Happy Friday!

This is your official notice that the weekend is about to begin. Close that office document, get yourself a nice drink (it’s just about autumnal enough for hot chocolate) and treat yourself to our carefully curated list of 10 inspiring links. Reading this email still counts as work, but it doesn’t feel like it. If your boss doesn’t agree, send them to us and we’ll talk them round.

Talking of things that don’t feel like work, I’m really enjoying writing our current series on how to find great stories for our Attention Matters newsletter every Wednesday. Next week’s edition is going to give you two really valuable tricks to find great stories inside your organisations - I can’t wait to share them, so sign up if you haven’t already. We’re also trialling a 15 day story finding sprint workshop for new clients. So if you’d like help finding great stories for your company, hit the button below and we’ll set up a call.

In the meantime, I think your hot chocolate is cool enough to drink now. Time to lean back and browse the ten stories we found for you this week.

Have a great weekend!

Matt

Teenage Boys’ Lives Are More Complex Than Ever (8-minute read)

Keep It Real Campaign (multi-interview feature)

Inside The Chaos of Mr Beast’s Reality TV Show (10-minute read)

The Rise of ‘Bento’ Book Covers (Dozens of inspirational images)

When Kris Kristofferson Stood By Sinéad O’Connor (5-minute watch)

Bizarre But Cute MIDI Wooden Choir (5 minute listen)

The Megalopolis Live Actors Breaking The Fourth Wall (timeline)

Adam Curtis on Culture and Power (15-minute read)

Above The Line vs Below The Line Media (7-minute read)

Bop Spotter: The Shazam Hack Listening To Music From The Street (fun art project)

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. Here are 2 reasons to get in touch. 

1. “I want to tell better stories” – You’ve been creating content but it’s not having the impact you need. Talk to us about our Content Audit Workshop.

2. “I need help making things” – You know what you want to make, but need an agency to make it. We can help make your podcast, video, publication, animation or newsletter. We do other things too. Get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

Teenage Boys’ Lives Are More Complex Than Ever (8-minute read)
Back in the mid 00s, I worked commissioning content for 14-19 yr olds at UK public broadcaster Channel 4. The research we did on teens and their lives always felt heart-breakingly familiar from my own awkward teen years. This FACE interview with teenage boys about their lives feels very similar. They might live in a different world from my 20th century teen years, but the combination of a sense of limitless possibilities with the very real dangers and constraints of the adult world they’re entering is just the same.

Keep It Real Campaign (multi-interview feature)
We’re enjoying playing around with a bunch of AI tools at Storythings, but we’d never use them as a replacement for human creativity. They are tools we can use to enhance, not replace, the fabulously creative in-house and freelance talent we rely on. Creator Talent agency Raptive are starting a campaign to ‘keep it real’, and we wholeheartedly agree.

Inside The Chaos of Mr Beast’s Reality TV Show (10-minute read)
Mr Beast’s Amazon-funded production is getting a lot of critical press right now, mostly because of the sheer scale and complexity of the production. I’m not sure whether some of this is just jealousy or sour grapes, but there’s one moment in this article that hints the production has crossed a really important line. One production assistant complained “There was either not enough food, they were running out, or it wasn’t ready on time.” If there’s one thing you have to get right to make a hit TV show, it’s lunch.

The Rise of ‘Bento’ Book Covers (Dozens of inspirational images)
I love it when someone spots a trend that feels so obvious, but you hadn’t noticed it yourself. This great article from I Need A Book Cover shows a recent trend in book cover design for ‘bento box’ style illustrations, with different image and text elements in comic book like panels. The examples are just gorgeous.

When Kris Kristofferson Stood By Sinéad O’Connor (5-minute watch)
Hugh shared this on the Storythings Slack channel, as Kristofferson sadly died this week. It’s a remarkable 5 minute video splicing together Sinéad O’Connor’s controversial SNL appearance, and her blistering response to audience jeers two week’s later. Kristofferson supports her throughout, showing what a true ally he really was.

Bizarre But Cute MIDI Wooden Choir (5 minute listen)
I have no idea how cult audio company Teenage Engineering has managed to build a business around their increasingly esoteric products, but I’m glad they exist. After their recent medieval synthesiser, they’ve now launched a MIDI powered choir comprised of wooden dolls that could have appeared in Midsommar. Kind of creepy, but also kind of cool.

The Megalopolis Live Actors Breaking The Fourth Wall (5-min read)
Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis is getting a bit of a pasting in reviews, and I can’t say I’m rushing to see it. But I found this truly extraordinary detail in a review - some performances involve a live actor in the cinema who steps up and performs to an audio track mid way through the film, with Adam Driver looking out at them from the screen. I wish films did this kind of thing more often.

Adam Curtis on Culture and Power (15-minute read)
Back in 2011, Adam Curtis gave a speech at our conference The Story in London. It was a brilliant talk about the emerging world of digital culture, and how power operates in it. This new interview for CRACK magazine builds on the same themes, and includes Curtis’ take on AI: “AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist.”  

Above The Line vs Below The Line Media (7-minute read)
Brian Morrissey on what Above the Line and Below the Line looks like in a world of limitless synthetic content: “The models that are best positioned are varied. The one unifying thread is distinctiveness. Many of the centrifugal forces of digital media have created incentives to create versions of the same thing. This is what happens when you lose control of distribution.”

Bop Spotter: The Shazam Hack Listening To Music From The Street (fun art project)
This is a fantastic hack/art project: a cheap Android phone, powered by solar panels, is fixed to a mystery location in San Francisco, with the Shazam app constantly running. As it picks out and recognises music openly played on the street by passers-by, they are tracked and displayed on this beautifully retro website.

That’s it! We hope you enjoyed our curation of stories this week. Maybe you have a friend, family member or colleague who’d like to get this direct into their inbox. Please ask them to subscribe, we’d really appreciate it!

Thanks for reading. Till next week!

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the rest of Team Storythings

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