Plot Explained – Movie Summaries, Timelines & Film Analysis
detailed plot summaries
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, and the Political Class | Ta-Nehisi Coates - Vanity Fair
There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.
Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.
Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”
There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”
Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”
The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.
What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.
More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.
The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Every Website is an Essay | CSS-Tricks
Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.
Everyone is tired of lifeless, humorless copywriting. They’ve seen all the animations, witnessed all the cool fonts, and in the face of all that stuff, they yawn. They yawn because it supports a bad argument, or more precisely, a bad essay; one that doesn’t charm the reader, or give them a reason to care.
Two rights groups are first Israeli voices to accuse Israel of genocide
Trump tries to close the Epstein investigation.
Now, I hate the expression “conspiracy theory” and have been advocating against its casual use for a couple years now. I especially object to how commonly people use the term to slander popular beliefs that contradict institutional statements but are highly credible; we’ve learned that many “conspiracy theories” have ended up being true. But today, I’m going to use the expression to refer to things I’d define like this: a belief or set of beliefs which connect unrelated observations together based on a set of fundamentally false assumptions.
As the internet has proliferated unsubstantiated assumptions, conspiracies have become more abundant. The internet has also incentivized politicians, political influencers, media outlets, and pundits to constantly battle for attention. Attention means influence, which translates to votes, fundraising clicks, subscriptions and money, depending on what you are looking for. And easy ways to get attention include: stoking conspiracies, evoking fear, and providing shock value.
Republican conspiracy theories are at the center of conservative discourse and messaging. Conspiracy theorists on the left, in contrast, are usually marginalized
Psychologist Answers Couples Therapy Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
Hamas' iron grip on Gaza is slowly slipping as residents protest
"The world is deceived by the situation in the Gaza Strip," says Moumen al-Natour, a Gaza lawyer and former organiser of the 2019 anti-Hamas "We Want to Live" movement.
Al-Natour spoke to us from the shattered remains of his city, the flimsy canvas side of the tent which now forms part of his house billowing behind him.
"The world thinks that Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza," he said. "We didn't choose Hamas and now Hamas is determined to rule Gaza and tie our fate to its own. Hamas must retreat. "
With little to lose and hopes of an end to the war dashed once more, some Gazans direct their fury equally at Israel and Hamas.
Asked which side he blamed most for Gaza's catastrophe, Amin Abed said it was "a choice between cholera and the plague".
How Palestinian first responders ended up in a mass grave in Gaza - T…
Former Israeli defense minister Yaalon warns of ethnic cleansing in Gaza
"I am compelled to warn about what is happening there and is being concealed from us," Yaalon told Israel's public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. "At the end of the day, war crimes are being committed."
Yaalon is a former army chief of staff who served as defence minister under Netanyahu from 2013-16, and has been a fierce critic of the prime minister ever since.
Netanyahu's Likud party accused him of spreading "slanderous lies", while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, head of a small rightist party, said his accusations were baseless.
"Everything Israel does is in accordance with international law and it is a pity that former minister Ya'alon does not realise the damage that he has done and retract his remarks," he told a conference hosted by Israel Today newspaper.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence chief Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The narratives we build, build us — sindhu.live
You see glimpses of it in how Epic Games evolved from game engines to virtual worlds to digital marketplaces, or how Stripe started as a payments processing platform but expanded into publishing books on technological progress, funding atmospheric carbon removal, and running an AI research lab.
Think about what an operating system is: the fundamental architecture that determines what's possible within a system. It manages resources, enables or constrains actions, and creates the environment in which everything else runs.
The dominant view looks at narrative as fundamentally extractive: something to be mined for short-term gain rather than built upon. Companies create compelling stories to sell something, manipulate perception for quick wins, package experiences into consumable soundbites. Oil companies, for example, like to run campaigns about being "energy companies" committed to sustainability, while their main game is still extracting fossil fuels. Vision and mission statements claim to be the DNA of a business, when in reality they're just bumper stickers.
