Tag: china

TGFI, Volume 573: your brain is complicated

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The human brain is two sep­a­rate organs, study finds (Krista Con­ger, Stan­ford News): “ ‘We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain aris­es from a total­ly dif­fer­ent prog­en­i­tor cell than the back of the brain,’ said Kyle Loh, PhD, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gy.… This rev­e­la­tion explained decades of frus­tra­tion in the field — sci­en­tists had been try­ing to turn one type of prog­en­i­tor cell into anoth­er that it is fun­da­men­tal­ly inca­pable of becom­ing.”
  2. Stan­ford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Stu­dents for Adver­tis­ing (Gar­ret Mol­loy and Zayd Patel, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford Res­i­den­tial & Din­ing Enter­pris­es recent­ly used AI to change the races of the stu­dents it includ­ed in its adver­tise­ments. AI was also used to notice­ably slim down and alter stu­dents’ faces. On his jour­ney to cam­pus, Stan­ford stu­dent Bil­ly Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stan­ford pho­tog­ra­ph­er tak­ing. Upon clos­er exam­i­na­tion, he noticed that he had been removed from the pho­to and replaced by a AI-gen­er­at­ed black woman.”
    • This is so bizarre. If RD&E wants a spe­cif­ic racial or male/female break­down in a pho­to at Stan­ford it is not hard to have hap­pen organ­i­cal­ly. Look around the cam­pus! The demo­graph­ic per­mu­ta­tions of friend groups are wild­ly var­ied, so just take more pic­tures.
  3. Why I’m Not a Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist (J. D. Greear, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Since Rev­e­la­tion tells me that the weaponiza­tion of gov­ern­ment pow­er against believ­ers isn’t only a pos­si­bil­i­ty but a prob­a­bil­i­ty, I don’t want to hand the Beast author­i­ty over my con­science or put him in a posi­tion to arbi­trate our church’s beliefs. Instead, I’m con­vinced that the best way to lim­it the dam­age evil rulers can do to faith and con­science is to deny them pow­er over faith and con­science in the first place. Fur­ther­more, quite frankly, our gospel doesn’t need the pow­er of human gov­ern­ments. Its pow­er is suf­fi­cient on its own.”
  4. The Oth­er Vic­tims of China’s Church Crack­down (Vivian Wang, New York Times): “Cherie had to do every­thing. Her hus­band, a pas­tor at one of China’s biggest under­ground church­es, was seized last Octo­ber by offi­cers who roused him from bed at 2 a.m. After­ward, Cherie, fear­ing arrest her­self, had fled with their son to Thai­land. Since then, she had been in charge of not just cook­ing, but also rent­ing a home, sort­ing out visas, find­ing schools and earn­ing an income. She’d had to fig­ure out where she could find authen­tic Chi­nese beef noo­dles, where to buy Chi­nese pic­ture books. Hav­ing just learned to dri­ve in Bei­jing, she now had to dri­ve on the oth­er side of the road.… And she prayed, con­stant­ly. There was an irony to her sit­u­a­tion: Now, when the bur­den of being a pastor’s wife was heav­ier than ever, she was final­ly doing what Yingjia had always advised her to do, just giv­ing up con­trol and trust­ing in God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. What I Found Out About Organ Dona­tion Shocked Me (Greg Segal, New York Times): “Antho­ny Thomas Hoover II was 33 when he arrived at a hos­pi­tal in Ken­tucky, unre­spon­sive after a drug over­dose. Doc­tors told his fam­i­ly he was brain-dead, and the fam­i­ly agreed to remove him from life sup­port. A pro­cure­ment orga­ni­za­tion was called in to col­lect his organs. While being eval­u­at­ed for dona­tion, Mr. Hoover opened his eyes and thrashed on the bed. The case should have been stopped. Instead, Mr. Hoover was sedat­ed and giv­en a par­a­lyt­ic drug. Hours lat­er, he awoke again and moved his toes on com­mand; his fam­i­ly was told he was mere­ly exhibit­ing reflex­es. In the oper­at­ing room, Mr. Hoover pulled his knees to his chest and shook his head ‘no.’ Tears rolled down his face. The sur­geon refused to pro­ceed. Whis­tle-blow­ers say pro­cure­ment exec­u­tives called their staff mem­ber on-site at the hos­pi­tal and demand­ed she find anoth­er sur­geon to take the organs. No sur­geon would. Mr. Hoover sur­vived, though he still asks his old­er sis­ter, ‘Why did they try to kill me?’ ”
  6. AI-relat­ed
    • What AI Is Teach­ing My Youth Group Girls (Jensen Holmes, The Gospel Coali­tion): “My small group of stu­dents is con­stant­ly being told by their most trust­ed companion—AI—that they’re not that bad, that they’re [mis]understood, and that their reac­tions and respons­es are jus­ti­fied. This is keep­ing them from true repen­tance and expe­ri­enc­ing the full grace offered by Jesus (Rom. 6:23).”
    • Using AI, a pro­fes­sor wrote 200 papers this year. Researchers are alarmed. (Todd Wal­lack, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some espe­cial­ly busy pro­fes­sors might pub­lish a dozen or more stud­ies a year. Then there’s the curi­ous case of Nicholas Pol­son. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sta­tis­ti­cian has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and as many as 14 books released this year, unleash­ing spec­u­la­tion on the inter­net about whether he used arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to inflate his pro­duc­tion with­out dis­clos­ing the assis­tance.”
    • A.I. Has Made Me a Bet­ter Doc­tor. It’s Made Med Stu­dents Worse. (Rachael Bedard, New York Times): “I prac­tice pri­ma­ry care, where every mal­a­dy is my busi­ness. Almost every month, I’m con­front­ed with a com­plaint or syn­drome that I don’t rec­og­nize. I’m con­fi­dent in my mas­tery over what doc­tors do — his­to­ry-tak­ing, rea­son­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing. I’m less con­fi­dent about my con­tin­ued mas­tery of an ever-evolv­ing uni­verse of facts. Now, the chat­bot in my pock­et reas­sures me that I will always know enough, or have access to the cloud-based intel­li­gence that gen­er­al­ly does.… For the res­i­dents I super­vise, how­ev­er, the app’s speed and antic­i­pa­to­ry help­ful­ness are a hin­drance as much as an enhance­ment. When I skim a chatbot’s response to a ques­tion about back pain, I’m intu­itive­ly test­ing its sug­ges­tions against my hard-won men­tal mod­el for how to approach back pain. Could I have devel­oped that if I’d had a robot lead­ing my think­ing all along?”
  7. 30 Life Cheat Codes I Wish I Knew At 25 (Daniel Pink, YouTube): six­teen min­utes.
    • There’s a lot of good wis­dom in this video. The pre­sen­ter is a NYT best­selling author. Don’t like videos? The “cheat codes” are also avail­able in writ­ten form at https://www.danpink.com/life-cheat-codes/ (although you need to sign up for his email list to get them).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hump­back Whale Spot­ted 60 Miles From Ocean (Bob Cronin, News­er): “North­ern Cal­i­for­nia received an unex­pect­ed vis­i­tor in its inland waters: a hump­back whale spot­ted rough­ly 60 miles from the Pacif­ic. The ani­mal was first seen Tues­day mov­ing through San Fran­cis­co Bay, then turned up Wednes­day in the Sacra­men­to Riv­er near the Rio Vista Bridge, wit­ness­es told local media. One fish­er­man said he ini­tial­ly mis­took the mas­sive shape for a sub­ma­rine and esti­mat­ed it was about the length of at least half a school bus, ABC News reports.”

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 572: happy news about Tolkien and Lewis

