Whoever tells the best story wins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a useful 2023 book by Morgan Housel titled Same as Ever: A guide to what never changes. Google Books has a preview through page 18 and pages 21 to 25.

 

The first page about its contents is titled 23 Little Stories about Things That Never Change, and those stories and their starting pages are:

 

Introduction

The Little Laws of Life.  1

 

Hanging by a Thread

If you know where we’ve been you realize we have no idea where we’re going.  5

 

Risk Is What You Don’t See

We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises – which tend to be all that matters.  16

 

Expectations and Reality

The first rule of happiness is low expectations.  25

 

Wild Minds

People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.  36

 

Wild Numbers

People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.  44

 

Best Story Wins

Stories are always more powerful than statistics.  56

 

Does Not Compute

The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured.  67

 

Calm Plants the Seeds of Crazy

Crazy doesn’t mean broken. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal.  78

 

Too Much, Too Soon, Too Fast

A good idea on steroids quickly becomes a terrible idea.  88

 

When the Magic Happens

Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.  96

 

Overnight Tragedies and Long-Term Miracles

Good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in a blink of an eye.  109

 

Tiny and Magnificent

When little things compound into extraordinary things.  115

 

Elation and Despair

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.  122

 

Casualties of Perfection

There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect. 129

 

It’s Supposed to Be Hard

Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.  136

 

Keep Running

Most competitive advantages eventually die.  144

 

The Wonders of the Future

It always feels like we’re falling behind, and it’s easy to discount the potential of new technology.  152

 

Harder Than It Looks and Not as Fun as It Seems

‘The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.’  159

 

Incentives: The Most Powerful Force in the World

When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.  164

 

Now You Get It

Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand.  171

 

Time Horizons

Saying ‘I’m in it for the long run’ is a bit like standing at the base of Mount Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, ‘That’s where I’m heading.’ Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.  178

 

Trying Too Hard

There are no points awarded for difficulty.  184

 

Wounds Heal, Scars Last

What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have? 192

 

Chapter 6, Best Story Wins, says on page 56:

 

“The best story wins.

 

Not the best idea, or the right idea, or the most rational idea. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.

 

Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere, while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution. Morgan Freeman can narrate a grocery list and bring people to tears, while an inarticulate scientist might cure a disease and go unnoticed.

 

There is too much information in the world for everyone to calmly sift through the data, looking for the most rational, most correct answer. People are busy and emotional, and a good story is always more powerful and persuasive than ice-cold statistics.

 

If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead.

 

If you have the wrong answer, but you’re a good storyteller, you’ll probably get ahead (for a while).

 

If you have the right answer, and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost certainly

get ahead.

 

That’s always been true, always will be true, and it shows up in so many areas of history.

 

[and on page 63]…When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage.

 

Leverage squeezes the full potential out of something with less effort. Stories leverage ideas in the same way that debt leverages assets.

 

Trying to explain something like physics is hard if you’re deadlifting facts and formulas. But if you can explain things like how fire works with a story about balls rolling down hills and running into one another – that’s what physicist Richard Feynman, an astonishing storyteller, used to do – you can explain something complex in seconds, without much effort.

 

Stories do more than persuade others. They can help you just as much. Part of what made Albert Einstein so talented was his imagination and ability to distill complexity into a simple scene in his head. When he was sixteen he started imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, holding onto the sides like a flying carpet and thinking through how it would travel and bend. Soon after, he imagined what your body would feel like if you were in an enclosed elevator riding through space. He contemplated gravity by imagining bowling balls and billiard balls competing for space on a trampoline surface. He could process a textbook of information with the effort of a daydream.

 

Ken Burns once said, ‘The common stories are one plus one equals two. We get it, they make sense. But good stories are about one plus one equals three.’ That’s leverage.”

 

An 1856 painting by Vincenzo Cabianca of a Napoleonic Legionnaire was cropped from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

 

Effective Scientific Presentations Across Formats - A Modern Guide for Science Trainees, Researchers, and Others

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a very detailed 17-page pdf article by Steven C. Grambow and Kevin P. Weinfurt at Advances in Social Science Research on September 19, 2024 (Volume 11, number 9, pages 42 to 55) titled Effective Scientific Presentations Across Formats: A Modern Guide for Science Trainees and Researchers.

