economics - Glen Davis

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 467

This is volume 467, a number which has strictly increasing digits when written normally as well as when written in bases 7 (1235₇) and 9 (568₉).

Things Glen Found Interesting

Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned (David French, New York Times): “In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a number of universities were taken by surprise by the sheer sustained disruption and by the antisemitic animosity on their campuses. They struggled to respond effectively. As the war continues — and as the conflict with Hezbollah escalates on Israel’s northern border — universities can no longer claim to be surprised. They know what might happen this school year, and this knowledge has legal significance. If they fail to protect the free speech of students or to protect students from antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment, there will be consequences.”
Stranded in Space? NASA Doesn’t See the Starliner Astronauts That Way. (Kenneth Chang, New York Times): “If you go somewhere expecting an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most people would consider that ‘stranded.’… All summer, NASA and Boeing officials have been reluctant to use the words, ‘stuck’ and ‘stranded,’ which would add another black mark to a spacecraft that has been delayed for years by technical setbacks.”
Augustine, AI, and the Demon Heuristic (Robert Cotton, Mere Orthodoxy): “One does not have to dig deep into the comments section of a ChatGPT demo video to find someone convinced that there’s something demonic about it. At the risk of keeping company with the most paranoid of the terminally online, I would like to add another point which makes this position plausible–that there is something of the demonic to recent AI developments.… I think we should be quite alarmed by how we are approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how it appears to look. If this theurgic vision of idolatry is Biblically true, we should be worried that there are malignant actors attempting to gain a foothold. The veneer of disenchantment to which technology so effectively pretends is, in fact, quite capable of hiding a very old and very magical stratagem.”
- Fascinating and brings completely unexpected (to me) evidence to the table.
Faith abounds at the Democratic National Convention, but don’t be surprised (Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service): “The faith-fueled messaging [at the DNC] may have surprised some conservatives, but it’s hardly news to anyone who kept a close eye on liberals over the past decade or so. The Democratic Party, although home to a growing (and sizable) subset of religiously unaffiliated voters, remains majority religious and majority Christian, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. More to the point: Although people of faith have long been at home among its ranks, religious rhetoric at Democratic Party conventions has garnered more headlines in recent years, with the 2016 gathering featuring a primetime address from a prominent pastor and the 2020 event including an entire section dedicated to faith.”
College Freshman, Stick the Landing (Vince Greenwald, Gospel Coalition): “Know ahead of time that you won’t find a perfect church. There are no perfect churches. You’re just looking for a healthy and faithful one. So after your short church-shopping phase, make the pivot from evaluation to participation. Pursue membership. Look for opportunities to serve. Bring some friends. And resist the urge to church shop indefinitely. Plants don’t grow well when they’re constantly uprooted and transplanted. Neither do Christians.”
- Recommended by a student. I would add to the article: look for an on-campus fellowship such as Chi Alpha. They will help you find a church as well as in many other practical ways.
The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite (Tanner Greer, blog): “I laugh sometimes at the complaints I see on humanities twitter bewailing the shallow reading habits of the tech-bro. The technology brothers read—a lot! I am sure more novels are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capitol Hill. Washington functionaries simply do not live a life of the mind. If Silicon Valley technologists do not always live such a life, they at least pretend to.… You can divide most of these [beloved by Silicon Valley] titles into five overarching categories: works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, math, or cognitive science; books that outline the operating principles and business strategy of successful start-ups; and finally, narrative histories of successful start-ups themselves.”
Praise for Price Gouging (John Cochrane, Substack): “We should praise price-gouging. Yes, pass a new federal law, one that overrides the many state laws against price gouging.… Price gouging directs scarce supply to the people who really need it, encourages new supply to come in, encourages holding stockpiles for a rainy day, encourages efficient use of stockpiles we have sitting around, and encourages people to substitute for less scarce goods when they can.”
- The author is an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Study Finds Polls Are Only Accurate When Your Candidate Is Ahead (Babylon Bee)

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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 393

