At its simplest, this traditional Lebanese dish is made with lentils, rice, onion and water. I have added spices. The onions should be cooked really well with lots of blackened, crunchy bits. To make a creamy, thickened yoghurt, drain through a colander or sieve lined with muslin or a new Chux kitchen cloth.
Serve this simple, traditional Lebanese dish with thick yoghurt and mint.Photo: Marina Oliphant
Ingredients
6 tbsp olive oil
6 onions, halved and finely sliced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice
5 cups water or vegetable stock
1 1/2 cups brown lentils, washed and drained
1 cup long grain rice, washed and drained
1 cup plain yoghurt, drained through muslin-lined colander for 30 minutes
Fresh mint sprigs, to garnish
Method
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in large saucepan over medium heat.
Add one onion, garlic, cumin, cinnamon and allspice and saute for four minutes until onion is softened and lightly coloured.
Add water (or stock) and lentils and bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Stir in rice, return to boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and cook until liquid has been absorbed and rice and lentils are tender, about 15 minutes.
Season well with salt and pepper.
Meanwhile, heat remaining oil in pan and cook remaining onions until soft, well coloured and beginning to caramelise and blacken at the edges, about 30 minutes.
Arrange rice and lentils on a platter and sprinkle with caramelised onion. Serve with yoghurt and mint.
This is a great dessert to share with friends around the barbecue, as the pomegranate sauce can be made well ahead, leaving only the mangoes to be sliced and cooked for a few minutes before serving. Scarlet pomegranate seeds add an exotic tart crunch. Buy firm mangoes and leave to soften for a day or two in the fruit bowl.
Combine caster sugar and water in a jug and stir until sugar dissolves. Add pomegranate molasses and Grenadine and stir well. Rest at room temperature.
Heat barbecue to medium. Cut cheeks from each mango and brush cut sides with melted butter. Cook mangoes cut side down on barbecue, for about 3-4 minutes or until golden.
To serve, place mango cheeks on serving plate, drizzle with sauce and sprinkle with pomegranate seeds.
It’s all very well to be impressed by the extent to which the capacity of a 5 year old to delay the consumption of a marshmallow so that they receive two marshmallows later can predict their success in life.
What I’m less impressed by is the extent to which the same qualities result in ungratified lives?
I’ve seen many doctor friends successfully delay their gratification indefinitely to the point where they just miss out, on fun, and ultimately on life.
When I was a kid, I read a book called The Listmaker. It’s about a young girl who uses lists to organize and make sense of her life. At the time I didn’t read any more into it besides the fact that this was an odd hobby for a pre-teen girl to spend so much time on.
Now, although I don’t remember the book that well, I do see much more significance in the humble list–especially after researching where they come from and why we make lists.
As I researched this post I realised how hard it is to pinpoint the origin of something as simple and widespread as the list (to-do or otherwise), but I did find out some interesting stories about how lists have been used in the past and why we find them useful in everyday life.
WHY DO WE MAKE LISTS AS HUMANS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco is a big fan of lists and has some fascinating ideas about why they’re so important to humans:
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible… And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists…
Umberto Eco
Umberto explained in an interview that lists are often seen as relics of primitive cultures–simplistic devices that don’t belong in our modern day and age. However, the simple form of the list prevails again and again over time, because, as Umberto says, it has “an irresistible magic.”
Not only that, but we also form and challenge definitions of the things around us by making lists of their characteristics. For instance, if we were to describe an animal to a child, we would do so by listing characteristics like color, size, diet and habitat. Regardless of whether this matches the scientific definition of the animal or not, that’s how we make sense of it.
The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE GODFATHER OF THE TO-DO LIST?
Benjamin Franklin is a great example of someone known for using lists to encourage his own self-improvement. He famously detailed a thirteen-week plan to practice important virtues such as cleanliness, temperance, etc. Each day he tracked his progress on a chart.
Benjamin also set himself a strict daily routine, which included time for sleeping, meals and working, all set for specific times of the day. Unfortuantely, the demands of his printing business made it difficult for him to always stick to his routine, but this image shows how he aimed to spend his time:
The to-do list in particular is one that we spend a lot of time and energy on perfecting. Somehow, we don’t seem to struggle when it comes to making a shopping list and buying everything on it, but getting the tasks on our to-do list done is a whole other ball game.