 

The abstract says:

 

“This paper presents a comprehensive tutorial on delivering effective scientific presentations in the modern era, addressing a landscape altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to virtual and hybrid formats has fundamentally changed the norms of how scientific findings are shared, creating new challenges and opportunities for presenters.

 

Drawing from over a decade of experience teaching and refining presentation skills, we address a soft-skill gap in clinical and translational science training. The tutorial outlines four key topics: (1) identifying your scientific story, (2) using effective slide design, (3) presenting data, and (4) delivering your presentation. These lessons, developed through extensive seminars and individual coaching at various academic institutions, enable researchers to enhance communication and audience engagement across presentation formats.

 

Our approach, informed by cognitive processing and data visualization principles, has adapted to the new reality of virtual and hybrid presentations. This work contributes practical insights for optimizing presentation skills in this changed communication landscape. By offering actionable recommendations derived from real-world experience, this tutorial provides valuable guidance for science trainees, junior faculty, and established researchers across disciplines. It aims to equip readers with the necessary tools to deliver compelling scientific presentations in any format, advancing effective academic discourse in an era where virtual and hybrid presentations have become the norm.”

 

This article is useful for most presenters, not just scientists. There are four particularly useful figures that are shown by individual images:

 

Figure 1. Comparison of a Slide with More (top) versus Fewer (bottom) Words

 

Figure 2. Directing the Audience’s Attention Through Outlined Shapes or Highlighted Boxes

 

Figure 3. Elements of an Effective Presentation Palette

 

Figure 4. Presenting a Complex Figure in Steps to Support Your Storytelling

 

Back on January 7, 2019 I blogged about A good (but not great) article on how to give a scientific talk. And on February 19, 2014 I blogged about how Assertion-Evidence PowerPoint slides are a visual alternative to bullet point lists.

 

The 2013 image of Edward C. Stone came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

There is a massive 710-page book titled The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a Lifetime of Songwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on April 4, 2011 I blogged about Stories in words and music: country edition. Of course, I mentioned Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 to September 12, 2003) and his songs Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk the Line, and Tennessee Flat Top Box. Songs are magical – they tell a story in a few minutes with poetic words and music.

 

At my friendly, local public library I found and am leafing through a massive 710-page book from 2025 assembled by Mark Stielper and titled The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a lifetime of songwriting.

 

Folsom Prison Blues (from 1955) appears on page 26. I Walk the Line (from 1956) appears on pages 40 and 41. Tennessee Flat-Top Box (from 1961) appears on page 120.

 

I Still Miss Someone (from 1957) with Roy Cash Jr. appears on page 52. There is a video from  1990 with Highwaymen – a duet with Willie Nelson. The lyrics lament:

 

“At my door the leaves are falling
A cold wild wind will come
Sweethearts walk by together
And I still miss someone

 

I go out on a party
And look for a little fun
But I find a darkened corner
'Cause I still miss someone

 

No, I never got over those blue eyes
I see them everywhere
I miss those arms that held me
When all the love was there

 

I wonder if she's sorry
For leaving what we'd begun
There's someone for me somewhere
And I still miss someone”

 

Elsewhere there is a curious description for a song Johnny wrote with another person. That song, Tiger Whitehead (from 1973), is listed as being with Nat Winston. An article at Bob Cox’s Yesteryear on February 24, 2014 titled Dr. Nat Winston Fondly Remembered as a Noted Psychiatrist, Musician says that:

“Martha Winston recalled that Nat often talked about the time he received a call from June Carter Cash urging him to treat her husband. Although Johnny would not agree to enter a hospital for rehabilitation, he was perfectly willing for Nat to come to his Hendersonville, Tennessee home for private therapy. Nat did this over a period of one year, visiting Johnny every day after work without accepting compensation. He did it out of friendship and love for Johnny and members of the Carter family. Also, since he was serving as Commissioner of Mental Health, he felt it would be a conflict of interest to continue to treat patients for a fee while he was serving the state.

‘Johnny Cash credited Nat,’ said Susan, ‘both in his biography and publicly on the Larry King Show for his medical treatments that restored his life and career.’

‘On one visit,’ Nat told him of James ‘Tiger’ Whitehead, a colorful Carter County mountaineer, mill operator and bear hunter (reportedly killed 99 bears during his lifetime). On another trip to Nat's cabin, he took Johnny to visit Tiger's grave on Tiger Creek Road between Hampton and Roan Mountain. Johnny was so impressed by the story that he wrote ‘The Ballad of Tiger Whitehead,' which he later recorded on an album. Nat had no idea that Johnny gave him credit as co-writer until one day when he received a royalty check. Listen to Johnny talk about Tiger Whitehead and sing the song.”

