Tag: drugs

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

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 hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 328

Every­thing from bap­tisms to abor­tion to per­ceived noos­es. Also self-repli­cat­ing robots which is noth­ing to wor­ry about at all.

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 328, which is the year that one of my favorite church lead­ers became a bish­op: Athana­sius.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Supreme Court recon­sid­ers abor­tion:
    • The Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Mississippi’s abor­tion law. (Adam Lip­tak, New York Times): “The Supreme Court seemed poised on Wednes­day to uphold a Mis­sis­sip­pi law that bans abor­tions after 15 weeks of preg­nan­cy, based on some­times tense and heat­ed ques­tion­ing at a momen­tous argu­ment in the most impor­tant abor­tion case in decades. Such a rul­ing would be flat­ly at odds with what the court has said was the cen­tral hold­ing of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 deci­sion that estab­lished a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion and pro­hib­it­ed states from ban­ning the pro­ce­dure before fetal via­bil­i­ty, or around 23 weeks. But the court’s six-mem­ber con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty seemed divid­ed about whether to stop at 15 weeks, for now at least, or whether to over­rule Roe entire­ly, allow­ing states to ban abor­tions at any time or entire­ly.”
    • For a free, non­pay­walled analy­sis check out Major­i­ty of court appears poised to roll back abor­tion rights (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog)
    • Why Roe Will Fall And Oberge­fell Won’t (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In Roe, the Court tried to jump­start a con­sen­sus and failed to secure it, with pub­lic opin­ion very sim­i­lar now to where it was half a cen­tu­ry ago. In Oberge­fell, the Court wait­ed until there was major­i­ty sup­port, which arrived, accord­ing to Gallup, in 2011, and the Court then val­i­dat­ed a still-grow­ing soci­etal con­sen­sus four years lat­er.”
  2. Low­er­ing the Vot­ing Age (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Peo­ple who dis­cuss low­er­ing the vot­ing age – not only those for it but also those against – assume that it would mean a trans­fer of polit­i­cal influ­ence to the young. That is absurd. It would mean no such thing. Although the very young are often very sure of their opin­ions and con­vinced that they have made up their own minds, they lack the matu­ri­ty to form their minds inde­pen­dent­ly. So to low­er the vot­ing age would not mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal influ­ence of the young. It would only mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal clout of those who have influ­ence through the young.”
    • That’s a real­ly good point I had­n’t con­sid­ered. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy and of gov­ern­ment at UT Austin.
  3. Horse Troughs, Hot Tubs and Hash­tags: Bap­tism Is Get­ting Wild (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Con­tem­po­rary evan­gel­i­cal bap­tisms are often rau­cous affairs. Instead of sub­dued hymns and mur­murs, think roar­ing mod­ern wor­ship music, fist pumps, tears and bois­ter­ous cheer­ing. There are pho­tog­ra­phers, self­ie sta­tions and hash­tags for social media. One church in Texas calls its reg­u­lar mass bap­tism event a ‘plunge par­ty.’ ”
    • This is an inter­est­ing arti­cle most­ly for how inter­est­ing utter­ly nor­mal things can seem to NY Times read­ers.
  4. She set out to save her daugh­ter from fen­tanyl. She had no idea what she would face on the streets of San Fran­cis­co (Heather Knight, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “I asked Jes­si­ca if she thought she would ever leave San Fran­cis­co. ‘It’s like a vor­tex,’ she said. ‘I want to get out of here. But why the f— would I leave here if I have every­thing I need giv­en to me? It might be enabling or it might be keep­ing you in a cycle, but at least you can sur­vive,’ she con­tin­ued. ‘That’s bet­ter than a lot of places.’ ”
    • The wages of sin is death. What a gut-punch of a sto­ry.
  5. Race Pan­ic! Stan­ford inves­ti­gates “cords with loops that may rep­re­sent noos­es” (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “Call­ing out and address­ing racism? No, these Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors are com­mit­ted to invent­ing racism. Though, I must hand it to them: Dean Hicks and her ‘insti­tu­tion­al equi­ty’ side­kick Mr. Dunk­ley might not real­ize it, but there is a beau­ti­ful, almost poet­ic irony to the tim­ing of their email. They rushed to inform Stan­ford stu­dents of an alleged race inci­dent on the very day that the crim­i­nal tri­al of Jussie Smol­lett, the great­est of all race hoax­ers, began in Chica­go. That lit­tle coin­ci­dence is the cher­ry on top of this giant farce.”
    • Mey­er’s take is, as far as I can tell, entire­ly cor­rect. If those loops looked at all like noos­es we’d have pho­tos.
  6. Team builds first liv­ing robots—that can repro­duce (Joshua Brown, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont press release): “Some peo­ple may find this exhil­a­rat­ing. Oth­ers may react with con­cern, or even ter­ror, to the notion of a self-repli­cat­ing biotech­nol­o­gy. For the team of sci­en­tists, the goal is deep­er under­stand­ing.”
  7. The Busi­ness of Extract­ing Knowl­edge from Aca­d­e­m­ic Pub­li­ca­tions (Markus Strass­er, per­son­al blog): “I had to wrap my head around the fact that close to noth­ing of what makes sci­ence actu­al­ly work is pub­lished as text on the web. Research ques­tions that can be answered log­i­cal­ly through just read­ing papers and con­nect­ing the dots don’t require a biotech corp to be formed around them. There’s much less log­ic and deduc­tion hap­pen­ing than you’d expect in a sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline.”
    • Long and poor­ly for­mat­ted, but with an inter­est­ing core idea. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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 224

