The Story of Stories summary

Bernardino of Sienna was a priest with a simple story that he never tired of telling. He set up his makeshift pulpit in the market squares of towns across Italy and began. For the next four hours, he denounced the fleeting delights that distracted his listeners from God’s eternal glory. When he was done, a pile of sinful frivolities was made and set alight. 

A contemporary account lists the objects consigned to the flames in early fifteenth-century Florence during one of these “bonfires of the vanities.” Musical instruments, mirrors, high-heeled shoes, perfume, lace dresses – and 4,000 sets of playing cards. 

There’s an old joke that mid-century American broadcasting was controlled by 12 middle-aged white men. It’s an exaggeration, but it’s true that radio and television rarely strayed far from America’s standard story. The nation portrayed to radio listeners was inhabited by suave men of the Frank Sinatra type, their “dames,” and the occasional nostalgic cowboy. The music was always live, always from a national network, and always white. 

Broadcasters didn’t see the need to change much when television expanded in the 1950s. They sold established radio stations, stopped opposing new competitors, and moved their resources over to TV. Radio didn’t die off, but it did have a problem. Suddenly, there were more stations and less programming with which to fill them. Big names like Bing Crosby still refused to let stations play their records – they wanted people to buy them, not to listen to them on the radio. That left just one source of popular recorded music: jukebox singles. 

Julodimorpha bakewelli is better known as the jewel beetle. Native to Australia, it uses visual cues to locate mates. Unfortunately for males, brown beer bottles look a lot like the dimpled wing cases of females. In the 1970s, scientists observed males mounting discarded, sun-hot bottles and dying from heat exposure. A decade later, the species was close to extinction. 

In 2016, an AI system called AlphaGo beat the best human player at Go. Until that point, this ancient and mind-bogglingly difficult game had proved resistant to brute-force computation. When the system defeated Lee Sedol, the South Korean reigning world champion, it was clear that a new frontier in machine learning had been crossed. 

Silicon Valley isn’t the first commercial power to sell our attention to advertisers. Nor is it first to do so using compelling stories. Explosions and one-liners fill seats when James Bond movies hit theaters, but we leave knowing exactly which Dutch lager 007 finds most refreshing. TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers use the same tricks. 

The difference is curation. At the very least, there’s an editorial team that understands the meaning of the content newspapers and TV stations publish and broadcast. A company like Facebook doesn’t curate or edit or even know what’s in the stories it places on users’ feeds: the entire process is automated.