Timothy Stanley

Just caught a brief vimeo from a Gel conference where Ira Glass discusses the nature of good narratives and telling the news on a human scale. It's an interesting reflection on how we inhabit narratives and, how, even though we live in a world saturated with entertainment, good storytelling is still rare. Glass, it seems, is one person working in the news and media business today who has figured out how to tell a story well. His podcast, This American Life, based on his Chicago public radio news show, has one of the largest audience's in America. He has a way of telling ordinarily mundane and often boring news stories and making them captivating if not just short of addictive. In any case, his discussion of Arabian Nights touches on a theme about how we come to really understand the world. Somehow, as the king engages and inhabits Scheherazade's stories, he comes to be more empathetic, more humane, and more sane. In the end, the suspense of Scheherazade's stories, the power of narrative, saves her life. As Glass puts it,

"It's about the power of narrative. How narrative itself is like a back door to a very deep place inside of us. A place where reason doesn't necessarily hold sway. And you know like all of us, when a story gets inside of us it makes us less crazy."

Just as stories cured the king's madness in Arabian Nights, so too Glass's approach to the news brings his audience in touch with the human beings caught up in what is going on in the world today. In any case, here's a short vimeo of Glass doing what he does best.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

As an aside, the power of narrative to humanize and foster empathy is one made by commentators of the Christian and Jewish scriptures as well. Burton Visotzky's The Genesis of Ethics comes to mind. There, Visotzky writes about the years of experience he has teaching ethics through the narratives in the book of Genesis. Students' ethical aptitude increased not from learning a list of moral precepts, but through engaging the stories where so many ethical connundrums were faced by vividly depicted human beings like Abraham, Sarah and Jacob.