussing on Readability is Not Dumbing Down (5 min read)Makeup Artist Transforms Himself into Jennifer Coolidge (1 min watch)Steven Johnson on the Art of Telling Long Zoom Stories (8 min read)

Creep Mart - A Toy Store That Doesn’t Exist (Instagram account)

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What Teens Think Parents Should Know About Mobile PhonesThis week we hosted a fascinating dinner with a group of friends and clients to share our Scroll Stoppers research. The conversation turned to how our children are using phones – maps on Snapchat are really popular. A little later we spoke about the importance of creating space for people to tell their own stories. So here’s a great example of both. We heard a lot of this in our research: “I know someone two years older than me. She’s deleted all of her social media. She felt like she was going into a downward spiral. She felt like she wasn’t really enjoying other people. She just found herself in her room scrolling on TikTok rather than going out and hanging with friends or going for a walk. Now she only uses her phone to take pictures and call people. She thinks that when she takes pictures, she looks at it a different way because it’s not for the purpose of posting on Instagram. It’s like you live in the moment, and when you take a picture, you really get more joy from it.”(8 min read)

A Blog Post Is a Search Query to Find Your PeopleAustin Kleon on using writing to find your tribe: “A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.”(2 min read)Netflix Releases Glass Onion CommentaryThis is an interesting new thing. Netflix has released a new Glass Onion director’s commentary from writer-director Rian Johnson. It comes in the form of a podcast that you sync up with the film. Whilst there’s nothing new about director’s commentaries there is something interesting about delivering this as a podcast to be played in time with the movie. As our recent Scroll Stoppers report pointed out, audiences are choosing to layer their media in many ways. (4 min watch)When Ford Hired a Prize-Winning Poet to Name Their New CarNaming things is hard. Really hard. And sometimes you have to think outside the box which is what the Ford Motor Company did in 1955 when they hired poet Marianne Moore to come up with a name for their newest car. How did that turn out? Well, none of us are driving around in the Ford “The Intelligent Whale,” “The Dearborn Diamante” or “The Utopian Turtletop.” But thankfully design firm Pentagram recently commissioned illustrator Seymour Chwast to bring Moore’s names to life. The results are delightful. (via Kottke)(2 min read)The Enduring Legacy of Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” SpeechI wasn’t aware of this speech or its legacy until early this week when Neil Perkin shared these words that need to be heard: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”(4 min read)Three Ways We Enjoy MusicI’m currently developing a format for BBC Sounds which is all about using music to make great speeches and oratory accessible to wider audiences. It’s been fascinating having to dive into music theory and look at what it is that makes people listen. For this project in particular, having to develop my own theories around what it is that will make people pay attention to the voice over the music whilst at the same time making the music serve as a vehicle for holding attention for longer. Anyway. If you are interested in what makes some people like pop music and some like more niche forms you will enjoy this. (5 min read)Focussing on Readability is Not Dumbing DownAsh Mann measured how readable the websites of some of the UK’s largest cultural organisations are. The results aren’t great. As Ash points out, there’s resistance to readability: “Often when we are encouraging the cultural organisations we work with to write in a way that will be easier to understand, to use less jargon, and to think about how people consume content online, we get told that we are asking them to ‘dumb down’. There seems to be an impression that by making your content difficult to read, you are somehow making it more valuable.”(5 min read)

Makeup Artist Transforms Himself into Jennifer CoolidgeHeads turned this week when the White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge turned up at Diesel’s show in Milan. Only it wasn’t Jennifer but Mancunian makeup artist Alexis Stone. Check out his transformation video.(1 min watch)Steven Johnson on the Art of Telling Long Zoom StoriesSteven is one of my favourite writers who we’ve been fortunate to work with on several occasions. He’s a master at telling stories that zoom out, looking far back in history to explain the series of connected events that shape the world we live in today. Here he looks at how one of his writing heroes does this in what he describes as being one of the greatest chapters in the history of nonfiction prose.(8 min read)Creep Mart - A Toy Store That Doesn’t ExistAn online store filled with creepy AI-generated toys that don’t exist…yet!(Instagram account)

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.