BLOGPOST ARCHIVES #1: MY TOP 15 FAVORITE BLOGPOSTS, ANNOTATED

Take a stroll through my all-time favorites from over the past 10 years.

I write a lot of stuff. Not just 11 books since 2009, but also 400 blogposts for The Benshi, and then another 220 for Science Needs Story.

For the latter — the more recent collection -- here’s my 15 favorites.

They include Michael Crichton’s deep narrative intuition (29) and his identification of “obfuscation” in 1975 as the enemy of effective communication (followed by the science world basically saying “yeah, whatever” and ignoring his warning) (144).

Comedians and comic writers do know the power of narrative structure more than anyone (171). Michelle Wolf demonstrated this in a stunning way (132). The National Academy of Sciences does not (83). Nor does the Democratic Party (177). And even worse were the graphics folks at my book publisher plus the editors at Science magazine who couldn’t grasp the difference between “story” and “a story" (165).

Oprah really does have solid narrative intuition (she could have beat Trump in 2016) (125). James Carville (81) really, really does. The good folks at HBO’s Real Sports (who sadly got obliterated by an ignoramus who took over HBO’s programming, ending the show in its 29th brilliant season — wouldn’t even let them get to 30) really, really, really knew narrative structure (105). And even better, we had three veterans of HBO programming (a producer, a director, an actor) who appeared in the ABT course during the height of the pandemic (187).

But on the deterioration side, Hollywood is killing the first act of movies, as seen with “Dunkirk” (104). That same short attention-spanned audience constantly wants us to shrink workshops to a single day instead of the 10 weeks we sometimes take (so that things can sink in) (120).

Interestingly, for the United States, it turns out southerners use BUT more, while northerners use AND more (130).

And last but not least, my eternal message is that the science world needs to partner with the people who are good at communication, namely business and entertainment (184). Scientists can’t do everything by themselves, though they really don’t like to hear this.

• #187) Three HBO Veterans appear in the ABT Framework Course: View their Sessions

• #184) Business Meets Science: What Scientists Writing Proposals Can Learn from the Business World

• #177) What the Democratic Party Lost with Al Franken: Narrative Intuition

• #171) 4 COMEDIANS: THE Most Interesting/Important Discussion of Communication I’ve Ever Heard

• #165) Science Doesn’t Need “A Story”: It needs an understanding of narrative

• #144) “Buried Pearls”: 43 years later, why is OBFUSCATION still the central problem of science communication?

• #132) Michelle Wolf’s Narrative Index was a Stunning 47

• #130) The ABT/Narrative Fingerprint of the United States

• #125) Oprah Gives an ABT Tour De Force

• #120) Do One Day Storytelling Workshops Work? No

• #105) Professionals at Work: Narrative analysis of the HBO Real Sports Segment on the Great Barrier Reef

• #104) “Dunkirk”: Introducing “The Get to the Point Rule”

• #83) Is this Really How to Communicate Science “Effectively”?

• #81) JAMES CARVILLE: The Embodiment of Narrative Intuition

• # 29) Michael Crichton had deep “narrative intuition” (duh)