Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 365

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.

This is vol­ume 365, which is the num­ber of days in most years. In oth­er words, I’ve done the equiv­a­lent of work­ing on this email dai­ly for a year. In real­i­ty I just add a lit­tle bit every day as I’m read­ing things, but it’s still a big sta­tis­tic.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good. And, above all, lis­ten to your moth­er.”
    • Warn­ing: the head­er pic­ture is risque but the arti­cle is worth it. The author is not a Chris­t­ian and unsur­pris­ing­ly comes to some non-Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions — still fas­ci­nat­ing to see a force­ful sec­u­lar rejec­tion of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion.
  2. Racism-relat­ed:
    • Black cou­ple sues after they say home val­u­a­tion ris­es near­ly $300,000 when shown by White col­league (Justin Gam­ble and Vir­ginia Lang­maid, CNN): “Con­nol­ly and Mott lat­er re-applied with anoth­er lender, and ‘white­washed’ their home, accord­ing to the law­suit. This includ­ed remov­ing pho­tos of their Black fam­i­ly from the home, and hav­ing a White col­league present the prop­er­ty to the apprais­er. The suit claims this val­u­a­tion came back at $750,000, more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars high­er than 20/20 Val­u­a­tions’ appraisal of $472,000.”
    • In California’s largest race bias cas­es, Lati­no work­ers are accused of abus­ing Black col­leagues (Mar­got Roo­sevelt, Los Ange­les Times): “Though the agency tracks the race and eth­nic­i­ty of vic­tims, it does not com­pile offi­cial sta­tis­tics on offend­ers. Nor are there data­bas­es of pri­vate cas­es cat­e­go­rized by per­pe­tra­tors’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hos­til­i­ty from Lati­no work­ers. But court fil­ings, vic­tims’ alle­ga­tions and employ­er records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co offices involved dis­crim­i­na­tion by Lati­nos, about a third involved white offend­ers and a third were unspe­cif­ic.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Polit­i­cal Ethics Are Upside Down (David French, The Dis­patch): “…both the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties are utter­ly depen­dent upon their most devout mem­bers for their elec­toral suc­cess. As I’ve not­ed before, non­white Democ­rats (and espe­cial­ly black Democ­rats) are among the most God-fear­ing, church­go­ing mem­bers of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At the same time, the Repub­li­can Par­ty would be irrel­e­vant with­out its own white Evan­gel­i­cal base. The bot­tom line is that Chris­tians in both par­ties have absolute veto pow­er over (at the very least) the party’s nation­al can­di­dates.”
  4. Silent cri­sis of soar­ing excess deaths grip­ping Britain is only tip of the ice­berg (Sarah Knap­ton, The Tele­graph via Yahoo News): “For 14 of the past 15 weeks, Eng­land and Wales have aver­aged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, the num­ber of non-Covid excess deaths will soon out­strip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more dead­ly than the omi­cron wave. So what is going on? Experts believe deci­sions tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in the ear­li­est stages of the pan­dem­ic may now be com­ing back to bite. Poli­cies that kept peo­ple indoors, scared them away from hos­pi­tals and deprived them of treat­ment and pri­ma­ry care are final­ly tak­ing their toll.”
  5. The Rise of the Work­er Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Score (Jodi Kan­tor and Arya Sun­daram, New York Times): “…two years ago, her employ­er start­ed requir­ing chap­lains to accrue more of what it called ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty points.’ A vis­it to the dying: as lit­tle as one point. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a funer­al: one and three-quar­ters points. A phone call to griev­ing rel­a­tives: one-quar­ter point.”
  6. Good con­ver­sa­tions have lots of door­knobs (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Con­ver­sa­tion­al affor­dances are things like digres­sions and con­fes­sions and bold claims that beg for a rejoin­der. Talk­ing to anoth­er per­son is like rock climb­ing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist our­selves sky­ward. Maybe that’s why a real­ly good con­ver­sa­tion feels a lit­tle bit like float­ing. What mat­ters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affor­dances.” The author has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from Har­vard and is doing a post­doc at Colum­bia study­ing con­ver­sa­tions.
    • Relat­ed: Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “…most of us are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­tak­en about how much we will enjoy a social encounter. Com­muters expect­ed to have less pleas­ant rides if they tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. But their actu­al expe­ri­ence was pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. Peo­ple ran­dom­ly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips con­sis­tent­ly more than those instruct­ed to keep to them­selves. Intro­verts some­times go into these sit­u­a­tions with par­tic­u­lar­ly low expec­ta­tions, but both intro­verts and extro­verts tend­ed to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions more than rid­ing solo.”
  7. Put Down the Woke Man’s Bur­den (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “The Har­vard being whipped along by the admin­is­tra­tive caste, by con­trast, resem­bles the Children’s Cru­sade of the Mid­dle Ages: wrong cause, wrong army. And it ends up attack­ing the wrong ene­mies.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Relat­ed: Harvard’s Sta­tus as Wealth­i­est School Faces Oil-Rich Con­tender in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas (Janet Lorin & Ser­gio Cha­pa, Bloomberg): “Oil reached a high of $120 a bar­rel ear­li­er this year as a result of a war-induced ener­gy crunch. The rev­enue is expect­ed to help nar­row the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 bil­lion endow­ment and Harvard’s $53.2 bil­lion as of June 2021. ‘The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas has a cash wind­fall when every­one is look­ing at a poten­tial cash crunch,’ said William Goet­z­mann, a pro­fes­sor of finance and man­age­ment stud­ies at Yale University’s School of Man­age­ment. ‘Adjust­ing your port­fo­lio for social con­cerns is not cost­less.’ ”

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 Too much trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in public.”First shared in vol­ume 233.

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.

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