Tag: china

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 253

Spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for police reform, var­i­ous explain­ers and opin­ion pieces, and some weird news about Tik­Tok and Chris­tian­i­ty.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On the racial divi­sion in Amer­i­ca:
    • How to Make this Moment the Turn­ing Point for Real Change (Barack Oba­ma, Medi­um): “Finally, the more spe­cif­ic we can make demands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and police reform, the hard­er it will be for elect­ed offi­cials to just offer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usu­al once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that reform agen­da will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous communities.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Some spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: “For those who are inter­est­ed in research-based solu­tions to stop police vio­lence, here’s what you need to know — based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)” (Samuel Sinyang­we, Twit­ter)
    • More spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: How to Actu­al­ly Fix Amer­i­ca’s Police (Seth W. Stoughton, Jef­frey J. Noble & Geof­frey P. Alpert, The Atlantic): “‘Overcriminalization’ has been broad­ly dis­cussed; there are so many laws that vio­la­tions are ubiq­ui­tous. If every­one is a crim­i­nal, offi­cers have almost unfet­tered dis­cre­tion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” The authors have an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of exper­tise (a law prof, a crim­i­nol­o­gy prof, and a for­mer offi­cer).
    • I Must Object: A Rebut­tal to Brown Univ.’s Let­ter Decry­ing Per­va­sive Racism in US (Glenn C. Loury, City Jour­nal): “I deeply resent­ed the let­ter. First of all, what makes an admin­is­tra­tor (even a high­ly paid one, with an exalt­ed title) a ‘leader’ of this uni­ver­si­ty? We, the fac­ul­ty, are the only ‘leaders’ wor­thy of men­tion when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-push­ing appa­ratchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unset­tling. Why must this university’s senior admin­is­tra­tion declare, on behalf of the insti­tu­tion as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any sub­tle dif­fer­ences of empha­sis or nuance—interpret con­tentious cur­rent events through a sin­gle lens?” Loury, who is black, is an econ pro­fes­sor at Brown. He did not come to play.
    • Efrem Smith: White Evan­gel­i­cals Need to Hum­ble Them­selves (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve been encour­aged, espe­cial­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the church, to see more pas­tors speak­ing out, being bro­ken­heart­ed, call­ing for change. But then there’s also a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of evan­gel­i­cal­ism that is either silent or late to the par­ty when it comes to the church call­ing for justice.”
    • A Nation on Fire Needs the Flames of the Spir­it (Esau McCaul­ley, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There is no oth­er world in which to talk about Jesus than a world in which black men can have their necks stepped on for nine minutes.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Wheaton. 
    • Don’t under­stand the protests? What you’re see­ing is peo­ple pushed to the edge (Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar, LA Times): “…even though we do all the con­ven­tion­al things to raise pub­lic and polit­i­cal aware­ness — write artic­u­late and insight­ful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the con­tin­ued dev­as­ta­tion on CNN, sup­port can­di­dates who promise change — the nee­dle hard­ly budges.”
    • On Days of Dis­or­der (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Notice that this schema is val­ue neu­tral: it describes both the foot­ball hooli­gan and the race riot­er, 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian pogroms and 21st cen­tu­ry Hong Kong street bat­tles. In all of these a cer­tain per­cent­age of the par­tic­i­pants plays the game for fair­ly mun­dane rea­sons: to rev­el in excite­ment or ter­ror, lose them­selves in a rare sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty, belong­ing, or pow­er, or to sim­ply gain the mon­e­tary rewards that come with theft and loot­ing. The pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion will­ing to join a riot to attain these things like­ly reflects the pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion oth­er­wise cut off from them in nor­mal times. Few riot­ers are mar­ried men who must be at work at 8:00 AM the next morning.” This was quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Sim­plic­i­ty Is The Ene­my & Bad Apples (Jonathan Last, The Bul­wark): “What’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now is large and com­pli­cat­ed. We have a series of prob­lems, some of which over­lap, some of which do not. And attempts to solve them have, his­tor­i­cal­ly, been stymied by con­flat­ing them and believ­ing that they are sim­ple and connected.”
  2. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • The Trea­son of Epi­demi­ol­o­gists (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The sim­ple fact is that what­ev­er leg­is­la­tion we’re going to get, we’d still get if the protests stopped this morn­ing. In fact, a rea­son­able per­son would con­clude we’d be more like­ly to get it if they stopped now, because the more these things go on, the more oppo­si­tion and resent­ment will grow.” 
    • Relat­ed: “A thread about how protest­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic was described when con­ser­v­a­tives were doing it” (Matt Walsh, Twit­ter)
    • Sur­gi­sphere: gov­ern­ments and WHO changed Covid-19 pol­i­cy based on sus­pect data from tiny US com­pa­ny (Melis­sa Dav­ey, Stephanie Kirch­gaess­ner & Sarah Bose­ley, The Guardian): “The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and a num­ber of nation­al gov­ern­ments have changed their Covid-19 poli­cies and treat­ments on the basis of flawed data from a lit­tle-known US health­care ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny, also call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of key stud­ies pub­lished in some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious med­ical jour­nals. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion can reveal the US-based com­pa­ny Sur­gi­sphere, whose hand­ful of employ­ees appear to include a sci­ence fic­tion writer and an adult-con­tent mod­el, has pro­vid­ed data for mul­ti­ple stud­ies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief exec­u­tive, but has so far failed to ade­quate­ly explain its data or methodology.” This is actu­al­ly nuts.
    • The C.D.C. Wait­ed ‘Its Entire Exis­tence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong? (Eric Lip­ton, Abby Good­nough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoor­va Mandavilli,Sheri Fink & Mark Walk­er, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. is risk-averse, per­fec­tion­ist and ill suit­ed to impro­vis­ing in a quick­ly evolv­ing cri­sis — par­tic­u­lar­ly one that shuts down the coun­try and par­a­lyzes the economy.”
  3. The Muse­um of the Bible is win­ning over some of its biggest crit­ics: Jew­ish schol­ars (Men­achem Weck­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mintz believes Jew­ish schol­ars who denounced evan­gel­i­cal tones in the muse­um may have done so because they don’t see eye-to-eye with its polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive own­ers. But, she notes, the muse­um itself caters to Jews. She cites a time when it arranged kosher food for an event in which her hus­band, an Ortho­dox rab­bi, par­tic­i­pat­ed. ‘They were just nice about it,’ she says.”
  4. Chris­t­ian Tik­Tok videos are cen­sored and delet­ed in the US, cre­ators say (Liza Van­den­boom, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Christian con­tent is often cen­sored and removed from Tik­Tok, accord­ing to sev­er­al cre­ators on the plat­form. The Chi­na-based social media app hosts short, snip­py videos rang­ing from inspi­ra­tional mini-speech­es to musi­cal and dance per­for­mances and is pop­u­lar with teenagers and young adults. The plat­form reports over 800 mil­lion active users, with 30 mil­lion active users in the U.S. Researchers have grown con­cerned over the app’s reach and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it bring­ing Chi­nese-style cen­sor­ship to main­stream U.S. audiences.” 
  5. Tech­noc­ra­cy Is Impos­si­ble (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Leaders should pay atten­tion to sci­en­tists, dra­mat­i­cal­ly more than the cur­rent Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion does, but an immu­nol­o­gist will say one thing, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, an econ­o­mist some­thing alto­geth­er oth­er. The var­i­ous sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines will not speak with a sin­gle voice, indeed will not speak at all: indi­vid­ual schol­ars will speak, and what they say will arise from a com­bi­na­tion of their schol­ar­ly exper­tise and their beliefs (derived from non-sci­en­tif­ic sources) about what mat­ters most in life, and a good polit­i­cal leader will have the gen­er­al intel­li­gence and moral dis­cern­ment to sift the var­i­ous mes­sages he or she receives and make a deci­sion based on all the rel­e­vant input.”
  6. There was a fight at the New York Times this week. I’m not actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in the op-ed that pro­voked it, but I am quite inter­est­ed in how the fight is play­ing out. The New York Times occu­pies a spe­cial place in the Amer­i­can media ecosys­tem and fights like this illu­mi­nate some of what is hap­pen­ing beneath the sur­face.
    • New York Times Jour­nal­ists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page (Matt Welch, Rea­son): “This pub­lish­ing flap, which in com­par­a­tive impor­tance is a sput­ter­ing match next to the hell-infer­no of spring 2020, is nonethe­less sym­bol­ic of a shift bear­ing more tec­ton­ic heft. Our lib­er­al insti­tu­tions, not unlike our con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als, are nois­i­ly aban­don­ing liberalism.”
    • The Inside Sto­ry of the Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “This process, with back and forth over phone, email, and text, extend­ed through the morn­ing and after­noon on Wednes­day. Cot­ton and his team then signed off on the final ver­sion around 2:30 p.m. It was post­ed short­ly after. Then, all hell broke loose.”
    • A Twit­ter thread from NY Times opin­ion colum­nist Bari Weiss: “The civ­il war inside The New York Times between the (most­ly young) wokes the (most­ly 40+) lib­er­als is the same one rag­ing inside oth­er pub­li­ca­tions and com­pa­nies across the coun­try. The dynam­ic is always the same. (Thread.)”
    • ‘New York Times’ Staffers Grill Lead­er­ship Over Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed Dur­ing All-Hands (Lau­ra Wag­n­er, Vice): “…the most infor­ma­tive parts of the meet­ing came from the lengthy ques­tion-and-answer por­tion. Staffers asked for an autop­sy of the piece and how it was pub­lished; if com­pa­ny lead­ers were plan­ning to address James Bennet’s lead­er­ship of the opin­ion sec­tion, which has had ‘several mis­fires’; whether Opin­ion staff edi­tor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘openly bad mouth[ing] younger news col­leagues on a plat­form where they, because of strict com­pa­ny pol­i­cy, could not defend them­selves’; whether the opin­ion sec­tion had sug­gest­ed the top­ic of the op-ed to Cot­ton; and what the Times would do to help retain and sup­port Black employees.”
    • After staff uproar, New York Times says Sen. Tom Cot­ton op-ed urg­ing mil­i­tary incur­sion into U.S. cities ‘did not meet our stan­dard­s’ (Ela­he Iza­di, Paul Farhi and Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of its promi­nence, the Times’s op-ed page and colum­nists often gen­er­ate con­tro­ver­sy, though rarely from with­in the news­pa­per itself. There was wide­spread crit­i­cism in Feb­ru­ary, for exam­ple, when the Times pub­lished an op-ed from a mem­ber of Afghanistan’s Tal­iban, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the paper failed to iden­ti­fy the author’s his­to­ry of involve­ment in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There was lit­tle inter­nal oppo­si­tion to the col­umn, how­ev­er, at least none that spilled into pub­lic view.”
    • New York Times has stopped defend­ing its Tom Cot­ton op-ed (Erik Wem­ple, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As Jack Shafer has not­ed, the Times opin­ion page exists to pro­voke. It has run op-eds by Moam­mar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin and oth­ers. In a Decem­ber 2017 staff meet­ing, Ben­net addressed the dif­fi­cul­ties of judg­ing when a piece goes too far: ‘We’ve pub­lished Vladimir Putin,’ Ben­net said in the meet­ing. ‘Should we not allow Vladimir Putin into our pages? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say that that would be doing a ser­vice to our read­ers. But as you can see, I mean, I strug­gle to artic­u­late what those bound­aries are.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Overfitting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more parameters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well‐written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 252