This is volume 393, which I find interesting because it only has two factors: 131 and 3.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Some AI thoughts
- The Waluigi Effect (mega-post) (Cleo Nardo, Less Wrong): “Here’s an example — in 101 Dalmations, we meet a pair of protagonists (Roger and Anita) who love dogs, show compassion, seek simple pleasures, and want a family. Can you guess who will turn up in Act One? Yep, at 13:00 we meet Cruella De Vil — she hates dogs, shows cruelty, seeks money and fur, is a childless spinster, etc. Cruella is the complete inversion of Roger and Anita. She is the waluigi of Roger and Anita. Recall that you expected to meet a character with these traits moreso after meeting the protagonists. Cruella De Vil is not a character you would expect to find outside of the context of a Disney dog story, but once you meet the protagonists you will have that context and then the Cruella becomes a natural and predictable continuation. [And since LLMs are all about continuation, simulated Cruellas emerge predictably.]”
  - This was easily the most interesting thing I read this week. A very clever argument.
- Why am I not terrified of AI? (Scott Aaronson, personal blog): “In the Orthodox AI-doomers’ own account, the paperclip-maximizing AI would’ve mastered the nuances of human moral philosophy far more completely than any human—the better to deceive the humans, en route to extracting the iron from their bodies to make more paperclips. And yet the AI would never once use all that learning to question its paperclip directive. I acknowledge that this is possible. I deny that it’s trivial.”
  - The author is a CS prof from UT who works at OpenAI
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest (Jonathan Haidt, Substack): “We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It’s time we started treating social media and other apps designed for ‘engagement’ (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms.”
- A well-written and distressing summary of the current state of adolescent and young adult mental health. The author is a social psychologist at NYU.
- Related: Review of 1,039 studies indicates exercise can be more effective than counselling or medication for depression (Ben Singh, Carol Maher, & Jacinta Brinsley, PsyPost): “When comparing the size of the benefits of exercise to other common treatments for mental health conditions from previous systematic reviews, our findings suggest exercise is around 1.5 times more effective than either medication or cognitive behaviour therapy.”
  - I expect this will be contested in future studies. Fascinating, though. The authors are all at the University of South Australia. The lead author seems to be the Australian equivalent of a MD/PhD.
- Related: Lynching the Deplorables (Chris Hedges, Substack): “The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressional hearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?”
  - This is a sane and sobering essay.
Testing Common Theories on the Relationship Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability (Jesse Smith and Nicholas H. Wolfinger): “The table below shows the wide range of variables we used to try to explain the relationship between premarital sex partners and divorce. Do any of them matter? The answer is a clear no. Without controls, people with premarital partners are 161% more likely to dissolve their marriages compared to people who tie the knot as virgins. In other words, premarital sex increases the chances of divorce between twofold and threefold. After including the laundry list of covariates shown in the table, the odds of divorce remain 151% higher—in other words, a statistical artifact away from being identical.”
- This falls into the category of “research which is obviously true but which many people wish to disbelieve”
Some COVID thoughts:
- Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response (Lauren Weber and Joel Achenbach, Washington Post): “When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies toissuevaccination or testing mandates to thwart its march.”
  - America usually comes through in the end. The article is super-angsty about all this, but I view it as an inevitable response to administrative overreach and also a fundamentally good thing. Distributed power is safer power.
- Related: When a Renegade Church and a Zealous County Health Department Collide (David Zweig, Substack): “…extensive legal documents, totaling more than a thousand pages, reveal a county, and its health department, that went to extraordinary, and potentially unlawful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levying more than $2 million in fines against Calvary, and a multi-faceted surveillance program of the church and its members, breathtaking in scope and reminiscent of totalitarian regimes, rather than an American county health department — the spy operation included stakeouts, forced in-person monitoring of prayer groups and other intimate activities, and tracking the cellular mobility data of churchgoers.”
  - The details in here are pretty wild. The comments are interesting — one of the pastors of a neighboring church disputes part of the account, but the author is like, “I’ve read sworn affidavits testifying to the contrary.”
  - So much going on — my main takeaway is that it really was worse in Santa Clara County than almost anywhere else in America. The technocrats felt empowered to an absurd degree.
- Having said that: Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times): “Brown, who led the Cochrane review’s approval process, told me that mask mandates may not be tenable now, but he has a starkly different feeling about their effects in the first year of a pandemic. ‘Mask mandates, social distancing, the other shutdowns we had in terms of even restaurants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the number of deaths would have been much higher,” he told me. “I’m very confident of that statement.’ So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus.”
Earnings Are Greater and Increasing in Occupations That Require Intellectual Tenacity (Christos Makridis, Louis Hickman & Benjamin Manning, SSRN): “…we identify two broad occupational personality requirements, which we label intellectual tenacity and social adjustment. Intellectual tenacity encompasses achievement/effort, persistence, initiative, analytical thinking, innovation, and independence. Social adjustment encompasses emotion regulation, concern for others, social orientation, cooperation, and stress tolerance. Both occupational personality requirements relate similarly to occupational employment growth between 2007 and 2019. However, among over 10 million respondents to the American Community Survey, jobs requiring intellectual tenacity pay higher wages…”
- Christos is one of our alumni.
Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at Stanford. Students are obsessed. (Lisa Bonos, Washington Post): “The university seems keen to play down his presence. Officially, the university doesn’t talk about Bankman-Fried. Stanford Law School didn’t respond to requests for comment. When asked whether they could confirm a rumor that a nearby student co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stanford campus police did not respond.”
- I have unlocked the paywall for this article.
Dropping the SAT Requirement Is a Luxury Belief (Rob K. Henderson, Substack): “Columbia University, has just become the first Ivy League school to permanently abandon the SAT/ACT requirement for college admission. Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.… Standardized testing should be freely available and compulsory for all high school students.”
- This is 100% true.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Not Work Remotely (Dilbert)
Romanian Jail (Dilbert)
Study Confirms Everyone At Gym Is Watching You And Criticizing Your Form And Making Fun Of Those 10-Pound Dumbbells (Babylon Bee)
Politics Explained (Pearls Before Swine)
Dear Bees (SMBC)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we experience on campus has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ideology simply by existing. So it’s not so much that Zionism is racism. It’s that Jewishness is.“ From volume 272.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 358

This is volume 358, a number whose base 3 representation ends in its base 7 representation. 358₃ is 111021, and 358₇ is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

The Culture War That More Christians Should Be Fighting (Tish Harrison Warren, New York Times): “But the people who debate the morality (or lack thereof) of Disney or Hobby Lobby rarely discuss how much paid time off these companies provide employees or whether they pay a living wage or what the wealth disparity is between their top and bottom earners or whether they have adequate maternity leave policies or how much a corporation financially gives back to a community.” Recommended by a student.
The Surprising Case for Marrying Young (W. Bradford Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies): “Our analyses indicate that religious men and women who married in their twenties without cohabiting first — a pattern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the lowest odds of divorce in America today.”
I should have loved biology (James Somers, personal blog): “In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.”
Concerning abortion and the Supreme Court:
- Christians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl Trueman, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for example, regards the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 as a morally ambiguous thing. No child freed that day was particularly concerned that his liberators were members of the Red Army, acting on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a military action that, in the long term, would lead to the notorious Iron Curtain dividing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a morally ambiguous thing, even though it was only made possible by the Americans and the British striking a deal with Joseph Stalin. Yes, Trump is obnoxious, but he isn’t Stalin, and he did deliver on the abortion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
- Here’s the Surprising Backstory of the Downfall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hemingway, Real Clear Investigations): “…conservative activists have long argued the pro-life movement was a moral cause on par with the civil rights movement – and ignoring the strategies commonly used to get the Supreme Court’s attention would amount to unilateral disarmament in a lot of important legal battles.”
- SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone): “In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as ‘Ministry Row.’ The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes…”
- In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pitting Mothers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first person to see us was another ultrasound technician. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heartbeat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice softened a little, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of providing care was denying there was any room for grief. But when the surgeon came in, he began by expressing his condolences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
- There’s a follow-up at My Ectopic Pregnancies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Substack): “I wanted to write about Camillian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to parents who are losing their child when the doctors acknowledge their child as a child, rather than minimizing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cruel people can be.
- Angry about Roe, many journalists focus on crisis pregnancy centers as villains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetReligion): “Like, the CPCs have outwitted the abortion clinics when it comes to figuring out what many pregnant women really want and it’s clear the abortion facilities have suffered financial losses as a result. How about asking people at the latter hard questions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad marketing decision that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultrasounds offered by the CPCs. Offering this service was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it really cried out for coverage. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
- ‘The Pro-Life Generation’: Young Women Fight Against Abortion Rights (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not connected to religious belief are relative newcomers to the movement, where they make up a small but boisterous niche. Kristin Turner started a chapter of a youth climate group in her hometown, Redding, Calif. Her Instagram bio includes her pronouns (she/they) and support for Black Lives Matter. She describes herself as a feminist, an atheist and a leftist. At 20, she is also the communications director for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, whose goals include educating the public about ‘the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens.’”
Seeing Like a Finite State Machine (Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber): “In short, there is a very plausible set of mechanisms under which machine learning and related techniques may turn out to be a disaster for authoritarianism, reinforcing its weaknesses rather than its strengths, by increasing its tendency to bad decision making, and reducing further the possibility of negative feedback that could help correct against errors.” The author is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and I hope he is correct.
Why I’m Giving Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Manson, Bari Weiss’s Substack): “Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of ‘critical’ (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty members recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them.”
Transgender-related:
- Transformation of a Transgender Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, Gospel Coalition): “Martin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of justice,” said Falls Church Anglican rector Sam Ferguson, who has spent time with multiple transitioning young adults and their families. “The Bible also envisions the long arc of redemption, which aims at the resurrection of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the beginning. Our Creator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chromosome, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemption, not against it.”
- Pronouns and Cases Involving Transgender Parties (Eugene Volokh, Reason): “For a bit of the factual backstory, which may be relevant because it may illustrate how use of pronouns might color readers’ perspective: Petitioner C.G. was found to have sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy (whom the opinion calls Alan, a pseudonym) who had been ‘diagnosed with autism’ and who was apparently working in school at three grades below his age level. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year later be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was apparently perceived by people, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a little more on the case: No First Amendment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Reason).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Uh oh! (The Far Side)
Study Finds 92% Of Californians Who Flee The State Don’t Survive First Winter (Babylon Bee)
A Classic (The Far Side)
Magician Dan White Proves Fate Really Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half minutes.
Frightening But 100% True Facts About Guns (Babylon Bee, YouTube): four minutes. The first part is the funniest, it drags a little at the end.
Truly Humbled to Be the Author of This Article (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.’ Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.’ The whole point of humility display is to signal that you are humbled by your own magnificent accomplishments. We can all be humbled by an awesome mountain or the infinitude of the night sky, but to be humbled by being in the presence of yourself—that is a sign of truly great humility.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Other Hand (Derek Sivers, personal blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the difference between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheaply, it’s easy to be free.” This is really simple and really true. Emphasis in the original. First shared in volume 226.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 332

