I love stories.

Stories are what make us human. They are the foundation of community and of continuity. They connect us, teach us, comfort us. We each tell stories. Small stories. Big stories. We yearn to tell stories. Some of us don’t think consciously about it, but we do it all the time. Telling stories, listening to others’ stories. It is the basis of culture. Any culture.

We communicate through stories. I like to think about communications. To study communications is largely to observe how we format those stories — the protocols we follow, the methods we employ, the ways we preserve stories for future generations.

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