Tag: elite colleges

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 483

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 Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “When religion is seen as belief, then the believer lives on a continuum between belief and doubt. But when religion is seen as a longing, then the believer lives on the continuum between intensity and apathy. That’s the continuum I live on these days.” 
    • Highly recommended, unlocked, sent to me by multiple alumni.
  2. Archaeologists Found a Skeleton Wearing an Amulet That May Change the History of Christianity (Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics): “Every other link to reliable evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine area of the Roman Empire is at least 50 years younger, all coming from the fourth century A.D.…. The scientific study is bolstered by references never found so early, such as mention of Saint Titus, a student of the Apostle Paul, the invocation ‘holy, holy, holy!’ which wasn’t more common until the fourth century A.D., and the phrase ‘bend your knees,’ which is a quote from Paul’s letter to the Philippians.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus. The title is clickbait, but the article’s content is interesting.
  3. What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity? (David French and Jonathan Rauch, New York Times): “It turns out that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in democracy, and the founders told us that. They didn’t specify that you have to be a Christian, per se, but they said that our liberal, secular Constitution, it’s great, as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues like truthfulness and lawfulness and the equal dignity of every individual. And they understood that those have to come from an outside source. The Constitution won’t furnish them. And the source that they relied on principally was religion to teach those things and to build and transmit those values. And it turns out that for most of our history, Christianity has been pretty good at that.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  4. Study claims all observables in nature can be measured with a single constant: The second (Phys.org): “ ‘In Galilean space-time, you need rulers and clocks to measure all the physical variables. In relativistic space-time, however, clocks are sufficient. This is because in relativity, space and time are so interrelated that a single unit is sufficient to describe all quantities. High-precision clocks, such as the atomic clocks used today, are capable of meeting all measurement needs,’ says Matsas.”
  5. Why are Top Scientists Leaving Harvard? (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “Mina tells an incredible story of what happened during the pandemic. At the time Mina was a faculty member at the Chan School of Public Health, he is extremely active in advising governments on the pandemic, and he brings Harvard millions of dollars a year in funding. But when he tries to hire someone at his lab, the university refuses because there is hiring freeze! Sorry, no hiring for pandemic research during a pandemic.”
  6. When Gen. George Patton Called on God (Alex Kershaw, Wall Street Journal): “Patton instructed his men: ‘Pray when driving. Pray when fighting. Pray alone. Pray with others. Pray by night and pray by day.’ He believed the Third Army’s nearly 500 chaplains, representing 32 denominations, were as critical to victory as his tank commanders. ‘He wanted a chaplain to be above average in courage,’ O’Neill recalled. ‘In time of battle, he wanted the chaplains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chaplains went—up front. We lost more chaplains, proportionately, than any other group.’ ” 
    • This is one of those historical moments that I always marvel at when I read about it.
  7. The Abortion Lobby Endangers Pregnant Women (Rachel Roth Aldhizer, Wall Street Journal): “Reclassifying induction of labor—or, rarely, surgical resolution for PPROM—as abortion care seems to threaten women’s prenatal care nationwide. No abortion legislation in any state restricts emergency procedures to protect the life or health of the mother. Yet this linguistic shift could mislead physicians in states with abortion restrictions into believing that standard treatments for pregnancy complications may be illegal, or at least subject to a higher standard of physician judgment when determining a treatment course.… Only the abortion lobby and the politicians who support it benefit from these linguistic games.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 479

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. How the Ivy League Broke America (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Students who got into higher-ranking colleges, which demand high secondary-school GPAs, are not substantially more effective after they graduate. In one study of 28,000 young students, those attending higher-ranking universities did only slightly better on consulting projects than those attending lower-ranked universities. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale student would have been only about 1.9 percent more proficient than a student from Cleveland State when measured by the quality of their work. The Yale student would also have been more likely to be a jerk: The researchers found that students from higher-ranking colleges and universities, while nominally more effective than other students, were more likely to pay ‘insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friendly,’ ‘more prone to conflict,’ and ‘less likely to identify with their team.’ ” 
    • Interesting throughout. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snobby about going to Stanford seems as ridiculous as being snobby about your great-grandmother’s membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, this would transform not just college admissions but American childhood.”
    • Somewhat related: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, students are given the faculty’s high-class political opinions as a form of cultural capital. Thus the public perceives these opinions — on defunding the police, or viewing biological sex as a social construction, or Israel as absolute evil — as markers in a status game. Far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions by the lucky graduates. Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports.” 
      • The author is an English professor at Case Western. He throws a lot of strong punches.
  2. Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Christianity Today): “the power of Peterson’s style is his marriage of existential urgency with hermeneutical creativity. He expects the Word to show him wonders. He wrestles with the text—a mystery and a stranger—until he secures a blessing from it. He takes for granted that its depths are bottomless. Do pastors model this posture in the pulpit? Do teachers in the classroom? Do scholars on the page?Christian readers should learn from Peterson’s boldness, his disposition of awe and docility before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spirit as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Recommended by a colleague. This is one of the best Christian engagements with Jordan Peterson I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiven Peter, Mere Orthodoxy): “The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: ‘By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.’ Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values.” 
    • This is a review of Aaron Renn’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improving them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Our mental health crisis is usually cast as either a failure of therapeutic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trauma well enough yet—or else an unavoidable consequence of climate anxiety, polarization, or bad media. But [perhaps the crisis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of living your life as a kind of constant retreat into both the safety and the chaos of your own imagination, and nearly everything about how we learn, communicate, and work as modern people helps us condition for this. We are taught early and often to direct our gaze inward.” 
    • Several substantive insights in this article.
  5. Why the Federalist Society Has Been a Great Success (Ed Whelan, Substack): “The Federalist Society’s success has led many on the Left—and, more recently, some envious folks on the Right—to revile and demonize it. But its critics routinely display that they do not understand how it operates and how it has succeeded.… It does not submit amicus briefs. It does not undertake to enlist the public in political undertakings. And it has never done any of these things. And therein lies one of the great keys to its success.”
  6. AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Brian Porter & Edouard Machery, Scientific Reports [Nature]): “We collected 5 poems each from 10 well-known English-language poets, spanning much of the history of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Samuel Butler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using ChatGPT 3.5, we generated 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ paradigm: we used the first 5 poems generated, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or provide any feedback or instructions to the model beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first experiment, 1,634 participants were randomly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and presented with 10 poems in random order: 5 poems written by that poet, and 5 generated by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, participants were asked whether they thought the poem was generated by AI or written by a human poet.… Contrary to what earlier studies reported, people now appear unable to reliably distinguish human-out-of-the-loop AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets.… Furthermore, people prefer AI-generated poetry to human-authored poetry, consistently rating AI-generated poems more highly than the poems of well-known poets across a variety of qualitative factors.” 
    • The authors are at the University of Pittsburgh.
  7. Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings (Paul Bloom, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “You may have heard of the study published in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them. It got a huge amount of coverage in the popular press. It was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent last year on the court’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions. The research, Jackson claimed, shows the benefits of diversity. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same journal just published a re-analysis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant,’ once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns with low birth weight. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the re-analysis because I didn’t believe the original finding.… It’s like what someone once said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Ginger Rogers is doing them backward and in high heels. A published finding that clashes with the political prejudices of reviewers and editors is a Ginger Rogers finding. It had to be twice as good.” 
    • The author is a psychology professor (emeritus at Yale, currently at U Toronto).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 473



