Compassion won't fight for itself, so we have to. In the middle of the radical religious right's "war on empathy,"' we're giving away $100,000 in grants for Americans to help their neighbors. America needs more empathy, not less, and we're standing on it.

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it. The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state. What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it. Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure. In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

As a monogamous person, my partner meets all my romantic/sexual/intimacy needs, yes. For other things, there are these things calls friendships, familial relationships, etc. Expecting a singular person to be everything to you isn’t monogamy, that’s more co-dependence imo

look at this guy and his suicidal empathy. doesnt he know that the heat maps say it's liberal to prioritize an unrelated child?

“You can’t build socialism if you like America” is a deeply-held belief by much of the left, especially academics, and it’s also complete nonsense. Literal idealism. On the left, in general, we put infinitely too much weight on how you *feel* about certain things, like a nation

More and more people are getting into pro-fish politics

Maybe this time we can try to run without naming a villain and it will work. Not last time and barely the time before and not the time before that, but maybe this time

Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is the logical endpoint of an economic ideology that treats public investment as “socialism” when it helps ordinary people, and as “entrepreneurship” when it helps billionaires.

Pete Hegseth should put down the bottle and pick up the constitution. I’m tired of our military being run by a belligerent himbo who thinks our national security is just a platform for him to shove his religion down our throats.

I don’t care about Platner’s personal life, I don’t need him to be my friend. I need him to vote correctly.

I don't think the point of gifted programs is to produce "eminence," it's to allow children who can learn at an accelerated pace to do so without being separated from same-age peers. We can do that while reducing pressure making the system more accessible to low-income kids

I’ve been informed by folks on this site that The Hobbit and now Jane Austen are too difficult for teens. I can’t stress enough how condescending this is to teenagers. You’re taking away all the things that might bring them joy and leaving them with no pastimes but scrolling.

1/ I watched the attacks on Graham Platner and explored the one involving is wife. I'm convinced this level of coordinated beltway attacks are Koch machine-driven and not just focused on the possible loss of Maine's seat. It's because the Koch machine knows that

The moral of the boy who cried wolf is that the boy’s dishonesty was deadly to him, not that people were wrong to disbelieve him. If anyone with a hard earned reputation for honesty alleged fraud, they’d deserve a hearing. At this point that excludes the entire Republican Party.

I don't know who gave people the idea that your college admissions essay is supposed to be about the worst thing that ever happened to you. I wrote an essay about my first crush with the sole explicit goal of making the admissions officer laugh, and it got me into Yale

Grijalva: “It makes me take a pause, definitely, when I'm considering paying my dues that they're being used against candidates that I'm supporting. I'm supposed to give you $175K of very difficult-to-raise money & then the money we give to show we're a good team player you turn around & spend in primaries?”

OpenAI and Palantir are with Ben McAdams The people are with progressive @NateForUtah

"those engineering professors should get real jobs, like podcasting or something"

Vote Blue No Matter Who