There was an abun­dance of sad news this week, which match­es this month, which match­es this year.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bible tells us to weep with those who weep, and this is a good week for that. I’ve had to share arti­cles about sim­i­lar wicked­ness too many times, begin­ning all the way back in vol­ume 4.
    • I think this 8 minute Face­book video by my friend Jamil Stell is good. He filmed it a few hours before George Floyd’s death, which is why he doesn’t ref­er­ence it. Jamil, who spoke at our fall retreat four years ago, is the Chi Alpha direc­tor at Cal State Stanis­laus.
    • I Specif­i­cal­ly Request­ed The Oppo­site of This (Imgur) — if a pic­ture is worth 1,000 words, a pic­ture with a great cap­tion is an entire trea­tise.
    • The Sor­rows of Min­neapo­lis: A Prayer for Our City (John Piper, Desir­ing God): dif­fi­cult to excerpt, quite good.
    • When the Law Does­n’t Con­tain All the Answers (Bob Driscoll, The Dis­patch): “The law, even applied cor­rect­ly, doesn’t rem­e­dy what we know is wrong. We can hope that the George Floyd killing can pro­vide some insight into the feel­ing of frus­tra­tion in many minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties sur­round­ing polic­ing issues, because we can see, or at least sense, the depth of the prob­lem. Assum­ing the sys­tem prop­er­ly tries and con­victs the kneel­ing offi­cer of some seri­ous offense, will you feel any bet­ter about George Floyd’s death? I won’t.”
    • George Floyd Left a Gospel Lega­cy in Hous­ton (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The rest of the coun­try knows George Floyd from sev­er­al min­utes of cell phone footage cap­tured dur­ing his final hours. But in Houston’s Third Ward, they know Floyd for how he lived for decades—a men­tor to a gen­er­a­tion of young men and a ‘person of peace’ ush­er­ing min­istries into the area.”
    • Did George Floyd and Then-Offi­cer Derek Chau­vin Work Togeth­er in Min­neapo­lis? (Snopes): “So while it’s true that Floyd and Chau­vin worked at the club at the same time, it’s unknown, and unlike­ly, accord­ing to the for­mer own­er of the build­ing where the club was locat­ed, that the two men knew each other.”
    • Cooped up: A shame­ful Cen­tral Park encounter demands all New York­ers be bet­ter peo­ple (Robert A. George, NY Dai­ly News) : “In the lat­est episode of the every­day-fresh-hell that is New York City under quar­an­tine, one white female, Amy Coop­er, was caught on video call­ing the cops on one black male, Chris­t­ian Coop­er. Sor­ry, folks, I’d encour­age every­one to push back on the reflex­ive instinct to make this into a sto­ry about racism as it’s more a mod­ern para­ble of bad behav­ior between two individuals.” Super-inter­est­ing.
    • White Peo­ple Behav­ing Bad­ly (Zaid Jilani, Arc Dig­i­tal): “The truth is, mea­sured explic­it and implic­it racial bias has rapid­ly declined, inter­ra­cial crimes are rare, and whites are actu­al­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed com­pared to their share of the pop­u­la­tion in the FBI’s index of hate crimes. No racial group has a monop­oly on hate, what­ev­er anec­dotes ele­vat­ed to news cov­er­age may lead us to believe.”
    • Anger Is Jus­ti­fied, Riots Nev­er Are (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Riots are bad. Riots are nev­er a coher­ent or moral response to injus­tice, they just mul­ti­ply injus­tices and the riot­ers them­selves often suf­fer more in the long run…. Riots dis­suade indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies, and busi­ness­es from stay­ing in or join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty. Who wants to raise their kids in the neigh­bor­hood where the police sta­tion had to be evac­u­at­ed before it was set ablaze?” Some research on the effects of riots The Eco­nom­ic After­math of the 1960s Riots in Amer­i­can Cities: Evi­dence from Prop­er­ty Val­ues (Collins & Mar­go, Jour­nal of Eco­nom­ic His­to­ry on JSTOR) and this Twit­ter thread by a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor.
    • A dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive: What the news does­n’t show about protests in Min­neapo­lis and Louisville (Jason John­son, Vox): “Nighttime cov­er­age will sel­dom show a full city map demon­strat­ing that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a ‘city engulfed in flames,’ there’s a CVS still open for busi­ness. The press flock­ing to dra­mat­ic images as a protest metaphor is not a new phenomenon.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism at Mor­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • George Floyd protests: Pho­tos show upris­ings across Amer­i­ca (Jen Kir­by and Kainaz Amaria, Vox): strik­ing images.
  2. About Chi­na:
    • The Infi­nite Heart­break of Lov­ing Hong Kong (Wil­fred Chan, The Nation): “Something pro­found has been lost. It is not democ­ra­cy, because Hong Kong was nev­er demo­c­ra­t­ic. It is not auton­o­my, because Hong Kong nev­er enjoyed self-deter­mi­na­tion. It is cer­tain­ly not the will to resist; as I write this, activists are already plan­ning a full cal­en­dar of mass protests, deter­mined to fight until the bit­ter end. What is lost is the feel­ing that Hong Kong’s future could be an open question.”
    • Pom­peo declares Hong Kong no longer autonomous from Chi­na (Car­ol Morel­lo, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘Hong Kong and its dynam­ic, enter­pris­ing, and free peo­ple have flour­ished for decades as a bas­tion of lib­er­ty, and this deci­sion gives me no pleasure,’ [Pom­peo] added. ‘But sound pol­i­cy­mak­ing requires a recog­ni­tion of real­i­ty. While the Unit­ed States once hoped that free and pros­per­ous Hong Kong would pro­vide a mod­el for author­i­tar­i­an Chi­na, it is now clear that Chi­na is mod­el­ing Hong Kong after itself.’”
    • What to Make of Sec­re­tary Pom­peo Decer­ti­fy­ing Hong Kong Auton­o­my (Julian Ku, Law­fare): “Although Pompeo’s dra­mat­ic announce­ment drew head­lines around the world, his deci­sion should not have sur­prised observers, giv­en the new require­ments on any such cer­ti­fi­ca­tion imposed by Con­gress in Novem­ber 2019.”
    • ‘All-out com­bat’ feared as India, Chi­na engage in bor­der stand­off (Saif Khalid, Al Jazeera): “A video shot by an Indi­an sol­dier and shared on social media showed sol­diers from both nations engaged in fist­fights and stone-pelt­ing at the de fac­to bor­der, known as Line of Actu­al Con­trol (LAC). The inci­dent, which con­tin­ued until the next day, result­ed in 11 sol­diers being injured on both sides.” The head­line seems a bit over-the-top. I talked with a friend who has some rel­e­vant exper­tise and he is not that con­cerned. Still worth keep­ing an eye on. 
    • Chi­na-India bor­der: Clash­es raise fears of broad­er con­fronta­tion as Bei­jing pur­sues sov­er­eign­ty claims on all fronts (Anna Fifield and Joan­na Slater, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The rela­tion­ship between the two coun­tries remains tense, exac­er­bat­ed by efforts from both cap­i­tals to stoke nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment. The obvi­ous place for this to erupt is at the point where the two coun­tries bump up against each oth­er.” 
  3. ‘AKA Jane Roe’ and the humil­i­a­tion of the pro-life move­ment (Karen Swal­lows Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Even before the film aired, head­line after head­line heaped humil­i­a­tion on pro-lif­ers. The Los Ange­les Times report­ed that McCor­vey had been paid to change her mind. This was mis­lead­ing: McCor­vey wasn’t paid to change her mind — she was paid to speak at pro-life events after she claimed she had changed her position.”
    • Relat­ed: FX doc­u­men­tary on Nor­ma McCor­vey omits key Catholic sources who knew her best (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Also, the doc­u­men­tary is coy about one impor­tant thing. To get access to McCor­vey, sure­ly they had to pay up too? We call that ‘checkbook jour­nal­is­m’ and eth­i­cal news orga­ni­za­tions don’t offer mon­ey to their inter­vie­wees. When pressed by the Wash­ing­ton Post, the film’s pro­duc­er admit­ted he paid her a ‘modest licens­ing fee’ for use of fam­i­ly pho­tos and doc­u­men­tary footage.” 
  4. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives who refuse to wear masks under­cut a cen­tral claim of their beliefs (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Refusing to wear masks] also under­cuts a more cen­tral claim of con­ser­vatism: that big, coer­cive gov­ern­ment pro­grams are unnec­es­sary because pri­vate insti­tu­tions could pro­vide many ben­e­fits that we think of as ‘public goods.’ For that to be true, the civic cul­ture would have to be such that indi­vid­u­als are will­ing to make seri­ous sac­ri­fices for the com­mon good, and espe­cial­ly to pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble among us.”
    • Reopen­ing church­es safe­ly: What pas­tors in Utah, Geor­gia have learned (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “The Rev. Leroy Davis wants his church to feel as safe as Cost­co. The ser­vice will hope­ful­ly be a lit­tle more per­son­al, he said, but the envi­ron­ment should seem just as clean.“
    • The Reg­u­la­to­ry State Is Fail­ing Us (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “It is impor­tant not to make this a par­ti­san con­flict. I do not view the admin­is­tra­tive state as extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al. That said, it has become far too inflex­i­ble, and not suf­fi­cient­ly focused on out­comes. It is time we woke up and real­ized that we have a sys­tem that sim­ply is not working.”
    • COVID-19 Has Exposed Crit­i­cal Weak­ness­es in Glob­al High­er Edu­ca­tion (Chris­tos Makridis and Soula Paras­sidis): “While pub­licly avail­able data does not seem to exist to iden­ti­fy the source of the increas­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of degree pro­grams, many stu­dents have been fun­neled into degree pro­grams with­out an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what they are going to learn and their post-grad­u­a­tion labor mar­ket prospects.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
  5. Have Pen­te­costals Out­grown Their Name? (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Names can be tricky. What do you call a Pen­te­costal who isn’t called a Pen­te­costal? The ques­tion sounds like a rid­dle, but it’s a real chal­lenge for schol­ars. They have strug­gled for years to set­tle on the best term for the broad and diverse move­ment of Chris­tians who empha­size the indi­vid­ual believer’s rela­tion­ship to the Holy Spir­it and talk about being Spir­it-filled, Spir­it-bap­tized, or Spirit-empowered.”
  6. Conn. trans­gen­der pol­i­cy found to vio­late Title IX (ESPN): “Connecticut’s pol­i­cy allow­ing trans­gen­der girls to com­pete as girls in high school sports vio­lates the civ­il rights of ath­letes who have always iden­ti­fied as female, the U.S. Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment has deter­mined in a deci­sion that could force the state to change course to keep fed­er­al fund­ing and influ­ence oth­ers to do the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Individuals have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 251

