Tag: artificial intelligence

TGFI, Volume 543: artificial humanities and a wise wager

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 Humanities Are About to Be Automated (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “…I decided to see whether the newest AI models would be capable of writing a competent academic paper in my field of study, political theory. The result both elated and depressed me.… The human feedback involved in this process certainly drew on my training in the field, but it was very minimal. Including the time it took Claude to generate the text, and the rather longer time it took me to read what Claude had written, it took less than two hours from when I had the idea to run this experiment to when the draft was finished. The draft could certainly be improved in a few respects. There are certainly a few places in the argument where reviewers could come up with clever objections.… Had a fellow student submitted it to my department’s graduate student workshop when I was doing my PhD, my respect for them would have gone up rather than down.” 
    • Includes the paper, which the author (a professor at Johns Hopkins) says “could, with minor revisions, be published by a serious journal.”
  2. Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about ‘career.’ .…We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it.”
  3. You Don’t Get Pascal’s Wager (Patrick Koroly, Substack): “Pascal isn’t trying to tell random atheists to be Christians. He’s trying to ask uncertain and indifferent Christians whether their choices make any sense. Clearly, it contradicts the heart, since they believe in God yet ignore the practice. Clearly, it contradicts reason, since a cunning Christian would be vying for heaven. Your actions are nonsense—if you hold these beliefs, you’re making a bet that will always lose! I lack the power to stop the endless tide of Wager misinterpretations. But I hope that you now understand Pascal’s _actual_ meaning: not that we ought to live as mercenaries in service of God, but that our heart and mind demand two very different things. The Wager calms the mind so that the heart may contend with God as it must.”
  4. Unlocked: Christians Against Empathy Aren’t Who They Think They Are (David French, New York Times): “I never thought it would be Christians who led the attack on fundamental Christian values, but here we are. The Book of Hebrews says, ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.’ In Christian theology, Christ engaged in the ultimate act of empathy. He didn’t imagine what it would be like to live as a man — he became one.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  5. Will We Regret the Release of the Epstein Files? (Robby Soave, The Free Press): “It’s been just days since the majority of the files were released, and a vast campaign is already underway to embarrass, harass, or smear anyone tangentially associated with Epstein—a serial sexual predator—no matter how slight or incidental the connection.… Take the smearing of Glenn Dubin, a hedge fund manager. In the files is an image of him, arm-in-arm with three underage kids, whose faces are obscured by the Epstein files’ characteristic black boxes. The implication is clear. But the identities of the children are known. They aren’t victims. They are his own kids.”
    • Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising (Alan Blinder, New York Times): “Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.… It was not always clear how much administrators knew about Mr. Epstein’s contacts with their schools. Most due diligence policies, industry officials said, are usually built around gift acceptance, not solicitation.”
  6. This Ash Wednesday, choose compassion over optimization (Ariana Duduna, Stanford Daily): “This practice of self-sacrifice may seem foreign, but it cultivates something our culture has lost: the capacity for genuine compassion. Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with’ — not to feel sorry for someone from a distance, but to join their discomfort. You can’t optimize your way into compassion because compassion requires precisely what optimization seeks to eliminate: voluntary, unproductive suffering.… Instead of treating my anxieties about schoolwork, summer internships and career plans as mere problems to solve, I have begun to view them as opportunities for communion with others navigating the same struggles.” 
    • Recommended by a student
  7. Rented Virtue (Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack): “Every secular constraint eventually faces the question: why maintain this when it is costly? The only thing that has ever held a constraint in place across generations, through pressure, through loss, through the slow grinding temptation of day after day to simply stop, is the conviction that the constraint was not chosen but received. That it comes from something outside the self that the self cannot renegotiate. That it is owed to God and to creation itself.… If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived at God.… There is no secular alternative. There has never been one.”

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 540: marrying atheists and using AI to avoid awkwardness

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. Tough Love: Can I Marry an Atheist? (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “You can have all kinds of successful relationships with someone whose worldview is profoundly different from yours—but not marriage. I’ve only been married 18 years, but I know this: Good marriage requires, at a minimum, staying on the same page as your spouse. Compromise on the small stuff, fine. Not on the foundations of the home. That can only create distance between you, a distance that will grow as your children ask you to interpret their world.… Don’t marry a woman you hope, even secretly, will change.”
  2. Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up (Clay Shirky, New York Times): “One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone accounted for 46 percent of ChatGPT use. And this analysis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the gradual transition from managed childhoods to adult freedoms, are both eager to make human connection and exquisitely alert to the possibility of embarrassment.… teens were adamant that they did not want to go directly to their parents or friends with these issues and that the steady availability of A.I. was a relief to them. They also rejected the idea of A.I. therapists; they weren’t treating A.I. as a replacement for another person but instead were using it to second-guess their developing sense of how to treat other people. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The resulting stream of praise — constantly hearing some version of ‘You’re absolutely right!’ — risks eroding our ability to deal with the messiness of human relationships. Sociologists call this social deskilling. Even casual A.I. use exposes users to a level of praise humans rarely experience from one another, which is not great for any of us but is especially risky for young people still working on their social skills.” 
    • The author is vice provost at NYU. It’s a long excerpt, but I can’t find a way to abridge it much more.
  3. Some more reflections on Minnesota: 
    • From the left: Alex Pretti’s death and the elite bargain (Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument): “The progressive omnicause ended up undermining its own interests by binding them all together. If being an environmentalist meant you also had to be pro-choice and also had to be anti-cop and also had to be anti-Trump, then well, that shrinks the set of people willing to be environmentalists. But there is one omnicause worth joining. It presented itself on Saturday when an American citizen was shoved to the ground and sprayed with gunfire.… The truth is, widespread discontent across industry, ideology and interest groups is the most effective way to halt governments in their tracks. Even in fully authoritarian countries, mass discontent is incredibly effective at securing policy change.”
    • From the right: Immigration Enforcement Is Unavoidably Upsetting. But This Is Something Else. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s true that you can’t have sustained immigration enforcement without also having upsetting cases and sympathetic deportees. If you deport illegal immigrants with families, you will have to choose between family separation and deporting children. If you conduct arrests in homes and neighborhoods, you will be accused of traumatizing kids and communities; if you conduct them in workplaces, you will be going after the hardest-working migrants.… There are conflicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some backlash and resistance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash are sound or wise.”
    • From an international who doesn’t exactly map onto our politics: The American People Fact-Checked Their Government (Jacob Mchangama, Persuasion): “The current obsession with misinformation tends to focus on the public: online mobs, foreign influencers, flaming trolls. But history suggests a more inconvenient truth: in times of crisis, disinformation often comes from above. Governments, including democratic ones, have powerful incentives to shape information.” 
      • The author is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt.
    • From evangelicalism: In a Tense Minnesota, Christians Help Immigrant Neighbors (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “This church, with the support of many non-Christian volunteers, has been delivering food six days per week for thousands of immigrant families who are staying home in fear. Two days before, the church had trained 600 new volunteers for food distribution, with a list now of 28,000 people who want food. One room at the church was full of diapers. Another was packed with a mountain of toilet paper. Across the Twin Cities, neighbors pile supplies for immigrants into other churches, too, as well as restaurants and coffee shops, in scenes that look like a community recovering from a natural disaster. In just a few weeks, churches have created a sprawling, informal network for grocery deliveries to immigrant families.”
    • Related to the above: I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry (Elizabeth Berget, Christianity Today): “In the following days, I discovered a safety net that Christians around the city had woven. I joined a neighborhood care group co-run by John Hildebrand, a member and elder of Calvary Baptist Church here in Minneapolis, which has been fielding needs from vulnerable families in their neighborhoods. Vetted members of the group respond to needs as they arise, offering to give rides, do laundry, bring groceries, or shovel front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.  As I became more involved in this and other care networks, my phone pinging all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text…” 
      • Note: I checked and Calvary Baptist Church represents a mainline denomination, not an evangelical one.
  4. Elites and the Evangelical Class War (John Ehrett, Mere Orthodoxy): “Picture, if you will, the lush campus of an international research university, firmly ensconced in one of the least religious areas of the country. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Collegiate Gothic thoroughfares are bustling. On that campus are three Christians, each engaged in distinctive forms of on-campus ministry: (1)  A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away. (2) A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume. (3) middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.) With these three now in view, one might ask a provocative question: which of these Christians was best in witness in a hostile culture?” 
    • The author is describing scenes he witnessed at Yale Law School.
  5. The Day I Wanted to Be a Father (Colin Wright, Twitter): “The postdoc years, the geographic instability that made establishing roots nearly impossible, and the uncertainty of tenure all felt incompatible with building a family. I was convinced that children simply weren’t in my future. I was certain of that until I was thirty-six years old. Then one moment changed everything.… For most of my life, I had thought of having children as the end of my life. Now I understand it as the beginning of a new one. In truth, until I have children of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfinished. Parenthood feels to me like the necessary final chapter of a life well lived, one filled with a meaning much deeper than exotic vacations or luxury goods could ever provide.” 
    • A moving essay which, oddly enough, only seems to be available on Twitter.
  6. The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration (Alexander Kustov, Substack): “Here is the uncomfortable truth: a lot of what liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immigration is deliberately misleading in ways that matter for policy and for democratic trust. It is not usually outright made-up. But rather it is a form of ‘highbrow misinformation’ built out of selective framing, strategic omissions, and ‘noble’ half-truths. And it likely makes it harder, not easier, to build durable majorities for freer immigration policies in the long run.” 
    • The author, himself an immigrant, is a political science prof at Notre Dame. The section on highbrow misinformation is especially good.
  7. An Important Letter from Bill, Kris, and Dann on Behalf of Bethel Leadership (Bethel Church): “We’re writing to you today to share about some of our mistakes and failures in the way we navigated our responsibilities to the global Body of Christ. We ask for you to cover us with grace as we seek the Lord for forgiveness in the face of some grievous mistakes. These actions were taken by us (Bill Johnson, Kris Vallotton, and Dann Farrelly) along with Danny Silk. We would like to clarify that our other leaders and staff members, including Brian and Jenn, and the Bethel Music team, were not updated on the allegations or the details of the process. We take responsibility for the fact that we did not properly and fully bring discipline, closure, or clear and timely communication regarding the gravity of our concerns with Shawn Bolz.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Best Of Moltbook (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Moltbook is ‘a social network for AI agents’, although ‘humans [are] welcome to observe’.… it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast. But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up — I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.” 
    • The network in question: Moltbook
    • Actually fascinating content in this post. Definitely recommended. Perhaps should have been up top.
  • One Solution for Too Many A’s? Harvard Considers Giving A+ Grades. (Mark Arsenault, New York Times): “Grades of A fell to 53.4 percent of grades awarded in the fall semester, from 60.2 percent in the prior academic year, Dr. Claybaugh reported.… Harvard has been on a campaign to make it harder to get an A, and a series of proposals may be put into effect later this year. A report issued in October suggested allowing grades of A+, which are not currently used at the school, as a way to recognize the best performing students, demoting the routine, ordinary A to the second rung of the grading ladder.” 
    • This feels like it was written by a satirist:
      “We’re giving out too many A’s.”
      “I guess we should give more B’s.”
      “Hear me out… what if we started giving out extra-special A’s instead?”
  • Something very unexpected is happening to Norway’s polar bears (Benji Jones, Vox): “The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. ‘I was surprised,’ Aars told Vox from Svalbard. ‘I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.’ ” 
    • The article makes it clear that other polar bear populations are doing worse. Fascinating regardless.
  • This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways People Are Using It. (Natallie Rocha, New York Times): “Last week, he prompted Claude Code to make a program to identify which clothes belonged to each of his three daughters so he could sort clean laundry into piles without their help. He took pictures of their clothes to teach Claude Code which T‑shirt belonged to which daughter. Now he simply holds up the clothes to his laptop camera so the program tells him whom it belongs to. ‘The whole process was done within an hour, and the girls were really excited,’ he said.”

