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The United States of America has the highest prison population in the world

Black Americans and Latin people make up the majority of this population (many of whom are non-violent offenders)

Federal Prisons in America require that their state keeps their prisons at a maximum occupancy at all times.

If county-A has a population of 50 voters but no prisons, and county-B has a population of 50 voters and 50 prisoners, the county with the prisoners gets more government funding and more political represention. This is sometimes called “prison gerrymandering” and it is used in redistrictring.

the second image is a tweet by Anthony Oliveira / @.meakoopa that reads: hi everyone - a government that denies its prisoners the right to vote is a government that now has an extremely vested interest in jailing its political opposition

What about handwriting in your personal lives? I went on. One student reported that he had to ask his parents to “translate” handwritten letters from his grandparents. I asked the students if they made grocery lists, kept journals, or wrote thank-you or condolence letters. Almost all said yes. Almost all said they did so on laptops and phones or sometimes on paper in block letters. For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates.

During my years as Harvard president, I regarded the handwritten note as a kind of superpower. I wrote hundreds of them and kept a pile of note cards in the upper-left-hand drawer of my desk. They provided a way to reach out and say: I am noticing you. This message of thanks or congratulations or sympathy comes not from some staff person or some machine but directly from me. I touched it and hope it touches you. Now I wonder how many recipients of these messages could not read them.

cursiveletters.com is extremely helpful and free.

Each lowercase and uppercase letter has a page that includes:

a video showing exactly how to form the letter,

videos on how the letter looks at the beginning of the word and in the middle of the word, and

free downloadable worksheets that you can trace over and practice on.

All of this is free. (The only charge I see is if you want to download all the worksheets in a bundle; they have an Etsy shop for that, and you could buy everything there for less than $4. You can also just download them one at a time from their site, for absolutely nothing.)

Another free site, consistentcursive.com, looks helpful but possibly more focused on refining one's handwriting rather than learning from scratch.

I think legibility is much more important than consistency or matching an aesthetic standard (unless you feel moved to make handwriting a hobby of yours, which I'm told can be fun but is not at all necessary).

I'm in my mid-30s, so I learned cursive in school, and I've been writing with it for many years; some of my letter forms are a little streamlined and deviate a bit from the standard that you see on these pages. I love that my writing has character, and it's still very easy to read if you've learned these shapes.

Don't let the standardized nature of these examples scare you off; just learn them as a starting point, and you'll naturally develop your own distinctive spin on them as you go. It's a joy!