George Soros’s Foundation Starts Up New Arts Fellowships
“Soros Arts Fellowship [is] an initiative to support innovative mid-career artists using art and public space to advance ‘pluralistic, democratic, and just societies.’ The eight fellows received an $80,000 stipend to realize an ‘ambitious socially engaged art project’ over the following 18 months.” – Inside Philanthropy
A version of this article appeared in the December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review. Peter Guber is Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, owner and co-executive chairman of the Golden State ...
Storyteller Kevin Roberts:
The Harvard Business Review is not the first place you’d go to for advice on telling stories, but that is exactly where I found a great article by Peter Guber. Guber is a long-time movie producer whose credits range from Flashdance to Rainman, Batman Returns to Tango & Cash, so he’s not exactly your usual HBR management geek. As an executive producer, he’s someone who's had to make the call on whether a story works or doesn’t, so his article struck a chord with me. His ideas aren’t based on abstract theory, but on whether real live people are going to shell out cash for your story.
Guber’s article is behind a subscription wall, but I think his four truths about what makes a great story are useful whether you are pitching an idea for a website, reporting results to the Board or inspiring staff to work up to the next level.
Guber’s article is behind a subscription wall, but I think his four truths about what makes a great story are useful whether you are pitching an idea for a website, reporting results to the Board or inspiring staff to work up to the next level.
1. Truth to the teller. Yes, authenticity again. Show and share who you are with an open heart.
2. Truth to the audience. It’s Value for Time. They give you their time on the understanding that you will give them emotional value and personal insight.
3. Truth to the moment. Be prepared and then – improvise. The preparation will ensure you don’t lose focus. The improvisation will make sure you don’t lose your audience!
4. Truth to the mission. Don’t even try to inspire people to do something you don’t believe in yourself. They won’t believe in it either.
In my book, sisomo: The Future on Screen, I wrote a chapter on stories and storytelling. The status of stories is transforming. Their ability to inspire people and connect with consumers is putting them at the heart of business. I’ve often quoted Rolf Jensen of the Dream Company that “The highest-paid person in the first half of the next century will be the ‘storyteller’.” That’s a prediction to make people pay attention!
In sisomo, I had 12 ideas about what makes a great story.
In sisomo, I had 12 ideas about what makes a great story.
1. Great stories touch us. They connect with our own desires and experiences and what we care about.
2. Great stories are contagious. The itch to pass on a great story is almost unbearable. Stories have to be shared.
3. Great stories are cloaked in credibility. They make practical sense, intuitive sense, emotional sense.
4. Great stories connect with the emotions. Genuine, compelling emotion drives every story.
5. Great stories surprise and delight. They are infinitely capable of the unexpected. It’s not just about novelty and revelations but also creativity and emotional truth.
6. Great stories have context. Whether it’s a fairy tale or a business lesson, stories weave facts and events together so we understand their larger meanings.
7. Great stories are fast workers. They get in ahead of our rationalizations and logic with their own compelling truth.
8. Great stories are crafted. We all like stories to be recounted with skill and effort.
9. Great stories make us laugh. Humor disarms us and opens us up to new ideas.
10. Great stories teach us to be smart. Through great stories we learn to spot disinformation in an instant. Shoddy stories reinforce prejudice and hide the truth.
11. Great stories introduce us to great characters; people we want to spend time with.
12. Great stories open us up to other worlds. Welcome to the world of the imagination, to new geographies, to new realities.
I live in aged care but it's not home: an insider's story
Merle Mitchell
Reading Catcher in the Rye in Moscow. For Soviet audiences, imbibing Western culture — and misinterpreting it — was an expression of a freedom... Reading Catcher in Rye
Have You Picked The Music For Your Funeral Yet?
Data by Co-op FuneralCare suggests that 24% of UK adults (in a survey of 2,000) have already made clear what music they want played at their funeral – up from 19% in 2016 – with one in four opting for songs that will make mourners laugh. – The Guardian
The study also reports that "heart attack patients were shown to have lower than normal cholesterol levels of LDL-C" and that older people with higher levels of bad cholesterol tend to live longer than those with lower levels.
Why You Should Start Binge-Reading Right Now
The New York Times – Ditch Netflix for a novel. And not just because a novelist is telling you to. By Ben Dolnick. Mr. Dolnick is a novelist. “…But in book after book, if you do push on through one chapter break, and then on through the chapter break after that, something amazing happens. Subplots that would once have been murky to the point of incomprehensibility (what was the deal with that dead sea captain again?) step into the light. Little jokes and echoes, separated by dozens or even hundreds of pages, come rustling out of the text forest. A writer’s voice — Grace Paley at her slangy best, Nicholson Baker at his hypomanic craziest — starts to seep into and color the voice of your innermost thoughts. You will, in other words, find yourself propelled through a book that would once have been a multiseason dead weight in your tote bag. And this will not be the creepy propulsion of the countdown that draws you guiltily into a “White Collar” marathon, but the intimate, happy propulsion that keeps you talking well into the night with a visiting friend…”
The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could relieve them of their fortunes, if not their heads. In this sense, they could end up serving, in Lenin’s words, as “useful idiots” in their own destruction.
MEANWHILE, ON THE LEFT, IT’S STILL “RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!”: Former CIA Officer Pleads Guilty to Chinese Espionage Conspiracy.
East Germany: Youth Shot at Berlin Wall
He was only one person, one 18-year-old who was killed trying to escape communism, but the moment he was killed the Berlin Wall became real because everyone near the wall saw him die. In a poignant record of the tragedy, British Pathe provided this unnarrated, silent 3-minute clip.
“Peter Fechter (14 January 1944 – 17 August 1962) was a German bricklayer from Berlin in what became East Germany in 1945. He was 18 when he became one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall’s East German border guards while trying to cross over to what was then West Berlin.”
–Wikipedia
–Wikipedia
Perhaps as many as a hundred million people were victims of communism in the last century, deliberately rounded up, shot, starved, or simply forced to march into snowy wasteland until dead, exterminated by communist regimes.
The most comprehensive statistical source for democide statistics, Death By Government, puts the toll at 106 million. Necrometrics estimates that Stalin and Maoalone killed 60 million. Wikipedia, defining democide more narrowly, puts the toll between 21 million and 70 million. The Museum of iCommunism estimates 100 million murdered. The Black Book of iCommunism estimates 80 to 100 million.
But these are just statistics. As psychologists have pointed out, it’s impossible for the human mind to grasp the magnitude of that level of horror through sheer numbers. Just as Schindler’s List was instrumental in getting the public to come to finally terms with the Holocaust, it is perhaps through film that death toll of communism can best be understood.
Every May 1st for the last several years, Ilya Somin has written an editorial for the Washington Post declaring the “May Day” so beloved by the Left to be renamed “Victims of Communism Day.” I concur, and so, while socialists blissfully celebrate their worker’s paradise this May Day, indifferent to the human cost of their political philosophy, I propose that well-meaning people consider watching a film on the subject, both out of respect for those lost and to be intellectually armed against the ignorance of those still in denial. Here are some recommendations.
MISS LIBERTY: Victims of Communism Day | Ten Films to Honor the Dead