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. A Mil­lion Peo­ple Are Jailed at Chi­na’s Gulags. I Man­aged to Escape. Here’s What Real­ly Goes on Inside (David Stavrou, Ha Aretz): “Tor­ture – met­al nails, fin­ger­nails pulled out, elec­tric shocks – takes place in the ‘black room.’ Pun­ish­ment is a con­stant. The pris­on­ers are forced to take pills and get injec­tions. It’s for dis­ease pre­ven­tion, the staff tell them, but in real­i­ty they are the human sub­jects of med­ical exper­i­ments. Many of the inmates suf­fer from cog­ni­tive decline. Some of the men become ster­ile. Women are rou­tine­ly raped.” This is one of the worst things hap­pen­ing in the world right now, and that is say­ing some­thing since ‘glob­al hor­rors’ is a fright­en­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive cat­e­go­ry.
  2. Stan­ford fails its Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty (Sarah Myers, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “This year, class­es were held on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kip­pur. These hol­i­days are the High Holy Days of Judaism, so-called because they are the holi­est days of the year for Judaism. Rosh Hashanah lasts two days and Yom Kip­pur one. Many Jews attend ser­vices for most of the day on these hol­i­days. Fast­ing is con­sid­ered a key part of observ­ing Yom Kip­pur. Yet, Stan­ford decid­ed that class­es would be held, and pro­fes­sors would be free to cre­ate assign­ments with no regard for stu­dents observ­ing these days.”
  3. Black Bap­tist church shaped Cum­mings’ com­mit­ment (Jeff Karoub, AP News): “To many black cler­gy, Mary­land Rep. Eli­jah E. Cum­mings was more than a for­mi­da­ble ora­tor, civ­il rights cham­pi­on and pas­sion­ate pub­lic ser­vant, he was also one of them — in prac­tice, if not pro­fes­sion.”
  4. How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing.
  5. The Codev­il­la Tapes (David Samuels, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Samuels: ‘Please remove me from temp­ta­tion, said no one, ever.’ “Codev­il­la: ‘Well as a mat­ter of fact, Chris­tians do “lead us not into temp­ta­tion” all the time.’ Samuels: ‘You do say “lead us not into temp­ta­tion,” but I am not aware of the Chris­t­ian prayer that says “please take away the choco­late cake while I’m in the mid­dle of eat­ing it.”’ Codev­il­la: ‘Well, St. Augus­tine said exact­ly that, you know, “Lord make me pure, but not yet.”’ This is a super-long, wide-rang­ing inter­view. It is full of fas­ci­nat­ing tid­bits and will reward skim­ming.
  6. On Mex­i­can State Col­lapse (El Anti-Pozolero, a per­son­al blog): “It’s an absolute­ly extra­or­di­nary episode even by the grim and bizarre annals of what we mis­tak­en­ly call the post-2006 Mex­i­can Drug War. The Bat­tle of Culi­acán stands on a lev­el above, say, the Ayotz­i­na­pa mas­sacre, or the Zetas’ expul­sion of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Ciu­dad Mier. Killing scores of inno­cents and bru­tal­iz­ing small towns is one thing: seiz­ing region­al cap­i­tal cities and crush­ing the nation­al armed forces in open fight­ing in broad day­light is some­thing else.”
    • Mex­i­co’s bid to detain El Chapo son ‘a fail­ure of every­thing’ (Will Grant, BBC News): “It was a huge embar­rass­ment for the gov­ern­ment. They had cap­tured one of the most want­ed men in Mex­i­co and, out­gunned and over­whelmed by the car­tel, they sim­ply turned him back over to his men.”
    • How Mex­i­co became a failed state (Manuel Suárez-Mier, Asia Times): “When we think about what’s impres­sive here, it is the sheer amount of dev­as­ta­tion of a large coun­try (14th in GDP; 135 mil­lion peo­ple) that a dog­mat­ic, self-cen­tered, nar­cis­sis­tic and igno­rant leader can inflict in such short time.”
  7. What Teach­ing Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridg­ing America’s Par­ti­san Divide (Evan Man­dery, Politi­co): “We teach peo­ple that it’s impo­lite to dis­cuss reli­gion and pol­i­tics in pub­lic. It’s wrong. We need to teach peo­ple how to dis­cuss reli­gion and pol­i­tics.”

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 219

New stu­dents: if this is your first email from the Chi Alpha list, wel­come! Every Fri­day I email out a com­pi­la­tion of arti­cles about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. My hope is that every­one will find at least one link intrigu­ing enough to click through for more.

