Hospice Harpist @charkin

To everyone so eager to cancel someone for a tattoo they got at age 22, a drunk text, a selfie they took in the middle of a mental health crisis: Show us your laptop. Show us your iCloud. Open your entire digital life to your worst enemy. No context. No filter. No explanation. You won’t. You won’t because you know what I know. Any one of us, frozen at our worst moment, photographed in our lowest hour, looks like a monster. Looks like a stranger. Looks like someone who deserves to be cast out. That is not who we are. My mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident when I was just a kid. Cancer took my brother Beau, my best friend and my rock. I battled alcoholism. I battled addiction. I chose the coward’s way out more times than I can count. For years I believed the defining chapters of my life were written by tragedy, loss, and shame. I no longer believe that. Pain can shape us. Loss can humble us. Failures can leave scars that never fully fade. But none of them have the authority to define us. And it sure as hell ain’t the critic that counts. That authority belongs to us alone-the person in the arena. Every setback presents a choice. Play the victim, or cut the bullshit and take ownership for who we become next. Life does not determine our character. It reveals it. Again and again we are asked the same question. When shit happens, what next? We are not defined by what happened to us. We are not defined by the worst photo, the worst text, the worst tattoo, the worst night. We are defined by the person we choose to become. And by the courage to choose that person, every single day. So before you reach for the gavel - show us your laptop. You won’t. The whole world saw mine. And I am still here. Still becoming. Still choosing. Still standing. That is the only definition that matters.

Our Wisconsin Revolution is honored to announce our endorsement of FRANCESCA HONG for Governor of Wisconsin.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

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.

@AuthorJFuller He’s so little!

Such a beautiful poem, now illustrated. Take a listen. Save your soul.

Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_

a month ago

An artist named Monica Raven made this with my poem "Instructions for Having a Soul," and I love it so much. ❤️

8 45 213 7K 69

@kid_riles Whoo-hoo! I’ve been here since the Walker years!

@hell_line0 Pink hair at my 70th birthday party. I can’t tell you how many smiles I get from strangers who love my hair!

I'm astonished by the response to my poem "Instructions for Having a Soul." Here it is in my voice, from one human to another.

David, an African American caregiver, shared a touching story about his 91-year-old client — a naval veteran who marched for civil rights in his youth. Now, years later, David feels deep joy and fulfillment caring for him. Their bond reflects a beautiful spirit of kindness, mutual respect, and love that transcends generations. ❤️

@Joseph_Fasano_ I carried this in my wallet for yrs, not knowing who Wendell Berry was. To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. Wendell Berry

His family left him behind but he never stopped waiting for them to come back. But that was his past. Look at him now. Perfection

It's 4/20. Do you know where your tax revenue is? Wisconsin is one of the last states without a real cannabis program, and we're handing our neighbors millions every year because of it.

@VinylAudiophile @kid_riles @WisGOP 15 years of Republican control in the Wisconsin Senate and Assembly and people can't figure out that Republicans forced public schools to use additional property taxes to make up for the shortfall from the state government. The Republican controlled legislature is the blame.

Take a good look folks. These are the Minnesota boundary waters. Every Republican senator voted to allow a Chilean billionaire to mine it. The minerals will go to China. This truly enrages me. It should you as well. Fuck, and I mean fuck… The @GOP 🖕

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@Joseph_Fasano_ I needed this today. ❤️

"If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war." —Wendell Berry

@Michaeljos92972 💔 Your words here remind me of a Wendell Berry poem I refer to in a book I put together. The poem is called Rising. Here is an excerpt. mwerickson.com/2025/01/15/any…

@Michaeljos92972 It’s soooo good!

Michael writes so beautifully, in the raw light of truth, about grief. 💔💔❤️‍🩹❤️

Michael & Rebecca @Michaeljos92972

2 months ago

A CHANGING LIFE by Michael Whelan The house has learned a new language this past month. It speaks in absence. The quiet isn’t just quiet—it’s instructional. It teaches me where Rebecca used to be. The empty chair at the table isn’t furniture anymore, it’s a headline. The bed

25 11 331 6K 6