Barbara Steele

NC@AVL ➡️ NC@RDU 🎓 @NCState | Communications | Public policy

[Andrew Kaczynski @KFILE]

The last Democratic senator from Kansas was born the same year the light bulb was invented, so that’s kind of wild.

[yasmin @yasmin86]

I’m going to save this tweet forever if anyone ever says that again

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Michigan Central Station, Detroit. 2018 vs 2024.

Decline is a choice.

[Evolve @EvolveWildlife]

Mountain goat kids huddle together against the coming storm in Mount Evans Wilderness, Colorado.

📷 Verdon Tomajko

[Gerry Cohen @gercohen]

If you are an N.C. voter (and haven’t voted) look-up your polling place at https://t.co/I4MaBOGeic
if you moved from your registration address AFTER Oct 4, 2026 continue to vote at the polling place for your old address. #ncpol

[Kyronis @kyronis_talks]

This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.

Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.

It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.

And the results are wild.

participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.

they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.

the paper revealed a brutal paradox:

the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.

if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.

this creates a dangerous systemic loop.

the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.

meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.

top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.

they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.

we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.

the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.

the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.

[Chris Pratt @prattprattpratt]

Before Hollywood, I was living in a van in Hawaii and waiting tables at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. One day, the incredible Rae Dawn Chong walked into the restaurant, and naturally, I went up to her table and said, “Hey, you’re a movie star! What are you doing here?”

She asked if I could act, and I said, “Fuck yeah, put me in your movie!”

She asked for my phone number. The only problem was I didn’t have one. So I gave her my buddy Mike’s number instead. A couple days later, Mike casually mentions, “Oh, by the way, someone called you.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MIKE?!

I called her back, and sure enough, she was serious. I drove over to pick up the script, went back to Mike’s house, and read all 120 pages three times in a row. First script I’d ever read. My character's name was Devon, and I remember thinking, “Sweet! I could totally play a Devon!”

I showed up to the audition with every line and inflection mapped out in pencil. Rae told me I could act and offered me the part. I asked if we were shooting in Hawaii. Nope. Los Angeles.

I had about $60 to my name, a bag of clothes, and some rollerblades.

Then Rae told me they'd fly me out. And I remember thinking right then and there, my life just changed forever. I'm going to be an actor.

That little movie was Cursed Part 3, a low-budget horror comedy that opened the door to Hollywood for me.

I'll forever be grateful to Rae for taking a chance on a kid working at a shrimp restaurant. Everybody starts somewhere, and this is where it all began for me.

[Barbara Steele @SteelePack]

💔🥹

[Michael & Rebecca @Michaeljos92972]

THE HORROR OF BEING LONELY AT SEVENTY.
by Michael Whelan

The cruelest part of growing old isn't knowing that life is getting shorter. It's wondering how much of it you'll have to spend without being loved the way you once were.

At seventy, loneliness is not simply an empty house.
It is a body that still remembers what it feels like to be loved.

God, how I miss being held.

I miss holding Rebecca's hand. The beautiful simplicity of our fingers finding each other without either of us giving it a thought. I miss cuddling in bed after a long day, feeling her warmth against me, knowing that whatever horrors the world had waiting, for that one precious moment, we were safe.
I miss someone telling me I look handsome.
I miss hearing those three ordinary, extraordinary words: "I love you."
And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, I miss saying them to someone who could whisper them back.

These are the little things we take for granted until death comes along and steals them.

For years, I cared for Rebecca as Parkinson's and dementia slowly took possession of the woman I adored. Cancer had already ravaged my own body. I was exhausted, frightened, and sometimes so overwhelmed that I prayed for one afternoon when nobody needed me.

Now I have more afternoons than I know what to do with.

What a cruel joke.

People think loneliness is about having nobody to talk to. They're wrong. I can talk to friends. I can laugh. I can attend a gathering and appear perfectly happy.

Then I return home.

Nobody asks how my day went. Nobody reaches across the couch to touch my arm. Nobody notices that I've put on a nice shirt or that I'm unusually quiet.

