Lori cook

wife, boy mom, school counselor, animal lover, coffee connoisseur, amateur seamstress, crafting extraordinaire

[Lori cook @CookLori]

@ObhishekSaha Agree!!

[Cons @CaptainCons]

The Crash On Netflix Is A Blueprint For How NOT To Parent

[Travis Akers 🇺🇸 @travisakers]

New reality tv show pitch:

Members of Congress fill in for middle and high school teachers during the month of May.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

"The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it," per WSJ

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Anthony Bradley @drantbradley]

A grading system that can’t be hacked through the internet. Who remembers?🙋🏾‍♂️

[Children’s Health Defense @ChildrensHD]

“You cannot tell Americans to eat real food while protecting the cancer-causing chemicals sprayed on it.”

Vani Hari blasts the Trump administration for claiming to care about health while protecting glyphosate and Bayer.

“Inside that building, Monsanto Bayer will be arguing for the right to poison us and not be held accountable.”

“They want to give us cancer and get away with it.”

“You cannot claim to care about health while protecting poison.”

“You cannot stand with families and side with one of the most evil corporations in the world.”

“We wouldn’t be here right now if they weren’t inside this building arguing on Monsanto’s behalf.”

“They made this their moment. Now we make it ours.”

@thefoodbabe #PeopleVsPoisonRally

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

These were all released within 57 days of each other in 1991

[Lori cook @CookLori]

@hjluks What about a shoulder labrum tear? My son tore the front part of his shoulder labrum playing football and had surgery. Had PT & recovered. Six months later he was cleared and shortly after tore it again at practice, this time in the back. Another surgery scheduled this summer.

[beanie0597_2.0 @0Beanie05923291]

Not teaching students math facts because they can use calculators, spelling rules because they have spell check, historical dates because they can google it, or writing skills because they have Al is a travesty. Depriving students of these things enslaves them to technology rather than freeing them to flourish as human beings.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m entirely convinced that the key to life and happiness is having low expectations for things outside your control and high expectations for things within it.

[Lane Brown @lanebrown_3]

Hero Principal Kirk Moore—who tackled a school shooter at Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma is crowned prom king!

This man deserves a raise! Hero.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate"

my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations.
poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable

the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point

we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it

the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @__Injaneb96]

As an Iranian watching this rescue mission unfold, I was praying the American pilot would make it out alive, not just for him, but so the Islamic Republic could not use him as a bargaining chip or claim some twisted “victory.”

At the same time, I felt a deep envy.

Your government sent elite special forces, million-dollar aircraft, and moved heaven and earth to bring one American home. No hesitation. No excuses.

In Iran, the regime uses human shields and recruited child soldiers to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war. They treat their own people like disposable tools. They are now recruiting child soldiers as we speak.

The Islamic Republic has zero regard for human life. That’s the brutal difference.

One side risks everything to save their own.
The other sacrifices their own to stay in power.

This hits hard when you have lived under both realities.

[Rustin Dodd @rustindodd]

Before he got to Michigan, Dusty May started working with a former high school principal and education expert who has studied the cognitive science behind high-performing teachers.

It speaks to a larger idea: the benefits of coaching like a teacher. https://t.co/Bw1ksSCOmz

[Lori cook @CookLori]

@BabakTaghvaee1 @cvpayne 🙏

[Gavin Harvey @GavinHarvey24]

JUCO SOPH HIGHLIGHTS
2x First Team-KJCCC
2025 Fresh of the Year
62-9 Career (71/71 Starts)
2026 Szn 31-3 (29-0 regular szn)
Playmaking PG
11.6 PPG
5.4 APG (1st in conference)
46% FG
36.5% 3FG
(Finished 8th at Danville both Yrs)
@JCCC_CavsMBB @JC4PT @JucoRecruiting @TheRyanDeppen

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

I don’t think people realize how much healthcare costs are driving big companies to fire and not hire.

It costs them $30k per family, per year for premiums and care. Most of that goes to the massive, vertically integrated insurance companies that send weekly bills that no one reviews in details. And it doesn’t include the company overhead to deal with it all. It’s usually the 2nd largest expense after payroll. Which is insane

It’s far easier to blame AI than it is to blame Healthcare costs.

Want to increase jobs, wages and improve affordability for every American ?

Break up the biggest insurance companies. Make divest non insurance companies. They don’t need thousands of subsidiaries. That’s how they game and abuse the system and increase costs for all of us.

Call your senator and tell them to support the BreakUp Big Medicine Bill by @HawleyMO and @SenWarren.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

FBI agents have to retire at 57, air traffic controllers at 56, and pilots at 65. But somehow demented 70 and 80 year olds running the country is totally fine. Make it make sense.