Tag: artificial intelligence

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 508: euthanasia, nitpicking, and homesteading misadventures

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. Are you grad­u­at­ing this week­end? Con­grat­u­la­tions! Still want these emails after you lose your Stan­ford account? Sub­scribe for free with your long-term email address at https://theglendavis.substack.com/
  2. White lies hide dark truths (Tom Tugend­hat, Sub­stack): “What is assist­ed dying? Sui­cide exists. Killing exists. Both are real, long­stand­ing, legal con­cepts. But assist­ed dying? That’s a phrase sus­pend­ed between the act and its denial. The bill claims to offer choice, dig­ni­ty and con­trol. But its lan­guage and its silences speak vol­umes about who holds pow­er and who is expect­ed to dis­ap­pear qui­et­ly. Patients are not poi­soned, they are ‘assist­ed’. Doc­tors don’t kill, they ‘par­tic­i­pate in the process’. Insti­tu­tions aren’t forced to com­ply, they’re just not ‘pro­tect­ed’ from being com­pelled. Patients ‘take life-end­ing med­ica­tion’, as if it’s a herbal tea. Death is cleaned, blanched and euphemised. This new bill doesn’t just hide the real­i­ty of its actions; it hides the deci­sion from the fam­i­ly.”
    • The author is a mem­ber of the British par­lia­ment.
    • Relat­ed in terms of “safe­guards”: Doc­tors Were Prepar­ing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up. (Bri­an M. Rosen­thal, New York Times): “Four years ago, an uncon­scious Ken­tucky man began to awak­en as he was about to be removed from life sup­port so his organs could be donat­ed. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, offi­cials still tried to move for­ward. Now, a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion has found that offi­cials at the non­prof­it in charge of coor­di­nat­ing organ dona­tions in Ken­tucky ignored signs of grow­ing alert­ness not only in that patient but also in dozens of oth­er poten­tial donors.”
  3. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Cor­rect It (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you say Joe Crim­i­nal com­mit­ted ten mur­ders and five rapes, and I object that it was actu­al­ly only six mur­ders and two rapes, then why am I ‘defend­ing’ Joe Crim­i­nal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to cor­rect it. If one side lies to make all of their argu­ments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up.”
  4. Col­lege Stu­dents Are Using ‘No Con­tact Orders’ to Block Each Oth­er in Real Life (Pamela Paul, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Admin­is­tra­tors, ado­les­cent psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists describe Gen Z stu­dents as fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. Many have dif­fi­cul­ty with con­fronta­tion and lit­tle expe­ri­ence work­ing through inter­per­son­al con­flicts, which was only exac­er­bat­ed by the pan­dem­ic. They have mas­tered the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of ‘harass­ment’ and ‘dis­crim­i­na­tion,’ some­times with just cause and oth­er times to brand a run-of-the-mill dis­agree­ment.”
    • Some wild sto­ries in here.
  5. My expen­sive, exhaust­ing, hap­py failed attempt at home­steading (Mike Rig­gs, Wash­ing­ton Post): “How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s straw­ber­ry demand? I still don’t know. We ded­i­cat­ed 80 square feet to straw­ber­ries last sea­son. The bugs ate half our har­vest, and the oth­er half equaled rough­ly what our kid could eat in a week. Have you ever grown peas? Give them some­thing to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heav­ens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost crim­i­nal mis­use of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 min­utes to shell a sin­gle serv­ing. Mean­while, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Wal­mart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.”
  6. At Secret Math Meet­ing, Researchers Strug­gle to Out­smart AI (Lyn­die Chiou, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Ono says. ‘I don’t want to add to the hys­te­ria, but in some ways these large lan­guage mod­els are already out­per­form­ing most of our best grad­u­ate stu­dents in the world.’ ”
  7. On the protests in LA:
    • Still look­ing for arti­cles with insight — let me know what you find help­ful.
    • ‘Delete That Pho­to or We’ll F— You Up’ (Leighton Wood­house, The Free Press): “I have been to dozens of mass protests like the one that explod­ed in Los Ange­les on Fri­day. What I saw in Los Ange­les on Sun­day was dif­fer­ent.… The demon­stra­tions are ugly, but so is what pre­cip­i­tat­ed them.”
    • 11 The­ses on the Unrest in Los Ange­les (Isaac Sauls, Per­sua­sion): “Trump wants the fight. The pro­test­ers want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.”
  8. The Best and the Bright­est Under Pres­sure (Matt Stoller, Sub­stack): “I do not know if there is a broad­er real­iza­tion of the harm that elites have done among my class­mates.… Near­ly every­one I met has matured into some­one who is kinder than they were as a col­lege stu­dent, will­ing to over­look flaws and acknowl­edge vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I was gen­uine­ly impressed, and felt a deep con­nec­tion to my class. But I also peri­od­i­cal­ly asked, ‘do you know some­one who died of fen­tanyl?’ And the answer was always no, some­times accom­pa­nied by sur­prise that most Amer­i­cans do have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with a fam­i­ly mem­ber or friend, or friend of a kid, who died.”

