Ravi Howard

Author of Like Trees, Walking & Driving the King. Ernest J. Gaines Prize winner. PEN/Hemingway finalist. Best American Mystery and Suspense.

[Hopkins Press @JHUPress]

Jazz giant Sonny Rollins, who passed away last month, gave an interview to John A. McCluskey for the pages of @CallalooJournal in 2018

In celebration of his memory, we've unlocked the interview on @ProjectMUSE; read free through 15 June: https://t.co/mHGw9dxUkL

[Garrett Wymer @GarrettFOX35]

BREAKING | Orange Co. Mayor Jerry Demings suspends his Florida gubernatorial campaign after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Demings says he will finish the remainder of his term as mayor.

[SAVE A SEAT FOR ME (Simon & Schuster, 2026) @NewBlackMan]

The Black Studies Podcast

Michele Prettyman - Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
https://t.co/6tmev18bY8

[Karen Attiah @KarenAttiah]

I was wrongfully fired by the @washingtonpost in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing.

And I challenged them. Finally we went to arbitration.

✊🏾

[The Paris Review @parisreview]

We’re hiring an assistant / associate editor. Applications are open until 6/18. https://t.co/TkQlxnn8lE

[Etan Thomas @etanthomas36]

Much Respect DC 👊🏾🍊

[Jose Antonio Vargas @joseiswriting]

Dear journalists covering Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for Ohio Governor:

Is Ramaswamy, a first generation Indian American, aware of the debt that his immigrant parents owe the Civil Rights Movement? That Movement was largely responsible for the passage of the 1965 immigration act that repealed the racist exclusion law that allowed his parents to emigrate to the U.S. in the 1970s. ⬇️

[Howard University @HowardU]

Howard University honors the life and legacy of Mary Lovelace O’Neal (BFA ’64), a fearless alumna whose work bridged abstraction, activism, teaching, and liberation.

A visionary artist and educator, O’Neal expanded the language of American abstraction while deepening the relationship between beauty, justice, and freedom.

Read the full feature in The Dig: https://t.co/98TZJDHCuX

#HowardUniversity #FineArts #MaryLovelaceONeal

[miss talk sum @shootmeadub]

“What I knew that my critical elders didn’t…was that hip-hop mattered from the get-go. That once again, the African American working class…had created another vernacular, improvisational form of addressing their condition and the condition of the world.”

— Greg Tate

[Kyle Whitmire @WarOnDumb]

Tommy Tuberville says he goes back to Auburn for ball games “three or four times” a year — then remembers he “lives” there.

[Ravi Howard @RaviHoward]

@LeftOfBlack I miss videos. So many artists, directors, and styles thrived in the culture.

[Ellie Wolfe @elliew0lfe]

Morgan State University, Maryland’s largest historically Black college, is expanding its off-campus housing options after another year of record-breaking enrollment. The public research university has seen five straight years of enrollment growth:

https://t.co/Z4n9jCb4qQ

[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.

[Left of Black @LeftOfBlack]

Jessie Maple: Pioneering Black Indie Filmmaker | @criterionchannl

[Namwali @namwalien]

Some good news for the real Morrison heads in the midst of all this discourse: my book, ON MORRISON is one of the @nytimesbooks best books of 2026 thus far!

Grateful that at least some readers are finding it useful to accompany their (re)readings of her incredible writing!

[Namwali @namwalien]

I've been thinking about Beloved and difficulty and why, beyond the trigger H-word, the missing context that I reread it in college, and the general condescension to black art that demands it be accessible, people are resistant to the idea that it requires rereading to grasp. /1

[Ravi Howard @RaviHoward]

@byjoelanderson I remember when the Jacksonville Jaguars kicker said Urban kicked him when he missed a FG during a preseason warmup.

[deb saslaw @butlikesrsly]

howard dean yelled a little too loud at the 2004 Iowa caucus and was deemed too unhinged to be president just thinking about that for no reason today

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

Be honest… does ANYONE actually use these words in real life? 🤣

Bamboozled
Flabbergasted
Discombobulated
Shenanigans
Cattywampus
Lollygag
Malarkey
Kerfuffle
Brouhaha
Nincompoop
Skedaddle
Tomfoolery
Flibbertigibbet
Pumpernickel

[Alex Cole @acnewsitics]

Today’s Artemis II launch is brought to you by the Biden Administration. You know Donald Trump wasn't going to send a woman and a Black man into space.