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. What Did Tolkien Real­ly Think about Nar­nia? (Hol­ly Ord­way, Sehn­sucht: The C. S. Lewis Jour­nal): “From A to Z, we seem to have a con­sen­sus: Lewis loved Mid­dle-earth, but Tolkien hat­ed Nar­nia and the horse it rode in on. There is just one dif­fi­cul­ty with this assess­ment: it is not sup­port­ed by the evi­dence.… Tolkien was atten­tive to and involved with his grandchildren’s read­ing: it is very sig­nif­i­cant that he kept the Nar­nia books on hand, in his home, for them to read, and even direct­ed his grand­daugh­ter to pri­or­i­tize Nar­nia above his own Lord of the Rings. Though he did not per­son­al­ly care for the Chron­i­cles, he evi­dent­ly saw their val­ue for their intend­ed audi­ence: chil­dren.”
  2. Are Amer­i­cans aban­don­ing church­es to be ‘nones’? This is the real­i­ty. (Byron R. John­son & Thomas S. Kidd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Rather than expe­ri­enc­ing sim­ple growth or decline, Amer­i­can reli­gion is in a state of churn. Some sec­tors are falling fast, while oth­ers show phe­nom­e­nal growth. Through­out his­to­ry, Amer­i­cans have rou­tine­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed reli­gious change as decline. Head­lines about the demise of faith may be atten­tion-grab­bing, but they con­ceal a more com­pli­cat­ed and inter­est­ing real­i­ty.”
  3. China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Par­ty Rule (Lily Kuo, New York Times): “In an arti­cle pub­lished on Sun­day in the state-run mag­a­zine Chi­na Cyber­space, Mr. Chen called for more par­ty con­trol over A.I. and stricter gov­ern­ment over­sight. This, he said, was nec­es­sary to pro­tect polit­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty at home; to defend against increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed cyber­at­tacks and mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns from ‘hos­tile forces’; and to com­pete mil­i­tar­i­ly with coun­tries like the Unit­ed States.… The warn­ing from the pow­er­ful secu­ri­ty agency makes clear that Chi­na sees for­eign A.I. mod­els as an active threat to Chi­na, accord­ing to Hen­ry Gao, a law pro­fes­sor at Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­si­ty. That effec­tive­ly draws a red line before talks between Amer­i­can and Chi­nese offi­cials on A.I. safe­ty risks, expect­ed ahead of a meet­ing between Pres­i­dent Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jin­ping, on Sept. 24 in Wash­ing­ton. ‘Bei­jing is going into these talks view­ing A.I. safe­ty not as a shared human­i­tar­i­an mis­sion, but through an adver­sar­i­al lens,’ Mr. Gao said. It is mak­ing clear to Chi­nese tech firms and for­eign rivals that ‘data sov­er­eign­ty and polit­i­cal secu­ri­ty will nev­er be trad­ed away for inter­na­tion­al safe­ty accords,’ he added.”
  4. Why Is Chi­na Not Freak­ing Out about AGI? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s pos­si­ble that Sil­i­con Val­ley is right about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doom and Chi­na is wrong. But giv­en that it is com­mon for cul­tures to get into an intel­lec­tu­al bub­ble, it might be infor­ma­tive to think about how a for­eign coun­try per­ceives an issue that has cre­at­ed a great deal of debate with­in the West. It is more worth study­ing Chi­nese atti­tudes than, say, those of Egypt or even Japan, since Chi­na is the only oth­er coun­try that is a sig­nif­i­cant play­er in this indus­try. This means that they are like­ly to have a high­er degree of famil­iar­i­ty with AI tech­nol­o­gy and debates over its dan­gers than oth­ers, and also to have opin­ions that actu­al­ly mat­ter. If Chi­na has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward the ques­tion of the exis­ten­tial dan­gers of AI, it would sug­gest that maybe we should recon­sid­er our own posi­tions.”
  5. A.I. Faces Two Big Threats. Sil­i­con Val­ley Does Not Know How to Deal With One. (Tan­ner Greer, New York Times): “The indus­try must nav­i­gate the nar­row space between two new polit­i­cal forces, each capa­ble of derail­ing its progress. The first is the A.I. safe­ty move­ment, whose dire prophe­cies of an A.I. apoc­a­lypse have fright­ened many of the great names in Wash­ing­ton. The sec­ond is the nation­wide back­lash against the data cen­ter. This grass-roots upris­ing is not as orga­nized or as well fund­ed. Nor is it as artic­u­late as the safe­ty movement’s many Jere­mi­ahs. But the anger behind this back­lash is real — and explo­sive. The A.I. indus­try is bet­ter pre­pared to deal with the first move­ment. It orig­i­nat­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley, and indus­try exec­u­tives have thought hard about the issues involved — as can be seen in the recent near­ly 4,000 word man­i­festo on the top­ic from Dario Amod­ei, CEO of Anthrop­ic. No A.I. exec­u­tive is pub­lish­ing long man­i­festoes on how to resolve the back­lash against the data cen­ter build­out. This is a prob­lem Sil­i­con Val­ley does not know how to solve.”
  6. He Might End Up the World’s Most Edu­cat­ed Per­son (Scott Cac­ci­o­la, New York Times): “Beat­on, she learned, had grad­u­at­ed magna cum laude from Har­vard in 2016, pick­ing up a master’s degree in applied math­e­mat­ics along the way. He had gone on to col­lect an M.B.A. from Stan­ford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was fol­lowed by a doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy in pub­lic pol­i­cy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes schol­ar — all before age 28. Attend­ing class­es remote­ly and in per­son, he earned addi­tion­al master’s degrees from — deep breath — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (edu­ca­tion entre­pre­neur­ship), Stan­ford (edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy), Prince­ton (finance), Cor­nell (health care pol­i­cy and eco­nom­ics), Dart­mouth (imple­men­ta­tion sci­ence), King’s Col­lege Lon­don (war stud­ies) and Tsinghua Uni­ver­si­ty in Bei­jing (glob­al affairs).”
  7. My Dumb­phone Made My Life Bet­ter. It Made Every­one Else’s Worse. (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, New York Times): “I antic­i­pat­ed that not hav­ing a smart­phone would make me more reliant on oth­er peo­ple — per­haps with­out Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actu­al human for direc­tions. And sure, that’s hap­pened. But I think it’s more accu­rate to say that I’ve become more reliant on oth­er people’s smart­phones. Instead of order­ing from the bar or print­ing out movie tick­ets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up hav­ing some­body else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e‑tickets. It’s still smart­phones all the way down; I’ve just exempt­ed myself from the costs of car­ry­ing one around.… To for­go smart­phones in a world opti­mized for them is to become some­one in con­stant need of accom­mo­da­tion, but for total­ly self-imposed rea­sons. Like adopt­ing a high­ly restric­tive diet with­out any of the health issues that might jus­ti­fy the need to orga­nize every din­ner out around it.”

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 566: a great roiling bouillabaisse of links

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. Stop Pathol­o­giz­ing Ordi­nary Life (Clay Rout­ledge, New York Times): “The more fix­at­ed we are on men­tal health, the more sen­si­tive we become to any­thing that might qual­i­fy as a symp­tom and the more we use clin­i­cal lan­guage to describe nor­mal emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences like grief, burnout and lone­li­ness. This broad­en­ing of what we think counts as a dis­or­der — known as con­cept creep — encour­ages us to pathol­o­gize ordi­nary life and see our­selves as men­tal­ly unhealthy.… Near­ly a third of Amer­i­can adults and half of Gen Z adults have giv­en them­selves a diag­no­sis of a men­tal ill­ness based on infor­ma­tion from social media. And research sug­gests that peo­ple who rely on social media for infor­ma­tion about men­tal ill­ness­es tend to have less accu­rate knowl­edge about them.”
  2. Coun­ter­feit Prov­i­dence: Why Chris­tians Must Reject the Con­spir­a­to­r­i­al Mind (Mitchell Bahnsen, Sub­stack): “The believ­er has been cat­e­chized, right­ly, to reject the sec­u­lar pic­ture of his­to­ry as a direc­tion­less churn of mat­ter and acci­dent. He knows in his bones that events mean some­thing, that his­to­ry is going some­where, that appear­ances deceive and a deep­er order under­lies them. Con­spir­acism takes the prov­i­den­tial instinct, a the­o­log­i­cal­ly healthy one, and trans­fers its object from the father­ly hand of God to the hid­den hand of the deep state. Where prov­i­dence teach­es that his­to­ry is gov­erned by a God who is for us, con­spir­acism teach­es that it is gov­erned by pow­ers who are against us.”
  3. US pros­e­cu­tors charge Atlanta man after Graphe­neOS phone wipes itself dur­ing air­port search (Skye Jacobs, TechSpot): “The case rais­es ques­tions about which con­sti­tu­tion­al rights apply at US bor­ders, includ­ing inter­na­tion­al air­ports, where author­i­ties have broad­er search pow­ers.… Graphe­neOS is designed to improve pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty on Pix­el phones. Sup­port­ers say those tools are legit­i­mate secu­ri­ty pro­tec­tions, not evi­dence of crim­i­nal intent. Boutry point­ed to France and Spain, where author­i­ties have strug­gled to gain access to secured devices. He said author­i­ties have treat­ed the use of Graphe­neOS itself as sus­pi­cious. In Cat­alo­nia, Spain, police have been pro­fil­ing peo­ple car­ry­ing Pix­el phones, assum­ing they have Graphe­neOS installed and are drug deal­ers or gang mem­bers.”
  4. A rev­o­lu­tion is unfold­ing. Vot­ers every­where are furi­ous. (Fareed Zakaria, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We sum­mon a car in three min­utes. A pack­age arrives the same day. AI answers com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions in sec­onds, and does more com­plex work that took peo­ple months in mere min­utes. Nat­u­ral­ly, cit­i­zens begin to expect sim­i­lar effi­cien­cy from gov­ern­ment. But democ­ra­cy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legit­i­ma­cy. It bar­gains, com­pro­mis­es, con­sults courts, pro­tects vul­ner­a­ble groups and bal­ances com­pet­ing inter­ests. Those safe­guards are pre­cise­ly what dis­tin­guish democ­ra­cy from author­i­tar­i­an­ism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increas­ing­ly look like paral­y­sis.”
  5. How the mod­ern plea bar­gain under­cuts the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a jury tri­al (Matt Martens, The Hill): “Jury tri­als, by pub­licly air­ing and test­ing the evi­dence of the crimes, serve the dual func­tions of both pro­tect­ing the accused from false accu­sa­tions and coer­cion to wrong­ly admit guilty and pro­tect­ing the com­mu­ni­ty from lenient sen­tenc­ing of dan­ger­ous offend­ers. Mod­ern Amer­i­can-style plea bar­gains wreak hav­oc on both those vital inter­ests.”
    • The author is a lawyer and a well-known Chris­t­ian thinker on the sub­ject of jus­tice. He has a sem­i­nary degree in addi­tion to his legal train­ing and attends Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Church in DC.
  6. The Apples and Oranges Tri­bunal (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Jus­tice: jus­tice is about con­duct — how one per­son treats anoth­er. An employ­er who defrauds his work­ers, an employ­ee who steals from the till, a prod­uct sold under false pre­tens­es — con­demn them, take them to court. But the pat­tern of prices that emerges from mil­lions of vol­un­tary trades is nobody’s con­duct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The con­stel­la­tion of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demand­ing that prices be just is a cat­e­go­ry error, like suing the weath­er. Prices don’t grade our mer­it; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the sec­ond.”
  7. Some thoughts on AI:
    • What will more intel­li­gence actu­al­ly do for us? (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “So although we don’t know yet, it’s pos­si­ble that humans were already hit­ting the point of dimin­ish­ing returns with regards to indi­vid­ual cog­ni­tive capac­i­ty, and that super­in­tel­li­gent machines will nev­er be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three rea­sons why machine super­in­tel­li­gence could still deliv­er huge pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains.… (1) The most obvi­ous advan­tage that machine super­in­tel­li­gence con­fers is replic­a­bil­i­ty.… (2) in the age of AI, dis­trib­uted tac­it knowl­edge might not be near­ly as big of a bar­ri­er to tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fu­sion.… (and 3) there may be laws of the uni­verse that humans can’t under­stand but AI can.”
      • This is real­ly good and worth a pon­der.
    • The Hid­den Cost of China’s Free A.I. (Tal Feld­man, New York Times): “When researchers asked DeepSeek to write code for users whom the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment views with hos­til­i­ty, such as Falun Gong or Tibetans, DeepSeek wrote code with secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, mak­ing it eas­i­er for hack­ers to pen­e­trate.… Imag­ine an employ­ee inside an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny who was smart and hard-work­ing and whose goal in life was to pro­mote the inter­ests of a for­eign gov­ern­ment. We would call that per­son a for­eign agent. We are now hir­ing mil­lions of them through the use of Chi­nese A.I.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • $200,000 Spent On Trav­el Ball Final­ly Pays Off With Son’s $500 Col­lege Schol­ar­ship (Baby­lon Bee): “Ben­son’s uncle Matthew, a finan­cial plan­ner, had advised years ago that if the fam­i­ly would put all the trav­el ball mon­ey in a 529 account, young Bray­den would have rough­ly one mil­lion dol­lars to pay for his col­lege edu­ca­tion. ‘Who’s laugh­ing now, Matthew?’ said Mr. Ben­son. ‘What a dope. I can’t wait to text out pic­tures of the schol­ar­ship offer. He’s going to feel so stu­pid.’ After 10 years of miss­ing church, school, birth­days, wed­dings, and funer­als for trav­el ball, the Ben­son fam­i­ly was thank­ful their per­sis­tence had paid off. ‘I admit, there were times I ques­tioned if we were doing the right thing,’ said mom Jes­si­ca. ‘When we skipped my sis­ter’s wed­ding because there was sup­posed to be a col­lege scout at this tour­na­ment in Alaba­ma, I had my doubts. Hold­ing this $500 check in my hands, those doubts are final­ly gone.’ ”
  • Cal­i­for­ni­a’s icon­ic wel­come signs are get­ting a dra­mat­ic makeover (Tes­sa McLean, SF Gate): “Aside from being ‘warm and wel­com­ing,’ Cochrane said the goal for the new designs was to present ‘a legit pho­to op’ for pass­ing motorists. He said they’ve already become ‘social media mag­nets’ in just the short time they’ve been dis­played.”
    • They look real­ly nice. I’m impressed.
  • Datatype: a vari­able font that turns text into charts: “Datatype is an Open­Type vari­able font that turns sim­ple text expres­sions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no ren­der­ing library — just type the syn­tax and Datatype­’s lig­a­ture sub­sti­tu­tion does the rest.”
    • THIS IS SO COOL! Note: this is for web­sites, won’t work on a Word doc­u­ment.