Con­cern­ing the ben­e­fits of reli­gion, the virtue of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, the glob­al strat­e­gy of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and an unset­tling account of gov­ern­men­tal sur­veil­lance.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions!
  2. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • Amid the Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis, a Reg­i­men for Reën­try (Atul Gawande, The New York­er): “But, in the face of enor­mous risks, Amer­i­can hos­pi­tals have learned how to avoid becom­ing sites of spread. When the time is right to light­en up on the lock­down and bring peo­ple back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that nev­er locked down in the first place.” This was quite good.
    • What African Nations Are Teach­ing the West About Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus (Jina Moore, The New York­er): “Much of what Ger­ca­ma encoun­tered at the air­port had been designed to pre­vent Ebo­la. Since 2018, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go, South Sudan’s neigh­bor to the south­west, has been strug­gling with the dis­ease. But local pub­lic-health offi­cials’ quick repur­pos­ing of Ebo­la pro­to­cols and infra­struc­ture impressed Ger­ca­ma, as did the work of rapid-response teams, whom she twice wit­nessed respond to sus­pect­ed coro­n­avirus cas­es dur­ing the week she spent in the coun­try.”
    • A Spec­tac­u­lar­ly Bad Wash­ing­ton Post Sto­ry on Apple and Google’s Expo­sure Noti­fi­ca­tion Project (John Gru­ber, blog): “A Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry today on Apple and Google’s joint effort on COVID-19 expo­sure noti­fi­ca­tion project, from reporters Reed Alber­got­ti and Drew Har­well, is the worst sto­ry I’ve seen in the Post in mem­o­ry. It’s so atro­cious­ly bad — fac­tu­al­ly wrong and one-sided in opin­ion — that it should be retract­ed.” Ouch. Gru­ber backs it up. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis: Ron DeSan­tis Got Flori­da’s COVID-19 Strat­e­gy Right (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “A cou­ple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decid­ed that Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis was a pub­lic men­ace who was going to get Florid­i­ans killed with his lax response to the coro­n­avirus cri­sis…. The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has begun to change about Flori­da, as the dis­as­ter so wide­ly pre­dict­ed hasn’t mate­ri­al­ized.”
    • As more states reopen, Geor­gia defies pre­dic­tions of coro­n­avirus resur­gence. What’s the les­son for the rest of the coun­try? (Andrew Romano, Yahoo News): “That’s the bal­ance reopen­ing needs to strike if it’s going to work: few­er offi­cial restric­tions in exchange for more indi­vid­ual and com­mu­ni­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty.”
    • A con­trary per­spec­tive: It Sure Seems Like Flori­da And Geor­gia Lied About Their Infec­tion Rates (Luis Pra­da, Cracked): “Flori­da and Geor­gia are petu­lant, enti­tled quar­an­tine pro­test­ers embod­ied as states. Since this all start­ed, both states have been fran­ti­cal­ly search­ing for an excuse to end their quar­an­tines as fast as pos­si­ble and get back to life as usu­al despite a ram­pag­ing virus that’s killing peo­ple.”
    • Mis­sis­sip­pi church destroyed by arson was suing city over safer-at-home order (Ari­an­na Poindex­ter, WLBT TV): “A Mis­sis­sip­pi church at the cen­ter of an arson inves­ti­ga­tion is the same church cur­rent­ly in a bat­tle with city lead­ers over a COVID-19 safer-at-home order. First Pen­te­costal Church in Hol­ly Springs was destroyed by what inves­ti­ga­tors believe is an arson­ist. Inves­ti­ga­tors found graf­fi­ti on pave­ment in the church park­ing lot that reads, ‘Bet you stay home now you hypokrits (sic).’” 
    • Meet the ‘Gang Pas­tor’ Behind Cape Town’s Viral Coro­n­avirus Coop­er­a­tion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We reg­u­lar­ly stop while we are work­ing to invite peo­ple to fol­low Jesus. I’ve lost track, but maybe 5,000 to 10,000 have told us they’ve repent­ed and are turn­ing to fol­low Jesus. But I don’t call this suc­cess, it is just a small piece in the over­all cause of what we Chris­tians are called to do.”
    • Don­ald Trump Does­n’t Want Author­i­ty (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Great men and bad men alike seek atten­tion as a means of get­ting pow­er, but our pres­i­dent is inter­est­ed in pow­er only as a means of get­ting atten­tion.”
  3. Uncer­tain­ty (Howard Marks, Oak­tree Cap­i­tal): “The peo­ple who are always sure are no more help­ful than the peo­ple who are nev­er sure. The real expert’s con­fi­dence is rea­son-based and pro­por­tion­al to the weight of the evi­dence.” Shared by an alum­nus’ father.
  4. China’s Plans to Win Con­trol of the Glob­al Order (Tan­ner Greer, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “As Bei­jing sees it, China’s suc­cess depends on dis­cred­it­ing the tenets of lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism so that notions like indi­vid­ual free­dom and con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy come to be seen as the relics of an obso­lete sys­tem.” I found this piece to be very insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: In China’s Cri­sis, Xi Sees a Cru­cible to Strength­en His Rule (Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adver­si­ty as a young man, has seized on the pan­dem­ic as an oppor­tu­ni­ty in dis­guise — a chance to redeem the par­ty after ear­ly mis­takes let infec­tions slip out of con­trol, and to ral­ly nation­al pride in the face of inter­na­tion­al ire over those mis­takes. And the state pro­pa­gan­da machine is aggres­sive­ly back­ing him up, tout­ing his lead­er­ship in fight­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Relat­ed: Xi’s Regime Recasts Chi­na as the Good Samar­i­tan dur­ing Pan­dem­ic (Alan Dowd, Prov­i­dence): “Add it all up—the PR spin, the pro­pa­gan­da push, the pal­lets of aid, the preening—and in a very real sense, Xi Jinping’s regime is offer­ing a new, twist­ed ver­sion of the Para­ble of the Good Samar­i­tan. In Xi’s retelling, the road­side rob­bers who assault the trav­el­er lat­er return to res­cue him—and some­how expect to be hailed as heroes.”
    • An explo­sive sum­mer of dis­con­tent is brew­ing in Hong Kong (Shibani Mah­tani, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On Tues­day, Hong Kong author­i­ties extend­ed pan­dem­ic-relat­ed rules lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings to effec­tive­ly ban, for the first time, a June 4 vig­il mark­ing the anniver­sary of Chi­na’s mas­sacre of stu­dent demon­stra­tors in Tianan­men Square in 1989.”
    • Chi­na Push­es for New Hong Kong Secu­ri­ty Law (Kei­th Brad­sh­er and Austin Ramzy, New York Times): “The leg­isla­tive push in Bei­jing marks the most aggres­sive step by the par­ty to exert its influ­ence over the for­mer British colony since it was reclaimed by Chi­na in 1997.”
    • Seri­ous­ly — pray for Hong Kong.
  5. A Mis­sis­sip­pi pas­tor with eight kids and no pro­fes­sion­al music back­ground won ‘The Voice’ — and made show his­to­ry (Emi­ly Yahr, Wash­ing­ton Post): ““‘I’ve lit­er­al­ly nev­er per­formed. I just sing at church,’ Tilgh­man explained, intro­duc­ing him­self as a pas­tor. This sparked an attempt to prove who was the biggest church fan; Leg­end revealed his grand­fa­ther was a pas­tor, and Jonas one-upped him by boast­ing his father was a pas­tor.”
  6. Under the Rain­bow Ban­ner (Darel Paul, First Things): “In June 1999, Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton declared the first nation­al Pride Month. Twen­ty years lat­er, June is as teem­ing with rain­bows as Decem­ber is with rein­deer. The Pride flag flies above embassies, state capi­tols, and sta­di­ums. Rain­bow stripes adorn city cross­walks.”
    • In response: Queer Times (Carl True­man, First Things): “The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sex­u­al behav­ior. I sus­pect it is not real­ly at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are car­ry­ing the day, and we need to under­stand that the debate is about the rad­i­cal abo­li­tion of meta­physics and meta­nar­ra­tives and any notion of cul­tur­al sta­bil­i­ty that might rest there­upon.”
  7. Since I Met Edward Snow­den, I’ve Nev­er Stopped Watch­ing My Back (Bar­ton Gell­man, The Atlantic): “Some­one had tak­en con­trol of my iPad, blast­ing through Apple’s secu­ri­ty restric­tions and acquir­ing the pow­er to rewrite any­thing that the oper­at­ing sys­tem could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were con­ta­giou” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Grip­ping and dis­turb­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Ian McE­wan ‘dubious’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 248

One of the best expla­na­tions of reli­gious lib­er­ty I have read, along with arti­cles about the pan­dem­ic, UFOs, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with a pas­tor.