 

There also are some clearly mistaken attributions in the book. Gold All Over the Ground (from 1967) on page 192 is listed as with Brad Paisley. But Brad was born later, on October 28, 1972. Chinky Pin Hill (1970s) on page 248 is listed as with Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins. Sarah Jarosz was born on May 23, 1991. Aoife O’Donovan was born on November 18, 1982. Sara Watkins was born on June 8, 1981. Those three women formed a band, I’m With Her, in 2014.

 

There is a 2016 posthumous book by Johnny Cash titled Forever Words: The Unknown Poems. And there is a 2018 album by that same name. The thirteenth song is Chinky Pin Hill  by I’m With Her. There is a review of it at RedGuitarMusic on April 23, 2018 titled Johnny Cash – Forever Words (Album Review). The song Gold All Over the Ground by Brad Paisley is the second one on the Forever Words album.

 

And To June, This Morning on page 320 (1970) is listed as with Ruston Kelly who only was born on July 31, 1988, and Kacey Musgraves, who was born on August 21, 1988. The song is the second one on the Forever Words album. There is a video of them from April 6, 2018 titled Ruston Kelley, Kacey Musgraves – To June This Morning (Johnny Cash: Forever Words).

 

The 1977 image of Johnny Cash came from the Library of Congress.

 

 

Between the Listening and the Telling of Stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been skimming a 2022 book about storytelling by Mark Yaconelli titled Between the Listening and the Telling: How stories can save us. Google Books has a preview through page 21. There is a 29-second video at Hearth Community on August 2, 2022 titled Storytelling is being human together with this description:

 

“Storytelling is being human together. We tell stories to savor the pleasure of living. We share stories to help one another remember who we are and what matters. We tell stories to weave our lives together. We tell stories to keep our souls intact when suffering overtakes us. This is story as medicine. This is how story can save us.”   

 

Twelve chapters and three interludes in the book are titled:

 

A Place the Soul Once Knew

Confession

The Catacombs

Coming-Out Parade

Pure Medicine

Interlude: Clara

The Hearth

Storycatcher

Undocumented Stories

Tragedy

Interlude: Shoes

The Apocalypse

Sacred Stories

Interlude: The Faun

Home

There is an excerpt on June 28, 2022 at Broadleaf Books titled The Healing Power of Stories, taken from page 15 of Chapter 2: Confession. Another excerpt on September 5, 2023 at Thriving in Ministry titled ‘Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us' that comes on page 150 from Chapter 11: Sacred Stories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a striking excerpt on page 93 from Chapter 7: Storycatcher says that:

 

“One night in an Irish pub, over dinner with writer Brian Doyle, I talked about my newly discovered work, drawing stories forth from people and towns and organizations. ‘You’re a seanachie,’ he declared. Seanachie, he explained, is a Gaelic word meaning ‘storycatcher.’ In traditional Irish towns, a storycatcher’s role was to unearth, gather, and share stories to strengthen and bind people to one another.

 

After Brian’s declaration, I began to claim my vocation as a storycatcher. I learned to ask questions that drew forth memories: A scared place from childhood. A memorable winter. A sacrifice. A missed opportunity. I learned to listen for patterns, for change, for the revealing heat of emotion. I read books by writers, oral historians, and professional storytellers and noted how they went about their craft. Over time I learned the warp and woof of stories, how they gather, arch, spiral, and spring forth. I learned how to root up the deepest stories from people and communities, how to catch their scent, how to ferret them out from the tangle of a person’s living.

 

I discovered that in every town the stories wait, like seeds beneath the concrete. They wait within the receptionist who sailed alone across the Black Sea, within the store manager who raised his two sisters after their mother died, within the well-dressed grandmother who spent her youth stealing horses in Saskatchewan. Lower me down into a seemingly empty, colorless place – a fast-food restaurant, a warehouse chain store, a gray office cubicle – and I will excavate a story that will break your heart, a true story that will bust your sides with laughter or unlock all that’s bound up in you, a story that will aim you like the North Star toward whatever is true and right. Give me a few hours of your time and I will mirror back a story from your life that will fill you with self-compassion. There’s no need to make anything up, no need for fiction. The truth waits to be told, but few know how to catch it. And fewer still know how to tell it.”

