Category: Jared’s View
“You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story…” It is hard to deny the salience of this lyric penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his Broadway smash Hamilton. Still, it is difficult not to catch a whiff of irony, as the show itself dramatizes and in some...
Whether you’re religious or not, you can’t deny that humans delight in few things more than playing God. While usually an accusation imputed to politicians, executives, and scientists, there are none so guilty of divine imitation as writers. Cloistered in our messy rooms, our brains imbibe on the power of...
When asked to imagine what I would do if I were “emperor of the world,” my first instinct is to say “abdicate.” I’ve never been in charge of a space that’s more than 850 sq. ft, so I feel like the stress of commanding the infinite cosmos might cause me...
Since the release of Disney’s latest Star Wars trilogy, the internet has been rife with memes mocking the saga’s mercurial, millennial goth villain- Kylo Ren. Indeed, compared to the menacing machismo of Darth Vader, the tantrum-throwing, Hot Topic reject of a sith lord is not the antagonist you’d expect in...
I am not a religious person, but like many a skeptical millennial, I often find myself wondering about the greater truths of existence. Typically, I would never hazard a spiritual discourse in a blog. There are many heated internet discussion boards for that purpose. However, when I sat down to...
A couple of years ago, as a fresh-faced college sophomore proudly brandishing his self-engineered major of “narrative brand promotions,” I had a limpid vision of my impending career. It began with an internship at Walt Disney Imagineering and ended with my induction as a Disney Legend, with my handprints forever...
Working for a company like IDEAS, you can’t help but be constantly mindful of story’s role in human society. It is the hallmark of our species’ intellectual capacity, the ability to organize our sensory intakes into meaningful schemas of cause-and-effect. In last month’s blog on poetry, I referred to human...
I love words. Their sounds, their shapes, the way they tango off the tongue and lips. I love the creative combination of these weird utterances and am amazed at their ability to move men to both greatness and ruin. I love their histories and often surprising heritages. Most of all,...
In the Parable of Wise and Foolish Builders, Jesus waxes architectural about the merit of houses built on rock foundations. In his words, “everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” This well-known Biblical passage...
It’s riding a rollercoaster as the track is being laid. It’s running an obstacle course shrouded in opaque fog. It’s explaining the breadth of existence in a wordless language. It’s splendidly primal. It’s ineffably sophisticated. It’s life. It’s jazz. Since I first heard Sinatra’s silky baritone crooning to the brassy...
Good vs. Evil. It is the most rudimentary of human conflicts, disputed in theatres of war, chambers of argument, and across Thanksgiving dinner tables. Our nature as logical beings is to categorize the world in comprehensible terms. We use the descriptors of “good” and “evil” as shorthand designations of our...
Safety, Courtesy, Show, and Efficiency. Anyone who has ever worked for “The Mouse” can recite these Four Keys of guest experience with cultish zeal. Working as a Walt Disney World cast member, I observed that these four pillars support the larger pediment of an unspoken key called Repeatability. This means...
