Ujjwal

PhD candidate @ English Department, Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) / Faculty @ Hunter College, New York

[Aanchal Magazine @AanchalMagazine]

Eagerly awaiting to read the work of @koulsaebh, @niyati_bhat, @kyaathaam and others who have contributed to this compilation on Kashmiri literature.

[Saikat Majumdar @saikatmajumdar.bsky.social @_saikatmajumdar]

“Rhetorical strategy in The Amateur calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnosis in On the Genealogy of Morals of the “slave re-volt,” in which the lowly seize power by turning their weakness into the source of strength and moral superiority.” Sanjay Krishnan @CulturalCritiq1

[Ramachandra Guha @Ram_Guha]

The Great Nicobar Project – A Geological Folly and a Strategic Gamble https://t.co/PZKduIB7ar via @thewire_In

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[The Caravan @thecaravanindia]

Hiral Trivedi: Given the threats to the environment and communities, where do you see India’s ecological fate headed?

Ashish Kothari: If currently dominant trends continue, we are in very serious trouble. The basics of life, including air, water and soil, are in crisis, and this will worsen. Hundreds of millions of people will face greater uncertainty, disasters like crop losses and heat stress and water scarcity and pollution spikes, malnutrition, unemployment, and various forms of alienation and loss of meaning. We focus a lot on armed security, ignoring the fact that ecological, economic and social security are so much more important. The various conflicts we see erupting in India and across the world will get much worse, as we create more and more ecological and climate refugees—imagine millions of people from coasts across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh pouring inland—and as corporations and powerful nation states use all their might to sustain their power and profits.

Ashish Kothari, an environmental activist in an email interview with Hiral Trivedi (@hiraltrivedi17), an intern at The Caravan, talked about the limitations of this model and the need to develop radical alternatives that can bring about transformation without compromising on values such as solidarity, diversity, freedom and autonomy.

Read here: https://t.co/HJ2LrIlvsz

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

I'm happy to share this new paper led by @morenahanbury, which explores the drain of resources from Latin America through ecologically unequal exchange. Available open access in Ecological Economics: https://t.co/VMeZFHlfu5

[Austin Ahlman for Congress @ahlmanforne]

I'm Austin Ahlman. Nebraska is my home. This is our fight. You are my people.

Let’s take Nebraska back.

[Prem Thakker @prem_thakker]

Man…no words.
"My dad got cancer and my mom's employer collapsed. The executives got paid and the workers got screwed. She didn't have the heart to tell us, even when the bank took the house. And when she took her own life, the eviction notice was in her pocket."

[Siddharth @DearthOfSid]

Francesca Albanese on Arundhati Roy:

[Saikat Majumdar @saikatmajumdar.bsky.social @_saikatmajumdar]

“Selling, killing, spying and gambling”. To that, add love and sex. The Telegraph Edit Page today: https://t.co/JgNq3Gz9Jc

[N S @nandinisundar]

Brilliant article by @AnandTeltumbde on Hungary and India - the similarities, the differences and what must be done
https://t.co/wAR561Me3C

[K.Diallo ☭ @nyeusi_waasi]

C.L.R. James on African Radical Social History.

[Mukul Kesavan @mukulkesavan]

A 2008 review of Mike Marqusee’s fine memoir-polemic ‘If I Am Not For Myself: Journey Of An Anti-Zionist Jew’ and the lessons it has for every pluralist who wants to sidestep majoritarianism’s sweaty hug.
https://t.co/kRVNtYguAk

[Mukul Kesavan @mukulkesavan]

This is well argued. It reminded me of Mike Marqusee’s great memoir, If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). Some anti-Semitism, though, like all forms of bigotry, doesn’t have a social science explanation. It’s just the cruelty of large communities.

[Mukul Kesavan @mukulkesavan]

Interesting that Circle of Reason and The Calcutta Chromosome aren’t mentioned in this appreciation of Ghosh’s oeuvre. An ambivalence about rationalism runs through his work. CoR’s absence is odd; TCC is likely classed as ‘genre’.
https://t.co/0M4JpqaBcU

[Vaishnavi Rathore @_Vaishnavi_R]

We at @scroll_in have been tracking the various aspects of the Great Nicobar project for the last 4 years. Deforestation, impacts on wildlife, voices of Nicobarese, interviews of experts. You can find it all here: https://t.co/w7y01gw4k5

[Samyak Ghosh 🌈 @GhoshSamyak]

Arundhati Roy & Mahasweta Devi. Two portraits by Raghu Rai.

[Mirza Waheed @MirzaWaheed]

Line of Control, adapted from my novel The Collaborator, is now on Apple TV and YouTube Movies in India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and across the Middle East.

Official Trailer

https://t.co/x5XOjuDSKV

[Shaunna Rodrigues ಶೊನಾ ರೊಡ್ರಿಗಸ್ @simhashaunna]

Incase the link below isn’t working:

https://t.co/OrABP6vnc0