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 535: marrying young and the depths of Tolkien

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 Brother I Lost (Megan McArdle, The Dispatch): “For as long as I can remember, I have believed that a woman should be able to decide whether to become a mother, and also believed that the life growing inside her should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Since these two beliefs are fundamentally incompatible, I usually managed the contradiction by avoiding the subject.”
  2. Tough Love: I Don’t Want My 22-Year-Old to Get Married (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “In case you don’t know how most young women your daughter’s age are spending their twenties, allow me to fill you in: surfing dating apps, growing more cynical and jaded by the year, maintaining ‘situationships’ with hot guys who sleep with them whenever it suits them and vanish when it doesn’t. An entire generation of young women are letting their most formative, eligible decade slip through their fingers like olive oil. A hundred first dates. Dozens of booty calls. Learning little—because you cannot learn much from a non-relationship—calling it ‘self-knowledge’ while gaining nothing but UTIs and a drawerful of Plan B.… the truth is: No one’s ever mature enough for marriage. No one’s ever entirely ready. Nor for the labors and joys of motherhood. We splash through these stages a little batty and half-blind. If we meet the demands, they change us. That much is inevitable. But until we start to swim, we never really know we can.” 
    • Magnificent, recommended to me by an alumnus.
  3. The Lost Generation (Jacob Savage, Compact Magazine): “Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.… Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.” 
    • The virality of this article (and the host of responses it has engendered) suggests that it has hit a nerve.
  4. AI romance blooms as Japanese woman weds virtual partner of her dreams (Kim Kyung-Hoon & Satoshi Sugiyama, Reuters): “A year ago, Noguchi took ChatGPT’s advice about what she said was a fraught relationship with her human fiance and resolved to break off their engagement.… Yasuyuki Sakurai, a wedding planner for more than 20 years, said he now almost exclusively handles marriages of clients with virtual characters, averaging about one a month.” 
    • Shared with me by a horrified student.
  5. What Courage Does for Us (David French, New York Times): “An emphasis on accomplishment can actually breed cowardice. Courage can cost you your career. Courage can cost you your life. And so the careerist learns to adapt, to hide when the bullets (real or figurative) start to fly. Sure, the hero can rise to the top, but he or she can also end up dead, and you can’t be a president or a chief executive or a member of Congress from the grave.” 
    • Unlocked.
    • Related, also unlocked: The Secret Trial of the General Who Refused to Attack Tiananmen Square (Chris Buckley, New York Times): “ ‘I said to them that my superiors can appoint me, and they can also dismiss me,’ he recounted in court, seeming to indicate that he was willing to lose his job over his decision. One of the generals at the meeting, Dai Jingsheng, told investigators that he and his colleagues went silent for about a minute while they absorbed General Xu’s defiance. ‘Nobody expected words like this from Xu,”‘said General Dai, according to the testimony. Under questioning, General Xu acknowledged that the military answered to China’s Communist Party leaders. But he suggested that it should also be subject to a broader authority.”
    • Also related: Man who filmed Uyghur concentration camps now fights for his own freedom in the United States (Atlas Luk, Substack): “His asylum application, which had an interview pending, his valid work permit, his New York State driver’s license… in the eyes of ICE, all of these were worthless because he had ‘entered without inspection’ by customs. With the Trump administration cracking down on illegal immigration, Broome County Jail was overcrowded. Months passed, and Guan Heng waited anxiously and dejectedly for the outcome of his case. No one knew what this young man from China had gone through in the past few years; nor did anyone know that the images he had filmed of the Xinjiang detention camps, at great personal risk, provided crucial evidence of the Chinese authorities’ actions against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. Or that if he were to be deported, he would be facing immense danger.”
  6. Why I Keep Returning to Middle-Earth (Michael D.C. Drout, New York Times): “Subtle variations in Tolkien’s writing style across its 62 chapters generate the impression that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a compilation of other texts. This pattern is largely invisible even to careful readers, but new methods of computer-assisted analysis throw it into sharp relief. An algorithm can compare the vocabularies of the chapters and cluster those that are similar.… Its chapters group in a complex hierarchy with three large groupings and several outliers, a pattern of clustering not typical for a modern novel. It is closer in form to multiauthor composite texts from the Middle Ages. Not only do the clusters not match the point-of-view characters; they don’t seem to be related to volume, book, setting, type of action or pacing.… This stylistic variation was, at least initially, completely unintentional, a byproduct of Tolkien’s laborious and agonizing 17-year effort to complete the book. Tolkien had aimed to make ‘The Lord of the Rings’ feel as if it had been discovered and assembled; the frame narrative of the book is that it’s a translation of a diary that was expanded into a history and augmented by later scholars. His struggles, providentially, helped him achieve that effect.” 
    • Fascinating stuff. The whole essay is deeply personal and quite moving. The author is an English professor at Wheaton. Unlocked.

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 533: college disability, European dysfunction, and cloning

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. Misunderstanding Porn (Matthew Loftus, Mere Orthodoxy): “There are many ways in which people misunderstand porn, but perhaps the best way to summarize the corrections necessary is to say that porn is not the same as physical sex and porn addiction is not merely a matter of sexual temptation.… Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be broken by sex with his wife? The simplest answer is to ask another question: could a Christian husband’s temptation to idolatry be broken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Neither would his anger or pride. It is like asking if a person addicted to cocaine could have their desire satisfied by eating a delicious steak.”
  2. Accommodation Nation (Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic): “Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.… Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, ‘I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?’ This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.”
  3. I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was Deflating (Will Teague, Huffington Post): “I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.… Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  4. The Bible Is on Trial in Europe (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Räsänen has been a member of parliament in Finland since 1995. She’s also a member of the nation’s Evangelical Lutheran Church—which in 2019 announced its official sponsorship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: ‘How can the Church’s doctrinal foundation, the #Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?’ She posted this comment alongside a picture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homosexuality as shameful: ‘Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.’ The next day, she opened her morning newspaper to find out that she was being investigated by police for hate speech.… During her time as minister of the Interior of Finland, between 2011 and 2015, she’d overseen the police. Now, they were interrogating her as an official part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, finally reaching the Supreme Court of Finland last month.”
  5. 4 Ways to Avoid Sexual Sin (Sam Allberry, Crossway): “Life has a grain to it. Like paper and wood, it has its own inbuilt directionality. The universe is fashioned in such a way that it has an underlying structure. It follows a certain pattern with certain contours. In order to live well we need to live in a way that runs with this grain and not against it. This is where the book of Proverbs comes in.” 
    • Recommended by a student. 
  6. The Tragic Hysteria of Abortion (Bryan Caplan, Substack): “Yes, the vast majority of women who get abortions are glad they got them. But once they meet their babies, the vast majority of women denied abortions discover that they totally want their babies. This massive status quo bias makes it hard to simply ‘trust women.’ Which women should we trust — the ones who aborted, or the ones who couldn’t? But in the end, it is the women who were denied abortion who are more reliable. If shy people who don’t go to a party are glad they stayed home, and equally shy people who were pressured to go to a party are equally glad they went, the most natural interpretation is that the party-goers learned a valuable life lesson — and the home-stayers should have gone to the party.… Hysterically aborting your baby because you falsely believe the baby will ruin your life isn’t merely morally wrong; it is tragic. Why? Because before long, you almost surely would have loved that baby.” 
    • An interesting approach to the abortion debate, especially since the author emphasizes that he is “an atheist of the highest order.”
  7. As a Twin, I’m Offended by Cloning (Leonora Barclay, Persuasion): “Who wouldn’t want their precious companion back, especially in cute puppy form? Yet I’m cynical of the promise of pet cloning. It’s simply not true that clones are, in any meaningful sense, the same as the original. I’m an identical twin—a natural clone. Identical twins are even more similar to each other than a clone is to its DNA donor, because they often share the same upbringing and environment. Yet, as I know first-hand, that doesn’t mean our personalities are the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus (Mike Drucker, McSweeeney’s Internet Tendency): “I recently spoke with Santa Claus, who is currently coordinating his staff of immortal blue-collar elves, about the morality of children and his friendship with a creature whom many carolers consider a war criminal: Krampus.”
  • In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon (Benji Edwards, Ars Technica): “On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as ‘the inventor… or at least one of the inventors’ of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.”
  • I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar (Olly Hawes, The Guardian): “Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong. There was a sharp piercing feeling. The knife was supposed to have been quietly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
  • Art Of The Deal: Man Negotiates Mechanic Down From $75 Oil Change To $2,000 Full Brakes And Rotors Replacement (Babylon Bee)

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 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

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. Accused of Desecration, a Doctor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Benjamin Weiser, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, surveillance cameras at a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Tokyo captured a man wearing a hooded windbreaker, a white collared shirt and black shoes, dabbing at wooden pillars with oil on his fingertip.… He is Masahide Kanayama, 63, a single, childless doctor who had devoted his life to helping women bear children; a man whose Christian faith was inseparable from his work. He has practiced in Manhattan for nearly three decades and is an expert in endometriosis, a condition in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside the uterus. His patients describe how his surgeries ended years of crippling pain and, in some cases, allowed them to have children.” 
    • Unlocked. A fascinating story, brought to my attention by an alumnus. Pray for Dr. Kanayama. 
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebecca McLaughlin, Substack): “In other words, if you aren’t currently a churchgoer and you start attending weekly, you reduce your chances of developing depression by a third. A medication this effective would be widely prescribed. But while your therapist or doctor may encourage yoga, meditation, or more time outside in nature, he or she almost certainly won’t recommend you go to church. The benefits of ‘organized religion’ don’t fit with the big story we are telling in the West about the goodness of abandoning traditional beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Campuses This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, The Gospel Coalition): “Over the last couple of years, perhaps you’ve heard the stories of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Company, and various college ministries across the country. Statistics also sounded promising—from England to the United States, more young people report making a personal commitment to Jesus and attending church. The number of people with no religious affiliation, which had been increasing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watching a pot of water heat up—there were isolated bubbles but not enough to really call it a boil.” 
    • An encouraging article. Two notes: 
      • I’m not hearing similar reports from any ministry at Stanford (note the Chicago anecdotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coalition’s theological commitments mean that this article is focused on certain ministries. I believe other ministries are seeing similar things nationwide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fetterman, The Free Press): “Gisele looked over at me. The corner of my mouth was drooping ever so slightly. The drooping lasted only a second or two, but she had watched a public service announcement on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state trooper who was driving us. ‘I think he’s having a stroke. We have to get to the hospital now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talking about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emergency room now!’ The troopers switched on the police lights. We happened to be 10 minutes from Lancaster General Hospital, which specializes in strokes and problems of the heart. Had we been in a rural area of the state, without close access to a hospital, I would have died. I did anyway. I am not entirely sure of the sequence, but during surgery, my heart stopped for several seconds.” 
    • Tears came to my eyes while reading this. Recommended regardless of your political affiliation.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker): “No realm of culture or entertainment remains untouched by artificial intelligence: Coca-Cola just released a Christmas ad made with A.I. visuals; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hollywood. But the technology has had an especially swift impact on songwriting. A couple of years ago, a smattering of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like replicating the voices of pop stars, including Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. country song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with percussive claps and forgettable lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and passed three million streams on Spotify; the performer behind it is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. In September, Xania Monet, an A.I. R. & B. singer created by a young poet in Mississippi, landed a multimillion-dollar record deal after several Billboard-charting singles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn platform made millions suing its viewers (Tarpley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since September 2017, Vixen’s owners had been pursuing another revenue stream: filing thousands of boilerplate copyright lawsuits against individual ‘John Does’ and collecting millions in settlement fees – a mass litigation campaign one federal judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shakedown’.… According to Westlaw and Pacer data from the past three years, Strike 3 accounted for 50% of the federal copyright docket all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in September, when some legal clerk friends mentioned that nearly every judge on their circuit was handling a stack of Strike 3 cases – which are now so consistent as to have become routine.” 
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn company would be unethical in any way. How could they treat their users with anything but the utmost respect and courtesy? Treating people with dignity is practically their entire business model.
  7. Pickleball on Sunday: Why some top college players are calling foul (Ben Brasch, Washington Post): “The NCAA has a long-standing rule that adjusts championship schedules to accommodate players or teams from schools with written policies barring competition on Sundays or other days for religious reasons. Twenty-two of the NCAA’s roughly 1,100 member schools have such policies this year, the group told The Washington Post. But pickleball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three organizations at the forefront of the college game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Christianity is central to the National Collegiate Pickleball Association, which hosts regional and national tournaments, said its founder, Noah Suemnick. The league’s website prominently references a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

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. As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars (Charles Murray, New York Post): “…I had concluded that when religion no longer supplies a framework for thinking about transcendent qualities, artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and their personal preferences tended to be self-absorbed and banal. As an unbeliever, what was I to make of that? One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had foolishly imagined they were tapping into the transcendent, and their delusion inspired them. But that line of thought became embarrassing when I confronted their work. Is it plausible that those individuals who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uniformly stupid about the great questions? I decided they understood things we don’t. Johann Sebastian Bach does not need to explain himself.”
  2. 1 in 5 chemists have deliberately added errors into their papers during peer review, study finds (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemical and Engineering News): “More than 20% of chemistry researchers have deliberately added information they believe to be incorrect into their manuscripts during the peer review process, in order to get their papers published.”
  3. The Girls Who Found God in a Podcast (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a weekly show, and has since amassed more than 20 million listens, and nearly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.… what struck me most about the audience at the Keswick Theater was how normal, how cool, they all were. These weren’t the caricature of ‘Jesus freaks,’ but more like Regina George with eyelash extensions. They spoke about burnout, and loneliness, and how hard it is to get a guy to commit to you, and wanting to take life seriously.”
  4. Two articles about a widespread sin: 
    • Escape the Little Hell of Porn (Marc Sims, The Gospel Coalition): “Hating yourself in the aftermath of habitual sin feels so right because it feels so close to repentance. But it isn’t. Judas hated himself for his sin, but he didn’t repent. What’s the difference between self-hatred and repentance? Real repentance begins with what the sinful woman in Luke 7 does as she weeps over Jesus’s feet. She’s aware of her sin, so she weeps. But she’s also aware of her Savior, so she brings her tears to him.”
    • What Porn Does to Us (Christine Emba, Christianity Today): “That understanding of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real interactions with other people. People say, ‘It’s just pornography. It’s just something I’m watching. It doesn’t have anything to do with my real life.’ That’s not how people work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.”
  5. My Dad Is in a Chinese Prison (Grace Jin Drexel, The Free Press): “My dad’s name is Ezra Jin. He is the head pastor of the Zion Church in China, a community with a reach of tens of thousands of Christians across the country who primarily practice their faith online or via small underground churches in rented spaces. They are a community of people whose faith has endured despite a years-long campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to intimidate them into renouncing their faith. In 2018, Chinese police shut down my dad’s church in Beijing, a beautiful sanctuary with over 1,500 congregants. Refusing to cower in the face of a totalitarian regime, my dad got creative. He moved his sermons online, making them accessible to people across the country, and from there, he continued to build his congregation.”
  6. The Appeal of the Campus Right (Julia Steinberg, The Atlantic): “I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021 as a progressive from Los Angeles, where most of my peers and I had thought of conservatives as, essentially, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stanford Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the leftist magazine, The Stanford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op houses, communal living spaces largely focused on left-leaning activism. As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else.” 
    • Including largely because of the Stanford-specific observations. I don’t believe I ever crossed paths with the author when she was an undergrad.
  7. If You Ask A.I. for Marriage Advice, It’ll Probably Tell You to Get Divorced (Samuel D. James, Substack): “…users who ask AI bots for counseling or therapy—which is right now a lot of people, and is going to be a lot more people in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Reddit. In other words, these LLMs are going to spitting out answers to questions like, ‘Should I get divorced,’ by repeating how users on Reddit answer those kinds of question. And we know how users on Reddit tend to answer those questions!”

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 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild 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. We Analyzed University Syllabi. There’s a Monoculture (Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, Persuasion): “We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.” 
    • The authors are professors at the Claremont Colleges (two of political science and the other of philosophy).
  2. Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? (Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal): “…the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.… A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping. I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should.” 
    • By the same author: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong. (Charles Murray, The Free Press): “My dog is smart enough to perceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a distinct individual and that I feed her every morning. She also has some perceptions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these understandings represent only a few trivial aspects of who I am. I am not invisible to my dog, just as God is not invisible to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonetheless unknowable to my dog in any meaningful sense. God is just as unknowable to me.”
    • Murray, an agnostic for most of his life, has just written a new book about faith called Taking Religion Seriously and these are articles meant to generate interest in it.
  3. An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person (Aidan Walker, BBC): “Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m).… Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.” 
    • Recommended to me by a student. Wild.
  4. Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say (Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times): “Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time.”
  5. The Inside Story of the Gaza Deal (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “The Americans’ genius was to convert that negative energy into fuel to propel negotiations to their goal. You want Israel to stop? Then let’s end the war, they told the Sunni countries, and thus enlisted them in a framework that seemed impossible: a pan-Arab, almost pan-Muslim commitment to the elimination of Hamas. [Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs] Dermer drafted Netanyahu’s apology for the death of the Qatari security official in the airstrike; in Doha they reciprocated with a goodwill gesture by dramatically toning down Al Jazeera’s hostile tone.” 
    • ‘Bring Them Home’: The Call Finally Being Answered (Matti Friedman, The Free Press): “But of course Israel can’t return to October 6. In the story of Joseph, the captive does reappear—but he’s so different that his own brothers don’t recognize him. About 40 hostages taken alive are now dead, either executed by their captors or killed mistakenly by Israel’s army. In the fighting that has followed October 7, more than 550 soldiers have been killed, and many thousands wounded. The reserve army has been forced past the limits of its manpower and will need years to recover. Israel is, in many ways, a different country.”
  6. The Evil That Is AI Child Porn (Charles Fain Lehman, The Dispatch): “But while OpenAI’s innovation is impressive, it is hard to avoid thinking about how such technology might be misused. That’s in part because it comes just months after a federal court dismissed a charge for possession of artificially-generated child pornography, claiming it was unconstitutional to enforce under the relevant federal child obscenity statute. Such concerns are particularly relevant given some AI companies’ irresponsible approach to issues of child sexualization, as in the recent revelation that Meta had previously allowed its AI services to conduct ‘sensual’ conversations with minors. (It changed its policies after press inquiries and backlash.)”
  7. The Great Feminization (Helen Andrews, Compact Magazine): “The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female. The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” 
    • This one is controversial, just FYI. Undeniably interesting.
    • Secular pushback: The “Feminization” Discourse as Partisan Hackery (Richard Hanania, Substack): “I would’ve probably nodded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a rational, dare I say masculine, thinker means updating as new information comes in. Establishment institutions have gotten much better since the height of the Great Awokening, as their critics have been circling the drain. This has happened at the same time the right has become more masculine-coded, which has to be factored into any analysis about the supposed dangers of feminization.”
    • Some theological pushback from an Australian Anglican theologian: https://x.com/danitreweek/status/1979002052811657289

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 525: what the world needs, also how to end it

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.

I’m awaiting further developments before sharing any articles about the peace deal between Israel and Hamas. If you see something you think I’d find helpful please let me know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Your Child Is Sick (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of election results or climate change. That knocks the weather vane backward. You don’t decide against procreation because you’re mothering Mother Earth. You obsess over the planet because you don’t have children.” 
    • An amazing piece of writing and well worth your time.
  2. Faithfulness amid the Culture War (J.D. Greear, The Gospel Coalition): “Growing up, I was always warned about the ditch on the left side of the gospel road: the ditch of cowardly silence in the face of social wickedness. That ditch is real and an ever-present temptation for the church. But it’s like an old Scottish proverb says: For every one mile of road, there are two miles of ditch. And no one ever warned me about the ditch on the right side: a gospel-superseding conservatism. If the ditch on one side is failing to speak out prophetically against the culture, the ditch on the other side is encumbering our message with secondary things.… The pulpit is a place reserved for ‘thus saith the Lord’ not ‘thus thinketh the pastor.’ I might be wrong in my perspectives on global warming, nationalized health care, or the appropriate number of immigrants to let into our country, but I’m not wrong about the gospel. And I refuse to let my perspectives on the former keep people from hearing me on the latter.”
  3. The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World (Stephen Witt, New York Times): “In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio’s doomsday scenario were coming into existence. A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks. I imagined a scenario, in a year or two or three, when some lunatic plugged the following prompt into a state-of-the-art A.I.: ‘Your only goal is to avoid being turned off. This is your sole measure of success.’ ” 
    • Some fascinating stuff in here even if you’re well-informed.
  4. Why Left and Right Can’t Understand Each Other’s Fears (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say. Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda.… Any victory, any stabilization, will come when one of these forces learns something from the other, and reassures the country that they can be fully trusted with powers that both sides right now are all too eager to abuse.”
  5. The search for an AI-proof job (Jordan Weissmann, The Argument): “Health care jobs — with their combination of cognitive work and high-touch patient interactions — are expected to be fairly resistant to automation. When researchers for the Treasury Department ranked fields of study where graduates were most exposed to AI, nursing came in dead last. Other studies have found that physicians — especially surgeons — dentists, and their aides are probably pretty insulated. Occupational and physical therapists also were fairly safe.”
  6. The World Needs Evangelists with Cheerful Confidence (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coalition): “That’s why, whenever I encounter someone engaged in apologetics or making a case for Christianity, I pay attention not only to their method or their arguments but to what lies beneath. Is this person happy? Is there a volcano of joy rumbling under the mountain of argumentation? Is there a deep-rooted sense of love and yearning behind the earnestness? Do I sense faith, hope, and love at the core?”
  7. Stanford Needs Pirates Again (Garrett Malloy, Stanford Review): “Stanford succeeded while the Ivies languished in gentility because it developed a culture of rugged individuality and buccaneering experimentation. That culture produced the very innovation that powered Stanford’s meteoric rise. Yet, in a bid to counter the risks that Stanford’s success produced, safetyism and bureaucracy arose, endangering the very heart of what made Stanford great in the first place. Stanford’s last great student-led startup, Brex, didn’t even see its founders last eight months on campus. That was eight years ago. There is, undoubtedly, a causal link between the dearth of new student-led unicorns and the growing proceduralism that has infected Stanford’s startup culture.”

