Lonnie Bunch Protected the Smithsonian From More Than Trump; The Atlantic, September 9, 2026

Sebastian Smee, The Atlantic; Lonnie Bunch Protected the Smithsonian From More Than Trump

"Since his appointment as the Smithsonian’s top official—its 14th secretary and the first historian and Black man to hold the position—in June 2019, Bunch has been the glue holding the Smithsonian together. Through a combination of principled stances and deft political skills, he has kept the sprawling institution on mission and aligned with its public. Chief Justice John Roberts, who serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said in a statementthat Bunch has “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the Smithsonian has “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision, and leadership.”"

City of Boulder Releases Its First Tribal History Report; City of Boulder, June 2, 2026

 City of Boulder; City of Boulder Releases Its First Tribal History Report

"The City of Boulder is pleased to announce the release of the first part of its Tribal ethnographic-education report documenting Indigenous history and cultural connections to the Boulder Valley, now available on the city website. This report marks a significant milestone in Boulder's ongoing commitment to honoring Indigenous history and fostering a more inclusive, historically grounded community.

The report documents the cultural, historical, and ecological connections of Tribal Nations to the Boulder Valley. By centering Tribal perspectives, it provides guidance for education, land stewardship, public interpretation, and community engagement — integrating Indigenous knowledge into the contemporary management of Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) lands. It also seeks to strengthen collaborative partnerships and advance efforts to incorporate Indigenous knowledge systems into environmental management, education, and policy.

“This work represents more than research or documentation — it reflects living histories, enduring cultures, and the ongoing presence of Indigenous Peoples whose connections to this land long predate the City of Boulder and continue today,” said Boulder City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde. “We are deeply grateful to the Tribal Nations, elders, and knowledge holders who chose to share their stories, perspectives, and wisdom. This report is a gift, and we receive it with respect and responsibility.” 

Developed in partnership with Tribal Nations, the report is part of a continuing collaboration with the City of Boulder that began in the 1990s, renewed through the 2016 Indigenous Peoples' Day Resolution and subsequent consultations. Grounded in the City-Tribal Memorandum of Understanding, it provides accurate, respectful educational content about each Tribe's history in Boulder and Jefferson Counties and is intended as a resource for city staff and the community at large.

This work was led by Living Heritage Anthropology, LLC (LHA), a woman-owned small business specializing in ethnographic research and Tribal consultation. LHA's Community-Based Participatory Research approach ensures Tribal voices and goals are central to every stage of the process. Additional reports representing more Tribes who share a history in the Boulder Valley are forthcoming.

Read the report and learn more about the city's Tribal consultation work on the city website."

That Meeting You Hate May Keep A.I. From Stealing Your Job; The New York Times, April 15, 2026

 Noam Scheiber, The New York Times ; That Meeting You Hate May Keep A.I. From Stealing Your Job

"Mr. Sirk’s experience, while perhaps extreme, reflects the broader impact of A.I. in the workplace: It is vastly accelerating many of the tasks conducted by white-collar workers, and even replacing some of these tasks altogether. What it can’t automate — at least not yet — are the hard-coded requirements of bureaucracy.

With the help of A.I., white-collar workers can generate far more memos or strategy options than in the past and churn out more product prototypes or software features. But some executive still has to decide which option to greenlight. Workers can gin up many more sales pitches, but they still have to persuade clients to sign on the dotted line.

As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces.

“These were always important skills,” said David Deming, an economist who is the dean of Harvard College. “But as the information landscape becomes more saturated, the ability to tell a story out of it — to take a ton of text and turn it into something people want — is more valuable.”"

AI could never replace my authors. But, without regulation, it will ruin publishing as we know it; The Guardian, September 18, 2025

Jonny Geller, The Guardian ; AI could never replace my authors. But, without regulation, it will ruin publishing as we know it

[Kip Currier: This is a thought-provoking piece by literary agent Jonny Geller. He suggests an "artists’ rights charter for AI that protects two basic principles: permission and attribution". His charter idea conveys some aspects of the copyright area called "moral rights".