Most of the list’s con­tent isn’t remote­ly like this, so even if this isn’t your cup of tea be sure to stick around (although I’ve heard rumors that some peo­ple stay on our list just for this Fri­day email). Also pay atten­tion to the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom — I real­ly mean them. And I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lega­cy and Ath­lete Pref­er­ences at Har­vard (Peter Arcidi­a­cono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ran­som, link is a PDF of a work­ing paper): “The law­suit Stu­dents For Fair Admis­sions v. Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vid­ed an unprece­dent­ed look at how an elite school makes admis­sions deci­sions. Using pub­licly-released reports, we exam­ine the pref­er­ences Har­vard gives for recruit­ed ath­letes, lega­cies, those on the dean’s inter­est list, and chil­dren of fac­ul­ty and staff (ALD­Cs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African Amer­i­can, Asian Amer­i­can, and His­pan­ic, the share is less than 16% each. Our mod­el of admis­sions shows that rough­ly three quar­ters of white ALDC admits would have been reject­ed if they had been treat­ed as white non-ALD­Cs. Remov­ing pref­er­ences for ath­letes and lega­cies would sig­nif­i­cant­ly alter the racial dis­tri­b­u­tion of admit­ted stu­dents, with the share of white admits falling and all oth­er groups ris­ing or remain­ing unchanged.” The lead author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Duke.
  2. Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. I nor­mal­ly avoid two links from one author, but every once in a while some­one is on fire. Against Against Pseudoad­dic­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Let me con­fess: I think pseudoad­dic­tion is real. In fact, I think it’s obvi­ous­ly real. I think every­one should real­ize it’s real as soon as it’s explained prop­er­ly to them. I think we should be ter­ri­fied that any of our insti­tu­tions – media, acad­e­mia, what­ev­er – think they could pos­si­bly get away with claim­ing pseudoad­dic­tion isn’t real. I think peo­ple should be tak­ing to the streets try­ing to over­throw a med­ical sys­tem that has the slight­est doubt about whether pseudoad­dic­tion is real. If you can think of more hyper­bol­ic state­ments about pseudoad­dic­tion, I prob­a­bly believe those too.” I am ful­ly per­suad­ed by this arti­cle. 
  4. ‘I Basi­cal­ly Just Made It Up’: Con­fes­sions of a Social Con­struc­tion­ist (Christo­pher Dum­mitt, Quil­lette): “In my defence, I wasn’t alone. Every­one was (and is) mak­ing it up. That’s how the gen­der-stud­ies field works. But it’s not much of a defence. I should have known bet­ter. If I were to retroac­tive­ly psy­cho­an­a­lyze myself, I would say that, real­ly, I did know bet­ter. And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic lev­el, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was say­ing. So I stuck to the argu­ments with fer­vor, and denounced alter­na­tive points of view.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Trent Uni­ver­si­ty (in Cana­da). 
  5. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Help­ing Dri­ve Lib­er­als Away From Reli­gion (Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux and Daniel Cox, FiveThir­tyEight): “Researchers haven’t found a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion for why the num­ber of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too com­plex. But a recent swell of social sci­ence research sug­gests that even if pol­i­tics wasn’t the sole cul­prit, it was an impor­tant con­trib­u­tor.”
    • Relat­ed: Not every­body wants thoughts and prayers after a dis­as­ter, accord­ing to a study of hur­ri­cane sur­vivors (Allen Kim, CNN): “Think­ing of send­ing your ‘thoughts and prayers’ to those affect­ed by tragedy or a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? Well, not every­one wants them. While Chris­tians val­ue these ges­tures from reli­gious peo­ple, some athe­ists and agnos­tics would pay mon­ey to avoid them, accord­ing to a study pub­lished Mon­day in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.” I am shocked at how aller­gic some peo­ple are to reli­gion. The aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle upon which this news sto­ry was based is The val­ue of thoughts and prayers (Lin­da Thun­ström and Shiri Noy, PNAS).
  6. World Vision Flips the Script on Child Spon­sor­ship (Jere­my Weber, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Almost 1,000 chil­dren in rur­al Guatemala gained spon­sors this month from a megachurch in south­ern Indi­ana. But in this case, it was the indige­nous chil­dren in need who pon­dered pho­tos of smil­ing faces and chose one they felt a con­nec­tion with. And it was the adult donors in the Unit­ed States who ner­vous­ly wait­ed, won­der­ing who would pick them.”
  7. The grand­mas­ter diet: How to lose weight while bare­ly mov­ing (Aish­warya Kumar, ESPN): “Robert Sapol­sky, who stud­ies stress in pri­mates at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, says a chess play­er can burn up to 6,000 calo­ries a day while play­ing in a tour­na­ment, three times what an aver­age per­son con­sumes in a day. Based on breath­ing rates (which triple dur­ing com­pe­ti­tion), blood pres­sure (which ele­vates) and mus­cle con­trac­tions before, dur­ing and after major tour­na­ments, Sapol­sky sug­gests that grand­mas­ters’ stress respons­es to chess are on par with what elite ath­letes expe­ri­ence.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 181.

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 209

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.

