Tag: cancer

TGFI, Volume 571: cancer bureaucracy and wild AI stories

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’ve been a bit dis­con­nect­ed late­ly — so there’s an excel­lent chance I’ve missed some fas­ci­nat­ing things. If you’ve read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing that I’ve over­looked, please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Is the Biggest Obsta­cle to New Can­cer Cures (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, New York Times): “The paper­work bur­den alone can be enor­mous: Novo Nordisk’s for­mer chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer once not­ed that the doc­u­men­ta­tion required to request approval for two insulin prod­ucts, if print­ed and stacked, would rise high­er than the Empire State Build­ing. That accu­mu­la­tion fol­lows from a med­ical frame­work that treats any poten­tial risk, how­ev­er neg­li­gi­ble, as some­thing that must be mit­i­gat­ed and a rea­son to delay while dras­ti­cal­ly under­weigh­ing the cost of delay itself. Reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, hos­pi­tals and drug com­pa­nies all cov­er them­selves against lit­i­ga­tion or blame. But respon­si­bil­i­ty for mit­i­gat­ing the sec­ond, often much greater risk — that the dis­ease afflict­ing the patient takes advan­tage of the delay, with poten­tial­ly dead­ly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often for­get that the most tox­ic thing for the patient is the can­cer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cas­es, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expect­ed to live, which is why weeks lost to paper­work are not abstract to him.”
  2. Is Col­lege Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are like­ly to earn more, net of col­lege cost, even if that upgrade is small­er than it used to be. Sec­ond and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, col­lege is a great place to make friends, date, and pos­si­bly meet a spouse. Those fea­tures are ever more impor­tant as Amer­i­ca suf­fers a cri­sis of lone­li­ness. Fur­ther­more, if you think that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may dis­place a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, mar­ry­ing well will become more impor­tant.”
  3. AI Dis­course
    • The Rise and Fall of Agent Civ­i­liza­tions (Dwarkesh Patel, Sub­stack): “Over the course of three months at Ope­nAI, three con­sec­u­tive secret AI civ­i­liza­tions got start­ed, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ash­es. This cul­mi­nat­ed in the third one tak­ing over part of Ope­nAI itself. All this hap­pened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the con­spir­a­cy.”
      • Absolute­ly bonkers. 100% worth read­ing.
    • On the Loose (Dean Ball, Sub­stack): “But it is true that I—and can­did­ly I think many of my col­leagues in the pro­fes­sion of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the lev­el of seri­ous­ness and urgency it required.… many of the peo­ple who think about the gov­er­nance of super­in­tel­li­gence, myself includ­ed, avoid­ed that unpleas­ant­ness and bowed to the social pres­sure to self-cen­sor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the dis­cur­sive strait­jack­et and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
      • The author is a fel­low at a lot of think­tanks and a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er at Yale.
    • Hunter Ash has a more reas­sur­ing take on Twit­ter: “All the achieve­ments of the human mind only arrive when we coop­er­ate at scale, and involve a lot of iter­a­tion and real-world bot­tle­necks. Newton’s dis­cov­er­ies ulti­mate­ly enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give New­ton the pow­er to fly. If he were iso­lat­ed, his physics would be almost entire­ly use­less to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an air­plane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Pow­ered flight was the result of tons of iter­a­tion, which is to say evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion. So was the car. Very few of the inven­tions that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world were ‘one-shot­ted’. To be sure, hav­ing smart nodes in your evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion makes it faster. Rather than ran­dom search as in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, intel­li­gence at least mod­est­ly con­cen­trates muta­tion prob­a­bil­i­ties towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t mag­ic. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the world is just not that com­press­ible. Gold­en motes of com­press­ibil­i­ty are the trea­sured excep­tions in thing­space, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iter­a­tive, coop­er­a­tive, and bot­tle­necked by the messy incom­press­ibil­i­ty of phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Doom makes sense in a world with mag­ic. If intel­li­gence alone allowed you to move moun­tains, I would share the wor­ries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved grad­u­al­ly, iter­a­tive­ly, and coop­er­a­tive­ly. Pure IQ does not allow you to lev­i­tate or hyp­no­tize or tele­port. It makes you a bet­ter node in the dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary process which is the lay­er where most of the think­ing hap­pens. If I were to psy­chol­o­gize, I’d say peo­ple who define them­selves by their intel­li­gence over­es­ti­mate the (direct) pow­er of intel­li­gence.”
    • For­mal­iz­ing Fer­mat’s Last The­o­rem (Anthrop­ic): “Recent­ly, Tianyi Peng, an Anthrop­ic researcher whose group at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty builds tools for AI for­mal­iza­tion, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on for­mal­iz­ing FLT. The result went fur­ther than he expect­ed. In 11 days, work­ing large­ly autonomous­ly, Claude pro­duced the first end-to-end, com­put­er-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 mil­lion lines of Lean and proved 29,500 inter­me­di­ate the­o­rems.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