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

I’m a lit­tle hap­py because the num­ber 248 seems cool to me. If I ever reach 1248 I’ll think it’s even cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant link I’ve shared in quite a while. Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund.
  2. Erwin McManus: The Peace­able War­rior (Paul J. Pas­tor, Out­reach Mag­a­zine): “I talked to some­one last Sun­day who said, ‘I’m here because some­body invit­ed me. I didn’t want to come.’ [Laughs] She actu­al­ly said, ‘I’m mean, jad­ed and cyn­i­cal. I don’t believe in God or reli­gion. I think it’s all a sham.’ I said, ‘You’re real­ly dis­ap­point­ed, aren’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you like us,’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do with that.’ ” (the excerpt is actu­al­ly from part 2 of the inter­view and the sto­ry gets even bet­ter). I only stum­bled upon this slight­ly old­er arti­cle because it won a Mag­gie award for best inter­view of 2019.
  3. Coro­n­avirus News & Per­spec­tives
    • Com­par­ing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Com­par­ing Apples to Oranges (Jere­my Samuel Faust, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “When reports about the nov­el coro­n­avirus SARS-CoV­‑2 began cir­cu­lat­ing ear­li­er this year and ques­tions were being raised about how the ill­ness it caus­es, COVID-19, com­pared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­den­cy and over three and a half years as an attend­ing physi­cian, I had almost nev­er seen any­one die of the flu. I could only remem­ber one trag­ic pedi­atric case.” The author is an instruc­tor at Har­vard Med­ical School. Fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Takes Pics Of Peo­ple In Pub­lic From 2 Per­spec­tives And It Shows How Eas­i­ly The Media Can Manip­u­late Real­i­ty (Liu­ci­ja Ado­maite and Denis Tymulis, Bored Pan­da): “‘The prox­im­i­ty of peo­ple has wide­ly been debat­ed in Den­mark in the past weeks. Dan­ish politi­cians and author­i­ties have fre­quent­ly referred to images which they believed to show mem­bers of the pub­lic behav­ing in dis­agree­ment with the gen­er­al guidelines.’ As a nation­al pho­to news agency that sup­plies visu­al cov­er­age on the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, ‘we became aware that our con­tri­bu­tion could be misread.’” A pic­ture is worth 1000 words, not all of them hon­est.
    • Seattle’s Lead­ers Let Sci­en­tists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not (Charles Duhigg ‚New York­er): “Constantine told me, ‘Jeff rec­og­nized what he was ask­ing for was imprac­ti­cal. He said if we advised social dis­tanc­ing right away there would be zero accep­tance. And so the ques­tion was: What can we say today so that peo­ple will be ready to hear what we need to say tomor­row?’ In e‑mails and phone calls, the men began play­ing a game: What was the most extreme advice they could give that peo­ple wouldn’t scoff at? Con­sid­er­ing what would like­ly be hap­pen­ing four days from then, what would they regret not hav­ing said?”
    • A Vir­ginia preach­er believed ‘God can heal anything.’ Then he caught coro­n­avirus. (Peter Jami­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the days after Lan­don suc­cumbed to covid-19, his death brought words of sym­pa­thy from peo­ple who knew him — and jeers from peo­ple who didn’t. The New York Post, the Dai­ly Mail and an athe­ist blog pub­lished arti­cles seiz­ing on his March 13 Face­book post. Lan­don was posthu­mous­ly attacked as a vic­tim of mis­guid­ed beliefs — in the assur­ances of his pres­i­dent and the pro­tec­tions of his God.”
    • Infor­ma­tion Can Do What Lock­downs Can’t (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Americans, like peo­ple in almost every coun­try, were quick­er to under­stand the risks than most of the peo­ple who gov­ern us. Alas, had our lead­ers tak­en the threat seri­ous­ly a month ear­li­er, and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the risks to Amer­i­cans more explic­it­ly, COVID could have been a flash in the pan. Instead, many thou­sands of Amer­i­cans are going to die unnec­es­sary deaths.”
    • Why Did YouTube Remove The Doc­tors’ Brief­ing? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…I absolute­ly believe that it’s wrong to cen­sor what qual­i­fied med­ical pro­fes­sion­als (read: not quacks) are say­ing about the cri­sis, which is so unique in our expe­ri­ence as a nation. A strong lock­down was nec­es­sary at first. If there is good med­ical evi­dence that the lock­down, and relat­ed pub­lic health strate­gies, might be doing more harm that good at this date, then let’s hear that argument.”
    • Relat­ed: The Inevitable Coro­n­avirus Cen­sor­ship Cri­sis is Here (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The peo­ple who want to add a cen­sor­ship regime to a health cri­sis are more dan­ger­ous and more stu­pid by leaps and bounds than a pres­i­dent who tells peo­ple to inject dis­in­fec­tant. It’s aston­ish­ing that they don’t see this.”
    • With US Bor­ders Closed by Covid-19, How Will I Afford Insulin? (James Stout, Undark): “During months when I teach as an adjunct pro­fes­sor and am cov­ered by my university’s insur­ance plan, I stock up as much insulin as I can. Dur­ing the remain­der of the year, I do what thou­sands of oth­ers do: I cross the bor­der to Mex­i­co where, just 12 miles from my house in San Diego, I can buy the same med­i­cine at one-tenth of the price.” Sent my way by a stu­dent.
  4. UFO Sight­ings: They Deserve to Be Tak­en More Seri­ous­ly (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “The offi­cial release of some pre­vi­ous­ly leaked UFO videos tak­en by U.S. navy pilots has sparked renewed inter­est in the big­ger ques­tions. For sure those fly­ing objects are uniden­ti­fied, but how much atten­tion should we earth­lings devote to this issue? I am struck by the con­trast between those who see this as an impor­tant ques­tion and those who think the whole thing will turn out to be an error or some kind of opti­cal illusion.”
  5. On the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty: 
    • Chi­na Has a Post-Pan­dem­ic Dream for Hong Kong (Yi-Zheng Lian, New York Times): “But the recent devel­op­ments actu­al­ly are remark­able. For the first time, the tra­di­tion­al pan-dems are being treat­ed as ene­mies just like the sep­a­ratists. And for the first time, Bei­jing is vio­lat­ing the very let­ter of the Basic Law, which it itself has pro­mul­gat­ed; the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment typ­i­cal­ly only con­torts the law and dis­torts its spirit.”
    • The End of the Har­vard Cen­tu­ry (Mat­teo N. Wong, Har­vard Crim­son): “Chinese offi­cials reg­u­lar­ly deliv­er com­plaints to uni­ver­si­ties host­ing events on sen­si­tive issues and even offer schol­ars mon­ey to mod­i­fy research crit­i­cal of Chi­na.… giv­en Harvard’s sta­tus in the inter­na­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic hier­ar­chy, Chi­nese author­i­ties may be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty. ‘We’ve had Chi­nese cit­i­zens at Har­vard, who are clear­ly doing the bid­ding of the Chi­nese state, com­ing and sit­ting in on talks and tak­ing notes and report­ing back,’ Per­ry says. She sim­i­lar­ly sus­pects Chi­nese cit­i­zens of report­ing on vis­it­ing Chi­nese schol­ars’ activities.” This arti­cle is quite long but fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Amer­i­ca is awak­en­ing to Chi­na. This is a clar­i­on call to seize the moment. (Mitt Rom­ney, Wash­ing­ton Post): “China’s alarm­ing mil­i­tary build-up is not wide­ly dis­cussed out­side clas­si­fied set­tings, but Amer­i­cans should not take com­fort in our dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly large mil­i­tary bud­get. The gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping doesn’t report its actu­al defense spend­ing. An apples-to-apples analy­sis demon­strates that China’s annu­al pro­cure­ment of mil­i­tary hard­ware is near­ly iden­ti­cal to ours; but because our mil­i­tary has mis­sions around the world, this means that in the Pacif­ic, where Chi­na con­cen­trates its fire­pow­er, it will have mil­i­tary superiority.”
    • I was arrest­ed in Hong Kong. It’s part of China’s larg­er plan.(Mar­tin C. M. Lee , Wash­ing­ton Post): “Hong Kong peo­ple now face two plagues from Chi­na: the coro­n­avirus and attacks on our most basic human rights. We can all hope a vac­cine is soon devel­oped for the coro­n­avirus. But once Hong Kong’s human rights and rule of law are rolled back, the fatal virus of author­i­tar­i­an rule will be here to stay.”
  6. My Native Amer­i­can father drew the Land O’Lakes maid­en. She was nev­er a stereo­type. (Robert Des­Jar­lait, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mia’s van­ish­ing has prompt­ed a social media meme: ‘They Got Rid of The Indi­an and Kept the Land.’ That isn’t too far from the truth. Mia, the stereo­type that wasn’t, leaves behind a land­scape void­ed of iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry. For those of us who are Amer­i­can Indi­an, it’s a his­to­ry that is all too familiar.”
  7. By Biden’s Own Stan­dards, He Is Guilty As Charged (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “On Friday’s Morn­ing Joe, Biden laid out a sim­ple process for judg­ing him: Lis­ten respect­ful­ly to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or dis­prove her spe­cif­ic claim. The objec­tive truth, Biden argued, is what mat­ters. I agree with him. But this was emphat­i­cal­ly not the stan­dard Biden favored when judg­ing men in col­lege. If Biden were a stu­dent, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evi­dence pro­vid­ed, who was charg­ing him, who was a wit­ness, and no right to ques­tion the accuser.”
    • This arti­cle is about col­lege Title IX pro­ceed­ings using Tara Reade and Joe Biden as illus­tra­tions. If its inclu­sion comes off as par­ti­san, bear in mind that the author intends to vote for Biden.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Dol­phins swim in bio­lu­mi­nes­cent waves in New­port Beach (YouTube): three min­utes
  • Obvi­ous­ly Con­fused Amash Runs For Pres­i­dent Even Though We Already Have Two Choic­es (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Unusu­al­ly Heavy Call Vol­umes (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Lat­est Com­put­er Mod­el Pre­dicts Between 0 And 12.6 Bil­lion New COVID-19 Deaths By Sum­mer (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Steve Har­vey Gets Tie Stolen by Pick­pock­et Bob Arno (Steve Har­vey Show, YouTube): sev­en min­utes, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

    • Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have the provoca­tive read In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

    Why Do You Send This Email?

    In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

    Disclaimer

    Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 247

Arti­cles rang­ing from how to share your faith dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to Amish health­care poli­cies to the lim­i­ta­tions of lock­downs. Enjoy!

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amish Health Care Sys­tem (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by how many of today’s biggest eco­nom­ic prob­lems just mys­te­ri­ous­ly failed to exist in the past. Our grand­par­ents eas­i­ly paid for col­lege with sum­mer jobs, raised three or four kids on a sin­gle income, and bought hous­es in their 20s or 30s and nev­er wor­ried about rent or evic­tion again. And yes, they got med­ical care with­out health insur­ance, and avoid­ed the kind of med­ical bank­rupt­cies we see too fre­quent­ly today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today?”
    • I would say unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing except near­ly every­thing on Slate Star Codex is fas­ci­nat­ing; in fact, the more eso­teric the top­ic the bet­ter.
    • Fol­low-up: Employ­er Pro­vid­ed Health Insur­ance Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Most of my patients have insur­ance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intel­li­gent enough that they should be able to nav­i­gate the bureau­cra­cy. Lis­ten to the usu­al debate around insur­ance, and you would expect them to be the win­ners of our sys­tem; the rich peo­ple who can turn their finan­cial advan­tage into bet­ter care. And yet bare­ly a day goes by with­out a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus News and Com­men­tary 
    • Amid Pan­dem­ic, Hong Kong Arrests Major Pro-Democ­ra­cy Fig­ures (Elaine Yu and Austin Ramzy, NY Times): “The virus has halt­ed protests around the world, forc­ing peo­ple to stay home and giv­ing the author­i­ties new laws for lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings and detain­ing peo­ple with less fear of pub­lic blow­back while many res­i­dents remained under lock­downs or observ­ing lim­its on their move­ment. But the arrests on Sat­ur­day in Hong Kong, along with a renewed push for nation­al secu­ri­ty leg­is­la­tion in the city, could anger pro­test­ers and rein­vig­o­rate mass demon­stra­tions that had tapered off.”
    • Lock­downs Don’t Work (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Lock­downs don’t work. These oth­er policies—travel restric­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its, cen­tral­ized quar­an­tine, mask require­ments, and school cancellations—do work. Because COVID is an extreme­ly severe dis­ease that, if left unchecked, will kill hun­dreds of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans, it is vital­ly impor­tant that pol­i­cy­mak­ers focus their efforts on poli­cies that do work (masks, cen­tral quar­an­tines, trav­el restric­tions, school can­cel­la­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its), and avoid imple­ment­ing dra­con­ian, unpop­u­lar poli­cies that don’t work (lock­downs).”
    • Lock­down Social­ism will col­lapse (Arnold Kling, per­son­al blog): “you can stay in your res­i­dence, but pay­ing rent or pay­ing your mort­gage is option­al…. you can obtain gro­ceries and shop on line, but hav­ing a job is option­al…. if you own a small busi­ness, you don’t need rev­enue, because the gov­ern­ment will keep send­ing checks.”
    • We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “…protests against our total shut­down, while puny now, will doubt­less grow. The psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age — not count­ing the phys­i­cal toll — caused by this deeply unnat­ur­al way of life is going to inten­si­fy. We remain human beings, a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly social mam­mal, and we ori­ent our­selves in time, look­ing for­ward to the future. When that future has been sus­pend­ed, humans come undone.”
    • How not to say the wrong thing to health-care work­ers (Dorothy R. Novick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…a per­son in any giv­en cir­cle should send love and com­pas­sion inward, to those in small­er cir­cles, and process per­son­al grief out­ward, to those in larg­er cir­cles…. Com­fort in, grief out.”
    • It’s Time To Build (Marc Andreesen, blog): “The things we build in huge quan­ti­ties, like com­put­ers and TVs, drop rapid­ly in price. The things we don’t, like hous­ing, schools, and hos­pi­tals, sky­rock­et in price. What’s the Amer­i­can dream? The oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a home of your own, and a fam­i­ly you can pro­vide for. We need to break the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing price curves for hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, and health­care, to make sure that every Amer­i­can can real­ize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
    • In response: Why We Can’t Build (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The insti­tu­tions through which Amer­i­cans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Fran­cis Fukuyama’s term, ‘vetoc­ra­cies,’ in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. It’s true in state and local gov­ern­ments. It’s even true in the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • How to Pro­tect Civ­il Lib­er­ties in a Pan­dem­ic (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In emer­gen­cies, [the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the ACLU] reflect­ed in an inter­view ear­li­er this month, gov­ern­ment offi­cials jus­ti­fy new pow­ers by point­ing to the extra­or­di­nary chal­lenges of the moment. Yet long after the emer­gency pass­es, they tend to assert those very same pow­ers as if they are the new nor­mal…. ‘We are still lit­i­gat­ing pow­ers in 2020 that were adopt­ed in 2001.’”
  3. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus News & Com­men­tary
    • COVID-19 Is Not God’s Judg­ment (Jim Deni­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…bib­li­cal judg­ments through dis­ease are super­nat­ur­al in ori­gin. When God sent ‘boils’ on Egypt, they broke out instant­ly ‘on man and beast’ through­out the land. The ‘pesti­lence’ of Rev­e­la­tion will come by one of the ‘four horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse,’ not a wet mar­ket in Wuhan. Every­thing sci­en­tists can tell us about COVID-19 is that the virus evolved from oth­er virus­es. It is nat­ur­al, not super­nat­ur­al.” 
    • If Liquor Stores Are Essen­tial, Why Isn’t Church? (Michael McConnel & Max Raskin, NY Times): “It is not for gov­ern­ment offi­cials to decide whether reli­gious wor­ship is essen­tial; the First Amend­ment already decid­ed that. The ques­tion is whether, and how, it may be con­duct­ed with­out undue risk to pub­lic health.” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof.
    • Pan­dem­ic Evan­ge­lism: Spread­ing the Gospel, not the Virus (Peter Cush­man, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Step 1: Fer­vent­ly Pray for the Lost… Step 2: Tell the Lost You’re Pray­ing for Them… Step 3a: Tell the Lost about Christ: Rec­og­niz­ing Oppor­tu­ni­ties.” This is a series of blog posts which is not yet fin­ished. The indi­vid­ual posts so far → step one, step two, step 3a.
    • Covid-19 has killed mul­ti­ple bish­ops and pas­tors with­in the nation’s largest black Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Church of God in Christ, the country’s biggest African Amer­i­can Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion, has tak­en a deep and painful lead­er­ship hit with reports of at least a dozen to up to 30 bish­ops and promi­nent cler­gy dying of covid-19…”
    • Under fire from many, Samaritan’s Purse finds an unlike­ly cham­pi­on (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “In the course of the past four weeks, Tilson, who is not reli­gious and had nev­er heard of Franklin Gra­ham, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader of Samaritan’s Purse, has become one of the field hospital’s most ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers and cham­pi­ons.”
  4. Is the World Ignor­ing a Chris­t­ian Geno­cide in Nige­ria? (Lela Gilbert, Prov­i­dence): “Those of us who track reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions and Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion agree with those who increas­ing­ly speak of anoth­er geno­cide. Mur­der­ous inci­dents are act­ed out with accel­er­at­ing fre­quen­cy, per­pe­trat­ed pri­mar­i­ly by two ter­ror groups—Boko Haram and Fulani jihadis. Tens of thou­sands of Nige­ri­ans have been slaugh­tered in the last decade. But their sto­ries rarely appear in main­stream West­ern news reports.”
  5. Four arti­cles more par­ti­san than those I often share:
    • On the right: End the Glob­al­iza­tion Gravy Train (J.D Vance, The Amer­i­can Mind): “West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion was, in fact, built by figures—one in par­tic­u­lar whose res­ur­rec­tion we just celebrated—who rec­og­nized that mate­r­i­al con­sump­tion, while nec­es­sary and impor­tant, was hard­ly the only good worth pur­su­ing.” 
    • On the left: Study­ing Fas­cist Pro­pa­gan­da by Day, Watch­ing Trump’s Coro­n­avirus Updates by Night (Andrew Marantz, The New York­er): “[Yale pro­fes­sor Jason] Stan­ley isn’t, or isn’t main­ly, a schol­ar of pub­lic pol­i­cy; he is a philoso­pher of lan­guage. When he insin­u­ates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philoso­pher of lan­guage to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fas­cist, not nec­es­sar­i­ly that he gov­erns like one.” Sent my way by a con­cerned alum­nus.
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cals Need More Prag­ma­tism and Less Moral­ism (Daniel Strand, Prov­i­dence): “Many evan­gel­i­cals have expressed their dis­il­lu­sion at both polit­i­cal par­ties because nei­ther seems to line up with their beliefs. Democ­rats seem antag­o­nis­tic to Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions, and Repub­li­cans ral­ly to defend and sup­port a pres­i­dent whose char­ac­ter would not exact­ly line up with Chris­t­ian stan­dards, let alone those of used car salesman—my apolo­gies to used car sales­men. To all this, I say good.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of ethics at the USAF Air War Col­lege.
    • On the left: We Are Liv­ing In A Failed State (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “When the virus came here, it found a coun­try with seri­ous under­ly­ing con­di­tions, and it exploit­ed them ruth­less­ly. Chron­ic ills—a cor­rupt polit­i­cal class, a scle­rot­ic bureau­cra­cy, a heart­less econ­o­my, a divid­ed and dis­tract­ed public—had gone untreat­ed for years. We had learned to live, uncom­fort­ably, with the symp­toms. It took the scale and inti­ma­cy of a pan­dem­ic to expose their severity—to shock Amer­i­cans with the recog­ni­tion that we are in the high-risk cat­e­go­ry.”
  6. The Decline of the Jury (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “For with­out a jury, any tri­al is sim­ply a process by which the state reas­sures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employ­ees, none of them espe­cial­ly dis­tin­guished, are asked to con­firm the views of oth­er state employ­ees. With a jury, the gov­ern­ment can­not know the out­come and must prove its case. And so the faint, phan­tas­mal ide­al of the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence takes on actu­al flesh and bones and stands in the path of pow­er.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have For an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) expe­ri­ence, read What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly intervene.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 246