Moral rights provide copyright creators with a right of paternity (i.e. attribution) and a right of integrity. The latter can enable creators to exercise some levels of control over how their copyrighted works can be adapted. The moral right of integrity, for example, was an argument in cases involving whether black and white films (legally) could be or (ethically) should be colorized. (See Colors in Conflicts: Moral Rights and the Foreign Exploitation of Colorized U.S. Motion Pictures) Moral rights are not widespread in U.S. copyright law because of tensions between the moral right of integrity and the right of free expression/free speech under the U.S. Constitution (whose September 17, 1787 birthday was yesterday). The Visual Artists Rights Act (1990) is a narrow example of moral rights under U.S. copyright law.

To Geller's proposed Artists' Rights Charter for AI I'd suggest adding the word and concept of "Responsibilities". Compelling arguments can be made for providing authors with some rights regarding use of their copyrighted works as AI training data. And, commensurately, persuasive arguments can be made that authors have certain responsibilities if they use AI at any stage of their creative processes. Authors can and ethically should be transparent about how they have used AI, if applicable, in the creation stages of their writing.

Of course, how to operationalize that as an ethical standard is another matter entirely. But just because it may be challenging to initially develop some ethical language as guidance for authors and strive to instill it as a broad standard doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted or done.]

[Excerpt]

"The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI...

As a literary agent and CEO of one of the largest agencies in Europe, I think this is something everyone should care about – not because we fear progress, but because we want to protect it. If you take away the one thing that makes us truly human – our ability to think like humans, create stories and imagine new worlds – we will live in a diminished world.

AI that doesn’t replace the artist, or that will work with them transparently, is not all bad. An actor who is needed for reshoots on a movie may authorise use of the footage they have to complete a picture. This will save on costs, the environmental impact and time. A writer may wish to speed up their research and enhance their work by training their own models to ask the questions that a researcher would. The translation models available may enhance the range of offering of foreign books, adding to our culture.

All of this is worth discussing. But it has to be a discussion and be transparent to the end user. Up to now, work has simply been stolen and there are insufficient guardrails on the distributors, studios, publishers. As a literary agent, I have a more prosaic reason to get involved – I don’t think it is fair for someone’s work to be taken without their permission to create an inferior competitor.

What can we do? We could start with some basic principles for all to sign up to. An artists’ rights charter for AI that protects two basic principles: permission and attribution."

‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology; The Guardian, November 24, 2024

  Introduction by Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian; ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

"Greek myth is not a stable thing. There is no such thing as a canonical, “original” version of a Greek myth. The stories that remain to us – the material of classical plays and poetry, and of visual culture from pottery to pediments – are already elaborations and accretions. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, stories were adapted and remade to serve the needs of the moment. The Greek tragedians often took the germ of an idea from the Homeric epics, and built an entire plot from it. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for instance, is in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey: both are stories of a warrior’s return from war, but with entirely different outcomes. Euripides’s subversive play Helen proposes that the entire Trojan war was fought not in the cause of a real woman, but of an illusory, fake version sent by the gods, while the “real” Helen of Troy sat out the siege in Egypt.

Seen in this light, as novelist Pat Barker points out below, the modern appetite for working with (and maybe sometimes against) Greek myth is a part of a long continuum, rather than an innovation...

Stephen Fry on Ithaka by CP Cavafy (1911), a poem inspired by The Odyssey

Author of Mythos, Heroes and Troy, a trilogy of books retelling the myths of ancient Greece

The Odyssey is the beginning of human modernity. Suddenly, the greatest qualities a warrior could have were cunning, intelligence and curiosity, but also a sense of home – Odysseus is constantly striving to get back to his wife and son. There was something new in that. This idea of “nostos” – of returning home to the hearth after your wanderings – has been very powerful in the Greek imagination ever since.

Early last century, there was a wonderful Greek poet living in Alexandria named Constantine Cavafy. I found out about him by reading EM Forster, who met Cavafy in Alexandria and recommended him to WH Auden and others. One of Cavafy’s greatest poems is about Ithaca, the island which Odysseus spends 10 years trying to get back to. The poem is about this journey, this yearning to find the place that we think of as home, but Cavafy tells us that it’s not worth anything. You must strive for it, he says, but you’ll find it isn’t the place itself that’s the destination, it’s the striving, it’s what you learn on the way. It’s the gorgeous things you find and the people you meet and the experiences you have. So you must aim for Ithaca and simultaneously know it’s not worth getting to, because it will have nothing to give you. That’s how the poem ends, in Edmund Keeley’s terrific translation: “Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey./ Without her you wouldn’t have set out./ She has nothing left to give you now.”

I think it’s a very brilliant and moving poem, even in translation (I’m sure if you were fluent in modern Greek it would be even more astonishing). It’s an example of what the Greek myths can give us in terms of retellings. All the JRR Tolkien books are nostos stories, stories of returns home – The Hobbit is subtitled There and Back Again. It is the most mythic, primal, elemental story that we have. As told to Killian Fox"

The Leadership Storytelling Secrets That Keep Audiences Riveted; Forbes, April 2, 2022

Esther Choy, Forbes; The Leadership Storytelling Secrets That Keep Audiences Riveted

"Authentic persuasion requires leaders to have relevant and compelling stories on hand. Stories not only create stronger bonds with your audience, they also make information more memorable.

To create stories quickly, stories should follow a basic story structure. We call it the “IRS” model:

• I - Intriguing beginning
• R - Riveting middle
• S - Satisfying end"

Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war; The Guardian, February 28, 2022

Yuval Noah Harari, The Guardian; Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war

"Nations are ultimately built on stories. Each passing day adds more stories that Ukrainians will tell not only in the dark days ahead, but in the decades and generations to come. The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks."

The Positives—and Perils—of Storytelling; HBR IdeaCast, Episode 840, February 8, 2022

Curt Nickisch, HBR IdeaCast, Episode 840; The Positives—and Perils—of Storytelling

"JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL: Ever since I published The Storytelling Animal, I became part sort of on the edges of what I’ve called the storytelling industrial complex – keynoters and book writers and consultants who’ve traveled around the country and are giving lessons to businesses and other big organizations about how to tell more persuasive stories, more memorable stories, more contagious stories. And I’ve also been spreading the good news that stories are a good thing. They’re good in the sense that they do good in the world. And they’re good in the sense that they also happen to make good business. And I’ve become increasingly troubled by the overstatements or the things left out of the messaging.

So the first thing is that stories aren’t good. They just aren’t. Stories are just powerful. I think it’s better to think of the force of storytelling as a mercenary that sells itself just as eagerly to the bad guys.

The other thing about storytelling is as soon as you’re telling a story, you’re in an ethically fraught situation, because basically what you’re doing is you’re trying to use a form of messaging that’s not quite explicit. Storytelling is always sort of indirect. And that’s the power of storytelling, and so people don’t get as skeptical and they don’t get as suspicious.

In my years in the storytelling industrial complex and attending conferences and reading other people’s books, I’d noted quite frequently that the power of storytelling was often likened to a Trojan horse. And this is a pretty good analogy for how stories work. The idea is that you have this beautiful structure, this thing we all love. The Trojan horse is this beautiful work of art, but it’s smuggling in something else. It’s smuggling in a message."

What to Do When You’re Losing Your Audience During a Presentation; Harvard Business Review, September 19, 2019

Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review; What to Do When You’re Losing Your Audience During a Presentation

"As a professional speaker who has given more than 300 talks over the past half-decade, I’ve addressed plenty of audiences under adverse conditions, from the serious (employees smarting from news of an impending reorg) to the banal (fighting to be heard over the clank of silverware during a lunchtime speaking slot). Here are four strategies that have helped me regain control of the room."

Meet the Boston City Councilor With Visions of Becoming the Next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; The Daily Beast, July 23, 2018

Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast; Meet the Boston City Councilor With Visions of Becoming the Next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[Kip Currier: Massachusetts candidate Ayanna Pressley's "Treadmill story" is a great communication example of using the power of storytelling to persuade and make a lasting impression.  

Another excellent example of highly effective storytelling that I've highlighted in my Management and Leadership course is this one from a 2011 New York Times interview, A Blueprint for Leadership: Show, Don’t Tell, with Amy Schulman, executive vice president and general counsel at Pfizer:

Q. [Adam Bryant] Can you give me an example of one of those stories?
 

“A. [Amy Schulman] A story I often tell is about the first time I took a deposition. I got there early, and I thought that the most important thing was to control the witness. I didn’t realize the first time around that the way you control somebody is not by intimidating them. But I adjusted the chair that I was sitting on so that I’d be really tall, and could look down imposingly on the witness. But I raised it so high that as soon as I sat down, I toppled over and fell backward. I tell that story for a few reasons. I want people to know I’m not afraid to laugh at myself. And the best way to show people that you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself is to actually laugh at yourself and tell a story of a time that you’ve been embarrassed.”]

