My wife is furious with the Lindsay Clancy case. She says it’s the worst thing possible for women. If women are so hormonal they can’t keep from killing their own children, how can women argue they deserve any positions of high responsibility? It’s anti-women to favor not guilty.
Black people defending Jaylen Brown by saying “he’s actually smart” are arguing the wrong point.
Nobody gets punished for being intelligent.
People get punished for signaling that they think they’re smarter than everyone else.
Those are different things.
Human nature is ruthless about this.
If you constantly communicate “I’m the smartest guy here,” people stop listening for your ideas and start looking for reasons to humble you.
Especially when your job isn’t to demonstrate your intellect—it’s to produce results.
Brown is paid to play basketball.
If his intelligence makes him a better basketball player, everyone benefits.
If it becomes a separate performance competing with his basketball, it creates unnecessary friction.
Intelligence is an asset.
Making everyone aware of it, usually isn’t.
The smartest person in the room rarely needs to announce it. The room figures it out on its own.
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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.
.@Chris_Broussard is doing the Lord’s work here. His comments, coupled w/my own work in this area, have made one thing crystal clear to me: any serious movement to revive marriage & rebuild the black family MUST be led by black Christian men who embody the values they espouse.
We’ve outsourced our processing time to the “algorithm” aka people in mass.
A catastrophe lands.
We react.
A conspiracy blooms.
We react.
The ground shifts again?
Repeat.
No pause. No reflection…the next story is already loading.
In this process I find I am losing the space between stimulus and response.
The moment where thinking happens. Not the performance of thinking…the kind where we construct hot takes while the dopamine is still fresh.
Real thinking.
The uncomfortable kind that requires sitting with something longer than it takes to scroll past it.
And make no mistake, this isn’t about long versus short form content.
You can spend two hours on a podcast and never encounter a single original thought. Length doesn’t equal depth.
What’s missing is contemplation.
The kind that builds arguments instead of reactions, that synthesizes instead of summarizes, that has a rhetoric that persuades instead of performs.
We used to call this critical thinking. Now we call it being late to the conversation.
I don't blame the platforms, they just scratch itching ears well and reward for Being first.
Being loud.
Being certain.
But real ideas don’t work on that schedule or that way. They need time to cure.
They require the friction of counter-evidence, the patience of revision, the humility of “I don’t know yet.” which is almost blasphemy these days to say.
I don't expect the platforma to change before we do. They reflect us, and they’re built to optimize for engagement.
The question is whether we’ll choose to think anyway and optimize ourselves for understanding.
Found this to be helpful from Ellul…
"To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event. He's carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate. He can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness of himself, his condition, or his society. For the man who lives by current events, such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of new events." Jacques Ellul - Propaganda
“You are going to hear a rumour one day that Voddie Bauckham is no more. Don't you believe it? Because though I die, I will rise with Christ. It will not be the end of me.”
PRAISE THE LORD!!!
Our hearts are heavy, yet rejoicing, as we share the news that our beloved pastor and teacher John MacArthur has entered into the presence of the Savior. This evening, his faith became sight. He faithfully endured until his race was run.
2 Timothy 4:1-8