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 565: AI in the real world

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chi­nese House Church Lead­ers Who Didn’t Win Release (Angela Lu Ful­ton, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Geng ‘Cherie’ Peng­peng joined Zion in 2008. She met her now-hus­band, Gao ‘Joshua’ Yingjia, at the church. Like many mem­bers, Geng and Gao had advanced degrees at top Chi­nese schools—Geng a PhD in the­o­ret­i­cal physics and Gao a PhD in plant genetics—but they felt God’s call to pur­sue full-time min­istry.… By June of last year, police were arrest­ing min­is­ters sev­er­al times a month. In August, they detained 27 people—including babies—at the Sun­day ser­vice in Jiax­ing and sought to arrest Su on charges of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an ille­gal gath­er­ing.”
  2. What does AI look like? (David Zax, IBM): “A mod­ern AI sys­tem like Chat­G­PT (or Claude, DeepSeek or Gran­ite) is a series of spread­sheets filled with num­bers. It’s a curi­ous irony that this ver­bal tech­nol­o­gy is, at root, almost pure­ly numer­i­cal. How many spread­sheets? It depends on the mod­el. For the rest of this arti­cle, we’ll focus our ener­gy on OpenAI’s GPT‑3, released in 2020, which served as the basic ‘engine’ of the break­out prod­uct Chat­G­PT two years lat­er. Though you may well run a more souped-up mod­el today, it works basi­cal­ly the same way. GPT‑3 has 577 spread­sheets. Peo­ple in the AI indus­try call these ‘ten­sors,’ but it’s fair to think of them as spread­sheets. Each and every cell of each and every spread­sheet is filled with a sin­gle, small num­ber (typ­i­cal­ly between ‑1.0 and 1.0).… The very first spreadsheet—which has a spe­cial func­tion we’ll dis­cuss soon—is the biggest: it’s 50,257 rows tall, and 12,288 columns wide. (If you do the math, that’s 617,558,016 tiny num­bers, just in the first spread­sheet.) Then, after the very first spread­sheet, the remain­ing 576 set­tle into a repeat­ing pat­tern of shapes: first four squares, 12,288 rows and 12,288 columns. Then a wide rec­tan­gle, 12,288 rows tall but four times as wide. Then a tall rec­tan­gle with the same pro­por­tions, only rotat­ed upright, 12,288 columns wide.”
    • From an alum­nus. Way more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  3. Exam­ples of AI in the real world
    • Pas­tors Using AI to Help Write Ser­mons Grap­ple With Where to Draw the Line (Anvee Bhutani, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Stetler, the Okla­homa City pas­tor, has made mis­takes with AI. Two years ago, rush­ing to fin­ish a slide for a ser­mon on a South Pacif­ic mis­sion­ary, he dropped in an AI-gen­er­at­ed image with­out check­ing it close­ly. After the ser­vice, a con­gre­gant approached him. ‘Did you make that with AI?’ Yes, he said. ‘Did you know there’s a top­less woman in the back­ground?’ He apol­o­gized on the spot. He tells that sto­ry now as a cau­tion­ary tale to any­one he’s intro­duc­ing to the tools.”
      • HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Some wild sto­ries in here.
    • Human math­e­mati­cians are being out­coun­terex­am­pled (Kevin Buz­zard, blog): “A few days ear­li­er I had got an email from a pro­fes­sor in the maths depart­ment here at Impe­r­i­al, express­ing sur­prise that some of our grad­u­ate stu­dents were pay­ing $200 per month to access mod­els such as Sol and Fable. He said that he thought that these peo­ple were crazy. I did not imme­di­ate­ly respond. But after meet­ing with Andrew I emailed the pro­fes­sor back and told him that in my opin­ion, any PhD stu­dent who was not pay­ing $200 per month to access these tools was crazy. In fact dur­ing the work­shop I learnt from Har­vard PhD stu­dent Bryan Wang that Har­vard were already giv­ing free Fable access to all PhD stu­dents, post-docs and fac­ul­ty at Har­vard.”
    • Politi­cians Are Try­ing to Change What Chat­bots Say About Them (Stu­art A. Thomp­son and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times): “Can­di­dates have long had to wor­ry about their rep­u­ta­tions among vot­ers. Now, they have to wor­ry about what A.I. thinks about them, too. And a new indus­try has sprung up to help them nav­i­gate this world.… Cau­cus AI ran an exper­i­ment to see how long it took for con­tent new­ly pub­lished to Wikipedia to end up in a chatbot’s answer. The result: about 12 min­utes. That sug­gests that can­di­dates can already insert their own infor­ma­tion into an A.I.’s respons­es by tweak­ing pub­lic infor­ma­tion ‘quick­ly, unvet­ted and with­out any­one on the oth­er side watch­ing,’ the com­pa­ny wrote in a blog post about its find­ings.”
    • A.I. Drones Are Com­ing. We Are Not Ready. (W.J. Hen­ni­gan, New York Times): “Defense Sec­re­tary Pete Hegseth said in Jan­u­ary that he intends to make the mil­i­tary ‘an ‘A.I. first’ warfight­ing force across all domains.’ Through­out the Pen­ta­gon, Uncle Sam-style recruit­ment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s like­ness declar­ing ‘I want YOU to use A.I.’ are plas­tered on the walls. His depart­ment has request­ed $54.6 bil­lion in next year’s bud­get for the Defense Autonomous War­fare Group, or DAWG, a body recent­ly set up to coor­di­nate all autonomous weapons pro­grams across U.S. forces. The Unit­ed States isn’t alone in this pur­suit. Around the world, and par­tic­u­lar­ly in Chi­na and Rus­sia, an arms race is emerg­ing to mass-pro­duce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin of Rus­sia declared in 2017 that who­ev­er leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping of Chi­na has poured bil­lions of dol­lars into A.I. devel­op­ment for the country’s mil­i­tary. Pro­to­types of small­er, rudi­men­ta­ry A.I.-assisted weapons have already been report­ed in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azer­bai­jan and Gaza.”
    • China’s A.I. Play Is Dif­fer­ent From America’s (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Amer­i­can A.I. com­pa­nies and the nation­al secu­ri­ty state seem to assume that we’re already at a point where you sim­ply can’t let the world use the best A.I. mod­els with­out con­trols and guardrails any more than you’d ship atom­ic bombs or ICBMs to ran­dom homes or pri­vate com­pa­nies. Where­as the Chi­nese are will­ing to shrug and push the enve­lope and let Amer­i­ca fret about safe­ty and sov­er­eign­ty, on the assump­tion that A.I. is a nor­mal tech­nol­o­gy and the safe­ty con­cerns will get fig­ured out along the way.”
  4. Con­tra Pritchard On Lib­er­al Hap­pi­ness (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The ele­gant math­e­mat­i­cal response is: hap­pi­ness scales with log(income), not with income: ‘In a large U.S. sam­ple, the shape of the asso­ci­a­tion between hap­pi­ness and Log(income) was extreme­ly sys­tem­at­ic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, aver­age hap­pi­ness rose almost per­fect­ly lin­ear­ly with Log(income), with group-lev­el cor­re­la­tions of 0.98–0.99 across a range of hap­pi­ness mea­sures, includ­ing both in-the-moment expe­ri­ence and over­all life sat­is­fac­tion.’ So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coef­fi­cients, hap­pi­ness should have increased about three points on a 1–10 scale. If the aver­age serf would have rat­ed his con­di­tion 3/10, we should be at 6/10.”
    • An absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing way to mod­el the idea that mon­ey has dimin­ish­ing pow­er to increase hap­pi­ness as wealth increas­es.
  5. Amer­i­ca Has 2 Polit­i­cal Par­ties but 8 Polit­i­cal Tribes (Kris­ten Soltis Ander­son, New York TImes): “There’s noth­ing wrong, of course, with being a par­ty loy­al­ist, but it’s worth remind­ing our­selves that most of us don’t line up neat­ly with the plat­form of either of America’s two major par­ties. It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that there’s a rea­son Democ­rats range from the afore­men­tioned demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Oca­sio-Cortez to the cen­trist Sen­a­tor Elis­sa Slotkin. And why Repub­li­cans range from the mod­er­ate Sen­a­tor Lisa Murkows­ki to the pop­ulist Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Anna Pauli­na Luna. It may be more use­ful to think of our two par­ties as two coali­tions. For now, at least, both have to accept some lev­el of ide­o­log­i­cal inco­her­ence in order to cob­ble togeth­er a major­i­ty.”
  6. The inter­view that exposed academia’s clue­less­ness (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Car­olyn Rouse, the pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, was not one to stay silent while out­siders claimed that her field had aban­doned rig­or­ous argu­ment in favor of social jus­tice ortho­doxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it. Her inter­view with the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still strug­gling to con­vince myself that it’s real.”
    • The inter­view in ques­tion: Is Anthro­pol­o­gy Hope­less­ly Politi­cized? (Stephanie M. Lee, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — “So the idea that there are two sex­es is just fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect, and to force bio­log­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gists to teach that is the equiv­a­lent of turn­ing an astron­o­my depart­ment into an astrol­o­gy depart­ment. So I don’t know why we’re debat­ing that. ”
  7. Zohran Mam­dani Does­n’t Know What Work­ing Class Means (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple often con­flate social class with eco­nom­ic class. This allows us to talk about the for­mer while pre­tend­ing we are talk­ing about the lat­ter.… The focus on eco­nom­ic class (rather than social class) pro­motes the belief that we could have an egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety if every­one sim­ply had enough mon­ey. This focus is espe­cial­ly con­ve­nient for the upper and upper mid­dle class­es. It allows them to express con­cern about inequal­i­ty with­out impli­cat­ing them­selves.”
    • A super-inter­est­ing arti­cle that explains social class very help­ful­ly.

