I told @AliVitali that today was the realization of Peter Thiel's worst fear — that the “woke American pope,” in his words, would take on Silicon Valley and challenge it to build an artificial intelligence in the service of humanity.
Here’s the problem for Thiel.
Leo deals in a currency he doesn't understand.
There’s no ballot that removes him, no impeachment, no indictment, no deportation order, no tariff that touches him.
His authority comes from somewhere Thiel has no instrument to reach.
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.
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.
Curtis Sliwa just reminded British royalty of their history. 'Your king and queen laid flowers at the 9/11 memorial
But a block away is the memorial to the Irish famine. Your royalty was responsible for killing a million Irish. You never apologized. They have a lot to apologize for
Discussion we had this evening. In NYC we are bringing back the IRISH HELLO. AKA THE 90s. Here’s how it works. You and your friends all share location. Sporadically throughout the day (lunch break, coffee walk, after work, before work) you check to see where they are. If you’re close to someone, you just show up at their location. Aka bring them a coffee to work, stop by their apt unannounced, kick shoes off and spill the tea. Spontaneously grab a drink or dinner because you’re in the same vicinity. And even if you’re not, meet in the middle. It’s easy to get around here. We’re nostalgic for a time that does not exist and yet we have the means to create it and still we refuse. Everyone is too cool or too nonchalant or too scared to appear desperate. Who gives a fuck. I think we should all be a little more desperate. You’re alive. You need people and people need you. Be the one who calls. Be the one who makes the plan, who sets the tone. I guarantee you’ll be surprised at who shows up. It’s better to be the person who tries than the person who doesn’t.
HELLO I AM HERE.
Bad Bunny's team Press release about 2026 Met Gala:
"The choice of an all-black, timeless silhouette is intentional: the suit doesn't age, he does....This is Bad Bunny's most conceptually ambitious Met Gala appearance to date and one of the most thoughtful responses to a Met theme in recent memory".