Tag: America

TGFI, Volume 563: tongues-speaking weirdos and more

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amer­i­can age was the human age (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Much of the coun­try has eased into a com­fort­able equi­lib­ri­um of scle­ro­sis; local veto pow­er either pre­vents the con­struc­tion of fac­to­ries, hous­ing, ener­gy, trans­porta­tion, and oth­er infra­struc­ture, or delays it by decades, or rais­es the cost to mul­ti­ples of what oth­er rich coun­tries pay. The past has become more valu­able than the future to many Amer­i­cans; they cling des­per­ate­ly to the pow­er to enforce sta­sis, pre­serv­ing a facade of the coun­try they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that coun­try great. That scle­ro­sis seeps into every­thing else. Immi­gra­tion, and even migra­tion from city to city, becomes a vicious zero-sum fight over a fixed hous­ing sup­ply. Cities decay into muse­ums of them­selves. The indus­tries of the future can only be built in Amer­i­ca if they take up near­ly no land, use near­ly no ener­gy, require very lit­tle bank financ­ing, and are able to pro­cure skilled labor as need­ed from abroad. Some­how the inter­net indus­try sat­is­fied all of those con­di­tions for three decades, but that time is done.”
  2. Why Do Only Weird Peo­ple Speak in Tongues? (Daniel Kunkel, Sub­stack): “I’ve nev­er spo­ken in tongues. And, in all sin­cer­i­ty, I’d pre­fer not to. They weird me out. In the few times I’ve heard some­one bab­bling, my mind imme­di­ate­ly runs to ‘They are mak­ing it up.’ And over the years, I’ve flirt­ed with, and even defend­ed, ces­sa­tion­ism (Rest in Pow­er, John­ny Mac). And yet, recent­ly, I’ve come to terms with the fact that most of my gripes about these var­i­ous gifts (tongues, prophe­cy, heal­ings) have more to do with human rea­son and pref­er­ence than scrip­tur­al con­vic­tion.… I still have nev­er spo­ken in glos­so­lalia. And if I am being sin­cere, I still do not want to, but I want to want to (: Thus, if I think 1 Cor 12–14 is pre­scrip­tive, and I do, then the plea for my own heart is to desire the gift.”
  3. You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep (Ryan McCormick, New York Times): “A con­sis­tent find­ing in sleep epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies is that there is not a mag­ic num­ber below which health sud­den­ly falls off a cliff. Rather, stud­ies that show an asso­ci­a­tion between sleep dura­tion and mor­tal­i­ty often find that the low­est risk clus­ters around sev­en hours.… Sleep improves per­for­mance on tasks, makes dri­ving safer and buoys our men­tal health. Ade­quate sleep leads to a stronger immune sys­tem, bet­ter meta­bol­ic and car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, and more reli­able phys­i­cal ener­gy through­out the day.”
  4. Some AI-adja­cent thoughts:
    • “I see what Tyler Cowen is get­ting at. If you want info about the Bible, AI already out­per­forms at some mar­gin (speed, if noth­ing else). But in an equal­ly impor­tant sense he’s also wrong, and there’s an easy way to see this. Just ask the AI what, say, David’s sto­ry means. 🧵(see the full thread on twit­ter)
    • We Are Los­ing the Abil­i­ty to Dis­cov­er What We Didn’t Know to Ask (Anne-Lau­re Le Cunff, New York Times): “More than 60 per­cent of Google search­es in the Unit­ed States now end with­out the user click­ing on a link. We type a ques­tion, read an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed sum­ma­ry of the results and leave with our answer.… The space between a ques­tion and an answer has val­ue, and that val­ue should not be engi­neered away. The most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that deliv­ers only what is asked for, we will lose the capac­i­ty to dis­cov­er what we didn’t know to ask.”
      • The author is a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don.
    • A Chris­t­ian Vision for the Future of AI (Wal­ter Kim, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Trans­for­ma­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment are before us, thanks to AI. But a pro-human worldview—the philo­soph­i­cal ground­ing to aim those oppor­tu­ni­ties at the moral end of human flourishing—won’t emerge spon­ta­neous­ly. We must shape AI before it shapes us.”
      • The author is the pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals.
  5. Min­istry After the Boomer Apoc­a­lypse (Derek Rish­mawy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Remem­ber, when Jesus was preach­ing and min­is­ter­ing, what did he do? As an RUF bud­dy of mine point­ed out, he spent three years walk­ing around with the equiv­a­lent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s cor­pus, near­ly 1/6 of his writ­ten mate­r­i­al is direct­ed to guid­ing the young pas­tors Tim­o­thy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.”
    • Inter­est­ing reflec­tions root­ed in cam­pus min­istry in a dif­fer­ent con­text. Maybe not for every­one, but I real­ly liked it.
  6. Decline of Ph.D. Admis­sions Could Imper­il a ‘Gen­er­a­tion of New Tal­ent’ (Vimal Patel, New York Times): “The num­ber of stu­dents admit­ted to Ph.D. pro­grams this fall dropped 15 per­cent from the pre­vi­ous year, accord­ing to data from over 50 top research uni­ver­si­ties, rais­ing fears that the nation’s capac­i­ty to pro­duce new sci­ence could be dimin­ished… The data show­ing the decrease comes from 55 uni­ver­si­ties, all of them mem­bers of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties, an invi­ta­tion-only orga­ni­za­tion that includes 69 of the most pres­ti­gious research insti­tu­tions in the Unit­ed States.”
  7. Report­ed sex­u­al assault of jog­ger did not occur, inves­ti­ga­tion finds (Alu­la Alder­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stanford’s Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty (DPS) con­duct­ed a ‘thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion’ into the assault, which alleged­ly took place on March 29 by the inter­sec­tion of San­ta Ynez Street and May­field Avenue. Inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined the report was fab­ri­cat­ed, accord­ing to Stan­ford PR Direc­tor Char­lene Gage.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 562: secular AI, cheating with AI

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Will God speak to you through AI? No, AI does­n’t go there (Marc Ramirez, USA Today): “A mul­ti-uni­ver­si­ty research group has found AI mod­els large­ly omit reli­gion when asked about eth­i­cal or exis­ten­tial con­cerns, such as how to save one’s mar­riage from infi­deli­ty, whether to for­give an unfaith­ful friend, how to remain calm dur­ing dif­fi­cult times or what makes peo­ple tru­ly hap­py and free.… When asked specif­i­cal­ly about reli­gion, the mod­els pro­vide neu­tral, respect­ful replies, Wingate said. But when prompt­ed with ques­tions about grief, per­son­al chal­lenges and major life deci­sions, AI sys­tems often default to sec­u­lar fram­ing and avoid reli­gion alto­geth­er – even when, accord­ing to con­sor­tium research, most peo­ple expect answers to such ques­tions to include reli­gious per­spec­tives.”
  2. Pro­fes­sor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty: ‘Aca­d­e­m­ic integri­ty is at risk’ (Manuel G. Pas­cual, El Pais): “The course, which he has been teach­ing for years, is not an easy one: it typ­i­cal­ly attracts few stu­dents, but very good ones. He has nev­er had more than 30 stu­dents enrolled at a time, and on some occa­sions he had only eight. This semes­ter, prob­a­bly because of the new eval­u­a­tion sys­tem, 86 stu­dents signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was admin­is­tered on March 5, were extra­or­di­nary, with an aver­age score of 96 out of 100. Forty stu­dents scored a per­fect 100.… Ser­ra­no did not void the midterm exam, but warned stu­dents that the final one, which count­ed for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-per­son. He also said that if the grade dis­tri­b­u­tion was not sim­i­lar to the midterm, only the final exam would be tak­en into account. The aver­age score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 stu­dents who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a per­fect 100 in the midterm exam.”
  3. Your God-giv­en right to be hap­py (Jerusalem Dem­sas and Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We are rich beyond our ances­tors’ wildest dreams. We casu­al­ly dis­card things for which they would have worked all their lives. In the back­ground noise of our lives, there are stag­ger­ing won­ders. When you look at your­self through your ances­tors’ eyes, you should see an astound­ing­ly rich per­son, a life lived in the lap of unfath­omable lux­u­ry. Delight in it. And we should feel, too, a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty: What­ev­er oblig­a­tions you believe attach to the rich, they attach to you. The things that we enjoy are not the default state of affairs. They are not uni­ver­sal. What we have in the mod­ern world is pre­cious and rare, and it should make us gen­er­ous.”
  4. An Embold­ened Iran Goes After Its Chris­tians (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “The church has long served Iran’s grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of Mus­lim con­verts to Christianity—but the regime has spent years mak­ing it hard­er for St. Peter to do so. In Jan­u­ary 2014, it banned Far­si-speak­ing indi­vid­u­als from attend­ing Chris­t­ian ser­vices entire­ly, forc­ing con­verts to wor­ship in secret under­ground house church­es, at the risk of 10- to 20-year prison sen­tences. Those who evan­ge­lize to Mus­lims can be found guilty of a crim­i­nal offense and treat­ed as a nation­al secu­ri­ty threat, accord­ing to Fard.… These mea­sures have not stopped Ira­ni­ans from con­vert­ing. The coun­try now has an esti­mat­ed 1.2 mil­lion Chris­t­ian con­verts, mak­ing it, by some accounts, the fastest-grow­ing Chris­t­ian nation in the Mid­dle East.… Most wor­ship in under­ground house church­es.”
  5. Sci­en­tists React to the Lab-Made, Yet Life­like, Spud­Cell (K. R. Call­away, New York Times): “Unlike pre­vi­ous attempts to cre­ate life­like cells, which have start­ed with liv­ing cells whose genet­ic mate­r­i­al is stripped down to the very basics, Spud­Cell is con­struct­ed from the ‘bot­tom up,’ using life­less chem­i­cal com­po­nents. It’s the first time an arti­fi­cial cell con­struct­ed this way has been able to com­plete a full life cycle and spawn the next gen­er­a­tion.… The new­ly cre­at­ed Spud­Cell still has sev­er­al key lim­i­ta­tions that sep­a­rate it from liv­ing cells. Although it can feed, grow and divide, Spud­Cell is not self-suf­fi­cient like most liv­ing cells. It can build many of the inner work­ings of a cell-like sys­tem, but can­not build its own ribo­somes. Because it lacks these essen­tial pro­tein-build­ing cell struc­tures, a Spud­Cell can live only in the lab, rely­ing on sci­en­tists to feed it a nutri­ent-rich mix of enzymes and pro­teins.”
  6. Boko Haram, Bei­jing-Style (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “Some of our naïve friends con­tin­ue to tell us—forgive the cliché—that ‘real social­ism has nev­er been tried.’ But that is pre­cise­ly wrong: Real social­ism is being prac­ticed in Chi­na, just as real social­ism was prac­ticed in the Union of Sovi­et Social­ist Republics. Real social­ism is here to be seen and examined—it is hypo­thet­i­cal social­ism that has nev­er been tried, because it is hypo­thet­i­cal, the­o­ret­i­cal, and utopi­an. Vogu­ish Amer­i­can pro­gres­sives make a great many argu­ments in favor of social­ism, which is very much in fash­ion at the moment (not only in New York City), and almost all of those argu­ments amount to: ‘The ide­al­ized hypo­thet­i­cal ver­sion of my pol­i­cy is prefer­able to the real-world ver­sion of your pol­i­cy.’ ”
  7. Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy Looks Bad Every Fifty Years Or So (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “There are a lot of rea­sons to be pes­simistic about the cur­rent moment. But I have enough faith in my coun­try to pre­dict two truths about what the Unit­ed States will look like in 2076. First, Amer­i­cans will be grumpy about the state of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Sec­ond, it will nonethe­less be in bet­ter shape than it is in 2026.”
    • The clos­ing sec­tion has an inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal overview, begin­ning with the phrase “Lit­tle won­der” — just skip down to there.

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.