Final 2021 installment, including some good news about a bad disease.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension (Murphy et al, Applied Cognitive Psychology): “We presented participants with lecture videos at different speeds and tested immediate and delayed (1 week) comprehension. Results revealed minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but performance declined beyond 2x speed. We also compared learning outcomes after watching videos once at 1x or twice at 2x speed. There was not an advantage to watching twice at 2x speed but if participants watched the video again at 2x speed immediately before the test, compared with watching once at 1x a week before the test, comprehension improved. Thus, increasing the speed of videos (up to 2x) may be an efficient strategy, especially if students use the time saved for additional studying or rewatching the videos, but learners should do this additional studying shortly before an exam.” The authors are researchers at UCLA.
The pandemic:
- Our playbook to fight covid-19 is outdated. Here are 10 updates for 2022. (Joseph G. Allen, Washington Post): “Public health’s credibility is on the line now. The public and businesses see that public health guidance isn’t keeping up with the times, and they’re right.” The author is a professor of environmental health at Harvard.
- Pan-coronavirus “super” vaccine (Katelyn Jetelina, Substack): “This clinical trial has taken longer than expected because people can only participate if they have not been previously vaccinated or infected with COVID. As you can imagine, the pool of eligible and willing participants is getting smaller and smaller.” The author is an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Center.
- Covid 12/30: Infinity War (Zvi Mowshowitz, Less Wrong): “For five weeks, we’ve seen Omicron double and double again. That which can’t go on forever, won’t. There aren’t many doublings left. This is it. The CDC’s revised guidelines made it even more clear that we’re going to collectively make the right decision, let it happen, and hope for the best. It’s not like we have any choice in the matter.” Long and full of timely information.
The Missing Data in the Inflation Debate (Austan Goolsbee, New York Times): “…the pain of inflation may not be shared equally.… In November, online prices fell 0.2 percent as the C.P.I. rose 0.8 percent. In other words: The more someone shops online rather than in stores, the less inflation the individual has faced. Notably, shopping online is far more common among high-income people. And during the pandemic the practice has grown more prevalent.” The author is an econ prof at U Chicago.
Evangelicals a Rising Force Inside Argentina’s Prisons (German de los Santos & Rodrigo Abd, Christianity Today): “Many here began peddling drugs as teenagers and got stuck in a spiral of violence that led some to their graves and others to overcrowded prisons divided between two forces: drug lords and preachers. Over the past 20 years, Argentine prison authorities have encouraged, to one extent or another, the creation of units effectively run by evangelical inmates—sometimes granting them a few extra special privileges, such as more time in fresh air.” An Associated Press story.
The secret truth of the student debt crisis (Ryan Cooper, The Week): “The truth is the question of whether student debt should be canceled is largely irrelevant. Most student debt will be canceled sooner or later, because an ever-growing share of borrowers cannot possibly repay their loans. Ever.”
Building Trust Across the Political Divide (April Lawson, Comment): “The Blue-inflected traditional empathy-building forms of bridge-building have a great deal to recommend them. But there is a flaw: the implicit belief underlying this style of bridging is that we can learn to love each other by seeing that we are all deeply the same. While true in some senses, this misses a fundamental insight about relationship that most of us know from experience: We have the capacity to build relationship through conflict.” Honestly describes very real dynamics. Almost a year old but I’m just seeing it now.
Muskogee student honored for saving 2 lives (Cathy Spaulding, Enid News & Eagle): “Davyon, who attends the 6th and 7th Grade Academy, used an abdominal thrust on a school mate who was choking on a bottle cap. Later that day, Davyon rescued a woman from a burning house.”
- First, this 6th grader deserves huge props. Second, the stories are actually a little comical when you read the details. So much so that “saved” might be generous on the burning house. Still, boss.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

In Retrospect, Woman Attending Communist-Themed Party Should Have Realized There Wouldn’t Be Any Food (Babylon Bee)
Government Spending & Stock Market (Mo Amer, YouTube): language warning. Six minutes. More insightful than many serious commentators.
A Very Stanford Solution (Pearls Before Swine)
You Can’t Find A Birthday Gift For A 90-Year-Old (Dan Grueter, YouTube): four minutes.
Confounding Variables (xkcd)

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. Worth watching as you prepare to return to campus. First shared in volume 181.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 308

there are a few articles touching on faith in unexpected ways this week

This is the 308th installation of this series, and the number 308 is a heptagonal pyramidal number. Pyramidal numbers describe the number of objects required to form a pyramid of a certain height with a given number of sides (in this case, a seven layer pyramid with a heptagonal base).

Things Glen Found Interesting

Academia and faith:
- Dr. Karin Öberg: Planetary Formation, Faith-Shaping Books, and the Beauty of an Intelligible Universe (Raquel Sequeira, BioLogos): “I feel like there are so many stories of Christians that have had a great struggle in academia and for whom living out their faith has been problematic in different ways. While these people do exist and those struggles are real, I want people to know that this is not always the case. I have had a smooth and joyful journey being very open about my faith at the very secular place that Harvard is.”
- The turning tide of intellectual atheism (Jonathon Van Maren, MercatorNet): “Not so long ago, the atheists who retreated to their Darwinian towers and bricked themselves up to fire arrows at the faithful wanted to be there. Their intellectual silos were a refuge from faith because they didn’t want Christianity to be true. They hated it and thought we’d be better off without it.… [but v]iewing Western civilisation with its Christian soul cut out, many are now willing to say: ‘We need Christ.’ What they are unable, thus far, to say, is: ‘I need Christ.’ But the political must become personal. Peterson appears to understand that—and is awestruck by the reality of it.”
When the Aliens Come, Will Their Arrival Destroy Our Faith? (David French, The Dispatch): “…a surprising number of theologians and Christian thinkers have openly considered the possibility of alien intelligence, including in books and essays. The good folks at Biologos have pondered the question. And surveying the literature, there is an interesting amount of consensus about both the key Christian questions and the Christian conclusions about alien life.” David French agrees with me, which is always a happy outcome.
Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling. (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times): “Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has been due to lab leaks — six incidents in three countries, including twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing.” This article is unlocked — you won’t use up your NYT articles reading it.
What Bari Weiss Won’t Tell You About Human Rights and China (Freddie deBoer, Substack): “Perhaps there could be greater trade barriers between the United States and China — but there’s a real risk that doing so could cause major damage to the international economy. And that’s precisely the problem, right? When the fight to treating people with respect and dignity by extending them basic freedoms is such a challenge to the world economic system, you have to acknowledge that there’s something wrong with what that system defines as valuable.”
My Conversation With Winston Marshall (Bari Weiss, Substack): “One of the things that I have noticed is that an inordinate number of people who have been willing to tell the truth and stand up to the new illiberalism, are religious. And I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit more about how your faith guided you through this decision or maybe to put it another way, maybe it’s that your faith anchors you in values that are so much bigger and more eternal than the idiot winds that feel like they’re sweeping through our politics every day.”
A Scholarly Screw-Up of Biblical Proportions (Ariel Sabar, Chronicle of Higher Education): “What should a journal do after publishing a blockbuster paper marred by fraudulent evidence, failed peer review, and undisclosed conflicts of interest? If you’re Harvard Theological Review, the answer appears to be nothing.”
Book Announcement: We Have Never Been Woke (Musa al-Gharbi, personal website): “…the Americans who are the primary producers and consumers of content on antiracism, socialism, feminism, etc. also happen to be among the primary beneficiaries of gendered, racialized and other forms of inequality – and not passive beneficiaries. We are active participants in exploiting and reproducing inequalities. And yet, it is difficult for us to ‘see’ how we contribute to the problem — precisely because of our deeply felt commitments to social justice. So we expropriate blame to others… often people who benefit far less from the system than we do, and exert far less influence over it.” The author is a sociologist at Columbia, and this book looks like it will be straight fire.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

John Crist on Why He Scared to Listen to Christian Radio! (YouTube): three minutes, amusing
Senior Year At Cal (Pearls Before Swine)
Following Jesus: Pros And Cons (Babylon Bee): “Pro: The all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the universe loves you and sent his Son to die for you Con: His book is really long” The entire list is reasonably amusing.
Man Watching Food Network Has Already Committed Gluttony In His Heart (Babylon Bee)
Are Humans Good Or Bad? (SMBC)
Psychic Peter Antoniou Reads the Judges’ MINDS! (America’s Got Talent, YouTube): eleven minutes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 303

topics range from the pandemic to a Biblical view of UFOs

This is the 303rd edition, which is fun because 303 is a lucky number, a category of numbers that gives us insight into prime numbers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Dr. Francis Collins Discusses The Complexities Of Herd Immunity (Colbert Report, YouTube): seven minutes. Dr. Collins is a fellow believer and eminent scientist. He flat-out shares his testimony! Recommended by an alumnus.
Why I Didn’t “Just Bake the Cake” (Jack Phillips, First Things): “My commitment to God and to the truth of a book I believe to be his holy Word is the defining premise of my life, the focus of my faith, and the guiding directive for my actions. If you ask me to separate all of that from my work, from my decisions, from my art … I simply can’t do that. Not just won’t—can’t. It’s like asking a contractor to build a great building, but first remove the foundation.”
It’s Time to Develop a Biblical Ufology (Kyle Beshears, Theology in the Middle): “What is the relationship, if any, between UAP phenomena and Christian angelologies and demonologies? How does the doctrine of the imago Dei fit in? Can our theology of the fall address extraterrestrials? What if they arrive denying the lordship of Christ (Gal 1:8; 1 John 2:22)? What if they arrive proclaiming the lordship of Christ (Rom 10:9)?”
The Myth of the Value-Neutral Market (Mark Movsesyian, First Things): “The neutral market does not create tolerance for diverse views; rather, it’s the other way around. Tolerance for diverse views creates the neutral market; when tolerance disappears, the market becomes as polarized as everything else.”
The future of war is bizarre and terrifying (Noah Smith, Substack): “The world may yet explode into another WW2-style conflagration, or the kind of nuclear holocaust we feared during the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dominate that battlefield. But most of the modern military technologies led themselves to a very different kind of great-power war — a war of constant sniping and harassment. Assassin drones, cyberattacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the possibility of never-ending low-grade attacks that are below the threshold of massive retaliation.”
For Cosmopolitan Christians, Secular Approval Is a Common Temptation (Justin E. Giboney, Christianity Today): “We need Christians who aren’t smitten with the culture or merely proficient at regurgitating its liturgy. We need believers who can wrestle with secular thought, affirming the merits and opposing the lies. Christians must be confident and distinctly Christian in our fields—boldly speaking up when the emperor is striding around with no clothes. When change is necessary, we must correct the mistakes of our elders by moving closer to the Bible, not further from it.”
Some thoughts about Wuhan:
- The media’s lab leak fiasco (Matt Yglesias, Substack): “If something is a 70–30 issue but the 30 are keeping their heads down, it can look like a 98–2 issue.… There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading.”
- Checking Facts Even If One Can’t (Zeynep Tufekci, Substack): “If anything, all this overreach and hurry to declare everything a conspiracy theory or ‘not following the science’ just helps erode what trust authorities or fact-checkers may have had in their pronouncements. Imagine that in a few years, we do get some evidence that really helps resolve the question one way or the other, and the scientific community were indeed able achieve a consensus of sorts. Who’d believe it after this?”
- The Considerable, If Circumstantial, Evidence of a Wuhan Lab Leak (Jim Geraghty, National Review): “Perhaps the least plausible argument in opposition to the lab-leak theory is that the staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Chinese facilities are just too diligent to ever make a consequential mistake. The original SARS virus had accidentally leaked from the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing, part of China’s Center for Disease Control. Twice.” The compilation of the evidence is compelling. To use a legal image, if I was a on a jury I’d vote to convict unless the opposing counsel had some slam dunk arguments — and in this situation the opposing counsel is frantically trying to get the case dismissed before it comes to court.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Social Media Companies Remind Users They Can Be Banned For Saying Anything False Or Anything Too True (Babylon Bee)
Meet America’s Newest Chess Master, 10-Year-Old Tanitoluwa Adewumi (NPR): “When he started, Adewumi and his family were living in a homeless shelter in Manhattan after fleeing religious persecution by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in their home country of Nigeria” Recommended by a student.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 301

