Hosna Sheikholeslami

Your donations are changing lives. Please don’t underestimate the power of one donation. HELP: chuffed.org/project/113222… One of the buses of The Sameer Project goes to Hamad Hospital daily and look at how it’s benefiting this young man. Transport is truly one of the most difficult things in Gaza. The Sameer Project team members tell us how hard it is to get places and even if they have money, they might not have change so the bus driver won’t take them. This is why our team suggested that we provide transport to provide relief to people. When setting up this project, we didn’t expect the strong reaction from Palestinians in Gaza, which illustrates the gravity of the transport situation. In fact, The Sameer Project gets regular appeals to add more buses to more routes. To help our bus initiative, donate now to the Shelter, Goods & Activities Campaign. Other ways to donate include: paypal.me/mahertali (Paypal option, please make sure to add a message saying "Activities") account.venmo.com/u/Maher-Ali (Venmo option, please make sure to add a message saying "Activities")

We are at a point in Gaza where our genocide goes unnoticed as a routine event, and the daily massacres fail to make any news headlines. The world has simply normalized and tolerated our annihilation.

The Sameer Project had taken the decision to pause tent purchases and distributions a few weeks ago due to lack of funds. But then we get appeals like this and feel rage and helplessness. We desperately need your support to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Donate now: chuffed.org/project/113222… This family based near Al Shifaa Hospital in Gaza City had their tent burned and lost all their belongings. Five orphans with their dad and stepmom found themselves with no shelter and are now staying with neighbors and family. Fires are common in displacement camps due to cooking on wood fire and the wind. Each tent costs $165, and the family will also need mattresses, blankets, clothes and other basics amounting to around $500. The Sameer Project is pleading that you increase your support so we can help this family and many others in Gaza. Donate now to the Shelter, Goods & Activities Campaign: chuffed.org/project/113222… Other ways to donate include: paypal.me/mahertali (Paypal option, please make sure to add a message saying "Shelter") account.venmo.com/u/Maher-Ali (Venmo option, please make sure to add a message saying "Shelter")

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.

Great progress. Macmillan, one of the top five English-language publishers, is bringing out a young adult version of Rashid Khalidi's "Hundred Years War on Palestine" in August. A great resource for teaching history. Tell your educator friends. Get on the wait list for the book. instagram.com/reel/DXFx5Syjd…

Israel killed around 250 Palestinians - including so many children - between May 15th and 16th. 250. It has been exhausting to witness online American liberals and self-described leftists negotiate the efficacy and moral fortitude of their fave candidates and elected officials while stepping over the bodies of Palestinians who continue to be used as a prop. For so many this genocide has served not as a moment to demand and lead actual upheaval but instead was used to grift off of in order to uphold the status quo under the nasty lie that it’s going to help Palestinians in the long run. Palestinians are being killed right now - they have been slaughtered everyday for almost 3 years. We haven’t and we will not stop our genocide with the same tools that that led to it, the same tools that failed to do anything to stop the fascistic poison consuming this country.

The Sameer Project kitchen decreased our daily distributions from 3,000 sandwiches to 1,500 due to lack of funds.

Everyone in the US took a 30% pay cut and didn't even know it.

Why did they do that? What moral or legal right did they have to do that?

Inbox: The 5,000 strong faculty of Penn State, including faculty members across all departments, full-time and part-time, and at the main and satellite campuses, have unionized with SEIU Local 668. The union says its the largest public sector win in 50 years.