FYI: there’s an excel­lent chance I won’t be send­ing my Fri­day roundup next week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Christ in the Camps (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “I humbly reach out to the only fac­tion of Amer­i­cans I know of who have the ear of the admin­is­tra­tion and who care about chil­dren: my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ who attend evan­gel­i­cal church­es. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a pro­found human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis and that chil­dren are being forced to suf­fer in ter­ri­ble ways. Maybe it was nev­er sup­posed to be this way; maybe the sys­tem just got over­whelmed. But this is a dis­as­ter.” Sear­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • The hor­ri­fy­ing con­di­tions fac­ing kids in bor­der deten­tion, explained (Dara Lind, Vox): “It is appar­ent that even an admin­is­tra­tion act­ing with the best inter­ests of chil­dren in mind at every turn would be scram­bling right now. But pol­i­cy­mak­ers are split on how much of the cur­rent cri­sis is sim­ply a resource prob­lem — one Con­gress could help by send­ing more resources — and how much is delib­er­ate mis­treat­ment or neglect from an admin­is­tra­tion that doesn’t deserve any more mon­ey or trust.
    • Why a Gov­ern­ment Lawyer Argued Against Giv­ing Immi­grant Kids Tooth­brush­es (Ken White, The Atlantic): “This admin­is­tra­tion is mere­ly the lat­est one to sub­ject immi­grant chil­dren to abu­sive con­di­tions. It’s been 35 years since Jen­ny Flo­res was strip-searched in an adult facil­i­ty. Before Sarah Fabi­an defend­ed con­crete floors and bright lights for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, she defend­ed putting kids in soli­tary con­fine­ment for Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. The fault lies not with any one admin­is­tra­tion or politi­cian, but with the cul­ture: the ICE and CBP cul­ture that encour­ages the abuse, the cul­ture of the legal apol­o­gists who defend it, and our culture—a large­ly indif­fer­ent Amer­i­ca that hasn’t done a damn thing about it.”
    • Indi­rect­ly relat­ed: I’m a Jour­nal­ist but I Didn’t Ful­ly Real­ize the Ter­ri­ble Pow­er of U.S. Bor­der Offi­cials Until They Vio­lat­ed My Rights and Pri­va­cy (Seth Harp, The Inter­cept): “As I was walk­ing out, I said to Mon­civias and Vil­lar­real, ‘It’s fun­ny, of all the coun­tries I’ve been to, the bor­der guards have nev­er treat­ed me worse than here, in the one coun­try I’m a cit­i­zen of, in the town where I was born.’” This is unset­tling. 
  2. Peo­ple Who Pay Peo­ple to Kill Peo­ple (Rene Chun, The Atlantic): “The authors deter­mined that 2 per­cent of all mur­ders in Aus­tralia were con­tract killings and that con­tracts were, in some cas­es, sur­pris­ing­ly afford­able. One unful­filled con­tract was for 500 Aus­tralian dol­lars; anoth­er job was com­plet­ed for just $2,000.” This is wild to me because those are close to the amounts that a min­is­ter might get paid for preach­ing at a retreat or offi­ci­at­ing a wed­ding. Who knew assas­sins and min­is­ters had sim­i­lar pay scales? Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Some LGBT links (large­ly occa­sioned by Pride Month).
    • A Match Made In Heav­en (Nathaniel Frank, Wash­ing­ton Post): “What may seem like a straight­for­ward chance to cel­e­brate progress actu­al­ly masks a fault line that has divid­ed our move­ment since its start: whether our goal is equal­i­ty or lib­er­a­tion, a fight for the right to be treat­ed like every­one else or the free­dom to be authen­ti­cal­ly our­selves. Do we seek belong­ing in the world as it is (includ­ing the mil­i­tary, mar­riage and par­ent­ing) or the chance to trans­form the world, by throw­ing off repres­sive norms, into a place where all of us — queer and non-queer alike — can be more free?”
    • Response: Stonewall’s ‘Gift’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To an old-school Cas­san­dra like me — one of the Cas­san­dras who was mocked in the 2000s as a para­noid — this entire col­umn reads like an I told you so, and a vin­di­ca­tion of the Law of Mer­it­ed Impos­si­bil­i­ty (‘It will nev­er hap­pen, and when it does, you big­ots will deserve it’). Not that it does a bit of good now.”
    • Rug­by Australia’s “Own Goal” (Peter Singer, Project Syn­di­cate): “Rug­by Aus­tralia would have a stronger basis for its deci­sion if Folau’s post had expressed hatred toward homo­sex­u­als and could have been inter­pret­ed as an incite­ment to vio­lence against them. But the post no more express­es hatred toward homo­sex­u­als than cig­a­rette warn­ings express hatred toward smok­ers.” Yes, this is the famous philoso­pher Peter Singer. I rarely agree with him, but in this case I strong­ly do.
    • The Reli­gious Roots of Pride (Brett Krutzsch, The Advo­cate): “What most Amer­i­cans do not know when they gaze on the parade’s near­ly-naked dancers, ‘dykes on bikes,’ and trans­gen­der teenagers is that Pride parades exist because of a devout Pen­te­costal min­is­ter.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Haver­ford Col­lege. One quib­ble: describ­ing Troy Per­ry as a “devout Pen­te­costal” is not accu­rate. He said, “
I knew that I was not start­ing anoth­er Pen­te­costal church. I was start­ing a church that would be tru­ly ecu­meni­cal.” (source: the his­to­ry of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Com­mu­ni­ty Church­es). It would be fair to say “ex-Pen­te­costal min­is­ter Troy Per­ry”, though. His back­ground was news to me.
  4. The Chris­t­ian Case for Mar­i­jua­na (Jonathan Mer­ritt, New York Times): “Amer­i­ca is sick, and the Chris­t­ian call to com­pas­sion oblig­ates the faith­ful to act. Chron­ic pain and ill­ness now affect tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, and in many cas­es the cause eludes the bright­est med­ical minds. To fight these ail­ments, Amer­i­cans have been pre­scribed mind-alter­ing anti-depres­sants, high­ly addic­tive pain reliev­ers and opi­oids, and all man­ner of legal sub­stances with a list of side effects so long that drug com­mer­cials feel like ‘Sat­ur­day Night Live’ shorts.”
  5. The Per­cep­tion Gap: How False Impres­sions are Pulling Amer­i­cans Apart (Sean Stevens, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans sig­nif­i­cant­ly over­es­ti­mate how many peo­ple on the ‘oth­er side’ hold extreme views. Typ­i­cal­ly, their esti­mates are rough­ly dou­ble the actu­al num­bers for a giv­en issue…. Edu­ca­tion seems to increase, rather than mit­i­gate, the Per­cep­tion Gap (just as increased edu­ca­tion has found to track with increased ide­o­log­i­cal prej­u­dice). Col­lege edu­ca­tion results in an espe­cial­ly dis­tort­ed view of Repub­li­cans among lib­er­als in par­tic­u­lar.” The orig­i­nal research is at https://perceptiongap.us/ (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

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 The Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 205