perspectives on Israel, Bitcoin, and intellectual honesty

This is volume 301, which is what is known as a Happy Number. So there.

Things Glen Found Interesting

The Cross and the Machine (Paul Kingsnorth, First Things): “It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being … hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.” A wonderfully-told conversion story.
Why We Should Read What We Cite (Because It Matters) (Joseph Latham & Gilly Koritzky, Heterodox Academy): “Consider an academic article that came out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and argues that doctors’ racist biases are a main reason for the higher COVID-19-related hospitalization and mortality rates among African Americans. It says that ‘there is evidence of medical bias in the testing and treatment of African-Americans with COVID-19’ and cites this report as the source. The problem? The report contains no such evidence.” The excerpt does not do it justice. Highly recommended. The authors are psychologists.
How We Got to the Equality Act (Matthew Lee Anderson, Christianity Today): “The story that evangelicals are (merely) victims of progressive aggressors not only fails to account for the ways in which the LGBT movement was shaped by populist evangelical rhetoric and tactics. It also forgets that the gay liberation movement was a direct response to the systemic and pervasive exclusion of lesbian and gay individuals from the structures of our public life—including from America itself. Perfectionism in politics breeds radicalism in response.”
When a Famous Literary Critic Unraveled Silicon Valley’s Most Sensational Murder Case (Ted Gioia, Substack): “Imagine a violent murder at the epicenter of early Santa Clara Valley—soon to be renamed Silicon Valley in the popular imagination—and an innocent man sent to Death Row at San Quentin. But a famous literary critic emerges as the super sleuth who gets him freed, amid dark evocations of scandal involving corrupt politicians and murky underworld figures. You don’t need to imagine it, because it really happened.” A engrossing Stanford story.
About the current conflict in Israel:
- This was written before the current violence: Eight Tips for Reading About Israel (Matti Friedman, Sapir): “If you’re critical of open-fire orders on the Gaza fence, you should know how that works on the India-Pakistan border, or the Turkey-Syria border, or on the perimeters of U.S. military bases in Afghanistan. Same goes for refugee absorption, press freedom, minority rights, or anything. Israel doesn’t always come out looking great. But you’ll find that most criticism of Israel doesn’t compare it with anything. That’s a sign the discussion isn’t about a real country.”
- Against Israel: A bad partner is worse than rain (Freddie de Boer, Substack): “If every word that they have said about the perfidy and self-destruction of the Palestinians was correct, it would make no difference. The moral obligation falls on the dominant party, and Israel is beyond dominant. The mythmaking about all of the opportunities they squandered does not make a lick of moral difference.”
- For Israel: For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Israel made plenty of mistakes in the run-up to the current fighting, including heavy-handed policing in Jerusalem at Ramadan and inadequate policing in Arab-Israeli towns that have been hit by mob violence. But there is a vast difference in moral weight between Israel’s miscalculations and Hamas’s calculations, between blunders and crimes. That’s something to bear in mind when Palestinian rockets hit Israeli civilians by design and Israeli missiles hit Palestinian civilians inadvertently.”
- Against Israel: A Nightmare of Terror Across the Landscape of Palestine (Yousef Munayyer, The Nation): “In towns throughout Israel, Palestinians have been beaten and terrorized by rampaging mobs; one man was dragged from his car and brutalized in what many are describing as a lynching. In the West Bank, Palestinians have been shot and killed in raids by the Israeli military. In Jerusalem, Palestinian families, facing the ongoing threat of expulsion, have been harassed by settlers and military alike. And across Gaza, Israeli war planes have dropped bomb after bomb, destroying entire apartment buildings. Many have died, many more have been injured. If they manage to survive, they will witness their society shattered when the smoke clears.”
- For Israel: The Two Wrongs of the Gaza Narrative (David French, The Dispatch): “Any discussion of the law of war often sounds cold and clinical, even though we’re discussing matters of life and death, including the inevitable and tragic deaths of civilians who always suffer when wars rage in city centers—especially when jihadists wear civilian clothes and embed themselves in civilian structures. When Hamas does so, it violates the law of war by inhibiting the distinction between civilian and military targets. The legal and moral responsibility for resulting civilian deaths rests with Hamas, not Israel.”
- Against Israel: The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government (Bernie Sanders, New York Times): “No one is arguing that Israel, or any government, does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people. So why are these words repeated year after year, war after war? And why is the question almost never asked: ‘What are the rights of the Palestinian people?’ And why do we seem to take notice of the violence in Israel and Palestine only when rockets are falling on Israel?”
- For Israel: The Bad Optics of Fighting for Your Life (Bari Weiss, Substack): “The goal here is the eradication of the Jewish people. That is the bone-chilling truth. That is the core obstacle to peace. Anyone who insists that the ongoing rocket barrage is about a particular Israeli government policy must be made to answer for this.”
Religious Liberty and Economic Freedom (Christos Makridis, City Journal): “Using data on more than 146 countries since 1996, my research finds that increases in religious freedom precede, and help explain, increases in economic freedom. The logic is simple: since religious freedom fundamentally involves granting individuals the autonomy to think and worship in whatever form they wish, it is arguably the most basic of all freedoms. Property rights are of little use if those who retain them do not have the freedom to think what they wish and practice what they believe.” Christos, an economist at Arizona State, is an alumnus of our ministry.
Rival thoughts on Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin Is Civilization (Balaji S. Srinivasan, Bari Weiss’ Substack): “Bitcoin might seem like a curiosity in a democracy with a stable currency. But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline. As Alex Gladstein recently explained in Reason Magazine, Bitcoin has been used by dissidents and activists in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Belarus. In Russia, the country’s most prominent opposition politician and Putin critic, Alexei Navaly, has raised millions in Bitcoin. As Gladstein wrote: ‘Putin can do a lot of things, but he can’t freeze a bitcoin account.’ If you want to understand what crypto is really about, ask Venezuelans if they’d rather own bolívar or Bitcoin.”
- The Case Against Bitcoin (Michael W. Green, Bari Weiss’s Substack): “In the last week of April, mining pools based in China accounted for roughly 90% of the processing power (‘hash rate’) in the Bitcoin network. Roughly three weeks ago, a power outage in the Xinjiang region of China resulted in a plunge in global Bitcoin processing. Bitcoin mining — the process of record keeping for the ‘immutable’ chain of record on which the Bitcoin network depends — is dominated by entities in countries with the stated objective to harm the interests of the United States. Bitcoin proponents continuously assure us that this is ‘just about to change,’ but the data has not shifted in a meaningful manner in the last five years. This is not a decentralized system. It is centralized in the countries that seek our destruction.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Border Crisis Worsens As Biden’s New Cat Stands At Gate To Mexico And Can’t Decide Whether To Go In Or Out (Babylon Bee) — a political joke that isn’t partisan — it’s almost a miracle!
“I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar the Elfstone, Dunadan (he/him).” (Twitter thread — some of the replies are awesome)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 286