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 555: optimizing everything is foolish

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. Your Deci­sion Mak­ing Is All Wrong (David Epstein, New York Times): “If in mak­ing deci­sions you are often guid­ed by a search for the best, you are going about deci­sion mak­ing all wrong — and you’re also prob­a­bly less hap­py for it. In an age of infor­ma­tion and choice abun­dance, we assume we can find the best of every­thing if we look long and hard enough. Psy­chol­o­gists call that ten­den­cy max­i­miz­ing. But search­ing for the best is the wrong goal. That is because search­ing is itself a cost, and most peo­ple for­get to account for it. If you did, you would see that the opti­mal strat­e­gy isn’t opti­miz­ing at all.… Max­i­miz­ers tend to be less sat­is­fied with their deci­sions and their lives. They are typ­i­cal­ly less hap­py, more prone to regret and more like­ly to com­pare them­selves end­less­ly with oth­ers. Sat­is­fi­cers don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have low stan­dards. Their stan­dard is ‘good enough for me’ rather than ‘the best out there,’ and that makes it pos­si­ble to feel sat­is­fied with their choic­es, instead of haunt­ed by the ones they didn’t make.”
  2. Chi­na Is Much Weak­er Than It Seems. That’s the Prob­lem. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “ ‘Busi­ness debt has dou­bled since 2019, while rev­enues are only 30 per­cent high­er,’ reports For­tune. This eco­nom­ic house of cards rests, if you’ll for­give the mixed metaphor, on a foun­da­tion of sand: an aging and declin­ing work force, net emi­gra­tion, wide­spread youth unem­ploy­ment, plum­met­ing for­eign direct invest­ment, an arbi­trary rule of law that ter­ri­fies busi­ness lead­ers, repeat­ed purges of the mil­i­tary that project far more para­noia than con­fi­dence and a tru­cu­lent for­eign pol­i­cy that does lit­tle more than alarm and alien­ate China’s neigh­bors.… Ris­ing nations, which is what Chi­na was under Deng Xiaop­ing and Jiang Zemin, have the lux­u­ry of being able to bide their time. Declin­ing nations don’t. It tends to make them more inclined to gam­ble with their future. It’s why Putin invad­ed Ukraine after he real­ized the coun­try was mov­ing inex­orably into the West’s orbit. It’s also why Xi will be pow­er­ful­ly tempt­ed to seize Tai­wan by inva­sion or block­ade despite the enor­mous risks it pos­es not only to the world’s econ­o­my but also to his own.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Why Chi­na Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. (Jacob Dry­er, New York Times): “The real­i­ty is that Chi­na and the Unit­ed States are rac­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, because the two coun­tries con­cep­tu­al­ize A.I. very dif­fer­ent­ly. Amer­i­cans want to cre­ate the most pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy humans have ever known. In the quest for super­in­tel­li­gence, the U.S. gov­ern­ment is encour­ag­ing pri­vate firms to move full speed ahead, reg­u­la­tion be damned. Under the very tight­est reg­u­la­tion, by con­trast, the Chi­nese want to make A.I. more prac­ti­cal and embed­ded in soci­ety, more care­ful­ly select­ing how it is deployed and used by the pop­u­la­tion.… In that way, as Chi­na exports those A.I. mod­els, it will be export­ing Chi­nese gov­er­nance as well, with all of the safe­ty, abun­dance, sur­veil­lance and embed­ded hier­ar­chies that entails. That’s why the dif­fer­ence between these two coun­tries in the A.I. race mat­ters so much.”
  3. The Athe­ist and the Machine God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There is no obvi­ous escape from mys­tery here. If you bite the bul­let and just say that Clau­dia has already attained con­scious­ness, then that implies we some­how built a con­scious mind with­out hav­ing any idea of how con­scious­ness works or where it comes from. That’s sci­ence with extreme­ly spooky char­ac­ter­is­tics: Like Kevin Cost­ner sum­mon­ing base­ball ghosts to the Iowa corn­field, we put up a mate­r­i­al archi­tec­ture and the mys­te­ri­ous ‘I’ mag­i­cal­ly appeared. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you say that A.I. isn’t con­scious but mere­ly capa­ble, then the ques­tion of why we expe­ri­ence real­i­ty through con­scious­ness — the inter­nal ‘I,’ the sense of per­son­al iden­ti­ty and will — becomes much more dif­fi­cult to answer. If con­scious­ness isn’t nec­es­sary for capa­bil­i­ty, then pre­sum­ably evo­lu­tion should default to zom­bies.… As cer­tain philoso­phers have argued, this har­mo­ny between the psy­cho­log­i­cal and the phys­i­cal seems more much like­ly to appear in a uni­verse where con­scious­ness is fun­da­men­tal, where mat­ter isn’t every­thing and Mind is where things start. In which case maybe the achieve­ment of Claude, or Clau­dia if you pre­fer, is to show us what intel­li­gence might look like in the materialist’s uni­verse — even as our own con­scious­ness indi­cates that this uni­verse is a much, much stranger place.”
    • I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed this essay.
  4. Chi­na vs God (Fran­nie Block, The Free Press): “I’ve obtained hours of inter­views with Jin that the Drex­els record­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2025, a month before he was arrest­ed. I’ve viewed nev­er-before-seen footage of Chi­nese police arrest­ing Chris­tians. I’ve lis­tened to audio of police inter­ro­ga­tions, and read near­ly a dozen tes­ti­monies of those who wit­nessed first­hand the arrests and raids on church­es. More than half a dozen peo­ple who have been impris­oned or had fam­i­ly mem­bers impris­oned by the Chi­nese regime have shared their sto­ries with me. ‘A gov­ern­ment moves from author­i­tar­i­an­ism into total­i­tar­i­an­ism when it wants to infil­trate and direct the most inti­mate parts of your­self, of your com­mu­ni­ty, of your fam­i­ly,’ Bill told me. ‘What we’re see­ing now,’ he con­tin­ued, ‘is a renewed desire from the state under Chair­man Xi, basi­cal­ly, to engi­neer souls.’ ”
  5. We’re Think­ing About Men­tal Health Diag­noses All Wrong (Awais Aftab, New York Times): “In my prac­tice, I rou­tine­ly see patients who have been diag­nosed with depres­sion and anx­i­ety by one clin­i­cian, bipo­lar dis­or­der by anoth­er and post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der by a third, at dif­fer­ent points in their lives. They arrive con­fused and frus­trat­ed, ask­ing: What dis­or­der do I _really_ have? The hon­est answer is: all of them and none of them. Each of these labels can cap­ture some­thing use­ful and inform treat­ment options, but none of them do jus­tice to the dimen­sion­al and dynam­ic nature of men­tal ill­ness. Your men­tal health prob­lems are not caused by a sim­ple thing that you either have or don’t have. They are pat­terns shaped by who we are as peo­ple and that, in turn, shape the peo­ple we become. This is a more com­pli­cat­ed sto­ry than ‘chem­i­cal imbal­ance’ or ‘brain dis­ease.’ But it is clos­er to the truth.”
    • The author is a psy­chi­a­trist at Case West­ern.
  6. The Silence That Meets the Rape of Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “It’s impos­si­ble to know how com­mon sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tini­ans are. My report­ing for this arti­cle is based on con­ver­sa­tions with 14 men and women who said they had been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by Israeli set­tlers or mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces. I also spoke to fam­i­ly mem­bers, inves­ti­ga­tors, offi­cials and oth­ers.… How does this kind of vio­lence hap­pen? Decades of cov­er­ing con­flict has taught me that a com­bi­na­tion of dehu­man­iza­tion and impuni­ty can pro­pel peo­ple into a Hobbe­sian state of nature. I’ve encoun­tered this drift toward sav­agery in killing fields from Con­go to Sudan to Myan­mar, and I think it also rough­ly explains how Amer­i­can sol­diers came to sex­u­al­ly abuse pris­on­ers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The blunt real­i­ty is that when there are no con­se­quences, we humans are capa­ble of immense deprav­i­ty toward those we are taught to scorn as sub­hu­man.”
    • A dis­turb­ing read which I, for the record, find large­ly plau­si­ble even if cer­tain lurid details wind up not with­stand­ing scruti­ny. This isn’t root­ed in think­ing that Israel is any way worse than oth­er nations. I think Israel is far more praise­wor­thy than her rivals — and I also think that praise­wor­thy nations can have very dark cor­ners. This op-ed set off a firestorm on the inter­net, and some note­wor­thy respons­es fol­low:
    • How ‘The New York Times’ Laun­dered a Con­spir­a­cy (Mat­ti Fried­man and Dan Senor, The Free Press): “When you read the piece, you have to use your own com­pass to decide which charges could plau­si­bly be true and which charges come from the world of con­spir­a­to­r­i­al, anti-Israel fan­ta­sy. I think there is a plau­si­ble rea­son for con­cern about sex­u­al assaults of pris­on­ers. I don’t think we can dis­miss every account of sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tin­ian detainees. But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being cred­u­lous about charges that are much, much hard­er to believe. After all, the facil­i­ties are equipped with cam­eras. There are com­man­ders, there are lawyers.… It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t inves­ti­gate cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al assault. I remain con­cerned about the peo­ple in charge of deten­tion facil­i­ties and law enforce­ment in Israel. I do not have com­plete faith that the right peo­ple are run­ning this, to be hon­est, or that we’re pur­su­ing every alle­ga­tion of mis­deeds by our own sol­diers.”
      • This is a debunk­ing of the Kristof piece, but it hon­est­ly seems to agree with the sub­stance of what Kristof said. I don’t know why peo­ple find it so hard to say, “Peo­ple who are ‘on my side’ some­times do real­ly vile things.”
    • The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Free Press): “The Israeli Prison Ser­vice has a rep­u­ta­tion for incom­pe­tence. There have been cas­es of abuse, even famous cas­es of pris­on­ers abus­ing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison sys­tems strug­gle with the prob­lem: New York pris­ons face huge num­bers of abuse claims. Pris­ons are not nice places, wher­ev­er they are in the world. So mis­treat­ment of pris­on­ers by Israeli guards isn’t mere­ly pos­si­ble, it’s almost cer­tain, as in any prison sys­tem any­where in the world. And con­di­tions were espe­cial­ly prob­lem­at­ic in recent years. Octo­ber 7 and the ensu­ing war sent thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian detainees into the pris­ons, togeth­er with under­trained reservist guards in the ear­ly months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos glee­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ing mas­sacres that the new pris­on­ers had com­mit­ted.… And it must be said, as I’ve said before: Nei­ther Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ita­mar Ben-Gvir nor Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu seems inter­est­ed in fix­ing it. Our lead­ers do not seem to care about the sim­ple break­down of dis­ci­pline that these abus­es rep­re­sent, the kind of break­down we saw again and again with the inci­dents of loot­ing in Gaza and in the ear­ly cas­es of pris­on­er abuse that came to light.”
      • Again, a debunk­ing that con­tests details but con­cedes the basic point.
    • “Every­thing Is Legit­i­mate To Do! Every­thing!” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…the con­text for claims of Israeli excess­es is obvi­ous: a trau­ma­tized Israeli psy­che that has rad­i­cal­ized even more dur­ing this war, in which inhi­bi­tions around hat­ing the ene­my have obvi­ous­ly loos­ened. And the man in charge of the prison sys­tem is Ita­mar Ben-Gvir — a far-right Kahanist, Jew­ish suprema­cist. He’s as close to a neo­fas­cist as you can get. His view of Arabs, let alone sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists, is, shall we say, not great. So a recent Abu Ghraib-like case in the sys­tem he pre­sides over is worth look­ing at. A pris­on­er in Sde Teiman, Israel’s tor­ture and prison camp, was hand­cuffed, blind­fold­ed, beat­en, tased, and sodom­ized with a broom han­dle, end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal with bro­ken ribs and a rup­tured bow­el. The inci­dent was even caught on video­tape, but the gris­ly details were con­cealed behind IDF shields.”
  7. The Con­gress­woman Who Wants to Shoot Sea Lions (Will Rahn, The Free Press): “…By the 1950s, there were only about 10,000 sea lions left. And so, in the 1970s, they imple­ment­ed some­thing called the Marine Mam­mal Pro­tec­tion Act (MMPA). And the great news was that they recov­ered, going up to about 300,000 of them. In fact, they are now inva­sive in the Colum­bia Riv­er trib­u­taries, where they were nev­er his­tor­i­cal­ly dom­i­nant. The prob­lem is that they are now real­ly evis­cer­at­ing native vul­ner­a­ble and endan­gered salmon and steel­head pop­u­la­tions. So we basi­cal­ly have an inva­sive species con­sum­ing an endan­gered species.… I think we clear­ly need to amend the MMPA to allow for more trib­al con­trol, and allow them or their designees to engage in lethal removal of sea lions in the Colum­bia Riv­er and its trib­u­taries.”
    • 100% rec­om­mend this inter­view. A fas­ci­nat­ing read.

