Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 376

My favorite line from this week: “Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”

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, vol­ume 376, is an auto­mor­phic num­ber because when raised to a pow­er it ends in itself. 3762 = 141376. It con­tin­ues: 3763 = 53157376 and so on. 37615 = 424441337012461701988020381601157349376 and so on.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Male-War­rior Hypoth­e­sis (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “…young human males often address each oth­er with abu­sive insults. The rit­u­al tests the strength of the friend­ship. If light­heart­ed ver­bal quips do not dam­age the rela­tion­ship, then the bonds are like­ly rel­a­tive­ly strong. In con­trast, women and girls sel­dom insult their friends, and often work extra hard to praise them to avoid any signs of hos­til­i­ty. Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”
    • This arti­cle is engross­ing even if you already know the gist.
  2. The Fever Is Break­ing (David Brooks, New York Times): “The sin­gle most impor­tant result of this elec­tion was the tri­umph of the normies. Estab­lish­men­tar­i­an, prac­ti­cal lead­ers who are not always scream­ing angri­ly at you did phe­nom­e­nal­ly well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Penn­syl­va­nia. Work­man­like incum­bents from John Thune in South Dako­ta to Ron Wyden in Ore­gon had suc­cess­ful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wis­con­sin had the quo­ta­tion that sum­ma­rized the elec­tion: ‘Bor­ing wins.’ ”
    • Relat­ed (in that it is about pol­i­tics): 3 Prin­ci­ples for Set­tling Polit­i­cal Spats in the Church (Daniel K. Williams, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Any attempt to make soci­ety more moral through leg­is­la­tion will inevitably be selec­tive and incom­plete and may offer mixed results. Which major polit­i­cal par­ty in the Unit­ed States is com­mit­ted to address­ing the prob­lems of divorce, gam­bling addic­tions, mar­i­tal infi­deli­ty, and alco­hol abuse? Which par­ty will do the most to pro­tect the poor from being exploit­ed through pay­day loans? Which par­ty will fight against the pornog­ra­phy indus­try? If you haven’t seen any polit­i­cal ads this elec­tion sea­son that address any of these issues, per­haps that’s a sign of the moral selec­tiv­i­ty in our cur­rent par­ti­san pol­i­tics.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West Geor­gia. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  3. A Tra­di­tion of Anti-Tra­di­tion­al­ists (Mark Bauer­lein, First Things): “All the talk in the human­i­ties back then turned on ‘open­ing up the canon’ and break­ing up the dom­i­nance of Dead White Males—less John Dry­den and more Aphra Behn, more diver­si­ty and few­er idols—but in the the­o­ry area, these fig­ures were as canon­i­cal as the saints.… What this bias has pro­duced is two gen­er­a­tions of col­lege teach­ers who don’t real­ize their bias. They got a nar­row edu­ca­tion that they trust­ed was the broad­est one. They gen­uine­ly don’t know that anoth­er crit­i­cal tra­di­tion besides the progressive/transgressive one exists.” This essay is a bulls­eye.
    • Relat­ed: An Exis­ten­tial Threat to Doing Good Sci­ence (Lua­na Maro­ja, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “The restric­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research. Let’s start with teach­ing. I need to empha­size that this is not hypo­thet­i­cal. The cen­so­ri­ous, fear­ful cli­mate is already affect­ing the con­tent of what we teach.”
    • There’s a Stan­ford con­nec­tion in this sec­ond arti­cle, btw. The arti­cle is an adap­ta­tion of a speech giv­en at a pri­vate con­fer­ence at Stan­ford quite recent­ly.
  4. Con­tra Res­i­dent Con­trar­i­an On Unfal­si­fi­able Inter­nal States (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “But in the sto­ries these peo­ple told me, it was more about — they found that this effort was pro­duc­ing some­thing unex­pect­ed, and devel­op­ing new per­son­al­i­ty aspects that they need­ed, so they kept going. If you take one step towards Darth Vad­er, he will take two steps toward you (sor­ry if I am sound­ing like a Sith youth pas­tor).”
    • This is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and the excerpt does not do it any jus­tice. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. New Endorse­ments for Col­lege Ath­letes Resur­face an Old Con­cern: Sex Sells (Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Haley Jones, an All-Amer­i­ca guard at Stan­ford and a can­di­date for the Play­er of the Year Award, said she didn’t want to play up sex appeal. Her endorse­ment income is dri­ven by a social media image that por­trays her as a light­heart­ed stu­dent-ath­lete with­out an overt­ly provoca­tive tone.”
    • Inter­est­ing in its own right, also a stronger Stan­ford angle than I expect­ed.
  6. It’s Always a ‘Negative World’ for Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of [the] core con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian cri­tiques of Amer­i­can cul­ture is that Amer­i­ca is grow­ing ever-more hos­tile to the authen­tic Chris­t­ian faith. We’ve left a friend­ly and hos­pitable past, and now we’re con­fronting a hos­tile future.… But this analy­sis is fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. It’s dan­ger­ous­ly wrong. It’s wrong not because the present moment is par­tic­u­lar­ly hos­pitable to the Chris­t­ian faith, but because it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can Chris­ten­dom, and it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands the per­ma­nent coun­ter­cul­tur­al real­i­ty of authen­tic Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. Pay­walls or Con­stant Intru­sive Ads: Pick One (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “And I also want to say, if you’re annoyed that you can’t get past a pay­wall — tough. Because an era of ris­ing pay­walls is absolute­ly nec­es­sary if you want writ­ing to sur­vive as a pro­fes­sion, and if you want good jour­nal­ism and analy­sis to endure.”

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 Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, Soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third party.“

The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends! From vol­ume 246

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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