4 TOP TIPS TO WRITE A TO-DO LIST THAT WILL ACTUALLY HELP YOU GET THINGS DONE
Looking at the history of lists and how they’re used, we can glean some insights about how to create a to-do list we can actually complete.
1. Break projects into tasks, don’t succumb to the Zeigarnik effect
We kind of have a reminder system built-in to our minds that nags us about unfinished tasks, called the Zeigarnik effect. It sounds pretty cool that we already have this, but it’s actually not that reliable or healthy for us.
What really happens is that there’s a disconnect between our conscious and unconscious minds–the unconscious mind can’t plan how to finish the task, but it gets annoyed with the feeling of it being unfinished. To shake off that feeling, it nags the conscious mind with reminders about the task–not to finish it, but simply to encourage us to make a plan.
If you’ve heard of David Allen’s GTD method, you’ll be familiar with his concept of “next steps,” which is pretty much the same thing. It’s the process of breaking down a project or task into smaller tasks, and planning which one will be the next step towards completing the whole thing.
This abates the nagging of the unconscious brain, as it’s satisfied that at some point we’ll get onto that task, and we know exactly how we’ll do it.
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings says the essentials of creating these do-able next steps are to make “a few very specific, aactionalbe, non-conflicting items.”
2. Prioritize ruthlessly
Maria’s post on the history of the to-do list also describes the story of a psychologist who gave a talk at the Pentagon about managing time and resources. Before the talk began, the psychologist asked everyone in the group to write a summary of their strategic approach in 25 words.
Apparently, 25 words was too little for the men to express their strategies, and the only response came from the single woman in the group, whose summary read as follows:
First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.
I’ve heard this approach suggested before in various places, and it always reminds me of the CEO I worked with at my previous company, who had a Post-It on his desk that read, “prioritize until it hurts.” in other words, learning the powerful skill of saying no. I’m not sure if he ever managed to do that, but I liked the approach.
To-do lists invariably crop up when we have so many things to do that we can’t keep track of them all in our heads (Aha! We’re back to Umberto’s thoughts on how lists help us to create order from the chaos of our lives!). Which means that we end up with lists far too long for us to complete.
Prioritizing ruthlessly seems to be the only way to actually get done what’s most important in the little time that we have.
3. “Plan ahead”–advice for which Charles Schwab paid $25,000
Here’s another cool story of how to-do lists evolved in the workplace:
Almost 100 years ago, the president of the Bethlehem Steel company in the USA was Charles M. Schwab. His company was struggling with inefficiency and Schwab didn’t know how to improve it, so he called in Ivy Lee, a well-known efficiency expert at the time.
Lee agreed to help the company, with his fee being whatever Schwab felt the results were worth after three months.
Lee’s advice to each member of the company’s management team was to write a to-do list at the end of each day, which consisted of the six most important tasks to be done the following day. Then they were told to organize the list based on the highest priority tasks.
The next day, the employes worked through the list from top to bottom, focusing on a single task at a time. At the end of the day, anything left on the list would get added to the top of tomorrow’s list when the employees once again planned for the following day.
In your own planning, you can take Lee’s advice for free and use the night before to plan your workday. Setting out the most important tasks you want to complete the following day will help you to avoid time-wasters and distractions by knowing what to work on immediately.
4. Be realistic in your planning
Sometimes it’s nice to know that even our great heroes are fallible. This story about Benjamin Franklin’s struggles to keep up with his daily to-do list shows how important it is to be realistic about how much time we have and what our priorities are.
Franklin was known to be a meticulous tracker of his daily routine and his work towards the virtues he prioritized.
Unfortunately, the demands of his business meant that he didn’t always keep up with his ideal daily routine. He often got interrupted by clients and had to ignore his schedule to meet with them.
He also noticed that some of the virtues he aspired to practice, such as frugality–not wasting anything–took up too much time for him to live life as he wanted to. Preparing his own meals and mending his own clothes all the time, for instance, meant that he didn’t have enough time for business or his side projects.
The result of these conflicting priorities was unhappiness over not completing the tasks he set for himself. As a result, he had to re-prioritize, which is something we should keep in mind.
If we’re struggling to complete our to-do lists on a regular basis (we’ve all been there at some point!), we need to make a change to the list–make it more realistic.
Although a to-do list can be infinite, our time is not. We need to match the tasks we require of ourselves to how much time and energy we can afford to spend on them. This is where prioritizing can really come in handy, as well.
Starting to develop your own, personal daily routine is one of the most powerful ways to become a great list maker. You might find some inspiration from these seven famous entrepreneurs and their routines.
Find a way that works for you
As with pretty much any kind of lifehacking or productivity topic I write about, individual mileage will vary. We all need to take into account our unique situation when experimenting with advice like this. For me, prioritizing and planning the night before has really helped. For you, being realistic might be more useful.
BONUS: JOHNNY CASH’S PERFECT, SEMI-EFFICIENT TO-DO LIST
As a last example, I found a to-do list from Johnny Cash. This wouldn’t necessarily be one we’d advocate to help you become more efficient. But then again, we can’t argue with Johnny Cash’s success, can we?
—Belle Beth Cooper is a Content Crafter at Buffer and Co-founder of Hello Code. Follow her on Twitter at @BelleBethCooper.
In the first of a three-part series, author Jonathan Gottschall discusses the science of storytelling–not just escapism, stories have real power to hold human attention and shape our thinking.
Humans live in a storm of stories. We live in stories all day long, and dream in stories all night long. We communicate through stories and learn from them. We collapse gratefully into stories after a long day at work. Without personal life stories to organize our experience, our own lives would lack coherence and meaning. Homo sapiens (wise man) is a pretty good definition for our species. But Homo fictus (fiction man) would be about as accurate. Man is the storytelling animal.
When it comes to marketing, a company like Coca-Cola gets this. They know that, deep down, they are much more a story factory than a beverage factory. No matter what they’d like us to believe, Coke’s success isn’t due to some magic in their fizzy syrup water (at least not since they took the actual cocaine out). Coke excels because they’ve been clobbering the opposition in the story wars for more than a century. People want to see themselves in the stories Coke tells. Coke understands that their customer is a member of the species Homo fictus, and that they will succeed or fail based largely on the power of their storytelling.
As Scott Donaton argued in a recent Co.Create post, other brands should learn this lesson as well as Coke has. “The challenge is clear by now,” Donaton writes, “Intrusive, interruptive, self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did, and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish in the social age. The question is what will replace the legacy model. There’s a one-word answer: stories.” Story is the answer for two reasons, both of them backed by compelling science. First, because people are naturally greedy for stories, they have a unique ability to seize and rivet our attention. Second, stories aren’t just fun escapism–they have an almost spooky ability to mold our thinking and behavior. In this post, I’ll describe the science behind the attention-seizing power of stories, leaving their molding power for a follow-up post.
Brands play in an intensely competitive attention economy. The problem isn’t just that attention is a woefully scarce resource relative to demand, it’s that it’s also shattered and scattered around. We can’t blame our smart phones or other modern technologies for our short attention spans. The human mind is a wanderer by nature. The daydream is the mind’s default state. Whenever the mind doesn’t have something really important to do, it gets bored and wanders off into la-la land. Studies show that we spend about half of our waking hours–1/3 of our lives on earth–spinning fantasies. We have about two-thousand of these a day (!), with an average duration of fourteen seconds. In other words, our minds are simply flitting all over the place all the time.
So this is the most fundamental challenge we face in the attention economy: how do we pin down the wandering mind? How do we override the natural tendency for a mind to skip away from whatever we are showing it? By telling stories. In normal life, we spin about one-hundred daydreams per waking hour. But when absorbed in a good story–when we watch a show like Breaking Bad or read a novel like The Hunger Games–we experience approximately zero daydreams per hour. Our hyper minds go still and they pay close attention, often for hours on end. This is really very impressive. What it means is that story acts like a drug that reliably lulls us into an altered state of consciousness.
To illustrate why, let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine you are living in Paris in 1896, and you’ve been invited to see something that you’ve heard about but never seen. You walk out of the bright hot streets into a cool, dark theater, and there’s a white screen that opens up in a dazzling explosion of light–like a window thrown open on an alternative universe. You are watching one of the first films screenings in the world. And what you see through the magic window is terrifying. The film is by the Lumiere brothers and it is called The Arrival of a Train. Go ahead, watch it now–but brace yourself! Arguably, this is history’s first horror film.
Don’t bother watching the whole thing. Nothing happens. A train arrives at a station and people mill around. Were you terrified? Well, according to film lore, the first audience for this film was so terrified that they shot out of their seats and stampeded for the exit. They did not want to get run over by that train. Film historians believe this story of chaos in a Parisian theater is probably exaggerated. But whether true or not, the story communicates the same idea. The first movie audiences were totally unsophisticated about the illusion of film. But after more than a century of experience, we moderns are highly sophisticated about film. Movie trains don’t scare us anymore.
