When was the last time you wrote in cursive, other than a hastily scrawled signature on a receipt? For most of us, it’s not an everyday occurrence. But a couple of months ago, designer Cristina Vanko decided to change that: After discovering one of her dad’s old fountain pens and beginning to practice a little calligraphy, she spent a week writing every text message on her phone by hand.

Here's one designer whose belief in cursive script led her to handwrite all her text messages for a while. Of handwriting, she says

There are so many benefits lost when you replace the hand with the key,” she says, listing everything from hand-eye coordination to the ability for kids to recognize letter forms. “During handwriting, both sides of the brain are in sync and make connections that stimulate language, learning, and fluency in a more effective way.

I’ve tried to suggest that at least a portion of that pursuit can have gratifying economic results. (Plus it will not plunge us into an endless recession!) But that’s not really the point. The point is truth and beauty, without which our lives will lack grace and meaning and our civilization will be spiritually hollowed out and the historical bottom line will be that future epochs will remember us as a coarse and philistine people who squandered our bottomlessly rich cultural inheritance for short-term and meaningless financial advantage.

And that is why you should major in English.

Gerald Howard in today's New York Times

NPR shared a story this morning of the way the Brazilian post office makes Christmas wishes come true for children. I think it's cool that the post office insists on handwritten letters.

Peter Lloyd writes When anyone bemoans the death of letter writing, perhaps I should direct the conversation to letter reading. Who reads them?, gives a shocking example, and suggests several sources to follow up.

I sent hand-written letters to several colleagues at a digital marketing agency. None of them read my missives. The letters arrived but languished in mailroom pigeon holes. “I don't ever go get my snail-mail,” one of my addressees explained, when I asked him if he had received my traditional letter. I meant for it to stand out from all the electronic messages I know he receives.

Another statement, Letters may prove more thoughtful and intimate, but it's stimulation variety we seem to crave today, sees to echo Sherry Turkle's op-ed earlier this week.

Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does thing to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.

It is not too late to reclaim our composure. I see the most hope in young people who have grown up with this technology and begin to see its cost. They respond when adults provide them with sacred spaces (the kitchen, the family room, the car) as device-free zones to reclaim conversation and self-reflection.