Tag: criminal justice

TGFI, Volume 561: church-leavers and wikipedia-gatekeepers

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two Hun­dred Peo­ple Left Our Small Church (Ben­jamin Vrbicek, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In sev­en years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The loss­es nev­er occur rapid­ly, as though a lev­ee burst, but more as a steady trick­le or slow leak. A few of our mem­bers died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page let­ter of griev­ances I was instruct­ed to share with the elders; anoth­er wrote a chap­ter-length blog post sug­gest­ing we’re not even a church. Some parish­ioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shat­tered pieces. These depar­tures are by far the excep­tions. Many of those who left told me nei­ther why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back chan­nels like social media and oth­er imper­son­al means.”
    • This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • On a relat­ed note: one of a pas­tor’s love lan­guages is near­ly always atten­dance. If you stop going to a church, pas­tors assume that part of the rea­son you stopped is that you don’t like them. Even though they intel­lec­tu­al­ly know that is not always the case, it is nonethe­less a felt real­i­ty. It’s not true of all pas­tors, but I feel very con­fi­dent say­ing it is true of most pas­tors. Pas­tors often feel great sor­row when remem­ber­ing peo­ple who qui­et­ly depart­ed. Lov­ing peo­ple who don’t love you back (or you assume don’t love you back) is a man­date of the Chris­t­ian life, but it’s not fun.
  2. I read the entire Quran, all the Hadiths, and the Sira. Here is what I found. (A.C. Rosen­thal, Sub­stack): “Plen­ty of ancient texts con­tain things that make mod­ern read­ers uncom­fort­able, and the Bible is not exempt from that cat­e­go­ry. The ques­tion that changed every­thing was struc­tur­al. It is this: in Chris­tian­i­ty, the founder is the stan­dard against which the insti­tu­tion is mea­sured. When the church falls short, the accu­sa­tion is always: you are not liv­ing like Jesus. The stan­dard itself is not in ques­tion. Jesus did not order raids. He did not arrange mar­riages with chil­dren. He did not autho­rize the exe­cu­tion of apos­tates. He was exe­cut­ed by the state, not empow­ered by it. Every­thing the church has done wrong can be mea­sured against what Jesus actu­al­ly did and found want­i­ng. The stan­dard holds. In Islam, the founder is the stan­dard. When you exam­ine the pri­ma­ry sources and find things that trou­ble you, you are not find­ing a gap between Islam and Muham­mad. You are find­ing Muham­mad.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry. A sol­id arti­cle with a gen­tle tone.
  3. Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physi­cists been retract­ed? (Sam Kean, Sci­ence): “In ear­ly May, Yves Gin­gras, a his­to­ri­an of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Que­bec (UQ) at Mon­tre­al, was brows­ing Retrac­tion Watch, a web­site that cat­a­logs fraud, data manip­u­la­tion, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic sins. He noticed a link that read, ‘Retrac­tions by Nobel Prize win­ners.’ Were there real­ly Nobel lau­re­ates whose papers had been with­drawn from the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture? After click­ing, Gin­gras froze. ‘That’s impos­si­ble,’ he recalls think­ing. The fourth name on the list, with two retract­ed papers, was Max Planck—a leg­endary pio­neer of quan­tum mechan­ics and the 1918 Nobel lau­re­ate in physics.”
    • Brief and worth the read. Super-inter­est­ing.
  4. He Went to Prison. Now He Is in Charge of Them. (P.G. Sit­ten­feld, The Free Press): “Josh Smith, 51, spent this past Christ­mas in prison. Just like he did for five years after being caught at the age of 21 in pos­ses­sion of a kilo­gram of cocaine and 150 pounds of mar­i­jua­na. The dif­fer­ence? Smith wasn’t behind bars any­more. A year ago this month, he was sworn in as deputy direc­tor of the fed­er­al Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP), one of the world’s largest prison sys­tems.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing pro­file of a Chris­t­ian in pub­lic ser­vice.
  5. I Co-Found­ed Wikipedia. Now I’m Banned for Life. (Lar­ry Sanger, The Free Press): “In exas­per­a­tion, I point­ed out that the mob was not fol­low­ing due process. There was no des­ig­nat­ed pros­e­cu­tor, but rather many self-select­ed ones. There was no list of charges, and what­ev­er any­one said became an action­able charge. There was no assigned judge, because my accusers were also my judges. And of course there was no pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, no jury, and no require­ment of deco­rum that would for­bid prej­u­di­cial state­ments. I knew Wikipedia’s dis­ci­pli­nary process­es were bad—but I had nev­er expe­ri­enced them myself. I was tried by a face­less mob. I learned that their great­est anger is reserved for those who refuse to bow in awe of their mighty pow­er.”
    • Sanger is, inci­den­tal­ly, a rel­a­tive­ly recent con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty, as I men­tioned last year.
  6. Sci­ence rais­es more ques­tions than it answers (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “[Skep­tics] have faith (not entire­ly unwar­rant­ed on their lim­it­ed knowl­edge) that nat­ur­al the­o­ries will even­tu­al­ly fill every gap, not real­iz­ing that the gaps tend to widen and mul­ti­ply the deep­er we go. The ratio of what we know to what we don’t know keeps shrink­ing, and I sus­pect that’s by design. What’s an athe­ist to do once they ful­ly grasp this? I don’t know—maybe just accept that the uni­verse is fun­ny that way. But they should stop accus­ing Chris­tians of a ‘God of the gaps’ fal­la­cy when we invoke God for what is tru­ly unex­plain­able by nat­ur­al means.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Who Should Be Admit­ted to the Lord’s Sup­per? 4 Views (Davy Elli­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Today, the table is cel­e­brat­ed less fre­quent­ly and more lan­guid­ly by many. It shouldn’t be so—everyone (but espe­cial­ly church lead­ers) needs to con­sid­er the supper’s fre­quen­cy, sig­nif­i­cance, and ben­e­fits. I want to help you think more deeply about who should be admit­ted to the sup­per. If com­mu­nion is a pre­cious and pro­found priv­i­lege, who par­tic­i­pates is impor­tant.”
    • The author comes to a wrong con­clu­sion, but explains some posi­tions that you might not know exist­ed along the way.

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 458



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

This is vol­ume 458, a num­ber with very few fac­tors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anx­i­ety (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “We’re see­ing the inter­na­tion­al trans­mis­sion of a nov­el West­ern the­o­ry of men­tal health. It’s the glob­al­iza­tion of Western—and, just maybe, Amer­i­can—despair.… Accord­ing to the pod­cast search engine Lis­ten Notes, more than 5,500 pod­casts have the word trau­ma in their title. In celebri­ty media, men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als are so com­mon that they’ve spawned a sub­genre of sum­maries of celebri­ty men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als, includ­ing ’39 Celebri­ties Who Have Opened Up About Men­tal Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebri­ties Have Said About Hav­ing Depres­sion,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Men­tal Health.’ ”
    • Poly­math Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most impor­tant pieces of the year.” Unlocked.
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the week­end, but most peo­ple think they know how to save the chil­dren, fix the schools, reform the pris­ons, over­haul health­care, repair pol­i­tics, restore civil­i­ty, and bring about world peace. Per­haps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those oth­er things.”
    • This is a hum­bling essay.
  3. Chat­G­PT is bull­shit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy): “The machines are not try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing they believe or per­ceive. Their inac­cu­ra­cy is not due to mis­per­cep­tion or hal­lu­ci­na­tion. As we have point­ed out, they are not try­ing to con­vey infor­ma­tion at all. They are bull­shit­ting.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow. Apolo­gies for the lan­guage, but the lan­guage is at the heart of the point the authors are mak­ing.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hay­den, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For Paul, what makes sin­gle­ness ‘bet­ter’ is not the absence of sex as such, for nei­ther sex nor mar­riage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, sin­gle­ness is the ‘hap­pi­er’ state because it pro­vides believ­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be ‘anx­ious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘world­ly things’ because the ‘appoint­ed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all sin­gles should live devot­ed to the Lord… one either lever­ages sin­gle­ness for the Lord, like Paul; or one lever­ages it for world­ly or sin­ful pur­pos­es, like idle wid­ows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich essay about sin­gle­ness.
  5. Evo­lu­tion May Be Pur­pose­ful And It’s Freak­ing Sci­en­tists Out (Andrea Mor­ris, Forbes): “Noble is neu­tral on reli­gious mat­ters. Yet he sees com­pelling evi­dence that pur­pose may be fun­da­men­tal to life. He’s deter­mined to debunk the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digm and replace the ele­vat­ed impor­tance of genes with some­thing much more con­tro­ver­sial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained sup­port from the next gen­er­a­tion of ori­gins-of-life researchers work­ing to top­ple the reign of gene-cen­trism.”
  6. Some arti­cles about the war in Gaza:
    • Israelis Are Not Watch­ing the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of secu­ri­ty and casu­al­ties. And all of a sud­den, peo­ple under­stand that this was not fea­si­ble for the long run. That is to say that we will prob­a­bly have to see more sol­diers fight­ing in the north and in the south for the com­ing years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a per­ma­nent war but maybe a per­ma­nent state of ongo­ing oper­a­tions.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing (albeit a tad long) inter­view with an Israeli intel­lec­tu­al.
    • Get­ting Aid Into Gaza (Ger­man Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, cit­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid ship­ments for its own use.”
      • A rea­son­ably fair-mind­ed arti­cle. Exam­ines mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jes­si­ca Con­tr­era, Jenn Abel­son, John D. Hard­en, Hay­den God­frey & Nate Jones, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion has found that over the past two decades, hun­dreds of law enforce­ment offi­cers in the Unit­ed States have sex­u­al­ly abused chil­dren while offi­cials at every lev­el of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem have failed to pro­tect kids, pun­ish abusers and pre­vent addi­tion­al crimes… The Post iden­ti­fied at least 1,800 state and local law enforce­ment offi­cers who were charged with crimes involv­ing child sex­u­al abuse from 2005 through 2022.”
    • I have long said that the peo­ple throw­ing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sex­u­al abuse cri­sis would be stunned with the far worse num­bers on child sex­u­al abuse in the pub­lic school sys­tem (and I stand by that). But I did not fore­see this one and I should have. There is author­i­ty, there­fore there is abuse of author­i­ty.
    • Unlocked.

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 430

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. That’s espe­cial­ly true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanks­giv­ing, and I still feel behind on my read­ing.

This is vol­ume 430, a sphenic num­ber. That means it is the prod­uct of three primes, name­ly 2 · 5 · 43.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford neu­ro­sci­en­tist Andrew Huber­man recent­ly men­tioned that he believes in God. Here’s a 13 minute video of him explain­ing why (YouTube) or you can just watch this two minute excerpt which con­tains the essence of his point (Twit­ter).
    • For the record, I’ve nev­er met Huber­man and do not know what his spe­cif­ic reli­gious beliefs are. I just find it inter­est­ing that a promi­nent pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al affil­i­at­ed with Stan­ford is a believ­er.
  2. This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers (Darbe Saxbe, New York Times): “[Pro­grams designed to help young peo­ple instead] made their men­tal-health prob­lems worse. Under­stand­ing why these efforts back­fired can shed light on how soci­ety can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suf­fer­ing from depres­sion and anx­i­ety.… Teenagers, who are still devel­op­ing their iden­ti­ties, are espe­cial­ly prone to take psy­cho­log­i­cal labels to heart. Instead of ‘I am ner­vous about X,’ a teenag­er might say, ‘I can’t do X because I have anx­i­ety’ — a refram­ing that research shows under­mines resilience by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to view every­day chal­lenges as insur­mount­able.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at USC.
  3. Reli­gion isn’t sex­u­al­ly repres­sive. Just read the data. (Stephen Cran­ney, Deseret News): “…con­trary to wide­ly held belief, reli­gious peo­ple report bet­ter sex lives, and mar­ried reli­gious cou­ples have more fre­quent and bet­ter sex than oth­ers (non-mar­ried reli­gious peo­ple, intu­itive­ly, have less sex). These results were sup­port­ed by one study that found reli­gious British peo­ple report­ed more sat­is­fy­ing sex lives. A sep­a­rate BYU study, pub­lished by Psy­chol­o­gy of Reli­gion and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, found sim­i­lar results for mar­ried cou­ples in the U.S. while anoth­er found that high­ly reli­gious peo­ple had high­er sex­u­al ‘pas­sion’ than more mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious peo­ple (non­re­li­gious peo­ple also reflect­ed high­er ‘pas­sion’ lev­els).”
    • This sen­tence made me chuck­le: “It may well be that the most sex­u­al­ly active cam­pus­es in the U.S. aren’t the famous par­ty schools, but rather the more reli­gious­ly con­ser­v­a­tive schools with more mar­ried stu­dents.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist and a demog­ra­ph­er with appoint­ments at Bay­lor’s Insti­tute for the Study of Reli­gion and at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca
  4. Solomon Fried­man is on a mis­sion to save Porn­hub (Andrew Duffy, Ottowa Citzen): “Solomon Fried­man is not some­one read­i­ly defined: He’s a defence lawyer and an organ donor; a firearms advo­cate and an ordained rab­bi; an investor, phil­an­thropist, and pornog­ra­phy mag­nate. If the 37-year-old father of three is not the most inter­est­ing man in Ottawa, then the licensed pilot and part-time law pro­fes­sor is cer­tain­ly one of the busiest.”
    • This is actu­al­ly insane.
  5. Why I No Longer Sup­port the Death Penal­ty (Matthew T. Martens, Cross­way): “8,790 peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death in the Unit­ed States since 1973. One hun­dred and eighty-four of those men and women were exon­er­at­ed as of the end of 2022.11 They were inno­cent of the crimes of which they were con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to die. In oth­er words, we know that at least 2 per­cent of peo­ple sen­tenced to death since 1973 were wrong­ly con­demned. Even if we have iden­ti­fied all of those wrong­ly con­vict­ed and the error rate is ‘only’ 2 per­cent, that is an error rate high­er than I am will­ing to tol­er­ate.… I am unwill­ing to wager anoth­er man’s life. I would not wager my own under those con­di­tions.”
    • The author has recent­ly writ­ten a book about a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on crim­i­nal jus­tice. He is a defend­er of the death penal­ty as a con­cept yet opposed to it as prac­ticed in Amer­i­ca today.
  6. Tik­Tok par­ent com­pa­ny used AI to opti­mize Lin­ux ker­nel, boost­ing per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy (Matthew Con­natser, Tom’s Hard­ware): “The gen­er­al gist of the pre­sen­ta­tion: ByteDance used AI to make the Lin­ux ker­nel (the core of the oper­at­ing sys­tem) much more effi­cient and per­for­mant across all kinds of hard­ware.… AI opti­miza­tions were able to reduce mem­o­ry usage by 30% — and that was using exist­ing Lin­ux tools, just more effi­cient­ly. Net­work laten­cy was also improved by up to 12% with AI that has pri­or knowl­edge (which would­n’t be hard to obtain on a com­put­er used reg­u­lar­ly).”
  7. On Cul­ture War, Doug Wil­son, and the Moscow Mood (Kevin DeY­oung, per­son­al blog): “My con­cerns are not so much with one or two con­clu­sions that Chris­tians may reach if Wil­son becomes their intel­lec­tu­al men­tor. My big­ger con­cern is with the long-term spir­i­tu­al effects of admir­ing and imi­tat­ing the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts peo­ple to Moscow is too often incom­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian virtue, incon­sid­er­ate of oth­er Chris­tians, and ulti­mate­ly incon­sis­tent with the stat­ed aims of Wilson’s Chris­ten­dom project.”
    • Broad­ly cor­rect, although I think DeY­oung over­states his case a few times. Wil­son does present the gospel more than DeY­oung acknowl­edges and that is one of his appeals. Still, as I said, broad­ly cor­rect.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 414

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

This is vol­ume 414, which is a mul­ti­ple of 23.

