Some good advice from Karen Amstrong.

"There are times when you have to speak out against injustice or cruelty. But if you speak — and this is what Gandhi said — in order to punish or wound, you will do more harm than good. The Dalai Lama said that to condemn injustice with hatred in your voice will make the injustice worse. ... So it does no good to attack viciously. The thing to do is not to rise to the bait."

-from an interview with Karen Armstrong in the June issue of the Believer magazine.

Brown, Grey, & Green.

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."

- John Berger

Vincent Grey is the recently-elected Mayor of Washington, DC. During the campaign, candidate debates were regularly marked by another candidate, Mr. Sulaimon Brown, proclaiming "Vote Brown, vote Grey, vote any color you want, just don't vote [for incumbent Mayor Adrian] Fenty!"

After Mr. Grey took office, Mr. Brown was given a job in his administration, but was soon fired, when some facts about Mr. Brown's past came out.

Mr. Brown is now alleging that the Grey campaign had promised him a job, and provided him with financial support during the campaign, in return for his continued attacks on Mr. Fenty.

To support these contentions, Mr. Brown has made his cellphone records available to the Washington Post, which has assembled a data graphic summarizing calls between him and Mr. Grey, and between him and Mr. Grey's campaign chair, Ms. Lorraine Green.

We at NeuroCooking today celebrate the key, or graphical legend, to the Washington Post's fine data graphic:

Reading us is ok everywhere, we think.

NeuroCooking friends reading this from a computer at the United States Air Force may continue to do so, even though their access to the New York Times has been cut off; we have no word on whether they are physically searched upon entrance, to prevent them from bringing onto the base print copies of the newspaper.

_______

[While we know of no classified information on NeuroCooking, we cannot guarantee that NeuroCooking comments are free of classified information.]

Story is a Structure

When everything is a story, then nothing is a story. A message is not a story. A rhetorical frame is not a story.

A story is a structure for delivering information. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Usually, something happens to someone and something changes as a result.

Recently, a professional media relations specialist was bemoaning the fact that a newspaper journalist “did not get the story” that the specialist was attempting to relay. When I pressed the professional communicator, it became clear that he was delivering a message to the journalist. He had not offered the journalist a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, let alone characters, action, challenge, and resolution. He had not thought about how to make his message concrete or his complex data meaningful, or to provide a context for the message, all of which could be delivered through a structured and strategic story.

The journalist may not have reported the precise and desired message. But he did not fail in reporting the story, as he was not offered a story on which to report.