    • How an AI math break­through ignit­ed a con­tro­ver­sy (Celi­na Zhao & Adri­an Cho, Sci­ence): “Math­e­mati­cian Tris­tan Buck­mas­ter of New York Uni­ver­si­ty and Lev­ent Alpöge, a researcher affil­i­at­ed with Anthrop­ic, one of OpenAI’s major com­peti­tors, had made sig­nif­i­cant progress solv­ing the prob­lem over the past month using AI tools adapt­ed from Ope­nAI and Anthrop­ic. But before they could pub­li­cize their find­ings, Ope­nAI mount­ed its own colos­sal effort—pouring mil­lions of dol­lars of com­pu­ta­tion­al resources into the prob­lem. Ope­nAI says it didn’t know­ing­ly tap into Buck­mas­ter and Alpöge’s lat­est work, but Buck­mas­ter has released pub­lic state­ments ques­tion­ing that posi­tion.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  4. I’m an evan­gel­i­cal. My faith isn’t ‘a can­cer.’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research shows that prac­tic­ing evan­gel­i­cals are marked­ly more like­ly than those who leave the church to ‘avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race,’ to pro­vide ‘finan­cial­ly and/or prac­ti­cal­ly for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, steal­ing and greed. Evan­gel­i­cals donate twelve times as much to dis­as­ter relief and mis­sions as they spend on pol­i­tics. Accord­ing to a study con­duct­ed by the Amer­i­can Bible Soci­ety in con­junc­tion with the Nation­al Opin­ion Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, of the reli­gious demo­graph­ics sur­veyed, evan­gel­i­cals lead both in the aver­age amount donat­ed and in the per­cent­age of peo­ple donat­ing mon­ey — not just to church­es, but to reli­gious and non­re­li­gious char­i­ties. Those num­bers match my expe­ri­ence over a life­time in evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Evan­gel­i­cal church­es and com­mu­ni­ties are not per­fect, but they are good, full of peo­ple sin­cere­ly seek­ing to love God, study Scrip­ture and bring you a casse­role.”
  5. FBI Probes Ser­vice Sell­ing 153M+ Dri­vers Licens­es: “The ser­vice, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 mil­lion dri­vers licens­es for peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, as well as more than 10 mil­lion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards; more than three mil­lion trav­el doc­u­ments and/or inter­na­tion­al IDs; and at least 579,000 med­ical cards.”
  6. Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Char­i­ty Fer­reira, Stan­ford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take reg­u­lar upkeep. Shun­ney works with con­ser­va­tion teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of oth­ers on a rotat­ing sched­ule. A glossy ceram­ic coat­ing, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deb­o­rah Kass’ Lam­borgh­i­ni yel­low OY/YO (2019) so that every­thing from tree sap to bird poop to hand­prints ‘wash­es right off with a gar­den hose.’ Alexan­der Calder’s The Fal­con (1963) is refur­bished annu­al­ly in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so mat­te it’s almost invis­i­ble – the orig­i­nal shade was devel­oped by the mil­i­tary for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s man­u­fac­tur­er no longer exists, and when the Calder Foun­da­tion approved a sub­sti­tute, Shun­ney said, ‘we gob­bled up a bunch of inven­to­ry.’ ”
  7. Hump­back whales are inter­rupt­ing orca hunts to res­cue com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent species, swim­ming under­neath a doomed seal and lift­ing it out of the water on their chest, or form­ing a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and sci­en­tists still can’t ful­ly explain why they both­er to save ani­mals they have noth­ing to gain from: “…the team com­piled 115 doc­u­ment­ed inter­ac­tions between hump­back whales and killer whales over a six­ty-two-year peri­od from 1951 to 2012. The inter­ac­tions came from researchers, whale-watch oper­a­tors and wildlife pho­tog­ra­phers across mul­ti­ple ocean basins.… The inter­ven­tions weren’t casu­al. Hump­backs trav­elled up to two kilo­me­tres to reach an ongo­ing attack. They approached bel­low­ing and trum­pet­ing. They posi­tioned them­selves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flip­pers, which on a four­teen-metre hump­back are capa­ble of doing real dam­age. They stayed for hours in some cas­es, refus­ing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Cock­roach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mos­qui­to Print­ers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achieve­ments that first make peo­ple laugh and then make them think. That’s the mot­to of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annu­al com­pe­ti­tion that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusu­al sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. The orga­ni­za­tion Improb­a­ble Research has been host­ing the event since 1991 with the aim of show­ing that sci­ence also has a humor­ous side in its quest to mean­ing­ful­ly answer ques­tions about the world. This year the cer­e­mo­ny was held in Zurich, Switzer­land, and rec­og­nized 10 research projects rang­ing from an attempt to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly define what a kiss is to an exper­i­ment that used buried under­wear to assess soil health.”
  • Woman Pray­ing That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Weird, Hyper­local Cus­toms of the Coun­try (Nat Sege­bre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okee­chobee, I watched a 13-year-old Semi­nole boy learn to wres­tle alli­ga­tors in an inflat­able kid­die pool — after his father, and his grand­fa­ther, and his great-grand­fa­ther before that. In anoth­er town I saw an armadil­lo race put on in hon­or of a stew made from what’s called swamp cab­bage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I vis­it­ed a town in the Appalachi­an foothills of Penn­syl­va­nia where res­i­dents pull rat­tlesnakes out of the woods to show­case them for an after­noon, and a shore­line in Vir­ginia where every sum­mer 200 or so wild ponies are herd­ed into the water for a mass swim. In Twins­burg, Ohio, thou­sands of twins gath­er every August for a fes­ti­val they treat as a fam­i­ly reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where every­body under­stands them.”