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. #MeToo Comes For Mar­tin Luther King (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I wish none of this were true, and per­haps we will learn when the record­ings are even­tu­al­ly released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s rep­u­ta­tion as a civ­il rights move­ment his­to­ri­an is beyond reproach, and as a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist, Gar­row can­not be said to have polit­i­cal motives for try­ing to dis­cred­it King. “ This is very sad. I knew King was adul­ter­ous, but these alle­ga­tions go far beyond that.
  2. Christo­pher Hitchens and his Chris­t­ian friends (Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridge­head): “Christo­pher Hitchens is remem­bered by the god­less as a man who tru­ly hat­ed Chris­tians and want­ed to utter­ly destroy Chris­tian­i­ty. In pub­lic, in front of his admir­ers, he main­tained that posi­tion even as the grave yawned at him. But as was always the case with Christo­pher Hitchens, there was quite a bit more to the sto­ry.”
  3. These two sto­ries are very dif­fer­ent and yet very sim­i­lar.
    • Los­ing Reli­gion and Find­ing Ecsta­sy in Hous­ton (Jia Tolenti­no, The New York­er): “I won­der if I would have stayed reli­gious if I had grown up in a place oth­er than Hous­ton and a time oth­er than now. I won­der how dif­fer­ent I would be if I had been able to find the feel­ing of devot­ed self-destruc­tion only through God. Instead, I have con­fused reli­gion with drugs, drugs with music, music with reli­gion. I can’t tell whether my incli­na­tion toward ecsta­sy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecsta­t­ic ten­den­cy that I ever believed at all.”
      • Tolenti­no has a way with words and her arti­cle, though sad, is enter­tain­ing­ly writ­ten. Over at GetRe­li­gion, Dou­glas LeBlanc offers the obser­va­tion: “Tolentino’s child­hood expe­ri­ences appar­ent­ly left her think­ing that the main point of Chris­tian­i­ty is to live in an unbreak­able bub­ble of bliss. If that’s the case, Ecsta­sy makes per­fect sense as the most tempt­ing sub­sti­tute for God.”
    • Come­di­an Pete Holmes was a good Chris­t­ian guy. Then his wife left him, and things got weird. (Daniel Burke, CNN): “…I thought that the lines were to God were closed, but they aren’t. We were taught that God spoke direct­ly to his prophets and the authors of the New Tes­ta­ment, and then Paul, and then it was over. And then I took mush­rooms, and I was like, ‘It ain’t over!’”
  4. Can We Believe? (Andrew Kla­van, City Jour­nal): “In any case, sci­en­tists used to accuse reli­gious peo­ple of invent­ing a ‘God of the Gaps’—that is, using reli­gion to explain away what sci­ence had not yet uncov­ered. But mul­ti­vers­es and sim­u­la­tions seem very much like a Sci­ence of the Gaps, jer­ry-rigged noth­ings designed to cir­cum­vent the sim­plest expla­na­tion for the real­i­ty we know.”
    • This is the same Andrew Kla­van who spoke on cam­pus recent­ly. I was unable to attend his talk (being busy preach­ing at the same time), but every­one I know who went found it quite com­pelling despite the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing it.
  5. See the World Like a Title IX Bureau­crat (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[The Prince­ton stu­dents’ pro­pos­als] illus­trate an under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed ten­sion in the approach of today’s stu­dent activists, who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly express out­rage at the bad behav­ior of admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies and fight to expand their size and pow­er… Prince­ton bureau­crats have been focused on cam­pus sex­u­al assault for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. And in the telling of the stu­dent activists, they’ve yet to meet even min­i­mal eth­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al stan­dards. So why pour mil­lions more into the same hier­ar­chies, expand­ing the might, mea­sured in total staff, of their lead­ers?”
  6. Five Insights Chris­tian­i­ty Brings to Pol­i­tics (Michael Math­e­son Miller, Law & Lib­er­ty): “It is impor­tant to note that a Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is not sim­ply a sec­u­lar vision of gov­ern­ment with reli­gion sprin­kled on top. Sec­u­lar­ism is not neu­tral. A Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is ground­ed in key the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal ideas about the nature of God and real­i­ty, the impor­tance of jus­tice, the val­ue of free­dom, the role of the fam­i­ly, and a rich under­stand­ing of the human per­son as cre­at­ed in the image of God, made for flour­ish­ing, and called to an eter­nal des­tiny.” This arti­cle is a par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholic way of think­ing about this sub­ject (one of sev­er­al Catholic approach­es, I should add).
    • On a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal note: The man who pre­dict­ed Trump’s vic­to­ry says Democ­rats may have to impeach him to have a chance in 2020 (Chris Cil­liz­za, CNN): “Licht­man, a pro­fes­sor at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton, DC, was the most promi­nent voice pre­dict­ing Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in the run-up to the 2016 elec­tion. When Trump won, it marked the 9th(!) straight pres­i­den­tial elec­tion where Licht­man had cor­rect­ly pre­dict­ed the Elec­toral Col­lege win­ner. (That’s all the way back to 1984, for you math wiz­ards.)”
      • Caveat lec­tor. There are a lot of pun­dits, and at least one of them being right about the last 9 elec­tions by chance isn’t that improb­a­ble (unless I’m miss­ing some­thing there are only 512 dif­fer­ent out­comes if you are only con­sid­er­ing the two major par­ties). Inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
  7. Self-cen­sor­ship on Cam­pus Is Bad for Sci­ence (Lau­na Mar­jo­la, The Atlantic): “Sad­ly, stu­dents do not seem to real­ize that their good inten­tions may lead them to resist learn­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts, and can even harm their own goal of help­ing women and eth­nic minori­ties.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Williams Col­lege.

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 185

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

In case you’re won­der­ing: I just don’t find sto­ries about the Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion or the gov­ern­ment shut­down inter­est­ing. I think they’re impor­tant, but few peo­ple are writ­ing things about them that catch my atten­tion. Rec­om­men­da­tions are wel­come.

Also, one of you men­tioned that you some­times can’t open the links. If you, being a broke col­lege stu­dent, ever can’t access an arti­cle because of a pay­wall, try putting http://outline.com/ in front of the link. I did it for the first arti­cle as an exam­ple. Hav­ing said that, please sup­port jour­nal­ism once you are able.