When a narrative truly functions as an operating system, it creates the parameters of understanding, determines what questions can be asked, and what solutions are possible. Xerox PARC's focus on the architecture of information wasn't a fancy summary of their work. It was a narrative that shaped their entire approach to imagining and building things that didn't exist yet. The "how" became downstream of that deeper understanding. So if your narrative isn't generating new realities, you don't have a narrative. You have a tagline.
Most companies think they have an execution problem when, really, they have a meaning problem.
They optimise processes, streamline workflows, and measure outcomes, all while avoiding the harder work of truly understanding what unique value they're creating in the world. Execution becomes a convenient distraction from the more challenging philosophical work of asking what their business means.
A narrative operating system fundamentally shifts this dynamic from what a business does to how it thinks. The business itself becomes almost a vehicle or a social technology for manifesting that narrative, rather than the narrative being a thin veneer over a profit-making mechanism. The conversation shifts, excitingly, from “What does this business do?" to "What can this business mean?" The narrative becomes a reality-construction mechanism: not prescriptive, but generative.
When Stripe first articulated their mission to "increase the GDP of the internet" and “think at planetary scale”, it became a lens to see beyond just economic output. It revealed broader, more exciting questions about what makes the internet more generative: not just financially, but intellectually and culturally. Through this frame emerged problems worth solving that stretched far beyond payments:
What actually prevents more people from contributing to the internet's growth?
Why has our civilisation's progress slowed?
What creates the conditions for ambitious building?
These questions led them down unexpected paths that seem obvious in retrospect.
Stripe Atlas enables more participants in the internet economy by removing the complexity of incorporating a company anywhere in the world. Stripe Climate makes climate action as easy as processing a payment by embedding carbon removal into the financial infrastructure itself. Their research arm investigates why human progress has slowed, from the declining productivity of science to the bureaucratisation of building. And finally, Stripe Press—my favourite example—publishes new and evergreen ideas about technological progress.
The very metrics meant to help the organisation coordinate end up drawing boundaries around what it can imagine [1].
The problem here again, is that we’re looking at narratives as proclamations rather than living practices.
I don’t mean painted slogans on walls and meeting rooms—I mean in how teams are structured, how decisions get made, what gets celebrated, what questions are encouraged, and even in what feels possible to imagine.
The question to ask isn't always "What story are we telling?" but also "What reality are we generating?”
Patagonia is a great example of this. Their narrative is, quite simply: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. It shows up in their unconventional decision to use regenerative agriculture for their cotton, yes, but also in their famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" Black Friday campaign, and in their policy to bail out employees arrested for peaceful socio-environmental protests. When they eventually restructured their entire ownership model to "make Earth our only shareholder," it felt less like a radical move and more like the natural next step in their narrative's evolution. The most powerful proof of their narrative operating system was that these decisions felt obvious to insiders long before it made sense to the outside world.
Most narrative operating systems face their toughest test when they encounter market realities and competing incentives. There are players in the system—investors, board members, shareholders—who become active narrative controllers but often have fundamentally different ideas about what the company should be. The pressure to deliver quarterly results, to show predictable growth, to fit into recognisable business models: all of these forces push against maintaining a truly generative narrative.
The magic of "what could be" gets sacrificed for the certainty of "what already works." Initiatives that don't show immediate commercial potential get killed. Questions about meaning and possibility get replaced by questions about efficiency and optimisation.
a narrative operating system's true worth shows up in stranger, more interesting places than a balance sheet.
adaptability and interpretive range. How many different domains can the narrative be applied to? Can it generate unexpected connections? Does it create new questions more than provide answers? What kind of novel use cases or applications outside original context can it generate, while maintaining a clear through-line? Does it have what I call a ‘narrative surplus’: ideas and initiatives that might not fit current market conditions but expand the organisation's possibility space?
