Glen & Paula Davis

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Stanford scientists find solution to reverse coral bleaching (Abigail Chan, Stanford Daily): "The team, led by third-year Ph.D. candidate Danny Collins, discovered that bleached corals could make a complete recovery when paired with a healthy counterpart. The team published their recent findings in 'Science Advances.'" (recommended by a student)
2. ‘I’m just a carpenter from Bend’: Father who killed Silver Rail school shooter grapples with the aftermath (Emily Cureton Cook & Jen Baires, Oregon Public Broadcasting): "That’s when I started hearing children pleading for their lives and then I started hearing gunfire and I just started army crawling faster and faster and I told myself this is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do." - This story is wild.
3. New Dwarf Planet Hiding in Our Solar System? (NOVA, PBS) - seven minutes of absolute coolness.
4. My California Ballot, 2026 (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): "As effective altruists, we are called to care for all creatures, from slimy shrimp to bodiless AIs, and so we may - perhaps - try to cultivate a tiny measure of compassion for California politicians. They face the near-impossible task of governing a state whose residents are allowed to kneecap them however they want through a bonkers ballot proposition system. If they try to build houses, a thousand local NIMBY groups will rise up to thwart them; if they don’t, the voters will kick them out for letting housing become unaffordable. If they tolerate homeless people and criminals, the voters will remove them for failing to prioritize public order; if they don’t tolerate them, the voters will remove them for cruelty and unfairness. Having given them this small measure of sympathy, we can admit that Californian politicians mostly fail to live up to even the very low baseline we can fairly expect from them."
   • I always find Scott's ballot analysis posts helpful even when I disagree with him. Highly recommended if you want to see what it looks like to thoughtfully evaluate your options before casting a ballot. Insert your own values over Scott's wherever there is divergence, obviously.
5. AI Related
   • Benchma(r)king (James Bridle, Emergence Magazine): "What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way."
     • Fairly fascinating in bits, but I confess to skimming parts of it. The author is wordy!
   • AI dominates human peer reviews (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): "'We show that AI-generated article reviews are now better, by every measure we could construct, than reviews written by well-compensated human experts and judged to be of unusually high quality by journal editors and authors. We then discuss how this result may inform journal policy choices, with concerning downsides as well as potential paths to increase publication speed and quality; reduce adversarial interactions; improve the experience of editors, reviewers, authors, and readers; and advance science.' By Gary King and Steven Worthington, not even using what are now the very best models, rather based on Claude Opus 4.8. The details of the dominance, as outlined in the paper, are striking. It is not close."
6. How the Mainstream Recruits for the Manosphere (Aaron Renn, Substack): "[Women blame men for their problems far more than men blame women for theirs.] One of the signature appeals of the manosphere is providing true statistics like this rarely mentioned in mainstream discussion. The canonical case here is the fact that women initiate the vast majority of divorces. But this is another good example. Harvard’s Steven Pinker has noted that encountering true facts that aren’t said in mainstream society is a prime vector of online radicalization."
7. Notes on a Burning Flagship (Daniel Silliman, Substack): "Ruth Graham reports—accurately, I was there, though I’m not the source for this information—that a new leader at Christianity Today said, a year ago, that CT needed to be less like Wheaton College and more like TikTok.... Two younger staffers had been experimenting with the platform, seeing what it could do, how it connected. They were figuring out how to take, e.g., news reports about evangelicals in the UK giving up their banks for lent, and turn them into shortform video. What they were doing seemed to have the potential to reach and build new audiences. It was exciting. Until suddenly word came down from the top that it was shut down. No explanation. Just ended. The person making TikTok videos was laid off right after leadership said CT needs to be more like TikTok. So the message, somehow, was less like Wheaton, more like TikTok, but also no TikTok."

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• IT'S GO TIME: Mormons Prepare For One Evening Of Year When Everyone Will Answer Their Door - (Babylon Bee)
• A love letter to T-charts (Sanya Gupta, Stanford Daily): "I know I wronged you. It was the coin flip. That was the final straw. When I went behind your back and flipped a coin to make my decision, I know that’s what hurt you most. For that I will always be so exceptionally sorry. You didn’t deserve my infidelity."

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda - we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. Also, remember that I’m not reporting news - I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.