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, pre­pub): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third party.“
    • The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends!
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • A Com­ic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pan­dem­ic Mod­el­ing (Zach Wein­er­smith, Mag­gie Koerth, Lau­ra Bron­ner and Jas­mine Mithani, FiveThir­tyEight): dif­fi­cult to excerpt. It’s a com­ic strip.
    • Why can’t you go fish­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic? (Matthew Wal­ter, The Week): “Common sense is exact­ly what has been lack­ing through­out this pan­dem­ic. This has been true of near­ly every­one in a posi­tion of author­i­ty. Telling peo­ple that they can­not engage in ordi­nary, whole­some, total­ly risk-free activ­i­ties is not, as Whit­mer recent­ly put it, ‘the best science.’ It is not any kind of science.”
    • When Coro­n­avirus Lock­downs Go Too Far (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…officials micro­manag­ing out­door time and exer­cise — chivvy­ing peo­ple out of parks if they’re doing the wrong thing (read­ing qui­et­ly instead of exer­cis­ing, say) or clos­ing an entire state’s worth of parks, as New Jersey’s gov­er­nor chose to do last week — are crack­ing down on exact­ly the kind of cre­ative and adap­tive behav­iors that a social­ly dis­tanced soci­ety ought to be encouraging.”
    • When Will The Riots Begin? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “From the point of view of the non-elites, the elites with their mod­els and data and pro­jec­tions have shut the econ­o­my down. The news is full of pleas for New York, which always seemed like a sus­pi­cious den of urban inequity, but their home­town is doing fine. The church is closed, the bar is closed, the local plant is closed. Mon­ey is tight. Mean­while the elites are laugh­ing about bing­ing Tiger King on Netflix.”
    • What does this econ­o­mist think of epi­demi­ol­o­gists? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…I have a few rude ques­tions that nobody else seems will­ing to ask, and I gen­uine­ly do not know the answers to these: As a class of sci­en­tists, how much are epi­demi­ol­o­gists paid? Is good or bad news bet­ter for their salaries? How smart are they? What are their aver­age GRE scores? Are they hired into thick, liq­uid aca­d­e­m­ic and insti­tu­tion­al mar­kets? And how mer­i­to­crat­ic are those mar­kets? What is their over­all track record on pre­dic­tions, whether before or dur­ing this crisis?”
      1. A response: From my email, a note about epi­demi­ol­o­gy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The quan­ti­ta­tive mod­el­ers are gen­er­al­ly much smarter than the peo­ple per­form­ing con­tact trac­ing or qual­i­ta­tive epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies. How­ev­er, if I’m being com­plete­ly hon­est, their intel­li­gence is prob­a­bly low­er than the aver­age engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor – and cer­tain­ly below that of math­e­mati­cians and statisticians.”
      2. A response: A reply to Tyler Cown’s ques­tions on Epi­demi­ol­o­gy: (an anony­mous pro­fes­sor named Joseph, per­son­al blog): “Epidemiologists are typ­i­cal­ly paid above aver­age for aca­d­e­mics, because of their links to med­ical schools. Those in depart­ments of pub­lic health are shame­ful­ly under­paid. Since peo­ple want good news from them, there is some pres­sure to pro­duce good news and most of our scan­dals come from over-opti­mistic forecasts.” 
    • Sus­pend­ing WHO Fund­ing Should Be Just the Begin­ning (Lyman Stone, The Dis­patch): “…the WHO is sim­ply not the orga­ni­za­tion of doc­tors many peo­ple envi­sion. Of the 80 job list­ings cur­rent­ly on the WHO’s web­site, no more than four that I could iden­ti­fy apply to doc­tors at all. Even per­ma­nent career posi­tions on the inter­na­tion­al pro­fes­sion­al payscale usu­al­ly do not require more than a master’s degree in a health-relat­ed field. The WHO is cur­rent­ly hir­ing almost as many media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion staffers as it is epi­demi­o­log­i­cal staffers.”
    • Car­ta’s covid-19 lay­off (Hen­ry Ward, Medi­um): “It is impor­tant that all of you know I per­son­al­ly reviewed every list and every per­son. If you are one of those affect­ed it is because I decid­ed it. Your man­ag­er did not. For the major­i­ty of you it was quite the con­trary. Your man­ag­er fought to keep you and I over­rode them. They are blame­less. If today is your last day, there is only one per­son to blame and it is me.” This is super-classy.
    • The Black Plague (Keean­ga-Yamaht­ta Tay­lor, New York­er): “The old African-Amer­i­can apho­rism “When white Amer­i­ca catch­es a cold, black Amer­i­ca gets pneu­mo­ni­a” has a new, mor­bid twist: when white Amer­i­ca catch­es the nov­el coro­n­avirus, black Amer­i­cans die.”
    • A dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive: Do COVID-19 Racial Dis­par­i­ties Mat­ter? (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “In fact, blacks are more like­ly than whites to die of many diseases—not just this one. In oth­er cas­es, the reverse is true. Accord­ing to CDC mor­tal­i­ty data, whites are more like­ly than blacks to die of chron­ic low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liv­er dis­ease, and eight dif­fer­ent types of can­cer. The same think­ing that attrib­ut­es the racial dis­par­i­ty in COVID-19 deaths to sys­temic racism against blacks could be applied equal­ly to argue the exis­tence of sys­temic racism against whites.”
    • Wast­ed time: how San Fran­cis­co failed its home­less pop­u­la­tion amid coro­n­avirus (Vivian Ho, The Guardian): “…many not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions that offered ser­vices to the unhoused were forced to close. Shel­ters that used to allow peo­ple to con­gre­gate dur­ing the day closed their doors. So did gyms with show­ers, busi­ness­es with pub­lic restrooms and even the pub­lic library, where the unhoused can stay dry from the rain.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Will of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Because we are not Jesus, it is a very bad idea to walk around telling strangers how their suf­fer­ing might dis­play the works of God. But as friends, we can par­tic­i­pate in oth­er­s’ dis­cern­ment and pat­tern-seek­ing, and we can try to dis­cern pur­pos­es in our own life — suf­fer­ing as pun­ish­ment, suf­fer­ing as refine­ment, suf­fer­ing as a judg­ment on a nation or soci­ety, suf­fer­ing as an oppor­tu­ni­ty, suf­fer­ing as part of a sto­ry not our own.”
    • Min­istry Lead­ers to ICE: Release Immi­grants and Let Church­es Help (Bekah McNeel, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This week, evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers from nine major orga­ni­za­tions wrote the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to urge offi­cials to release detained immi­grants dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are elder­ly or at high­er risk for con­tract­ing COVID-19.”
    • A Q&A for church­es on gov­ern­ment restric­tions with a reli­gious lib­er­ty attor­ney: Nav­i­gat­ing the ten­sion between church and state dur­ing a pan­dem­ic (Jeff Pick­er­ing, The Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “Ultimately, church­es should approach reli­gious free­dom con­flicts the same way they approach COVID-19: not with fear of suf­fer­ing but with calm con­fi­dence in the good­ness of God. Nei­ther a glob­al pan­dem­ic nor a local bureau­crat can silence the gospel.”
    • Jus­tice Depart­ment takes church’s side in 1st Amend­ment suit (Colleen Long, Michael Bal­samo And Emi­ly Wag­ster Pet­tus, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment took the rare step on Tues­day of weigh­ing in on the side of a Mis­sis­sip­pi Chris­t­ian church where local offi­cials had tried to stop Holy Week ser­vices broad­cast to con­gre­gants sit­ting in their cars in the park­ing lot.…. Attor­ney Ryan Tuck­er of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, which rep­re­sents the church, says there’s a Son­ic Dri­ve-In restau­rant about 200 yards (180 meters) from the church where patrons are still allowed to roll down their win­dows and talk.”
    • Promi­nent Vir­ginia pas­tor who said ‘God is larg­er than this dread­ed virus’ dies of covid-19 (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Earlier in the ser­mon, he said: ‘If I had to deliv­er my own eulo­gy, I’d say, ‘God is greater than any chal­lenge you and I face.’ That would be my epitaph.’”
  4. Athe­ists are the Most Polit­i­cal­ly Active Group in the Unit­ed States (Ryan P Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “At every lev­el on the edu­ca­tion spec­trum, athe­ists and agnos­tics are more polit­i­cal­ly active than Protes­tants or Catholics. More edu­ca­tion leads to high­er lev­els of polit­i­cal activ­i­ty among all reli­gious groups, but the rela­tion­ship is even stronger for athe­ists than oth­er groups. An athe­ist with a grad­u­ate degree par­tic­i­pat­ed in 2.1 polit­i­cal activ­i­ties in the last year. It was 1.8 activ­i­ties for agnos­tics. For Catholics and Protes­tants it’s between 1.3 and 1.4 activ­i­ties. That’s not a small difference.”
  5. The Trump cam­paign wants to win the votes of evan­gel­i­cals of col­or (Julie Zauzmer and Michelle Boorstein , Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Black and Lati­no evan­gel­i­cals] have con­ser­v­a­tive beliefs on social issues such as same-sex mar­riage, which they oppose at rates just slight­ly low­er than white evan­gel­i­cals, and to some extent abor­tion, which would put them in the Repub­li­can camp. But they also tend to favor more legal­ized immi­gra­tion, gov­ern­ment sen­si­tiv­i­ty toward racial jus­tice, and help for the poor, gen­er­al­ly push­ing them toward Demo­c­ra­t­ic candidates.”
  6. The bloody decade: think Amer­i­ca’s divid­ed now? Try the 1970s (William Rose­nau, Spec­ta­tor): “In 1974 alone, there were 2,044 bomb­ings in Amer­i­ca, with 24 peo­ple killed. Vio­lent extrem­ist groups dot­ted the polit­i­cal land­scape in a way they sim­ply do not today.”
  7. Bloomberg News Killed Inves­ti­ga­tion, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife (David Folken­flik. NPR): “Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an inves­ti­ga­tion into the wealth of Com­mu­nist Par­ty elites in Chi­na, fear­ful of reper­cus­sions by the Chi­nese government.The com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters qui­et, too.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 242