rate of internal idea generation. How many ideas come out of the lab? And how many of them don’t have immediate (or direct) commercial viability? A truly generative narrative creates a constant bubbling up of possibilities, not all of which will make sense in the current market or at all.
evolutionary resilience, or how well the narrative can incorporate new developments and contexts while maintaining its core integrity. Generative narratives should be able to evolve without fracturing at the core.
cross-pollination potential. How effectively does the narrative enable different groups to coordinate and build upon each other's work? The open source software movement shows this beautifully: its narrative about collaborative creation enables distributed innovation and actively generates new forms of cooperation we couldn't have imagined before.
There are, of course, other failure modes of narrative operating systems. What happens when narratives become dogmatic and self-referential? When they turn into mechanisms of exclusion rather than generation? When they become so focused on their own internal logic that they lose touch with the realities they're trying to change? Those are meaty questions that deserve their own essay.
100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency
"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves.
The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.
At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters.
Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."
Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department.
At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.
Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.
The prehistoric psychopath - Works in Progress
Stop Analyzing Trump's Unhinged Ideas Like They're Normal Policy Proposals
Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.
The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.
The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.
On Nonviolent Communication
if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes.
Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.
If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.
It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!
Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.
There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap.
If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.
We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.
the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.
NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”
NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.
You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important.
With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority.
When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.
The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.
When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.
The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done.
If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”
Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission.
NVC involves the following:
1) how we express ourselves to other people,
2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly,
3) how we communicate with ourselves.
Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.
Why Storytelling by Tony Fadell
Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.
He talked for a while about regular mobile phones and smartphones and the problems of each before he dove into the features of the new iPhone.
He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.
when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words.
Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.
When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”
That’s the case no matter what you make—even if you sell B2B payments software. Even if you build deep-tech solutions for customers who don’t exist yet. Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.
If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.
A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough instincts and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.
So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.
And always remember that your customers’ brains don’t always work like yours. Sometimes your rational argument will make an emotional connection. Sometimes your emotional story will give people the rational ammunition to buy your product. Certain Nest customers looked at the beautiful thermostat that we lovingly crafted to appeal to their heart and soul and said, “Sure, okay. It’s pretty” and then had a thrilled, emotional reaction to the potential of saving twenty-three dollars on their energy bill.
everyone will read your story differently.
That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.
That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10-15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.
Because to truly understand many of the features of our products, you’d need a deep well of knowledge about HVAC systems and power grids and the way smoke refracts through a laser to detect fire—knowledge almost nobody had. So we cheated. We didn’t try to explain everything. We just used an analogy. I remember there was one complex feature that was designed to lighten the load on power plants on the hottest or coldest days of the year when everyone cranked up the heat or AC at once. It usually came down to just a few hours in the afternoon, a few days a year—one or more coal power plants would be brought on line to avoid blackouts. So we designed a feature that predicted when these moments would come, then the Nest Thermostat would crank the AC or heat up extra before the crucial peak hours and turn it down when everyone else was turning it up. Anyone who signed up for the program got a credit on their energy bill. As more and more people joined the program, the result was a win-win—people stayed comfortable, they saved money, and the energy companies didn’t have to turn on their dirtiest plants.
And that is all well and good, but it just took me 150 word to explain. So after countless hours of thinking about it and trying all the possible solutions, we settled on doing it in three: Rush Hour Rewards.
Everyone understands the concept of rush hour—the moment when way too many people get on the road together and traffic slows to a creep. Same thing happens with energy. We didn’t need to explain much more than that—rush hours are a problem, but when there’s an energy rush hour, you can get something out of it. You can get a reward. You can actually save money rather than getting stuck with everyone else.
Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.
A good product story has three elements:
It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides.
