Brian Stewart

[Julia @PJuvek]

Imagine how it felt to be a new fan at truncated '25 Gorge show (day after Bob Dylan birthday 💙) to hear the man sing ERK 'my bell still rings' & moments later the wind blows a light down behind him! ⚡️then he bedtime-stories UtRS until has to go :) 🛡️🙏🏻

[Brian Stewart @Roll1234Stewart]

@RpsAgainstTrump Why goes that guy have a basket ball under his shirt.

[Brian Stewart @Roll1234Stewart]

@BroWire_ Our next president

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[Brian Stewart @Roll1234Stewart]

@Amockx2022 @georgegalloway Poly sci 101. Don’t go to war with Iran.

[Brian Stewart @Roll1234Stewart]

@bluegeorgia Huh!?

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A Möbius strip is a fascinating mathematical object with unique properties: it has only one side and one boundary edge.

This is how you eventually return to the starting point.

[📹 bz.math]

[nightly moth @nightly_moth]

Bob Dylan — It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Madison Square Garden, New York City
October 16, 1992.

[nightly moth @nightly_moth]

Bob Dylan — West L.A. Fadeaway. The Lyon and Lucca 2023 versions. I was glad to be at 3 of the 4 shows that they played this song at back in 2023.

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

At 17 years old, Notorious B.I.G. performing in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn is a testament to his undeniable greatness.

[Brian Stewart @Roll1234Stewart]

@Rainmaker1973 Its unique.

[HOW THINGS WORK @HowThingsWork_]

A rust repair job in action! What do you think? 🔥

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Using a practical knot in emergency situations

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

After 10.000 years, the dire wolf’s howl echoes again.

Scientists have resurrected this extinct species by extracting DNA from fossils and editing gray wolf genomes.

Meet Romulus and Remus

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Back in 2016, Portnoy said it loud:
“I don’t care if he’s a joke. I don’t care if he’s racist. I don’t care if he’s sexist… My day-to-day life isn’t gonna change.”

Flash forward to 2025:
“I’m down $7 million today… Trump has put his tariffs all over the place… I’ve been trying to understand them — I don’t. And everything is in the shitter because of it.”

You cheered on the chaos because it made politicians “squirm.”

Now the chaos squirmed its way into your portfolio — and suddenly, you care.

[Salad Jazz @SaladJazz1]

Wes Montgomery Live In 65
#Jazz

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

One of the few recordings of The Mamas & the Papas performing California Dreamin' without lip-sync (1967)

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Difficult to exaggerate the utterly disqualifying ignorance of this statement. “You violated the law, you don’t get due process.”

[Punt Road @punt_rd]

Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister steals the show at the end of a Frankie Goes To Hollywood performance of “Relax” on the German tv show Musikladen in 1984. Wait to the end of the video as Lemmy swoops…!

[Jazz Is Dead @jazzisdeadco]

#FrankieBeverly and Raw Soul, before they were #Maze, performing their soulful, psychedelic ballad "I Need You" live at Winterland in San Francisco, CA (1975)

#rawsoul #sanfrancisco #marvingaye #winterland