some very strong articles in this roundup

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 286^th of these roundups. 286 is a tetrahedral number, which basically means you could stack 286 marbles into a three-sided pyramid (four sides if you count the base).

Things Glen Found Interesting

California Is Cleansing Jews From History (Emily Benedek, Tablet Magazine): “Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.” THIS IS WILD.
The New National American Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Magazine): “…from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.” Lind is a professor at UT Austin in the school of public affairs, and I featured another article by him recently.
In Which I Finally Lose My Mind (PoliMath, Substack): “After a reasonable amount of time for the vaccination to produce an immune response (aim for 2 weeks), you are not in danger and you are not a danger to others. Yes, wear a mask for social cohesion or to follow the rules or just generally to be polite. Wash your hands, use your common sense, and ignore the news written by people who seem to want this crisis to last forever. Make it a priority to get your second dose on schedule. Once you are vaccinated with the second dose, this crisis is over for you.” The author is
The Religious Roots of Our Free Enterprise System (Alan Wolfe, New York Times): “What does an esoteric concept like Calvinist soteriology have to do with the rise of modern economics? Does laissez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quinquarticular Controversy? Can one find the origins of the welfare state in postmillennialist eschatology? Questions like these, according to the Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, are essential to understanding his discipline today.”
How Redditors Beat Hedge Funds at Their Own Game(Stop) (Eric Levitz, New York Magazine): “Another less-than-populist aspect of this drama is that the hedge fund that’s been hardest hit — Melvin Capital — did not become the favored target of WallStreetBets on account of its unique avarice or unscrupulousness, but rather, its exceptional transparency.… Thus, for Wall Street, the upshot of all this is going to be: Never let regulators or the public know what your short positions are. Which doesn’t seem like a huge win for ‘the 99 percent.’”
- A youth pastor interviewed about the stock market on MSNBC (Twitter): I’ve mentioned before that some Christians are too tentative when speaking about the gospel in high-profile media environments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pastor at Beachpoint Church in Orange County.
- The GameStop Fiasco Proves We’re in a ‘Meme Stock’ Bubble (James Surowiecki, Medium): “The point, then, is that even though GameStop’s current stock price is utterly irrational — it will never make enough money to justify a $6 billion market cap — the way Redditors and others have driven its price up has been quite smart.”
- The GameStop Reckoning Was a Long Time Coming (Kevin Roose, New York Times): “If you can get past the all-caps lunacy and strange inside jargon, the Redditors make some good points. Big banks and hedge funds really do play by different rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks really did get bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis while Main Street homeowners suffered. M.B.A.s in fancy suits are probably no more likely to give you good investing advice than guys on YouTube with names like ‘RoaringKitty.’ ” Recommended by a student.
What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus (Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker): “In the years before emancipation, the best arguments against slavery were also arguments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bedtime reading for seekers of wisdom. But those who were weak, or suffering, or in urgent trouble, would have to look elsewhere.” This is quite an article. Recommended.
Two Stanford-relevant articles:
- Editor’s Note: The Twilight of Stanford (Annika Nordquist, Stanford Review): “Stanford’s reputation, which attracted me and countless others to the University, offers students a stake in the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of creativity and risk. Stanford students are less elitist than our East Coast peers, and more well-rounded: Stanford offers amenities, like Greek life and competitive athletic teams, absent in earlier iterations of the prestigious American university. The university’s unstructured curriculum expects its students to either succeed at the highest level in their own arenas, or create entirely new spheres for success. Stanford revels in nonconformity and experimentation. It was through these characteristics that Stanford gained its prestige. I do believe that this Stanford once existed. But it is close to destruction, hastened by a caste of administrators, parasites who jump from one top university to another, who care only for raising Stanford’s rankings, and lack an intimate understanding of what makes Stanford special.” Annika is a student in Chi Alpha.
- The Education of Josh Hawley (Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna and and Emily Cadei, Politico): “Other classmates, however, say that while Hawley was ardently against abortion, his faith during college seemed less an obvious motivation for his political aspirations and more a guide for his social interactions. Friends of Hawley’s told POLITICO they didn’t ever see Hawley drink, smoke or ‘bring a girl back’ to his dorm room. By many accounts, he preferred to stay in and study on weekend nights than to go out and party.” I found this article fascinating. His evangelical ethics were so incomprehensible to some of the people quoted in this article (the bit about the dancing girl was particularly striking). Also, I wonder why it focuses on his time at Stanford and not Yale.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Local Woman Excommunicated From Church After Bringing Kale Chips To Potluck (Babylon Bee)
Economic Stimulus (Pearls Before Swine)
GameStop Announces That Due To Skyrocketing Stock, They Can Now Afford To Pay Up To 25 Cents For Your Used Games (Babylon Bee)
Family Carefully Times Trip To Church To Miss Opening Worship Set (Babylon Bee)
Goals (Pearls Before Swine)
Eric Chien (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): eight and half minutes. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this trick before, but this time he does it for Penn & Teller and it’s awesome.
Penn & Teller vs Married Duo (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine minutes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have Conservatives Clash on the Goal of Government (Jonathan Leeman, Providence): “There is no neutrality. The public square is a battleground of gods. Our culture wars are wars of religion. For the time being, liberalism keeps us from picking up sixteenth‐century swords for those wars, which is no small achievement. But don’t assume it won’t control us with the subtler tools of a twenty‐first century legal totalitarianism.” Insightful reflections on how Christians should form their political positions. First shared in volume 218.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 262

Honestly, this week’s collection of articles has some of the best I’ve seen in some time.

Things Glen Found Interesting

A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Christians have an ancient, rich, strong, comprehensive, complex, and attractive understanding of justice. Biblical justice differs in significant ways from all the secular alternatives, without ignoring the concerns of any of them. Yet Christians know little about biblical justice, despite its prominence in the Scriptures.” The read of the week.
The Church Forests of Ethiopia (YouTube): nine minutes. This commentary by Rod Dreher was what brought the video to my attention. Watch the video before you read the commentary. These forests are a beautiful picture of the way the Church blesses the world around it, and what the Church must do to thrive in the environment we find ourselves in.
Listen to Thomas Sowell (Coleman Hughes, City Journal): “…people predictably line up on opposite sides of political issues that seemingly have nothing in common. For instance, knowing someone’s position on climate change somehow allows you to predict their views on taxing the rich, gun control, and abortion. It’s tempting to dismiss this as mere political tribalism. But Sowell contends that more is at work: that there are two fundamental ways of thinking about the social world, two sets of basic assumptions about human nature, and two conflicting ‘visions,’ from which most political disagreements follow.” Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Some reflections on the media:
- The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free (Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs): “You want ‘Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,’ ‘The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,’ or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall.”
  - This is a good article. For the record, I agree with his assessment of the New York Times: it often contains the facts, but sometimes incorrectly framed with foolish inferences built upon them. That burning Bibles and flags thing Robinson knocks, though? That really happened: Did Portland Protesters Burn Bibles and American Flags? (Snopes)
- How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong (Ben Smith, New York Times): “The coronavirus crisis means that states like Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump tweets false allegations about fraud. And the last barriers between American democracy and a deep political crisis may be television news and some version of that maddening needle on The New York Times website.”
  - This is terrifying and is 100% worth using up one of your paywall articles for.
- How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening (Zach Goldberg, Tablet): “During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like ‘racism’ were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.”
On the divisions in America:
- To unite the country, we need honesty and courage (Robert George and Cornell West, Boston Globe): “Honesty and courage alone can save our wounded, disunited country now. We need the honesty and courage to speak the truth — including painful truths that unsettle not only our foes but also our friends and, most especially, ourselves.” The authors (both Christian) are professors at Princeton and Harvard, respectively.
- Remembering John Lewis, and the Political Theology that Changed a Nation (David French, The Dispatch): “What looks inevitable in hindsight was anything but certain. In fact, if you were placing contemporary bets on a political outcome, would you guess that some version of a three-century status quo would prevail, or that the civil rights movement would achieve a legal revolution nearly on par with emancipation itself? At the same time, can we even recall a modern Christian political movement so consistent with the upside-down logic of biblical Christianity?”
- This is Not The American Cultural Revolution (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “Americans are extremely fond of exaggerating the threat their political enemies pose. Histrionics about Donald Trump ending American democracy are everywhere to be found; readers will no doubt remember the protestors who claimed that Dick Cheney was the second coming of Hitler, or that Barack Obama was a stealth authoritarian socialist.” This is a reassuring essay.
- Secularism Cannot Sustain Liberty, a Response to Greg Forster (Al Mohler, Law & Liberty): “I believe that the project of civilization in the West, and in the English-speaking world in particular, has brought the greatest flowering of liberties and the greatest opportunities for human flourishing in human history. I also believe that this civilizational project has arrived at this moment of maximum danger after decades of both neglect and mounting opposition. The most fundamental problem is the loss of the intellectual and moral preconditions that make the project of ordered liberty possible.”
- Could America split up? (Damon Linker, The Week): “I often catch myself pondering exactly what it is that keeps our country together. What do we hold in common? What do we share?”
Churches and the pandemic:
- How Two California Megachurches Kept Worshiping (Kate Shellnutt and Nicole Shanks, Christianity Today): “Two California churches were so eager to meet last weekend that when their services began, worshipers erupted in applause. In Sun Valley, congregants filling Grace Community Church’s 3,500-seat sanctuary rose and cheered, some documenting the moment with their iPhones, when pastor John MacArthur opened the second week in a row of in-person services…. An hour away in Riverside, California, worshippers at Harvest Christian Fellowship were greeted with cheeky pink and purple signs that said, ‘Smile with your eyes (and wear a mask)’ and ‘Just leave room for your Bible—and another 5½ feet.’ It was the third Sunday that Harvest met in a white tent half the size of a football field to comply with state orders restricting indoor worship.”
- Should Churches in California Defy Government Restrictions? A Response to John MacArthur (Gavin Ortlund, personal blog): “To my mind, there are at least four biblical values that should inform our decision-making in this situation: 1. the importance of worship (Hebrews 10:25), 2. love for neighbor (Mark 12:31), 3. obedience to government (Romans 13:1–7), and 4. maintaining a good witness (Colossians 4:5–6). What concerns me about defying the state order right now is that it seems to prioritize 1 at the expense of 2–4.”
- Masking and Masks: A Hypothetical Interview (Doug Wilson, personal blog): “A free people should be jealous of their liberty. And one of the best ways to be jealous of your liberty is to require the government, whenever it exercises its authority coercively, to be able to give a very specific reason. A general reason is not good enough. The law should prohibit stealing, for example, and when the cops arrest a thief, they should be able to say that they arrested him because he was ‘stealing.’ Negative prohibitions are the foundation of civic liberty, and broad, general feel-good directives are the foundation of tyranny.“ I am not opposed to mandatory masks, but this is a good defense of the opposition.
Concerning China:
- The TikTok War (Ben Thompson, Stratechery): “TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?”
- Books pulled from the library shelves, songs banned…it’s the new normal in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim, The Guardian): “Put simply, within a single month, Beijing has dismantled a partially free society and is trying to use its new law to enforce global censorship on speech regarding Hong Kong.”
- Christians Worry Hong Kong’s New Law Will Hamper Missions (D. Cheng, Christianity Today): “…Christians living outside of China now wonder: Is it still safe for them to communicate openly with friends and colleagues in Hong Kong? For years, the territory has served as a staging ground for ministry organizations operating across the region. But now, will they face pressure or persecution, as those in the mainland do? If they are critical of Beijing on social media or in an article such as this, will they be denied entry to Hong Kong—or worse, detained and possibly imprisoned upon landing in Hong Kong?”
- ‘Clean Up This Mess’: The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line (Chris Buckley, New York Times): “While China’s Communist Party has long nurtured legions of academics to defend its agenda, these authoritarian thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily erudite advocacy of one-party rule and assertive sovereignty, and their turn against the liberal ideas that many of them once embraced.”
- Trump Administration Penalizes Chinese Officials for Hong Kong Crackdown (Pranshu Verma and Edward Wong, New York Times): “The action is another in a series of measures the Trump administration has taken in recent months to ratchet up pressure on Beijing. Last month, the administration imposed sanctions on the Chinese government, including a senior member of the Communist Party, over human rights abuses against the largely Muslim Uighur minority.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Ball (SMBC)
Experts Predict Winner Of Election Will Be Candidate Who Talks The Least (Babylon Bee)
Beetle Has an Amazing Way of Escaping Death (Newser): this is real and awesome. Also kind of a metaphor for 2020.
Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (James Vincent, The Verge): also real.
‘Down With Fascism!’ Cries Protester Burning Bibles (Babylon Bee)
my new favorite way to read Emily Dickinson (Imgur)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christman, The Hedgehog Review): “I live out my masculinity most often as a perverse avoidance of comfort: the refusal of good clothes, moisturizer, painkillers; hard physical training, pursued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of physical pain or self‐imposed discipline that I owe the universe.” Very well‐written. Everyone will likely find parts they resonate with and parts they reject. The author is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and based on his CV seems to be a fairly devoted Episcopalian. First shared in volume 178.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 152