But not so fast. Consider this trailer for the horror film Paranormal Activity 3.What’s happening here? These people aren’t idiots. This isn’t their first film. They know the blood isn’t real. They know there are no ghosts or monsters in the theater. They know everything they are seeing is just light flickering on a two-dimensional background. So why are they treating fake things as real? Neuroscience of brains on fiction gives us a clue. If you slide a person into an FMRI machine that watches the brain while the brain watches a story, you’ll find something interesting–the brain doesn’t look like a spectator, it looks more like a participant in the action. When Clint Eastwood is angry on screen, the viewers’ brains look angry too; when the scene is sad, the viewers’ brains also look sad.
“We” know the story is fake, but that doesn’t stop the unconscious parts of the brain from processing it like real. That’s why the audience for a horror film cringes in their chairs, screams for help, and balls up to protect their vital organs. That’s why our hearts race when the hero of a story is cornered–why we weep over the fate of a pretend pet like Old Yeller. Stories powerfully hook and hold human attention because, at a brain level, whatever is happening in a story is happening to us and not just them.
But this all leads to a bigger question. Most of us think of stories as a way to pleasantly while away our leisure time. Is there any evidence that story is actually effective in influencing us–in modifying our thinking and behavior? Yes. Lots. That’s the subject of my next post.
INFECTING AN AUDIENCE: WHY GREAT STORIES SPREAD (2 of 3)
BY JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
In the second of a two-part series, Jonathan Gottschall discusses the unique power stories have to change minds, and the key to their effectiveness.
In his 1897 book What is Art? the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy defined art as “an infection.” Good art, Tolstoy wrote, infects the audience with the storyteller’s emotion and ideas. The better the art, the stronger the infection–the more stealthily it works around whatever immunities we possess and plants the virus. Tolstoy reached this conclusion through artistic intuition, not science, but more than a century after Tolstoy’s death this is exactly what psychologists are finding in the lab. When we enter into a story, we enter into an altered mental state–a state of high suggestibility.
Note that this goes against our culture’s dominant idea about stories. When I ask my students why people like stories, most cite escapism. Life is hard. Storyland is easy. Stories give us a short vacation from the troubles of our real lives. We enter the pretend worlds of stories and have a nice time, and then walk away unscathed and unchanged. But if we think this we are wrong. Studies show that our fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by our stories.
For instance, if psychologists get a bunch of people in the lab and just tell them all the reasons it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals, they don’t make much progress. People who feel differently dig in their heels. They get critical and skeptical. They don’t walk out of the lab with more tolerant views. But if they watch a TV show like Will and Grace, which treats homosexuality in non-judgmental ways, their own views are likely to move in the same non-judgmental direction. And if a lot of us start empathizing with gay characters on shows like Ellen, Modern Family, Six Feet Under, andGlee, you can get a driver of massive social change. American attitudes toward homosexuality have liberalized with dizzying speed over the last 15 years or so, and social scientists give TV some of the credit.
So stories have a unique ability to infect minds with ideas and attitudes that spread contagiously. The next question is obvious: How do we get a piece of that power? It isn’t easy because the story has to be good or it doesn’t work. Here’s what I mean by “good”: psychological studies show that we don’t get infected by a story unless we are emotionally transported–unless we lose ourselves in the story.
And how do we make an audience lose themselves? This is a hard task that countless books and courses on film and creative writing try to answer. But we can make a good start by learning to use story’s basic master formula. Stories–from great epic poems to office scuttlebutt–are almost uniformly about humans facing problems and trying to overcome them. Stories have a problem-solution structure. Stories are always about trouble. Stories aren’t often about people having good days. They are usually about people having bad days–the very worst days of their lives–and struggling to get through.
But stories are not usually about meaningless problem solving. Unless a story is communicating some message or moral, some set of values or ideas, it seems empty. Moby Dick wouldn’t be a great story if it were just about a deranged whale smashing boats and chomping sailors. Moby Dickis a great novel because all that action communicates a deeper message about good and evil.
In a business setting, this makes story a natural vehicle for conveying our ideas, our values, our vision. At bottom, that’s what all the action in a story is for: a story is a delivery vehicle for the teller’s message. Story is the thing that sneaks the infection past our immunities, past our resistance. And the story then turns us into hosts who spread the infection through our social networks and help create epidemics.
