Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 414

Once a week, usu­al­ly on Fri­day, 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 414, which is a mul­ti­ple of 23.

A day late because I was trav­el­ing. Next week’s may be delayed as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The best pre­dic­tor of hap­pi­ness in Amer­i­ca? Mar­riage (W. Brad­ford Wilcox and David Bass, Unherd): “This truth is borne out yet again in new research from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, which found that mar­riage is the ‘the most impor­tant dif­fer­en­tia­tor’ of who is hap­py in Amer­i­ca, and that falling mar­riage rates are a chief rea­son why hap­pi­ness has declined nation­al­ly. The research, sur­vey­ing thou­sands of respon­dents, revealed a star­tling 30-per­cent­age-point hap­pi­ness divide between mar­ried and unmar­ried Amer­i­cans. This hap­pi­ness boost held true for both men and women.… Oth­er fac­tors do mat­ter — includ­ing income, edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, race, and geog­ra­phy — but mar­i­tal sta­tus is most influ­en­tial when it comes to pre­dict­ing hap­pi­ness in the study.”
   • Relat­ed: More on Sin­gle­ness, Mar­riage, and the Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…some read­ers took me to be say­ing that sin­gle peo­ple are in sin or not grow­ing in their faith the way that mar­ried peo­ple are. Not so. There is a pro­found (sub­tle, per­haps, but pro­found) dif­fer­ence between say­ing that some­thing has intrin­sic val­ue in the nor­ma­tive life of an indi­vid­ual or the church, and say­ing that this thing is com­pul­so­ry.”
   • Very help­ful fol­lowup to the arti­cle I shared last week.
2. The Hard-Drug Decrim­i­nal­iza­tion Dis­as­ter (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “…the sticky fact that pro­po­nents of decrim­i­nal­iza­tion rarely con­front is that addicts are not mere­ly sick peo­ple try­ing to get well, like can­cer suf­fer­ers in need of chemother­a­py. They are peo­ple who often will do just about any­thing to get high, how­ev­er irra­tional, self-destruc­tive or, in some cas­es, crim­i­nal their behav­ior becomes. Addic­tion may be a dis­ease, but it’s also a lifestyle — one that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion does a lot to facil­i­tate. It’s eas­i­er to get high wher­ev­er and how­ev­er you want when the cops are pow­er­less to stop you.”
   • Unlocked.
3. She’s the One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Humans are good at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to most mate­r­i­al con­di­tions. You get used to your house, your car, your clothes, your gran­ite coun­ter­top, and your mon­ey. What humans are bad at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to is… oth­er peo­ple. If you spend a lot of time around humans whose com­pa­ny you enjoy, you will prob­a­bly be hap­py. If you spend a lot of time around human whose com­pa­ny you detest, you will prob­a­bly be unhap­py. Over your life­time, you will prob­a­bly spend more time around your spouse than any oth­er human. So while find­ing good friends and good co-work­ers is cru­cial for hap­pi­ness, find­ing a good spouse is even more so.”
   • This is full of most­ly-good advice for guys.
4. What’s going on with the reports of a room-tem­per­a­ture super­con­duc­tor? (John Tim­mer, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The per­fect time to write an arti­cle on those results would be when they’ve been con­firmed by mul­ti­ple labs. But these are not per­fect times. Instead, rumors seem to be fly­ing dai­ly about pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion, con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry results, and informed dis­cus­sions of why this mate­r­i­al either should or should­n’t work.”
   • Relat­ed: LK-99 Is the Super­con­duc­tor of the Sum­mer (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “I tru­ly don’t get the excite­ment about her preprint,” said Dou­glas Natel­son, a pro­fes­sor of physics at Rice Uni­ver­si­ty in Hous­ton. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that the­o­rists and com­pu­ta­tion­al mate­ri­als folks very often pro­duce preprints based on the lat­est claimed mate­r­i­al of inter­est. There’s noth­ing excep­tion­al in that.”
5. You’re prob­a­bly recy­cling plas­tic wrong. And it’s not your fault. (Robert Gebel­hoff, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Pic­ture this: You fin­ish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throw­ing it out, you check the bot­tom of the cup to see the icon­ic recy­cling sym­bol. That means it can be tossed in the recy­cling bin, right? Wrong. Solo cups are made of poly­styrene, a plas­tic that is very dif­fi­cult to recy­cle.… Nowa­days, the only plas­tic items that are con­sis­tent­ly recy­cled are bot­tles and jugs made out of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (which is labeled with a ‘1’) and high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (labeled with a ‘2’), as a sur­vey of recy­cling facil­i­ties by Green­peace shows. Recy­cling plants typ­i­cal­ly reject almost every­thing else, mean­ing it ends up in land­fills.”
6. He Held Up a Bank to Get His Own Mon­ey (Raja Abdul­rahim, New York Times): “The cen­tral bank has not allowed depos­i­tors to with­draw more than a few hun­dred dol­lars a month since a finan­cial col­lapse in 2019. So, like oth­er des­per­ate Lebanese before him — some of them sim­i­lar­ly com­pelled by the need for med­ical treat­ment — Mr. al-Haj­jar went to his bank in Novem­ber, threat­en­ing to burn it down unless it gave him some of the $250,000 he had in his account. More than 12 hours lat­er, he left with $25,000 in stacks of cash. ‘If you don’t go in and threat­en to hurt them, they won’t give you any­thing,’ he said months lat­er.”
   • Absolute­ly wild (and sad) sto­ry.
7. California’s free prison calls are repair­ing estranged rela­tion­ships and aid­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion (Kwasi Gyam­fi Asiedu & Helen Li, Los Ange­les Times): “At a time when most con­sumers enjoy free or low-cost call­ing, prison phone calls at their peak in Cal­i­for­nia cost more than $6 per 15 min­utes via a pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider. That allowed only hur­ried, super­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tions between the sib­lings — with one eye always on the clock.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• The Trol­ley Prob­lem Solved (SMBC)
• It is kind of sad that I only came across one divert­ing thing this week…

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good. From vol­ume 291.

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.