I wanted to say three extemporaneous things before I launch it in my prepared comments. The first was I wanted to thank Freethink and the Templeton Foundation. What an amazing night. I mean, I'm, I'm just like so impressed and moved and, you know, the last act, I just, I sort of wish I was on mushrooms now, and when they asked me to do this, I thought, yeah, sure.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
She enjoyed a distinguished career in public education, remembered for her intelligence, articulate teaching style, and dedication to preserving history and culture. Beyond the classroom, Ms. Boyce was celebrated for her joy in singing and her beautiful operatic voice. She performed widely, bringing to life African American spirituals, operatic arias, Broadway classics, and art songs. Her recitals often included sing-alongs, inviting audiences to share in the music and storytelling traditions she cherished.
The 2025 film Frankenstein reframes Mary Shelley's story as a narrative told across two worlds: Victor speaking on a freezing ship after being rescued, and the Creature recounting his long journey of wandering and despair. Healing Through Storytelling The film is structured through storytelling itself-Victor's tale told under duress, and the Creature's own response as a counter-story he had held inside for years. Their exchanges suggest how many relationships fracture when we fail to tell the stories that hold our pain
Queer writer/director Julia Jackson ( Bonus Track) has crafted a stylish and clever queer romance with 100 Nights of Hero. The film, opening in area theatres December 5 and adapted from Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel, The One Hundred Nights of Hero, is set in a fictional medieval land where a woman's place is to marry and have sons, not to read or write.
When Quentin Farmer was getting his startup Portola off the ground, one of the first hires he made was a sci-fi novelist. The co-founders began building the AI companion company in late 2023 with only a seed of an idea: Their companions would be decidedly non-human. Aliens, in fact, from outer space. But when they asked a large language model to generate a backstory, they got nothing but slop. The model simply couldn't tell a good story.
Recipes carry stories, and often when they have been passed down from generation to generation, these tales have a chapter added to them each time they are made. Family members concoct elaborate treats and seasoning mixes, which in some cases travel across oceans to end up on our dinner tables. We would like to hear about the recipes that have stood the test of time for you, and never fail to impress.
Do you know how your parents met? Where your grandparents went to school? Your mother's first job? My friend (and travel agent!) Carol Shaddux came up with a fun way to use the Do You Know Scale, a 20-item questionnaire I developed with my colleague Marshall Duke to assess knowledge of family stories. Carol suggests writing out each of the 20 questions on a strip of paper and having each family member pick one and then either tell or ask to hear that story.
As a daughter of the Mississippi Delta and Black woman in the South, so many narratives about me have been told without me. My body, as trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk would say, keeps the score. Nevertheless, as a journalist, entrepreneur, mental health counselor, evaluator, and now foundation program officer, I have had the opportunity to combine and crystallize the importance of storytelling, leadership, healing, and lived expertise.
For almost 40 years of training real estate agents, one truth has stood out above the rest: memorized scripts don't move people. In fact, they can actually hold you back and hurt your business. I've long been called the godfather of metaphors and analogies, and for good reason it's the basis of all my coaching. The reason I teach agents to use metaphors and analogies instead of memorized scripts comes down to two things:
Then 2019 hit, and he saw the podcasting wave building. Smart money recognizes patterns early. "We started as 'So and Sign' but rebranded to Saspod to focus exclusively on podcasting," Nicolae told me. Translation: they went all-in when everyone else was still hedging their bets. The rebrand wasn't just marketing theater. It was strategic focus-the kind that separates winners from the "we do everything" crowd that does nothing particularly well.
In an era when we are all talking about AI, the climate crisis, surveillance and privacy, and how technology shapes our choices, we wanted to reframe data not as something cold or distant, but as something deeply personal: a tool we (as human beings) can wield to understand ourselves and the world better. The book explores what we call Data Humanism, an approach that brings context, nuance, narrative, and imperfection back to the center of how we collect, design, and communicate data.
When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another and those become the stories we're reading. As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights Shahrazad's feat of creativity refuses the present emergency the contrived drama of a powerful man.
In 2013, I premiered my experimental short film, , at Outfest, and to my surprise, it won the Grand Jury Award. That moment wasn't just a career milestone; it was an act of recognition for the trans community. It affirmed that a trans artist could belong in cinema's future and that our stories could take up space in a world that had long refused to see us.
Over the last two years, the value of content has collapsed. Thanks to the LLM revolution, the internet is drowning in an avalanche of indistinguishable output: an endless parade of fast-food writing, recycled reports, and SEO-bait fluff optimized for algorithms instead of people. That's why the only competitive moat left is the human story. For business leaders, this creates an urgent mandate: Storytelling is no longer a marketing tactic. It's a strategic business imperative-the only reliable engine for changing minds and shifting behaviors.
Over the past two decades, the Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto has developed a unique performance/installation practice in which she produces installations of absurd sculptural devices-from haemorrhoid cushions to oversized fishing lures-that, in turn, serve as an object-based score and environment for improvised performances that combine humorous spoken narratives with physical actions and mark-making. The artist's first mid-career survey, Aki Sasamoto's Life Laboratory at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), traces the evolution of this practice through a sharp combination of installations, documentation and live performances.