The neuroeconomist Paul Zak studies how this works at a brain level. He paid research subjects $20 and then had them read a sad and compelling story about a father and his terminally ill son, taking blood samples before and after. At the end of the study, subjects were given the chance to donate money to a charity serving sick kids. After the story, the blood samples showed spikes of oxcytocin in the blood. Oxytocin has been called the empathy chemical. And the more oxcytocin there was in the blood, the more these cash-strapped, empathy-drunk, students donated to charity (on average they donated half of their pay). The study suggests that stories change our behaviors by actually changing our brain chemistry.
But Zak stresses, as I do, that the information about the sick child has to be presented in a classic story structure. Lacking that structure, you don’t get emotional transportation, you don’t get chemical changes in the brain, and you don’t get the behavior change–which in this case consists, take note, of people deciding to cough up money.
For an example of a brand that understands story structure, look at this commercial for Jack Links beef jerky. Jack Links expertly compresses a classic story arc into a sleek 30-second spot. We have our protagonist–an innocent sasquatch who is so gentle and hopeless that he can’t even catch a bunny for his supper. And we have our cocky, beer-guzzling antagonists who torment our sasquatch for no reason at all. And then we have the poetic justice that people thirst for in stories: the hero gives the villains what they deserve.
Notice that these ads say nothing about the qualities of the product. No smiling pitchman strolls out to say, “Try our beef jerky–it’s wholesome and delicious!” Jack Link’s strategy was simply to tell the coolest and funniest stories it could, with the jerky appearing in the stories only as product placement–in exactly the same way that a Coke can might show up in an episode of CSI. This attempt to create a positive emotional connection with consumers worked big time. People liked the commercials so much that they went out of their way to watch them millions of times on YouTube and to spread them around through their social networks. As a result of the “Messin with Sasquatch” campaign, Jack Link’s is now a brand that most of us know and think about positively.
This all raises another question. Should marketers feel bad about using stories as a tool to shape values and earn a buck? Sure. But maybe not too much. After all, guys like Melville and Tolstoy and Shakespeare were playing the same game. They hoped to infect us with particular ideas about life, while earning as much money and fame as possible. This article isn’t a set of instructions for turning story into a prostitute. It’s an explanation for why story has always been a prostitute.
But let’s back up for a moment. Is storytelling really locked into a master formula? Hasn’t the digital revolution paved the way for a new kind of storytelling? That’s the subject of my next post. Is it time for story 2.0?
STORY 2.0: THE SURPRISING THING ABOUT THE NEXT WAVE OF NARRATIVE
BY JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
Wrapping up a three-part series, Jonathan Gottschall discusses the problem with interactivity and some eternal truths of storytelling.
Imagine the novelist James Joyce peering through his window into the Parisian night. He’s chain-smoking. He’s taking a bit of medicinal cocaine for his ailments. He’s adjusting his thick glasses and squinting down at his big notebook pages, scratching out Finnegan’s Wake in blue crayon. He’s laughing so hard at his own jokes–his rollicking wordplay, his lewd asides–that his long-suffering wife, Nora, shouts at him from bed to knock it off so she can get some sleep.
Finnegan’s Wake was an act of breathtaking literary swagger. Like Jackson Pollack slinging paint at canvas, Joyce wanted to smash up the traditional grammar of his art form. Frustrated with the limitations of English, he invented his own language, mashing together words and word bits from dozens of tongues into a new dialect. Bored with the contrivances of “cutanddry plot,” Joyce did away with plot almost entirely. And while he was at it, he pretty much demolished the whole notion of character, too. Joyce’s characters shift and morph, changing names, personality attributes, and physical traits. James Joyce set out to take something as old as humanity–the storytelling impulse–and make it new.
Joyce–mostly blind, toothless, obsessed with his money and his fame–worked heroically at Finnegan’s Wake for 17 years, producing 700 pages that would, he bragged, keep literary critics busy for 300 years. In this, he probably succeeded. The book is now hailed as a towering monument of experimental art, and as one of the greatest novels ever written. According to Yale critic Harold Bloom, Finnegan’s Wake is the one work of modern literature whose genius stands comparison to Dante and Shakespeare.
