"For there's nothing as powerful or as great As when a husband & wife, united by oneness of mind in their thinking, Keep their home together—a great bane to their enemies, A blessing to their friends, & their renown is on everyone's lips.” Odysseus' great praise of marriage.

Elf with the pearl earring

i love her so much you don't understand

You’ve seen this beautiful sculpture all over X, again and again. The graceful, ethereal woman reaching upward like she’s slipping away. But what most people don’t realize is that it’s actually a funeral monument. Anelito Fuggente (Fleeing Soul) was created by Ruperto Banterle in 1915 as a tribute to his friend’s late mother. The male figure represents Life desperately trying to hold onto the soul as it flees. At the time, it was considered almost too sensual for a cemetery. Today, it remains one of the most emotional and poetic graves in Verona’s Monumental Cemetery.

Bertrand Russell on Buddhism "Among present-day religions Buddhism is best. The doctrines of Buddhism are profound, they are almost reasonable, and historically they have been the least harmful and the least cruel. But I cannot say that Buddhism is positively good, nor would I wish to have it spread all over the world and believed by everyone. This is because Buddhism only focuses on the question of what Man is, not on what the universe is like. Buddhism does not really pursue the truth; it appeals to sentiment and, ultimately, tries to persuade people to believe in doctrines which are based on subjective assumptions not objective evidence. However, subjective opinions can produce false beliefs. I think that no matter what the religion, nor how ambiguously its faith is expressed, the same problem arises because of the substitution of subjective sentiment for objective evidence. Sentiment might be taken as the dominant force in our daily lives. But as for belief in facts, the farther we distance ourselves from sentiment the better. Never substitute sentiment for facts. It is absolutely harmful to do so."

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.

Happy Thursday! Here's one from 2009: 'Muse and Medium' 30x48 inches, oil on linen #ThrowbackThursday

I think my favorite quote in Old English might be this, from King Ælfred’s translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies: Mē ne þyncð nānwiht hefiġ, ðæs þe man lufað. “It seems to me that nothing is difficult, if it is done for love.”

Each dot is 100 illegal immigrants. This is what colonisation looks like.

“If the spread of reading represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the smartphone revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.” I compress @j_amesmarriott’s superb new book into a quote tweet.

Before technology advanced, everything was art and elegance…

There are two ways to get rid of a woman. 1) Tell her how miserable and empty your life is. 2) Treat her like she is the most valuable and important thing in your life. Make her think she is the center of your universe. Women say they want this, but I have come to find. If you want to change a woman's mind give her exactly what she wants.

Imagine what the Germanic tribes could’ve done if they’d united after conquering Rome

Women don't realise that niggas will wait 25yrs for the yambs to fall into their lap.

Britain took on fifty nations. African kings. Arab sultans. Bombarded ports. Deposed rulers who refused. Lost 1,600 men. Spent 40% of the entire Treasury. A debt so big it wasn't paid off until 2015. You or your parents were still paying for it. Not for land. Not for gold. To end the slave trade. They captured 1,600 ships. Freed 150,000 people. Patrolled 3,000 miles of coastline for sixty years. And none of it was the government's idea. It was 400,000 ordinary people who signed petitions and 300,000 families who refused to buy sugar. They forced Parliament's hand. Your ancestors changed the world and nobody told you. If you think this should be taught in schools, help us reach more people: proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us Be Proud Of Us 🇬🇧

How do you find out you’re good at this? What’s the conversation look like

The spiritual moment when you go out to eat alone at night in another country

Some dude at Bungie when they were creating Halo: