Last month I asked, Are TED Talks still a thing? (See my blog post titled “Against TED?”, which I am reblogging below.) As it happens, I stumbled upon this 2009 TED Talk by my favorite polymath, Tyler Cowen, while I was reading this fascinating essay by author Ian Leslie. Both Professor Cowen’s unorthodox talk (“Be suspicious of stories”) and Ian Leslie’s scathing essay (“Stories are bad for your intelligence”) are super-critical of storytelling. The supreme irony of their “anti-story” critiques, however, is not lost on me: both Cowen and Leslie end up having to tell a story in order to debunk the value of stories! File under: hmmm …