When I give talks about the science of storytelling to business audiences, I always get the same question: “What’s the next big thing in story? What new thing will come along and transform everything”? My audiences seem to worry–as Joyce did–that the old story forms have gone a little stale, and the time is ripe for a bit of creative destruction. The digital revolution has put a massive number of new and powerful tools at the storyteller’s disposal. And if technology has revolutionized our tools, shouldn’t this lead to a revolution in the stories themselves? This whole way of thinking is summed up in an annual summit called The Future of Storytelling, which bills itself as “Reinventing the way stories are told.” Is it time for story 2.0?
Interactivity seems to be the holy grail. The idea of a creative class feeding stories to passive consumers is so 1995. Everything in the digital universe is two-way, interactive, and collaborative. Digital-age consumers will want to interact with their stories–control them, talk back to them. They don’t want stories washing over them like waves, they want to jump on the waves and surf. All storytelling doesn’t necessarily have to go as far as video games–where you get to actually be the character in the movie and make choices that determine how it ends. But that’s the idea.
Before we get too swept up in our enthusiasm to reinvent storytelling, let’s return to James Joyce. There’s a paradox about Finnegan’s Wake. It is known as one of the greatest novels a human has ever penned, and also as a novel that humans simply cannot stand to read. I’m a literature professor, and I’ve never met a single colleague who has managed to read the whole thing, or has even wanted to. Finnegan’s Wake is admired for its sheer balls and its astonishing, half-loony creativity, but it’s almost entirely unread and unloved.
James Joyce | From Finnegan’s Wake: “Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous pervinciveness! Flowers. A cloud. But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues the whispered wilfulness (’tis demonal!) and shadows shadows multiplicating (il folsoletto nel falsoletto col fazzolotto dal fuzzolezzo), totients quotients, they tackle their quarrel. Sickamoor’s so woful sally. Ancient’s aerger. And eachway bothwise glory signs. What if she love Sieger less though she leave Ruhm moan? That’s how our oxyggent has gotten ahold of half their world. Moving about in the free of the air and mixing with the ruck. Enter eller, either or.
Master storytellers are wizards who lull us into a trance. When entranced by story, we lose track of our immediate surroundings as our minds teleport us into an alternative story universe (psychologists call this phenomenon narrative transportation). Finnegan’s failure to connect with readers isn’t due only to the novel’s fantastically obscure language (one critic refers to the novel as an act of “linguistic sodomy”). It’s because the novel–with its incomprehensible plot and shape-shifting characters–doesn’t cast an entrancing spell. Joyce denies us what we most want in a story: that sensation of falling through the pages of a book and losing track of ourselves in a land of make-believe.
Here’s the problem with interactivity: There’s no evidence people actually want it in their stories. No one watches Mad Men or reads Gone Girl yearning for control of the story as it unfolds. Interaction is precisely what most of us don’t want during story time. The more we interact with a story, the more we have to maintain the alertness of the mind operating in the real world. We can’t achieve the dreamy trance that constitutes so much of the joy of story–and the power. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Finnegan’s Wake, for all its splendor as a kind of impressionistic word painting, repels readers because of its interactivity. Most critics think that Joyce was trying to get away from what he called “wideawake language” to re-create the chaos of dreaming life. Paradoxically, however, the sheer difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake forces readers to maintain a “wideawake” frame of mind as they attempt to puzzle their way through. They can’t slip into the waking dream of story time.
Image courtesy of AMC
Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all. Over the last 15 years, perhaps the most spectacularly successful “new” thing in story has been very old. I’m speaking here of the rise of great cable dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. But there’s nothing new about these shows. They are just very good novels transferred to the screen. (The much ballyhooed anti-hero trend may be new to TV drama, but it’s nothing new to literature.) When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now–and never will be–anything new under the sun.
Sharing a story
To see what I’m getting at, take a good look at this famous photograph of the storytelling animal in action. This photograph captures Kung San bushmen sharing a story in 1947. The storyteller is at the center, holding his arms up like a wizard throwing spells. He’s drawn his audience together skin against skin, mind against mind. He’s dictating the images in their minds, the feelings in their hearts. He’s wielding huge power. And he’s doing so only with the most natural human tools: his expressive face and hands, his voice, his story. And things aren’t much different today. There’s an ancient grammar to story that opens our mental locks, and gives us the joy of story. A tablet computer is a bit like the clay tablet from 3000 BC or the printing press from 1450–a technology that is radically changing how we consume stories, without changing the fundamental elements of the stories themselves.