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 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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 Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. John­ston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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 Whis­per­ing Ear­ring (Scott Alexan­der): “The ear­ring is a lit­tle topaz tetra­he­dron dan­gling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whis­pers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Bet­ter for you if you take me off.’ If the wear­er ignores the advice, it nev­er again repeats that par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion.”
    • A brief sto­ry. 10/10 rec­om­mend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it time­ly.
  2. These Inter­nal Doc­u­ments Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Com­pa­nies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of peo­ple work­ing at porn com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from videos of chil­dren being raped? Thanks to a fil­ing error in a Fed­er­al Dis­trict Court in Alaba­ma, releas­ing thou­sands of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments from Porn­hub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Inter­nal mem­os seem to show exec­u­tives obsessed with mak­ing mon­ey by attract­ing the biggest audi­ences they could, pedophiles includ­ed. In one memo, Porn­hub man­agers pro­posed words to be banned from video descrip­tions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kid­dy’ — while rec­om­mend­ing that the site con­tin­ue to allow ‘bru­tal,’ ‘child­hood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwill­ing,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wast­ed.’ One inter­nal note says that a per­son who post­ed a sex­u­al video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made mon­ey.’”
    • This is a dis­tress­ing read. Kristof has been per­sis­tent on this issue and it is much to his cred­it. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There’s a bet­ter way to tell the sto­ry of the Chris­t­ian Right’s ori­gins that makes sense of all the data – the tim­ing of the Chris­t­ian Right’s for­ma­tion, the com­mit­ment of evan­gel­i­cals to the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and even the enthu­si­asm of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers for Don­ald Trump.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. A Bat­tle That Shaped Black Evan­gel­i­cals (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In uni­ver­si­ties, the his­to­ry of the ear­ly Black church found a home in Africana stud­ies, which focused more on the growth of Chris­tian­i­ty among Black peo­ple and less on the type of Chris­tian­i­ty they prac­ticed. In con­trast, the writ­ten his­to­ry of ear­ly evan­gel­i­cal­ism pre­dom­i­nant­ly fol­lowed the lives of its white lead­ers and sub­scribers. But even though we’ve inher­it­ed seg­re­gat­ed sto­ries, his­to­ry paints a pic­ture of an inte­grat­ed sto­ry in which Black evan­gel­i­cals always exist­ed.”
  5. Con­ti­nen­tal Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dis­patch): “Today, to an extent that few peo­ple on either con­ti­nent have ful­ly inter­nal­ized, a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic gulf sep­a­rates Amer­i­ca and Europe. On aver­age, Amer­i­cans are now near­ly twice as rich as Euro­peans.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle that antic­i­pates and effec­tive­ly responds to the most com­mon objec­tions to its the­sis.
  6. The Pro­fes­sors Are Using Chat­G­PT, and Some Stu­dents Aren’t Hap­py About It (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “The Times con­tact­ed dozens of pro­fes­sors whose stu­dents had men­tioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no con­sen­sus among them as to what was accept­able. Some acknowl­edged using Chat­G­PT to help grade stu­dents’ work; oth­ers decried the prac­tice. Some empha­sized the impor­tance of trans­paren­cy with stu­dents when deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive A.I., while oth­ers said they didn’t dis­close its use because of stu­dents’ skep­ti­cism about the tech­nol­o­gy. Most, how­ev­er, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s expe­ri­ence at North­east­ern — in which her pro­fes­sor appeared to use A.I. to gen­er­ate class notes and slides — was per­fect­ly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Reject­ed Gen­er­a­tion’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone con­ver­sa­tions with cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, focus­ing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclu­sion might be strongest. I asked the stu­dents if the ‘most reject­ed gen­er­a­tion’ the­sis res­onat­ed with them. Every sin­gle one said it did. Sev­er­al of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a super­s­e­lec­tive col­lege, the rat race would be over. On the con­trary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
    • Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • New Pope Now Sec­ond-Most Influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian Named ‘Bob’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Nov­el Direc­tion for Trol­ley Prob­lems (SMBC)
  • Mod­ern (xkcd)
  • Even as pope, Leo XIV might have to deal with U.S. tax returns (Vic­to­ria Craw & Julie Zauzmer Weil, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Unit­ed States gen­er­al­ly requires all cit­i­zens to file an annu­al tax return, even those who live out of the coun­try. But assum­ing he doesn’t renounce his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Leo — born in the Chica­go area and known until this week as Robert Pre­vost — has spe­cial tax con­sid­er­a­tions, both as a cler­gy­man and now as the head of a for­eign gov­ern­ment.… it’s pos­si­ble the IRS will issue a pri­vate let­ter specif­i­cal­ly address­ing his sit­u­a­tion. Or Con­gress might even pass a law spelling out the tax sit­u­a­tion of the first Amer­i­can pope, Wal­czak spec­u­lat­ed.”

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.