sam ellington

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

You’ve got to start where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where other people think you should be. But where you are. So many people mess this up. You’re never going to get where you want to go if you don’t start from where you are.

[VOA Mid-States @voamid]

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the Louisville H.E.R.O. Run/Walk/Ruck this past Saturday!

Together, we honored our heroes and supported veterans in our community.

#SupportOurVeterans #SaluteToService

[sam ellington @ellingtonsam]

@LouisvilleBats It was a beautiful evening despite the result! Thanks for the jerseys!

[sam ellington @ellingtonsam]

Much sage investing advice among other Buffett wisdom. All free on the internet.

[Bloomberg @business]

At 940 pages, Warren Buffett’s collected shareholder letters sound like homework. Instead, they’re a surprisingly rich read: funny, instructive and full of lessons that go beyond investing. https://t.co/FLwsYrf4z8

[Baird @rwbaird]

At Baird, giving back is embedded in our culture. Each year, our associates, business units and Baird Foundation support qualified organizations around the world. In 2025, we’re proud to have collectively contributed over 6,000 volunteer hours and $25 million to nonprofits in the communities where we live and work. https://t.co/P0wLNqNhAZ

[David French @DavidAFrench]

And another thing ... when establishment Republicans shrug their shoulders and campaign for corrupt politicians immediately after calling them out for their corruption, they demonstrate how few principles they have. If corruption is only a dealbreaker in the primary, then it's no dealbreaker at all.

[sam ellington @ellingtonsam]

@Reds Fun to watch last night!

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

There’s an increasingly pervasive attitude where people are so scared of failure that they don’t even try. It’s really tragic. You’ve got to get over it. Every good thing in life requires putting yourself out there.

[The American Conservative @amconmag]

Thomas Massie: "I’ve got seven months left in Congress."

"Today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, and a minister of culture. That was just six months."

[sam ellington @ellingtonsam]

Handwriting notes was a game changer for me in college and passing the CFA exam. Many years ago.

[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.

[VOA Mid-States @voamid]

We’re hiring in Murray!

Join our Recovery Community Center as a Lead Recovery Support Technician/Peer Support and help individuals on their path to healing and stability. Be part of a team making a real difference every day.

Apply today: https://t.co/ecLR6qae0k

[Anglican Communion @AnglicanWorld]

Today is Ascension Day, when the Church celebrates the risen Christ returning to the Father.

In the Gospel, Jesus blesses his disciples and is taken from their sight. This is not an ending, but a new beginning. Christ’s ascension affirms his authority and points to his continuing presence, as the disciples are sent out with joy to bear witness to what they have seen.

Ascension Day reminds us that Christ reigns with God and calls us to live as his witnesses in the world.

Scripture reading: Luke 24:50–51, 52–53

‘Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.

And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.’

Prayer

Risen and ascended Lord,
you reign in glory and fill all things with your presence.
Lift our hearts to where you are,
and strengthen us to bear witness to your love.
Send us out in joy and faith,
to serve you in the world you came to save.

Amen.

[Ben Carlson @awealthofcs]

The Nasdaq 100 now has a higher return over the past 10 years than:

Japan in the 1980s
The Dow in the Roaring 20s
The S&P in the 1950s

Still trails the 1990s tech run but it's close

Is this it?

Is the melt-up here?

How much crazier could it get?

https://t.co/ZjvVrxtq1S

[VOA Mid-States @voamid]

This Mother’s Day, we celebrated the incredible mothers of Madison County Family Recovery Court

Clients enjoyed catered food, painted flower pots, and planted their own “Seeds of Recovery” alongside Judge Shepherd.

[VOA Mid-States @voamid]

To every mother walking the road to recovery: we see your strength, your resilience, and your love. Happy Mother’s Day. 🌸

Read more here: https://t.co/N7DpkO5USW

#MothersDay #RecoveryJourney #HopeandHealing

[sam ellington @ellingtonsam]

Encouraging

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

For years, churches have worried about empty pews. At St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, the problem is flipped: there isn’t enough room. https://t.co/r3w1m1j7cI

[Brad Stulberg @BStulberg]

One of the hardest but most important practices is to realize you are not the stuff inside your head; you are the awareness that decides what to do with the stuff inside your head. The ability to choose which thoughts to pursue and which to leave behind is key to everything.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Practical assistance offered to the disadvantaged allows them to experience God’s love, and opens a path for them to enter into a lasting relationship with God. At the same time, it enables us to come into contact with the flesh of Christ by seeking to see and serve Him in our brothers and sisters (cf. Mt 25:31-46). In this way, our works of charity become a mutual encounter with the Lord who is present among us.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

“Have faith,” Jesus tells us in the #GospelOfTheDay (Jn 14:1). That is the secret! It is precisely this faith that frees our hearts from the anxiety of possessing and acquiring, and from the illusion that we must pursue a position of prestige to have worth. Each person already has infinite worth in the mystery of God.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

The Kentucky city has seen a wave of newcomers looking to buy more affordable luxury properties. https://t.co/ZEWkvwZzgV