James Joyce certainly knew how to tell stories in the classic way (see his immortal short-story collection Dubliners). As he wrote to a friend aboutFinnegan’s Wake, “I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. . . . Every novelist knows the recipe. . . . But I, after all, am trying to tell the story . . . in a new way.” Joyce was genuinely surprised that so few people–a portion of highly sophisticated critics aside–could connect with his new way of telling a story. He really had, as H. G. Wells complained to him in a letter, “turned his back on the common man.”
In business storytelling, connecting with the “common man” is the whole point. And, as I’ve argued in these posts, successful connection means hewing to the principles of good storytelling that are coded in the DNA of our species and won’t change until human nature does.
In one of the blockbuster’s most memorable sequences, Sandra Bullock found herself howling like a dog with a stranger on a space station radio. So who was that guy?
Gravity is a perfect example of why we go to the movies: It’s as full and complete a combination of storytelling and spectacle as we’ve seen in recent years.The film was notable for the simplicity of its core story, a story that unfolded as the characters struggled to survive in space, with no expansion or flashbacks required. But there were other worlds introduced within that story. And viewers can explore one of them in Aningnaaq, a companion short film directed by Jonas Cuaron, co-writer of Gravity (and son of the feature film’s director, Alfonso Cuaron).
The short, which runs six minutes and takes place on Earth, where the laws of physics are in full effect, was released November 20 by Warner Bros. The studio opted to submit the short for Academy Award consideration, and putting it out to the world is a fine way to make sure that voters see it–though given Gravity‘s significance, it’s hard to imagine that they’d have passed.
As the Jonas Cuaron told The Hollywood Reporter, the idea for the film came when two were working through the screenplay and the character was inspired by someone he met while visiting Greenland.
In any case: Take six minutes to meet Aningnaaq, the man who finds himself on the opposite end of Sandra Bullock’s radio distress call. Aningnaaq is facing difficult conditions himself–the film takes place several days out from a journey through the tundra–and the story of his barking dogs and the baby who brings tears to Bullock’s eyes in Gravity make for a tender reminder that everyone’s circumstances are often more dramatic than you think.
It’s clear the algorithm that DoHA established was stuffed if what they say about a glass of water vs chicko rolls is true.
The fact that dairy has held sway indicates the project has been undermined.
Never mind if it ever gets adopted, which is unlikely given AFGC’s mutterings at the press club recently.
Then finally, how much of an impact will food labeling actually have, given all the other drivers of the problem of fundamental overeating. I suspect industry is using food labelling as a straw man to keep the bureaucrats and academics tied up while industry marches on its merry way.
This is a classic case of policy development driven by obsessions with process rather than focus on outcome.
THE Department of Health and Ageing has admitted it changed how it rated dairy products under a radical new food labelling scheme following lobbying from the industry – but staunchly defended its assessment methods.
In Senate estimates this week, department secretary Professor Jane Halton said the dairy industry had complained about how its products fared in the new star system designed to combat obesity.
“The concern that was raised in respect of the algorithm in respect of dairy was that it didn’t give dairy the right prominence,” she said.
“The [department’s] project group considered in great detail how dairy might be recalibrated. We’ve pulled dairy out and we’ve got different categories now.”
But Professor Halton rejected “in the strongest possible terms” suggestions the formulae were wrong after the Senate heard a glass of water would be rated as less healthy than some junk food products.
“It is highly robust and it has been tested across a large number of foods,” she said of the system.
Other industries had told the department they wanted their products rated “better” but she would not say which.
In a statement, Senator Bridget McKenzie said the new scheme risked sending the message that healthy products like milk and cheese were unhealthy.
“The fact that under this scheme a glass of water is less healthy than a Chiko Roll calls into question the whole basis of the front-of-pack labelling scheme,” she said.
Research showed healthy amounts of dairy were linked to reduced risk of several chronic diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, stroke and type 2 diabetes, she said.
The scheme is expected to have the star ratings on food packaging by mid-2014.
This month Ingredion Inc. rolled out Weightain, a satiety ingredient the firm claims can reduce daily caloric intake by up to 50 or 100 calories per day.
Weightain contains a proprietary high-amylose whole grain corn (high in prebiotic natural resistant starch), along with a viscous hydrocolloid, added using a heat-moisture treatment process, which work together to impact satiety and calorie consumption, according to the company.
Starch fermentation in the colon triggers satiety, increased gastrointestinal viscosity prolongs absorption, reducing calorie consumption, and whole grains delay digestion, reducing hunger pangs.