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

A lot of links this week. Can you tell I’m on lock­down in the Bay Area? Since some of you are, too, you’ll have time to read them! 😂

Kid­ding aside, I nev­er assume any­one reads all of these. Skim the links and open the ones that inter­est you in new tabs, but be sure to open all the amus­ing stuff at the end — you need it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic Visu­al­iz­ers:
  2. Chris­t­ian Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • The Emo­tion­al Impact Of Cam­pus Clo­sures (Michele Phoenix, per­son­al blog): “There are few things in life as pre­dictable as one’s col­lege tra­jec­to­ry. From the dread­ed fresh­man-fif­teen to changes in aca­d­e­m­ic majors or find­ing out last minute that you’re two cred­its short… It all plays out accord­ing to an estab­lished time­line. Then comes a virus that upends every­thing and predictability—one of the pri­ma­ry sta­bi­liz­ing fac­tors of our lives—suddenly morphs into a whirl­wind of shift­ing unknowns.”
      • Relat­ed: Unfin­ished nar­ra­tives (Jes­si­ca de la Paz, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Everyday there’s anoth­er email, and with every email anoth­er string of hope we wear hang­ing around our necks is yanked off, and we’re left with a red impres­sion of where it once was. My immi­grant par­ents who fought tooth and nail for me and my broth­ers won’t get to see me walk across the stage to get my diplo­ma. There will be no pho­tos or laugh­ter-filled reception.” Jes­si­ca is a Chi Alpha stu­dent. She is also quot­ed in this Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle: To Fight Coro­n­avirus, Col­leges Sent Stu­dents Home. Now Will They Refund Tuition?
    • In Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic, Chris­tian­i­ty Has Ancient Lessons (Lyman Stone, For­eign Pol­i­cy): “The mod­ern world has sud­den­ly become reac­quaint­ed with the old­est trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of human his­to­ry: exis­ten­tial dread and the fear of unavoid­able, inscrutable death. No vac­cine or antibi­ot­ic will save us for the time being. Because this expe­ri­ence has become for­eign to mod­ern peo­ple, we are, by and large, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly under­equipped for the cur­rent coro­n­avirus pandemic.” Side note: I have very much enjoyed the author on Twit­ter.
    • Respond­ing to Pan­demics: 4 Lessons from Church His­to­ry (Glen Scriven­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “Plagues inten­si­fy the nat­ur­al course of life. They inten­si­fy our own sense of mor­tal­i­ty and frailty. They also inten­si­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­play coun­ter­cul­tur­al, coun­ter­con­di­tion­al love. The church rose to the chal­lenge in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, win­ning both admir­ers and also converts.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A longer ver­sion is avail­able as a 45 minute YouTube video (which, full con­fes­sion, I have not watched). 
    • The­o­log­i­cal Reflec­tions on the Pan­dem­ic (Bri­an Tabb, Gospel Coali­tion): “All people—rich and poor, young and old, reli­gious and non-religious—are sus­cep­ti­ble to sick­ness and are cer­tain to die one day. Yet for fol­low­ers of Jesus, sick­ness tests our faith, reveals our hope, and moves us to be zeal­ous for good works.”
    • Plague and Prov­i­dence: What Huldrych Zwingli Taught Me About Trust­ing God (Stephen Ecch­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “I first came across Huldrych Zwingli’s ‘Plague Song’ while study­ing the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews: ‘Help, Lord God, help in this trou­ble! I think death is at the door. Stand before me, Christ, for you have over­come him.’”
    • Does Reli­gion Impact What Peo­ple Are Afraid Of? (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “Among Protes­tants who nev­er attend church, their total num­ber of fears is no dif­fer­ent than Catholics at just about six­teen. How­ev­er, as a Protes­tant increas­es their fre­quen­cy of wor­ship atten­dance their total num­ber of fears begins to decline. Among Protes­tants who attend more than once a week, the mod­el pre­dicts just 11.5 fears – which is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant from both low attend­ing Protes­tants and all Catholics.”
    • This is not the end of the world, accord­ing to Chris­tians who study the end of the world (Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Could this be a sign of the apoc­a­lypse? It sure might feel apoc­a­lyp­tic. But not if you ask Chris­t­ian writ­ers and pas­tors who have spent years focus­ing their mes­sage on the Book of Rev­e­la­tion — the New Testament’s final book.”
  3. Gen­er­al Pan­dem­ic Think­pieces:
    • Buzz Aldrin has some advice for Amer­i­cans in quar­an­tine (Eric Berg­er, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “Buzz Aldrin knows a thing or two about quar­an­tines. After return­ing from the Moon in 1969, Aldrin, Neil Arm­strong, and Michael Collins spent 21 days in quar­an­tine to pre­vent the spread of any con­ta­gions they might have brought back from the lunar surface.” Very short. Mild­ly amus­ing.
    • NIH Direc­tor: ‘We’re on an Expo­nen­tial Curve’ (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “When I asked him how he sees faith now, in his late 60s, com­pared with how he saw things in his late 20s, he told me, ‘I think I’ve also arrived at a place where my faith has become a real­ly strong sup­port for deal­ing with life’s strug­gles. It took me awhile, I think—that sense that God is suf­fi­cient and that I don’t have to be strong in every circumstance.’” Fran­cis Collins is a sol­id believ­er who we co-host­ed to speak at Stan­ford around a decade ago. Good inter­view. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • A fias­co in the mak­ing? As the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic takes hold, we are mak­ing deci­sions with­out reli­able data (John Ioan­ni­dis, Stat News): “The most valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion for answer­ing those ques­tions would be to know the cur­rent preva­lence of the infec­tion in a ran­dom sam­ple of a pop­u­la­tion and to repeat this exer­cise at reg­u­lar time inter­vals to esti­mate the inci­dence of new infec­tions. Sad­ly, that’s infor­ma­tion we don’t have.” The author is a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine, of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and pop­u­la­tion health, of bio­med­ical data sci­ence, and of sta­tis­tics.
    • Chi­na Is Avoid­ing Blame by Trolling the World (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “A gov­ern­ment is not a race. It’s a regime—and eas­i­ly one of the worst and most bru­tal in our life­time. Crit­i­ciz­ing author­i­tar­i­an regimes for what they do out­side their own bor­ders and to their own peo­ple is sim­ply call­ing things as they are. To do oth­er­wise is to for­go analy­sis and accu­ra­cy in the name of assuag­ing a regime that deserves no such consideration.”
      • Relat­ed: Don’t blame ‘China’ for the coro­n­avirus — blame the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Let’s stop say­ing ‘Chinese virus’ — not because every­one who uses it is racist, but because it need­less­ly plays into the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our atten­tion from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the ‘CCP virus.’ That’s more accu­rate and offends only those who deserve it.”
    • “Dishonesty…Is Always an Indi­ca­tor of Weak­ness”: Tuck­er Carl­son on How He Brought His Coro­n­avirus Mes­sage to Mar-a-Lago (Joe Hagan, Van­i­ty Fair): “I felt I had a moral oblig­a­tion to be use­ful in what­ev­er small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actu­al author­i­ty. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strong­ly felt—that I had a moral oblig­a­tion to try and be help­ful in what­ev­er way pos­si­ble. I’m not an advis­er to the per­son or any­one else oth­er than my chil­dren. And I mean that. And you can ask any­body in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opin­ion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in gen­er­al I real­ly dis­ap­prove of peo­ple stray­ing too far out­side their lanes and act­ing like just because they have sol­id rat­ings, they have a right to con­trol pub­lic pol­i­cy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.” Unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Coro­nalinks 3/19/20 (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m usu­al­ly pret­ty harsh on Bay Area gov­ern­ments here. So I want to give cred­it where cred­it is due: they’ve react­ed to the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic with a lev­el of swift­ness and feroc­i­ty they usu­al­ly reserve for attempts to build new housing.” I am includ­ing the link entire­ly for that glo­ri­ous line. The rest is worth­while, but that line is majes­tic.
    • Coro­n­avirus: The Ham­mer and the Dance (Tom­sa Pueyo, Medi­um): “This is prob­a­bly the sin­gle biggest, most impor­tant mis­take peo­ple make when think­ing about this stage: they think it will keep them home for months. This is not the case at all. In fact, it is like­ly that our lives will go back to close to normal.”
      • The author is quite crit­i­cal of the USA. Maybe it’s because I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley and am cur­rent­ly on lock­down, but I think we’re respond­ing pret­ty aggres­sive­ly. Hon­est­ly, I think we’re doing bet­ter than most coun­tries around the world (def­i­nite­ly not Sin­ga­pore, though — respect to that island tech­noc­ra­cy). Also, Amer­i­ca often takes a while to mobi­lize in response to great chal­lenges but once we do the strength of our response is stag­ger­ing. We engage in relent­less and pub­lic self-crit­i­cism that leads us to over­com­pen­sate; for exam­ple, the news keep empha­siz­ing that we are piti­ful­ly behind on test kits. It is true that we were inex­cus­ably behind. How­ev­er, our capac­i­ty for test­ing is explod­ing — pre­cise­ly because every­one believes we are piti­ful­ly behind. There remain oth­er areas in which we are still falling flat, and they are hav­ing bright spot­lights trained upon them. So I’m cau­tious­ly opti­mistic. Things will be bad but not near­ly as bad as they could have been. For all of her faults, Amer­i­ca is still pret­ty amaz­ing.
      • Also, the author inex­plic­a­bly trusts China’s reports about their cur­rent lev­els of infec­tion. Giv­en extreme­ly recent his­to­ry, that is per­plex­ing.
    • Why Telling Peo­ple They Don’t Need Masks Back­fired (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “It used to be said that back in the Sovi­et Union, if there was a line, you first got in line and then fig­ured out what the line was for — peo­ple knew that there were going to be short­ages and that the author­i­ties often lied, so they hoarded.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at UNC. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • We’re not going back to nor­mal (Gideon Lich­field, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “…one can imag­ine a world in which, to get on a flight, per­haps you’ll have to be signed up to a ser­vice that tracks your move­ments via your phone. The air­line wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infect­ed peo­ple or dis­ease hot spots. There’d be sim­i­lar require­ments at the entrance to large venues, gov­ern­ment build­ings, or pub­lic trans­port hubs. There would be tem­per­a­ture scan­ners every­where, and your work­place might demand you wear a mon­i­tor that tracks your tem­per­a­ture or oth­er vital signs.” Shared by a con­cerned stu­dent.
  4. Non-pan­dem­ic (YES!!!!):
    • Book Review: Hoover (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Herbert Hoover is the first stu­dent at Stan­ford. Not just a mem­ber of the first grad­u­at­ing class. Lit­er­al­ly the first stu­dent. He arrives at the dorms two months ear­ly to get a head start on var­i­ous mon­ey-mak­ing schemes, includ­ing dis­trib­ut­ing news­pa­pers, deliv­er­ing laun­dry, tend­ing live­stock, and help­ing oth­er stu­dents reg­is­ter. He would lat­er sell some of these busi­ness­es to oth­er stu­dents and start more, oper­at­ing a con­stant churn of enter­pris­es through­out his col­lege career. His aca­d­e­mics remain mediocre, and he con­tin­ues to have few friends – until he tries out for the foot­ball team in sopho­more year. He has zero ath­let­ic tal­ent and fails mis­er­ably, but the coach (whose eye for tal­ent appar­ent­ly tran­scends ath­let­ics) spots poten­tial in Hoover and asks him to come on as team man­ag­er. In this role, Hoover is an unqual­i­fied suc­cess. He turns the team’s debt into a sur­plus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berke­ley vs. Stan­ford foot­ball match played on Thanks­giv­ing which remains a beloved Stan­ford foot­ball tradition.” Long but good (if you are inter­est­ed in Stan­ford, pres­i­den­tial his­to­ry, or clever thoughts).
      • Relat­ed: Scott Alexan­der on Her­bert Hoover (Scott Sum­n­er, The Library of Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­ty): “Hoover was not the most tal­ent­ed per­son to ever become Pres­i­dent, but he was prob­a­bly the most com­pe­tent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his areas of com­pe­tence did not dove­tail with the prob­lems fac­ing the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s. Hoover was very good at orga­niz­ing large endeav­ors, but the prob­lems faced by the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s were macro­eco­nom­ic in nature. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, being a good admin­is­tra­tor doesn’t have much cor­re­la­tion with under­stand­ing macroeconomics.”
    • ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ at the Muse­um of the Bible are all forg­eries (Michael Greshko, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “Loll insist­ed on inde­pen­dence. Not only would the Muse­um of the Bible have no say on the team’s find­ings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the pub­lic. The Muse­um of the Bible agreed to the terms. ‘Honestly, I’ve nev­er worked with a muse­um that was so up-front,’ Loll says.”
      • The Muse­um of the Bible comes off look­ing pret­ty good in this arti­cle. I feel bad for them.
    • Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.”
    • Learn­ing From His­to­ry: How Con­gress Can Pro­tect Both Rights and Beliefs (Don Bonker, Real­Clear­Reli­gion): “Back in 1984, I received an unex­pect­ed call from Sen­a­tor Mark Hat­field (R‑OR), a high­ly regard­ed Repub­li­can who chaired the pow­er­ful Sen­ate Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee. I won­dered, why would he call a young Demo­c­rat who had no sig­nif­i­cant posi­tion and lit­tle influ­ence in the halls of Congress?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 241

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus and Chris­tian­i­ty:
    • Love in the Time of Coro­n­avirus — Andy Crouch (Andy Crouch, The Prax­is Jour­nal): “…while gov­ern­ment at all lev­els can enforce a cer­tain amount of behav­ior change, for exam­ple through quar­an­tines and “lock­downs,” it is almost impos­si­ble for coer­cive author­i­ty to increase people’s capac­i­ty for love and ser­vice to oth­ers. This is the role of faith and above all, we believe, the Chris­t­ian faith. Equip­ping Chris­tians for moments like this is the role of Chris­t­ian lead­ers.” THIS. READ THIS.
    • What Mar­tin Luther Teach­es Us About Coro­n­avirus (Emmy Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a cli­mate of fear sur­round­ing the out­break, I come back to Luther’s let­ter for guid­ance. As a med­ical stu­dent and a future physi­cian, I have a clear voca­tion­al com­mit­ment to car­ing for the sick—whether they have coro­n­avirus, tuber­cu­lo­sis, or influen­za. Pre­cau­tions I will take, yes. But I am remind­ed by Luther that they are indi­vid­u­als deserv­ing of care all the same.”
    • Here is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Luther’s orig­i­nal let­ter: Whether One May Flee From A Dead­ly Plague: “Since it is gen­er­al­ly true of Chris­tians that few are strong and many are weak, one sim­ply can­not place the same bur­den upon every­one. A per­son who has a strong faith can drink poi­son and suf­fer no harm, Mark 16[:18], while one who has a weak faith would there­by drink to his death.”
    • Wuhan Pas­tor: Pray with Us (anony­mous, Chi­na­Source): “Thus, my broth­ers and sis­ters, I encour­age you to be strong in Christ’s love. If we more deeply expe­ri­ence death in this pesti­lence, under­stand­ing the gospel, we may more deeply expe­ri­ence Christ’s love, and grow ever near­er to God.”
    • How DC Church­es Respond­ed When the Gov­ern­ment Banned Pub­lic Gath­er­ings Dur­ing the Span­ish Flu of 1918 (Caleb Morell, 9 Marks): “Dur­ing one of the worst epi­demics to ever hit our coun­try, church­es respect­ed the direc­tives of the gov­ern­ment for a lim­it­ed time out of neigh­bor­ly love and in order to pro­tect pub­lic health. Even when church­es began to dis­agree with the Com­mis­sion­ers’ per­spec­tive, they con­tin­ued to abide by their orders.”
    • Should Your Church Stop Meet­ing to Slow COVID-19? How 3 Seat­tle Church­es Decid­ed. (Daniel Chin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “After work­ing for WHO and then the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion in Chi­na, my wife and I moved to Seat­tle in 2015 to lead the foundation’s work to con­trol tuber­cu­lo­sis in sev­er­al coun­tries. For a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, I’ve answered a call­ing as a fol­low­er of Christ to stop the spread of dis­eases and work to elim­i­nate them, and now I heed that call­ing to speak to my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ to take this epi­dem­ic seri­ous­ly and respond.” The author is an evan­gel­i­cal and a physi­cian who spe­cial­izes in infec­tious dis­eases.
  2. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus More Gen­er­al­ly:
    • How Much Worse the Coro­n­avirus Could Get, in Charts (Nicholas Kristof and Stu­art A. Thomp­son, NY Times): “What’s at stake in this coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic? How many Amer­i­cans can become infect­ed? How many might die? The answers depend on the actions we take — and, cru­cial­ly, on when we take them. Work­ing with infec­tious dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gists, we devel­oped this inter­ac­tive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the Unit­ed States and how much of a dif­fer­ence it could make if offi­cials act quick­ly.” Note that this is not pay­walled. Many promi­nent news orga­ni­za­tions have kind­ly made their pan­dem­ic news freely avail­able.
    • Why it’s so hard to pin down the risk of dying from coro­n­avirus (Marc Lip­sitch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sev­er­al esti­mates have sug­gest­ed that the risk of dying, for those infect­ed with covid-19 and show­ing its flu-like symp­toms, is around 1 or 2 per­cent. Elder­ly adults have a con­sid­er­ably high­er risk of both becom­ing infect­ed and dying, as do peo­ple with com­pro­mised immune sys­tems. The esti­mates might change as new data arrive, but the range of 1 to 2 per­cent for fatal­i­ties among the symp­to­matic seems to be the con­sen­sus for now. The over­all fatal­i­ty rate for peo­ple infect­ed with covid-19 will be low­er — pos­si­bly much low­er — when we know how many peo­ple are infect­ed but asymp­to­matic.” The author is a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. 
    • COVID-19 Event Risk Assess­ment Plan­ner (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Now here is the most impor­tant point. It’s the size of the group, not the num­ber of car­ri­ers that most dri­ves the result. For exam­ple, sup­pose our esti­mate of the num­ber of car­ri­ers if off by a fac­tor of 10–that is instead of 20,000 there are just 2000 car­ri­ers in the Unit­ed States. In this case, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of at least one car­ri­er at a big event of 100,000 drops not by a fac­tor of ten but just to 45%. In oth­er words, large events are a bad idea even in sce­nar­ios with just a small num­ber of car­ri­ers.” (source code for the embed­ded graph is at https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk-planner) The code and the graph come from a biol­o­gist at Geor­gia Tech and the expla­na­tion comes from an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Track­Coro­na — COVID-19 Track­er and Live Map — one of the peo­ple run­ning the web­site is a Stan­ford under­grad. 
    • Coro­n­avirus: Why You Must Act Now (Tomas Pueyo, Medi­um): “Coun­tries that act fast can reduce the num­ber of deaths by a fac­tor of ten. And that’s just count­ing the fatal­i­ty rate. Act­ing fast also dras­ti­cal­ly reduces the cas­es, mak­ing this even more of a no-brain­er.”
    • How Chi­na’s “Bat Woman” Hunt­ed Down Virus­es from SARS to the New Coro­n­avirus (Jane Qiu, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Shi—a virol­o­gist who is often called China’s ‘bat woman’ by her col­leagues because of her virus-hunt­ing expe­di­tions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the con­fer­ence she was attend­ing in Shang­hai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • $1 mil­lion plus in Emer­gent Ven­tures Prizes for coro­n­avirus work (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I believe that we should be using prizes to help inno­vate and com­bat the coro­n­avirus. When are prizes bet­ter than grants? The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is like­ly to make the break­through, you val­ue the final out­put more than the process, there is an urgency to solu­tions (tal­ent devel­op­ment is too slow), suc­cess is rel­a­tive­ly easy to define, and efforts and invest­ments are like­ly to be under­com­pen­sat­ed. All of these apply to the threat from the coro­n­avirus.”
    • COVID-19 reduces eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, which reduces pol­lu­tion, which saves lives. (Mar­shall Burke, G‑Feed): “…dis­rup­tion is only like­ly to increase in com­ing days in regions where the epi­dem­ic is just begin­ning. Strange­ly, this dis­rup­tion could also have unex­pect­ed health ben­e­fits — and these ben­e­fits could be quite large in cer­tain parts of the world.” Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed.
    • How social dis­tanc­ing for coro­n­avirus could cause a lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Make no mis­take: The rapid imple­men­ta­tion of social dis­tanc­ing is nec­es­sary to flat­ten the coro­n­avirus curve and pre­vent the cur­rent pan­dem­ic from wors­en­ing. But just as the coro­n­avirus fall­out threat­ens to cause an eco­nom­ic reces­sion, it’s also going to cause what we might call a “social reces­sion”: a col­lapse in social con­tact that is par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the pop­u­la­tions most vul­ner­a­ble to iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness — old­er adults and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties or pre­ex­ist­ing health con­di­tions.”
    • The effect of trav­el restric­tions on the spread of the 2019 nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) out­break (Chi­nazzi et al, Sci­ence): “The trav­el quar­an­tine around Wuhan has only mod­est­ly delayed the epi­dem­ic spread to oth­er areas of Main­land Chi­na…. The mod­el indi­cates that while the Wuhan trav­el ban was ini­tial­ly effec­tive at reduc­ing inter­na­tion­al case impor­ta­tions, the num­ber of cas­es observed out­side Main­land Chi­na will resume its growth after 2–3 weeks from cas­es that orig­i­nat­ed else­where.”
  3. Keep It Sim­ple (Ed Fes­er, First Things): “Math­e­mat­ics appears to describe a realm of enti­ties with qua­si-­di­vine attrib­ut­es. The series of nat­ur­al num­bers is infi­nite. That one and one equal two and two and two equal four could not have been oth­er­wise. Such math­e­mat­i­cal truths nev­er begin being true or cease being true; they hold eter­nal­ly and immutably. The lines, planes, and fig­ures stud­ied by the geome­ter have a kind of per­fec­tion that the objects of our ­expe­ri­ence lack. Math­e­mat­i­cal objects seem ­imma­te­r­i­al and known by pure rea­son rather than through the sens­es.” This is a very inter­est­ing review of a book by William Lane Craig.
  4. Con­cern­ing Woody Allen:
    • Woody Allen: Issues and Prin­ci­ples (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Pre­sump­tion of inno­cence in the courts is the legal reflec­tion of the prin­ci­ple that we need to be cer­tain some­one is guilty before inflict­ing pun­ish­ment, that, ‘it is bet­ter 10 guilty men go free than one inno­cent man be pun­ished.’ The prin­ci­ple pre-dates its legal reflec­tion, which, in West­ern soci­ety, we can find in sixth Cen­tu­ry Rome, as well as both Tal­mu­dic and Islam­ic law. The prin­ci­ple has always been fought for by the oppressed, and for good rea­son: it is the oppressed who are most vul­ner­a­ble, and most like­ly to be abused both by the legal sys­tem and bour­geois pub­lic opin­ion. Those who want to chuck the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, whether in law or in the pub­lic are­na, are doing the work of the oppres­sors.” The author is a social­ist, which I men­tion because the next author is very con­ser­v­a­tive. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion. 
    • The Woody Allen Witch Hunt (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But we are not sup­posed to live in a soci­ety in which some­one who has mere­ly been accused of a hor­ri­ble thing finds him­self unable to pub­lish a book telling his side of the sto­ry, or silenced because the cul­tur­al winds have shift­ed. Thir­ty years ago, or less, chil­dren who made accu­sa­tions against pow­er­ful men were not believed. Women too. It is not progress to go from dis­be­liev­ing women and chil­dren as a mat­ter of course to believ­ing them reflex­ive­ly. We think we are advanc­ing jus­tice, but real­ly we are just rear­rang­ing our prej­u­dices.” The author is a very con­ser­v­a­tive, which I men­tion because the pre­vi­ous author is a social­ist. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion.
  5. How Many Nones Are There? Maybe More than We Thought (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “When you com­pare those who say they have “no reli­gion” in the GSS, to those who say they are either athe­ist, agnos­tic, or noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar in the CCES, a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence emerges…. The upshot is this: the share of Amer­i­cans who have no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is near­ly a third of the Unit­ed States, not the 23.1% fig­ure which comes from the GSS.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Minimize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘principalities and powers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 239

