This Is Hell!

Billionaire ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt fails to read the room, championing artificial intelligence’s restructuring of society at the University of Arizona graduation ceremony Friday night in his speech as commencement speaker. Schmidt was met with merciless boos and jeers from the graduating students at every mention of AI. AI is expected to replace around 15 million U.S. jobs by 2030.

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.

This Week! Tuesday: @INETeconomics' Arjun Jayadev, co-author of, “Against Money," (@UChicagoPress). Wednesday: Michelle S. Phelps, author of, "The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America" (@PrincetonUPress). patreon.com/posts/this-wee…

Now! Sunday Funnies!... and not so funny... include psychopaths, @Trump, @GretaThunberg, SCOTUS, white supremacy, Black Power, AI, genocide and, of course, Hell! Join for bonus content throughout the week and to keep us free and 100% kistener supported. patreon.com/posts/sunday-f…

Back when capitalism, the government and the law were all failing us during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, socialism and drug dealers were filling the power vacuum. Go back to April 13, 2020, and keep TiH! free and 100% listener supported. patreon.com/posts/virus-mo…

Thousands of miners clashed with police in La Paz on Thursday, demanding the resignation of the neoliberal Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz over the country's economic crisis. The government says Paz, in power six months, will not step down.

A good photographer is worth his weight in gold

ICYMI, the October 7 mass rape is being debunked. Again. From past guest @AliAbunimah.

When the US sanctioned me for exposing corporate complicity, I trusted people would act. If after nearly a year @bookingcom & @Airbnb still profit from stolen Palestinian property, it’s because too many still use them. Stop using them now & tell them why. theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

NEW 9 Circles of Hell!: Children dying in Israeli wars and face solitary confinement in Israeli prisons, 20K sailors stranded in Persian Gulf, the ‘Thucydides trap,’ 'toxic' Trump brand and his 'ridiculous' fantasy, the 'criminal' siege of Cuba and more! patreon.com/posts/9-circle…

@adam_louis52328 @Jonathan_K_Cook Here's more about the lies you have been told. middleeastmonitor.com/20260514-israe…

@adam_louis52328 @Jonathan_K_Cook As IDF admitted that never happened, not sure what your point is.

In addition to Israel routinely beating, starving, torturing and raping Palestinians in its detention camps, new research by Israel's Physicians for Human Rights reveals that, in 2024, some 200 children were put in total isolation inside tiny punishment cells.

IMES Associate Director, Professor Shana Marshall @marshall_shana appeared on “This is Hell!” @thisishellradio Podcast.

Early drop for next week's Question from Hell! "What are the greatest achievements in US history?" Leave answer below. Our favorite announced Wednesday, May 20,, after Jeff Dorchen and "The Moment of Truth." Winner gets a rando postcard from Chuck! patreon.com/posts/new-ques…

This is what local accountability looks like: In Festus, Missouri, a town of about 14,000 people, the city council quietly approved a $6 billion Ai data center to be built on 360 acres just north of Highway 67. Residents say they were never properly heard. Meetings were held in private. Documents were released too late. A week after the approval, the town held a regular election. Voter turnout jumped 129 percent. Every single council member who had voted yes lost in a landslide. A 70-year-old first-time candidate beat an 8-year incumbent by 40 percentage points. Now a recall petition is circulating to remove the mayor as well. The lawsuit against the city is already filed. Has your local government ever been held accountable like this? 🔥

¡La BBC corta la transmisión de repente! 🔴El director de orquesta israelí Ilan Volkov genera controversia en Londres: "Siento un gran dolor en mi corazón... ¡No me quedaré callado por más tiempo! Describió el ataque a Gaza como salvajismo y exigió su detención inmediata porque 'cada momento que pasa pone en peligro a millones de almas'. Luego anunció: 'No tocaré más en Israel a partir de hoy'. ¡Y la BBC cortó la transmisión en vivo de inmediato!💥 #FREEPALESTİNE

Chuck asks the question revolutionaries rarely do PLUS a prescient 2008 talk with @GarethPorter on lies the US was telling about war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Join to keep us free and 100% listener supported. No grants. No ads. Just you. patreon.com/posts/new-bonu…

NEW FREE HELL! Today, our very special guest is... you! Instead of an in-depth interview with a guest, we readsemails from the world's best listeners. Last year, we did the same and it was the third most downloaded show of 2025. Join to keep us free! patreon.com/posts/new-hell…

NEW FREE HELL! @trillingual on his new book, "If We Tolerate This: How the British establishment made the far right respectable" (@panmacmillan). Also, this week's Hangover Cure, Question from Hell!, and Rotten History. Join now to keep us free! patreon.com/posts/daniel-t…

Wednesday, we will have a special start time of 11AM CDT because our special guest is... you! We'll read emails, share answers to the Question from Hell! and announce a favorite, Jeff delivers a "Moment of Truth," we'll reveal next week's guests, and what's happening on Patreon.