The Tower is a matryoshka doll of a book, which starts with this papery outer layer and, by way of Katherine Mansfield, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, illness, girlhood and more, peels back these different skins to reach the real, inner story: that of the author, denoted here as simply T. The former Times Literary Supplement editor's follow-up to Dandelions - a hybrid of family memoir and cultural history spun out around the central thread of Lenarduzzi's grandmother - also flexes the parameters of fact and fiction.
If you covered up your name and profile picture on LinkedIn, would your dream client still know that post was written by you? The LinkedIn feed is overrun with AI-generated posts, regurgitated quotes, and surface-level advice that sounds like everyone else. Your ideal clients scroll past dozens of posts every day, glazed eyes searching for something real, something that actually helps them solve their problems.
She could have told me the truth, that the paint was graffiti. Instead, she told me the rocks were a species of monster called bloodsuckers, and that at night they came alive to eat children who were foolish enough to stray outside after dark. I believed her with all my heart. Why wouldn't I? She was my nan!
Lauren Groff: If you want to write something that's going to affect people emotionally, you have to do it emotionally. Nick White: And it has to cost you more than the time you're spending writing. It pushes me to my emotional and intellectual capabilities. I feel like when something is working it is because all cylinders are firing, and I am working at the very bleeding edge of what I am capable of.
Tell me about what you had for dinner last night. There are different ways you could fill in the details of that story. You could give perceptual descriptions of how your food looked and tasted. Or you could focus more on conceptual experiences, such as what that food made you think and feel. In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener's brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them.
Because they land in an inbox already flooded with hundreds of other requests and are immediately deleted. This is usually because they are written as announcements, not as compelling stories. They scream "look at us" instead of offering genuine value to the journalist and their readers. The brutal reality is that you only have seconds to prove you're different, and you can do that by being strategic.
I've bought and flipped through a couple of memoirs lately from popular recording artists. Tens of millions of people stream their music on Spotify every month. It's not surprising that traditional publishers would offer them book deals. What's surprising, at least to me, is how boring they are. One artist seemed to put little effort into the book; a ghostwriter did the heavy lifting. When the artist does interviews, he seems to be talking about nothing. The book feels the same way.
If you've ever worked in or around startups, you've definitely seen it: a small team, new funding, great enthusiasm, and a whiteboard full of objectives and key results (OKRs). Everything appears polished, strategic, and "grown-up." However, for early-stage products, the polish might be a trap. In the early, messy, uncertain stages of product development, narrative always outperforms strategy. A compelling story not only guides your team, but it also persuades investors, early adopters, and potential hires to believe in something that doesn't exist yet.
I used to leave design presentations with a stack of changes and a heavy heart. Over 20 points to revise was normal. Most of the feedback wasn't from users; it was subjective opinions from stakeholders. Nothing felt anchored. I'd rush through the screens, hoping the room wouldn't ask hard questions. Then I learned to stop just showing screens and start telling the story behind them. The result was immediate: clearer conversations, fewer rounds of rework, faster buy-in, and designs that actually reflected user needs.
The room is silent. All eyes are on you. Your heart races, but as you take a deep breath, confidence replaces the nerves. You begin to speak, not just to inform, but to captivate. Public speaking isn't an innate talent; it's a skill that can be mastered. With the right techniques, anyone can transform into a compelling speaker. Research shows that 77% of people experience anxiety around public speaking, yet confidence and clarity can be learned.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is the strategy RPG I have been waiting for. I've been a Final Fantasy girlie ever since I discovered Final Fantasy VIII on my brother's PSX demo disk when I was a teenager. While I have loved, or found something to love, in every title since the original PlayStation era, this is my first time playing Tactics - a title widely considered among Final Fantasy diehards to be one of the franchise's best. With this new remaster, I now understand why.
The program prides itself in sharing personal stories and unique experiences of all types, with a goal of amplifying the voices of our community. It is crucial, now more than ever, to share your story. Local celebrities like Josh Kornbluth, Marga Gomez, Irma Herrera, Diane Barnes, and so many others got their start on Monday Night Marsh.
When product placement is used heavy-handedly in media, it can come across as disingenuous, and rightfully so. Nobody likes being advertised to while taking in a work of fiction, but art imitates life, and people buy stuff. More importantly, our cities, cupboards, and highway billboards all deliver one important message: brand recognition runs deep in our waking lives. We live in a consumer-driven landscape, so it's only natural that our media reflects this through product placement.
Jonathan Goldstein's narrative pod about regrets, mistakes and the pursuit of closure cancelled by Spotify in 2023 makes its return this week under the Pushkin banner, and it's been worth the wait. Heavyweight does up-close-and-personal like few other shows, and this first episode about a son's fears around his parents' cluttered house, and a plot to relocate their trinkets to a barn is both warm and spiked with melancholy. Hannah J Davies Widely available, episodes weekly from Thu
The Second Wednesday of every Month, The Setup presents"A Funny Thing Happened", a night of world class storytelling. You'll be joining bestselling authors, Emmy-Award winning writers, TED speakers, stars of The Moth Radio hour, Snap Judgment and accomplished comedic voices in an intimate setting right in the heart of San Francisco. "A Funny Thing Happened" Storytelling Night Every Second Wednesday | 8 pm The Beer Basement, 222 Hyde St,
