Schoolof MachinesMaking&Make-Believe🍉BLM

Check out our 2026 summer program brochure for a peek inside! bit.ly/SOMA_summerpro… This summer we focus on different areas of art tech: 1) data, ai, openclaw, investigation 2) alt ctrl and videogames from a feminist perspective 3) performance, embodiment, and touchdesigner

Sound for games lecture and workshop by Kidkanevil this summer in our intensive games program this July! Read his interview here: schoolofma.org/news/meet-gera…

I often want to write about life, but I find myself wondering, where is life? Where are the birds that used to land on my window on Friday mornings? Where is the sound of my mother calling me to have breakfast together? Where are the friends? Where are the raindrops that would fall on the zinc roof, creating a unique music? Where is the family gathering around the fire in winter, talking about our grandmothers in the old days? Where am I? Whenever I want to write about life, all I find is longing and nostalgia for the past.

This man robbed a bank for $1, sat down and waited for the police, just to get free healthcare in prison In 2011 a man named Richard James Verone walked into a RBC Bank in Gastonia, North Carolina Handed the teller a note demanding $1 One dollar Then sat down in the lobby and waited calmly for police to arrive He was 59. No job. No insurance. A growth on his chest. Two ruptured discs. Calculated that a federal conviction would guarantee him full medical coverage inside prison The judge sentenced him to 3 years He got the surgery He got the treatment He told reporters on the way out he had no regrets A 59 year old American man robbed a bank for $1 because it was cheaper than seeing a doctor

This is an official government account in a democracy. This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.

Please donate through the link so I can buy food for Maria and the rest of the cats. 😭💔 chuffed.org/project/172166

Berliners! Come! Lots of lovely humans in art, tech, open source hardware and beyond are on our streets this weekend, sign-up and join us if you can! Talks, workshops, art and performance, plus hangouts, lots of hangouts! <3 2026.oshwa.org/attend/

@Mo7mmd30 Praying for you all. <3

Right now. Pray for us

Heavy Israeli bombardment targeted displacement camps in Khan Younis, causing a massive fire to break out. I thought today was over and would pass without massacres, but Israel insists on committing a massacre in Gaza every single day. Where is the ceasefire?

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.

Trump sued his own government for $10 billion. Today he settled with the DOJ he runs and cut the judge out of the process. The deal: a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund his Attorney General controls, with no court oversight and no transparency. It’s the most corrupt scheme of his presidency.

Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history. Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind. Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President. His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history: Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million. That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY. While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling. Now here's where it gets really insane: On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock. Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell." Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99. Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%. And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history. So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high And that's just ONE stock... The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta. He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia. He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise." Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date. He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense. He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker. He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions. Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't. His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades. The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed." But here's what independently managed looks like: Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high. Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips. Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake. Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform. Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades. Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million. Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter. While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks. This isn't a left or right issue. We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses. What do you think?

Denmark also fascist? WTF.

Not a single stone remains standing, nor a tree, nor a human being—Israel has completely annihilated my town, Beit Hanoun.

BREAKING! US court ha suspended the US sanctions against me! As the judge says: "Protecting the Freedom of speech is always just the public interest". Thanks to my daughter and my husband for stepping up to defend me, and everyone who has helped so far. Together we are One.

No one can justify this. They can try but their words will be meaningless. Someone make this stop. #freepalestine

This week, in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, the jury saw video of a sworn deposition from Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO. Elaborating on her comments in our latest @NewYorker story, she alleged that Altman was not always truthful, gave different executives conflicting information, and pitted them against each other. Texts between Murati and Altman were also entered as evidence. Over the course of an 18-month investigation, we traced the yearslong history of these claims from Altman's colleagues, and looked at what this tells us about integrity in AI leadership, and how it affects all of us. Here's some of what we found. And read the full story here: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

gravitational survey

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The media is trying to manipulate us all! BE AWARE!