Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 133

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Frac­tured West (Michael Tot­ten, City Jour­nal): “…I inter­viewed a gay Native Amer­i­can who sports an ‘I Stand with Stand­ing Rock’ T‑shirt on his Face­book page. You might think that a gay Native Amer­i­can must have vot­ed for Hillary Clin­ton, but you would be wrong.” This is a tremen­dous­ly fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about Ore­gon pol­i­tics.
    • Speak­ing of Ore­gon: Col­lec­tive Action Kills Inno­va­tion (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Most of the rest of the America–where peo­ple pump their own gas every­day with­out a sec­ond thought–is hav­ing a good laugh at Oregon’s expense. But I am not here to laugh because in every state but one where you can pump your own gas you can’t open a bar­ber­shop with­out a license.”
  2. The Hard­est Work­ers Don’t Do the Best Work (Jer­ry Useem, Bloomberg View): “It turned out that some peo­ple who did less just accom­plished less. But the top per­form­ers also did less, and seemed to have a knack for fig­ur­ing out how to side­step inessen­tial tasks to obsess on a few impor­tant things.”
  3. Real­i­ty Has A Sur­pris­ing Amount of Detail (John Sal­vati­er, per­son­al blog): “The impor­tant details you haven’t noticed are invis­i­ble to you, and the details you have noticed seem com­plete­ly obvi­ous and you see right through them. This all makes makes it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how you could be miss­ing some­thing impor­tant.”
  4. Why you can’t blame mass incar­cer­a­tion on the war on drugs (Ger­man Lopez, Vox): “It’s not drug offens­es that are dri­ving mass incar­cer­a­tion, but vio­lent ones. It’s not the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that’s behind mass incar­cer­a­tion, but a whole host of prison sys­tems down to the local and state lev­el. It’s not sole­ly police and law­mak­ers lead­ing to more incar­cer­a­tion and lengthy prison sen­tences, but pros­e­cu­tors who are by and large out of the polit­i­cal spot­light.”
  5. “Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Sil­i­con Valley’s Secre­tive, Orgias­tic Dark Side (Emi­ly Chang, Van­i­ty Fair): “Rich men expect­ing casu­al sex­u­al access to women is any­thing but a new par­a­digm. But many of the A‑listers in Sil­i­con Val­ley have some­thing unique in com­mon: a lone­ly ado­les­cence devoid of con­tact with the oppo­site sex.”
  6. Two Tax­pay­ers, Two Def­i­n­i­tions of ‘Pro­gres­sive’ (Ramesh Pon­nu­ru, Bloomberg View): “…lib­er­al analy­ses of the tax cut empha­size that it gen­er­al­ly rais­es after-tax income more for high earn­ers than for low earn­ers. Con­ser­v­a­tive analy­ses tend to point out that low­er earn­ers will gen­er­al­ly see their tax bills decline by the same per­cent­age that high­er earn­ers will (and some­times will see them drop more). Nei­ther side is dis­tort­ing the truth. They’re look­ing at the same thing from dif­fer­ent angles.”
  7. When Democ­ra­cy Hinges On a Sin­gle Vote (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “…it turns out that we don’t count votes ter­ri­bly well. A 2012 study found that although some meth­ods of tab­u­lat­ing bal­lots are bet­ter than oth­ers, we can gen­er­al­ly expect an error rate of 1 to 2 per­cent. Although we can’t pre­dict which way the errors will fall, it’s unlike­ly that they will sum pre­cise­ly to zero – in oth­er words, there will always be mis­takes. So each time we count, we can expect a dif­fer­ent result.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.
  8. Mak­ing Chi­na Great Again (Evan Osnos, The New York­er): “For years, China’s star­tups lagged behind those in Sil­i­con Val­ley. But there is more par­i­ty now. Of the forty-one pri­vate com­pa­nies world­wide that reached “uni­corn” sta­tus in 2017—meaning they had val­u­a­tions of a bil­lion dol­lars or more—fifteen are Chi­nese and sev­en­teen are Amer­i­can.” Also, I found this bit very amus­ing: “In the city of Shen­zhen, the local gov­ern­ment uses facial recog­ni­tion to deter jay­walk­ers. (At busy inter­sec­tions, it posts their names and I.D. pic­tures on a screen at the road­side.) In Bei­jing, the gov­ern­ment uses facial-recog­ni­tion machines in pub­lic rest rooms to stop peo­ple from steal­ing toi­let paper; it lim­its users to six­ty cen­time­tres with­in a nine-minute peri­od.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay built on this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

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