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Just Another “Story” Book
The latest “story” book that I’ve read is Carmine Gallo’s newly-released The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don’t. Gallo, like Richard McKee and Richard Krevolin, both of whom I’ve written about lately, uses the generic noun “story” – not preceded by an article – as…
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The Koch Brothers(’) Take on Business Fiction
This is the season for anger at billionaires, and Jane Mayer’s new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right certainly stoked mine towards Charles and David Koch. Mayer showed how they were brought up by their magnate parents to believe that they could do whatever they…
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Not Hooked by “The Hook”
In my last post, I alluded to a book I was reading about narrative and marketing. That book, by Richard Krevolin, has the short title The Hook and the long subtitle How to Share your Brand’s Unique Story to Engage Customers, Boost Sales, and Achieve Heartfelt Success. The author appears to be a story-based jack…
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Trudeau and Poloz: On the Same Page?
Listening to the recent debate about whether the Bank of Canada should or would cut its lending rate, it seemed to me that the only argument in favor of cutting was that the economy was slowing and needed immediate stimulus. The arguments against cutting struck me as much stronger: concern about inflating the housing bubble;…
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I Disagree with Robert McKee
Robert McKee is well known for his seminars to screenwriter wannabes. He presents a model of an exciting or suspenseful screenplay and encourages his audience to apply it to their own story ideas. Though I have no aspirations of becoming a screenwriter, I recently took his introductory seminar. McKee sends out blast emails to the…
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Narrative in the 2015 Federal Election: Some Initial Results
During the recent federal election campaign, a research assistant and I recorded and analyzed all the English-language ads posted online by the three major parties. I am studying how the parties constructed their narratives for the campaign, what they had in common, and how they differed. We went to the parties’ websites and YouTube channels…
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The Big Short: Completing the Financial Crisis Trilogy
I watched The Big Short on its recent opening day, and together with Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award–winning 2010 documentary Inside Job and J.C. Chandor’s remarkable low-budget first feature Margin Call (2011), it forms a trilogy of excellent and thought-provoking movies about the global financial crisis. The Big Short follows Michael Lewis’s 2010 book with the…
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Political Narrative Revisited
In Plot Points, an article in the New York Times Magazine on Dec. 13, 2015 American political journalist Mark Leibovich reflected on the use of the word narrative in the current election campaign. He noted that it has become unhinged from its original literary meaning, discussed the narratives associated with various politicians, and observed the…
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Absence of Malice: Learning from Mistakes
Following last week’s post on Nothing but the Truth as a counter-fable of investigative journalism gone wrong, this week I’ll look at a much older movie, Absence of Malice, which had its debut in 1981. Thinking that the post-Watergate lionizing of heroic investigative journalists had gone too far, its screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke, a former newspaper…
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Global Spoiler Alert
As I work on Enterprising Fables, I realize that I should start it with a global spoiler alert. The plot trajectories of the texts I write about are an essential component of my analysis because they show how the texts’ creators have shaped their story material. Therefore I must present full plots, including their endings.…
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Going Deep at the Sento: Travel Wisdom of a Twelve-Year-Old
When my younger son, Nathaniel, was seven years old he announced that he was starting a travel fund. All future allowance, birthday gifts, Chanukah presents, and random grandparental disbursements would be saved for his “dream trip”. And Disneyworld was emphatically not on the itinerary. Nathaniel was the only early reader I knew whose bookshelves included…
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Spotlight: Heroic but not Triumphal
I watched Spotlight, the new movie about investigative journalism, last week. It has received rave reviews and been compared to All the President’s Men, the 1976 classic movie of this genre. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe’s spotlight team of four journalists, investigates rumors of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Boston. Spotlight focuses…
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Claiming Social Security: A Bureaucracy that Delivers
While an undergraduate at Harvard, for a semester or two I had a part-time job, which required me to get a Social Security number and to contribute. In addition, I was a faculty member at Northwestern University for a short time, and also contributed to Social Security. As I approached my mid-sixties, I wondered whether…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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