Jeremy Wattles

”Work as if you live in the early days of a Better Nation.” Educator, Sometime Poet, Runner, Political Junkie. Believer in the Public Good.

[Alex Thompson @AlexThomp]

New ad w/ AOC and El-Sayed ahead of next Tuesday’s primary.

[Isi Breen @isaiah_bb]

Rahm’s dad was in Etzel, aka The Irgun, a terrorist organization that perpetrated many atrocities, including the Deir Yassin massacre, the bombing of the King David Hotel, and the murder of 100s of women & children.

Zohran’s dad was a college professor at Columbia.

[Troy Jackson @TroyJackson207]

Susan Collins lied to Mainers. She helped destroy Roe v. Wade, she advanced Trump's $990 billion Medicaid cuts, and she gave ICE $70 billion continue its rogue terror campaign.

Together, we will replace her with a Senator who gives a damn about working people in this country.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

[African Maps @MapsAfrican]

The literal meaning of every country's name in Africa.

The etymology map of Africa.

[Cheyenne Hunt @CheyenneHuntCA]

Shawn Fain won UAW's biggest contract victories in 40 years and organized the South for the first time ever. Now, right before his re-election and ahead of a potential 2028 general strike, the DOJ opened a grand jury investigation into him — via a federal monitor Fain has clashed with since the UAW's Gaza ceasefire resolution.
Unions are one of the last real structural checks on oligarchy. That's exactly why the most effective labor leader in a generation is facing this kind of pressure right when it matters most. We need to watch this story closely.

[Daniel D'Addario @DPD_]

late to this but catching up on old New Yorkers and this essay is genuinely breathtaking… one of the most special pieces of writing of the past couple of years, easily https://t.co/DVjGYqlb8t

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

THANK YOU TO THE PEOPLE WHO BLESSED MSG TODAY TO GET THE STANK VIBES OUT YOUR SERVICE IS APPRECIATED

[Thomas Dekeyser @ThomasDekeyser]

As the academic whose book is cited multiple times in this article, I want to make it clear: the data center revolt is great and we need more of it. (Getting a little sick of journalists purposefully misreading my arguments)

[Joseph O'Neill @JosephONeillx]

Can't overstate how important it is to celebrate and publicize these historic wins in the face of huge rightwing ideological & political apparatuses.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

Melville provides the most lovingly intimate, affectionate information on whales, far in excess of what any reasonable person might wish; as if knowing that it's this one-time-only for New England whaling as "hideous intolerable allegory" of humankind's doom--so why not pack it all into one magical book? so too Joyce packs into "Ulysses" all the useless chatter/gossip of Dublin 1904 (including "the speech of my father & his friends") recreated in his frenetic rats'-nest memory: the secular world irradiated by the sacred.

[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.

[Prem Thakker @prem_thakker]

Zohran Mamdani becomes one of the first mayors in the US (and among a small handful of prominent US officials generally) to recognize the Nakba — the mass expulsion and forced displacement of 700,000+ Palestinians.

Connected directly with a Nakba survivor

[Justin J. Pearson @Justinjpearson]

Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on.

This move strips nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve in TN state leg.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

When we came into office, we uncovered a $12 billion budget deficit.

Today, I’m proud to say we brought it down to zero.

We didn’t close the gap on the backs of working people.

We closed it while funding parks, libraries, safer streets and making historic investments in public housing.

Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Democratic Socialism. It's government that delivers for the people who make this city run.

That’s what New Yorkers deserve. And that’s what we will keep fighting for every single day.

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

Thank you, @ReverendWarnock, for welcoming me to Ebenezer Baptist Church today.

As legislatures across the South seek to draw Black Americans out of power, we gathered this Sunday to steel ourselves for the work ahead.

We will always stand together, and we will not go back.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You can’t really argue this. They believe in investing in the people and infrastructure.

[DUA LIPA @DUALIPA]

Last night I did the introduction speech at the 10th anniversary of the International Booker Prize. An honour to speak about books and translated fiction, something I hold very dear to my heart infront of writers, translators, judges and book lovers. Thank you for having me @TheBookerPrizes 🤍📚
@service95

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

When I say the country is institutionally rigged for Republicans I’m talking about how Virginia gets their maps struck down after a two year process involving multiple legislative sessions and a statewide referendum but Tennessee can just decide not to enfranchise Memphis anymore

[Jeremy Wattles @jtwattles]

Final Issue of How to Survive a Hamilton Winter - https://t.co/sUPqDSJorg