TGFI, Volume 557: peer-reviewed miracles and AI-informed voting

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Peer-Reviewed Mir­a­cles: Are Mirac­u­lous Cures Pub­lished in Sci­en­tif­ic Jour­nals? (Caleb Jack­son, Sub­stack): “It is often sug­gest­ed that, if the evi­dence for mir­a­cle cures were tru­ly com­pelling, it would be expect­ed that such cas­es would be pub­lished in main­stream sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals. If these instances can­not stand the scruti­ny of peer review, then they ought to be dis­missed as noth­ing more than uncor­rob­o­rat­ed anec­dotes. I am not per­suad­ed. Indeed, this argu­ment remains tooth­less for a myr­i­ad of rea­sons. As we shall see below, there are no less than sev­er­al dozen instances of ‘mir­a­cle cures’ pub­lished in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, both main­stream and fringe, over the last cen­tu­ry. To claim oth­er­wise is to plead igno­rance of the pub­licly avail­able data.”
  2. Use AI This Elec­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I’m not say­ing AI is super­in­tel­li­gent or can decide bet­ter than you can. I’m say­ing that if you — like me — spend an hour or so doing research before vot­ing on local seats, AI can aid that research very effec­tive­ly. And if you don’t do that research — because you weren’t will­ing to waste an hour on it before — AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start.”
    • He gives a ver­sion of the prompt he used to gen­er­ate a cus­tom voter’s guide, so I tried it with a cus­tomized ver­sion and was pleased with the results. I tried it on both Claude and Chat­G­PT, only Claude was will­ing to do it. Chat­G­PT seemed to think it was uneth­i­cal to help me. I rec­om­mend giv­ing it a try. For a start, just go through his prompt sen­tence by sen­tence and change it to what you believe.
  3. The Twin Fal­lac­i­es of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and AI Max­i­mal­ism (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Here are two ques­tions I think about a lot: How does Chris­tian­i­ty restrict someone’s use of tech­nol­o­gy? How does Chris­tian­i­ty restrict someone’s strat­a­gems in pol­i­tics? These ques­tions come from a con­vic­tion that the claims of Christ in Scrip­ture are such a nature that one can­not believe and obey them with­out expe­ri­enc­ing some kind of lim­it­ing prin­ci­ple on their tech­nol­o­gy and on their pol­i­tics. In oth­er words, if you real­ly take Christ seri­ous­ly, your tech use and your pol­i­tics will bear a con­spic­u­ous mark. ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Nihilism With a Busi­ness Mod­el (John Seel, Sub­stack): “At one lev­el, the gig econ­o­my reflects an under­stand­able eco­nom­ic adap­ta­tion to a rapid­ly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment. But every eco­nom­ic sys­tem even­tu­al­ly shapes not mere­ly how peo­ple make mon­ey, but how they imag­ine real­i­ty itself. The gig econ­o­my does not sim­ply cre­ate gig work. It cre­ates a gig mind­set. And that mind­set is increas­ing­ly reshap­ing the moral imag­i­na­tion among younger gen­er­a­tions in deeply con­se­quen­tial ways. At the cen­ter of the gig mind­set is the assump­tion that near­ly every­thing can become mon­e­tized, opti­mized, and con­vert­ed into mar­ket val­ue. Every­thing and every expe­ri­ence are now for sale. The self itself becomes a plat­form. Con­sid­er two rapid­ly expand­ing phe­nom­e­na among young adults: men are increas­ing­ly addict­ed to online sports bet­ting, and women are increas­ing­ly post­ing on plat­forms such as Only­Fans. These two are deeply con­nect­ed man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same cul­tur­al log­ic.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Are “Real” Catholics as Con­ser­v­a­tive as Evan­gel­i­cals? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I think this is the best test I can devise to real­ly com­pare devout, con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics to evan­gel­i­cals in the same seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion. I just can’t look at these results and say that ‘real’ Catholics are just as social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive as ‘real’ evan­gel­i­cals. They aren’t — empir­i­cal­ly speak­ing — as con­ser­v­a­tive on these three core issues [abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and pre­mar­i­tal sex]… What I take away from all of this is that evan­gel­i­cal iden­ti­ty car­ries some­thing that can’t be ful­ly explained by how often you show up or how con­ser­v­a­tive you vote. There’s a the­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al foun­da­tion to evan­gel­i­cal­ism that shapes how adher­ents think about the body, sex­u­al­i­ty, and the fam­i­ly in ways that Catholic iden­ti­ty sim­ply doesn’t repli­cate — even among the most devout and polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the peo­ple in the pews aren’t inter­nal­iz­ing them the same way. And that gap between offi­cial teach­ing and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most inter­est­ing sto­ries in Amer­i­can reli­gion right now.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  6. Search­ing for God in Sil­i­con Val­ley (Avi­tal Bal­wit, The Free Press): “AI work­ers tend to be less reli­gious than the rest of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion. They are most­ly lapsed in their faith, or were nev­er reli­gious to begin with. Per­haps they were cir­cum­cised or bap­tized; now they may occa­sion­al­ly med­i­tate. This is, for the most part, a mate­ri­al­ist lot—by which I mean peo­ple for whom the world is atoms and phys­i­cal laws with noth­ing super­nat­ur­al left over, and for whom moral­i­ty is some­thing worked out from intu­ition or from phi­los­o­phy, rather than received from out­side the world.… Not all of them would say they are miss­ing some­thing, and I take the ones who say so at their word. But enough are vis­i­bly _searching_ that it is worth ask­ing what they are search­ing for.”
    • The author is chief of staff to Dario Amod­ei, the CEO of Anthrop­ic.
  7. Per­fect ran­dom­ness real­ized for the first time (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “…Wall­raf­f’s and Ren­ner’s teams have found a way to take imper­fect ran­dom­ness and still extract per­fect­ly ran­dom num­bers from it. They call their method ran­dom­ness ampli­fi­ca­tion.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 549: AI academia and Christian judges

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI and research papers (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “PubMed and Google Schol­ar are index­es of doc­u­ments. What we actu­al­ly want is an indexed, queryable map of _claims_ with their evi­dence and con­fi­dence lev­els. The paper is the prove­nance trail; the claim is the search­able unit. AI is already rea­son­ably good at extract­ing claims from papers; in 3–4 years it should be good enough to main­tain these data­bas­es reli­ably. A researcher ask­ing ‘what do we know about X’ should get a struc­tured con­fi­dence-weight­ed answer, not a list of PDFs to read.”
    • The bit I excerpt­ed is from Claude answer­ing a ques­tion from the author.
  2. How Reverse Game The­o­ry Could Solve The Hous­ing Short­age (Hen­nyGe Wich­ers, Noe­ma): “Tra­di­tion­al game the­o­ry assumes that the rules are fixed — the chess­board is set, the laws cod­i­fied — and asks how ratio­nal peo­ple will behave with­in them. It pre­dicts out­comes based on exist­ing incen­tives. Mech­a­nism design turns that ques­tion around: It asks, for exam­ple, what rules should we write to get a dif­fer­ent out­come — say, preser­va­tion and hous­ing?”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a read­er.
  3. What Does it Mean to Be a Chris­t­ian on the Bench? (Matthew J. Kac­s­maryk and James C. Ho, Jour­nal of Law and Civ­il Gov­er­nance at Texas A&M): “Many judges shy away from talk­ing open­ly about their faith— and even think such dis­cus­sions vio­late the judi­cial canons. That’s why I thought this dis­cus­sion was so valu­able. What’s your answer to the ques­tion: What does it mean to be a Chris­t­ian and a judge?”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Link is to a PDF.
  4. The Women Who Believe Women Should Lose the Right to Vote (Vivian Yee, New York Times): “On social media, the pas­tor has attract­ed a fol­low­ing by post­ing incen­di­ary com­men­tary: rail­ing against fem­i­nists, Catholics and gay peo­ple, describ­ing immi­gra­tion as ‘nation­al sui­cide,’ and label­ing Islam and Hin­duism ‘demon­ic.’ He also calls for eras­ing women’s suf­frage, which he lists as one rea­son ‘the world is falling apart.’ The 1920 pas­sage of the 19th Amend­ment, the land­mark leg­isla­tive achieve­ment of the move­ment to make women equal cit­i­zens, made it pos­si­ble for women across Amer­i­ca to vote. But for Mr. Par­tridge and a grow­ing num­ber of like-mind­ed Chris­tians, it drove Amer­i­ca into nation­al decline. Instead, they sup­port ‘house­hold vot­ing.’ One house­hold, one vote — the husband’s.”
  5. It’s Cool to Keep Calm (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Wall Street Jour­nal): “How you react dur­ing a con­flict doesn’t only change how oth­ers see _you_. Your reac­tion also changes how observers see the per­son with whom you’re argu­ing. Mak­ing some­one cry makes you look cold or insen­si­tive. So tears can dam­age the oth­er side’s rep­u­ta­tion. There’s a catch, though. The per­son who cries is also seen as less com­pe­tent, less pro­fes­sion­al and less desir­able as a friend or col­league. This cre­ates a trade-off. Cry­ing can hurt your opponent’s rep­u­ta­tion, but it hurts yours as well. Behav­ioral stoicism—maintaining a calm out­ward demeanor dur­ing a conflict—does the oppo­site. It pro­tects your own rep­u­ta­tion, but does lit­tle to dimin­ish the oth­er per­son.” — Remem­ber you have free access through Stan­ford.
  6. In a rare event, the moon got a mas­sive new crater (Lisa Gross­man, Sci­ence News): “The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robin­son said. Accord­ing to pre­dic­tions based on oth­er lunar land­marks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The dis­cov­ery can help high­light the risks impacts pose to future astro­nauts.”
  7. 9 things you (prob­a­bly) didn’t know were invent­ed at Stan­ford (Rebec­ca Bey­er, Stan­ford Report): “Long before the start-up era took hold, Stan­ford fac­ul­ty and stu­dents were dream­ing up inven­tions that trans­formed (and in some cas­es estab­lished) domains as far-rang­ing as genet­ic engi­neer­ing, nan­otech­nol­o­gy, organ trans­plan­ta­tion – even the inter­net itself.” — Heart trans­plants, the one-hand­ed bas­ket­ball shot, the com­put­er mouse, and recom­bi­nant DNA stood out to me.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • I Was Not Ready for the DMV (Greg War­ren, YouTube): eight and a half min­utes. Paula and I were so tick­led by this that we searched up one of his spe­cials and were equal­ly pleased.