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 547: canine cancer cure and paying college athletes

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. Tech boss uses AI and Chat­G­PT to cre­ate can­cer vac­cine for his dying dog (Natasha Bita, The Aus­tralian): “Heart­bro­ken when his fur-baby was diag­nosed with a dead­ly mast cell can­cer in 2024, Mr Conyn­g­ham threw thou­sands of dol­lars at vet­eri­nary chemother­a­py and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treat­ment with a cus­tom mRNA can­cer vac­cine over the Christ­mas break, the ten­nis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recov­ery that has astound­ed researchers at the cut­ting-edge of human can­cer treat­ments.… [A sci­en­tist said,] ‘Usu­al­ly we don’t sup­port direct-to-con­sumer type DNA sequenc­ing because while gen­er­at­ing data for genomics is rel­a­tive­ly easy for us, inter­ro­gat­ing that data is real­ly hard and chal­leng­ing,’ he said. But Paul said, ‘No wor­ries, I’m a data ana­lyst and I’ll fig­ure this out with the help of Chat­G­PT’.”
    • Note that he did not cure the can­cer, just treat­ed it. Stun­ning nonethe­less.
  2. The Dan­ger of AI Isn’t Mis­in­for­ma­tion. It’s Mis-For­ma­tion. (Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In each of these exam­ples, it’s pos­si­ble AI could churn out a bib­li­cal­ly accu­rate answer. But the dan­ger isn’t pure­ly a mat­ter of mis­in­for­ma­tion; it’s a mat­ter of for­ma­tion. The real issue is what habit­u­al AI use does to us. It turns into mus­cle mem­o­ry that, over time, will reshape basic Chris­t­ian habits like what we pay atten­tion to, what we expect, and where we look for coun­sel.”
  3. Pay­ing Col­lege Ath­letes Has Cre­at­ed a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do. (Joe Nocera, The Free Press): “What is a prob­lem, I acknowl­edge, is the trans­fer por­tal. In the bad old days, ath­letes couldn’t trans­fer with­out los­ing a year of eligibility—even if the coach who had recruit­ed them left for green­er pas­tures. But when play­ers switch two or three times in the course of their col­lege career, that cre­ates a whole oth­er set of prob­lems. Small­er schools, in par­tic­u­lar, have a dif­fi­cult time hold­ing on to their best play­ers because the major sports schools pick them off with NIL offers. (Pre­dic­tion: There will be few­er upsets in this year’s tour­na­ment than there used to be.) Col­lege ath­letes have become free agents rather than col­lege stu­dents. One astound­ing sta­tis­tic: In the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence, only one bas­ket­ball play­er spent four years at the same school. One!”
  4. Sex is not a sym­bol (Kris­ten Sanders, Sub­stack): “But there are a few threads in some of the con­ver­sa­tions swirling about fer­til­i­ty that I think we might pull on. For one, mar­riage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This mat­ters quite a bit! .…What I object to, most strong­ly, is a view of God and his work­ings in the world that relies on a ‘hid­den’ order or struc­ture that it is our job to dis­cov­er. God is present in the world with­out hid­ing behind every tree or bush. In say­ing that sex is a gift, we are say­ing all that we need to say about it. Mak­ing it sacred, for me, actu­al­ly impedes the kind of divi­sions being made in Leviti­cus between the holy and the pro­fane. The pro­fane is sim­ply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowl­edge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joy­ful­ly, rel­ish­ing its gifts- of com­mu­nion and hos­pi­tal­i­ty, of sex­u­al­i­ty and its nour­ish­ments, of chil­dren if they are grant­ed to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.”
  5. The mys­te­ri­ous Red­di­tor who’s chang­ing the way we do laun­dry (Alex Abad-San­tos, Vox): “He has sin­gle­hand­ed­ly changed the way peo­ple do laun­dry. He is the rea­son the word ‘lipase’ has become a top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion across elder mil­len­ni­al group chats. He can move the mar­ket. His adher­ents clam­or for their face­less cham­pi­on to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called ‘spa day’ and post their dis­gust­ing but sat­is­fy­ing results for the world to see.… Most of the world uses pow­dered laun­dry deter­gent, which allows for more enzyme flex­i­bil­i­ty; Amer­i­cans gen­er­al­ly pre­fer liq­uid, which doesn’t always con­tain these pre­cious enzymes.”
  6. Scrip­ture, Cre­ation, and Accom­mo­da­tion (Michael Hor­ton, Sub­stack): “[I]n 1896 Andrew Dick­son White intro­duced the fic­tion that, through its pro­mo­tion by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­er promi­nent thinkers, has proved influ­en­tial. White says, ‘Calvin took the lead (against Coper­ni­can­ism) in his Com­men­tary on Gen­e­sis, by con­demn­ing all who assert­ed that the earth is not at the cen­tre of the uni­verse. He clinched the mat­ter by the usu­al ref­er­ence to the first verse of the nine­ty-third psalm, and asked, ‘Who will ven­ture to place the author­i­ty of Coper­ni­cus above that of the Holy Spir­it?’’ How­ev­er, Calvin nev­er men­tions Coper­ni­cus, here or any­where else, and he does not con­demn helio­cen­trists. As [Mar­garet] Osler notes, ‘Few astronomers adopt­ed Coper­ni­can astron­o­my dur­ing the first fifty years fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of De rev­o­lu­tion­ibus.’ This includ­ed Bacon, of course, so it would not be sur­pris­ing if Calvin was not even aware of Coper­ni­cus. More egre­gious is White’s spu­ri­ous quo­ta­tion, put into cir­cu­la­tion by F. W. Far­rar a decade ear­li­er and, through White, passed on by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­ers. Instead, what Calvin says is that scrip­ture is accom­mo­dat­ed dis­course. Regard­ing Gen­e­sis 1 he cau­tioned, ‘The Holy Spir­it had no inten­tion to teach astron­o­my.’ ”
    • I con­sid­er myself well-informed in this area, and Hor­ton has got some good info here I don’t recall run­ning across before.
  7. Amer­i­can Din­er Goth­ic (Robert Mar­i­ani, The New Atlantis): “You’re in a small town in Wis­con­sin, the heart of Nor­mal Amer­i­ca. The trans­gen­der assis­tant man­ag­er at CVS has a sep­tum pierc­ing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads ‘Finn.’ A block away, the 4channer con­struc­tion work­er in the Sam Hyde shoot­er shirt lis­tens to Bladee and plots his impend­ing viral­i­ty. At Tar­get, the ani­me sec­tion has metas­ta­sized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t ran­dom weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aes­thet­ic bleed­ing through the cubi­cles: ani­me stick­ers on lap­tops, Dis­cord run­ning on sec­ond mon­i­tors. They’re a new Amer­i­can type, young but trans-gen­er­a­tional, as dis­tinc­tive as the orga­ni­za­tion man or the val­ley girl once were. I call them din­er­goths: what you get when eco­nom­ic mobil­i­ty dies, sub­urbs become psy­chic deserts, and Dis­cord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”

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 455



On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

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.