readtrung.com

Nathan Fielder and the Most Meta Documentary Ever

'There were certain things that are not true,' Arnold explained about Pumping Iron. 'And that's why we never called it a documentary, we called it always a docu-drama because certain things were created in order to make it more interesting because it was very clear to us that the only way we could raise the money for the movie was by making it more dramatic. So therefore, let's create some drama, some conflict. Let's create a villain. Let's create a hero. Let's create the guy that has the psychological power over people.'

whyisthisinteresting

WITI Interview: Paul Theroux on a Life of Travel Writing

The only way I think you can really write about something, or somewhere, is to talk to strangers about it. When people are speaking to me, it's as an equal. I'm there at the diner or whatever, having breakfast, you're next to me having yours, we strike up a conversation. The omelette; the weather; the upcoming election.

honest-broker.com

The 50 Essential Western Films

He uses up more ammo in a single scene than John Wayne required for an entire career. But there's no catharsis here. Just a huge body count, and a tiny number of survivors. In a way, this was a western to end all westerns.

whyisthisinteresting

The Friday Interview with Charles Cumming

Some intelligence officers will never talk to a journalist, but they will talk to a novelist. In my experience that's an outlet for intelligence officers, a release valve if you like. They can tell me things that they know I will bend into fiction, thereby absolving them of any qualms they might have about revealing secrets.

whyisthisinteresting

The Doxa Orange Edition

What now looks like a fairly aggressive style choice came out of an effort to make the watch easier to read underwater. The design gives you something to look at; the people and stories around it give you somewhere to go.

honest-broker.com

How Our Leisure Time Got Monetized

According to anthropologist Andrea Migliano's survey of 300 members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Philippines, she asked each respondent to pick five people they would want as companions if they were setting up a new community. She expected that they would choose the best hunters. Or maybe the strongest or the best at building. Or perhaps the best healer or the smartest leader. Instead they preferred the best storytellers.

honest-broker.com

The Best Gospel Music Happening Right Now

I note that Jelly Roll spent time behind bars himself. That comes across in his powerful connection with the inmates.

themarginalian.org

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

whyisthisinteresting

The Thrift Store Edition

"Open up a newspaper and take your pick. The energy crisis, the hostages — it was a marathon of disaster," he explained. "People needed Argent again for proof that there had been good times before the bad times."

lennysnewsletter.com

How to make people care about your startup

Starting a company is a life-altering pursuit with a famously high failure rate. Whatever reason sent you down that path, it was once compelling enough to rearrange your whole life around and recruit others to do the same. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.

whyisthisinteresting

The Televised Darts Edition

Premier League football (soccer, to some) is played on a gigantic pitch, with 22 players, and demands about 30 cameras to capture it all. World championship darts has just one small board, and only two players, but will still use 24 cameras.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Margaux Black

finance is ultimately just a mirror for human behavior and sociology anyway. It’s worth paying attention to. Also, more fiction!!! I will die on this hill. The more widely you read across fiction, the better you actually understand culture, history, and people.

readtheprofile.com

Kevin O'Leary Is Happy Playing the Villain

Heroes are expected to be flawless. Villains are allowed to be human. Audiences may not always like them, but they remember them and connect with their flaws.

readtrung.com

Pixar's $6 Billion Lunch

In the summer of 1994, there was a lunch. Me, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, the late Joe Ranft all sat down [at the Hidden City Cafe in Point Richmond, California near Pixar's head office]. Toy Story was almost complete and we thought 'well jeez, if we're going to make another movie, we better get started now'. So at that lunch, we knocked around a bunch of ideas that eventually became A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo. The last one we talked about that day was the story of a robot named Wall-E.

honest-broker.com

The 50 Essential Western Films

I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won't learn any other way.

themarginalian.org

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”

When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power — upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane.

personalcanon.com

i used to think that novels were a waste of time

Reading a novel don't always make us more moral, for instance—although my moral intuitions have been shaped by reading about the adulterous affairs of Russian aristocrats, and the political idealism of Norwegian PR consultants. The modest claim I'll make here is that novels and films have made me a better person, through the obscure mechanisms of style and form and story, and I'll never be without them again.

themarginalian.org

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: Apple’s next CEO & the billionaire who wants to reshape Miami

Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody's life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it.

honest-broker.com

Everything You Expect Is Missing in 'Project Hail Mary'

For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.

honest-broker.com

The Strangest Book in Harvard Library

This peculiar man took ads in the newspaper, offering to hire "talkers" who would tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives. The end result was a diary with more than 1,000 characters—striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored narrative.

3quarksdaily.com

Heated Rivalry In Russia

After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.

3quarksdaily.com

You Look Good in (Morally) Grey: An Ode to Sarah J. Maas’ Rhysand

Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole.