Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 440

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 440, the sum of the first sev­en­teen prime num­bers. 440 = 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 and that fact makes me hap­py.

Also, I’ve had a busy trav­el sched­ule late­ly and haven’t kept us with as much stuff as I nor­mal­ly do, so this is a short­er com­pi­la­tion than usu­al.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Super Bowl Ad They SHOULD Have Made | He Saves Us (Jamie Bam­brick, YouTube): one com­pelling minute. I don’t have any­thing against the He Gets Us ads, but this is pret­ty great.
  2. Chris­tians Are Not Ready for the Age of “Adult AI” (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “All vari­ables being equal, it is like­ly that with­in twen­ty years, most online pornog­ra­phy will not fea­ture real human beings. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems are already sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to fab­ri­cate entire bod­ies con­vinc­ing­ly.… It sim­ply won’t do any­more to try to elic­it post-Chris­t­ian out­rage against porn by empha­siz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sex traf­fick­ing or exploita­tion. In the era of dig­i­tal­ly-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, the ques­tion will no longer be, ‘Who was hurt in the mak­ing of this’ (for the prac­ti­cal answer to that ques­tion will be, ‘No one’). Rather, the ques­tion will be, ‘How am I hurt by con­sum­ing this,’ and, ‘Why is this objec­tive­ly wrong for me to enjoy?’ ”
  3. How Chi­na Mis­cal­cu­lat­ed Its Way to a Baby Bust (Liyan Qi, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Fol­low­ing the data release, researchers from Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia and the Shang­hai Acad­e­my of Social Sci­ences pre­dict­ed that Chi­na will have just 525 mil­lion peo­ple by the end of the cen­tu­ry. That’s down from their pre­vi­ous fore­cast of 597 mil­lion and a pre­cip­i­tous drop from 1.4 bil­lion now.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Mar­ry Young (Kasen Stephen­son, Stan­ford Review): “Although I’m now twen­ty-four, I got mar­ried as a twen­ty-two year old under­grad. I then bid farewell to my dorm in Roble and moved into a cozy apart­ment beyond EVGR with my wife. I have found that most of my class­mates are con­vinced that mar­riage is in their future, yet they are quite sur­prised that I mar­ried so young. While it’s dif­fi­cult to exer­cise con­trol over any time­line, I’m a strong advo­cate for get­ting mar­ried young, espe­cial­ly at Stan­ford where young mar­riages are most uncom­mon.”
  5. The Lure of Divorce (Emi­ly Gould, The Cut): “It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were con­tem­plat­ing them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her hus­band thought open­ing their mar­riage might be the answer. Anoth­er friend described the ease of shar­ing cus­tody of his young daugh­ter, then admit­ted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most week­ends. In my chron­i­cal­ly unde­cid­ed state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the dif­fer­ence.”
    • A wild and illu­mi­nat­ing sto­ry, although I sus­pect I am tak­ing away some dif­fer­ent lessons than the author intend­ed.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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