 

There is a 45-minute interview at Hearth Community on August 9, 2022 titled Anne Lamott Interviews Mark Yaconelli About His Newest Book.

 

Images of a fireside storyteller and lady catching a ball came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Another three stories from Kevin Ashton’s compelling new book The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My previous post was titled The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton. There are eight chapters in that book, titled as follows:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are another three quotations out of this book. The tenth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Story Factories. It begins on the bottom of page 130:

 

“Wood based paper first appeared in Germany in the 1840s, and by the end of the 1870s most printers in North America and Western Europe were using it. Not long after that, all paper was made from wood and none was made from rags. In less than thirty years, the price of paper fell by over 90 percent. In 1860 a pound of rags cost 44 US cents before pulping. In 1889, a pound of wood cost 4 cents after pulping. The invention of the mass production of mass communication, started by Gutenberg 450 years earlier was complete. An industrial revolution had transformed storytelling, and now there were story factories all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Those factories produced ever more stories, told by ever more storytellers, reproduced ever more times. In 1449, the year before Gutenberg’s printing press became operational, Europeans published two thousand new books and made an average of twenty-five copies of each one. In 1900, after paper made from wood replaced paper made from rags, Europeans published twenty thousand new books and, on average, there were twenty-five hundred copies of each one: ten times more stories a year, told by ten times more storytellers, to a hundred times more people.”  

 

The second section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled Experience. It begins on page 139:

 

“We are now halfway through The Story of Stories. The first half covered a million years of storytelling, from the first nightfires to the first telecommunications; the second half covers only two hundred years.

 

This imbalance – four chapters for one million years, four chapters for 200 years – arises because the book’s structure is not time but change, and change is not linear: Its rate increases so much that the next two hundred years of the story of stories contains as much change as the first million years.

 

When we look at almost any example of long-term human progress, we see change speeding up around the fifteenth century. This acceleration was once mistaken for a sudden springlike return to creation after a centuries-long winterlike freeze: a ‘renaissance’ preceded by ‘dark ages.’ The various versions of this mistake are all story-shaped: They center heroic protagonists and, by implication, individual human agency, hidden behind hand-wavy vaguenesses like culture or faith.

 

This ever-increasing, ever-continuing rate of change is not caused by individual human agency. The change causes itself, especially the change in storytelling. Our increasing acceleration of innovation arises from our accumulation of equality, liberty, and freedom of thought; of health, life expectancy, and population; and of time for nonsubsistence activities, all of which exist because we have ever more ways to share experience using stories.

 

Experience is knowledge that we have stored and recorded. Before we could recall and retell stories, we stored our experiences in the error-prone, personal, private, and, above all, mortal medium of memory. The rise of storytelling, through speaking, singing, painting, writing, and printing, enshrined ever more experience in ways ever more immortal. Printing is especially good at transforming one person’s experience into everyone’s experience: Frederick Douglass died in 1895, for example, but we can forever share some of his lived experience as a slave by reading his books.

 

The invention of the printing press enabled and inspired ever more inventions for storing and sharing experiences, among them the first atlas in 1482, the first postal service in 1516, the first book of mathematical references and tables in 1533, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1655, the first school textbook in 1690, and the first bookstore in 1732.

 

These inventions laid the foundation for an explosion of new storytelling technologies, many of them powered by electricity, in the nineteenth century, including the first electric telegraph in 1816, the first free, taxpayer-funded public library in 1833, the first photograph in 1838, the first paperback in 1841, the first practical typewriter in 1867, the first carbon copy in 1870 (now the vestigial ‘cc’ – carbon copy – and ‘bcc’ -blind carbon copy – options in the ‘send’ field of every email), the first telephone in 1876, the first duplicating machine for low-volume home, school, and office use in 1886, the first record player in 1887, and the first movie screening and the first radio transmission in 1895.

 

The speed with which we invented, improved, and industrialized these electricity-powered storytelling tools was a consequence of the accelerative, self-reinforcing effect of shared experience. New story-telling technologies create new storytelling technologies. Where writing took five thousand years to mature and spread around the world, and printing took two thousand years, the electrified storytelling tools of the 1800s developed and dispersed in little more than a century.

 

These inventions turned the nineteenth century into what we would now call an age of big data, where someone sitting at their kitchen table could benefit from the thoughts and experiences of others, of almost any kind, from almost any place and time, and preserve their own thoughts and experiences in handwriting, or as a printing-like typewritten manuscript that could be duplicated cheaply and in any quantity, from one to millions.

