Geraldine Leer

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

Thanks for the fun interview @themontclairgirl! I loved reflecting on my career and why I love calling #MontclairNJ my home. ❤️

[The Montclair Girl @themontclairgrl]

This Montclair resident has been an actress on multiple movies + TV shows (Photo credit: Inventing Anna/Netflix): https://t.co/qRyxdo1dtK

[Political Watchdog @PoliticalWatchD]

This video was deleted yesterday from Twitter by Elon Musk.

You know what to do ‼️‼️‼️

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

A British writer penned the best description of Donald Trump I’ve ever read:

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?”

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?' If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

-Nate White

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

❤️❤️❤️🎉🎉🎉🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[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.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

This is probably going to tick some people off, and I hope it does. But I’m going to keep on sharing it and saying it. And once again, I am not a Swiftie, but I am a human being, a Dad AND, a Monstrous Football fan.
I am extremely disappointed in so many of you who think that "not being a fan" of someone means you're entitled to shit all over them.
I want to remind you of something.
Your children are watching you complain about Taylor Swift sitting at a football game, being happy, and cheering for a man she loves in what appears to be a very loving, respectful relationship.
Your Children are watching you judge a woman for literally just EXISTING and taking up space happily.
And you know what? Ms. Swift has won 324 awards? How many do you have?
She brought $5 BILLION dollars in consumer spending and boosted the U. S. economy so significantly, that leaders from other countries actually beg for her to play there?
Did you know that there are over 20 college courses about her skills as an artist, lyricist, and musician - including at places like Harvard, Stanford & UC Berkeley?
Did you know that Taylor Swift quietly donates mass amounts of money to local food banks in every city she performs in?
AND DID YOU KNOW …
That Taylor Swift was sexually assaulted by a radio DJ, and she got him fired? When he sued HER for over $3 million for defamation, she counter sued for a symbolic $1 in a court case that took 2 YEARS for her to win. And, she did that just to show women that fighting for what's right has no price tag & to never be silent in the face of oppression.
WELL IF YOU DON’T CARE BY NOW, YOU SHOULD.
Because your daughters, nieces, and your nephews are watching you run your mouth. And they are seeing the world hate a woman who does so much good, simply because she exists in their line of sight.
DO BETTER PEOPLE.
Teach your boys to respect women. Teach your girls that as women - they are ALLOWED to take up space.
Fix it. Become aware of your words. Because we all have the ability and the obligation to fight for the future of our children with simple moments. And we need to consciously choose to be better for them.

[Heidi 🏖 🐬💙🍹🌊 @Brodiesmom68]

I haven’t laughed this hard in so long.
Make sure you have your pee pad on.
I have tears running down my leg. 😂
🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

Reality TV watch parties are taking over local sports bars https://t.co/jJSQMlN8tm Congrats @maddybiebel @realitybarla So cool!

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@Rabisaed1 Number 1 and can we just have a moment for your beautiful grandmother? 😍

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@505Cali2 We need your voice. I pray for your healing. ❤️‍🩹

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@ElinaMia34 Sending you strength!

[Bad Bunny HQ @BBPRTV]

The day the world danced.

[Heather Gardner @heathergtv]

Pam Bondi made MY town, Culver City, trend. I had to investigate.

For real… the worst crime of the century is that this woman had made a mockery of our justice system. Release the un-redacted files. Prosecute the REAL crimes.

[Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real]

Here is a thought worth considering

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

"Iron laws of the world"? Some of America's most important national accomplishments are about leading humanity away from this kind of bullshit.

If we let ideologues like Stephen Miller drag us back into a world where brute force is all that matters, all of us will be less safe.

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@Jindo_1307979 C 😍

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@syndrome22q1 @catturd2 @RepMTG @mtgreenee @GuntherEagleman @AngelaBelcamino @TaraBull @lindayaX Hey, Justin - Happy Holidays!

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

It wasn’t even close.

[Geraldine Leer @GeraldineLeer]

@oelma__ Geraldine

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Hugh Grant: "It's been very, very depressing watching Big Tech kidnap their lives, and to see children really finding it very, very difficult to get properly interested in anything that isn't a screen."