This article reviews Tariq Ramadan's book on the Arab Spring. Was the Arab Spring planned or staged? Was it a revolt by the people with no plan the day after?

"Half of this slim volume is spent examining whether the uprisings were staged or spontaneous. Ramadan counsels against both the naive view that outside powers are passive observers of events, and the contrary belief that Arab revolutionaries have been mere pawns in the hands of cunning foreign players. Certainly the US and its allies helped to guide events by collaborating with the military hierarchies which removed presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, and by full-scale intervention in Libya – for a variety of obvious reasons. An agreement signed by Libya's NTC last year, for instance, guaranteed France 3 per cent of future oil exports."

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"A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect."

This is a great post on the power of storytelling. The brain remembers stories and that is the main argument the author makes in this article. Stories are powerful and now there is scientific evidence to prove it.

"If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens. When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too."

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