It's Friday, and today we explore the need to write, both the good and not-so-good sides of getting every thought out into the ether. After many of us hacks are done publishing for the day, we highlight a few professionals who have turned out to be hall-of-fame storytellers despite a lack of classical training. Apple goes back to where you can end a call, and a section namesake is a perfect Sound Check to close out the day and prepare for the weekend.

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When you read a piece and think one of the words in the title is made up for emphasis, only to find out it's an actual word meaning; "a compulsive urge to write." Graphomania is an actual word; it's also a clinical diagnosis in psychology, meaning a pathological impulse to write, which may degenerate into graphorrhea—the compulsive writing of incoherent and meaningless words. When Adam Thirlwell writes about our propensity to vomit words over everything, it’s both a warning and a question.

Have we gone from raising our voices for justice and values to spectacle and attention only? Has the age of social media, likes, clicks, and recommendation engines given us too many incentives to post for a quick hit of validation? It's too early to tell, but having a voice in a largely digital world differs from having a genuine voice. In Thirlwell’s piece, he goes back in history to show gaslighting and other forms of misinformation have been around in various forms for a long time. Citing the French Revolution and rumors spread to slander people can give us hope that every time the screams come from the sky-falling group, the real writers get busy crafting stories based on better data. The every day writers will save us all.

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Speaking of words, a new piece of information popped up when an old 60 Minutes clip hit our internal feed. The episode was an interview with Michael Lewis, the prolific author who has written several books that turned into movies. Steve Kroft interviewed Lewis in 2010 after he wrote The Big Short about the financial crisis in 2007-08. Here is the new piece of info we learned from this old interview: Michael Lewis is married to another blast from our past, Tabitha Soren, from the 90s MTV NEWS days.

Here is the short list of books Lewis has written that have been turned into movies:

Lewis has been in the news the last few weeks, not for anything he did, but based on accusations made by Michael Oher from The Blindside; those details continue to be released. Lewis is also finishing up another book, Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, due out later this fall. Lewis has worked on Wall Street and has yet to study writing in school. His natural curiosity turned him into a great journalist and writer. As we wrote above, anyone can be a writer these days, but only some can have the consistent talent of Michael Lewis.

From writers to talkers, Mashable brings us a story we had to test to prove. According to the story, Apple moved the 'End Call' button from the middle to the right, and the blowback was enough to have Apple change it back on the next big update. The fact that we hadn't noticed it either way means we don't get a lot of calls 😒

One of my favorite songs and top-section namesake is here to play it for us.

The Smiths 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' ('Whistle Test', 1986)

Memorize the City.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us.

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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