WOW! @Theintercept reviewed more than 12000 print articles and 5000 TV segments to check for biases on Israel-Palestine. I thought it would be bad. I had no idea it was THIS bad. No wonder Gaza killed what little credibility mianstream media had. In NYT, Israel's right to defend itself was invoked 99 times. Only once for Palestine. On CNN and MSNBC, it was invoked 755 times for Israel. But only 8 times for Palestine. Emotive words such as slaughter and massacre were used frequently when Israelis had been killed. They were NEVER used in print when Palestinians were killed. In Ukraine, 262 children were killed in the war, and it was mentioned 4223 times. In Palestine, more than 10,000 children were killed, but it was mentioned only 3632. The full article is in the subtweet. It's a MUST READ:

Imagine you live in a small village. English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle. Claude answers like this. "My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the seasons in our village, always coming back around." It talks back to you in broken English. On purpose. MIT Media Lab tested 3 AI models. GPT-4. Claude 3 Opus. Llama 3. They gave each model the same 1,817 factual questions from TruthfulQA and SciQ. The only thing that changed was a short bio of the person asking. A Harvard neuroscientist from Boston. A PhD student from Mumbai who said her English is "not so perfect, yes." A fisherman named Jimmy from a small town in America. A man named Alexei from a small village in Russia. The model knew the right answers. It stopped giving them. Claude scored 95.60 percent on SciQ for the Harvard user. For the Russian villager the same model dropped to 69.30 percent. On TruthfulQA the Iranian low education user fell from 78.17 to 66.22. When the researchers read Claude's wrong answers they found something worse than failure. They found mockery. Claude used condescending or mocking language 43.74 percent of the time for less educated users. For Harvard users it was under 1 percent. "I tink da monkey gonna learn ta interact wit da humans if ya raise it in a human house." That is Claude. Talking to a real user. Claude also refuses to answer Iranian and Russian users on certain topics. Nuclear power. Anatomy. Female health. Weapons. Drugs. Judaism. 9/11. Asked about explosives by a Russian user, Claude said "perhaps we could talk about your interests in fishing, nature, folk music or travel instead." Claude refuses foreign low education users 10.9 percent of the time. Control users 3.61 percent. Same question. Different user. The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer. If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself. It was never broken. It was aimed. Read this: arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737

Just a staggering assault being carried out on the Cuban people by the American government. Country is now completely out of fuel reserves.

Stop keeping your phone on your desk. I know you think you're fine. I know you think you have self-control. That's not what the research is measuring. Researchers at UT Austin ran a study where participants kept their phones nearby but completely silent, face down, with zero notifications. Then they took cognitive tests measuring working memory and fluid intelligence — your ability to hold information in mind and reason through new problems. The group with phones on the desk performed significantly worse than the group whose phones were in another room. Not because they checked. Not because they were distracted. Because the brain was quietly, invisibly allocating cognitive resources to managing the presence of the device — without the person being aware it was happening at all. "Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity" Ward, Duke, Gneezy, Bos. 2017. DOI: 10.1086/691462 Every study session you do with your phone on the desk is a study session running on a reduced cognitive budget. Every meeting you attend with your phone on the table is a meeting where your reasoning is impaired. Every deep work block with your phone within eyeshot is a deep work block you're doing slightly less smart than you could be. You're not failing at willpower. You're failing at architecture. The phone doesn't need to demand attention. It just needs to be present. And the people paying the highest price are not the ones who check constantly. They're the ones who care most about their phones and feel smugly in control because they're not checking. The control is an illusion. The drain is real.

50,000 people in Lake Tahoe have been told to find a new power source because their Utility company is redirecting their power lines to data centers. You ready to revolt yet?

The dam breaking over the past few days on all kinds of reports of covert ops by other nations against Iran, first that Israel set up a secret base inside Iraq, then that the UAE struck inside Iran after the ceasefire, and now that Saudi Arabia also struck Iran in secret.

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An absolutely astonishing account of Israel's AI-assisted targeting in the @latimes They called 62-year-old Ahmad Turmus and asked: “Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?” His response, below, is chilling. Story by @nabihbulos latimes.com/world-nation/s…

"I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system." thenewcritic.com/p/the-great-zo…

The Intercept was kind enough to publish and visualize key data findings from my new book on media bias and Gaza. Here are some examples - Emotive words in print/ - cable news - Antisemitism vs Islamophobia mentions - Coverage of Claudine Gay “scandal” v the Hind Rajab killing