A day late because I was trav­el­ing. Next week’s may be delayed as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The best pre­dic­tor of hap­pi­ness in Amer­i­ca? Mar­riage (W. Brad­ford Wilcox and David Bass, Unherd): “This truth is borne out yet again in new research from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, which found that mar­riage is the ‘the most impor­tant dif­fer­en­tia­tor’ of who is hap­py in Amer­i­ca, and that falling mar­riage rates are a chief rea­son why hap­pi­ness has declined nation­al­ly. The research, sur­vey­ing thou­sands of respon­dents, revealed a star­tling 30-per­cent­age-point hap­pi­ness divide between mar­ried and unmar­ried Amer­i­cans. This hap­pi­ness boost held true for both men and women.… Oth­er fac­tors do mat­ter — includ­ing income, edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, race, and geog­ra­phy — but mar­i­tal sta­tus is most influ­en­tial when it comes to pre­dict­ing hap­pi­ness in the study.”
    • Relat­ed: More on Sin­gle­ness, Mar­riage, and the Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…some read­ers took me to be say­ing that sin­gle peo­ple are in sin or not grow­ing in their faith the way that mar­ried peo­ple are. Not so. There is a pro­found (sub­tle, per­haps, but pro­found) dif­fer­ence between say­ing that some­thing has intrin­sic val­ue in the nor­ma­tive life of an indi­vid­ual or the church, and say­ing that this thing is com­pul­so­ry.”
    • Very help­ful fol­lowup to the arti­cle I shared last week.
  2. The Hard-Drug Decrim­i­nal­iza­tion Dis­as­ter (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “…the sticky fact that pro­po­nents of decrim­i­nal­iza­tion rarely con­front is that addicts are not mere­ly sick peo­ple try­ing to get well, like can­cer suf­fer­ers in need of chemother­a­py. They are peo­ple who often will do just about any­thing to get high, how­ev­er irra­tional, self-destruc­tive or, in some cas­es, crim­i­nal their behav­ior becomes. Addic­tion may be a dis­ease, but it’s also a lifestyle — one that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion does a lot to facil­i­tate. It’s eas­i­er to get high wher­ev­er and how­ev­er you want when the cops are pow­er­less to stop you.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. She’s the One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Humans are good at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to most mate­r­i­al con­di­tions. You get used to your house, your car, your clothes, your gran­ite coun­ter­top, and your mon­ey. What humans are bad at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to is… oth­er peo­ple. If you spend a lot of time around humans whose com­pa­ny you enjoy, you will prob­a­bly be hap­py. If you spend a lot of time around human whose com­pa­ny you detest, you will prob­a­bly be unhap­py. Over your life­time, you will prob­a­bly spend more time around your spouse than any oth­er human. So while find­ing good friends and good co-work­ers is cru­cial for hap­pi­ness, find­ing a good spouse is even more so.”
    • This is full of most­ly-good advice for guys.
  4. What’s going on with the reports of a room-tem­per­a­ture super­con­duc­tor? (John Tim­mer, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The per­fect time to write an arti­cle on those results would be when they’ve been con­firmed by mul­ti­ple labs. But these are not per­fect times. Instead, rumors seem to be fly­ing dai­ly about pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion, con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry results, and informed dis­cus­sions of why this mate­r­i­al either should or should­n’t work.”
    • Relat­ed: LK-99 Is the Super­con­duc­tor of the Sum­mer (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “I tru­ly don’t get the excite­ment about her preprint,” said Dou­glas Natel­son, a pro­fes­sor of physics at Rice Uni­ver­si­ty in Hous­ton. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that the­o­rists and com­pu­ta­tion­al mate­ri­als folks very often pro­duce preprints based on the lat­est claimed mate­r­i­al of inter­est. There’s noth­ing excep­tion­al in that.”
  5. You’re prob­a­bly recy­cling plas­tic wrong. And it’s not your fault. (Robert Gebel­hoff, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Pic­ture this: You fin­ish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throw­ing it out, you check the bot­tom of the cup to see the icon­ic recy­cling sym­bol. That means it can be tossed in the recy­cling bin, right? Wrong. Solo cups are made of poly­styrene, a plas­tic that is very dif­fi­cult to recy­cle.… Nowa­days, the only plas­tic items that are con­sis­tent­ly recy­cled are bot­tles and jugs made out of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (which is labeled with a ‘1’) and high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (labeled with a ‘2’), as a sur­vey of recy­cling facil­i­ties by Green­peace shows. Recy­cling plants typ­i­cal­ly reject almost every­thing else, mean­ing it ends up in land­fills.”
  6. He Held Up a Bank to Get His Own Mon­ey (Raja Abdul­rahim, New York Times): “The cen­tral bank has not allowed depos­i­tors to with­draw more than a few hun­dred dol­lars a month since a finan­cial col­lapse in 2019. So, like oth­er des­per­ate Lebanese before him — some of them sim­i­lar­ly com­pelled by the need for med­ical treat­ment — Mr. al-Haj­jar went to his bank in Novem­ber, threat­en­ing to burn it down unless it gave him some of the $250,000 he had in his account. More than 12 hours lat­er, he left with $25,000 in stacks of cash. ‘If you don’t go in and threat­en to hurt them, they won’t give you any­thing,’ he said months lat­er.”
    • Absolute­ly wild (and sad) sto­ry.
  7. California’s free prison calls are repair­ing estranged rela­tion­ships and aid­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion (Kwasi Gyam­fi Asiedu & Helen Li, Los Ange­les Times): “At a time when most con­sumers enjoy free or low-cost call­ing, prison phone calls at their peak in Cal­i­for­nia cost more than $6 per 15 min­utes via a pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider. That allowed only hur­ried, super­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tions between the sib­lings — with one eye always on the clock.”

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 On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good. From vol­ume 291.

