Selected Stories for March 4, 2016

According to fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, “The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Below are some of the stories we’ve been talking about this week:

Greg is being Googlestalked! in the anxiety-inducing sci-fi short “Scroogled” by Cory Doctorow over at Literary Hub.

In a different response to our digital age, Under Armour’s new ad campaign is a story about young athletes engaged in JOMO, or the joy of missing out—reported on by Adage.

Ellen Urbani’s “There Is No Such Thing As A True Story” published at The Rumpus discusses memory, perspective, and truth in both Urbani’s life and her writing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “My perspective will never be full enough, nor my understanding sufficient, to speak to anything other than what I lived.”

The New York Times offers up a diversity of personal stories revealing what it’s like to work in Hollywood—and so to tell stories with Hollywood power and economy—”if you’re not a straight white man.”

“These teens are better marketers than anyone in the game right now”—or so claims a Tumblr executive in this fascinating piece of immersion journalism about the world of Tumblr teens, social capital, and cash.  (Reported by Elspeth Reeve over at A New Republic.)

And Sara Majka talks about “the fictional self” and writing as a single mother in a fascinating interview at the Graywolf Press website: “I guess that’s my largest advice to writers who don’t come from means: to learn to live off as little as you can.”