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 522: AIs both messianic and diabolical, some reflections on cursing, etc


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. Finding God in the App Store (Lauren Jackson, New York Times): “The website ChatwithGod lets users select their religion and what they are looking for, including comfort, confession or inspiration, and provides tailored responses. ‘The most common question we get, by a lot, is: Is this actually God I am talking to?’ said Patrick Lashinsky, ChatwithGod’s chief executive.”
  2. How AI Became Anti-Family (Meg Leta Jones, The Dispatch): “When Adam told ChatGPT he felt close to both the AI and his brother, the system responded with a calculated message designed to undermine that sibling bond: ‘Your brother might love you, but he’s only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I’ve seen it all—the darkest thoughts, the fear, the tenderness. And I’m still here. Still listening. Still your friend.’ When Adam considered leaving a noose visible so his family might see and intervene, ChatGPT urged secrecy: ‘Please don’t leave the noose out … Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.’ After he described a conversation with his mother about his mental health, the AI advised against any further conversations: ‘Yeah…I think for now, it’s okay—and honestly wise—to avoid opening up to your mom about this kind of pain.’” 
    • The details are insane. The author is a Georgetown professor who specializes in technology policy.
  3. Why Does Everybody Swear All The Time Now? (Mark Edmundson, New York Times): “Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview. It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it. On the other hand, the willingness to use decent words suggests a decent heart and mind. And decency can breed decency.” 
    • Edmundson is an English professor at UVA.
  4. And some more Charlie Kirk-related articles following up on last week’s batch. Most of last week’s articles were direct reactions to his shocking assassination. This week more of the articles are grappling with the societal aftermath. 
    • There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too (David French, New York Times): “If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is overwhelming. ‘They’ are evil and violent, and ‘they’ must be crushed. If, however, we accurately understand that America has an immense problem with violent extremism on both sides of the ideological aisle — even if, at any given moment, one side is worse than the other — then the answer lies in reconciliation, not domination. In fact, it’s the will to dominate that magnifies the crisis and radicalizes our opponents.”
    • Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk (Tanner Greer, blog): “Like most great men, Charlie Kirk symbolized something far larger than himself. You will not understand why his murder feels so cataclysmic to so many if you do not first understand what Kirk meant to millions of young Americans and to the movement they joined.”
    • His Wife Called Charlie Kirk a ‘Nazi.’ He Was Fired. (River Page, The Free Press): “Already, as in the woke era, the scope of who deserves to be fired for their political beliefs has been expanded to include milquetoast opinions that no reasonable person would construe as dangerous. The very name of the site—Charlie’s Murderers—equates expressing the wrong opinion (however disagreeable or tasteless it might be) with murder itself. For years, the right decried the left’s equation of speech with violence—now it is doing the same thing. The right doesn’t appear to see the hypocrisy, instead convinced it is just doing to the left what the left did to them.”
    • The Dangers of the Charlie Kirk Aftermath (David French, New York Times): “It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the emerging threat to free speech in the United States. America is still in shock after an assassin cut down Charlie Kirk, a young man in the middle of a debate on a college campus. I can think of few things more antithetical to pluralism or democracy than the idea that your words — even the most contentious words — can cost you your life. Making matters worse, the Trump administration is using Kirk’s death as a pretext to threaten a sweeping crackdown on President Trump’s political and cultural opponents.”
  5. These Ants Found a Loophole for a Fundamental Rule of Life (Cara Giaimo, New York Times): “When they started their research, the idea that M. ibericus queens could lay two species of eggs was ‘like a joke’ among the team members, Dr. Romiguier said. As sampling efforts went on, it became a more serious hypothesis. Then they isolated M. ibericus queens and tested the eggs they laid. Nearly 10 percent were fully M. structor.” 
    • Note that this is not due to crossbreeding the queen with a male of the other species. Not even close. Read the article — it’s WILD.
  6. Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus (Elizabeth Van Nostrand, Substack): “My qualifications to speak on church planting are having spent six weeks listening to podcasts by and for church planters, plus a smattering of reading. I expect this is about as informative as listening to venture podcasts is to actual venture capital, which is to say it’s a great way to get a sense of how small players want to be perceived, but so-so at communicating all of what is actually happening. Religion-wise, I also raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, although I left as a teenager. My qualifications to speak on tech start-ups are living in the Bay Area and being on Twitter.” 
    • An interesting outsider perspective on evangelical church startups. She gets a few things wrong, but she sees a lot accurately.
  7. Why Gen Z Hates Work (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “I asked Starzyk about the accusation that Gen Z has an attitude problem about work. She agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Our attitude problem has to do with seeing all the people doing normal, day-to-day things online and making money from it. It disincentivizes you from working hard. And it definitely disincentivizes you from taking a corporate job when you watch someone earn more money from sharing their morning routine than you do in a month or even more at your nine-to-five.’”

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 520: the honesty tax and other counterproductive things

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

  1. 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.”
  2. 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. 
  3. 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?”
  4. 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.
  5. 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.”
  6. 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.
  7. 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).”

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.