Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 455

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 455, which is the result of 15 choose 3 — how many ways you can select three objects from a col­lec­tion of fif­teen.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. What I’ve Learned From a Decade on the Dat­ing Apps (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “Dat­ing apps are not a neu­tral tool for find­ing love. Like all tech­nolo­gies, they act on us, even as we think we are in con­trol, act­ing on them. They shape how we see oth­er peo­ple, and our­selves, and roman­tic love itself. Accord­ing to the apps, love is the opti­miza­tion of traits that yield the high­est rates of mutu­al sat­is­fac­tion and per­son­al growth for two atom­ized indi­vid­u­als. This self-expres­sive mod­el of romance may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s a major depar­ture from the basis of love in pre­vi­ous eras.”
   • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
   • I also liked this bit: “It’s as if these apps don’t want users to find romance, because they are incen­tivized, to the tune of $5.3 bil­lion in 2022, to keep us swip­ing and search­ing.”
2. Are Gaza Protests Hap­pen­ing Most­ly at Elite Col­leges? (Marc Novi­coff & Robert Kelchen, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Count­ing Con­sor­tium and news reports of encamp­ments, we matched infor­ma­tion on every insti­tu­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion that has had pro-Pales­tin­ian protest activ­i­ty (start­ing when the war broke out in Octo­ber until ear­ly May) to the col­leges in our 2023 col­lege rank­ings. Of the 1,421 pub­lic and pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encamp­ments. By match­ing that data to per­cent­ages of stu­dents at each cam­pus who receive Pell Grants (which are award­ed to stu­dents from mod­er­ate- and low-income fam­i­lies), we came to an unsur­pris­ing con­clu­sion: Pro-Pales­tin­ian protests have been rare at col­leges with high per­cent­ages of Pell stu­dents. Encamp­ments at such col­leges have been rar­er still.”
   • Con­tains inter­est­ing charts.
3. Spy­ing Arrests Send Chill Through Britain’s Thriv­ing Hong Kong Com­mu­ni­ty (Megan Spe­cia, New York Times): “This month, three men were charged in Lon­don with gath­er­ing intel­li­gence for Hong Kong and forc­ing entry into a British res­i­dence. While the men have not yet been found inno­cent or guilty — the tri­al will not begin until Feb­ru­ary — the news of the arrests threw a spot­light on many activists’ exist­ing con­cerns about China’s abil­i­ty to sur­veil and harass its cit­i­zens abroad, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who have been crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment.”
4. Two arti­cles about sur­viv­ing can­cer:
   • Mar­i­tal Sta­tus and Sur­vival in Patients With Can­cer (Aiz­er et al, Jour­nal of Clin­i­cal Oncol­o­gy): “For five can­cers stud­ied (prostate, breast, col­orec­tal, esophageal, and head/neck can­cers), the sur­vival ben­e­fit asso­ci­at­ed with mar­riage was larg­er than the pub­lished sur­vival ben­e­fit of chemother­a­py. The impor­tance of this study is that it high­lights the con­sis­tent and sub­stan­tial impact that fea­tures of mar­riage, par­tic­u­lar­ly social sup­port, can have on can­cer detec­tion, treat­ment, and sur­vival.”
     • From 2013. Mar­riage is bet­ter than chemother­a­py. To be clear: if you have can­cer also receive med­ical treat­ment even if you’re mar­ried.
   • Tri­al results for new lung can­cer drug are ‘off the charts’, say doc­tors (Andrew Gre­go­ry, The Guardian): “Lung can­cer is the world’s lead­ing cause of can­cer death, account­ing for about 1.8m deaths every year. Sur­vival rates in those with advanced forms of the dis­ease, where tumours have spread, are par­tic­u­lar­ly poor. More than half of patients (60%) diag­nosed with advanced forms of lung can­cer who took lor­la­tinib were still alive five years lat­er with no pro­gres­sion in their dis­ease, data pre­sent­ed at the world’s largest can­cer con­fer­ence showed. The rate was 8% in patients treat­ed with a stan­dard drug, the tri­al found.”
     • Amaz­ing!
5. Two arti­cles about the job mar­ket:
   • Why Can’t Col­lege Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some The­o­ries — and Fix­es. (Peter Coy, New York Times): “Even though the unem­ploy­ment rate is low, few­er peo­ple are quit­ting, so few­er jobs are becom­ing avail­able, accord­ing to Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics data. LinkedIn’s esti­mate of the nation­al hir­ing rate was down 9.5 per­cent in April from a year ear­li­er.”
     • The arti­cle con­tains oth­er sub­stan­tive insights, but that one stood out to me.
   • The case of the angry his­to­ry post­doc (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Why is no one hir­ing his­to­ri­ans? There are four basic rea­sons. The first and most impor­tant — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s sup­posed to be so obvi­ous — is that the U.S. uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is large­ly done expand­ing. The 20th cen­tu­ry saw a mas­sive build-out of uni­ver­si­ties, which required hir­ing a mas­sive num­ber of tenure-track pro­fes­sors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the depart­ments at the exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties are clogged with a ton of old profs who will nev­er leave until they age out. New hires must there­fore slow to a trick­le, since as long as the num­ber of profs is rough­ly con­stant, they can only be hired to replace peo­ple who retire or die.”
6. Live by the Law or Die on the Cross (Jere­my Eng­land, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What would Jesus do if a Hamas fight­er held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while fir­ing? Hard to say for sure, but any­one who argues that a prop­er­ly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Chris­tian­i­ty. The image of the Cru­ci­fix­ion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accept­ing cor­po­re­al defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spir­i­tu­al vic­to­ry in the world of tomor­row. You will not hear Jesus men­tioned when West­ern lead­ers speak on how impor­tant it is that Israel adhere to inter­na­tion­al laws of war, but the con­cept of the inno­cent civil­ian enshrined in these laws grew prac­ti­cal­ly out of wars fought with­in Chris­ten­dom dur­ing the last sev­er­al hun­dred years.”
   • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who does not endorse all of the argu­ment but found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
7. A Redemp­tive The­sis for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Andy Crouch with oth­ers, Prax­is Labs): “Like the Inter­net, elec­tric­i­ty, and agri­cul­ture, AI is a gen­er­al-pur­pose tech­nol­o­gy that can be har­nessed to many ends. Redemp­tive entre­pre­neurs can lead the way in demon­strat­ing that AI can be deployed — in fact, is best deployed — in ways that dethrone pride, mag­ic, and Mam­mon and that ele­vate the dig­ni­ty of human beings and their capac­i­ty to flour­ish as image bear­ers in the world.”

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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.