 

The inventions of the nineteenth century also laid the foundation for a twentieth-century storytelling technology: the television, invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927, 111 years after the invention of the electric telegraph.”

 

The eighth section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled A New Literacy. On page 160:

 

“Reading only writing may have been sufficient when writing was the only technology of story, but it is not enough today. Everyone must be able to ‘read’ stories no matter what technology is being used to tell them.

 

This technology-independent literacy is sometimes called transliteracy, a term that originated in 2005 with Alan Liu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and means ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks,’

 

Transliteracy is especially well understood by librarians, the underground freedom fighters in the war of stories, whose sworn duty is to connect people in the universe of the mass of humanity to knowledge. For example, here is Tom Ipri, a senior librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, describing transliteracy’s importance:

 

Not only does transliteracy question previous assumptions of authority, it also calls into question the often assumed privilege of printed text. Transliteracy is not unique in questioning this bias – media literacy efforts have certainly tried to raise the profile of nonprint materials. But transliteracy is unique in combining democratizing communication formats, expressing no preference of one over the other, with emphasizing the social construction of meaning via diverse media. Because of the ways in which transliteracy questions authority and devalues hierarchical structures for disseminating information, transliteracy overlaps concerns much at the heart of librarianship.” 

 

Very detailed notes at the back of Kevin’s book point out that the above statement by Tom Ipri was edited for length from one in 2010 – it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation. You can find the original article by Tom Ipri at College and Research Library News (2010, Volume 71, Number 10) titled Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries? Also see the Wikipedia page for Transliteracy.

 

The 1904 drawing of a mysterious stranger (at the top left) telling a story came from the Library of Congress.

 

 

The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a compelling 2026 book by Kevin Ashton titled The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art at my friendly local public library and have been reading through the very many stories told in it. Google Books has a preview of just the first 16 pages. There are eight chapters, titled as follows, containing lots of stories:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are four quotations from this book. The third section in the first chapter, A Million Years of Stories, is titled The Universal Story. It begins on page 6:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our storytelling brains, unchanged since they first evolved, seek and tell stories that follow a simple pattern. This pattern is universal to all cultures, genres, periods, storytellers, storytelling technologies, and styles, and comprises three equally essential parts like the legs of a stool.

 

First, all stories feature humanlike characters as the agents of action. This is still true when the characters are supposed to be nonhuman. Stories that star aliens, Anglepoise lamps, animals, ants, trains, trees, and toasters are really about humans, which is why in stories these creatures tend to walk on two feet, talk, have expressive faces and eyes, feel human emotions, and set human goals. They are all rabbits in waistcoats – people pretending not to be people. Even Dr. Suess, creator of fabulous, apparently nonhuman characters including the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Horton the Elephant, said, ‘None of my animals are animals; they’re all people.’ These humanlike characters are the story’s actors; they take the actions that cause the story to happen. They live at or near the story’s center. They are literally the people the story is about: it embraces, revolves around, and surrounds them.

 

Second, all stories relate a chronology, a sequence of events. The chronology does not have to be told in chronological order – it can have flashbacks, flash-forwards, and meanwhiles – but it has to relate connected events that happened at different moments. We would not call a description of a dozen things that all occurred in the same second a story. A story is always a journey through time.

 

Third, all stories must reach, or at least be headed for, a resolution. The sequence of events must have a consequence, and that consequence must arise from the actions of its human or humanlike agents. We are compelled to give sequences of events consequences, to seek justice for our characters, and to resolve unresolved stories. An unfinished story is like an unscratched itch; if a story we care about is not explicitly resolves, or if we have to wait to see how it ends because of a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger climax we will often try to finish the story ourselves by imagining possible resolutions.”   

 

The fifth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Ox and the House. It begins on page 69:

 

“We do not have to wonder whether Europeans could have found a way to get from pictures of things to pictures of syllables: They tried. In 1400 BCE the Greeks adapted picture-based writing from another language, Minoan, and used it almost entirely for accounting. Few Greeks could read it, and even fewer could write it. Then around 1100 BCE, for reasons that are still not well understood, Greek civilization collapsed, and the Greeks did not write again for hundreds of years.