  1. Is Mar­i­jua­na as Safe as We Think? (Mal­colm Glad­well, The New York­er): “The authors assumed that alco­hol use among stu­dents would be a pre­dic­tor of vio­lent behav­ior, and that mar­i­jua­na use would pre­dict the oppo­site. In fact, those who used only mar­i­jua­na were three times more like­ly to be phys­i­cal­ly aggres­sive than abstain­ers were; those who used only alco­hol were 2.7 times more like­ly to be aggres­sive. Obser­va­tion­al stud­ies like these don’t estab­lish cau­sa­tion. But they invite the sort of research that could.”
    • This Reporter Took a Deep Look Into the Sci­ence of Smok­ing Pot. What He Found Is Scary. (Stephanie Mencimer, Moth­er Jones): “I smoked plen­ty of weed in high school and so did all my friends, and none of us jumped off a bal­cony or killed anyone—we could bare­ly get off the couch. But the mar­i­jua­na sold today is not what we smoked, which at 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent THC was the equiv­a­lent of smok­ing oregano. Today’s weed is insane­ly more potent, as are prod­ucts like “wax” and “shatter”—forms of butane hash oil designed to be vaped or dabbed that come pret­ty close to 100 per­cent THC. And these high-poten­cy prod­ucts usu­al­ly con­tain very lit­tle CBD oil, the ingre­di­ent in cannabis that’s sup­posed to account for many of its sup­posed health ben­e­fits.”
  2. Is Sun­screen the New Mar­garine? (Rowan Jacob­sen, Out­side): “Peo­ple of col­or rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Cau­casians, 5 per 100,000 in His­pan­ics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Amer­i­cans. On the rare occa­sion when African Amer­i­cans do get melanoma, it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly lethal—but it’s most­ly a kind that occurs on the palms, soles, or under the nails and is not caused by sun expo­sure. At the same time, African Amer­i­cans suf­fer high rates of dia­betes, heart dis­ease, stroke, inter­nal can­cers, and oth­er dis­eases that seem to improve in the pres­ence of sun­light, of which they may well not be get­ting enough. Because of their genet­i­cal­ly high­er lev­els of melanin, they require more sun expo­sure to pro­duce com­pounds like vit­a­min D, and they are less able to store that vit­a­min for dark­er days. They have much to gain from the sun and lit­tle to fear.”
  3. Leav­ing Reli­gion at Home: Engag­ing Reli­gious Thought and Action in Amer­i­can Soci­ety (Nathalie Kier­sznows­ki, Stan­ford Pol­i­tics): “People’s beliefs about the world will inevitably influ­ence their posi­tions on issues like moral­i­ty, pol­i­tics, dress, gen­der, sex and more. Sim­i­lar­ly, politi­cians will nat­u­ral­ly sup­port leg­is­la­tion in accor­dance with their val­ues, reli­gious or not. Many politi­cians, like Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, have faced crit­i­cism for allow­ing reli­gion to shape their polit­i­cal deci­sions. It would be unwar­rant­ed, though, to expect Pence to act ‘un-Chris­t­ian’ or ‘non-reli­gious’ exclu­sive­ly at his place of work. The notion of hav­ing both a ‘sec­u­lar pub­lic self’ and a ‘reli­gious pri­vate self’ is impos­si­ble: any pri­vate val­ue sys­tem will influ­ence deci­sions through­out all areas of life.”
  4. The case for going to bed at 2:30 am (Kate Shell­nut, Vox): “My faith doused our cul­tur­al pref­er­ence for ear­ly birds with bib­li­cal back­ing, too, mak­ing me feel even guilti­er. With­in Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism, many expect faith­ful Chris­tians to ded­i­cate the ‘first fruits’ of each day to ‘qui­et time’ with the Lord (prayers, devo­tion­al read­ing, Bible study). Researchers even found peo­ple to be more ‘spir­i­tu­al­ly aware’ ear­ly in the morn­ings. Faced with these expec­ta­tions, I real­ly did ques­tion whether my habits were sin­ful: Was I being self­ish by stay­ing up late? Was I putting pro­duc­tiv­i­ty over the nat­ur­al pat­terns of work and rest?”
  5. China’s Gulag for Mus­lims (Mustafa Aky­ol, New York Times): “…Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of the Sovi­et Union that oper­at­ed them. But now anoth­er dic­ta­tor­ship, ruled by anoth­er Com­mu­nist Par­ty, is oper­at­ing a new chain of pris­ons that evoke mem­o­ry of the gulags — more mod­ern, more high-tech, but no less enslav­ing.”
    • Where Did the One Mil­lion Fig­ure for Deten­tions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From? (Jes­si­ca Batke, Chi­naFile): “Two key stud­ies inde­pen­dent­ly arrived around the one mil­lion mark, by using lim­it­ed data sam­ples to esti­mate what per­cent­age of the eth­nic minor­i­ty Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion is detained. Both stud­ies arrive at a deten­tion rate of 10 per­cent —at least in some areas of Xinjiang—suggesting that just over one mil­lion of the region’s 11 mil­lion eth­nic Uighur pop­u­la­tion could be in the camps.”
  6. Con­querors of the Courts (David Mont­gomery, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The soci­ety itself lob­bies for no poli­cies; it nev­er signs ami­cus briefs or rep­re­sents clients in cas­es. No one at Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton dic­tat­ed Barnett’s moves or told him how to advo­cate for what posi­tions. It’s just that at a few gath­er­ings made pos­si­ble by the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety that Bar­nett hap­pened to attend, synaps­es fired, a cor­ner of the hive mind engaged, and Bar­nett took it from there. Mul­ti­ply that chem­istry tens of thou­sands of times over the past 36 years and you have the Fed­er­al­ist Society’s true source of pow­er.”
  7. Elect­ed lead­ers who weaponize reli­gion are play­ing a dan­ger­ous game (Tul­si Gab­bard, The Hill): “While I absolute­ly believe in the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state as a neces­si­ty to the health of our nation, no Amer­i­can should be asked to renounce his or her faith or mem­ber­ship in a faith-based, ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion in order to hold pub­lic office.” Gab­bard is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gress­woman rep­re­sent­ing Hawaii.

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 the unfor­tu­nate­ly date-spe­cif­ic Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 120

