When I was a young professor at Berkeley, my colleagues and I would frequently run into Jean Jenny, the wife of Hans Jenny, at various events on campus. Jean, a formidable force of nature with a deep interest in the future of soil science (and in the 1980's, its state of languishing in the backwaters of popular science), would frequently walk directly up to me and say, literally pointing her finger at me, ''you guys need to make soil sexy!!''. I would laugh, but I pondered the issue many times. As a young and then minor participant in the field, it seemed well beyond my ability, or even vision, that soil science would somehow be the stuff of popular appeal.Yet, here we are today. In the past decade or so, we have had high-end soil documentaries narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis (Dirt! The Movie) and Woody Harrelson (Kiss the Ground), with cameo appearances by people like Gisele Bu ¨ndchen and Tom Brady. How much sexier can we get!? Soil is on the cover of The New York Times Magazine (Velasquez-Manoff 2018), and the op-ed pages of the Washington Post (Barker and Pollen 2015). At this point, it is maybe useful to examine what this new-found sexiness means, for soils and for Soil Science, and consider if, or how, we might better create our own sciencebased stories about soil and human society.Narrative framing, or more simply -telling stories, is a fundamental human quality. ''We tell ourselves stories in order to live'' (Didion 1979). But our stories can also be wrong, and ultimately destructive. The new wave of Hollywood soil documentaries, and particularly ''Kiss the Ground'', tell a story of hope, coupled with a ''happy ending''. This is the approximate story line about soils that pervades the core of this Hollywood narrative: ''We'' have, in the recent decades, abused soils through industrialized farming, creating or contributing to looming food and climate challenges. But wait! ''We'' can change this, and ''we''can solve our food and climate challenges by getting back to some basics, regaining lost arts and knowledge from our agricultural past or from traditional practices. ''There could be a way to eat food that heals the planet!'' Soil is the answer! Pan to a shot of a smiling Woody Harrelson, then fade to black. THE END.