Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 253

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. On the racial divi­sion in Amer­i­ca:
   • How to Make this Moment the Turn­ing Point for Real Change (Barack Oba­ma, Medi­um): “Final­ly, the more spe­cif­ic we can make demands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and police reform, the hard­er it will be for elect­ed offi­cials to just offer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usu­al once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that reform agen­da will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
   • Some spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: “For those who are inter­est­ed in research-based solu­tions to stop police vio­lence, here’s what you need to know — based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)” (Samuel Sinyang­we, Twit­ter)
   • More spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: How to Actu­al­ly Fix Amer­i­ca’s Police (Seth W. Stoughton, Jef­frey J. Noble & Geof­frey P. Alpert, The Atlantic): “‘Over­crim­i­nal­iza­tion’ has been broad­ly dis­cussed; there are so many laws that vio­la­tions are ubiq­ui­tous. If every­one is a crim­i­nal, offi­cers have almost unfet­tered dis­cre­tion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” The authors have an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of exper­tise (a law prof, a crim­i­nol­o­gy prof, and a for­mer offi­cer).
   • I Must Object: A Rebut­tal to Brown Univ.’s Let­ter Decry­ing Per­va­sive Racism in US (Glenn C. Loury, City Jour­nal): “I deeply resent­ed the let­ter. First of all, what makes an admin­is­tra­tor (even a high­ly paid one, with an exalt­ed title) a ‘leader’ of this uni­ver­si­ty? We, the fac­ul­ty, are the only ‘lead­ers’ wor­thy of men­tion when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-push­ing appa­ratchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unset­tling. Why must this university’s senior admin­is­tra­tion declare, on behalf of the insti­tu­tion as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any sub­tle dif­fer­ences of empha­sis or nuance—interpret con­tentious cur­rent events through a sin­gle lens?” Loury, who is black, is an econ pro­fes­sor at Brown. He did not come to play.
   • Efrem Smith: White Evan­gel­i­cals Need to Hum­ble Them­selves (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve been encour­aged, espe­cial­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the church, to see more pas­tors speak­ing out, being bro­ken­heart­ed, call­ing for change. But then there’s also a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of evan­gel­i­cal­ism that is either silent or late to the par­ty when it comes to the church call­ing for jus­tice.”
   • A Nation on Fire Needs the Flames of the Spir­it (Esau McCaul­ley, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There is no oth­er world in which to talk about Jesus than a world in which black men can have their necks stepped on for nine min­utes.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Wheaton. 
   • Don’t under­stand the protests? What you’re see­ing is peo­ple pushed to the edge (Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar, LA Times): “…even though we do all the con­ven­tion­al things to raise pub­lic and polit­i­cal aware­ness — write artic­u­late and insight­ful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the con­tin­ued dev­as­ta­tion on CNN, sup­port can­di­dates who promise change — the nee­dle hard­ly budges.”
   • On Days of Dis­or­der (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Notice that this schema is val­ue neu­tral: it describes both the foot­ball hooli­gan and the race riot­er, 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian pogroms and 21st cen­tu­ry Hong Kong street bat­tles. In all of these a cer­tain per­cent­age of the par­tic­i­pants plays the game for fair­ly mun­dane rea­sons: to rev­el in excite­ment or ter­ror, lose them­selves in a rare sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty, belong­ing, or pow­er, or to sim­ply gain the mon­e­tary rewards that come with theft and loot­ing. The pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion will­ing to join a riot to attain these things like­ly reflects the pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion oth­er­wise cut off from them in nor­mal times. Few riot­ers are mar­ried men who must be at work at 8:00 AM the next morn­ing.” This was quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed.
   • Sim­plic­i­ty Is The Ene­my & Bad Apples (Jonathan Last, The Bul­wark): “What’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now is large and com­pli­cat­ed. We have a series of prob­lems, some of which over­lap, some of which do not. And attempts to solve them have, his­tor­i­cal­ly, been stymied by con­flat­ing them and believ­ing that they are sim­ple and con­nect­ed.”
