You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting
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.
Things Glen Found Interesting
- The Honesty Tax (Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “We set high — stupidly, counterproductively high — standards and then minimally enforce them because full enforcement would be a disaster. So, almost everyone just lies. Then, the people you punish are the people who are unwilling to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are ‘normal’ and what kinds are seriously out of bounds. Those less likely to know these informal rules are not a randomly selected group of people — the more connections you have in D.C., the more you know what ‘not to mention.’ But lying is bad! Selecting for liars is bad! This may end up looking sort of similar to the result you’d get if you just had a reasonable policy in the first place, but it’s actually a lot worse — you screened out everyone who wasn’t willing to be dishonest.”
- What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): brilliant and difficult to excerpt. Dwarkesh Patel hosts a podcast with God debating Iblis over whether humans are truly intelligent and whether biological intelligence is even possible. Don’t assume it is Christian based on the title — it is definitely not.
- What Happens If No One Reads (Spencer Klavan, The Free Press): “If ChatGPT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it? …I asked Grok about The Brothers Karamazov and it told me, ‘We’re all a mess of contradictions.’ And so we are. Why didn’t Dostoyevsky just say that?”
- The Millionaire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Paramedic (Christopher Maag, New York Times): “Jonathan Kleisner didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, except a success. After attending Fordham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston University, dropping out a semester before graduation to take a job at a small trading firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the recession was over and the mood on the street was buoyant.”
- Recommended by an alumnus. If for no other reason, read to see the story of 985 pound guy. Absolutely wild.
- Giving people money helped less than I thought it would (Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment.”
- Inspired by the above article but going in some different directions: Why I Am Not a Liberal (David Brooks, New York Times): “Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an internet storm. You might have thought the progressive reaction would have been: We need to keep giving poor people money, but we also need to focus on the human and behavioral factors that will enable them to build comfortable, independent lives. But that wasn’t the reaction. The progressives I saw doubled down on the thesis: Poor people just need money.”
- Sick People Are Sick (Freddie deBoer, Substack): “It will never stop amazing and depressing me, really, when the public reacts with shock when people with mental illness behave like people with mental illness… In our elite culture’s eagerness to destigmatize, we’ve made mental illness unserious. We’ve reduced it to TikTok dances and therapeutic hashtags. ‘It’s OK to not be OK,’ says the cheerful lettering, but there’s always the implied caveat: it’s OK so long as ‘not being OK’ looks like crying in an endearing way, journaling, eating ice cream straight from the carton, and then bouncing back with resilience. The real texture of serious mental illness — the paranoia, the rages, the breakdowns, the catatonia — doesn’t fit into that framework, so when it arrives people don’t know how to metabolize it.”
- This is common at Stanford. People love the rhetoric of supporting people with mental illness up until it’s actually hard and distressing.
- Your Rivals Aren’t Responsible for Mass Shootings (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…while the tendency to extreme and apocalyptic rhetoric is a consistent feature of American politics (even a democratic birthright), most of the killers shooting up schools and churches or targeting politicians for assassinations are not really participants in this polarization. They aren’t taking wokeness or populism too literally or too far; they’re following other directives and acting on other purposes entirely.”
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
- Taylor Swift Engagement Overturned As Referee Determines Travis Kelce’s Knee Didn’t Touch The Ground (Babylon Bee)
- Bing (Pearls Before Swine)
- Venmo (Texts from Superheroes)
- Wavefunction Collapse (xkcd)
- How Anime Took Over America (Joshua Hunt, New York Times): “A recent survey of over 4,000 American adults showed that 42 percent of all Gen Z respondents watched anime every week, far higher than the 25 percent of Gen Z respondents who followed the N.F.L.” — a visually stunning article
- Do Not Disturb (Pearls Before Swine)
- The top college campuses to find celebrities — and their kids (Christopher Cameron, New York Post): “Congratulations, the high school class of 2025 (rah-rah-rah!) is ready to matriculate! Your freshly sprouted scholar spent the last four years growing their GPA, acing their APs and crushing their SATs in preparation for brain-bending curriculum. But are they ready for the most advantageous aspect of life at a top college: socializing with stardom? It’s Mathematics 101. Half of Hollywood canoodling x 20 years = a crop of celebrity scions who are now ruling the campuses of New England’s oldest institutions, as well as the increasingly competitive so-called ‘new Ivies’ (schools like Notre Dame, New York University, Duke, Emory, Rice, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Washington University).”
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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.