At the Serpentine, a Show of Nature’s Healing Power
The climate crisis is inspiring — and requiring — new perspectives in thinking for the London gallery, starting with “Back to Earth.”

July 29, 2022
Frank Rose is the author most recently of The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World, a book that explores the concept of narrative thinking — and why it matters all the more in a world defined by data. He teaches global business executives as faculty director of Columbia University’s executive education seminar Strategic Storytelling and heads the Digital Dozen awards program at Columbia’s pioneering Digital Storytelling Lab. His previous book, The Art of Immersion, was a landmark work on technology and the evolution of narrative.
BUILDING ON INSIGHTS from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, ‘The Sea We Swim In’ shows us how to see the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told. This is the essence of narrative thinking.
NOT LONG AGO WE WERE SPECTATORS, passive consumers of mass media. Now we approach television shows, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate — as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will. What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a new form of narrative that is native to the Internet.
The climate crisis is inspiring — and requiring — new perspectives in thinking for the London gallery, starting with “Back to Earth.”
July 29, 2022
“Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” Old-media conglomerates famously dismissed Netflix when it was a fledgling startup. Time Warner, Blockbuster: Where are they now?
April 22, 2022
There’s a new gallery show of his whimsical drawings — and coming this summer, an immersive art-and-science experience.
January 27, 2022
The digital transition was always going to be a messy one—look at the antitrust fights that followed the telephone during the analog era. “System Error,” by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein.
September 23, 2021