Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

A Renewal of Pleasure

Our lives are enriched when we join artists in taking glorious risks. I became a Beatles connoisseur and fan both early and late—early in my life, late in their success. It was the summer I drove with my parents and a couple of their friends to (the former) Yugoslavia. We drove from Modena all the way to the (now Croatian) isle of Krk. We had just left Trieste behind (Trst on the other side of the border) and were driving along the winding road that flanked the coast when we came upon a horrific accident. People were literally bleeding all... Read more →

Whatever it Takes

From the dark side of business and the growing imbalance of power to making a difference with naming and words. Lehman Brothers Inc. was an American global financial services firm and the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States. Its founding dates back to 1847. Before filing for bankruptcy in 2008, the firm employed 25,000 people. A culture of fear permeated the company. Richard Fuld is the former CEO of the only bank that collapsed in the financial crisis. The bank collapsed because they were taking too high risks. Fuld was known for his super aggressive language: “we’re at war,”... Read more →

Life’s too Short…

to be a copycat of someone else. If machines have personalities, it’s our doing. ChatGPT sure has been in the news lately. I’m not surprised to see it all over social media feeds, given how monolithic those feeds tend to be. “ChatGPT this, ChatGPT that” say the marketers like proud parents of a new toddler to anyone who will look their way. It’s not GPT3’s fault that humans have a well-documented propensity for conning each other. Two years of pandemic isolation behind screens may have exacerbated the issue of bullying in the workplace. Complex PTSD is real. Two intelligent discussions... Read more →

They Called it the “Gentle Revolution.”

For six years I had the privilege of working with a group of therapists and researchers who believed that each child, at the time of birth, has the same potential as Leonardo da Vinci. Their belief was so strong that they started with brain-injured children—children who navigate life as different. The labels varied, but they’re not important. The children are. You see, typically we don’t see framing in our narrative. It’s like defaults. What you do with the cards you’re dealt, that’s what’s important. In a letter to Maria Montessori, her colleague and physician Giuseppe Montesano says, “You need to... Read more →

How you Speak is Who You Are

Identity is forged in the interplay of language and emotion. The connection between the two has value. But we only realize the value of something after we lose it. You may not realize it, but language is the vehicle of our lives. It’s the means through which we communicate our values and orient to the world. Through language, we tend to and access a rich emotional connection with loved ones. That connection with others helps us negotiate our identity. In ancient Greece they knew that it is others who create the context for “me” to emerge and develop. Then we... Read more →

Details are the Hallmark of a Story you can Relate to

But they work only when you nail the larger narrative. Lynda LaPlante Before he could start enjoying his job, Jack Warr had to find his place in the world. The interaction between a quest to reconnect with his identity and the mounting urgency of the crisis in a new case depend on each other to make the story work in Lynda LaPlante’s latest crime series. LaPlante turned to writing after a successful acting career. You may know her name for her work on Prime Suspect. The gap between the story you tell and your body language is what gives you... Read more →

Some of us Knew That all Along

Companies turned social networks into media because they had no idea how to harness the value of socially useful energy concentrated there. The real horror to turning networks into media is that it happened gradually, and then all of a sudden. Few noticed. Making connections for modest use was okay. Turning everyone into constant content creators/sinks was not. I was going to build on the conversation generated on LinkedIn on the article in The Atlantic about the age of social media being over when I discovered to my horror that all my connections, content, and company page were gone. All... Read more →

Making Headlines with the Wrong Story

Instead of investigating the funneling of Euroscepticism into Brexit and the reasons why Britain, once a land of ambitious colonizers, is descending into a dramatic spiral, The Economist decides to make fun of Italy. Perhaps cucumber on pizza (must be a British thing) can paper over the Government's embarrassment for the ridiculous twists and turns of the last few days. But the resignation of a Prime Minister is an opportunity for introspection. Ridicule may be entertaining, but it's rarely productive. According to the weekly report, Britaly is “a country of political instability, low growth and subordination to the markets.” The... Read more →

The Emotional Toll of Believing in the Wrong Story

It's 1860, the year before the end of “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” In 1814, the Congress of Vienna had put together the Kingdom of Naples (the southern half of Italy's “boot”) and the Kingdom of Sicily under the rule of a Bourbon, in Naples. This is the backdrop for a spellbinding story. “For everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” says Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1963 novel, The Leopard. The Salina family is an upper-class family of landowners, with some minor titles. Setting the tone of the patriarch’s life, di Lampedusa says, “Between the pride and... Read more →

Making the Story up as we Go

The “point of view in the American novel” was an assignment I relished during my course on American literature at the University of Bologna. I started the paper by describing a scene from Hitchcock’s Rear Window: A man in the semi-distance looking inside the apartment across and the yard below him. From the activities taking place in his view, the character develops a narrative piecing together clues made of body language and action. Third party observational narrative feels real to the moviegoer who becomes immersed in the sequence of events “as seen or described” by someone else. You watch the... Read more →