Cate Malek

Executive producer @AJplus, Co-editor of Palestine Speaks (McSweeney’s/Verso). | Probably off contemplating commas somewhere.

[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.

[Cate Malek @catemalek]

@EYakoby https://t.co/73rtvdpWdX

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

This is rampant today. Some people truly have no shame.

[liam cunningham @liamcunningham1]

The greatest ally fascism and genocide has are the people who say ‘I don’t follow the news, it’s too depressing.’

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

You know what? If you’re a Western journalist who hasn’t spoken up while more than 200 of your colleagues have been slaughtered then just keep Anas’s name out of your mouth. We’re not interested anymore. It’s too late.

[Mohammad Alsaafin @malsaafin]

“…thorough and transparent examination of the circumstances surrounding Al-Sharif’s death…”

???????

1. Israel had been publicly threatening to kill him for months.
2. Israel bombed the journalists tent he was in
3. The Israeli military immediately took credit for killing him

[Mohammad Alsaafin @malsaafin]

For months, Israel has openly threatened Anas with murder. What did his peers and colleagues around the world do to protect him? What did the most prominent, best paid, most comfortable journalists around the world do to protect the best of them?

[Dan Sheehan @danpjsheehan]

I don’t care if you review regional theater or run a Middle East desk, if you’ve been too cowardly or too careerist to denounce the targeted slaughter of hundreds of your Palestinian peers these last 22 months, you really have no business calling yourself a journalist.

[Mohammad Alsaafin @malsaafin]

The best, most heroic, and bravest of us.

Never stopped reporting even when Israel killed his father and many colleagues, including his close friends Ismail Alghoul and Hossam Shbat.

Anas Alsharif. Murdered by Israel tonight in Gaza City.

The genocidal regime must be stopped.

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

Do you understand what’s happening right now? Israel murdered Al Jazeera’s entire Gaza City crew including reporters @AnasAlSharif0 and Mohamed Qreiqea to silence the media coverage of the horrific and bloody massacres they are committing in Gaza City.

[Hind Hassan @HindHassanNews]

The fact that journalists in Gaza all have pre-written posthumous messages to be published upon news of their death tells you all you need to know about their existence & how we’ve failed them. Anas Al-Sharif faced death twice: writing this and when killed by the Israeli military

[Fan Ms Rachel At Songs @msrachelforlitt]

#FreePalestine This is Renad from Gaza. What do you say to an 11-year-old girl who’s starving?

To the girl who once dreamed of becoming a chef, of owning her own restaurant, but now can only dream of finding something to eat?

I’m so sorry that the world has failed the children of Gaza. I am so deeply sorry.
I will do everything I can to help my friend Renad achieve her dream of owning a restaurant one day. I pray for the day when I can walk in as her customer and eat her delicious food. And I pray for the day when this atrocity becomes a memory for her, not her reality.
#gaza #msrachel

[Fadi Quran @fadiquran]

If you’re not watching people across North Africa come out in droves to celebrate the convoy to break the siege, you’re missing out on one of the most beautiful things humanity has to offer in 2025.

A tsunami of humanity is rising for Gaza. Amplify it. #sumoudconvoy

[Noura Erakat @4noura]

For those in the US indignant about Trump but indifferent about genocide in Gaza - you will not find your way out of this crisis w/o dealing with the latter. These systems are connected - you cannot defeat fascism at home while committing genocide. #Thread
#Gaza #LosAngeles

[dolly li @dollyli]

I’m the host and producer of this documentary about the Mississippi Delta Chinese video & also cultural consultant on @SinnersMovie! Ryan Coogler and his team were meticulous about the details—truly an honor to see nonfiction enter the fiction space in this spectacular way.

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

How does a headline like this not stop the world in its tracks?

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

For this to have been a deliberate act — which it plainly was — consider what that means. A person within the IDF saw the news that Fatma’s film was accepted into Cannes. He/she/they then proposed assassinating her. Other people reviewed the suggestion and approved it. Then other people carried it out.

If I am wrong, please share the statement of regret, and the pledge to investigate, from the IDF in the replies.

[Abdulruhman Ismail @a_abdulruhman]

Don’t worry about me — the thing I’m best at is laughing.
And don’t be scared, I’m strong and can handle myself. What matters is that you stay alive and leave Gaza for the world.

This is what my friend Fatima told me before she was martyred this morning in an airstrike

[Tariq Kenney-Shawa @tksshawa]

Israelis love to say Palestinians could’ve turned Gaza into the “Singapore of the Middle East” if only they stopped resisting occupation & focused on development.

But every time Palestinians tried, Israel got in the way. This explainer tells the story of how Israel destroyed Gaza’s citrus industry, and it proves that nothing will change as long as Israel’s occupation & blockade continues.

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

The @nytimes put Rukmini Callimachi back on the ISIS beat 4 years after her “Caliphate” podcast on ISIS was largely retracted due to the main character fabricating his tale about joining the group.