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 548: anxiety, atheism, and China

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. Stop Being Anx­ious About Your Anx­i­ety (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The lis­ten­er is wor­ried because she doesn’t want to dis­obey Jesus, and she knows that he said, ‘Do not be anx­ious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on’ (Matt. 6:25, ESV through­out). And she’s inter­pret­ing this the way she would if she were refus­ing a moral com­mand from the Lord, like to for­give her ene­mies. The irony is that because of that, she can’t see that these pas­sages are not warn­ings but reas­sur­ances.…. Anx­i­ety tells you that you have to secure your future. Anx­i­ety about anx­i­ety tells you that you have to secure even your inner life. Anx­i­ety about anx­i­ety wants you to hear the voice of Jesus as irri­tat­ed and angry: Stop it! But the voice of Jesus is real­ly say­ing, You can rest. I’m here.”
  2. These sci­ence-based argu­ments destroyed my athe­ism (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “When I was an under­grad study­ing data for the Big Bang, every­thing I need­ed to answer my spe­cif­ic question—what was the chem­istry of the very ear­ly uni­verse before stars start­ed cook­ing up heav­ier elements?—was con­ve­nient­ly in place. Too con­ve­nient­ly. A fool­proof way to fin­ger­print every ele­ment and com­pound? Check. A smooth, pow­er­ful light source to back­light the most dis­tant reach­es? Check. An expand­ing uni­verse that lets us rewind cos­mic his­to­ry just by look­ing at dif­fer­ent wave­lengths? Check. A trans­par­ent atmos­phere so we can actu­al­ly do the obser­va­tions from the ground? Check. Laws of nature that don’t ran­dom­ly change with time or place? Check. The list goes on. I lit­er­al­ly could not have done the work unless dozens of these para­me­ters lined up just right. It felt less like luck and more like an engraved invi­ta­tion to explore the care­ful work of a tran­scen­dent Intel­li­gence.”
    • The author was for­mer­ly an astro­physi­cist at UT Austin. She now leads a min­istry.
  3. The Church in Chi­na Isn’t What You Think (Joy Marie Clark­son inter­view­ing Eas­t­en Law, Plough): “There’s an abid­ing myth that reg­is­tered church­es are just tools of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, that they do what­ev­er it demands. I want to clar­i­fy that this isn’t true. Many in the reg­is­tered church­es are gen­uine Chris­tians. They sim­ply have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on church and state, and they choose to nav­i­gate this rela­tion­ship with the Par­ty. They will sign the nec­es­sary doc­u­ments. They will give speech­es, such as on the Sini­ciza­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty. But they also take care of their con­gre­ga­tions and try to help peo­ple walk in faith. Their approach to nego­ti­a­tion with this tight­en­ing con­trol is dif­fer­ent from that of house church­es, which are resist­ing, hid­ing, and mov­ing around.”
    • The inter­vie­wee is a pro­fes­sor of world Chris­tian­i­ty at Yon­sei Uni­ver­si­ty in Seoul.
  4. Two great Chuck Nor­ris obit­u­ar­ies:
    • Chuck Nor­ris obit­u­ary: actor and mar­tial artist (The Times): “In 1994, when Chuck Nor­ris was star­ring in the TV action show Walk­er, Texas Ranger and at the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him. When the Dal­las police sub­se­quent­ly arrived, they found the duo with bro­ken arms, knives on the ground and Nor­ris, then 54, wait­ing qui­et­ly near­by. Try­ing not to laugh, the offi­cers asked the pair whether they knew who they had attacked. ‘We knew who he was,’ they said. ‘We just fig­ured that all that stuff on tele­vi­sion was fake.’ That there was noth­ing fake about Nor­ris was per­haps the key to his suc­cess and to his con­sid­er­able cul­tur­al sta­tus in the US.”
      • Absolute leg­end. Note this is the British Times. The Amer­i­can New York Times did not include this or any oth­er tru­ly epic scene in their obit­u­ary.
    • Chuck Nor­ris, 1940–2026 (Son­ny Bunch, The Bul­wark): “Inva­sion USA became an under­ground sen­sa­tion in Roma­nia, with boot­leg videos of the film passed around and help­ing to fuel the 1989 upris­ing’ against Nico­lae CeauÅŸes­cu, de Sem­lyen notes in his book. Accord­ing to James Bruner, who worked on the film with Nor­ris and direc­tor Chuck Zito, ‘They use the poster, to this day, in Roma­nia when they protest against the gov­ern­ment.… Ulti­mate­ly, action movies are about free­dom. Over­com­ing evil, in what­ev­er form it may be.’ ”
  5. Tech­nol­o­gy Weak­ens Our Minds. We Can Fix This. (Cal New­port, The New York Times): “We should con­sid­er tak­ing as strong a stance against ultra­processed con­tent as we already do against ultra­processed food. Which is to say: Most peo­ple should avoid these diver­sions most of the time. In the same way that you’re unlike­ly to eat Twinkies as a reg­u­lar snack, or still believe that Pop-Tarts pro­vide a bal­anced break­fast, stop con­sum­ing ultra­processed con­tent. Don’t use Tik­Tok. Don’t use Insta­gram. Don’t use X. Their sug­ar-high ben­e­fits aren’t worth the costs.… [and] any use of A.I. that main­ly serves to make core busi­ness tasks cog­ni­tive­ly less demand­ing should be treat­ed with cau­tion. Here’s a sim­ple rule that rein­forces this idea: Your writ­ing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the men­tal equiv­a­lent of a gym work­out by an ath­lete — it’s not an annoy­ance to be elim­i­nat­ed but a key ele­ment of your craft.”
  6. Sci­en­tists Filmed a Whale Birth. The Sur­prise: Mom Had Many Helpers. (Catrin Ein­horn, New York Times): “They found that the whales ori­ent­ed to the moth­er dur­ing labor and to the new­born after deliv­ery. Sperm whale calves can­not imme­di­ate­ly swim effec­tive­ly, and a core group of indi­vid­u­als — Rounder, her sis­ter Auro­ra, and a young, unre­lat­ed whale named Ariel — spent the most time lift­ing the new­born. But every whale in the group act­ed as ‘a pri­ma­ry sup­port­er’ at some point, includ­ing the sole male, an ado­les­cent named Allan who was start­ing to leave the group to embark on a large­ly soli­tary life, as male sperm whales do. But he appeared at the birth. The calf was rarely left untouched, and it was usu­al­ly being touched by at least two whales simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.”
  7. Promi­nent Pas­tor Calls for Texas Demo­c­rat to be ‘Cru­ci­fied With Christ’ (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “The host, Joshua Haymes, said of Mr. Talari­co: ‘I pray that God kills him. Ulti­mate­ly that means killing his heart and rais­ing him up to new life in Christ.’ Mr. Pot­teiger respond­ed: ‘Right — we want him cru­ci­fied with Christ. I want him to be — I think, Saul of Tar­sus — Talari­co of Tar­sus. That’s what I want.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. When out­siders eaves­drop on Chris­t­ian con­ver­sa­tions we can sound pret­ty weird to them.