 

But while Greece slumbered in its dark ages, The Canaanites, a seafaring people living in independent city-states in what is now Lebanon, and parts of Israel, Palestine, and Syria, solved the problem of how to write languages with clusters of consonants.

 

We can guess how it happened. Canaanites traded with, worked for, and were sometimes enslaved by Egyptians. Some Canaanites learned to read and write Hieratic, a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics developed for writing on papyrus, a writing surface made from a plant that grows in the shallows of the Nile, with reeds dipped in ink. Hieratic was a flowing script that could be written quickly by joining some characters together – a style now known as cursive, after the Latin currere, ‘to run.’ Sometime around 1800 BCE, or possibly a few centuries earlier, one or more of the Canaanites adapted Hieratic so that they could use it to write their own language too.

 

The adaptation was ingenious. The Canaanites selected hieroglyphs of things whose names start with the sounds of the Canaanite language and used the hieroglyphs to represent these sounds. For example, the Canaanites’ word for ox was aleph, so they used the hieroglyph for ox, which looked like an ox’s head, to represent an ‘a’ sound. Their word for house was beth, so they used the hieroglyph for house, which looked like the plan of a house, for the sound ‘b,’ and so on. If you were Canaanite, and could identify what thing a character represented, you would also know what sound that character represented, and could read.

 

Using characters to represent sounds instead of syllables made the writing system very efficient, especially for consonant-laden languages where most syllables are not also words. For example, every native English speaker knows around twenty to thirty-five thousand words, created from about three thousand syllables. A writing system for English that used one character for each syllable would therefore need about three thousand distinct characters. But those three thousand syllables are composed of only thirty-five to forty-four distinct sounds, depending on what definition of sound you use. And so, if you write sounds, not syllables, you can represent an entire language in very few characters. That is what the Canaanites did, and it gave them a complete writing system using just thirty-two characters. 

 

The first two of those characters, aleph and beth, the signs for ‘ox’ and ‘house,’ gave the Canaanites’ writing system its English name, alphabet.

 

Some pictures the Canaanites chose are still discernible today, thirty-five hundred years later, in the Latin alphabet used by 143 nations. For example, if you turn a capital A upside down, you can see the head of the ox, horns and all; a capital B is the plan of a two-room house, the letter c is a boomerang, gimel; l is from lamed, a shepherd’s crook, m comes from mem, water, and is the shape of two waves; and o is an eye, ‘ayin, now without the pupil of its original Egyptian hieroglyph. These vestigial pictures exemplify how our tools improve by evolution more than invention.”

 

The tenth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Secret Life of Stories. It begins on the bottom of page 87:

 

“Writing separates story and storyteller, and leaves readers to determine a story’s meaning by themselves. One of the most important consequences of this separation – and one that applies to all other forms of mass communication too – is that every reader is likely to imagine and interpret the same story differently. What the writer writes is not what the reader reads.

 

And that raises a question: Is a story what is written or what is read?

 

This is not a new concern. Literary theorist Roland Barthes, among many others, wondered about it. Barthes concluded a story is not what is written but what is read; so much so that he proclaimed the ‘death of the author,’ saying: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The reader holds together the written text. To give writing its future, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’

 

Barthes argued that there are two kinds of story: the readerly story, which requires little interpretation by the reader – the story is readerly because the reader mainly reads – and the writerly story, which requires lots of interpretation by the reader – the story is writerly because the reader does so much interpretation that they almost write the story themselves.

 

Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every reader to imagine a similar story, and others are so ambiguous that they lead every reader to imagine a different story. A stop sign is an example of something extremely straightforward and readerly: Everyone who reads it understands it the same way. A Rorschach test – a psychological test in which someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked ‘What might this be?’ – is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly: Everyone who ‘reads’ it understands it differently. Neither of these two things are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every story lies somewhere between.”

 

The fifth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Mass. It begins on page 112 and it says that:

 

“Printing came late to Europe, but when it arrived, the consequences were much the same as in China, Japan, and Korea.

 

On the day Gutenberg’s printing press started operating, scribes half a mile away were laboring in the scriptorium of St. Alban’s Abbey, copying scriptures and other Christian writing using goose-feather quills dipped in ink. The best and fastest of them, who were called antiquarii, wrote one or two pages that day. In Gutenberg’s workshop, the printing press produced three thousand pages. This wasn’t just a change in scale – it was a revolution in how ideas could spread.