It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”
LN 038: Semantic zoom
This “undulant interface” was made by John Underkoffler. The heresy implicit within [1] is the premise that the user, not the system, gets to define what is most important at any given moment; where to place the jeweler’s loupes for more detail, and where to show only a simple overview, within one consistent interface. Notice how when a component is expanded for more detail, the surrounding elements adjust their position, so the increased detail remains in the broader context. This contrasts sharply with how we get more detail in mainstream interfaces of the day, where modal popups obscure surrounding context, or separate screens replace it entirely. Being able to adjust the detail of different components within the singular context allows users to shape the interfaces they need in each moment of their work.
Pushing towards this style of interaction could show up in many parts of an itemized personal computing environment: when moving in and out of sets, single items, or attributes and references within items.
everyone has unique needs and context, yet that which makes our lives more unique makes today’s rigid software interfaces more frustrating to use.
How might Colin use the gestural, itemized interface, combined with semantic zoom on this plethora of data, to elicit the interfaces and answers he’s looking for with his data?
since workout items each have data with associated timestamps and locations, the system knows it can offer both a timeline and map view. And since the items are of one kind, it knows it can offer a table view. Instead of selecting one view to switch to, as we first explored in LN 006, we could drag them into the space to have multiple open at once.
As the email item view gets bigger, the preview text of the email’s contents eventually turns into the fully-rendered email. At smaller sizes, this view makes less sense, so the system can swap it out for the preview text as needed.
Fish eye lens for text
Each level gives you completely different information, depending on what Google thinks the user might be interested in. Maps are a true masterclass for visualizing the same information in a variety of ways.
Viewing the same text at different levels of abstraction is powerful, but what, instead of switching between them, we could see multiple levels at the same time? How might that work?
A portrait lens brings a single subject into focus, isolating it from the background to draw all attention to its details. A wide-angle lens captures more of the scene, showing how the subject relates to its surroundings. And then there’s the fish eye lens—a tool that does both, pulling the center close while curving the edges to reveal the full context.
A fish eye lens doesn’t ask us to choose between focus and context—it lets us experience both simultaneously. It’s good inspiration for how to offer detailed answers while revealing the surrounding connections and structures.
Imagine you’re reading The Elves and the Shoemaker by The Brothers Grimm. You come across a single paragraph describing the shoemaker discovering the tiny, perfectly crafted shoes left by the elves. Without context, the paragraph is just an intriguing moment.
Now, what if instead of reading the whole book, you could hover over this paragraph and instantly access a layered view of the story? The immediate layer might summarize the events leading up to this moment: the shoemaker, struggling in poverty, left his last bit of leather out overnight. Another layer could give you a broader view of the story so far: the shoemaker’s business is mysteriously revitalized thanks to these tiny benefactors. Beyond that, an even higher-level summary might preview how the tale concludes, with the shoemaker and his wife crafting clothes for the elves to thank them.
This approach allows you to orient yourself without having to piece everything together by reading linearly. You get the detail of the paragraph itself, but with the added richness of understanding how it fits into the larger story.
Chapters give structure, connecting each idea to the ones that came before and after. A good author sets the stage, immersing you with anecdotes, historical background, or thematic threads that help you make sense of the details. Even the act of flipping through a book—a glance at the cover, the table of contents, a few highlighted sections—anchors you in a broader narrative.
The context of who is telling you the information—their expertise, interests, or personal connection—colors how you understand it.
The exhibit places the fish in an ecosystem of knowledge, helping you understand it in a way that goes beyond just a name.
Let's reimagine a Wikipedia a bit. In the center of the page, you see a detailed article about fancy goldfish—their habitat, types, and role in the food chain. Surrounding this are broader topics like ornamental fish, similar topics like Koi fish, more specific topics like the Oranda goldfish, and related people like the designer who popularized them.
Clicking on another topic shifts it to the center, expanding into full detail while its context adjusts around it. It’s dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, it keeps you connected to the web of knowledge
The beauty of a fish eye lens for text is how naturally it fits with the way we process the world. We’re wired to see the details of a single flower while still noticing the meadow it grows in, to focus on a conversation while staying aware of the room around us. Facts and ideas are never meaningful in isolation; they only gain depth and relevance when connected to the broader context.
