𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his)

“The Ted Lasso of fundraising” - Doolittle. Author of Creative Deviations, international speaker and individual giving nerd at @agentsofgood.

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

The day has come. You can find me from now on over at Bluesky: @johnlepp.bsky.social. Thanks Twitter. You served me well for 15 years. RIP.

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@ColinDMello What a sweet gig…

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This is what the older generations should try and do more often

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@aftncanada Right? What a head scratcher…

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@AmazingPRMaven @USArmy So sorry for your loss Ami

[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.

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@GraemePerrow Enjoy the warm glow of the spotlight my friend!

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@Graemeperrow how famous are you? Holy?

[Maryam @hell_line0]

I saw one post this morning that said women over 50 shouldn’t wear their hair long and another post that said women over 50 shouldn’t wear their hair short because it ages them more and I just want to say that women of all ages should wear their hair however the fuck they want

[𝚓𝚘𝚑𝚗𝚕𝚎𝚙𝚙 (he/him/his) @johnlepp]

@dabitch This is true, I do like a great hazy ipa. We have a lot of them out here in BC.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

Nobody could figure out why the abandoned Hendricks apple orchard suddenly bloomed in April 2019. The trees hadn't produced fruit in eleven years. County agriculture office sent two inspectors. They found sixty thousand honeybees working the property - a massive colony that had escaped from Tomás Vega's apiary three miles south. Tomás had reported the swarm missing in March. He expected them dead. Instead they'd colonized the hollow barn on the Hendricks lot and cross-pollinated every surviving tree. That October, the orchard produced twenty-two tons of Cortland apples. The Hendricks family offered Tomás a permanent lease. He moved his entire operation there the following spring.

[Bev 🇨🇦 @Garnet_2203]

What bothers me more than Doug Ford buying a $28 million jet on Ontario taxpayers’ dollars…

…is the silence.

Silence from his own MPPs like @ToddJMcCarthy while people can’t afford groceries.
While kids are questioning if they can afford post-secondary.
While hospitals and education systems are being deprived of the funding they desperately need.

These MPPs were elected to represent their communities.
To be our voice.

Instead? Nothing.

That silence speaks volumes.

So when are they going to stand up and say,
“We work for the people of Ontario, not for Doug Ford” 🤷‍♀️

Because right now… it doesn’t look like it.

[Men's Humor @MensHumor]

This is how you run a business.

[George Stroumboulopoulos 🐺 @strombo]

He was sharp, thoughtful, and deeply human.

And you could see that in his relationship with his wife, writer and activist Michele Landsberg. They had shared values, convictions, and a commitment to making things better.

Rest in Peace Stephen Lewis.

[Kristin Raworth 🇨🇦 @KristinRaworth]

I've never sen anything more accurate

[The Sting @TheStingisBack]

Rita Moreno is one of just three people to win an Emmy for The Muppets, the other two: Bernadette Peters and Peter Sellers. The comedy timing during her performance of "Fever" while Animal attempts to railroad her is incredible. It was also done in one take
"Dat my kinda woman!"

[♡⃝ @wine_x13]

To the guy who held the door for me and then followed me a few steps before stopping on the sidewalk and calling out "I'm not trying to be weird, I just, uh, think I'm parked next to you. You go ahead!" and then waited for me to drive off.

Sir, may you only encounter green lights. May pizza never burn the roof of your mouth. May you awaken every day with a restored spirit. Absolute king behavior 🙌🏻
To every man wondering if it's weird to say something like this, please make it weirder and safer every time. We thank you.

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

This is Hank. He is incredibly invested in this plumbing project that does not require him in the slightest. 13/10

[Ann Green @agreennonprofit]

How to Ensure That Your Donor Engagement is Actually Engaging https://t.co/08mdEGmk9q #fundraising #nonprofit