Story resources

Book sources used for the 2026-08-02 expansion

Each new note contains a page-level locator and identifies whether the text was retold, condensed, or presented as legend.

Primary and public-domain sources used for the 50-story expansion

Ravaillac and the assassination of Henry IV

The Trial of Francis Ravaillac for the Murder of King Henry the Great — Edmund Goldsmid’s 1885 English translation, presented as extracted from the Paris Parlement’s 1610 registers. The assassination appears at PDF pp. 19–20; the judicial torture, execution narrative, and formal sentence at PDF pp. 49–59. This is a primary-derived institutional record mediated by a nineteenth-century editor.
Larousse — Henri IV — modern French encyclopedia corroboration for the 14 May assassination, prolonged torture, continued denial of accomplices, and 27 May quartering.
French Ministry of Culture — 1610 execution print — museum record for a contemporary print depicting the execution at the Place de Grève. It confirms the event’s immediate public representation, not every reported detail of the punishment.

The Daily Dad story collection

Ryan Holiday, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF
The Daily Dad - Story Index — 136 selected narrative entries organized into the book’s twelve monthly themes

Selection required a named notable or established figure, a concrete scene or event, and a reusable claim. Ryan Holiday’s personal or family anecdotes, unnamed everyday examples, stand-alone quotations, and advice without narrative action were excluded. The story notes paraphrase Holiday’s presentation and identify fiction, religious tradition, classical anecdote, film adaptation, and similar evidence boundaries; they do not independently authenticate every account.

The Daily Stoic story collection

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF
The Daily Stoic - Story Index — 72 reusable story records selected from 71 of the book’s 366 dated meditations

Selection used the same threshold as The Daily Dad: a notable or established figure (or comparable public example), concrete narrative action, and a reusable claim. Isolated quotations, generic scenarios, abstract advice, and historical name-checks without an episode were excluded. The collection adds 69 new canonical stories and enriches 3 existing stories without duplicating them. The notes paraphrase the book and label source types; they do not independently authenticate every account.

The Daily Laws story collection

Robert Greene, The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF
The Daily Laws - Story Index — 85 reusable story records selected from 90 of the book’s 366 dated laws

Selection required a notable or established figure (or comparable public example), concrete narrative action, and a reusable claim. Greene’s autobiographical passages, isolated quotations, generic scenarios, abstract advice, and historical name-checks without an episode were excluded. The collection adds 84 new canonical stories and enriches 1 existing story without duplication. The notes paraphrase the book and label source types; they do not independently authenticate every account or endorse every tactic described.

The Art of Seduction story collection

Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (Penguin Books, 2003; first published 2001)
The Art of Seduction - Story Index — 100 reusable story records from a complete review of the 496-page PDF

Selection required a notable or established figure (or comparable public example), a concrete narrative event, and a reusable claim. Greene’s personal material, generic scenarios, isolated quotations, abstract instruction, repeated fragments, unnamed examples, and famous-name references without a real episode were excluded. The collection adds 93 new canonical stories and enriches 7 existing stories without duplication. The notes paraphrase the book, label fiction and source limitations, and separate persuasive effect from ethical legitimacy.

The 48 Laws of Power story collection

Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (476 viewer pages)
The 48 Laws of Power - Story Index — 123 reusable records from a complete review of all 48 laws

Selection required a notable or established figure (or comparable public example), a concrete narrative event, and a reusable claim. Greene’s personal material, generic scenarios, isolated quotations, abstract instruction, repeated fragments, unnamed examples, and famous-name references without a real episode were excluded. The collection adds 113 new canonical stories and enriches 10 existing stories without duplication. The notes paraphrase the book, label evidentiary limits, and separate strategic effect from ethical legitimacy.

Discipline Is Destiny story collection

Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (293 viewer pages; byte-identical to the supplied NAS file)
Discipline Is Destiny - Story Index — 79 reusable records from a complete review of the 293-page PDF

Selection required a notable or established figure (or comparable named institutional example), concrete narrative action, and a reusable claim. Holiday’s autobiographical and family passages, isolated quotations, generic scenarios, abstract advice, repeated fragments, and famous-name references without an episode were excluded. The audit adds 69 new canonical stories and enriches 10 existing stories without duplication. The notes paraphrase the book and label evidentiary limits; they do not independently authenticate every historical or biographical claim.

The Better Angels of Our Nature story collection

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (1,262 viewer pages)
The Better Angels of Our Nature - Story Index — 50 selected stories and vignettes from a complete chapter-by-chapter review

Selection required a concrete scene, choice, reversal, encounter, or experiment with a transferable claim. Passing examples, hypothetical scenarios, and famous-name references without narrative action were excluded. The notes paraphrase Pinker, identify personal recollection, experiments, fiction, myth, and secondhand retellings, and preserve PDF++ locators. They do not independently authenticate every account. The Christian Wirth entry preserves Pinker’s citation to Jonathan Glover and does not infer the child’s coercion, understanding, state of mind, or later fate.