A single number on its own might tell you something, but it’s the trends, comparisons, and relationships that truly reveal its story. Is 42 a high number? A low one? Without context, it’s impossible to say. Context is what turns raw data into understanding, and it’s what makes any fact—or paragraph, or answer—gain meaning.
The fish eye lens takes this same principle and applies it to how we explore knowledge. It’s not just about seeing the big picture or the fine print—it’s about navigating between them effortlessly. By mirroring the way we naturally process detail and context, it creates tools that help us think not only more clearly but also more humanly.
Fight Theory
Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too.
But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.
Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group, blames what he calls fight theory. “It’s not enough to have positive messaging,” Green said. “Voters must see drama, clash and an ongoing saga in order for our message to break through a cluttered news environment.”
fights become the subject of political fundraising emails, activist campaigns, news stories and social media posts. Conflict attracts attention. The situation with Biden’s most popular economic policies — especially the reduction of medical costs — is somewhat different.
The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything
headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.
To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.
During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.
the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.
the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.
Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?
Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.
The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.
One last look at why Harris lost the 2024 election.
"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.
Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.
A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.
it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.
The Climate Reality Check
A "Bechdel test for the environment" tracking climate change depiction in media
MemoryLane - Reminiscence Therapy
A service that generates books from user memories using AI
Niche Internet#narratives#ai#generative#storytelling#texting#books#adaptations/books#publishing#cognitionSix months of war in Gaza.
Please just tell me what you do - Evan Conrad
Describe things that someone can explain to someone else, or you'll miss out on word-of-mouth growth. Imagine you wandered into some party and met an investor/donor/customer named Emily. Even if you're the most persuasive person ever and she walks away from the conversation energized and excited, your time is wasted because Emily can't explain to her coworkers/friends/legislative-body what specifically she's excited about.
If Emily is a potential customer and all she heard was nothing-language, then you've gained no information. She might be interested! But that interest might only be in something she's imagined — not what you're actually making.
Nothing-language is describing your product as "an investigation into how we generate dispersed intimacy, signify alliance, and physical representations of our digital coordination praxis"1 instead of saying you're an investment fund. If you're going to "revolutionize", "create the operating system for", "build at the intersection between", "empower", "democratize", "individually flourish", or "be interdisciplinary", the universe should pause, rewind, and let you explain again. It's kind and wants you to succeed.
Be boring. Say you're "plaid for messaging apps" or "a figma plugin that generates svg icons from gpt-3" or "chrome extension that adds cmd-k to every website".
Image Without Metaphor
Major studio video game story-telling standards and IP/franchise cinema both contribute greatly to the kind of lore-focused psychologically-disinterested narrative style.
The literal deterministic storytelling of Dune or Barbie or Oppenheimer attempts to put the cat back in the bag, to soothe the audience by seemingly bold aesthetic vision while actually telling quite dull and lifeless stories that ask little of the imagination. Don't worry, we'll explain everything to you, no need to think, no need to imagine.
Israeli Evidence of Hamas Command Center in al-Shifa Hospital Falls Short: Report
Kishōtenketsu for Beginners – An Introduction to Four Act Story Structure
Soft Power in Tech
Despite its direct affiliation, Stripe Press provokes a distinctive, emotional feeling. It’s an example of how form affects soft power. By focusing on actual, physical books — and giving them a loving, literary treatment — Stripe shows this project is firmly outside the world of “marketing.” Rather, this is a place for Stripe to demonstrate its ideological affinities and reinforce its philosophical positioning. The affection this project has earned suggests it has found distribution.
Most obviously, they can invest in it via in-house initiatives. Even moderately sized tech companies have large marketing teams capable of running interesting experiments, especially if augmented with external talent. Business banking platform Mercury has made strides in this area over the past couple of years, launching a glossy, thoughtful publication named Meridian.
