The Hill Wife poets.org/poem/hill-wife-0

I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

Was just remembering how common it was to just buy dress patterns and sew your own clothes. For the Bicentennial my mom made me Little House on Prairie themed clothes complete with sun bonnet. Really seems like another world.

Good morning 🌅

The West has created an utterly evil state religion where an accusation of “racism” is the gravest offense that can be committed, even worse than rape or murder! So if police show up at a crime scene and a British boy is bleeding out and an immigrant says the British boy is racist the cops will cuff the dying British boy.

Pentecost Sunday, Basilica of Our Lady Star of the Sea, Maastricht, Netherlands

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.

I don’t live in Vermont now, but it’s the place I will always call home, and this issue is close to my heart. ruralvermontrising.org/?fbcl…

I don’t care what your politics are, what color your skin is, or who you voted for — every family has one thing in common: this pan.

This is why I will always love my country

It is less known the Greeks are the ones who brought cats to southern Italy (Felix catus), with feline expansion following the one of the Roman Empire Pictured, Balbo, a descendant of its ancient Graeco-Roman ancestors napping on the streets of Herculaneum

I can't tell you how much I look forward to these blooming every year. The fragrance is so wonderful.

A nice drink after Mass at St Jozefkathedraal, Groningen. Life can be good

At least someone is having babies in Vermont

“A degree in medieval history won’t help you understand current events” they said

I didn’t say it

Today is National Pet Day. Cats throughout the land can barely contain their indifference.

Credo in unum Deum… Factorem cæli et terræ.

Did you know that the oldest recorded poem in English is about Good Friday? This is The Dream of the Rood - a poem where the cross of Christ talks to the poet about the crucifixion - read in Old English by Dr Alexandra Zhirnova, at @StPaulsLondon.

Hello I'm a cookie artist of bird-themed cookies in Japan🕊️ I want to connect with bird artists all over the world!