Richard Long

Better Together. My profile pic is the house I was raised in as a child in Chididi, Malawi. Grateful to my missionary parents who instilled a love for God.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

We have reached a strange place, where you can drain a river, poison a coastline, and lean on people with no rights, and still be thanked for saving the planet, so long as the damage happens somewhere you will never have to look. Follow the virtuous plate home, one item at a time, and watch the halo slip off it.

The avocado came from Michoacán, where the cartels run the orchards, divert the rivers, and murder the people who object.

The almonds in the milk came from California, drawn out of a drought and an emptying aquifer, pollinated by bees trucked three thousand miles across a continent and worked to exhaustion in a fortnight.

The salad was grown under a sea of plastic in Almería, by migrant workers on thirty euros a day in forty-five-degree heat, on groundwater so poisoned the region now has to import its own.

The peppers were grown beside a Spanish lagoon that has died so many times they had to give it the legal rights of a person just to defend it in court.

The cashews were shelled by hand by people whose fingers were burned by the acid in the husk.

The cotton bag it all came home in helped drain the fourth largest lake on earth into a salt desert.

Every item crossed thousands of miles, from somewhere left drier, poorer, and more poisoned for having grown it.

And the person carrying that bag home walks past a field ten miles up the road, where a cow stands in the rain turning grass nobody can eat into food, dropping dung that feeds the soil it stands on, on land that has looked more or less the same for a thousand years, and thinks, with total sincerity: there it is. The thing destroying the planet. A cow. Burping in a meadow.

It is one of the strangest acts of misdirection of the age. We built a supply chain that strips deserts, drains rivers, flattens forests and runs on people with no rights, and we taught ourselves to feel virtuous about it, purely because the alternative was an animal we could see, standing in a field we could walk to.

The cow you can point at gets the blame. The catastrophe you cannot see gets a halo and a sticker that says plant-based.

Heal the planet, they say, with the asparagus flown in from a drought.

[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.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

A brilliant summary of the roots and corrupt legacy of Critical Theory.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@cvangeyn @TomTSEC You spoke powerfully. Wish I had brought an extra warm coat to give you.

[Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @Tablesalt13]

I dont mind paying an extra $3 to fill up the car

if it means 45 million women in Iran are freed

and protestors dont get massacred in the streets.

[Melissa Lantsman @MelissaLantsman]

Waking up to the news of yet another night of gunshots fired into synagogues, this time over the Sabbath.

Call this what it is: an attempt to terrorize the Jewish community.

Synagogues are places where families gather, where seniors pray, where children learn. Targeting them with gunfire is meant to spread fear, intimidation - and yes, terror.

It is disgusting and sadly becoming commonplace in Canada.

Those responsible must be found, prosecuted, and made an example of.

And in the meantime, there must be increased police patrols and protection around synagogues and Jewish institutions immediately. Everywhere.

Jewish Canadians should never have to fear walking into their place of worship.

Time for governments to stop being “shocked” and “appalled” while send “thoughts” and “prayers”.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@richardmarceau Standing with you my friend. So sorry for the terrible tragedy in Australia.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@alangilman Amen.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@_MarkSutcliffe So sorry to hear this news. Condolences to her friends, family and colleagues.

[Warren Kinsella @kinsellawarren]

October 7: the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust.

1,200 men, women, children killed. Torture, rapes, brutality. Hundreds kidnapped. Jews, non-Jews.

To celebrate the monsters who committed those crimes is beyond evil.

If you reject this, speak up before it's too late.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@chloecole @TPUSA Thanks for your courage, Chloe. I am praying for your protection and for great clarity.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@JamesAFurey Keep them coming. You have a wonderfully fresh perspective.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@richardmarceau @OttawaPolice Really glad to see this development.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@cardusca It was a great honour to be a part of this new movement as it is now underway.

[Cardus @cardusca]

That’s a wrap on the #SimeonSummit! We are launching a movement, uniting Christian and Jewish communities across Canada, uniting against antisemitism and for human rights, freedom, and justice. Thank you for the extraordinary Christian and Jewish leaders who joined us these past two days, and once again, thank you to our amazing partners: @CIJAinfo @RickEkstein @UJAFederation

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

#WeRemember

[Nicky Gumbel @nickygumbel]

You are never too old to set another goal
or to dream a new dream.
– C. S. Lewis

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@KeithEgli Merry Christmas to Archie and all the rest of the Egli family.

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

Words are not enough! Join me in taking action against Jew-Hate in Canada: https://t.co/cKqIIkMlfb

[Richard Long @richard_a_long]

@_MarkSutcliffe Happy Thanksgiving, Mayor Sutcliffe!