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 371

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

This is vol­ume 371, which like its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor is one of four three-dig­it nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers, mean­ing that it has three dig­its and when you raise each dig­it to the num­ber of dig­its (in this case, to the third pow­er) they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber:  33 + 73 + 13 = 371.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Har­vard Is Real­ly Like (Olivia Glunz, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Pres­tige and influ­ence require class dis­tinc­tions; in a tru­ly equi­table world, Har­vard does not exist. Thus, Har­vard will con­tin­ue to cham­pi­on progressivism—but nev­er enough to endan­ger its own future. Har­vard stu­dents of all polit­i­cal stripes per­ceive this hypocrisy; if any­thing, they grad­u­ate not more lib­er­al but more cyn­i­cal. So much for the for­mi­da­ble brain­wash­ing machine.… Despite the preva­lence of sec­u­lar­ism and cre­den­tial­ism at Har­vard, faith and friend­ship were cen­tral to my joy­ful first year. In fact, Chris­tian­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholi­cism, is alive at Har­vard.”
    • Short but inter­est­ing, and rel­e­vant to life at Stan­ford.
  2. Why the music of Rich Mullins endures, 25 years after his death (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Mullins had all his roy­al­ties and wages go direct­ly to his accoun­tant, whom he asked to issue him an allowance equal to the aver­age work­ing-class salary at the time. The rest of his earn­ings were giv­en away, most­ly to char­i­ty. Smith tells me that Mullins ‘was scared for his own soul.’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t tempt­ed by mon­ey and fame. It’s that he knew he was tempt­ed, so he ran from it.”
  3. Rev­o­lu­tions Occur When a Sig­nif­i­cant Por­tion of Elites Defect From the Exist­ing Regime (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Social move­ments are typ­i­cal­ly led not by some­one from the under­class or the poor, but by sec­ond-tier elites. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Che Gue­vara, America’s founders, etc. were rel­a­tive­ly edu­cat­ed and at least mid­dle-class. They were not near­ly the poor­est of their soci­eties. Far from it.  Which is why their crit­i­cisms of the elite with­in their soci­eties were so astute. They were, fig­u­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, close cousins—they saw their flaws up close.”
    • This one is real­ly good. Relat­ed but long: Diverse and Divid­ed: A Polit­i­cal Demog­ra­phy of Amer­i­can Elite Stu­dents (Eric Kauf­mann, Sub­stack): “A quar­ter of stu­dents are LGBT, and there are rough­ly equal shares of Chris­t­ian and non­re­li­gious stu­dents. LGBT, Non­re­li­gious, and Chris­tians are set to become more impor­tant polit­i­cal groups among America’s future lead­ers.”
    • The data in this lat­ter one is inter­est­ing, but it is so long you should def­i­nite­ly skim and not read.
  4. Relat­ed to jus­tice:
    • A Jury Acquit­ted Them of Var­i­ous Charges. They Served Prison Time for Them Any­way. (Bil­ly Bin­ion, Rea­son): “Can you do prison time for a crim­i­nal charge of which you were nev­er con­vict­ed? I’d ven­ture that most would assume the answer is ‘no.’ They would be wrong. Known as acquit­ted con­duct sen­tenc­ing, the prac­tice allows judges to bloat a prison term when sen­tenc­ing a defen­dant by pun­ish­ing them for a sep­a­rate charge or charges on which a jury deemed them not guilty.” Out­ra­geous. I hope the Supreme Court squash­es this 9–0.
    • Thou­sands were released from prison dur­ing covid. The results are shock­ing. (Mol­ly Gill, The Wash­ing­ton Post): “To pro­tect those most vul­ner­a­ble to covid-19 dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the Cares Act allowed the Jus­tice Depart­ment to order the release of peo­ple in fed­er­al pris­ons and place them on home con­fine­ment. More than 11,000 peo­ple were even­tu­al­ly released. Of those, the Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP) report­ed that only 17 of them com­mit­ted new crimes. That’s not a typo. Sev­en­teen. That’s a 0.15 per­cent recidi­vism rate in a coun­try where it’s nor­mal for 30 to 65 per­cent of peo­ple com­ing home from prison to reof­fend with­in three years of release.… These 11,000 releas­es were not ran­dom. Peo­ple in low- and min­i­mum-secu­ri­ty pris­ons or at high risk of com­pli­ca­tions from covid were pri­or­i­tized for con­sid­er­a­tion for release.”
    • Stock Trades Report­ed by Near­ly a Fifth of Con­gress Show Pos­si­ble Con­flicts (Kate Kel­ly, Adam Play­ford and Ali­cia Par­lapi­ano, New York Times): “The poten­tial for con­flicts in stock trad­ing by mem­bers of Con­gress — and their choice so far not to impose stricter lim­its on them­selves — has long drawn crit­i­cism, espe­cial­ly when par­tic­u­lar­ly bla­tant cas­es emerge. But the Times analy­sis demon­strates the scale of the issue: Over the three-year peri­od, more than 3,700 trades report­ed by law­mak­ers from both par­ties posed poten­tial con­flicts between their pub­lic respon­si­bil­i­ties and pri­vate finances.… The 97 mem­bers who were flagged by the Times analy­sis amount­ed to more than half of the peo­ple who report­ed trades, and near­ly a fifth of Con­gress. The group was split almost equal­ly between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans.”
  5. The amaz­ing pow­er of “machine eyes” (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “While there are far sim­pler ways to deter­mine gen­der [than study­ing reti­nas], it’s a 50–50 toss up for oph­thal­mol­o­gists, which means there are no vis­i­ble cues to human eyes. But now two mod­els have shown 97% accu­ra­cy of gen­der deter­mi­na­tion from neur­al net­work train­ing. That was just the begin­ning.… That work has now extend­ed to detec­tion of kid­ney dis­ease, con­trol of blood glu­cose and blood pres­sure, hepa­to­bil­iary dis­ease, a pre­vi­ous study on pre­dict­ing heart attack, close cor­re­la­tion of the reti­nal ves­sels with the heart (coro­nary) artery cal­ci­um score, and, pri­or to the new report above, the ongo­ing prospec­tive assess­ment and track­ing of Alzheimer’s dis­ease.” Wild stuff.
  6. A Nuclear Zugzwang? (Anusar Farooqui, Sub­stack): “Pre­cise­ly because Rus­sia is so weak rel­a­tive to Nato, any Rus­sia-Nato war will even­tu­al­ly esca­late into strate­gic nuclear war, the only lev­el on which the Rus­sia enjoys par­i­ty with the Unit­ed States. So, any counter-esca­la­tion by the Unit­ed States would be fraught with esca­la­tion risk and nuclear dan­ger.”
    • The author has a PhD in math­e­mat­ics but writes exten­sive­ly about for­eign pol­i­cy. I have had mul­ti­ple smart peo­ple rec­om­mend this arti­cle and final­ly gave it a read.

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 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.” From vol­ume 242.

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 320

deli­cious news nuggets of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to thought­ful Chris­tians and peo­ple con­nect­ed to Stan­ford

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

This is vol­ume 320, which is 28 + 26.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Mis­takes We Can­not Make Again (David French, The Dis­patch): “…if peo­ple of faith are to be con­cerned about jus­tice (and they are!), then jus­tice is rarely more imme­di­ate and impor­tant than when con­fronting both the scourge of crime and the tragedy of excess enforce­ment and mass incar­cer­a­tion.”
  2. A Cog in the Col­lege Admis­sions Scan­dal Speaks Out (Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “Van­de­mo­er, unlike the oth­ers accused in the plot, did not per­son­al­ly gain in the trans­ac­tions. He hand­ed checks total­ing $770,000 from Singer to Stan­ford devel­op­ment offi­cers, who planned to use the mon­ey for new boats.… So as he told his sto­ry to Stanford’s inves­ti­ga­tors, he won­dered why no one had ever come to him when the indict­ments came down, not­ing that even fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors had acknowl­edged he did not enrich him­self from the scheme. It rein­forced the notion that he was sim­ply an asset — a name­less, expend­able cog in a cor­po­ra­tion with a $29 bil­lion endow­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Stan­ford does not come off look­ing good at all.
  3. Stan­ford stu­dents are more like­ly to wear masks on bicy­cles than hel­mets (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “In April of this year, I wit­nessed some­thing on the Stan­ford cam­pus that will be seared into my mem­o­ry for­ev­er: a stu­dent on a bicy­cle, wear­ing flip-flops, Air­Pods in ear, going the wrong way through a round­about in an active con­struc­tion zone, with no hel­met. But like any good fol­low­er of sci­ence, the stu­dent was wear­ing a dis­pos­able blue face mask — for safe­ty, I guess.” Should he desire to, Mey­er will become a well-known nation­al com­men­ta­tor some­day. He’s quite good.
  4. Why I Am a Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rist (Hans Boers­ma, First Things): “When rulers man­date vac­cine pass­ports and estab­lish elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic sys­tems to police com­pli­ance, it doesn’t take a great deal of imag­i­na­tion to see how the same sys­tem might be used—and in the eyes of many should be used—to reg­u­late car­bon emis­sions, expen­di­tures, and even opin­ions. After all, it’s not just the coro­n­avirus that is dan­ger­ous. So are cli­mate change, social inequal­i­ty, and cer­tain moral and reli­gious con­vic­tions. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, trav­el­ing from vac­cine pass­ports to a social cred­it system—the kind that Chi­na already has in place—takes no time at all.… This is not an argu­ment against vac­ci­na­tion per se. It is an argu­ment to take con­spir­a­cy theorists—David fore­most among them—seriously.” The author is an Angli­can the­olo­gian.
  5. The Pub­lic Con­tin­ues to Under­es­ti­mate COVID’s Age Dis­crim­i­na­tion (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “After 18 months of pub­lic-health guid­ance pro­mot­ing uni­ver­sal vig­i­lance, I think hard­ly any Amer­i­can has a clear view of just how dra­mat­ic these dif­fer­en­tials are. All else being equal, an unvac­ci­nat­ed 66-year old is about 30 times more like­ly to die, giv­en a con­firmed case, than an unvac­ci­nat­ed 36-year-old, and some­one over 85 is over 10,000 times more at risk of dying than a child under 10.… a vac­ci­nat­ed 80-year-old has about the same mor­tal­i­ty risk as an unvac­ci­nat­ed 50-year-old, and an unvac­ci­nat­ed 30-year-old has a low­er risk than a vac­ci­nat­ed 45-year-old.”
  6. Inside the Church That Preach­es ‘Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand’ (Sarah Stanko­rb, Vice): “Moth­er Kirk can be a joy­ous, faith­ful com­mu­ni­ty. But the con­ser­v­a­tive con­gre­ga­tion also is at odds with Moscow’s more lib­er­al pop­u­la­tion (sur­round­ing Latah coun­ty vot­ed for Pres­i­dent Biden in 2020). Depend­ing upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvin­ist utopia or a patri­ar­chal cult in which women must sub­mit or face dis­ci­pline at home and at church. At the cen­ter of it all is noto­ri­ous­ly con­tro­ver­sial Dou­glas Wil­son, the fire­brand pas­tor who has been pre­sid­ing over his Moth­er Kirk fief­dom for more than 40 years.” Many of the details in this sto­ry are very bad.
    • A Taste of Novem­ber in the Air (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Inci­den­tal­ly, in case you are curi­ous, I haven’t read the Vice piece because I did read the ques­tions that the writer sent to Nan­cy and to me while ‘research­ing,’ and the said ques­tions were all more loaded than the entrees at Tater’s, Home of the Grand Stuffed Pota­to Buf­fet. Way too many bacon bits.… If you read any­thing that unset­tles you, and you would like par­tic­u­lar answers to spe­cif­ic ques­tions, we have made them read­i­ly avail­able. On the top of this page, over to the right, we have a box called Crit­i­cal Ques­tions.” Wilson’s response to the Vice piece. 
  7. Unpop­ulism (David Leon­hardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, New York Times): “In elite cir­cles, includ­ing Capi­tol Hill, peo­ple often mis­un­der­stand Amer­i­can pub­lic opin­ion in a spe­cif­ic way. They imag­ine that the medi­an vot­er resem­bles a type of polit­i­cal mod­er­ate who is quite com­mon in those elite cir­cles — some­body who is social­ly lib­er­al and fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive.… In the rest of the coun­try, how­ev­er, this ide­o­log­i­cal com­bi­na­tion is not so com­mon, polls show. If any­thing, more Amer­i­cans can accu­rate­ly be described as the oppo­site — social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­al. That’s true across racial groups, includ­ing among Black and His­pan­ic vot­ers.” Not pay­walled.