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. Divine To Divid­ed: How Occu­py Cen­tral Split Hong Kong’s Chris­t­ian Lead­ers (Jayson Albano, Mar­ta Colom­bo And Maria Cristhin Kuiper, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “Once on the street, he could see clear­ly. He could see the crowds form­ing, and he could see the mount­ing ranks of riot police. And when he saw those same police­men fir­ing tear gas into the assem­bled mass­es one thing became clear in his mind: that his faith in God demand­ed he act.”
  2. The old­est human lived to 122. Why no per­son will like­ly break her record. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “The authors pro­pose this is a built-in ‘nat­ur­al lim­it’ to our longevi­ty, an ‘inad­ver­tent byprod­uct’ of our biol­o­gy. And to increase the nat­ur­al lim­it we’d need to fun­da­men­tal­ly alter our genet­ics.”
    • This is based on a very read­able piece in Nature Evi­dence for a lim­it to human lifes­pan (Xiao Dong, Bran­don Mil­hol­land & Jan Vijg, Nature).
    • This find­ing reminds me of Gen­e­sis 6:3, “Then the Lord said, ‘My Spir­it will not con­tend with humans for­ev­er, for they are mor­tal; their days will be a hun­dred and twen­ty years.’”
  3. I used to sup­port legal­iz­ing all drugs. Then the opi­oid epi­dem­ic hap­pened. (Ger­man Lopez, Vox): “By the time I began as a drug pol­i­cy reporter in 2010, I was all in on legal­iz­ing every drug, from mar­i­jua­na to hero­in and cocaine. It all seemed so obvi­ous to me. Pro­hi­bi­tion had failed…. Then I began report­ing on the opi­oid epi­dem­ic.” FYI: this arti­cle is long: only read the first two sec­tions unless you’re real­ly into the sub­ject.
  4. Authors’ note: Deep neur­al net­works are more accu­rate than humans at detect­ing sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion from facial images (Michal Kosin­s­ki and Yilun Wang, self-pub­lished on Google Docs): this note by two Stan­ford researchers to explain their recent paper is extreme­ly inter­est­ing. “We used wide­ly avail­able off-the-shelf tools, pub­licly avail­able data, and stan­dard meth­ods well known to com­put­er vision prac­ti­tion­ers. We did not cre­ate a pri­va­cy-invad­ing tool, but rather showed that basic and wide­ly used meth­ods pose seri­ous pri­va­cy threats.”
  5. I called Hugh Hefn­er a pimp, he threat­ened to sue. But that’s what he was. (Suzanne Moore, The Guardian): “But this man is still being cel­e­brat­ed by peo­ple who should know bet­ter. You can dress it up with talk of glam­our and bun­ny ears and fish­nets, you can talk about his con­tri­bu­tion to gonzo jour­nal­ism, you can con­tex­tu­alise his dri­ve to free up sex as part of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion. But strip it all back and he was a man who bought and sold women to oth­er men.”
    • Con­cep­tu­al­ly relat­ed: STD rates hit anoth­er record high, with Cal­i­for­nia near the top (Soumya Kar­la­mangla, LA Times): “More than a quar­ter-mil­lion Cal­i­for­ni­ans were infect­ed with either syphilis, chlamy­dia or gon­or­rhea last year, which con­sti­tutes a 40% jump com­pared with five years ago, state offi­cials said.” I am often struck by the fact that STDs would effec­tive­ly dis­ap­pear in one gen­er­a­tion if peo­ple obeyed the Bible.
    • Dit­to: Pas­tor­ing Sin­gles in a Sex-Crazed, Gen­der-Con­fused World (Juan Sanchez, Life­way): “Celi­bate sin­gle­ness is a gift from God with a pur­pose.” This one isn’t just for pas­tors — rec­om­mend­ed to all sin­gles.
  6. Col­in Kaeper­nick vs. Tim Tebow: A tale of two Chris­tians on their knees (Michael Frost, Wash­ing­ton Post): “They’re both Chris­t­ian foot­ball play­ers, and they’re both known for kneel­ing on the field, although for very dif­fer­ent rea­sons. One grew up the son of Bap­tist mis­sion­ar­ies to the Philip­pines. The oth­er was bap­tized Methodist, con­firmed Luther­an, and attend­ed a Bap­tist church dur­ing col­lege. Both have made a pub­lic dis­play of their faith. Both are prayer­ful and devout.” It’s a clever piece, although you should also read the gen­tle crit­i­cism of it at Kaeper­nick vs. Tebow? Wash­ing­ton Post pass­es along flawed take on a cru­cial heresy (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion)
    • Inter­est­ing­ly, Kaeper­nick began kneel­ing after a meet­ing with a vet­er­an who told him that mere­ly sit­ting was dire­spect­ful. Kaeper­nick Meets With Vet­er­an Nate Boy­er, Then Kneels Dur­ing Anthem (Under the Radar) (an arti­cle I found after an alum­nus shared it on twit­ter this week — thanks, Han­nah!)
    • The Abbie Hoff­man of the Right: Don­ald Trump (David Brooks, New York Times): “The mem­bers of the edu­cat­ed class saw this past weekend’s N.F.L. fra­cas as a fight over racism. They felt mobi­lized and uni­fied in that fight and full of right­eous ener­gy. Mem­bers of the work­ing class saw the fra­cas as a fight about Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty. They saw Pitts­burgh Steel­ers coach Mike Tom­lin try to dis­suade Ale­jan­dro Vil­lanue­va, a three-time com­bat vet­er­an, from cel­e­brat­ing the flag he risked his life for. Mem­bers of this class also felt mobi­lized, uni­fied and full of right­eous ener­gy.”
  7. A lot of you seemed to like the graph­ic I used in this week’s ser­mon. Here’s a thumb­nail, you can down­load a high-res ver­sion from the source at Visu­al The­ol­o­gy: The Books of the Bible (Tim Chal­lies).