Things Glen Found Interesting

Love, Again: on a celibate breakup and what happened after. (Wesley Hill, Comment Magazine): “For a long time, I found abstinence relatively easy. It’s not trendy to admit this, but I didn’t experience a sexless adulthood to be a fate worse than death, in part, perhaps, because I tried not to rev up my libido by seeing how close I could get to the line of intercourse without stepping over it…. What I didn’t realize, though, is that, for the intentionally abstinent, giving up sex is only part of the deal, and there’s more than one line you can step across.”
Let’s Not Forget How Wrong Our Crime Data Are (Cathy O’Neil, Bloomberg): “A year after Trump was elected, the number of reported rapes among the Latino population of Houston declined by 40 percent, a strong indication that people became afraid to report the crimes. Police often don’t take rape victims’ reports seriously, a problem that is probably even worse for male victims. So how can we get a better understanding of the underlying rate of crime? Surveys typically don’t help: People who get away with committing serious offenses aren’t likely to admit it, even if they’re guaranteed anonymity. The one notable exception is marijuana use, which — though still illegal in most places — is mild and socially acceptable enough that people are willing to tell the truth. Hence, if we compare the reported rate of marijuana use to the arrest data, we can gain some insight into how useful the latter really is. The picture isn’t pretty. The latest government surveys, for example, suggest that black and white Americans use marijuana at about the same rate. Yet blacks get arrested about four times more often than whites — and 15 times more often in Manhattan, according to a recent New York Times analysis.” The author has her Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University.
This week the US moved our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s modern instantiation. Violence ensued.
- Israel faces outcry over Gaza killings during Jerusalem embassy protests (Oliver Holmes and Hazem Balousha, The Guardian): “Gaza has had its bloodiest day in years on Monday after Israeli forces shot and killed 58 Palestinians and wounded at least 1,200 as tens of thousands protested along the frontier against the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.”
- The Real Dispute Driving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Yossi Klein Halevi, The Atlantic): “Abbas’s speech only confirmed for many Israelis that this conflict isn’t primarily about redressing the Palestinian grievances over the consequences of the events of 1967—the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—but of 1948: the creation of Israel. Even if we were to uproot every last settlement and withdraw to the 1967 lines, some Israelis say, it won’t bring us any closer to peace, because the real Palestinian grievance is Israel’s existence…. Israelis and Palestinians are caught in what could be called a “cycle of denial.” The Palestinian national movement denies Israel’s legitimacy, and Israel in turn denies the Palestinians’ national sovereignty. The cycle of denial has defined this shared existence since the creation of Israel 70 years ago.”
- Pulling an article I first shared back in volume 5: What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Matti Friedman, The Atlantic): “…one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.”
- Israel’s Massacre of Palestinian Civilians Should Spark Horror—and Action (Ian S. Lustick, The Nation): “As documented by the Israeli military, there are now more Palestinians under the control of the Israeli state than there are Jews. Indeed, for all intents and purposes the Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are already within the Jewish state. They are citizens of no other country, no other recognized state. As measured by how much impact the State of Israel has over the intimate details of their lives, and indeed over whether they will live at all, they are as much inhabitants of the State of Israel as black slaves were inhabitants of the United States or as Africans in the Bantustans were inhabitants of apartheid South Africa.” The author is a poli sci professor at Penn.
- Israel Has the Right and Obligation to Defend Its Border with Deadly Force (David French, National Review): “What would you have Israel do when thousands of people march on the border, some armed, some not? What would you have Israel do when you know that terrorists are certainly mixed in that crowd, people who’d gladly shoot or stab Israeli civilians if they were ever to gain access to Israeli towns?”
Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia (Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex): “I grudgingly forgive capitalism the misery it causes, because it’s the engine that lifts countries out of poverty. It’s a precondition for a free and prosperous society; attempts to overthrow it have so consistently led to poverty, tyranny, or genocide that we no longer believe its proponents’ earnest oaths that this time they’ve got it right. For right now, there’s no good alternative. But if we have a basic jobs guarantee, it will cause all the same misery, and I won’t forgive it.“ This is a long article — skim it. Overall a very strong argument.
An atheist Muslim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam (Sean Illing, Vox): “I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims.” This article is an interesting mix of insight and folly.
Interesting observations from a political scientist (Corrinne McConaughy, Twitter): “How hard is it to reach into politics and say simultaneously that you are owed more and less than you have been given? Like, that’s a hard argument to make—so hard that the elites trying to explain this sort of tension keep whiffing past it.” She is a political scientist at George Washington University. I don’t know if she is a Christian, but the way she worded that bit was very gospelish.
The Fall of The German Empire (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And thinking about the European Union this way, as a Germanic empire as well as a liberal-cosmopolitan project, is a helpful way of understanding how it might ultimately fall…. if the test of Europe’s unity feels like a test for liberal democracy, it’s a mistake to see it only in those terms. It is also a struggle of nations against empire, of the Continent’s smaller countries against German mastery and Northern European interests, in which populist parties are being elected to resist policies the center sought to impose upon the periphery without a vote.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

The Day You Were Born (Saturday Night Live, YouTube): a heartwarming Mother’s Day skit.
Fonts Matter (Imgur)
Man Frequently Compared To Hitler Recognizes Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital (Babylon Bee) — a student sent me this one
Mary Gary (YouTube): recommended by a student. You might recognize the comedian from his famous TED Talk: This is what happens when you reply to spam email

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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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.

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