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 com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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 313

a dis­turbing­ly high num­ber of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles

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.

313 is the 65th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • How the Pan­dem­ic Now Ends (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “Here, then, is the cur­rent pan­dem­ic dilem­ma: Vac­cines remain the best way for indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect them­selves, but soci­eties can­not treat vac­cines as their only defense.”
      • First, this is a free arti­cle that won’t use up a pay­wall click. Sec­ond, this is dis­cour­ag­ing to read and makes me think Stan­ford is going to be way more restric­tive than I was hop­ing come fall.
    • What We Lose When We Livestream Church (Collin Hansen, New York Times): “The very word we trans­late from Greek as ‘church’ in the New Tes­ta­ment sug­gests we must assem­ble in per­son. The church wasn’t just a bridge of 2,000 years until human­i­ty reached Peak Zoom. It’s essen­tial for the reli­gion where God took on flesh and dwelt among us. It’s essen­tial in a faith that believes Jesus phys­i­cal­ly rose from the dead and then sat down to enjoy a meal with his stunned friends.”
    • Covid incom­pe­tence (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amaz­ing­ly the US pol­i­cy response is even more irres­olute than the first time around. Our gov­ern­ment is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sug­ar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wan­ders off fol­low­ing a pup­py.”
      • The author is a senior fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • “What Do Full Hos­pi­tals Real­ly Tell Us About COVID?” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “The pub­lic argu­ment for spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals is more exper­tise and low­er costs because of effi­cien­cy. The real mod­el was no emer­gency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured peo­ple to get into the hos­pi­tal. All of the finan­cial ben­e­fits of being a hos­pi­tal with­out any of the respon­si­bil­i­ties. So we get wom­en’s hos­pi­tals, ortho­pe­dic hos­pi­tals, etc., suck­ing the prof­itable work from com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tals, with­out tak­ing any of the bur­den of com­mu­ni­ty care for the indi­gent.… The hos­pi­tals in Louisiana which take indi­gent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all.”
      • I did not know any of that. Real­ly inter­est­ing. Writ­ten a law prof at Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Porn­dem­ic? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study of Pornog­ra­phy Use Before and Dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in a Nation­al­ly Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sam­ple of Amer­i­cans (Grubbs et al, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “In gen­er­al, pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward over the pan­dem­ic, for both men and women. Prob­lem­at­ic pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward for men and remained low and unchanged in women.”
      • The excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing but also I think peo­ple are less like­ly to watch porn with their fam­i­lies around, which hap­pened a lot dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. I do won­der how their find­ings cross-check with traf­fic stats from porn web­sites. It seems like an obvi­ous way to do a sim­ple check on their find­ings.
  2. The Gap Between Law and Moral­i­ty (Helen Dale, Law & Lib­er­ty): “The planet’s two great legal sys­tems devel­oped in two Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tions, Rome and Eng­land. Their wide prove­nance is not only due to both peo­ples con­quer­ing great empires. It’s also because they worked: they did things no oth­er legal regime did before them, and those oth­ers are still inca­pable of doing now.… Incred­i­bly, these devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er. The Eng­lish com­mon law did not bor­row from Rome: when it first emerged, Roman law was lost.”
    • This is sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. In the words of an alum­nus, “This one was a sleep­er hit. Start­ed slow, blew me away by the end.”
  3. Why a Mas­cu­line Min­istry Rose and Fell (David French, The Dis­patch): “When coun­ter­ing a cul­ture that often attacks tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent virtue.… Driscoll, in all his tough­ness and swag­ger, tried to make men out of Chris­tians. The church, how­ev­er, should make Chris­tians out of men.”
  4. Cor­nel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When I was in Char­lottesville, look­ing at these sick white broth­ers in neo-Nazi par­ties and the Klan spit­ting and cussing and car­ry­ing on, I could see the hounds of hell rag­ing on the bat­tle­field of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. Peo­ple say, ‘Oh, you’re so qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than those gang­sters.’ I say, ‘No, I’ve got gang­ster in me. I was a gang­ster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sin­ner with gang­ster pro­cliv­i­ties.’ It is a very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things than many of my sec­u­lar com­rades.”
  5. Crim­i­nal-Jus­tice Reform­ers Chose the Wrong Slo­gan (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Before the pub­lic sours on crim­i­nal-jus­tice reform more broadly—as it may amid ris­ing fears about crime and dis­or­der in cities—a new focus and ral­ly­ing cry are need­ed. And giv­en the spike in homi­cides that has afflict­ed the Unit­ed States dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly killing Black peo­ple, there’s an espe­cial­ly strong case for this over­due slo­gan: Solve All Mur­ders. Pre­cise­ly because Black lives mat­ter, peo­ple who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.”
  6. Assem­blies of God Grow­ing with Pen­te­costal Per­sis­tence (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point exact­ly why the Assem­blies of God has con­tin­ued to increase over the past 15 years. Research shows that mem­ber­ship of the Assem­blies of God has become more polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and more reli­gious­ly active today than just a decade ago, but its own num­bers indi­cate that it has achieved incred­i­ble racial diversity—44 per­cent of mem­bers in the Unit­ed States are eth­nic minori­ties.”
    • Since the Assem­blies of God is the group with which I am ordained and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Chi Alpha, file under “arti­cles that make me hap­py.”
  7. We Need to Build Our Way Out of This Mess (Eli Doura­do, New York Times): “How did the most dynam­ic coun­try on the plan­et become so scle­rot­ic? We did it to our­selves. We enact­ed laws that priv­i­lege the sta­tus quo at the expense of change and progress. We lib­er­al­ly passed out veto rights to any­one with the mon­ey and where­with­al to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the dam­age and cre­ate a more pros­per­ous future, we must make it easy to build.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Utah State Uni­ver­si­ty.