Books of the Bible — Peri­od­ic Table

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 108

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. Should Tyler Cowen Believe In God? (Ross Douthat, NYT): this is delight­ful. “There: I’ve prob­a­bly blas­phemed, weak­ened my Catholic cre­den­tials, endan­gered my soul, insult­ed my reli­gious brethren, picked point­less fights with Mus­lims and Calvin­ists, and betrayed a juve­nile under­stand­ing of sta­tis­tics.”
  2. Des­per­a­tion and Ser­vice in the Bail Indus­try (Joshua Page, Con­texts): “…indus­try advo­cates con­fi­dent­ly assert that bail com­pa­nies and agents are ser­vice providers help­ing needy peo­ple. As my research shows, this claim is based in real­i­ty. But it is a con­struct­ed real­i­ty. Polit­i­cal and legal deci­sions make the ser­vices nec­es­sary in the first place.”
  3. “High” Achiev­ers? Cannabis Access and Aca­d­e­m­ic Per­for­mance (Olivi­er Marie & Ulf Zölitz, The Review of Eco­nom­ic Stud­ies): The authors stud­ied “an excep­tion­al pol­i­cy intro­duced in the city of Maas­tricht in the Nether­lands that dis­crim­i­nat­ed access via licensed cannabis shops based on an individual’s nation­al­i­ty…. We find that the aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance of stu­dents who are no longer legal­ly per­mit­ted to buy cannabis sub­stan­tial­ly increas­es.” In oth­er news, water is wet. You can find a PDF of the full paper at SSRN)
  4. The Case Against Car­di­nal Pell (Julia Yost, First Things): this is fas­ci­nat­ing and dis­tress­ing and full of all sorts of indi­rect­ly-relat­ed asides, such as “the McMartin Preschool case gen­er­at­ed 321 charges from forty-one chil­dren. We now know that every charge was a lie and every child was a liar. Yet today, with the chil­dren now well into their thir­ties, many of them still insist that their charges were true.”
  5. Stranger In A Strange Land (Fran­cis J. Beck­with, Inside High­er Ed): “A lit­tle over four years ago, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado at Boul­der began a three-year pilot pro­gram that I believe has no prece­dent in Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion. With the help of pri­vate donors and the sup­port of the university’s board, pres­i­dent and chan­cel­lor, the school cre­at­ed the posi­tion of Vis­it­ing Schol­ar of Con­ser­v­a­tive Thought and Pol­i­cy.”
  6. I Am Not a ‘Paki,’ Not a Ter­ror­ist. I Am Nobody but Myself. (Omar Aziz, NY Times): rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. “Here is the basic conun­drum the child of immi­grants faces as he goes through school. Until now, he has safe­ly assumed the iden­ti­ty pro­vid­ed to him by his fam­i­ly, but as he encoun­ters inno­cent white faces, he is con­front­ed with an inter­ro­ga­tion about who he real­ly is.”
  7. Would Your Dog Eat You if You Died? Get the Facts. (Eri­ka Engel­haupt, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “There’s no way to guar­an­tee that your pet won’t eat you if you die, apart from not hav­ing any pets. Even ham­sters and birds have been known to scav­enge on occa­sion.” Ham­sters? Real­ly? Who has ham­sters roam­ing freely through their house?

Things Glen Found Amusing

Something Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light a link I shared before which is still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have  The Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire): this essay teas­es out the impli­ca­tions of this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” Warn­ing: the for­mat­ting is hor­rid. It is worth read­ing any­way. Either use the Read­abil­i­ty book­marklet, an app like Pock­et, or just cut and paste it into a text doc­u­ment on your com­put­er. (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 97

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The ben­e­fits and harms of mar­i­jua­na, explained by the most thor­ough research review yet (Ger­man Lopez, Vox): “the bot­tom line is that mar­i­jua­na does pose some harms — par­tic­u­lar­ly for peo­ple at risk of devel­op­ing men­tal health dis­or­ders, preg­nant women, those vul­ner­a­ble to res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems, and any­one get­ting into a car. And while some of these harms may be over­come by marijuana’s ben­e­fits or cur­tailed by con­sum­ing pot with­out smok­ing it, the evi­dence shows that weed’s rep­u­ta­tion as a safe drug is unde­served.”
  2. What do slave­hold­ers think? (Austin Choi-Fitz­patrick, Aeon):  “The con­tem­po­rary traf­fick­ers and slave­hold­ers I spoke with are not moti­vat­ed by a love of injus­tice. They are instead dri­ven by cul­tur­al iner­tia, a desire for prof­it or, more fre­quent­ly, a need for basic sus­te­nance…. The terms used here – slav­ery and slave­hold­er – nev­er crossed the lips, nor per­haps even the minds, of the men I spoke with.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego.
  3. The Cri­sis of West­ern Civ (David Brooks, NY Times): “These days, the whole idea of West­ern civ is assumed to be reac­tionary and oppres­sive. All I can say is, if you think that was reac­tionary and oppres­sive, wait until you get a load of the world that comes after it.”
  4. Charles Murray’s ‘Provoca­tive’ Talk (Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci, NY Times): two Cor­nell pro­fes­sors “tran­scribed Mr. Murray’s speech and — with­out indi­cat­ing who wrote it — sent it to a group of 70 col­lege pro­fes­sors (women and men, of dif­fer­ent ranks, at dif­fer­ent uni­ver­si­ties)… the 57 pro­fes­sors who respond­ed to our request gave Mr. Murray’s talk an aver­age score of 5.05, or ‘mid­dle of the road.’” This, of course, is the speech which faced a back­lash result­ing in a pro­fes­sor need­ing a neck brace. Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  5. This Is About That (Andrew Wil­son, Vimeo): this 3.5 minute video starts slow but ends strong. A med­i­ta­tion on the rela­tion­ship between mar­riage and the gospel. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty Is a Polit­i­cal Foot­ball; Here’s Why It Doesn’t Have to Be (Chris Mar­tin, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Pro­gres­sives have adopt­ed an over­am­bi­tious mod­el of inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty in which every­one lies on axes of oppres­sion, and I will explain this model’s three flaws. Con­ser­v­a­tives gen­er­al­ly believe that inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty is use­less, but I explain how inter­sec­tion­al schol­ar­ship can be use­ful to researchers, regard­less of whether they are lib­er­al, cen­trist, con­ser­v­a­tive, lib­er­tar­i­an, or eclec­tic.”
  7. Here’s the Mil­lion-Dol­lar Answer to How Per­se­cut­ed Chris­tians Per­se­vere (Sarah Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Researchers grouped respons­es to per­se­cu­tion into three cat­e­gories: sur­vival, asso­ci­a­tion, and con­fronta­tion…. ‘Evan­gel­i­cals are divid­ed between those who are will­ing to take up arms and those who view wit­ness and non-retal­i­a­tion as the respons­es to which the Bible calls Chris­tians,’ the report stat­ed. They tend to be more skep­ti­cal of the inter­re­li­gious dia­logue favored by Catholics and main­line Protes­tants, and more like­ly to pur­sue evan­ge­liza­tion.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

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).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.