Matter, the new longform science and technology platform, was acquired yesterday by Medium, the other new publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Launched last fall, Medium is essentially a blog without blog content, a place for valuable, high-quality writing to stand apart from the hordes of rambling blog posts that flood the Web today. If you haven’t heard of either of these new publishing platforms, that’s OK: This is some serious inside tech-and-startup baseball, and that’s the problem.

Williams and Stone weren’t the only entrepreneurs with the idea to create a more structured, less cluttered, and less accessible space on the Web for good content—there’s Svtble, another invite-only blogging platform, Branch, the let’s-move-off-Twitter discussion space, and App.net, the $36-per-year Twitter without the riffraff. All these startups of the “new Internet” are ad-free but not free to enter. (Branch is slightly different: free to start a discussion, but participation by invite-only.)

The Kickstarter-funded Matter, which Williams backed, raised $140,000 in February 2012 and began publishing one long article per month in November, available to members for a subscription fee of 99¢ per month. So far the articles have been pretty great—I purchased their debut story, “Do No Harm“, which explores the neuropsychology of perfectly healthy people who want to amputate their limbs. It was an excellent piece of science journalism, the kind that should cost money, so it makes sense that Williams and Stone wanted to pull Matter’s good stories into their pristine publishing ecosystem—”the best place on the Internet to read and create high-quality content,” Williams told the Matter co-founders, according to their blog post.

An old man is dying, and calls his people to his side. He gives a short, sturdy stick to each on his many offspring, wives, and relatives. "Break the stick," he instructs them. With some effort, they all snap their sticks in half. "This is how it is when a soul is alone without anyone. They can be easily broken."

The old man next gives each of his kin another stick, and says, "This is how I would like you to live after I pass. Put your sticks together in bundles of twos and threes. Now, break these bundles in half." No one can break the sticks when there are two or more in a bundle. The old man smiles. "We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we are with another, we cannot be broken."

Native American Legends

GREENSBORO, N.C. (March 27, 2013) — Iconic women’s rights advocate GLORIA STEINEM will headline this fall’s Celebration Luncheon hosted by Women to Women.

Gloria Steinem
The event is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 21, at the Joseph S. Koury Convention Center. Tickets will go on sale this summer.
Women to Women is an endowed fund at The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro that supports the needs of Greensboro’s women and families. This year, the fund is expected to award a grant of up to $70,000 to a cause that incorporates the arts in education.

Children watch their parents play with shiny technical objects all day. Parents cradle them, caress them, never let them out of their hands. When mothers breast feed their infants, the shiny objects are in their hands, at their ears. When parents bring their toddlers to the park, they share their attention with the shiny objects to the point that children are jealous and indeed, often go unattended. Playground accidents are up.

As soon as children are old enough to express their desires, children want the objects as well and few parents say no. In parental slang, it has become known as the "passback," passing back the iPhone to quiet your toddler in the rear seat of the car.

In the 1840s, Benjamin Disraeli, still a long way from being prime minister of England, wanted to wake people up to the plight of the British working class -- and move them to act. The alarm he sounded wasn't delivered in a speech, a pamphlet, or an article -- but in a novel, Sybil, published in 1845. It had the desired effect -- raising awareness, provoking outrage, and leading to the passage of several fundamental social reforms.

Disraeli knew that one of the most effective ways to touch people is through narrative -- putting flesh and blood on raw facts and data. Ever since I read Sybil when I was at Cambridge, I've loved thinkers and writers and gadflies who use storytelling to reach people and get us to act. Of course, since Disraeli's time, other powerful ways of telling those stories have emerged -- including movies.

And so it was that I found myself moderating a panel discussion last week with the director and two cast members (Frank Grillo and Marc Jacobs -- yes, that Marc Jacobs!) of a movie that uses storytelling to wake us up to one of the biggest problems of our modern age: the effect that being "connected" to technology 24/7 is having on our ability to connect with our lives, ourselves and the people we love.