Eclecticity

Sens. Shaheen and Tillis introduced bipartisan legislation which would require POTUS to impose sanctions and visa bans on officials who block or delay assistance to Ukraine through US, European or NATO channels while continuing Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil and gas 2/3

💥Not how one wants to be featured in the @nytimes, but I’m glad a US audience sees what’s happening in this small country’s wild election campaign. As with other Orbán-related news, here's my warning to US colleagues: Orbán's actions still serve as a blueprint for Trump/MAGA...

A Harvard professor who has written 9 books and spent 40 years studying how language works inside the human brain just gave the most important writing masterclass I've ever seen. Here's what he said that broke my entire understanding of writing. Steven Pinker, the professor, opened with a single question: why is so much writing terrible? Not just academic writing, but corporate writing, government writing, and even most blog posts. His answer had nothing to do with effort or intelligence. He called it the Curse of Knowledge. The moment you understand something deeply, you lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to know it. You stop seeing your own blind spots because the blind spots feel like common ground. He watched a brilliant molecular biologist destroy a room of 400 people at a TED event. The man launched straight into jargon without ever explaining the problem he was solving or why anyone should care. The biologist had no idea it was happening. That's the curse. Then he said something I haven't stopped thinking about. Bad writing is not a character flaw. It's a failure of empathy. You cannot get inside your reader's head by trying harder. You have to actually find a real human being and watch them read your words in real time. He showed his drafts to his mother. Not because she was unsophisticated, but because she wasn't a cognitive psychologist. She was smart, well-read, and completely outside his world. When she lost the thread, he knew something was wrong. The second thing he said changed how I think about every sentence I write. Language is a delivery system, not the destination. What your reader actually understands is not the words. It is the image, the sensation, the concrete thing those words are supposed to summon. If your reader cannot picture it, they have not understood it. He asked: what is a paradigm? What does a framework look like? What color is a concept? Nobody could answer. Because abstractions produce nothing in the mind's eye. The writers from two centuries ago who still feel alive today were forced to think visually because they had no abstractions to hide behind. They had to say the spirit of the hawk tore into our flesh instead of aggression. The image did the work that the jargon could not. The third thing he said was the one most people ignore completely. Brevity is not about word count. It is about removing every word that makes the reader work harder without rewarding them for it. He quoted a line he had memorized for 40 years: omit needless words. Three words. An instruction that is also an example of itself. He said the best thing that ever happened to his writing was editors who gave him an 800-word limit and wouldn't budge. The constraint always improved the piece. Always. The curse of knowledge is real. The fix is simple and most people never do it. Find one person outside your world. Show them what you wrote. Watch their face, not the page.

It’s a pretty basic question. Does this guy own a chunk of our oldest Sunday newspaper @theobserveruk? And why won’t you tell us @theguardian? 12/

a positive video to brighten your day

Absolute humiliation for the Pentagon. A former 82nd Airborne Commander admits that sending 7,000 troops to Iran is a complete suicide mission. He reveals they canceled a similar drop in 1979 because they knew they would be completely massacred by Iranian forces.

Walz: The president said it's a bunch of radicals. You're damn right we've been radicalized. Radicalized by compassion, radicalized by decency, radicalized by due process, radicalized by democracy.

You don’t need to take Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Marco Rubio at their word to find out that Rubio is bluntly lying. Just look at Provision 21 of Trump’s 28-point peace plan: “Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk Oblast that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarized buffer zone, internationally recognized as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarized zone.”

NEW: Zelenskyy tells @NBCNews that Russia took satellite images of US airbase in Saudi Arabia three times in the days before Iran hit the facility with missiles and drones. He tells us such intelligence is being shared with Iran to help target US forces. nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/…

Dirk Bogarde in Darling, 1965 🖤 directed by John Schlesinger With Julie Christie and Laurence Harvey

🚨🇺🇸🇩🇪 BREAKING: Trump is considering a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany, a move he has been weighing since returning to office. The potential shift could mark a major change in U.S. military posture in Europe, where American forces have been stationed for decades. Source: The Telegraph

🚨 BREAKING: Scientists have just created engineered bacteria that can slip into cancer tumors and destroy them from within.

Crows enjoying the sunset #crow #birds #sunset #naturephotography

. . #blackandwhitephotography

Though barely visible (you have to look closely), a fox has found respite (on the fireplace) in my backyard. This was as close as I could come to it without upsetting its nap.

Springsteen: Well, this past winter federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis. They picked the wrong city. Your strength and your commitment told us that this is still America. And this reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand.

Again I’m standing alone in front of the US embassy in Tallinn, Estonia, in support of the “No Kings” protest. What this administration is doing is unacceptable, and it needs to be ended. Period.

Southern France