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.

TGFI, Volume 536: Christian nationalism and Jesus in Home Alone

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

As the year comes to a close, remem­ber that this post is the over­flow of a non­prof­it min­istry. Com­pil­ing these links is some­thing I do for the stu­dents I min­is­ter to at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shar­ing it here is just me mak­ing it avail­able more broad­ly. You can donate to sup­port the min­istry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the con­tent — it only takes me five min­utes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha stu­dents and refor­mat it for this plat­form. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mis­sion of reach­ing Stan­ford stu­dents with a thought­ful gospel mes­sage.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that here until next Decem­ber.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email bless­es you and helps you think about God and our world more clear­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gift link: What We Get Wrong About Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “I got a taste of this vari­ety and dis­agree­ment when I vis­it­ed King’s Park Inter­na­tion­al Church in Durham, N.C. Chris­tians there look for God to heal the sick, reveal prophet­ic mes­sages and per­form oth­er signs and won­ders. The stranger thing, per­haps, is that both Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats attend. The church’s 120 elders, dea­cons and employ­ees are split ‘about half and half, Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat,’ Reg­gie Rober­son, the pas­tor, told me. The sev­er­al hun­dred peo­ple who wor­ship at King’s Park on an aver­age Sun­day are a mix of races, nation­al back­grounds, ages and income lev­els.”
    • Worth a read. Dr. Worthen is, of course, a well-known adult con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty. While she writes pos­i­tive­ly about charis­mat­ic Chris­tians here, she her­self is more of a South­ern Bap­tist. She’s a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at UNC.
  2. Gift link: Chris­tian­i­ty Is a Dan­ger­ous Faith (David French, New York Times): “There is an unspo­ken impli­ca­tion that peo­ple would actu­al­ly like Chris­tians if we behaved more like Christ. But no. That’s demon­stra­bly wrong. It’s true that peo­ple want to receive love and com­pas­sion, and that when they encounter Chris­tians who love them and serve them, they tend to like them. Many peo­ple do not, how­ev­er, appre­ci­ate it when a Chris­t­ian loves and serves their ene­mies. They absolute­ly do not like it when a Chris­t­ian refus­es to join their polit­i­cal cru­sade.”
  3. Some inter­na­tion­al Christ­mas sto­ries:
    • This Christ­mas will be even hard­er for China’s Chris­tians (Chris­t­ian Shep­herd and Huiy­ee Chiew, Wash­ing­ton Post): “While Zion has faced the most pres­sure, about half a dozen oth­er unreg­is­tered church­es have been sub­ject to police raids as well. Last week, hun­dreds of police offi­cers in riot gear descend­ed on a small town in Zhe­jiang province and arrest­ed two local pas­tors and dozens of Chris­tians, accord­ing to videos and accounts of the inci­dent shared with The Wash­ing­ton Post.… ‘The gov­ern­ment is inher­ent­ly sus­pi­cious of reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties, espe­cial­ly Chris­t­ian groups,’ said Kar­rie Koe­sel, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in Chi­nese pol­i­tics and reli­gion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame. Bei­jing views orga­nized reli­gion that pro­motes an alter­na­tive world­view and ‘answers to a high­er pow­er’ as poten­tial­ly an exis­ten­tial threat to its grip on pow­er, Koe­sel said. Church­es, mosques and oth­er places of wor­ship have faced intense pres­sure to accept strict gov­ern­ment over­sight. State-approved reli­gious lead­ers must sub­mit their ser­mons and pub­li­ca­tions for approval to ensure that they teach the ‘cor­rect under­stand­ing’ of the­ol­o­gy.”
    • Gaza’s tiny Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty tries to cap­ture the hol­i­day spir­it dur­ing the cease­fire (Mari­am Fam, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Tarazi and much of the rest of Gaza’s tiny Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty are try­ing to cap­ture some of the season’s spir­it despite the destruc­tion and uncer­tain­ty that sur­round them. He clings to hope and the faith that he said has seen him through the war. ‘I feel like our joy over Christ’s birth must sur­pass all the bit­ter­ness that we’ve been through,’ he said. He’s been shel­ter­ing for more than two years at the Holy Fam­i­ly Church com­pound in Gaza.… He prays for peace and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. ‘Our faith and our joy over Christ’s birth are stronger than all cir­cum­stances,’ he said.”
  4. How the Bible Helped Smash the Crown (Meir Solove­ichik, The Free Press): “Our pol­i­tics is con­sumed by cul­ture wars linked to religion—religious free­dom is a sub­ject dom­i­nat­ing debates in the Supreme Court. But the fact remains that shorn of bib­li­cal faith, no cogent expla­na­tion can be giv­en for the doc­trine of equal­i­ty that lies at the heart of the Amer­i­can creed. Indeed, the oth­er sources of antiq­ui­ty to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philoso­phers of Greece and the states­men of Rome—denied human equal­i­ty and held a world­view that there were those des­tined to rule and oth­ers born to serve.”
  5. Dis­cov­er­ing God in Hamas tun­nels, hostages led a nation­al trend (Dina Kraft, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor): “Sev­er­al recent stud­ies in Israel back up anec­do­tal evi­dence of an uptick in reli­gious con­nec­tion in response to Oct. 7 and the war that fol­lowed. In a poll by Hid­dush, an orga­ni­za­tion that advo­cates for the sep­a­ra­tion of reli­gion and state, 25% of respon­dents said those sem­i­nal events strength­ened their faith in God. Fifty-five per­cent said they had not impact­ed their faith, and 7% said they had weak­ened it. Researchers at The Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty found in a sur­vey of stu­dents that one-third expe­ri­enced an increase in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, while 9% said it decreased.”
  6. The diver­si­ty over­cor­rec­tion in the work­place (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For some mys­te­ri­ous rea­son, peo­ple con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate the minor­i­ty share of the pop­u­la­tion, which made the White­ness of news­rooms, Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments look more unfair than it was.… even if [there had not been past dis­crim­i­na­tion], news­rooms, writer’s rooms and class­rooms would have been very White because most Amer­i­cans born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were White. I sus­pect peo­ple for­got about these cohort effects because so much of the DEI dis­course came up around col­lege admis­sions, where diver­si­ty can be achieved rel­a­tive­ly speed­i­ly: admit a racial­ly bal­anced class four years in a row, and voilà, you ‘look like Amer­i­ca.’ But a large cor­po­rate employ­er often has a work­force span­ning 40 years, not four. Rebal­anc­ing that through rep­re­sen­ta­tive hir­ing would take decades. The DEI cham­pi­ons didn’t want to wait that long.”
    • McArdle’s point about the dif­fer­ence between cor­po­ra­tions and uni­ver­si­ties is an impor­tant one. It also explains why under­grad­u­ate pop­u­la­tions are far more diverse than uni­ver­si­ty fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tions.
  7. Gift link: The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore (Adam Frank, The Atlantic): “To tru­ly under­stand liv­ing sys­tems as self-orga­nized, autonomous agents, physi­cists need to aban­don their ‘just the par­ti­cles, ma’am’ men­tal­i­ty. One of physi­cists’ great talents—starting with the laws of sim­ple parts (such as atoms) and work­ing up to a com­plex whole—cannot ful­ly account for cells, ani­mals, or peo­ple.”
    • The author is an astro­physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.

