🫎 Suburban Grouse ⚓️ 🛰

It was all over when we* decided it was a good idea to litigate nuanced domestic and foreign policy in 140 or less.

Russia is intentionally directing explosive drones into Finnish airspace. Question for the experts: Is this a Russian attack on a NATO country?

Russia now attacking Finland by redirecting Ukrainian drones.

Colombian installation artist, Doris Salcedo, from the 'Uprooted' exhibition #WomensArt

“Republicans will try to use this to say it’s illegitimate for ANY community of color to elect their candidate of choice. Not just in the South.” Election lawyer @marceelias sounds the alarm 🚨 about “the worst SCOTUS decision of my lifetime”

ZELENSKYY: Today, Ukraine conducted deep strikes against Moscow region, most heavily protected area in Russia. However, Ukrainian long-range capabilities already overcoming this defense. Russian war is returning home. This is a clear signal that one should not mess with Ukraine.

A psychologist at the University of North Carolina spent 20 years proving that a single 20-second hug rewires the human cardiovascular system, and the experiment she ran is so simple you can replicate it tonight at home. Her name is Karen Grewen. She works inside the UNC School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. The paper that made her famous was published in 2003, and almost nobody outside her field has read it. Here is what she actually did. She recruited 183 healthy adults living with a long-term partner. She split them into two groups. The warm contact group sat together for 10 minutes holding hands while watching a romantic video. Then they stood up and hugged each other for exactly 20 seconds. The control group sat alone in a separate room for the same amount of time doing nothing. Then she made every single one of them give a public speech in front of a panel. Public speaking is one of the cleanest stressors in psychology. Heart rate spikes. Blood pressure climbs. Cortisol floods the system within minutes. It is the laboratory version of every stressful moment you have ever had at work. The people who had been hugged for 20 seconds before walking into that room had measurably lower blood pressure responses to the stress. Lower systolic. Lower diastolic. Lower heart rate increases. Everything was the same.. the speech, the panel, and fear. But this time completely different physiological response. The hug had not made the stress disappear. It had changed how the body was allowed to respond to it. Two years later Grewen ran the follow-up study that explained why. She drew blood from 38 couples before and after the same warm contact protocol and measured what was actually changing inside them. The answer was a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding, and orgasm. It is the same molecule that makes a mother feel calm holding her newborn. Grewen's data showed that 20 seconds of physical contact with a trusted partner triggered a measurable spike in plasma oxytocin in both men and women, and the size of that spike directly predicted how much their blood pressure dropped. The mechanism turned out to be older than recorded history. Oxytocin binds to receptors in your heart, your blood vessels, and the part of your brainstem that controls how aggressively your nervous system reacts to threat. When the hormone shows up, the entire fight-or-flight machine downshifts. Your blood vessels widen. Your heart slows. Your cortisol production gets suppressed. This is not a feeling. This is a chemical instruction your body sends to itself that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff. The detail Grewen kept emphasizing in her interviews was the duration. Three seconds is the average length of a hug between two humans. It is too short. The hormonal cascade does not have time to start. 20 seconds is the threshold where the oxytocin actually crosses into the bloodstream in a quantity large enough to do something measurable. A follow-up study tracked 59 premenopausal women over time and found that the ones who hugged their partners most frequently had lower resting blood pressure and higher baseline oxytocin levels than the ones who did not. The effect compounded. Daily hugs produced a permanent shift in the cardiovascular baseline. A separate review of long-term partner contact research found that married adults with frequent affectionate touch had significantly lower rates of heart disease and all-cause mortality than equally healthy adults without it. The American Heart Association now cites this body of research when explaining why social isolation is treated as a cardiovascular risk factor on the same level as smoking. The most haunting line in Grewen's research is one she said in an interview after publishing the second paper. She pointed out that the average American touches another human being less than they did 50 years ago. Phones replaced eye contact. Texts replaced visits. Hugs at the door got shorter. The thing that used to regulate our cardiovascular system multiple times a day quietly disappeared from most adult lives. Your body still expects it. The hormone receptors are still there waiting. The system was designed to be reset by physical contact with people who feel safe, and the reset takes 20 seconds. You can run the experiment yourself tonight. Hug someone you love for 20 full seconds. Count it out. The first 10 will feel awkward. Around 15 something shifts. By 20 the shoulders drop, the breathing slows, the chest opens. That is not in your head. That is your bloodstream changing.

“We spotted nine Polymarket accounts, all connected, who made, collectively,$2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military operations,” says Nicolas Vaiman, co-founder of the small data analytics firm Bubblemaps. “And now here's the crazy part: 98% win rate.” cbsn.ws/4wwp0T7

False. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the first federal minimum wage into law in 1938 via the Fair Labor Standards Act, clarified, “By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.”

Home sales in central Ohio drop through April compared to last year, while inventory rises wosu.pm/3PfqFeZ

Ohio school levy support drops sharply as districts face growing funding challenges. Just 36% of school levies passed in Ohio this year compared to 65% last year. Ohio deserves full funding for public education. wkyc.com/video/news/edu…

Anyone remember this, I usually went for Mint

If you can’t budget $174K to feed your family while also having the best healthcare insurance in the country you have no business setting the budget for our country

I photographed my own wedding at the Old Arcade in Cleveland, Ohio and these are the photos I got I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, Jac - I love you so much ❤️

count me in!

Once Upon a World III (170526)

Fortune 500 companies that have contracts with ICE: -Amazon -AT&T -Booz Allen Hamilton -Caci -Charter Communications -Comcast -Dell -Ecolab -FedEx -General Dynamics -L3Harris -Motorola -Thermo Fisher -UPS Know who profits from Trump's cruelty.