29 Mar 2026 7:39 am
What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.Blackvegetable » 28 Mar 2026, 7:03 am » wrote: ↑ With a giant, golden tractor parked in the White House driveway, President Trump on Friday cast himself as a champion of the American farmer, promising to bolster small-business loan guarantees for an industry hit hard by his tariffs and rising prices from the war in Iran.
Mr. Trump announced the measure during an event at the White House where, speaking before hundreds of farmers from across the country, he declared that the expansion would drive down grocery costs.
Mr. Trump also said he was urging major tractor companies, such as John Deere and Caterpillar, to “produce a bigger, better tractor at substantially less money.” And he vowed that his administration would be “cutting out massive amounts of nonsense that are mandated to be put on your tractors and all of your trucks that cost you a fortune.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/us/p ... rmers.html
I know many of you here take great pride in refusing to read. It's one of the qualities you so admire in The Grand Galoot.
But this has consequences....the process of reading (assuming it is something more than a chyron on FOX) obliges certain cerebral processes (analysis, reconciliation, synthesis) that are sublimated when you are being read to.
Absent the cogitation, any opinion informed largely by "passive consumption" is mimicry....
or, as in the above example, idiocy.
We are now, again, reaping the harvest Alarming Ignorance fertilized in Vainglory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opin ... itive.html