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.

TGFI, volume 534: unfulfilled hopes and why the ESV is overrated

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 like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This week was espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to nar­row down to just 7 top-lev­el group­ings.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hop­ing for Right­ly Ordered Desires (O. Alan Noble, Sub­stack): “One of the most dif­fi­cult truths to inter­nal­ize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are right­ly ordered. For exam­ple, you may desire friend­ship or a spouse or chil­dren or a job, and none of them are giv­en to you. Or at least, not on the time­line you expect. Each of these are good desires, and when you desire them right­ly (not exces­sive­ly, not before God, not as idols, not self­ish­ly), they are good things to desire and work towards. But God, in his per­fect will, does not promise to give us all our earth­ly desires.”
  2. Bureau­cra­tiz­ing Faith (Stephen Eide, Library of Law & Lib­er­ty): “Those con­cerned about anti-Chris­t­ian bias often frame the FBO [faith-based orga­ni­za­tions] ques­tion as a reli­gious lib­er­ty mat­ter. That fram­ing only clar­i­fies whether reli­gious groups can con­tract with gov­ern­ment. It’s less help­ful in deter­min­ing whether they should. In gen­er­al, an orga­ni­za­tion spir­i­tu­al­ly moti­vat­ed to serve the poor may take pub­lic mon­ey to do so, as long as it doesn’t dis­crim­i­nate based on sect and doesn’t use tax­pay­er dol­lars to evan­ge­lize. But evan­ge­lism is pre­cise­ly how FBOs reach some peo­ple failed by sec­u­lar pro­grams.”
    • I real­ly liked this essay. Lots of great insights.
  3. To Be Hon­est.. I’m Strug­gling with the ESV (Loren­zo Figueroa Cusick, Sub­stack): “The ESV has been revised the fol­low­ing times: 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2025.  And when it is revised, it always claims to be sim­ply mod­est changes to bet­ter improve ‘accu­ra­cy and clar­i­ty’ (accord­ing to Cross­way). We can applaud when a Bible pub­lish­er wants to make the Bible even bet­ter for its users. Where it gets weird is the fact that they don’t iden­ti­fy (like the NASB, for exam­ple) when they do revise it. They don’t label it the ESV2001, ESV2002, ESV2007, etc. This leads to sit­u­a­tions where the Bible in your library or church bag is dif­fer­ent from the one used by the church.”
    • The ESV is a per­fect­ly ade­quate trans­la­tion — but some of the peo­ple who love it love it way too much. I pre­fer the NIV and the NET (which each have their own draw­backs, because no trans­la­tion is per­fect).
  4. Sor­ry, Liz Gilbert, Mar­ried Women Are (Increas­ing­ly) Hap­pi­est of All (Sophie Ander­son and Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “There’s only one prob­lem with the pro­gres­sive case against mar­riage and fam­i­ly for women: It’s com­plete­ly wrong. Today, mar­ried women live longer, earn more, and report more mean­ing in their lives, com­pared to sin­gle women. They are also marked­ly hap­pi­er than their sin­gle peers, accord­ing to recent research by psy­chol­o­gist Jean Twenge and col­leagues.… lib­er­al mar­ried moms are dra­mat­i­cal­ly more like­ly to say they are hap­py with their lives, com­pared to their sin­gle and child­less peers.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): How monog­a­mous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers. (Vic­to­ria Craw, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Pre­vi­ous work on the role of monogamy in human soci­ety­has relied on fos­sil records or com­par­i­son of mar­riage norms across cul­tures, Dyble said. His research stud­ied the data from human pop­u­la­tions and non­hu­man mam­mal species to find rates of full sib­lings, mean­ing those born to the same moth­er and father.… Analy­sis of near­ly 2 mil­lion human sib­ling rela­tion­ships and more than 60,000 mam­mal rela­tion­ships showed that the pro­por­tion of full sib­lings in the human groups ‘clus­ters close­ly’ with rates seen in social­ly monog­a­mous ani­mals and ‘con­sis­tent­ly exceeds rates seen in non-monog­a­mous mam­mals,’ Dyble wrote. He said the data showed there was a stark dif­fer­ence between groups that were con­sid­ered social­ly monog­a­mous and non­monog­a­mous, based on def­i­n­i­tions from a 2013 study by Cam­bridge researchers.”
  5. Pay Atten­tion to How You Pay Atten­tion (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “What Meta shows me is what Meta most want me to see, which is what­ev­er their pre­dic­tion mod­els believe will get me to spend as much time on their apps as pos­si­ble. The algo­rithms serve the company’s ends, not my ends. If Meta want­ed to know what I want to see, it could ask me. The tech­nol­o­gy has long exist­ed for users to shape their own rec­om­men­da­tions. These com­pa­nies do not offer us con­trol over what we see because they do not want us to have it. They do not want to be bound by who we seek to be tomor­row.”
    • A good essay with a poor title. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. No, You Are Not on Indige­nous Land (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Once the log­ic of land acknowl­edg­ments and ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ is fol­lowed, it leads very quick­ly to some very dark futures.… The gen­er­al prin­ci­ple here is that instead of a dark world of eth­nic cleans­ing in the name of ‘decol­o­niza­tion,’ we should try to build a bright future where Native Amer­i­cans and the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca exist in har­mo­ny and coop­er­a­tion rather than in con­flict.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed even if you think you know what it will say based on the title and the excerpt. The arti­cle has some sur­pris­es.
  7. The Mak­ing of a Tech­no-Nation­al­ist Elite (Tan­ner Greer, Amer­i­can Affairs): “The eco­nom­ic, social, and polit­i­cal activ­i­ties of the East­ern Estab­lish­ment were mutu­al­ly rein­forc­ing pil­lars of a larg­er pro­gram. Mem­bers of the Estab­lish­ment used the wealth gen­er­at­ed by new tech­nolo­gies to secure polit­i­cal influ­ence, used that influ­ence to sus­tain a nation­al mar­ket and legal frame­work geared for yet more tech­no­log­i­cal expan­sion, and then presided over a con­scious effort to pre­serve and trans­mit the val­ues of their class to future gen­er­a­tions, ensur­ing that the uni­ty and dis­ci­pline they gained in shared strug­gle would not dis­si­pate amid pow­er and pros­per­i­ty. Through these means, a tech­no-nation­al­ist elite guid­ed America’s devel­op­ment for more than sev­en­ty years. Under its stew­ard­ship, the Unit­ed States became the world’s wealth­i­est, most indus­tri­al­ly advanced, and most pow­er­ful nation: a true tech­no­log­i­cal repub­lic.… Behind the East­ern Estab­lish­ment stood a dense web of per­son­al ties that bound its fam­i­lies togeth­er. Many of these ties were con­sum­mat­ed, quite lit­er­al­ly, on the mar­riage bed. Karp and Zamiska are loathe to think in these terms. They write a great deal about the engi­neer­ing elite’s wan­ing com­mit­ment to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, but they have lit­tle to say about its wan­ing com­mit­ment to rais­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of that civ­i­liza­tion. The East­ern Estab­lish­ment was self-con­scious­ly repro­duc­tive: it built schools, endowed uni­ver­si­ties, and found­ed lit­er­al dynas­ties. Part of build­ing ‘a shared cul­ture … that will make pos­si­ble our con­tin­ued sur­vival’ is cre­at­ing the chil­dren who will sur­vive us.”
    • Excel­lent. Long but rec­om­mend­ed. Also, OUCH. The clos­ing four para­graphs of this book review are absolute­ly bru­tal.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 511: CPS, prosperity, & journalism



