Paula Haddock

Quirky

[Free To Choose @FreeToChooseNet]

The jobs a tariff saves are visible. The jobs it destroys might never get created in the first place, so nobody notices. Milton Friedman explains why that asymmetry is exactly how special interests win and everyone else loses.

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

The old paintings are real. All of them.

[John A. Daly @JohnDalyBooks]

It's not the years. It's the mileage.

[Paula Haddock @PaulaHaddock4]

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Happy 250th Independence Day, America!

[Sarah Isgur @whignewtons]

Yesterday, they voted for independence. Today, they’re debating how to announce it to the world. Tomorrow, they adopt the declaration heard round the world:

We declare these truths to be self evident…

[Jim Acosta @Acosta]

Reagan had a different view on immigration. It’s the American view.

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

I’m an ACB fan of the Supreme Court. She is all about the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, precedence and the law. If you don’t like her rulings, then pass legislation or an amendment to the Constitution. She interprets law, not polling.

[🎩Laird of the Manor🎩 @LairdOfThManor]

A small public service announcement from the Department of Things That You Should Know…

It has not “peeked” your interest.
Nor has it “peaked” your interest.

…It has piqued your interest.

You are not “phased” by something.
You are fazed by it.

If you’ve had a long day, you are weary.
If you suspect someone is an idiot, you are wary.

It is “due course”, not “do course”.
“Per se”, not “per say”.

And while we’re here, it’s “could have”, not “could of”, but that particular battle may already be lost.

Thank you for your attention during this brief outbreak of grammatical housekeeping.

This has been a @LairdofthManor announcement.🎩💙

[Paula Haddock @PaulaHaddock4]

@muheediva01 Eating at Pizza Hut without the coupon for the personal pizza because you read a lot. Loved those rare family dinners where we shared a big pizza, breadsticks, and Pepsi pitcher.

[Joe Scarborough @ScarboroughNow]

"The beachhead is secure, but the price was high. Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all.”
~Ernie Pyle, June 1944
82nd Anniversary, D-Day 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇨🇦

[Paula Haddock @PaulaHaddock4]

@KSPrior Sorry for your loss!

[Jay Nordlinger @jaynordlinger]

From Kevin D. Williamson. Anthologizable (as Bill Buckley would say). https://t.co/o7R9iTIWRK

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank]

@ThaddyStevie Because a major purpose of the filibuster is to protect federalism. If at least 3/5 of the states aren't on board with a law, the topic devolves on the states to decide.

[John A. Daly @JohnDalyBooks]

"Sasse’s principled conservatism infuriated the Make America Great Again base... He took the view that personality cults are unconservative, a position which (proving his point) enraged the Nebraska GOP leadership." —@DanielJHannan https://t.co/KxPfxh9gjo

[Rory Cooper @rorycooper]

Ben Sasse is uniquely extraordinary…but if you watch that interview and wish we had more civically serious leaders like him, please understand that’s a choice. Voters can demand it.

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

Those of us in the pro-democracy movement can and should hold both of these positions.

1. We unequivocally reject violence.

2. We will unequivocally oppose efforts by this administration to use last night as an excuse to try to suppress criticism and criminalize dissent.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Anyone suggesting we should stop accurately pointing out factual ways that the president is wrecking this country on a daily basis, or expressing an opinion about that, because of something a random nut does is espousing a profoundly un-American concept that I completely reject.

[Daniel Darling @dandarling]

Just heard from friends in Ukraine about a Baptist Church intentionally struck by the Russians in Zaporizhzhia. A congregation of 300 who sacrificially built that building to meet for worship. At least 5 victims that we know of, including the pastor. When you read and hear about the war in Ukraine, don't forget that Russians intentionally target, jail, and often murder Baptist and evangelical pastors wherever they take over. Pray for our brave Christian brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Pray for Putin's reign of terror to end. Pray for peace.

[NASA @NASA]

Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy! 🫶

The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.