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

I was sick last week and did­n’t have a chance to post. It was refresh­ing to take a break from the infor­ma­tion del­uge that is the mod­ern age!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Coro­n­avirus Is More Than a Dis­ease. It’s a Test. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “So already, the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the lib­er­al-glob­al­ist imag­i­na­tion: an overzeal­ous ‘remain calm’ spir­it in the face of the real risks of a hyper-con­nect­ed world.”. 
    • The Pan­dem­ic Is Com­ing (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): Dreher has been post­ing lots of great infor­ma­tion on this. Worth fol­low­ing on this top­ic gen­er­al­ly.
    • China’s Book­stores Band Togeth­er To Sur­vive the Epi­dem­ic (Ken­rick Davis, Sixth Tone): unex­pect­ed­ly inter­est­ing with strik­ing pic­tures.
    • How Fast Can a Virus Destroy a Sup­ply Chain? (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Glob­al sup­ply chains have yet to come apart most­ly because trade and pros­per­i­ty gen­er­al­ly have been ris­ing. But now, for the first time since World War II, the glob­al econ­o­my faces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true decou­pling of many trade con­nec­tions. It is not suf­fi­cient­ly well under­stood how rapid that process could be. A com­plex inter­na­tion­al sup­ply chain is frag­ile pre­cise­ly for the same rea­sons it is valu­able — name­ly, it is hard to con­struct and main­tain because it involves so many inter­de­pen­den­cies.”
  2. The boss who put every­one on 70K (Stephanie Hegar­ty, BBC): ‘“Before the $70,000 min­i­mum wage, we were hav­ing between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team,’ he says. ‘And since the announce­ment — and it’s been only about four-and-a-half years — we’ve had more than 40 babies.’”
  3. China’s ‘War on Ter­ror’ uproots fam­i­lies, leaked data shows (Dake Kang, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Rea­sons list­ed for intern­ment include ‘minor reli­gious infec­tion,’ ‘dis­turbs oth­er per­sons by vis­it­ing them with­out rea­sons,’ ‘rel­a­tives abroad,’ ‘think­ing is hard to grasp’ and ‘untrust­wor­thy per­son born in a cer­tain decade.’ The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 per­cent of peo­ple con­sid­ered ‘untrust­wor­thy’ were in the age brack­et of 25 to 29 years, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the data by Zenz.”
  4. Are We Liv­ing Out Romans 1? (Rosario But­ter­field, Desir­ing God): “Romans 1:26 tells us that peo­ple give them­selves over to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty because they wor­ship and serve the cre­ation. There­fore, from God’s point of view, homo­sex­u­al prac­tice is the sex­u­al dis­play of false wor­ship. Well-heeled Gay Pride march­es, with big-mon­ey cor­po­rate spon­sors smil­ing in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the LGBTQ machine, give us a mod­ern-day pic­ture of what wor­ship­ing the crea­ture looks like.”
  5. Chesa Boudin: San Francisco’s Law­less Rev­o­lu­tion­ary (Maxwell Mey­er, The Stan­ford Review) “In Com­rade Gringo’s new San Fran­cis­co, a naked pros­ti­tute on hero­in can defe­cate in a gro­cery store aisle, take up to $950 of goods, walk back to their tent on a city side­walk, steal a hand­gun and drop some nee­dles along the way, and then solic­it sex or drugs‚ or both, to pedes­tri­ans out­side a local busi­ness, with just a cita­tion (if that). But God for­bid that pros­ti­tute should offer those pedes­tri­ans a plas­tic straw, for hell hath no fury like San Fran­cis­co offi­cials when ‘The Plan­et’ is threat­ened.”
    • This rant in a stu­dent paper reads like pro­fes­sion­al pun­dit­ry in a nation­al-lev­el pub­li­ca­tion. I wish to acknowl­edge the author’s excel­lent writ­ing skills.
  6. The Rise and Tri­umph of the Mod­ern Self (Carl True­man, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Every age has its mal­adies, and I for one have no wish to have lived my life in an era when chil­dren worked as chim­ney sweeps or, like my father, grew up in the shad­ow of the Luft­waffe. We do not choose our time, and we must not waste ener­gy lament­ing our time. We need first and fore­most to under­stand our time and then to respond to it with informed wis­dom.”
  7. The Val­ue of Study Abroad Expe­ri­ence in the Labor Mar­ket: Find­ings from a Resume Audit Exper­i­ment (Cheng & Florick, SSRN): “Com­pared to resumes that list no study abroad expe­ri­ence, resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Asia regard­less of length are about 20 per­cent more like­ly to receive a call­back for an inter­view if the resume stud­ied. The dif­fer­ences in rates increas­es to 25 per­cent when com­par­ing resumes with­out study abroad expe­ri­ence to those that list two-week pro­grams in Asia. Resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Europe for one year are 20 per­cent less like­ly to receive any call­back and 35 per­cent less like­ly to receiv­ing [sic] a call back for an inter­view, rel­a­tive to resumes that do not list study abroad expe­ri­ence.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have some thoughts about slav­ery and the Bible – Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 236

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Behind the Great Fire­wall (Thomas Brown, Quil­lette): “The Chi­nese are proud of Chi­na, not just of 5,000 years of his­to­ry and a glob­al­ly rec­og­nized ancient cul­ture, but of mod­ern Chi­na. Chi­na the indus­try leader, Chi­na the pro­tec­tor of Chi­nese busi­ness, Chi­na the pow­er­ful and beau­ti­ful and rich. Chi­na the unapolo­getic. This is a sto­ry the Chi­nese want to hear and they don’t care if orga­ni­za­tions seem­ing­ly deter­mined to only tell the sup­pos­ed­ly bad things about Chi­na are kept out.”
    • Relat­ed: Polit­i­cal and Prac­ti­cal Impli­ca­tions of the Wuhan Virus (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Chi­nese peo­ple have an inter­est­ing rela­tion­ship with the Par­ty pro­pa­gan­da and cen­sor­ship sys­tem. Chi­nese are well aware that the gov­ern­ment lies to them. What they often have dif­fi­cul­ty dis­cern­ing is what it decides to lie about. Some­times it does not lie. Oth­er times it sim­ply leaves the truth unsaid.”
  2. Sun­day Morn­ing With Kanye (David French, The Dis­patch): “As we made our way close to the stage, I was struck by some­thing unusu­al. I didn’t see any mer­chan­dise for sale. There was no Kanye gear. There were no pro­mo­tions for Kanye. There were no pic­tures of Kanye—at least not that I saw. If you’d just walked up, you’d have no clue that one of the world’s biggest stars was about to perform.”
  3. Wokeademia (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “The game is no longer to advance can­di­dates who are them­selves ‘diverse.’ The game is to stock the fac­ul­ty with peo­ple of a cer­ti­fied ide­o­log­i­cal stripe, who are com­mit­ted to advanc­ing this cause. Tom Sow­ell need not apply.” The author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  4. Why These Young Amer­i­can Chris­tians Embraced Social­ism (Sarah Ngu, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “…their evan­gel­i­cal expe­ri­ences pushed them to take the Bible seri­ous­ly and read it literally—which meant they end­ed up con­clud­ing that being a Chris­t­ian meant car­ing about the poor and dis­trust­ing the state (which, after all, killed Jesus).”
  5. On Killing Human Mon­sters (Mark LiVec­chi, Prov­i­dence): “‘The inter­nal con­di­tion of God’s exter­nal expres­sion of wrath,’ writes the the­olo­gian and rab­bi Abra­ham Joshua Hes­chel, ‘is grief.’ To the best I can deduce, there­in is com­mu­ni­cat­ed the com­plex dis­po­si­tion of the just war­rior.… I do not rejoice that I wor­ship a God who kills. I only rejoice that I wor­ship a God who is will­ing to.” 
  6. What If We Don’t Have to Choose Between Evo­lu­tion and Adam and Eve? (Rebec­ca Ran­dall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we keep straight what the sci­ence is actu­al­ly say­ing, the sto­ry of Gen­e­sis could be true as lit­er­al­ly as you could imag­ine it, with Adam being cre­at­ed by dust and God breath­ing into his nos­trils and Eve being cre­at­ed from his rib. But evo­lu­tion is hap­pen­ing out­side the Gar­den, and there are peo­ple out there who God cre­at­ed in a dif­fer­ent way and who end up inter­min­gling with Adam and Eve’s descen­dants. It’s not actu­al­ly in con­flict with evo­lu­tion­ary science.” This is an inter­view with S. Joshua Swami­dass, a com­pu­ta­tion­al biol­o­gist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis. The book he wrote has been get­ting rave reviews.
  7. The Lost His­to­ry of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (Stan­ley Kurtz, The Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Schol­ars): “In Jan­u­ary of 1987, stu­dents at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty chant­i­ng ‘Hey hey, ho ho, West­ern Culture’s got to go,’ kicked off this cul­ture war. The fis­sure that opened three decades ago at Stanford—between the new mul­ti­cul­tur­al way, on the one hand, and tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can con­cep­tions of his­to­ry and cit­i­zen­ship, on the other—has widened now into a chasm.” This is long and not for every­one. It caught my atten­tion because Stan­ford plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in the nar­ra­tive. The author has a Ph.D. from Har­vard and has taught at both there and at U Chica­go. He is cur­rent­ly a senior fel­low at the Ethics and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Cen­ter.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From. (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qualities.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). (first shared in vol­ume 62)

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.