Karen Harrington 📚

Stories w @LittlebrownYR @EQMM @ShotgunHoney @ahitchcockmm - 2023 Derringer Winner - Best American Mystery & Suspense 2024

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

Check out my latest flash fiction - "Overheard At Henderson's Funeral" w/ @GuiltyCrimeMag

[M.E. Proctor @MEProctor3]

Hey! @KA_Harrington has a piece of flash @GuiltyCrimeMag ... and it's a great one! https://t.co/1yLB58upqI

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

Hany Farid saying this is terrifying.

“I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.” https://t.co/hFphrIkscp

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

Mother fails to notice daughter's fake tiny hands

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

@OfferKuban Thank you. Going to MD Anderson soon. Same cancer he had 33 years ago so it's been wild.

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

This hits hard as my husband was just diagnosed with cancer. Every day and meal is a gift.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Never forget what a true privilege it is to be healthy, to have a job, and food on the table. Don't take any of it for granted or lose sight of it, and above all, stay deeply grateful!

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

Mood. :)

[Elle Lookbook @EvaLovesDesign]

Book lover

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

Debut young adult novel wants to say hi.

https://t.co/aE9zsgaR2O

[Max Lawton @maxdaniellawton]

The greatest harbinger of end times is not plague or war, but the sudden enormous proliferation of Xerox-quality POD editions (unmarked! no warning!) from houses like Penguin.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

The Guardian has just published its "100 best novels of all time" list — these are the top 12.

Toni Morrison's Beloved is in 2nd. Dostoevsky does not make the top 25...

What do you think?

[Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused]

This, which has also been concurrently published in Granta for the competition, seems to be entirely AI with an author pic that’s also AI

[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.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Agatha Christie knew poisons so well, her books have been consulted when diagnosing patients. In 1976, a London infant was dying of a rare illness. Her nurses, having read The Pale Horse, realized she had been poisoned with thallium. Murder mysteries saved her life.

[Morgan Wright 💎 @byMorganWright]

This. Who else loves rereading books😁? I know not everyone likes it but I personally love it (it’s always weirdly comforting somehow).

[Koala Quill @KoalaQuillHQ]

Writers are told to "build a platform," as if the solution to being ignored as an author is to become ignored as a content creator instead.

[Ken Follett @KMFollett]

I have a routine for writing. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t.

https://t.co/5AXG0rffYm

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

@Adam_FaithfulM Amen.

[Karen Harrington 📚 @KA_Harrington]

@Bunny_ngl Eldredge

[Morgan Wright 💎 @byMorganWright]

This❤️