2. On the pan­dem­ic:
   • The Trea­son of Epi­demi­ol­o­gists (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The sim­ple fact is that what­ev­er leg­is­la­tion we’re going to get, we’d still get if the protests stopped this morn­ing. In fact, a rea­son­able per­son would con­clude we’d be more like­ly to get it if they stopped now, because the more these things go on, the more oppo­si­tion and resent­ment will grow.” 
   • Relat­ed: “A thread about how protest­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic was described when con­ser­v­a­tives were doing it” (Matt Walsh, Twit­ter)
   • Sur­gi­sphere: gov­ern­ments and WHO changed Covid-19 pol­i­cy based on sus­pect data from tiny US com­pa­ny (Melis­sa Dav­ey, Stephanie Kirch­gaess­ner & Sarah Bose­ley, The Guardian): “The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and a num­ber of nation­al gov­ern­ments have changed their Covid-19 poli­cies and treat­ments on the basis of flawed data from a lit­tle-known US health­care ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny, also call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of key stud­ies pub­lished in some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious med­ical jour­nals. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion can reveal the US-based com­pa­ny Sur­gi­sphere, whose hand­ful of employ­ees appear to include a sci­ence fic­tion writer and an adult-con­tent mod­el, has pro­vid­ed data for mul­ti­ple stud­ies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief exec­u­tive, but has so far failed to ade­quate­ly explain its data or method­ol­o­gy.” This is actu­al­ly nuts.
   • The C.D.C. Wait­ed ‘Its Entire Exis­tence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong? (Eric Lip­ton, Abby Good­nough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoor­va Mandavilli,Sheri Fink & Mark Walk­er, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. is risk-averse, per­fec­tion­ist and ill suit­ed to impro­vis­ing in a quick­ly evolv­ing cri­sis — par­tic­u­lar­ly one that shuts down the coun­try and par­a­lyzes the econ­o­my.”
3. The Muse­um of the Bible is win­ning over some of its biggest crit­ics: Jew­ish schol­ars (Men­achem Weck­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mintz believes Jew­ish schol­ars who denounced evan­gel­i­cal tones in the muse­um may have done so because they don’t see eye-to-eye with its polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive own­ers. But, she notes, the muse­um itself caters to Jews. She cites a time when it arranged kosher food for an event in which her hus­band, an Ortho­dox rab­bi, par­tic­i­pat­ed. ‘They were just nice about it,’ she says.”
4. Chris­t­ian Tik­Tok videos are cen­sored and delet­ed in the US, cre­ators say (Liza Van­den­boom, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Chris­t­ian con­tent is often cen­sored and removed from Tik­Tok, accord­ing to sev­er­al cre­ators on the plat­form. The Chi­na-based social media app hosts short, snip­py videos rang­ing from inspi­ra­tional mini-speech­es to musi­cal and dance per­for­mances and is pop­u­lar with teenagers and young adults. The plat­form reports over 800 mil­lion active users, with 30 mil­lion active users in the U.S. Researchers have grown con­cerned over the app’s reach and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it bring­ing Chi­nese-style cen­sor­ship to main­stream U.S. audi­ences.” 
5. Tech­noc­ra­cy Is Impos­si­ble (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Lead­ers should pay atten­tion to sci­en­tists, dra­mat­i­cal­ly more than the cur­rent Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion does, but an immu­nol­o­gist will say one thing, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, an econ­o­mist some­thing alto­geth­er oth­er. The var­i­ous sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines will not speak with a sin­gle voice, indeed will not speak at all: indi­vid­ual schol­ars will speak, and what they say will arise from a com­bi­na­tion of their schol­ar­ly exper­tise and their beliefs (derived from non-sci­en­tif­ic sources) about what mat­ters most in life, and a good polit­i­cal leader will have the gen­er­al intel­li­gence and moral dis­cern­ment to sift the var­i­ous mes­sages he or she receives and make a deci­sion based on all the rel­e­vant input.”
