So if you watch our series on world history, you'll no doubt remember that writing, and the ability to read it, are so-called "markers of civilization." Now that's a really problematic idea, I mean for one thing, great stories can have great lives in the oral tradition, like one of my favorite books, Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston, was a collection of folklore that lived in the oral tradition until Zora Neale Hurston wrote it down, and the same can be said for another of my favorite books, The Odyssey. But we privilege reading and writing because they allow us to communicate directly and transparently with people who live very far away from us, and they also allow us to kind of hear the voices of the dead. I mean, I don't want to get all liberal-artsy on you, but I do want to make this clear: for me, stories are about communication.