la tierra de los libres is occupied by a cartel dedicated to maximum extraction for the rich and powerful, in the most disastrous con in world history.
“A family from Mexico arrives this morning legally has as much right to the American Dream as the direct descents of the Founding Fathers.”
Bob Dole accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1996.
No one could have predicted this
“Jersey City was one of the busiest apartment-construction markets in the entire New York metro region, adding thousands of new units as developers chased the post-pandemic demand surge. When all that inventory came online at once, landlords had to compete on price to fill the units, which pulled rents down from their 2024 peak. The building boom is why renters are getting a break now."
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.
The EPA's independent science arm did groundbreaking research to save lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change etc etc
In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled
Of 1500 scientists, only 124 remain
https://t.co/05bluCvI2c
Few have done as much as Marc Andreessen to hollow out what remains of our threadbare moral order. It’s humiliating that we have to pretend he’s anything other an arsonist trying to sell us fire insurance.
Income levels in Milan, Italy.
Incredibly concentric and huge differences between the richer city centre and the poorer peripheries https://t.co/E47HuevRWg
the CATO Institute.. a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch brothers.. just published a study showing immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in benefits every single year from 1994 to 2023..
not a left-wing university.. not a Democratic PAC.. the Koch brothers' own research institute..
they reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion over 30 years.. they earn less per hour but work at higher rates.. which means higher per capita income.. which means higher taxes paid..
the country spent 30 years being told immigrants were draining the system.. turns out they were funding it.. and the people who told you that knew the numbers the whole time
All of the best things in life require a degree of embarrassment, or at least the possibility of it. Dancing, singing, sharing art, cooking food, having sex, holding hands; there is risk in it all. You could burn dinner or sing off key; no act of self expression or love is exempt from this danger.
This is a large reason dating apps fail
Human attraction (specifically for women) requires repeat exposure with low stakes
Dating apps do the opposite: meet once, on romantic terms, and decide immediately if it ever happens again