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 544: Outworking Your Fork and the Olympics

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. You Can’t Out­work Your Fork (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “More and more peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing we’re liv­ing in Baby­lon. How do we live in Baby­lon? By tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. Remem­ber what Daniel did in the first chap­ter of his book? He refused to eat from the king’s table. Remem­ber, he was a cap­tive. He had no con­trol over his life and yet, he took respon­si­bil­i­ty for what he ate. Like­wise, as Christ fol­low­ers, we have to take con­trol over the things that enter our minds and hearts. We have to be respon­si­ble for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. We have to be inten­tion­al about what we read, what we watch, what we talk about and what we think about.… You’re in con­trol of your mind and your heart. Feed them well. After all, you can’t out­work your fork.”
  2. Olympic thoughts:
    • Alysa Liu com­pletes incred­i­ble come­back to win gold in fig­ure skat­ing (Les Car­pen­ter, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Lat­er, as she stood in a room beneath the stands, Liu recount­ed her wait through Sakamo­to and Nakai’s per­for­mances, telling how much she enjoys watch­ing them skate and was hop­ing they would skate real­ly well before the world. She was asked if she want­ed the gold at that point. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said, look­ing down at the medal around her neck, which matched the new gold dress she ordered for the Olympic free skate. ‘What I need­ed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good. No mat­ter what hap­pened, you would have been fine. If that was a prob­lem, if I fell on every jump, I would still be wear­ing this dress.’ .…it was hard to know whether the real­i­ty would ever hit her. It might not mat­ter. She was thrilled she had skat­ed well; she was thrilled she had two new dress­es for the Olympics and a third for Sat­ur­day night’s Olympic gala; she was thrilled her fam­i­ly got to watch her skate.… Win­ning an Olympic gold medal seemed very far down the list of what was impor­tant to her at that point.”
      • Whole­some, com­mend­able, and encour­ag­ing. Plus look at the sheer joy on her face in the sec­ond pho­to of the piece (the top-down one).
    • What Eileen Gu Has Done is Total­ly Ordi­nary, Usu­al­ly Invites Zero Con­tro­ver­sy, and Has Rou­tine­ly Ben­e­fit­ted the Unit­ed States (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “What’s strik­ing is how selec­tive the con­cern is. When for­eign-born ath­letes become Amer­i­cans in time to com­pete for Team USA, we don’t sud­den­ly become tex­tu­al lit­er­al­ists about nation­al­i­ty statutes, we just cel­e­brate the medal haul. Only when affil­i­a­tion flows the oth­er way do we dis­cov­er a new­found rev­er­ence for puri­ty in cit­i­zen­ship law. The prac­tice of ath­letes com­pet­ing for coun­tries oth­er than their birth­place isn’t a scan­dal; it’s a cor­ner­stone of mod­ern Olympic sports!”
  3. A Chi­nese official’s use of Chat­G­PT acci­den­tal­ly revealed a glob­al intim­i­da­tion oper­a­tion (Sean Lyn­gaas, CNN): “The Chi­nese law enforce­ment offi­cial used Chat­G­PT like a diary to doc­u­ment the alleged covert cam­paign of sup­pres­sion, Ope­nAI said. In one instance, Chi­nese oper­a­tors alleged­ly dis­guised them­selves as US immi­gra­tion offi­cials to warn a US-based Chi­nese dis­si­dent that their pub­lic state­ments had sup­pos­ed­ly bro­ken the law, accord­ing to the Chat­G­PT user. In anoth­er case, they describe an effort to use forged doc­u­ments from a US coun­ty court to try to get a Chi­nese dissident’s social media account tak­en down.”
  4. “Help! All the Kids are Becom­ing Catholic/Orthodox” (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Catholi­cism and East­ern Ortho­doxy don’t just offer a way of _seeing_ the world, they offer a _culture to immerse your­self in_ that so many peo­ple feel devoid of. I take it as no coin­ci­dence that the rise of inter­est in tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty coin­cid­ed with the rise of inter­est in sites like ancestry.com or grow­ing nationalism—both of which, in their own way, are try­ing to offer peo­ple a sense of shared, com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty root­ed in the past. To focus on doc­trine to the exclu­sion of com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty when inves­ti­gat­ing why peo­ple con­vert would be fol­ly. Protes­tants must have an answer to this if they want to keep peo­ple.”
  5. Against witch­craft (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Over­all, using your intu­ition is mas­sive­ly over­rat­ed in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go hay­wire. You’re bet­ter off court­ing like you’re arrang­ing your own mar­riage, not like you’re star­ring in a rom com.”
    • Much sen­si­ble (albeit non-Chris­t­ian) wis­dom in this arti­cle. Although the first four para­graphs are kin­da unhinged.
    • I decid­ed to look up the oth­er entries in this series. AMAZING. 9/10 rec­om­mend with the excep­tion of her sec­ond arti­cle which I skipped for being less rel­e­vant to like­ly read­ers of this sen­tence.
    • How to find a hus­band (and why you should want one) (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “So I got mar­ried recent­ly. I’ve decid­ed to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schreck­er.… Find­ing a spouse should be the num­ber one pri­or­i­ty in your life. The right part­ner will make every oth­er goal in your life eas­i­er to achieve. If your pri­or­i­ty is your career, you will prob­a­bly be more suc­cess­ful with a well-cho­sen spouse. In some cas­es this will be a part­ner in a sim­i­lar field and you guys can pass each oth­er net­works and gos­sip. In some cas­es you may pre­fer some­one who is will­ing to put their career on the back­burn­er and sup­port you by tak­ing care of every­thing else in your life. If you’re aim­ing for suc­cess in pol­i­tics, or the arts, or you work tire­less­ly for a real­ly impor­tant altru­is­tic cause, then mar­ry­ing some­one with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.”
    • The wall is real but not for the rea­sons you think (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Every day that pass­es, eli­gi­ble bach­e­lors in your age range start dat­ing the women they are going to mar­ry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main rea­sons. (1) There’s some­thing wrong with him/ (2) There’s some­thing wrong with her. (3) Bad luck. As you get old­er the men who are attrac­tive, want to get mar­ried, and don’t have ruinous per­son­al­i­ty prob­lems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girl­friends, aren’t inter­est­ed in seri­ous dat­ing, and/or have been seri­al­ly reject­ed by women after get­ting into rela­tion­ships with them. Obvi­ous­ly lots of sin­gle old­er men are still mar­riage-wor­thy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfor­tu­nate sources of incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. But the more time pass­es, the less like­ly this becomes.”
  6. It’s Not His Fault He Used the N‑Word (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “As con­tro­ver­sies go, this one was immac­u­late. Unlike pre­vi­ous inci­dents of this type, there was no risk that the alleged hate speech would turn out to be an acci­den­tal mala­prop­ism, or an out­right fab­ri­ca­tion, or, as in one mem­o­rable case from 2021, a man who was mis­heard while try­ing to get the atten­tion of the mas­cot for the Col­orado Rock­ies, a pur­ple pol­ka-dot­ted tricer­atops named Dinger. This was an actu­al utter­ance of the actu­al no-no word, caught on actu­al cam­era and broad­cast on the actu­al BBC. If ever there was an iron­clad case for can­cel­la­tion—! Ah, but wait: Remem­ber, John David­son has Tourette’s syn­drome, which also makes this an actu­al case of the phe­nom­e­non col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Oppres­sion Olympics.”
    • The twist at the end is stun­ning. I won’t spoil it. In a tweet about it, the author said, “When I learned why David­son was in the audi­ence my soul left my body.”
    • On a per­son­al note: one of my good friends in col­lege had Touret­te’s like this. I can attest that bro did high­ly offen­sive stuff on the reg­u­lar that I guar­an­tee he had absolute­ly zero con­trol over nor any poor inten­tion behind.
  7. Big­ger is not always bet­ter (Will Gibbs, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “She lived an ordi­nary life. Had kids, divorced, worked, retired, babysat and even­tu­al­ly passed away. But, her impact was any­thing but ordi­nary. She ran one of the few preschools in my home­town for twen­ty years. She deliv­ered dona­tions every Mon­day of the month to the local food pantry. She trav­eled with my church’s youth group to rehouse roofs and build ADA acces­si­ble hous­ing for less for­tu­nate peo­ple in our area.… When she passed away, my pas­tor start­ed get­ting stopped in the streets. Every­body every­where — even peo­ple he had walked by for years with­out a con­ver­sa­tion — want­ed to per­son­al­ly give their sym­pa­thies and express how big of an impact she had on them.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 542: the humanities backstory and overhyped Chinese academia