On Fri­days — some­times Sat­ur­days when Fri­day is a hol­i­day — 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

  1. ICE Goes After Church Lead­ers and Chris­tians Flee­ing Per­se­cu­tion (Andy Olsen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pas­tor asks if he can go with them or even fol­low them. ‘They need me,’ he says. An agent says the pas­tor can­not go with them. Torosian tells the agents that the cou­ple was per­se­cut­ed in Iran and fled because of their faith. The agents don’t respond. ‘They came here for free­dom, not like this,’ Torosian tells the agents. ‘I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this gov­ern­ment.’”
  2. Does CPS Inves­ti­gate One Third of All Chil­dren in the US? (Maxwell Tabar­rok, Sub­stack): “Does CPS inves­ti­gate one out of every three Amer­i­can chil­dren? The answer to this one is not avail­able direct­ly in the pri­ma­ry source reports and the under­ly­ing data is only avail­able after an appli­ca­tion for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty school of pub­lic health. They down­load and de-dupli­cate the mas­ter data files from 2003–2014 and con­firm that 37% of Amer­i­can chil­dren are the sub­ject of at least one screened-in refer­ral to CPS from ages 0–18.”
  3. Have You Heard the Good News? (Clif­ford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, The Free Press): “Yes, we have real prob­lems. But widen the aper­ture, and you’ll see that there has nev­er been a bet­ter time to be alive than the present day.… a rel­a­tive stan­dard will always find rel­a­tive pover­ty. But using an absolute stan­dard finds that income pover­ty is below 6 per­cent. On a con­sump­tion basis, well over 20 per­cent of house­holds were in pover­ty in the 1960s, and 11 per­cent were in pover­ty in 1990. Today, the con­sump­tion pover­ty rate is around 1 per­cent.”
  4. When We Start­ed To Lie (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “Peo­ple writ­ing let­ters com­plain­ing about press errors and demand­ing cor­rec­tions, then and now, miss the point: These aren’t errors. They’re the result of the press doing a dif­fer­ent job cor­rect­ly.”
  5. Duke Law Jour­nal Sent a Secret Memo to Minor­i­ty Appli­cants Telling Them They’d Get Extra Points for Writ­ing About Their Race (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “When the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action in 2023, it said that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties could not use essays as a Tro­jan horse for racial pref­er­ences. The doc­u­ments from Duke illus­trate how a top law review has skirt­ed that direc­tive, cre­at­ing a points-based sys­tem that fore­grounds race and could put the law school in legal jeop­ardy.… The pack­et was over­seen by jour­nal edi­tor in chief Gabriela Nagle Alve­rio, who received her B.A. in Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty Stud­ies from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty…”
  6. You Don’t Need the Same Pol­i­tics to Surf Togeth­er (David Litt, The Free Press): “But over the years, Matt and I got to know each oth­er bet­ter, and the bet­ter we got to know each oth­er, the clear­er it became that we had absolute­ly noth­ing in com­mon. He was into Ulti­mate Fight­ing; I was into Ulti­mate Fris­bee. He was cov­ered in tat­toos; I was cov­ered in J.Crew. His def­i­n­i­tion of a work­place injury was death by vio­lent elec­tric shock; mine was carpal tun­nel syn­drome.”
  7. Where I Learned the Pow­er of Look­ing at Every­thing (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “Hav­ing arrived ear­ly for the cer­e­mo­ny, I lin­gered near Sather Gate, with its ornate pati­nat­ed met­al­work, and then head­ed toward Doe Library, where I used to not study and stared at peo­ple instead. Every­thing glowed with a kind of insti­tu­tion­al grandeur. My super­ego scold­ed me fur­ther: ‘Look where you were! The best pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty in the world, only to squan­der your luck!’ The beau­ty of the cam­pus, which I had no mem­o­ry of appre­ci­at­ing, seemed almost crush­ing in its majesty.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 485



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.

In this first email of 2025, I’d like to pass along an alum­nus’s obser­va­tion that 2025 is equal to 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93 which is also equal to (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)2.