The Righteous Mind story collection

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (473 viewer pages)
The Righteous Mind - Story Index — 60 selected stories, thought experiments, and research episodes from Chapters 1–12 and the Conclusion

Selection requires a concrete scene, reversal, encounter, experiment, or narratively developed thought experiment with a transferable claim. Bare hypothetical prompts remain in the book note; a thought experiment is retained only when its scene carries a reusable philosophical distinction. Chapter 8 adds Haidt’s private Kerry rewrite, the YourMorals origin, the reader criticism that changed Fairness, the secondhand Twi ethnography, and Fehr and Gächter’s public-goods experiment. Chapter 9 adds the paired post-9/11 flags, Haidt’s evolutionary boat race, the Tomasello comparative tasks, Belyaev’s foxes, and Muir’s hens. Chapter 10 adds McNeill’s drill, Emerson and Darwin’s awe, the Good Friday experiment, Hsieh’s rave, source-era oxytocin and conditional-empathy studies, and Haidt’s Kennedy–fascism contrast. Chapter 11 adds UVA football, Dennett’s parasite analogy, the commune-survival comparison, Balinese water temples, the maypole, a !Kung healing dance, and a German trust game. Chapter 12 adds Keith Richards’s choir betrayal, Haidt’s bookstore-floor reversal, the partisan-imitation task, the leaded-gasoline phaseout, Goldhill’s inquiry after his father’s death, and Jim Leach’s account of disappearing cross-party family life. The Conclusion adds Frank Cotham’s one-panel vignette of a father explaining political disagreement as proof that the child’s mother does not want what is best for the country. The source collection distinguishes autobiography, historical testimony, thought experiment, comparative cognition, ethnography, controlled breeding, small experiments, political cartoon, and interpretive political rhetoric; paraphrases Haidt; preserves endnote qualifications and PDF++ locators; and does not independently authenticate private recollection, reanalyze the studies, establish the contested group-selection case, infer a human evolutionary chronology from animal breeding, endorse extrajudicial killing, turn punishment or selection into a general license to control people, establish current oxytocin, psychedelic, candidate-gene, lead–crime, health-care, diversity, or polarization consensus, or make cohesion and self-transcendent feeling evidence that their object is just.

The WEIRDest People in the World selected stories

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (file not included in this release) — vault-local source PDF (752 viewer pages)
chapter summaries and source audit — twelve selected stories through Chapter 14

The current selection retains William Buckley’s entry into a Wathaurung kin network, Ilahita’s cross-cutting Tambaran system, the Marrakesh call-to-prayer field experiment, Pontius Paulinus’s costly renunciation, Motolinía’s account of elite resistance to Christian monogamy in New Spain, the diffusion of Magdeburg Law through daughter cities, London stockbrokers’ coffeehouse self-governance, the Hadza endowment experiment, Duke Berthold’s death as an instrument for Swiss democratic exposure, Said ibn Ahmad’s civilizational ranking and its reversal, Newcomen’s broken-boiler discovery, and France’s persecution-driven export of Denis Papin and other Huguenot skill. Selection requires a concrete episode or experiment with a transferable claim. The stories paraphrase Henrich, preserve direct PDF++ locators and source boundaries, and do not independently authenticate colonial-era testimony, ethnographic reconstruction, late-antique motives, missionary accounts, medieval legal or financial reconstruction, reported experiments, Said’s exact wording, invention priority, or Henrich’s France–steam-engine counterfactual. Functional cooperation, behavioral influence, institutional growth, diffusion, causal identification, and counterfactual judgment are kept separate from truth and moral legitimacy.

Editorial approach

Preserve the story’s decisive scene and reversal.
Paraphrase rather than reproduce book text.
Separate the narrative from “What it argues” so the same story can support more than one claim.
Flag legendary material rather than presenting it as verified history.
For PDF-backed collections, link to PDF viewer page numbers and keep source embeds collapsed so the note remains readable.

Theme-first organization

40 Stories is the canonical entry point.
Theme Assignment Ledger records the primary thematic home of every included story.
Prior standalone notes are preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Original Story Notes.
The former Daily Dad month notes are preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Daily Dad.
The Daily Stoic audit is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Daily Stoic.
The Daily Laws audit is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Daily Laws.
The Art of Seduction audit is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Art of Seduction.
The 48 Laws of Power audit is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The 48 Laws of Power.
The Discipline Is Destiny audit is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/Discipline Is Destiny.
The Better Angels of Our Nature extraction is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Better Angels of Our Nature.
The Righteous Mind extraction is preserved in 40 Stories/Misc/Source Collections/The Righteous Mind.
The current WEIRDest People in the World selections link directly to the chapter-audited book note and source PDF; no separate source-collection copy has been created.
Theme notes contain the consolidated story text; source archives remain for provenance and old backlinks.

REFERENCES