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Multi­bil­lion-Dol­lar Foun­da­tion That Con­trols the Human­i­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “Today, no sin­gle enti­ty, includ­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, has a more pro­found influ­ence on the fis­cal health and cul­tur­al out­put of the human­i­ties than the Mel­lon Foun­da­tion. The Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties’ grant bud­get was $78 mil­lion in 2024 (its over­all bud­get was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjust­ed for infla­tion). Mel­lon award­ed $540 mil­lion in grants that same year; its endow­ment sits at rough­ly $8 bil­lion. Mellon’s largesse is bad­ly need­ed, espe­cial­ly as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has threat­ened fur­ther cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s vir­tu­al monop­oly on human­i­ties fund­ing means that it has the pow­er to remake entire fields accord­ing to its desires. And in recent years, under the lead­er­ship of Eliz­a­beth Alexan­der, who became the organization’s pres­i­dent in 2018, Mel­lon has embraced an under­stand­ing of the human­i­ties that is much more util­i­tar­i­an, and far more polit­i­cal, than the one put for­ward by the 1964 com­mis­sion.”
    • Unlocked and gen­uine­ly shock­ing to me. One of the key insights: “The human­i­ties aren’t broke because they went woke. The human­i­ties went woke in large part _because_ they were broke. As oth­er donors, the gov­ern­ment, and uni­ver­si­ties them­selves all but aban­doned these fields, Mel­lon became a life­line.”
  2. The Pop­u­lar Pro­gres­sive Pod­cast Call­ing Evan­gel­i­cals ‘Can­cer’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, The Free Press): “…it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine the vit­ri­ol she directs at [evan­gel­i­cals] being tar­get­ed at any oth­er reli­gious group by a major media fig­ure with so lit­tle con­se­quence. Take one clip that has cir­cu­lat­ed among evan­gel­i­cals recent­ly. I assumed its cap­tion on X, ‘White Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is a can­cer,’ was intend­ed to scan­dal­ize with the most incen­di­ary quote. I thought wrong. If any­thing, the cap­tion under­sold a slan­der­ous, incu­ri­ous, unse­ri­ous screed that informed Welch’s view­ers that evan­gel­i­cals are ‘the worst peo­ple in our coun­try.’ They are, Welch says, peo­ple who want oth­ers to suf­fer, who belong to a ‘cult.’ And for Welch, this kind of lan­guage is par for the course. ‘I detest, with every mol­e­cule… in my being, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty,’ she said in May.”
  3. Get Mar­ried Young (Brad Wilcox, Com­pact): “First, the cul­ture is telling you to lean into work and trav­el. But work­ing for the man and ‘trav­el­ing to Thai­land’ is not going to bring you the ful­fill­ment you think it will. Sec­ond, you will min­i­mize your odds of being mis­er­able and max­i­mize your odds of liv­ing a mean­ing­ful and hap­py life by get­ting mar­ried and hav­ing kids. So, don’t wait to embark on life’s most impor­tant jour­ney. Third, do not assume that you can wait until your thir­ties to find a spouse and start your fam­i­ly. If you wait, you may miss out.”
    • Lots of good data in this one. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  4. Don’t Trust the Rank­ings That Put China’s Uni­ver­si­ties on Top (Ariel Pro­cac­cia, New York Times): “The gap between the rank­ings and real­i­ty can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a mea­sure becomes a tar­get, it ceas­es to be a good mea­sure. It’s like try­ing to cure a fever by icing the ther­mome­ter: You’ve cooled the instru­ment, but the patient is still burn­ing up. Chi­na has made suc­cess in glob­al uni­ver­si­ty rank­ings a nation­al pol­i­cy goal, in the process cre­at­ing incen­tives that pri­or­i­tize the appear­ance of excel­lence over the health of the research envi­ron­ment.”
  5. Two arti­cles about preva­lent sec­u­lar sex­u­al ethics:
    • Ope­nAI Exec­u­tive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sex­u­al Dis­crim­i­na­tion (Geor­gia Wells & Sam Schech­n­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ope­nAI has cut ties with one of its top safe­ty exec­u­tives, on the grounds of sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion, after she voiced oppo­si­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial roll­out of AI erot­i­ca in its Chat­G­PT prod­uct.… Before her fir­ing, Beier­meis­ter told col­leagues that she opposed adult mode, and wor­ried it would have harm­ful effects for users, peo­ple famil­iar with her remarks said. She also told col­leagues that she believed OpenAI’s mech­a­nisms to stop child-exploita­tion con­tent weren’t effec­tive enough, and that the com­pa­ny couldn’t suf­fi­cient­ly wall off adult con­tent from teens, the peo­ple said.”
    • The Sexbot Rev­o­lu­tion Is Already Here (Debra Soh, The Free Press): “Though sex dolls—meaning human‑like, anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate, anthro­po­mor­phic figurines—were once believed to be used only by social­ly inept weirdos, today near­ly 10 per­cent of men in the U.S. have bought or owned one. And it’s not just the guys; 6 per­cent of women in the U.S. have done the same.… The aver­age sex doll own­er is a mid­dle-aged het­ero­sex­u­al man who is sin­gle or divorced, high-school edu­cat­ed, and employed. Research has shown that doll own­ers have sex with a doll about 11 times a month and sex with a human part­ner about 2.6 times a month. In con­trast, non–doll own­ers have sex with a human part­ner about 4.5 times a month.”
      • I am not con­vinced the num­bers in this arti­cle are reli­able (ten per­cent of guys sounds like a lot), but even if the num­bers are off this is kin­da wild.
  6. It’s Time for Amer­i­ca to Admit That It Has a Mar­i­jua­na Prob­lem (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, New York Times): “…sup­port­ers of legal­iza­tion pre­dict­ed that it would bring few down­sides. In our edi­to­ri­als, we described mar­i­jua­na addic­tion and depen­dence as ‘rel­a­tive­ly minor prob­lems.’ Many advo­cates went fur­ther and claimed that mar­i­jua­na was a harm­less drug that might even bring net health ben­e­fits. They also said that legal­iza­tion might not lead to greater use. It is now clear that many of these pre­dic­tions were wrong.… At least one in 10 peo­ple who use mar­i­jua­na devel­ops an addic­tion, a sim­i­lar share as with alco­hol. Even some who do not devel­op an addic­tion can still use it too much. Peo­ple who are fre­quent­ly stoned can strug­gle to hold a job or take care of their fam­i­lies.”
    • Unlocked.
  7. A Stan­ford Exper­i­ment to Pair 5,000 Sin­gles Has Tak­en Over Cam­pus (Jas­mine Li, Wall Street Jour­nal): “More than 5,000 Stan­ford stu­dents have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 under­grad­u­ates. It has spread to 10 oth­er col­leges includ­ing Colum­bia, Prince­ton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 mil­lion in ven­ture-cap­i­tal fund­ing. The growth, fans say, reflects a real­i­ty about many col­lege kids: They’re intim­i­dat­ed by real-life courtship and over­whelmed by the end­less scroll of dat­ing apps. Entre­pre­neur­ial stu­dents have found huge demand for alter­nate match­mak­ing tools.”

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 538: missionary spies and Minneapolis reflections

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. God’s Spooks: Reli­gion, Spy­ing, and the Cold War (Matthew Avery Sut­ton, Church Life Jour­nal): “Since its incep­tion, the CIA has used mis­sion­ar­ies and oth­er reli­gious activists for intel­li­gence and espi­onage work; it has used reli­gion as an effec­tive pro­pa­gan­da tool, and its agents have even posed as cler­gy. CIA agents and reli­gious activists man­aged to keep their part­ner­ships most­ly hid­den until the 1970s. But in the wake of Viet­nam and Water­gate, numer­ous jour­nal­ists and then Con­gress began scru­ti­niz­ing the agency more close­ly. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employ­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to fur­ther its agen­da and that some reli­gious activists were receiv­ing sub­stan­tial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and reli­gious activists have long col­lab­o­rat­ed to achieve numer­ous pol­i­cy goals.”
    • Super fas­ci­nat­ing. My denom­i­na­tion receives spe­cif­ic men­tion: “The Assem­blies of God, which had a large and active mis­sion­ary out­reach, qui­et­ly instruct­ed work­ers to avoid CIA col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ev­er, church lead­ers did not want to go on record pub­licly against the CIA.”
  2. Report: More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians world­wide face ‘high lev­els’ of per­se­cu­tion (Gina Chris­t­ian, OSV News): “More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians — or 1 in 7 believ­ers world­wide — face ‘high lev­els of per­se­cu­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion for their faith,’ accord­ing to a new report.… Specif­i­cal­ly, Open Doors focus­es on col­lect­ing data on Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion in six key areas: restric­tions or dan­gers on prac­tic­ing faith in pri­vate, fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, nation­al and church life, as well as the lev­els of vio­lence — men­tal, phys­i­cal and sex­u­al — Chris­tians face in the 150 nations Open Doors mon­i­tors. Each area is scored, with each coun­try then receiv­ing an over­all score out of 100 for the sever­i­ty of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, with scores of 81–100 des­ig­nat­ed as ‘extreme,’ 61–80 ‘very high’ and 41–60 ‘high.’”
  3. Not So Sec­u­lar Swe­den (Joel Hall­dorf, Com­ment): “In high­ly sec­u­lar soci­eties, zoomers tend to be more reli­gious than their boomer par­ents. Nowhere, the study con­clud­ed, was that pat­tern clear­er than in Swe­den, once the poster child of sec­u­lar­ism.… Swe­den once set the glob­al bench­mark for sec­u­lar ratio­nal­i­ty, and every­body expect­ed the world to fol­low our path. Now the qui­et stir­rings of faith here in the north—more con­fir­ma­tions, new mem­ber­ships, con­ver­sa­tions once unthinkable—show that his­to­ry has a way of hum­bling even the most con­fi­dent nar­ra­tives. Iron­clad soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ries often insist that the cur­rent moment is our inevitable future. But his­to­ry sel­dom fol­lows straight lines.”
  4. Chris­tians, Let’s Stop Abus­ing Romans 13 (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “More­over, the use of Romans 13 as a refusal to ques­tion the moral­i­ty of a use of force is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a vio­la­tion of the pas­sage. We might well ask, what would Paul have writ­ten if Romans 13 were addressed to the author­i­ties rather than to those under their rule? Well, we actu­al­ly know the answer, because the same Spir­it who breathed out Romans 13 also breathed out John the Baptist’s instruc­tions to tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers. John told them not to extort mon­ey from any­one, imply­ing that they would be held respon­si­ble for the mis­use of their pow­er (Luke 3:12–14). The same Spir­it also favor­ably por­trayed Paul’s inter­ac­tion with the police who told him and Silas, on behalf of the mag­is­trates, to leave qui­et­ly, to which Paul replied, ‘They have beat­en us pub­licly, uncon­demned, men who are Roman cit­i­zens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secret­ly? No! Let them come them­selves and take us out’ (Acts 16:37).”
  5. Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ties Surge in Glob­al Rank­ings as U.S. Schools Slip (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “The issue at top Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties is not falling pro­duc­tion. Six promi­nent Amer­i­can schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Johns Hop­kins, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton-Seat­tle, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty — are pro­duc­ing more research than they did two decades ago, accord­ing to the Lei­den tal­lies. But pro­duc­tion by the Chi­nese schools has risen far more.… [How­ev­er,] a study has sug­gest­ed that Chi­nese researchers have been boost­ing their cita­tion rank­ings by cit­ing one anoth­er more often than west­ern researchers tend to cite oth­er west­ern­ers.”
  6. How to stop the chaos of col­lege sports (John Cali­pari, Wash­ing­ton Post): “There is no sus­tain­able path in col­lege ath­let­ics that doesn’t address these three things: First, stu­dent-ath­letes should have their oppor­tu­ni­ties for schol­ar­ships pro­tect­ed and get to com­pete against play­ers who are their age. Sec­ond, trans­fer rules, which now allow play­ers to leave one school for anoth­er as often as they’d like, need sta­bil­i­ty. This will help edu­ca­tion remain the heart of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. Third, pro­tect the free mar­ket and rights of young peo­ple to fair­ly earn what their local mar­kets can offer, which will require more rev­enue from teams.”
  7. Some reflec­tions on ICE in Min­neso­ta. There are many more float­ing around the web, and if you find one with good insights or a provoca­tive per­spec­tive please let me know about it.
    • I Joined Ice Watch (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “In the last six weeks, Min­neapo­lis has become the site of the largest immi­gra­tion enforce­ment oper­a­tion in U.S. his­to­ry. Thou­sands of city res­i­dents have respond­ed by join­ing var­i­ous Sig­nal groups whose main pur­pose is to find and dis­rupt ICE.… These indi­vid­u­als came from all walks of life. I count­ed at least five pub­lic school teach­ers, a divorce lawyer, two med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, a for­mer bal­le­ri­na, and even one Min­neapo­lis City Coun­cil mem­ber: Aurin Chowd­hury⁩, a pro­gres­sive who was endorsed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca in 2023. One local non­prof­it leader whose orga­ni­za­tion reset­tles refugees told me that the aver­age par­tic­i­pants in these Sig­nal groups are church mem­bers, retirees, and par­ents.”
    • Min­neapo­lis Isn’t a Movie (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “Around the same time that Renee Good was shot, a video cir­cu­lat­ed on Tik­Tok of anoth­er con­fronta­tion between a group of agents who appear to be U.S. Mar­shals and an activist with a cam­era. The activist is a young- to mid­dle-aged woman, as is one of the agents—and when the first woman men­tions that her 6‑year-old child is in her car, the agent looks like she’s been elec­tro­cut­ed. ‘You have a child in your car?’ she says, her voice pitch­ing sharply upward, her eyes wide with hor­ror. ‘Get your child off the scene! This is an active police scene!’ It could not be clear­er, in this moment, that these women inhab­it two dif­fer­ent real­i­ties. One under­stands her­self to be in a dan­ger­ous, high-stakes sit­u­a­tion; the oth­er thinks it’s all a sort of game.”
    • The Goon Squad (Nick Cat­to­gio, The Dis­patch): “Why on earth is the admin­is­tra­tion announc­ing its oper­a­tions before they hap­pen?… It makes no sense as a strat­e­gy for effec­tive law enforcement—but lots of sense as a pageant of dom­i­neer­ing law-and-order assertive­ness. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion wants con­fronta­tion. Its top pri­or­i­ty isn’t to unob­tru­sive­ly detain and remove the most dan­ger­ous immi­grants, as the depor­ta­tion num­bers prove. Its pri­or­i­ty is to intim­i­date its cul­tur­al ene­mies with heavy-hand­ed dis­plays of author­i­ty and promis­es of offi­cial impuni­ty for those who car­ry them out. That’s why ICE wears masks, a priv­i­lege even U.S. com­bat troops don’t enjoy, and why some agents are kit­ted out in cam­ou­flage despite the fact that they’re not try­ing to ‘blend in’ to their urban sur­round­ings. (There’s noth­ing stealthy about ICE.) They’re not enforc­ing the law, they’re going into bat­tle. And their anonymi­ty sig­nals, to you and to them, that no one will hold them account­able for what hap­pens dur­ing that bat­tle if you make trou­ble.”
    • One State, Two Very Dif­fer­ent Views of Min­neapo­lis (Sheila M. Eldred, Eliz­a­beth A. Staw­ic­ki, Ann Hin­ga Klein and Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Ms. Good’s death was trag­ic, they said. Hor­rif­ic. But they also said that she had asked for trou­ble. ‘You obey the law offi­cer,’ a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, ‘and ques­tion it lat­er.’ This is the divide, in a sin­gle sen­tence. In Min­neapo­lis, pro­test­ers saw an inno­cent woman killed by a fed­er­al agent and took to the streets. At ‘the Pick­le,’ the reg­u­lars saw a woman who should have com­plied.”