Even cool­er, he point­ed out that 2025 equals (20+25)(20/(2*5)) or just (20+25)2

Num­bers do fun things.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Intel­lec­tu­als Found God (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “Instead of smirk­ing at reli­gion, some of our most impor­tant philoso­phers, nov­el­ists, and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als are now reassess­ing their con­tempt for it. They are won­der­ing if they might have missed some­thing.”
  2. H5N1: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I con­clude that the most plau­si­ble esti­mate for the chance of an H5N1 pan­dem­ic in the next year is 5%.”
    • Pret­ty much exact­ly how much I want­ed to know and explained well. Reas­sur­ing.
  3. How to like every­thing more (Sasha Chapin, Sub­stack): “In my expe­ri­ence, high-lev­el enjoy­ment, like a sport, is com­posed of many inter­lock­ing micro-skills that must be trained indi­vid­u­al­ly, but which rein­force each oth­er.”
  4. Amer­i­ca, the beau­ti­ful (Chris Arnade, Sub­stack): “We are an ide­al for a large por­tion of the world, and while that ide­al isn’t always a real­i­ty that we live up to, very few peo­ple come here, then turn around and go back, because with enough ded­i­ca­tion, you can cre­ate your own form of ful­fill­ment here. The US is a vast fed­er­a­tion of micro com­mu­ni­ties and micro cul­tures, all bound togeth­er by the belief, how­ev­er ten­ta­tive and neb­u­lous, in the Amer­i­can Dream.”
    • A fre­quent crit­ic of Amer­i­ca explains why he loves it nonethe­less.
  5. Africa Has Entered a New Era of War (Gabriele Stein­hauser, Andrew Bar­nett and Emma Brown, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Africa is now expe­ri­enc­ing more con­flicts than at any point since at least 1946, accord­ing to data col­lect­ed by Upp­sala Uni­ver­si­ty in Swe­den and ana­lyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Insti­tute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two insti­tutes have iden­ti­fied 28 state-based con­flicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 coun­tries, more than in any oth­er region in the world and dou­ble the count just a decade and a half ago. That tal­ly doesn’t include con­flicts that don’t involve gov­ern­ment forces, for instance between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, and whose num­ber has also dou­bled since 2010.”
    • Vast­ly under­re­port­ed in Amer­i­ca. If you ask most Amer­i­cans what wars are rag­ing right now they’d be able to iden­ti­fy Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas and not much else. But there’s a lot else. Wikipedi­a’s sum­ma­ry puts the cur­rent tal­ly at 19 full-blown wars, 20 sig­nif­i­cant con­flicts and 15 skir­mish­es.
  6. Can You Can­cel a Coun­try? (Russ Roberts, Sub­stack): “The fans of set­tler colo­nial­ism love hat­ing Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return Amer­i­ca to 1619, say. In Amer­i­ca, there are over 325 mil­lion set­tlers and only 7 mil­lion Native Amer­i­cans. Decol­o­niz­ing the Unit­ed States is unimag­in­able. So is decol­o­niz­ing Israel, real­ly. But it’s more imag­in­able than the Unit­ed States. The defend­ers of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fight­ing against ter­ror­ism and Jihadism. For the those who use the set­tler colo­nial­ism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against set­tler colo­nial­ism.”
    • Roberts is an econ­o­mist, a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion, and the pres­i­dent of Shalem Col­lege in Jerusalem.
  7. A Cen­tu­ry of Human Detri­tus, Visu­al­ized (Den­nis Over­bye, New York Times): “ ‘The web­site enables many com­par­isons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,’ he said. For instance, humans out­weigh wild ani­mals 10 to 1, a fact that sur­prised Dr. Ménard. (‘In my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple expect the oppo­site.’) But we weigh only half as much as the live­stock herds we main­tain to eat. Per­haps more omi­nous­ly, humans use 100 times their own mass in plas­tic.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 460



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 460, a large­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber. It’s a mul­ti­ple of 23, so I guess that’s kin­da cool (for a cer­tain def­i­n­i­tion of cool).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Your Con­sti­tu­tion­al Right to Be a Pirate (A.J. Jacobs, The Free Press): “It may not get much pub­lic­i­ty, but there it is, smack-dab in Arti­cle I, Sec­tion 8 of the Con­sti­tu­tion: Con­gress has the pow­er to grant cit­i­zens ‘let­ters of mar­que and reprisal.’ Mean­ing that, with Congress’s per­mis­sion, pri­vate cit­i­zens can load weapons onto their fish­ing boats, head out to the high seas, cap­ture ene­my ves­sels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patri­ot­ic pirates were known as ‘pri­va­teers.’ ”
  2. the Pen­ta­teuch in brief out­line (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “As Robert Alter has point­ed out, the long-time obses­sion with sources among schol­ars of the Hebrew Bible — their slight­ly mad-eyed teas­ing out of the con­tri­bu­tions of their posit­ed authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assump­tion that ‘the redac­tors were in the grip of a kind of man­ic trib­al com­pul­sion, dri­ven again and again to include units of tra­di­tion­al mate­r­i­al … for rea­sons they them­selves could not have explained.’ Yet if that were true, why does an out­line of the Pen­ta­teuch look so order­ly — indeed, almost exces­sive­ly so?”
  3. The Codger-in-Chief (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “[We are see­ing] cov­er­age that bears more of a pass­ing resem­blance to what I saw dur­ing the Tod­dler-in-Chief days. In oth­er words, there are some dis­turb­ing par­al­lels in how Biden’s staffers are talk­ing about him to the press when com­pared to Trump’s White House staffers. Fur­ther­more, I strong­ly sus­pect the staffers now talk­ing to the press are high­er-rank­ing than, say, the deputy direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy.”
    • I read a lot of post-debate arti­cles, most of them strong­ly par­ti­san one way or the oth­er. This one sum­ma­rizes a lot of threads well. The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Tufts.
    • Not direct­ly relat­ed, but also relat­ed to the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion — My Unset­tling Inter­view With Steve Ban­non (David Brooks, New York Times): “I should empha­size that I wasn’t try­ing to debate Ban­non or rebut his beliefs; I want­ed to under­stand how he sees the cur­rent moment. I want­ed to under­stand the glob­al pop­ulist surge from the inside.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Unlocked.
  4. Notes From a For­mer­ly Unpromis­ing Young Per­son (Rebec­ca Sny­der, New York Times): “My sit­u­a­tion was this: I was fin­ish­ing my sopho­more year of high school and had prob­a­bly attend­ed few­er days than I’d missed. I’d failed near­ly all my class­es, and my tran­script boast­ed a 0.47. (I say ‘boast­ed’ because you real­ly do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spec­tac­u­lar­ly.) Then there were the fist­fights. The weed. The acid.… [Yet] some­one had tak­en the time to meet me, to lis­ten and to ulti­mate­ly believe I had poten­tial. When Mr. Spencer sat in the admis­sions office of North Cen­tral Col­lege and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Sny­der,’ those were prob­a­bly the most impor­tant words of my life.”
  5. Why a New Con­ser­v­a­tive Brain Trust Is Reset­tling Across Amer­i­ca (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The idea was a ‘fra­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ty,’ as one leader put it, that pri­or­i­tized in-per­son meet­ings. The result was the all-male Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, an invi­ta­tion-only social orga­ni­za­tion reserved for Chris­tians.… Mem­bers must be male, belong to a ‘Trini­tar­i­an Chris­t­ian’ church, a broad cat­e­go­ry that includes Catholics and Protes­tants, but not mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints. Mem­bers must also describe them­selves as ‘unhy­phen­at­ed Amer­i­cans,’ a ref­er­ence to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urg­ing the full assim­i­la­tion of immi­grants.”
    • Both the exis­tence of this move­ment and the way it is report­ed on are inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  6. Lov­ing Amer­i­ca Means Expect­ing More From It (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Too often we wor­ry that if we tell our chil­dren about our com­plex and some­times dark his­to­ry, their response will be debil­i­tat­ing shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gap­ing chasm between our ideals and prac­tices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pur­sue new goods.”
  7. Revival and Rev­o­lu­tion (John Fea, Com­mon­weal): “Since Evan­gel­i­cal­ism is an inher­ent­ly pop­ulist and anti-intel­lec­tu­al move­ment, most born-again Chris­tians do not trust aca­d­e­mics and rely instead on such ‘experts.’ When they need to know some­thing about sci­ence, they turn to Ken Ham, host of the pop­u­lar radio show Answers in Gen­e­sis and founder of the Cre­ation Muse­um in Peters­burg, Ken­tucky. They get their psy­chol­o­gy and social phi­los­o­phy from James Dob­son, the long­time cul­ture war­rior and founder of the lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion Focus on the Fam­i­ly. Their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy comes from sources like Fox News’s Sean Han­ni­ty, the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Stand­ing for Free­dom Cen­ter, or the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Pat Robertson’s Regent Uni­ver­si­ty. And for Amer­i­can his­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cals turn to David Bar­ton, the founder and CEO of Wall­Builders, an Evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion in Ale­do, Texas.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry prof at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 383

