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Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.
The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.
The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.
Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.
"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.
It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.
"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.
I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.
In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.
And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.
You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.
The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.
I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.
Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.
"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.
Discipline is a journey.
Adam Johnson, author of How to Sell a Genocide says in order to carry out a genocide, the US, Israel, and liberal media “needed to make a ceasefire with Hamas politically toxic… politically ‘unserious.’”
To achieve that, he explains, “it became so central [that Hamas and Palestinian resistance] are removed from history. And their grievances are [portrayed as] not secular or political but as instead driven entirely by hatred of Jews.”
“Then a ceasefire becomes not only impossible, it becomes immoral… and then genocide was inevitable.”
@adamjohnsonCHI | @PlutoPress
Do you ever think about how there are probably literary works that are the equivalent of Milton or Dante or Virgil in languages you don't know and have never heard of? Or lost completely to the past? Or to exist in thousands of years from now?
This is the best review yet of Suicidal Empathy, the new book by Elon Musk's pet demagogue.
In this review @MattPolProf clearly demonstrates how utterly vacuous Gad Saad and his books are.
What remains missing in this and other reviews, although hinted at by @MattPolProf , is a discussion of the outright fabrications and other falsehoods in Saad's book.
This strikes me as more important than the insufferable narcissism that is Saad's trademark, and his kiss up kick down persona, both brilliantly exposed in this review.
I have been going through the text and footnotes, and will have more to say on this in due course.
Will the fraudulent "free speech absolutist" Saad now also refer @MattPolProf to the FBI?
https://t.co/beuIiYxlfs
Call me a raging antisemite but I just don't think the only country to ever use nuclear weapons and the only country lying about having nuclear weapons should be the ones deciding who gets nuclear weapons
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.
May reads;
everything's computer, modern politics inherit religious fantasies of Rapture, hazy afternoons on the Rock, London through oligarch's empty apartments
If anyone else is interested in literary polls - these are the top 100 highest-rated books on Douban Books (basically Chinese Goodreads) w/ number of ratings. I have translated some titles, indicated w ?. All books pretty much sit within a point of each other on a 10-point scale
My own personal 100 favourite novels — an inherently unstable and capricious list, of course. Please don't shout at me if I've forgotten *your* favourites...
Self help books are one of the tools of modern Imperialism.
These books reduce "wealth" and "success" into an individual struggle rather than a direct result of systemic plunder, historical exploitation, and the concentrated hoarding of global resources.
They tell you that your poverty is a character flaw.
They suggest that the reason you cannot afford a home or a dignified life is because you haven't mastered your "internal state" while conveniently ignoring the fact that the "external state" is busy auctioning off your future to the highest corporate bidder.
Rather than give examples of situations where the people came together to form cultural groups under a socialist ideology, wrote manifestoes, built underground networks of resistance, and finally uprooted their oppressive system that kept them under the boot of foreign monopolies, these satanic books instead reduce a revolutionary problem into a personal struggle.
Instead of uniting to fight for better wages these books manage to convince their victims to "smile" at bosses and "win friends" for "promotion."
Instead of uniting together and holding a siege on these colonial institutions that give the rich and mega corporations unlimited access to your lands and resources, these books have managed to convince their victims that all they need is a better "morning routine."
Instead of demanding the nationalization of your country's minerals, they tell you to "manifest" abundance.
Instead of burning down the predatory banks that have shackled your nation in debt, they tell you to practice "mindfulness" to cope with the stress of being broke.
Instead of recognizing that your exhaustion is a logical response to a parasitic economic system, they tell you that you simply lack "courage and determination".
The truth of the matter is that there is no amount of "Atomic Habits" you develop that would free you from the pangs of state sponsored Imperialism.
If you like continue to follow the 4AM rule for mental clarity, jog every morning and smile sheepishly at everyone you meet because you want to win friends and influence people, you will still be a victim of a system that sees you as nothing more than a data point.
All of these are empty and meaningless habits. The best that you can hope for is to become a well behaved and disciplined corporate slave that would eventually be laid off once they complete building their data centers and finally automate your position.
You are being trained to be a more efficient battery for a machine that intends to discard you.
We need to understand that the real world is more brutal than advertised in these books.
You cannot build any "tech empire" when you are under an imperial occupation or a debt-trap.
These billionaires they have carefully sanitized as revolutionaries who took risks, dropped out of college and started a billion dollar empire in their "garages" are all lies designed to make you think the playing field is level.
They did not start in garages; they started with emerald mine shares, government-subsidized military technology, and massive safety nets of inherited colonial wealth.
To even build a company like Google today, you need a funding pool of world conquest proportion. This is because you need to cover corporate fees to hire a battalion of corporate lawyers to circumvent labor laws and crush local competition, you need to buy off regulators and trade unions to allow you to build poisonous data centers and masts that allow you to stay profitable while the local population suffers, you need to lobby for tax exemptions that drain the public health system of its funding, and you need to pay for the private security forces that ensure your supply chains in the Global South remain uninterrupted by the "un-optimized" locals.
Instead of self-help books, read Philosophy and books focused on Political Theory, Materialist History, and the mechanics of power. Read the works of those who dismantled empires rather than those who teach you how to serve them better.
To develop your mind and equip you mentally to challenge the colonial institutions that have turned your life into a commodity is the only real "growth" that matters. Stop trying to "fix" yourself for a broken system and start learning how to break the system that is fixing you in place.
We are the Original #WritersLift crew! Sadly, X couldn’t handle our truth bombs and support for the underdogs, so they hit us with the shadowban hammer.
But hey, you can’t keep a good writer down! 💪✍️. Follow Us NOW!
#Followtrain#writerscommunity#booklovers#writers
I’ve lived inside this story for months - long nights, early mornings, research spirals, wine, coffee, repeat.
And today, I finally get to share it.
Book One is now on PRE‑ORDER.
Releases 31/05/2026.
Seren Vale was the kind of star the world thought was untouchable.
They were wrong.
https://t.co/lFCu3Xj5zy
The book examines how colonial languages and education systems shape cultural identity, arguing that reclaiming African languages is central to intellectual and political liberation.
Key facts
Author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Published: 1986
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Language: English
Genre: Literary and cultural criticism.
If you want to know more about the history of writing, this is my book rec for you!
I think it’s the best history of writing for a general audience out there.