Books, movies, television, internet, made-up and true-to life: stories move us, motivate us, disgust us—but what is the mechanism of cultural storytelling? Why do we hear some stories, and not others, and why is it that so many of the stories told by popular culture seem so familiar, so uniform? In this lecture, the author of Snowball’s Chance demystifies what makes a story mainstream, what makes a story experimental, and the underlying economic foundation of mono-culture.