Five Case Studies On Politicization
The Signal and the Corrective
A technical breakdown of 'narratives' and how they operate: narratives simplify issues by focusing on a main "signal" while ignoring other relevant "noise", and this affects discussions between those with opposing preferred signals. It goes into many examples across basically any kind of ideological or cultural divide.
AI summary:
- The article explores how different people can derive opposing narratives from the same set of facts, with each viewing their interpretation as the "signal" and opposing views as "noise"
- Key concepts:
- Signal: The core belief or narrative someone holds as fundamentally true
- Corrective: The moderating adjustments made to account for exceptions to the core belief
- Figure-ground inversion: How the same reality can be interpreted in opposite ways
- Examples of opposing narratives include:
- Government as public service vs. government as pork distribution
- Medical care as healing vs. medical care as harmful intervention
- Capitalism as wealth creation vs. capitalism as exploitation
- Nature vs. nurture in human behavior
- Science as gradual progress vs. science as paradigm shifts
- Communication dynamics:
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Discussions become abstract
- Communication bandwidth is limited
- Under stress or emotional pressure
- Speaking to unfamiliar audiences
- In hostile environments
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Persuasion insights:
- It's easier to add correctives to someone's existing signal than to completely change their core beliefs
- People must feel their fundamental views are respected before accepting criticism
- Acknowledging partial validity of opposing views is crucial for productive dialogue
- Problems in modern discourse:
- Online debates often lack real-world consequences
- When there's no need for cooperation, people prefer conquest over consensus
- Lack of real relationships reduces incentives for civility and understanding
- The author notes that while most people hold moderate views with both signals and correctives, fundamental differences can be masked when discussing specific policies but become apparent in discussions of general principles
- The piece maintains a thoughtful, analytical tone while acknowledging the complexity and challenges of human communication and belief systems
- The author expresses personal examples and vulnerability in describing how they themselves react differently to criticism based on whether it comes from those who share their fundamental values
narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.
“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.”
and
“Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.”
. . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general principles — because then it’s only about the signal.
I’ve said that when discussions get abstract and general people tend to go back to their main signals and ignore correctives, which makes participants seem further apart than they really are. The same thing happens when the communication bandwidth is low for some reason. When dealing with complex matters human communication tends not to be super efficient in the first place and if something makes subtlety extra hard — like a 140 character limit, only a few minutes to type during a bathroom break at work, little to no context or a noisy discourse environment — you’re going to fall back to simpler, more basic messages.
Internal factors matter too. When you’re stressed, don’t have time to think, don’t know the person you’re talking to and don’t really care about them, when emotions are heated, when you feel attacked, when an audience is watching and you can’t look weak, or when you smell blood in the water, then you’re going to go simple, you’re going to go basic, you’re going to push in a direction rather than trying to hit a target. And whoever you’re talking to is going to do the same. You both fall back in different directions, exactly when you shouldn’t.
It makes sense to think of complex disagreements as not about single facts but about narratives made up of generalizations, abstractions and interpretations of many facts, most of which aren’t currently on the table. And the status of our favorite narratives matters to us, because they say what’s happening, who the heroes are and who the villains are, what’s matters and what doesn’t, who owes and who is owed. Most of us, when not in our very best moods, will make sure our most cherished narratives are safe before we let any others thrive.
Most people will accept that their main signals have correctives, but they will not accept that their main signals have no validity or legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to install a corrective in someone than it is to dislodge their main signal (and that might later lead to a more fundamental change of heart) — but to do that you must refrain from threatening the signal because that makes people defensive. And it’s not so hard. Listen and acknowledge that their view has greater than zero validity.
In an ideal world, any argumentation would start with laying out its own background assumptions, including stating if what it says should be taken as a corrective on top of its opposite or a complete rejection of it.