 

Europe’s scribes produced eleven million documents in the thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Presses based on Gutenberg’s design produced thirteen million documents by 1500. What once took a century now took four years.

 

Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass communication. His achievement established a pattern that repeats with each successive storytelling technology: that the true transformation comes not from the invention itself but from making it fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough for mass adoption. Gutenberg’s press could produce thousands of pages per day, but the revolution he started was not only because of speed or volume; it was also because of what happens when one idea enters thousands of minds simultaneously. That change is far more significant, and far more difficult to quantify or even qualitize.”

 

The 1848 painting of Baku storytelling by August Wilhelm Kiesewetter came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Tourons and the Disneyland Syndrome

 

 

 

 

 

Touron is a portmanteau word combining the first four letters from tourist with the last two from moron, as shown above. There is an article by Gig Morris at TheTravel on February 19, 2025 titled “Tourons” on the loose: Travelers are behaving so badly that they’ve earned their own nickname. For example, at Yellowstone National Park, they get injured after they come 11 feet from a bison rather than the recommended minimum of 75 feet. She said of touron:

 

“It sounds new, but the word can be traced to the mid-1970s within the National Park System.”

 

Another article by Katie Jackson at the New York Post on October 3, 2024 is titled Moronic tourists are ruining travel – how not to be one on your next vacation. I found the word discussed in a very profane four-minute YouTube video from Lewis Black on March 27, 2026 titled Tourists, Morons, & Lava | Lewis Black’s Rantcast Clips.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I was aware of the concept long ago. In the mid-1980s my brother Tom and I had visited the Smoky Mountain National Park. We wanted to get a great view by climbing to the highest point in Tennessee, Clingman’s Dome (Kuwohi). There is a mile-long paved trail leading to the concrete observation tower (shown above) via a spiral ramp.

 

That morning the sky already was medium to dark gray, so it was not a matter of if it would rain, just when. Both of us wore jackets. I got a big golf umbrella out from my car and used it as a walking stick on the way up from the parking lot.

 

Lots of tourists on the trail were without umbrellas or even hooded windbreakers. Just as we began heading back down it began to pour. We stayed dry, but most tourists got thoroughly soaked. I later referred to their behavior as the Disneyland Syndrome – behaving as if they just were in an amusement park rather than a national park.  

 

 

Dick Van Dyke told his hardest story from a 75-year career

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on December 13, 2025. And he published a book with a series of stories titled 100 Rules for Living to 100: An optimist’s guide to a happy life. An article by Sarah Lemire at Today on November 18, 2025 is titled EXCLUSIVE: At Almost 100, Dick Van Dyke Won’t Sit Still – and Is Eyeing 1 More Big Role. She notes that he had a 75-year career. There is another article by Liz McNeil in People magazine on November 25, 2025 titled Dick Van Dyke ‘Feels Pretty Good for 100.’ Here’s Why He’s Optimistic About His Centennial Birthday (Exclusive).

 

 On pages 105 to 113 there is a great story, titled Tell Your Hardest Story:

 

“In December 1973, I found a seat in a circle of chairs in a grim, fluorescent-lit meeting room at the Brentwood Veterans’ Hospital. Around me were military vets, young and old, all hospitalized for drug and alcohol addiction and gathered for regular group therapy. I was there as a visitor, doing research for my role as an alcoholic in The Morning After, a TV movie being shot elsewhere in the facility.

 

It was weird for these guys to have a Hollywood actor eavesdropping on their raw, real-life stories of struggle, I could tell. Right off the bat, I needed to assure them that I would be a sympathetic listener. ‘The subject of my movie is very personal to me,’ I began, ‘because I myself am an alcoholic.’

 

Their faces flickered with surprise. At the time, only my family and a handful of other people in my life knew about my drinking problem.

 

‘So, I understand some of what you’re going through. But really, I’m here to listen and learn.”

 

Then Dick decided to go public.

 

“The story got picked up across the country. As expected, when Mr. Goody Two-shoes admitted his addiction to the world, the public was shocked. Friends and colleagues from wherever I’d lived and worked called to offer sympathy and encouragement, reporting that they, and everyone they knew could barely believe the news. Within a week, I was getting letters by the thousand – people were moved and incredibly understanding. Many detailing how alcoholism had impacted them and their loved ones.

 

That reaction spurred me to go even more public. I appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, one of the best interviews I’ve ever done, and I told my story onstage in Washington, DC, for a press conference with other celebrity alcoholics. I am told that rehab facilities still show The Morning After to this day.