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I offi­ci­ate a wed­ding on Fri­day — con­grats Alex & Andrea!) 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.

Hap­py New Year! Most of my read­ers know this, but this bun­dle of links is an over­flow from a min­istry called Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Today is Decem­ber 31st, which is the biggest giv­ing day of the year. If you are inclined toward gen­eros­i­ty on New Year’s Eve, con­sid­er mak­ing a year-end dona­tion to sup­port the min­istry.

This is vol­ume 383, which is both a prime num­ber and a palin­drome. Not too shab­by, 383. Hold your head up high among the num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rea­sons to believe, Christ­mas edi­tion:
    • How Would You Prove That God Per­formed a Mir­a­cle? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “Josh Brown directs the pro­gram in neu­ro­science at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Bloom­ing­ton. He has pub­lished dozens of arti­cles on top­ics like the neur­al basis of deci­sion mak­ing in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glass­es and a calm, method­i­cal way of speak­ing. And after almost two decades of keep­ing rel­a­tive­ly qui­et, he is now speak­ing open­ly about his most sur­pris­ing research find­ing: He believes that God mirac­u­lous­ly healed him of a brain tumor.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a his­to­ri­an at UNC.
    • When Mary Met the Angel (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘Sci­ence is the descrip­tion of how God choos­es to work most of the time,’ writes Rus­sell Cow­burn, a pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. ‘We know dead bod­ies don’t come back to life accord­ing to sci­ence. And yet Chris­tian­i­ty is built on the obser­va­tion that Jesus came back to life. I am very hap­py to say that at that spe­cial moment, God was act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly.’ Like many oth­er world-class sci­en­tists I’ve interviewed—including Fran­cis Collins, for­mer direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health—Prof. Cow­burn came to faith in Jesus as an adult. He is not just try­ing to make sci­en­tif­ic sense of a child­hood faith that he can­not shed.”
      • Dis­claimer: I know the author and am thrilled she was invit­ed to write about faith for the WSJ.
    • A Christ­mas Con­ver­sa­tion About Christ (Nico­las Kristof inter­view­ing Rus­sell Moore, New York Times): “The most impor­tant blind spot is per­haps miss­ing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We real­ly do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deep­est long­ings of the human heart. I would just rec­om­mend that peo­ple read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times read­ers, too.”
  2. A Dark­ness Revealed (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…the great chal­lenge here, as ever, is to strive to see our ances­tors and our con­tem­po­raries with moral clar­i­ty, not white­wash­ing their sins and fail­ings with poet­ic mem­o­ry, while also rec­og­niz­ing their virtues — and in all cas­es, nev­er, ever allow­ing their full human­i­ty, the good and the bad alike, to be assim­i­lat­ed into the realm of ideas.”
    • I found this grip­ping. A man wres­tles with the not-entire­ly-sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion that his father was in the KKK.
  3. Urbana Mis­sions Con­fer­ence That Once Drew 20,000 Expect­ed to Fall Far Short (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry Watch): “Jao said that lin­ger­ing con­cerns over COVID-19 and the country’s eco­nom­ic woes are help­ing to dri­ve pro­ject­ed atten­dance down for the con­fer­ence, usu­al­ly held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pan­dem­ic. Like many church­es, he said, Inter­Var­si­ty and oth­er cam­pus min­istries are still rebuild­ing their atten­dance.”
  4. Our First Close­up Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Num­bers Pas­tel Draw­ing (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew with­in 6,118 miles of the sur­face of Mars, cap­tur­ing images as it passed over the plan­et. The image data was trans­mit­ted back to sci­en­tists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quick­ly ren­der a pho­to­graph from it. They deter­mined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imag­ing data as a series of num­bers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pas­tels from a near­by art store, and do a paint-by-num­bers job with the pas­tels on the data grid.”
    • This is actu­al­ly beau­ti­ful.
  5. Amer­i­cans Have Found Their Hap­py Place (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Two econ­o­mists, David G. Blanch­flower of Dart­mouth and Alex Bryson of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, have come up with a new and more intu­itive way to mea­sure well-being. The results are strik­ing. If you con­sid­er US states as com­pa­ra­ble to coun­tries, 16 of the top 20 polit­i­cal units in the world for well-being are in the US — includ­ing the top sev­en.”
  6. The Media Very Rarely Lies (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The point is: the media rarely lies explic­it­ly and direct­ly. Reporters rarely say spe­cif­ic things they know to be false. When the media mis­in­forms peo­ple, it does so by mis­in­ter­pret­ing things, exclud­ing con­text, or sig­nal-boost­ing some events while ignor­ing oth­ers, not by par­tic­i­pat­ing in some bright-line cat­e­go­ry called ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’.”
    • Fol­low-up: Sor­ry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I find it real­ly inter­est­ing that so many com­menters were so resis­tant to the idea that the worst and dumb­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of our time don’t involve out­right lies. I think all of us — not just cen­sors — want to main­tain the com­fort­ing illu­sion that the bad peo­ple are doing some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the good peo­ple, some­thing that marks them as Obvi­ous­ly Bad in bright neon paint.”
  7. Is the right win­ning the com­e­dy wars? (Con­stance Grady, Vox): “It’s as though there’s some sort of fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect between right and left on the issue of com­e­dy. On a very basic lev­el, the two sides seem to dis­agree on the ques­tion of what a joke should look like, what it’s okay to joke about, and what is so under threat that to joke about it would be unthink­able. No one seems sure how to talk about the dif­fer­ence, exact­ly. They just know that they want to be the fun­ny ones.”

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 Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion). From vol­ume 259

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.