6. There was a fight at the New York Times this week. I’m not actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in the op-ed that pro­voked it, but I am quite inter­est­ed in how the fight is play­ing out. The New York Times occu­pies a spe­cial place in the Amer­i­can media ecosys­tem and fights like this illu­mi­nate some of what is hap­pen­ing beneath the sur­face.
   • New York Times Jour­nal­ists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page (Matt Welch, Rea­son): “This pub­lish­ing flap, which in com­par­a­tive impor­tance is a sput­ter­ing match next to the hell-infer­no of spring 2020, is nonethe­less sym­bol­ic of a shift bear­ing more tec­ton­ic heft. Our lib­er­al insti­tu­tions, not unlike our con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als, are nois­i­ly aban­don­ing lib­er­al­ism.”
   • The Inside Sto­ry of the Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “This process, with back and forth over phone, email, and text, extend­ed through the morn­ing and after­noon on Wednes­day. Cot­ton and his team then signed off on the final ver­sion around 2:30 p.m. It was post­ed short­ly after. Then, all hell broke loose.”
   • A Twit­ter thread from NY Times opin­ion colum­nist Bari Weiss: “The civ­il war inside The New York Times between the (most­ly young) wokes the (most­ly 40+) lib­er­als is the same one rag­ing inside oth­er pub­li­ca­tions and com­pa­nies across the coun­try. The dynam­ic is always the same. (Thread.)”
   • ‘New York Times’ Staffers Grill Lead­er­ship Over Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed Dur­ing All-Hands (Lau­ra Wag­n­er, Vice): “…the most infor­ma­tive parts of the meet­ing came from the lengthy ques­tion-and-answer por­tion. Staffers asked for an autop­sy of the piece and how it was pub­lished; if com­pa­ny lead­ers were plan­ning to address James Bennet’s lead­er­ship of the opin­ion sec­tion, which has had ‘sev­er­al mis­fires’; whether Opin­ion staff edi­tor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘open­ly bad mouth[ing] younger news col­leagues on a plat­form where they, because of strict com­pa­ny pol­i­cy, could not defend them­selves’; whether the opin­ion sec­tion had sug­gest­ed the top­ic of the op-ed to Cot­ton; and what the Times would do to help retain and sup­port Black employ­ees.”
   • After staff uproar, New York Times says Sen. Tom Cot­ton op-ed urg­ing mil­i­tary incur­sion into U.S. cities ‘did not meet our stan­dards’ (Ela­he Iza­di, Paul Farhi and Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of its promi­nence, the Times’s op-ed page and colum­nists often gen­er­ate con­tro­ver­sy, though rarely from with­in the news­pa­per itself. There was wide­spread crit­i­cism in Feb­ru­ary, for exam­ple, when the Times pub­lished an op-ed from a mem­ber of Afghanistan’s Tal­iban, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the paper failed to iden­ti­fy the author’s his­to­ry of involve­ment in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There was lit­tle inter­nal oppo­si­tion to the col­umn, how­ev­er, at least none that spilled into pub­lic view.”
   • New York Times has stopped defend­ing its Tom Cot­ton op-ed (Erik Wem­ple, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As Jack Shafer has not­ed, the Times opin­ion page exists to pro­voke. It has run op-eds by Moam­mar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin and oth­ers. In a Decem­ber 2017 staff meet­ing, Ben­net addressed the dif­fi­cul­ties of judg­ing when a piece goes too far: ‘We’ve pub­lished Vladimir Putin,’ Ben­net said in the meet­ing. ‘Should we not allow Vladimir Putin into our pages? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say that that would be doing a ser­vice to our read­ers. But as you can see, I mean, I strug­gle to artic­u­late what those bound­aries are.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Nation Wish­es God Would Send Some­one Who Could Uni­fy Peo­ple Across Races, Class­es, Gen­ders, Tribes, Tongues (Baby­lon Bee)
• Mal­colm Cor­den Teach­es Don­ald Trump How To Hold the Bible (The Late Late Show With James Cor­den, YouTube): six min­utes.
• A Few Bad Apples (Chris Rock, YouTube): one and a half min­utes, mild lan­guage warn­ing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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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.