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 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 299

so many enter­tain­ing tid­bits at the end — way more than nor­mal

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

This is the 299th install­ment of these emails. 299 is, I am told, the most pieces into which a sim­ple object (like a cube or a sphere — some­thing with­out a weird struc­ture) can be split using 12 straight cuts.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why You’re Chris­t­ian (David Per­rell, per­son­al blog): “…I’m a tepid non-believ­er myself.… [How­ev­er] I real­ized that society’s most pas­sion­ate crit­ics, most of whom claim to be sec­u­lar, usu­al­ly have the most Chris­t­ian val­ues of all. They’ve stud­ied in elite uni­ver­si­ties, they live in major cities, and they’re proud mem­bers of the intel­li­gentsia. Human rights, a cen­ter­piece of their moral out­look, is incon­sis­tent with the rest of their world­view. Though they pride them­selves on evi­dence-based think­ing, they’re intel­lec­tu­al­ly bank­rupt on the top­ic of human rights.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): What Became of Athe­ism, Part One: Wear­ing the Uni­form (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…if God exists then that is the sin­gle most impor­tant fact in the his­to­ry of cre­ation and noth­ing else can take its crown, ever. If a being exists, of what­ev­er nature, who cre­at­ed real­i­ty, exists with­in all of real­i­ty, set reality’s phys­i­cal and moral rules, watch­es over all of real­i­ty, judges all of us on how devout and moral we are, and deter­mines reward and pun­ish­ment based on that judge­ment, that clear­ly is the truth that trumps all oth­er truths. Strange to let it slip out of the debate qui­et­ly in the night. But then I sup­pose that’s cul­ture war; soon­er or lat­er the only ques­tion that remains is who is on what side of the line, and all the rest dis­solves.”
  2. Jus­tice-relat­ed thoughts:
    • ‘The Voice of Your Broth­er’s Blood Is Cry­ing to Me From the Ground’ (David French, The Dis­patch): “…we can artic­u­late three truths of sim­ple, indi­vid­ual jus­tice. First, a grave wrong cre­ates a moral and spir­i­tu­al cry for redress. Sec­ond, it is the role of gov­ern­ment to pro­vide that redress. And third, the gov­ern­ment must be impar­tial, treat­ing ‘great and small’ alike. All too many Amer­i­cans are com­plete­ly unaware of the extent to which the present struc­tures and habits of Amer­i­can law fail to meet those basic oblig­a­tions, espe­cial­ly when injus­tice is vis­it­ed upon the cit­i­zen by the state.”
    • Chau­vin Was Con­vict­ed. Some­thing Is Still Very Wrong. (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “For­give­ness doesn’t feel par­tic­u­lar­ly tri­umphant. It’s a gift no one wants to be in the posi­tion to give; it releas­es a wrong­do­er from moral debt — for their own good and the com­mon good, not for the sake of the wronged.… But I want to live in a world where it is pos­si­ble to for­give and to be for­giv­en. In fact, I think it’s nec­es­sary.”
    • The Real Rea­son to End the Death Penal­ty (Paul Gra­ham, Sub­stack): “But in prac­tice the debate about the death penal­ty is not about whether it’s ok to kill mur­der­ers. It’s about whether it’s ok to kill inno­cent peo­ple, because at least 4% of peo­ple on death row are inno­cent.” I find this a real­ly inter­est­ing line of argu­ment. Clear­ly we want to have a 100% accu­ra­cy rate in all crim­i­nal con­vic­tions. But is 96% accu­ra­cy out­ra­geous­ly intol­er­a­ble? To the extent that it becomes a per­sua­sive argu­ment against the death penal­ty isn’t that then also an argu­ment against impris­on­ment? Or vir­tu­al­ly any pun­ish­ment?
    • Unjust Sec­u­lar Jus­tice (Matthew Schmitz,First Things): “While in the colo­nial era most cas­es went to tri­al (and most tri­als last­ed a stun­ning­ly short thir­ty min­utes), more and more are now resolved by a plea bar­gain. Nowhere is our aban­don­ment of colo­nial ideas of crim­i­nal jus­tice more appar­ent than in no-con­test pleas that allow defen­dants to receive lighter sen­tences with­out any admis­sion of guilt.” This is an old­er book review (2013) but is quite good.
    • Out­rage Over­load (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “Mod­ern policing—or even polic­ing qua policing—owes far less to slave patrolling than NASA owes to Hitler’s rock­et pro­gram. And yet no one talks about the trou­bling Nazi roots of mod­ern space explo­ration, or asks Elon Musk if he’s exor­cised the ghost of Wern­er Von Braun from SpaceX. I have seen this slave patrol thing brought up count­less times in inter­views, and not once have I seen an inter­view­er say, ‘Real­ly?’ nev­er mind, ‘What the hell are you talk­ing about?’ It’s as bat­ty as any con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, and it’s a delib­er­ate attempt to heap innu­en­do on polic­ing in lieu of mak­ing an intel­li­gent argu­ment. And that’s what frus­trates me to no end. It’s the job of jour­nal­ists to call out B.S. when it’s being thrown in their faces.”
  3. Where Two or Three Are Gath­ered (William J. Haun & Daniel L. Chen, Law & Lib­er­ty): “Over 40 ami­cus briefs lam­bast­ed this embrace of open-end­ed gov­ern­ment surveillance—reflecting an ide­o­log­i­cal agree­ment so wide that NARAL Pro-Choice North Car­oli­na and Wis­con­sin Right to Life joined the same brief. On the sur­face, wide­spread con­sen­sus in favor of asso­ci­a­tion­al pri­va­cy is sure­ly wel­come. But this agree­ment masks equal­ly wide­spread, decades-long con­fu­sion over how and why the Con­sti­tu­tion pro­tects free asso­ci­a­tion.” Quite good, a bit dry. The authors are lawyers with the Beck­et Fund.
  4. “Wok­e­ness is a prob­lem and we all know it” (Sean Illing inter­view­ing James Carville, Vox): “We won the White House against a world-his­tor­i­cal buf­foon. And we came with­in 42,000 votes of los­ing. We lost con­gres­sion­al seats. We didn’t pick up state leg­is­la­tures. So let’s not have an argu­ment about whether or not we’re off-key in our mes­sag­ing. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jar­gon and there’s too much eso­ter­i­ca and it turns peo­ple off.” Carville is a leg­endary Demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal strate­gist and he is in full-on old man rant mode here.
  5. ‘This Is a Cat­a­stro­phe.’ In India, Ill­ness Is Every­where. (Jef­frey Get­tle­man, New York Times): “New Del­hi, India’s sprawl­ing cap­i­tal of 20 mil­lion, is suf­fer­ing a calami­tous surge. A few days ago, the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate hit a stag­ger­ing 36 per­cent — mean­ing more than one out of three peo­ple test­ed were infect­ed. A month ago, it was less than 3 per­cent.”
    1. Relat­ed: ‘Death Is the Only Truth.’ Watch­ing India’s Funer­al Pyres Burn. (Aman Sethi, New York Times): “The Indi­an gov­ern­ment has ordered Twit­ter, Face­book and Insta­gram to take down dozens of posts crit­i­ciz­ing its han­dling of the pan­dem­ic. But the graph­ic images of mass cre­ma­tions have cut through this wall of noise, mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da, cap­tur­ing what epi­demi­ol­o­gists call ‘excess mor­tal­i­ty’ in grue­some detail.”
  6. Colum­bia Stone (T.A. Kras­ni­can, Sub­stack): “This pub­lic for­get­ful­ness is the same indif­fer­ence that in 1938 inspired Adolf Hitler, after issu­ing orders for his Nazi ‘death-head for­ma­tions’ to ‘send to death mer­ci­less­ly and with­out com­pas­sion, men, women, and chil­dren of Pol­ish deriva­tion and lan­guage,’ to write the famous phrase, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the anni­hi­la­tion of the Arme­ni­ans?’ Pub­lic ambiva­lence about human tragedy embold­ened him.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Indi­vid­u­al­ism is asso­ci­at­ed with hap­py coun­tries, but not peo­ple (Zaid Jilani, Sub­stack): “In a recent­ly released study, team of researchers stud­ied young adults across four coun­tries — Chi­na, the Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, and Italy — start­ing with the hypoth­e­sis that lev­els of life sat­is­fac­tion would be high­er among indi­vid­u­als who have indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues. At the coun­try lev­el, this is indeed what they found. Coun­tries with a high­er index of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues had more life sat­is­fac­tion — that put Amer­i­ca on top, fol­lowed by Italy, Rus­sia, and then Chi­na. But an entire­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerged when they looked at the indi­vid­ual lev­el. There, they found that indi­vid­u­al­ism had no impact on life sat­is­fac­tion. Instead, life sat­is­fac­tion was pos­i­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with col­lec­tivism, regard­less of the wider cul­ture of the coun­try.” My take: Amer­i­cans are on aver­age hap­pi­er than the Chi­nese because of the free­doms which emerge from our indi­vid­u­al­ism, but the hap­pi­est indi­vid­u­als in each coun­try are those that freely choose to embrace fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty.

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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 269

I share a few per­son­al thoughts about crim­i­nal jus­tice reform in this one. Just a few.