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 528: Halloween, China, and Nihilistic Violent Extremists

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. Chris­tians Don’t Cel­e­brate Hal­loween (Tyler Krug, Sub­stack): “For years now, when some­one asks me if our fam­i­ly cel­e­brates Hal­loween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t cel­e­brate any­thing on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neigh­bors for can­dy.’ My reply brings to the sur­face two relat­ed concepts—one explic­it, one implied. The first con­cept is cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion is ‘the action of mark­ing one’s plea­sure at an impor­tant event or occa­sion.’ Cel­e­bra­tion, there­fore, involves knowl­edge, intent and endorse­ment.… But my Hal­loween retort also implies a sec­ond con­cept: par­tic­i­pa­tion. While cel­e­bra­tion requires par­tic­i­pa­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion does not require celebration—playing in a foot­ball game and cel­e­brat­ing the sport are two dif­fer­ent things. Fur­ther, a defen­sive back might par­tic­i­pate in a play result­ing in a touch­down, but they won’t be cel­e­brat­ing in the end zone.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. Amer­i­ca Is Los­ing the Gray Zone War for the South Chi­na Sea (Ray­mond Pow­ell, The Dis­patch): “America’s con­tin­ued inabil­i­ty to devel­op any­thing approach­ing a counter-gray-zone strat­e­gy is exact­ly why Chi­na employs it. The CCP has fig­ured out that we real­ly like our neat cat­e­gories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or ille­gal; an asset is either mil­i­tary or civil­ian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoid­ed and de-esca­lat­ed, not used as oppor­tu­ni­ties to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strat­e­gy is designed to exploit the myr­i­ad gaps and seams that define our con­ven­tion­al and ordered pol­i­cy frame­works and deter­rence mod­els.”
  3. The Sus­pect­ed LA Arson­ist and the Rise of the Nihilis­tic Vio­lent Extrem­ists (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Don­ald Trump, peo­ple who ate meat, peo­ple who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chat­bot that he ‘lit­er­al­ly burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amaz­ing. I felt so lib­er­at­ed.’ …Rinderknecht came from a reli­gious home. His par­ents, Joel and Jen­nifer, were Bap­tist mis­sion­ar­ies who lived in France.”
  4. We All Live in a Vil­lage Now (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “We all live in a vil­lage again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its atten­dant free­doms from neigh­bor­ly super­vi­sion and col­lec­tive con­straint, was real­ly just a short inter­lude in the his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Facil­i­tat­ed by social media, the vil­lage has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and super­charged by the cru­el­ty of the crowd.”
  5. Blue State Blues (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “[The guid­ing prin­ci­ple of blue states] is pater­nal­ism for the law-abid­ing mass­es and per­mis­sive­ness for society’s anti­so­cial under­bel­ly. In oth­er words, liv­ing in a blue state means that the gov­ern­ment treats you like a child and does every­thing in its pow­er to make your life just a lit­tle more annoy­ing and inconvenient—unless you start open­ly smok­ing crack on the street.… I still sup­port labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dig­ni­ty and san­i­ty too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
  6. Is ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-John­ston, Sub­stack): “As a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, my first thoughts when encoun­ter­ing reports [of ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty] are that they can’t pos­si­bly be real. By the time patients with severe demen­tia actu­al­ly die, their brains are cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly dam­aged. They typ­i­cal­ly show no signs of rec­og­niz­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers. They often haven’t respond­ed mean­ing­ful­ly to their envi­ron­ment in months or years. Their brains are rid­dled with plaques and tan­gles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synap­tic con­nec­tions — so much that their brains have vis­i­bly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty keeps being report­ed.… The only prospec­tive study, which fol­lowed 100 hos­pice deaths, found it in 6% of cas­es. That’s not ubiq­ui­tous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thou­sand cas­es per year.”
    • An inter­est­ing com­ple­ment to the Charles Mur­ray arti­cle argu­ing for the exis­tence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
    • The author is a research sci­en­tist at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia.
  7. The Debate Divid­ing the Supreme Court’s Lib­er­al Jus­tices (Jodi Kan­tor, New York Times): “Bad­ly out­num­bered, seat­ed for the long haul of life tenure, Jus­tices Kagan and Jack­son in par­tic­u­lar are divid­ed on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sen­tenced to fail.… Like many oth­ers across the left in the era of Don­ald J. Trump, the lib­er­al jus­tices are in a gen­er­a­tional and philo­soph­i­cal strug­gle over whether to safe­guard insti­tu­tions from with­in or protest their decline. But unlike politi­cians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tra­di­tion-bound and deco­rous that clos­ing an opin­ion ‘I dis­sent’ instead of ‘I respect­ful­ly dis­sent’ is con­sid­ered a dra­mat­ic state­ment.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How easy is it to fudge your sci­en­tif­ic rank? Meet Lar­ry, the world’s most cit­ed cat (Christie Wilcox, Sci­ence): “Lar­ry Richard­son appeared to be an ear­ly-career math­e­mati­cian with poten­tial. Accord­ing to Google Schol­ar, he’d authored a dozen papers on top­ics rang­ing from com­plex alge­bras to the struc­ture of math­e­mat­i­cal objects, rack­ing up more than 130 cita­tions in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the stud­ies weren’t com­plete gib­ber­ish. And Lar­ry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not with­out prece­dent] In 1975, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Jack Het­her­ing­ton added his Siamese to one of his sin­gle-author papers so the ref­er­ences to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domes­ti­cus Chester Willard’ has 107 cita­tions.”
    • Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit out­dat­ed. I did check FDC Willard and his cita­tion count has gone up to 113.
  • AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
  • Sexy Cos­tumes for your Church Fall Fes­ti­val (Matthew Pierce, Sub­stack): “Prob­a­bly the sex­i­est man in the Bible is Sam­son, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Chris­t­ian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Sam­son is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pret­ty girls, and in five min­utes he will be talk­ing to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on pro­ba­tion for stab­bing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he nev­er will.”
  • Your Brain’s Job (The Oat­meal)
  • Doc­u­ment Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
  • What’s Miss­ing From Your Favorite Choco­late Bar? It May Be Choco­late. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Hal­loween sea­son boosts demand, some can­dy com­pa­nies are replac­ing expen­sive cocoa but­ter with oth­er fats, a swap that means their prod­ucts no longer meet the U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry def­i­n­i­tion of milk choco­late and can no longer be called that on pack­ag­ing.”
  • The Night­mare Is Over: Supreme Court Out­laws Can­dy Corn (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.