"Most politicians running for higher office don’t publicize embarrassing tales of personal physical harm.

But on scorching mid-July morning, Ayanna Pressley, a 44-year-old Boston city councilor seeking to become the next progressive candidate to knock off a well-known white male Democratic incumbent, regaled a group of kids about that time she fell off her treadmill.

“A girl got on the treadmill next to me,” she told a group of young, mostly African-American girls at a summer basketball clinic at Wainwright Park in the neighborhood of Dorchester. “And she had a cuter outfit on and she was running even harder and her form was even better. And I was so busy watching her that I fell and cracked my tooth on the treadmill.”

Pressley’s tale was an altogether human one: a former high school track runner trying to find her way back into shape. But it was a political metaphor too—one that she was applying to her own candidacy.

“Now that is a lesson for life,” she said, peering down at the girls underneath a sun hat. “I was so busy looking at her race that I wasn’t focused on my own. You have to run your own race.”"

How A Cleaning Lady Inspired Awesome Leadership; Forbes, June 2, 2018

Laura Rittenhouse, Forbes; How A Cleaning Lady Inspired Awesome Leadership

"In an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger shared a lesson he learned in college during a business strategy final exam.  Bettinger needed to ace the test so he could graduate with a 4.0.  He spent hours reviewing formulas and case studies.  On the day of the exam, his professor handed out just one sheet of paper and asked the class to turn it over.   It was blank.  He explained, “I’ve taught you everything I can teach you about business in the last 10 weeks, but… the most important question is this: What’s the name of the lady who cleans this building?” Bettinger was stunned.  It was the only test he ever failed.

 He told Bryant, “…I got the B I deserved. Her name was Dottie, and I didn’t know Dottie. I’d seen her, but I’d never taken the time to ask her name. I’ve tried to know every Dottie I’ve worked with ever since.”  The experience taught him “…you should never lose sight of people who do the real work.”  Bettinger’s lesson in humility impressed me.  By revealing his failure to Bryant, he chose to be vulnerable.  Instead of pounding his chest in the interview, he opened his heart...

Awesome leaders who act with integrity are more likely to be smart risk-takers.  To be adaptive, authentic and accountable means to keep one’s eye on the prize and lead with integrity.  The word “integrity” means to be whole.  To be whole means to care about others, even those who may be different from us.  This leads to awesome empathy – the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes and see what their world looks like.

For Walt Bettinger, it meant learning the name of the woman who cleaned his classroom."

Have a big presentation? Learn to ice the cake; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/21/16

Matthew Gutierrez, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Have a big presentation? Learn to ice the cake:

"On channeling nervousness...

Mr. English has taught public speaking for 15 years, yet he still gets “painfully” nervous before speaking to large groups. To lessen the nerves, he meditates, spending a few moments to be alone in his thoughts. He thinks of each speech as an opportunity to share something cool with his friends. Lowering the stakes makes the occasion more manageable...

On engaging your audience

Whether you’ve got a one-on-one talk or a speech in front of 400 people, think storytelling. Stories are powerful because they combine data and information with emotion. “The way to a person’s head is through their heart,” Mr. Carter said. “People buy into emotion.”

Stories paint even the most complex of topics in a new light. They can portray something new and enhance the message. Sometimes all it takes is a few seconds to connect an audience member with a story, Mr. English said."

Podcast: The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean on leadership; Washington Post, 4/24/15

Lillian Cunningham, Washington Post; Podcast: The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean on leadership:

"This week our podcast is with Susan Orlean, a writer at The New Yorker magazine and an author of several nonfiction books, including The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. (Orlean is also the co-host of a podcast called "Crybabies," which explores the many and varied things that make people cry.)

In this conversation, Orlean talks about the craft of writing, how she transformed into a better storyteller, what frustrates her about the publishing industry, and her advice for finding your own narrative voice.

You can subscribe to our On Leadership podcast on iTunes to hear all of our weekly conversations on life, character and advice, featuring influential figures from across business, politics, science and the arts."