5 quotes to think about this week...

Every Friday I read the internet! Like, almost all of it. Every. Last. Word.

During the week I bookmark every interesting-looking story that I come across and read them all on Friday as I prepare the Storythings newsletter.

Here are 5 things I learned on Friday worth thinking about this week...

"I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the things that need to be done."

- Why I adore the night, by Jeanette Winterson (via Alex Morriss).

"We see how happy and grateful people are for music. Especially music that was popular when they were younger. It doesn’t matter if that music was Frank Sinatra or Billy Joel or David Bowie or Q-Tip. What matters is this: ‘Don’t you remember our first date? This song was on.’ This means a lot to people. And they love the person who gave this to them. … Musicians are loved by people. Adored even, because they give them the ability to express their emotions and memories.”

- Fran Lebowitz on how music allows us to articulate emotion and memory.

“Often when we are encouraging the cultural organisations we work with to write in a way that will be easier to understand, to use less jargon, and to think about how people consume content online, we get told that we are asking them to ‘dumb down’. There seems to be an impression that by making your content difficult to read, you are somehow making it more valuable.”

-?Ash Mann on why focussing on readability is not dumbing down.

"I rely on a concept psychologists call “saturation”. I wrote a whole separate blog post about it, but in brief: Saturation is the moment when you’re doing research and you feel like you’re no longer encountering novel information. You read an article or a white paper and think, huh, yeah, I already know all this stuff. Someone mentions a major expert in a field and you go, yep, already read their work. (And if you’re a journalist, maybe you’ve already interviewed them on the subject). Saturation is a good signal that you’re probably ready to write your piece, or prepare your talk or presentation."

- Clive Thompson on knowing when you're research is done.

"Hostage negotiators sometimes use the term ‘one-down’ to describe the party who feels most insecure about their relative status. The one-down party in a dispute can be very hard to deal with. Whether it’s in a marital argument or an international negotiation, people go to great, even self-destructive lengths to avoid the perception that they are being walked over. One-down parties act irrationally and hyper-competitively. They play dirty, attacking their adversary from unexpected angles. They treat every argument as a desperate, zero-sum game which they must win or at least not lose."

- Ian Leslie on the art of negotiation.

Let us know if you found these useful in the comments or share them with anyone you think will enjoy them.