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. Some thoughts fol­low­ing the Bre­on­na Tay­lor ver­dict:
    • Cor­rect­ing the mis­in­for­ma­tion about Bre­on­na Tay­lor (Radley Balko, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We could pre­vent the next Bre­on­na Tay­lor. We could ban forced entry raids to serve drug war­rants. We could hold judges account­able for sign­ing war­rants that don’t pass con­sti­tu­tion­al muster. We could demand that police offi­cers wear body cam­eras dur­ing these raids to hold them account­able, and that they be ade­quate­ly pun­ished when they fail to acti­vate them. We could do a lot to make sure there are no more Bre­on­na Tay­lors. The ques­tion is whether we want to.”
    • From a month ago, but time­ly now: Supreme Court Prece­dent Killed Bre­on­na Tay­lor (David French, The Dis­patch): “Some­thing (or some things) have to give, and those ‘things’ are no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty. Indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties should not be sac­ri­ficed on the altar of police drug raids, and vic­tims of civ­il rights abus­es should be enti­tled to receive com­pen­sa­tion for their loss­es, includ­ing their injuries and wounds.”
    • My 2 cents: Amer­i­ca’s jus­tice sys­tem would be great­ly improved if no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty were either elim­i­nat­ed or great­ly con­strained. And if we get rid of civ­il asset for­fei­ture at the same time — wow.
  2. Review: ‘Domin­ion: How the Chris­t­ian Rev­o­lu­tion Remade the World’ by Tom Hol­land (Tim Keller, Gospel Coali­tion): “…the shame-and-hon­or cul­tures of old, pagan Europe—of the Anglo-Sax­ons, the Franks, and the Germans—thought that the Chris­t­ian eth­ic of for­giv­ing one’s ene­mies and of hon­or­ing the poor and weak to be com­plete­ly unwork­able as a basis for soci­ety. These ideas would’ve nev­er occurred to any­one unless they held to a uni­verse with a sin­gle, per­son­al God who cre­at­ed all beings in his image, and with a Sav­ior who came and died in sac­ri­fi­cial love. The ideas only could’ve grown from such a worldview—they don’t make sense in a dif­fer­ent one. If, instead, we believe we’re here by acci­dent through a process of sur­vival of the fittest, then there can be no moral absolutes, and life must be, if any­thing, about pow­er and the mas­tery of oth­ers, not about love. That, declared Niet­zsche, is the only way to live once you are tru­ly will­ing to admit that the Chris­t­ian God does not exist.”
  3. We Are All Algo­rithms Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­Stack): “In the past, we might have turned to more reli­able media for con­text and per­spec­tive. But the jour­nal­ists and reporters and edi­tors who are sup­posed to per­form this func­tion are human as well. And they are per­haps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape…. The press could have been the anti­dote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the prof­itable push­er of the poi­son.“ This was writ­ten before news of RBG’s death and is even more time­ly now.
  4. Con­cern­ing the Supreme Court:
    • Lead­ing Repub­li­can politi­cians have flip-flopped What Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (one minute video, YouTube)
    • Lead­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians have flip-flopped What lead­ing Democ­rats have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (two minute video, Twit­ter) 
    • A thought from the left: Down With Judi­cial Suprema­cy! (Jamelle Bouie, New York Times): “The Supreme Court has the pow­er to inter­pret the Con­sti­tu­tion and estab­lish its mean­ing for fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ment alike. But this pow­er wasn’t enu­mer­at­ed in the Con­sti­tu­tion and isn’t inher­ent in the court as an insti­tu­tion. Instead, the court’s pow­er to inter­pret and bind oth­ers to that inter­pre­ta­tion was con­struct­ed over time by polit­i­cal and legal actors through­out the sys­tem, from pres­i­dents and law­mak­ers to the judges and jus­tices them­selves.”
    • A thought from the right: How the G.O.P. Might Get to Yes on Replac­ing Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Since I became opposed to abor­tion, some­time in my lat­er teens, I have nev­er regard­ed the Supreme Court with warmth, admi­ra­tion or patri­ot­ic trust. What my lib­er­al friends felt after Bush v. Gore or after Brett Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion or in imag­in­ing some future rul­ing by Amy Coney Bar­rett, I have felt for my entire adult life.”
  5. On faith and pol­i­tics:
    • How Faith Shapes My Pol­i­tics (David Brooks, New York Times): “In a soci­ety that is grow­ing rad­i­cal­ly more sec­u­lar every day, I’d say we have more to fear from polit­i­cal dog­ma­tism than reli­gious dog­ma­tism.” 
    • Relat­ed: This just in! Evan­gel­i­cals are actu­al­ly Amer­i­ca’s least politi­cized group of church­es (Richard Ostling, GetRe­li­gion): “…the emerg­ing sce­nario appears to indi­cate a rel­a­tive­ly small and unrep­re­sen­ta­tive band of evan­gel­i­cal par­ti­sans at the nation­al lev­el has — aid­ed by mas­sive amounts of news cov­er­age — dis­tort­ed the pub­lic image of grass-roots white evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • What are your Expec­ta­tions of Jesus’ Local Church? (Adam Sin­nett, church web­site): “Over the last six months the elders of DCC have received numer­ous ques­tions, rec­om­men­da­tions, and crit­i­cisms in rela­tion to what we should be doing as a church in regards to: our pan­dem­ic response, the rela­tion­ship between church and state, tim­ing and con­tent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, grow­ing unem­ploy­ment, the home­less­ness cri­sis, polit­i­cal par­ti­san­ship, sys­temic injus­tice, police bru­tal­i­ty, social protests, and more.”
    • Fol­low-up: Who Does What in the Life of the Church? (Adam Sin­net, church web­site): “If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the lead­ers’ we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the life of the church on the pas­tors. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the peo­ple’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the indi­vid­u­als. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as an ‘insti­tu­tion’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the orga­ni­za­tion, its struc­tures, and process­es. Who then is respon­si­ble for ful­fill­ing God’s pur­pose for his church? Is it the lead­ers, or the peo­ple, or the insti­tu­tion? Put sim­ply, every­one is respon­si­ble, though in dif­fer­ent ways.”
    • Mark Dev­er’s Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Sues to Not For­sake the Assem­bly (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…the DC congregation’s legal fight is unique­ly tied to its the­o­log­i­cal beliefs around how a church should gath­er. Dev­er has long resist­ed mul­ti-site, mul­ti-ser­vice mod­els of church, though they are very pop­u­lar among fel­low South­ern Bap­tists. The DC Bap­tist church does not stream ser­vices online, and hasn’t made an excep­tion to that rule dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist, a large evan­gel­i­cal church, sues DC May­or Muriel Bows­er over coro­n­avirus restric­tions (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The vote Sun­day at a mem­bers meet­ing to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion was 402 in favor, 35 against, mem­bers said, though church lead­ers would not con­firm spe­cif­ic num­bers.”
  6. Two ran­dom arti­cles touch­ing on race:
    • This Is How Biden Should Approach the Lati­no Vote (Ian Haney López and Tory Gav­i­to, New York Times): “Pro­gres­sives com­mon­ly cat­e­go­rize Lati­nos as peo­ple of col­or, no doubt part­ly because pro­gres­sive Lati­nos see the group that way and encour­age oth­ers to do so as well. Cer­tain­ly, we both once took that per­spec­tive for grant­ed. Yet in our sur­vey, only one in four His­pan­ics saw the group as peo­ple of col­or.”
      • I am unin­ter­est­ed in the par­ti­san angle of this op-ed, but the sta­tis­tic I excerpt­ed stood out to me. I won­der what per­cent­age of Stan­ford stu­dents would have pre­dict­ed it? I sus­pect the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Stan­ford stu­dents would have bet on the oppo­site.
    • The Pre­tense That Prince­ton Is Racist (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I object to the entire witch hunt of an inves­ti­ga­tion, which Repub­li­cans would rec­og­nize as a fla­grant abuse of fed­er­al pow­er were it aimed at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty. No rea­son­able per­son could con­clude that an oner­ous probe of Prince­ton for anti-Black racism is the best use, or even a good use, of scarce resources to safe­guard civ­il rights. The deci­sion to grap­ple with racism should not trig­ger a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion, whether or not that grap­pling is total­ly hon­est.”
  7. Tea Time: The Chris­t­ian Mis­sion to Pre­serve Cul­ture (Lyman Stone, The Plough): “As strange as it may seem for a white Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary to be teach­ing an eight-year-old Chi­nese girl from the tea cap­i­tal of the world how to pour tea, such I under­stood to be my Chris­t­ian duty.”