And the bed.

Dear God, the bed.

There is something almost unbearable about having an entire side of a mattress available when you'd surrender everything you own to feel someone breathing beside you again.
At seventy, society seems to assume our need for tenderness has somehow expired.
It hasn't.

My heart is seventy.

My need to be loved is ageless.

I still want affection, companionship, laughter, romance, and the glorious comfort of knowing someone is genuinely happy that I walked through the door.

I don't want to spend my remaining years merely remembering what love felt like.
I want to feel it again.

And perhaps that is what makes loneliness at seventy so terrifying.

I am not finished loving.

I am simply living in a world where the person who knew how to love me best is gone.

But love does not vanish just because the person who awakened it is gone. It remains in the hand that still reaches across the sheets, in the words that rise to my lips with nowhere to land, in the part of me that still believes tenderness is worth wanting.

So every night, when I turn out the light, my hand finds the place where hers used to be. I always tell her how my day went.

And for one aching moment, in the darkness, I am not only remembering what I lost.
I am remembering that I am still capable of love.
And perhaps that is not the loneliest truth of all.

Perhaps it is a promise.

The heart that can grieve this deeply has not gone empty. It is still open. It is still reaching. Somewhere beyond the silence of this house, there may be another hand waiting to find mine—not to replace Rebecca, because no one could, but to meet the love that remains.

Until then, I will keep getting up. I will put on the nice shirt. I will answer the phone, accept the invitation, sit beside someone who needs company, help other caregivers how to get through another day and let the world surprise me when it can.

I have lost the life I knew.

But I have not lost my capacity to live.

And as long as I can still love, still hope, still reach toward another human being, my story is not over.

The bed may be empty tonight.
But I am still here.
And here, even at seventy, is not the end.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

This is what reading actually does to you:

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. … Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

— C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

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[Cari Kelemen @KelemenCari]

"Your ability to discern the beautiful from the ugly is intimately connected to your capacity to recognize the Divine."

[Tim Buckley @TimBuckleyWX]

Elk River Falls this afternoon. @ExploreFall

[Tim Buckley @TimBuckleyWX]

Linn Cove Viaduct on the Blue Ridge Parkway this afternoon.

Pretty much peak, I’d say.

I climb a rock to take this picture every year. A new tree is getting in the way of the view to the lower right. @ExploreFall

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

A good guy with a gun stopped the shooter. He did not stop the shooting. Understand the difference.

[Evolve @EvolveWildlife]

Perched high in the treetops, a tayra pauses its search for fruit to look straight down at the lens. A rare, sharp perspective on one of Panama’s most agile canopy dwellers.

📷 Max Waugh

[Evolve @EvolveWildlife]

After three years of patience, a motion-triggered camera captures a golden eagle at remarkably close range along the snow-covered coast of Northern Norway.

📷 Audun Rikardsen

[Evolve @EvolveWildlife]

What looks like a fuzzy football with feet is actually a king penguin chick in the Falkland Islands, tucking its head into its thick downy coat for warmth.

📷 Brian Matthews ( @bwmphotoUK )

[Evan Amato @SirEvanAmato]

One of the greatest travesties of the French Revolution took place 233 years ago today.

Here's an excerpt from Marie Antoinette's final letter, written at 4:30am on the day of her execution:

"I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed. Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy.

I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me. I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying. Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.

Farewell, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children. My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever! Farewell! farewell!"

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

One paragraph from C. S. Lewis can change your life

[Heather Long @byHeatherLong]

Here's the key problem...inflation has wiped out wage gains for 6 months now.

It's a financial squeeze.
Americans are trying to work more hours to make up for it, but many are still falling behind.

Many people are worse off. As BLS wrote,
In the past year, "real average hourly earnings decreased 0.7%. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.6% increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.1% decrease in real average weekly earnings."

[Jeff Jackson @JeffJacksonNC]

For every gas station in North Carolina:

Follow the law.

Pass your savings from the new gas tax suspension on to drivers.

If you don’t, you’ll hear from me.