Welcome to the seventy-third edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

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Alright, let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

That's a great interview question. My response: Structure in narrative.

Great tip on writing and good use of contrast.

Lovely writing by Joy about Nico's (and his parents') inspiring journey.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Ashwin's Bat' by Ramachandra Guha

As soon as I knew about R Ashwin's newly released autobiography, I dropped everything else I was reading and sped through it. (Highly recommended, though I would have loved for it to be longer, going beyond 2011).

Ram Guha on the other hand got stuck on the cover itself:

When I saw the cover of R. Ashwin’s cricketing memoir, I was struck by the fact that it had the author in whites, sitting with his hands clasped expectantly around the handle of a bat.

- - -

I know Ashwin can bat. And those who shall buy his book know it too. All the same, in the history of Indian cricket, Ashwin will be remembered more for his skill with the ball. Why would the taker of more than five hundred Test wickets, the man who has won more Test matches for India than anyone apart from Anil Kumble, write his autobiography and have it printed, published, and publicised with him holding a bat on the cover?

Sports writer Gideon Haigh had written an entire book about a photo taken of the Australian batsman Victor Trumper. Ram Guha doffs his hat to Gideon with this lovely piece in which he writes (merely) a 1,000-word article on Ashwin's cover photograph.

The greatest living cricket writer once wrote a whole book about a single cricket photograph. It is a wonderful book, which I wrote admiringly about in these columns several years ago. But since my name is not Gideon Haigh, I have stuck to the cliché and spun out of a photo only slightly more than a thousand words. All that you have read so far was written before I had read Ashwin’s memoir.

It's a poignant rumination on the dominance of batsmen in the sport we all love.

b. 'The Nutgraf: AI faces a new, unlikely threat - Capitalism' by Praveen Gopal Krishnan

From soaring high in the skies, the AI hype seems to be coming down-to-earth. And the guys who are popping the bubble are not Luddites, regulators or anti-business crusaders. It's the VCs.

As Praveen pithily puts it:

...the one thing I’ve learnt over the years is that when VCs (and friends of VCs) say that something is over-hyped, then it’s probably worth paying some attention to. These are the folks whose entire business model is built on hyping an optimistic, amazing, shining future. There’s a reason why VCs, consultants, and banks routinely put out reports and stories that project incredible growth, rising income and consumption, and a wonderful, happy tomorrow where the nation is shining and the world is a happy place.

And now these guys are the ones saying, “I don’t know about this AI thing…”

Praveen doesn't pull any punches:

A couple of quarters ago, Salesforce went all out and declared that they’d invest heavily into AI. And just a few weeks earlier, they declared their results.

Salesforce’s numbers weren’t just bad.

It was disastrous.

AI has had a wild ride on the Gartner Hype Cycle. This may be one more dip in the roller coaster before the next inevitable rise.

(The Nutgraf is a paid newsletter - in case you want access I have a few limited gift credits)

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'The Curious Science of Cravings' on the Hidden Brain podcast

I love the 'The Hidden Brain' for the content as well as the storytelling. Specifically, what I like is how the host Shankar Vedantam sets the context for a topic and then cues the guest (usually a doctor, scientist or other expert) to share a specific anecdote or personal experience. This keeps the conversation lively and engaging.

Shankar hits the ground running with a story from the past:

In the 4th century, a young man named Aurelius Augustinus found himself in a struggle with himself. He was born in what is today Algeria, but at that time, was part of the Roman Empire. Aurelius found himself torn between the dictates of his faith and the impulses of his own body. I was bound down by this disease of the flesh, he wrote. Its deadly pleasures were a chain that I dragged along with me. Aurelius was infatuated with his lover. He felt his attraction to her was purely physical, and this felt wrong to him. Aurelius happened to be one of the most prolific writers of his time, so we have a detailed picture of his mind from his various books and writings. At one point, he said, I was a prisoner of habit, suffering cruel torments through trying to satisfy a lust that could never be sated. Aurelius, whom devout Catholics know today as St. Augustine, is said to have prayed for divine assistance to battle his cravings. But his appeal to God revealed his own divided self. Lord, give me chastity and continence, he prayed. Only not yet.

After introducing his guest, psychiatrist Judson Brewer, Shankar humanises the doctor by getting him to share an anecdote from his youth about controlling his cravings:

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Jud, I want to take you back to your days in high school. I understand you were a serious athlete, but every once in a while, you would be consumed with a craving for ice cream. Tell me about that.

JUDSON BREWER: In high school, I had a very strict diet because I was trying to dial in everything that I had control over to try to improve my athletic performance, and I needed all the help I could get. So I, you know, there was no sugar, no refined foods, no sweets, no candy, no fast food, no junk food, and certainly no ice cream. And when I was off season, you know, I would see people eating ice cream, and I would just be struck with this craving. I was like, oh, that looks so good. And I remember eating close to half a tub, like half a gallon of ice cream, you know, in single settings. Generally, I would do this by myself. I was like, oh, I just, you know, I just had to get it in.

Over the rest of the episode Shankar and Judson discuss the nature of cravings, why we have them, what approaches people try to treat them, why most of them don't work, and most importantly, Dr. Judson's novel approach that seems to work better.

This section below is a great example of story mining - when the interviewer is able to focus on the exact a-ha moment for the guest:

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah. I understand that there was one moment in particular where you were forced to recognize the futility of your efforts to help your patients resist their cravings. You were standing in your office at the VA hospital. Tell me what happened, Jud.

JUDSON BREWER: Yes, this is kind of a lightbulb moment for me. So the VA hospital is a smoke-free campus, and so my patients couldn't smoke on campus, but they could find the parking lot where nobody would really police that. And so I was looking out my window one day and seeing, you know, my patients smoking in the parking lot, and I had this aha moment, because my lab had been studying habit change for years. And I was thinking, wait a minute, my patients don't learn to smoke in my office. They don't learn to overeat in my office. They don't learn to get into any of their addictive behaviors in my office. Is there some way that I could actually develop a way to port my office to them in their situations? Because the mechanism behind this is really about them learning things in a particular context. It's in their home environment. It's in their car. It's when they're stressed, and hopefully they're not particularly stressed in my office. So that was a big aha for thinking, well, there's got to be a different way to do this.

Dr Judson shares a three-step process to manage cravings:

Be aware of what the craving is, when does it come and how do you resolve it
Pay close attention to your senses and how you feel when indulging in the craving
Find out better alternatives to the things you crave

Addictions are complicated and this approach is unlikely to be a magic bullet. But, if you'd like to know more about how cravings can be managed better, you should listen to the conversation.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

A Story of Managing Your Cravings (3-2-1 by Story Rules #73)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

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