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 Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192

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 260

From naked pro­tes­tors in Port­land to slav­ery in Chi­na to the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tions on con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

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. Chi­na’s Xin­jiang Province a Moral Quandary for the West (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “The attempt to place mod­ern slaves in the sup­ply chain of West­ern lux­u­ry goods is an attempt to impli­cate and moral­ly geld West­ern nations who would crit­i­cize or pun­ish the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty for its crimes.”
  2. USS Uni­ver­si­ty (Scott Gal­loway, per­son­al blog): “There is a dan­ger­ous con­fla­tion of the dis­cus­sion about K‑12 and uni­ver­si­ty reopen­ings. The two are stark­ly dif­fer­ent. There are strong rea­sons to reopen K‑12, and there are stronger rea­sons to keep uni­ver­si­ties shut­tered.“ The author is a busi­ness prof at NYU. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Relat­ed: Col­leges Are Get­ting Ready to Blame Their Stu­dents (Julia Mar­cus and Jes­si­ca Gold, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents will get infect­ed, and uni­ver­si­ties will rebuke them for it; cam­pus­es will close, and stu­dents will be blamed for it. Rely­ing on the self-con­trol of young adults, rather than deploy­ing the pub­lic-health infra­struc­ture need­ed to con­trol a dis­ease that spreads eas­i­ly among peo­ple who live, eat, study, and social­ize togeth­er, is not a safe reopen­ing strategy—and yelling at stu­dents for their dan­ger­ous behav­ior won’t help either.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Har­vard and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly. 
    • Vague­ly relat­ed: Your State’s COVID Num­bers In Con­text (Poli­Math, Sub­stack): “Head­lines are aller­gic to con­text and the high-pop­u­la­tion states get all the atten­tion because they show big num­bers (because they are big states). When a small­er state gets any report­ing, it is entire­ly out­side any con­text. In Wash­ing­ton, it was report­ed that we had 754 new cas­es and 7 new deaths. Is that a lot? How does that com­pare to oth­er states?” Very detailed and insight­ful. 
  3. Coro­n­avirus, Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ries, and the Ninth Com­mand­ment (David French, The Dis­patch): “Chris­t­ian teach­ing about our lives in our work­places is not pri­mar­i­ly about how to obtain a pro­mo­tion, how to invest our mon­ey, or how to start a busi­ness. In oth­er words, it’s not about the objec­tives of eco­nom­ic engage­ment, though those objec­tives are impor­tant. Instead, the focus is on min­is­ter­ing to col­leagues, cul­ti­vat­ing faith in adver­si­ty, and gen­er­al­ly learn­ing how to be salt and light even in some­times hos­tile or intim­i­dat­ing envi­ron­ments. [But we don’t do this with pol­i­tics.]” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus, this one was real­ly good.
  4. 8 facts about reli­gion and gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States (Dalia Fah­my, Pew Research Cen­ter): “While the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion does not men­tion God, every state con­sti­tu­tion ref­er­ences either God or the divine. God also appears in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the Pledge of Alle­giance and on U.S. cur­ren­cy.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Where is the nation­al news cov­er­age of cur­rent surge of van­dal­ism at Catholic church­es? (Clemente Lisi, GetRe­li­gion): “Who’s respon­si­ble for this anti-Catholic vio­lence? Is it Mus­lim ter­ror­ists? Neo-Nazis? Left-wing rad­i­cals? Are these iso­lat­ed inci­dents or part of a coor­di­nat­ed attack? We don’t know because the elite news­rooms with the tal­ent and resources to han­dle this kind of inves­ti­ga­tion are miss­ing in action, in this case.… One has to won­der how these inci­dents would have been cov­ered had they been mosques? What about pub­lic schools? Or say Planned Par­ent­hood facil­i­ties?”
    • Relat­ed: Roman Catholics: The Orig­i­nal Abo­li­tion­ists (Paul Ken­gor, Cri­sis Mag­a­zine): “Last week­end, one of Serra’s mis­sion church­es in Cal­i­for­nia went up in flames, with the cause of the fire not yet known. In the last few days, a stat­ue of Mary was set on fire in Boston and anoth­er was van­dal­ized in Brook­lyn (among oth­ers). As to what Mary has to do with the mod­ern anti-stat­ue-racism move­ment is anyone’s guess. Nonethe­less, if the issue is (right­ly so) a just con­dem­na­tion of slav­ery and racism, and if one is gen­uine­ly seek­ing accu­rate his­to­ry, then today’s activists ought to look back in admi­ra­tion at the impres­sive track record of the Roman Catholic Church.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Grove City Col­lege. The his­to­ry of the Catholic Church on the issue of slav­ery is bet­ter than the Protes­tant church.
  6. What You Need To Know About The Bat­tle of Port­land (Robert Evans, Belling­cat): “I report­ed on the fight­ing in Mosul back in 2017, and what hap­pened that night in the streets of Port­land was, of course, not near­ly as bru­tal or dan­ger­ous as actu­al com­bat. Yet it was about as close as you can get with­out using live ammu­ni­tion.“ A sig­nif­i­cant qual­i­fi­er at the end of that sen­tence, inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
    • Portland’s protests were sup­posed to be about black lives. Now, they’re white spec­ta­cle. (E.D. Mondainé, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We wel­come our white broth­ers and sis­ters in this strug­gle. In fact, we need them. But I must ask them to remain humbly attuned to the oppor­tu­ni­ty of this moment — and to reflect on whether any actions they take will tru­ly help estab­lish jus­tice, or whether they are sim­ply for show.” The author is pres­i­dent of the Port­land branch of the NAACP.
    • Out of Port­land tear gas, an appari­tion emerges, cap­tur­ing the imag­i­na­tion of pro­test­ers (Los Ange­les Times): “She emerged as an appari­tion from clouds of tear gas as fed­er­al agents fired pep­per balls at angry pro­test­ers in the ear­ly Sat­ur­day dark­ness. A woman wear­ing noth­ing but a black face mask and a stock­ing cap strode toward a dozen heav­i­ly armed agents attired in cam­ou­flage fatigues, lined up across a down­town Port­land street.” Port­land gonna port.
    • Tan­gen­tial­ly Relat­ed: Amer­i­can Crime and the Bal­ti­more Mod­el (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Ide­al­ists may hope these changes will elim­i­nate police bru­tal­i­ty as com­mu­ni­ties find bet­ter ways to pre­vent crime than deter­rence and force. But on the hunch that human nature hasn’t changed, that isn’t going to hap­pen. Crim­i­nals, fear­ing less, will con­tin­ue to prey on oth­ers. Police, fear­ing more, will hold back from doing their jobs. Those with means to leave their neigh­bor­hoods, will. Those with­out the means will suf­fer.”
  7. A new intel­li­gentsia is push­ing back against wok­e­ness (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, For­ward): “The anti-woke Black intel­li­gentsia is lead­ing a counter-cul­ture to a woke hege­mo­ny and the online cul­ture that pop­u­lar­ized it. But their views hew more close­ly to those of most Black Amer­i­cans than the new antiracism. Polling has long indi­cat­ed that white lib­er­als express rad­i­cal­ly more lib­er­al views on racial and social issues than their Black and Lati­no neigh­bors.” Very inter­est­ing inter­views.
    • Relat­ed: The Left is Now the Right (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “Things we once despised about the right have been ampli­fied a thou­sand-fold on the flip. Con­ser­v­a­tives once tried to leg­is­late what went on in your bed­room; now it’s the left that obsess­es over sex­u­al cod­i­cils, not just for the bed­room but every­where. Right-wingers from time to time made head­lines cam­paign­ing against every­thing from The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ to ‘Fuck the Police,’ though we laughed at the idea that Ice Cube made cops lit­er­al­ly unsafe… today Matt Ygle­sias sign­ing a group let­ter with Noam Chom­sky is con­sid­ered threat­en­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: When Wokes and Racists Actu­al­ly Agree on Every­thing (Ryan Long Com­e­dy, YouTube) : two min­utes of bril­liance

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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.