 

…. Each time I put a new layer of it into words, I feel a release of the power that alcoholism had over me. I was separating myself from the disease, seeing my experience as a battle with the disease. Telling my story was giving me power and freedom.

 

Each of us has our own hard stories of crisis and struggle. When we hold them in, out of fear or shame, they control us. But when we tell our stories, we’re in the driver’s seat. And when we share those stories, even just among our friends and family, we are literally helping one another to survive, just like that brotherhood of vets.”  

 

Pages 9 and 10 have a story titled Make Your Own Rules. On page 10 Dick has the following weasel words about his rules and stories:

 

“I readily admit that you might find variations of the same rule emerging in multiple stories here. That’s because my life, like everyone else’s, has its personality-specific ongoing themes – questions that pop up, over and over again, in different contexts, old challenges that look different in each new light, wisdom learned and forgotten and learned again.

 

I might also add that, for some of these stories, there’s not exactly a rule or even a specific question. Sometimes that’s because I know there’s some nugget of meaning in the story, but I haven’t figured out what it is. Maybe you can! Other times, it’s just a funny story, plain and simple. Because don’t we all sometimes just need comic relief?

 

Finally, if you’re inclined to count up these rules to see if there are exactly one hundred, as advertised in the title, your math might disappoint you, just a little. Quality over quantity, as the saying goes, right? I can assure you that this book will deliver enough main rules, sub-rules, ancillary rules, and multipart rules to last you a lifetime, yes, all the way to one hundred!”    

 

His book doesn’t bother to number those stories or even give us a Table of Contents. I got suspicious about whether there really were a hundred, and then wrote down the following list of all the story titles (grouped ten at a time):  

 

Don’t Act Your Age

Make Your Own Rules

Examine Your Head

Learn to Fall

Find Your Passion in Your Past

Tolerate and Cherish Your Little Brother

Face Your Fear

Find “The New You” Inside “The Old You”

Find Your People – A Story in Several Parts

Figure Out Who You Aren’t

 

Don’t Litter: Tips for Safety and Hygiene on Family Road Trips in the 1950s

Don’t Count on “The Big Break”

Hone Your Bit (Every Job Is Training for the Next One)

Don’t Do Live Morning TV

Some Secrets You Shouldn’t Tell

Eggs Again? Some Failures Are Just That

Dance with Chita

Go Nuts (But Maybe Not That Nuts)

Suck Up to the Landlady

Speak Up for Your Family

 

It Doesn’t Take a Good Boss to Do Great Work

Accept Your Limitations

Win an Oscar

Stay on the Phone

Make Christmas with What You’ve Got

Don’t Trust Machines

Reconsider the Boogeyman

Tell Your Hardest Stories

Play Against Type

Retire on Your Own Terms

 

Remain Anonymous

Start a Band

Commit to Play

Save All That Artwork

Believe in Fate

Take Your Doubts to the Desert

Accept “Rescue” with Grace

See the Pattern to Get Past It

Help Someone Find Their Voice: Do’s and Don’ts

Reimagine Your Legacy

 

Read the Fine Print

Learn from Animals: 3 Species, 4 Rules

Get a Good DJ

Write It Down

Bond Through Crisis

Be Someone’s Baker

Get Frank: A Meditation on Old Rifts

Remember the Good Stuff, Leave the Rest Behind

Reminisce While You Can

Get a Great Sidekick

 

Clear the Air

Get a Second Opinion (and a Third and a Fourth…)

Learn from Teaching

Cross Off Regrets

Learn from Shame

Never Call “Cut”

Don’t Match Jimmy

Don’t Live in the Past

It Pays to Go to the Gym

Build a Slide and Grandkids Will Come

 

Transmogrify Halloween (On Family Traditions)

The Clothes Make the Gnome

Stay Tall Inside

Hand Over the Keys

Read While You Can

Do Get All Judgy (When You’re Watching TV)

Learn a New Way to Fall

Carpe Chita

Remember Honestly

Live with Regrets

 

Your Purpose Doesn’t Need to be Grand

You Will Not Be Alone

Save the Afterlife for After Life

You Can’t Protect Your Survivors

Find Your Arlene

 

As you can see, there are just seventy-five. The book could have more honestly been titled Seventy-Five Rules from My 75-Year Career: An optimist’s guide to a happy life.

 

The wreath was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.