John Hooper

Italy & Vatican correspondent, The Economist. Author of The Italians & The New Spaniards. I also write on trans-national organized crime. Views my own.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@joevizard @catholicourtney @elonmusk I agree

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@talhasezgin6107 @catholicourtney A great deal, I suspect. He was a Catholic and would have no doubt preferred to be quoted by a pope than by some of the others who have embraced his writings.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@NathanielParish @catholicourtney Indeed he does, starting with Giorgia Meloni.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@elbravozamazing @catholicourtney What does that have to do with Tolkien?

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@dmcp65 @catholicourtney Lots. Poor old Tolkien was first of all adopted by the Hippies. But then by many on the far right (the Italian MSI youth movement attended Hobbit Camps). And now LotR is the bible of the tech bros, many of whom subscribe to MAGA ideals.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

Makes eminent sense...

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Brené Brown, researcher and author, on the contradiction she keeps hearing in rooms full of tech billionaires:

Her work puts her in rooms where the founders and CEOs of major tech platforms talk openly about how they think.

What @BreneBrown hears there unsettles her:

"So I hear someone say, 'Hey, you know, tech billionaire, what should my kids study? I'm worried for my kids… they should study coding, physics,' and then five minutes later, as if that answer didn't happen, someone will say, 'What do you attribute your success to?' I mean deeply when you think about it, and the same person will say, 'My deep reading of philosophy and the stoics.'"

The contradiction is what stops her: the same people crediting philosophy and the liberal arts for their own success are telling other parents their kids should focus on coding and physics.

That gap leads her to a bigger, more uncomfortable question:

"I start to extrapolate from there and wonder if there is a thinking class that's emerging where they're like, 'We're going to read philosophy and we're going to read the liberal arts and we're going to study history, and the rest of you just keep scrolling. Don't worry about the big words. We'll handle all the big words for you.'"

She points to Steve Jobs as an early signal of the same pattern:

"It's like when they asked Steve Jobs, 'Boy, your kids must love the iPad.' Steve Jobs said, 'My kids don't have an iPad.' And then his biographer who spent time with his family said he wasn't kidding. There's no technology. At dinner, they're talking about art and history."

The takeaway is simple but uncomfortable.

The people building these platforms are protecting their own kids from them, and giving them books, ideas, and real conversation instead.

So why are the rest of us being sold something different?

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

In 1990s, a Baruch College study showed that US media, covering rise of Religious Right influence in GOP, entirely missed concurrent rise of Secular Left in the Democrats. Authors theorized that it's bec media, being liberal, couldn't see it. They thought this was normal.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

You need to read the encyclical (or at least the start) to understand the allusion. #pope

[Alberto Melloni @albertomelloni]

Le mura di Neemia #MagnificaHumanitas

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

I sense a lot of commentators are shrinking from an obvious interpretation of Pope Leo’s encyclical: it’s an onslaught on (almost) everything Trump and MAGA stand for. My take for The Economist Espresso app. You can try Espresso free for 7 days. https://t.co/0Y8E6PPsqJ

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@shattenstone It is, thanks!

[Armand D'Angour @ArmandDAngour]

I'm preparing a talk on the basics of philosophy entitled "What's it all about?" and will start by quoting this wonderful letter by Valerie Eliot about Bertrand Russell and the cabbie.

[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.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

Dr Jenni Gibbons, who like me is an honorary fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, plays a vital role in the @NASAArtemis mission as the voice link to the astronauts. Here she is as they break the record for distance from earth: https://t.co/QziVYqDvUt @Catz_Cambridge. .

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@CatherineBelton @PeterFinnWP I couldn't agree more. I knew Peter in Berlin. As good a journalist as you could get. What a waste! And far from the only one.

[Lizzie Johnson @lizziejohnsonnn]

I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I'm devastated.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

@annemcelvoy @BenMullin A characteristically honourable gesture from a terrific journalist. Peter and I were correspondents at the same time in Berlin and worked together on the aftermath of 9/11. We were in contact just a few weeks ago.

[John Hooper @john_hooper]

Very interesting. Suggests that Prevost and Bergoglio did not get on at first, but that Bergoglio as Francis came to value him.

[Catholics for Catholics 🇺🇲 @CforCatholics]

Pope Leo XIV, then Bishop Robert Prevost back in 2023, in Peru, right before he was made Cardinal:

“Yesterday marked ten years since Pope Francis' election. I knew Jorge Mario Bergoglio when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. As the Augustinian General, I'd met him several times. When he was elected, I told some brothers, 'Great, thank God I'll never be bishop.' I won't say why, but not all meetings with Cardinal Bergoglio were mutually agreeable.”

[Francis X. Rocca @FrancisXRocca]

This is where it really does feel like Kremlinology