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 473, the largest known number whose square (223729) uses different digits than when it is raised to the 4th power (50054665441).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Evangelistic Shift (Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy): “So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond? The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America.”
  2. Willful ignorance of the male suicide crisis (Richard V. Reeves, Substack): “It’s essentially impossible to come away from this [New Yorker] essay without a strong sense that the teen suicide crisis is, in fact, a teen girl suicide crisis. That is absolutely false. In fact, for every five teenagers dying from suicide, four are likely to be boys.”
  3. Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (Aaron Renn, Substack): “Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.… All is not well for American Christianity to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but given the manifest and widely publicized problems within evangelicalism, I would submit that at least as much time should go into introspection and internal reform.”
  4. Yes, Third-Trimester Abortions Are Happening in America (Emma Camp, The Atlantic): “…Colorado, which is home to clinics that perform third-trimester abortions, recorded 137 third-trimester abortions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight other states, plus Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on third-trimester abortions. Just a few minutes from my office building in D.C., a clinic offers abortions up to nearly 32 weeks. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, a clinic performs abortions up to 35 weeks’ gestation.… Americans are broadly uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 percent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Associated Press poll found that just 8 percent of respondents believe that third-trimester abortions should be legal in all cases.”
  5. A Defense of Legacy Admissions, the Surprising Engine of Meritocracy (Teddy Ganea, Stanford Review): “The purpose of college admissions isn’t to create a new elite from scratch. It’s to meld meritorious non-elites with the existing elite, to incorporate fresh talent and ideas into the highest echelons of power. It should be a win-win-win: established elites benefit from new merit, new merit benefits from elite connections and resources, and society benefits from a more meritocratic elite. Legacy admissions is a prerequisite for this mission statement, because you can’t meld together two groups if one of them is missing.… Critics of legacy admissions ignore the key reality of human history: that the existing elite is almost always deeply entrenched, and breaking into it requires more than just individual talent — it requires access. And this is where legacy admissions play their most crucial role: by enabling meritorious non-elites to mix with the existing elite, they open up the real opportunity for upward mobility.” 
    • Well-argued and provocative. My favorite kind of article!
  6. 55/45 is a really close race (Nate Silver, Substack): “I’ve never seen an election in which the forecast spent more time in the vicinity of 50/50, and I probably never will… on average, since our forecast relaunch on July 30, Harris has won 49.4 percent of simulations, and Trump has won 50.2 percent. (These don’t quite add up to 100 because of the slim possibility of a 269–269 Electoral College tie.) People understand intuitively that a 50/50 or 49/51 forecast is a toss-up. If the forecast is 55/45 in some direction instead, however, confusion can abound — even though this isn’t any different from 50/50 for most practical purposes. Some of the problem is that people can confuse this forecast for a prediction of vote share: if Harris were to win 55 percent of the vote and Trump 45 percent, that would be the biggest landslide in an American election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. But that’s not what this forecast is saying. Rather, it’s that Harris will win the Electoral College about 11 times out of 20 and Trump will win it 9 times out of 20: still basically a toss-up, just with the coin weighted ever so slightly in Harris’s favor.”
  7. Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depended on It (Chris Stirewalt, The Dispatch): “Politicians and media hype merchants tell us every cycle that this is the most important election in history, but the truth is that in a nation with stable system of elections held in a free, fair manner and abundant constitutional protections for political minorities, the knowledge that no election is the final word helps us to live in relative harmony.… It’s not the end of anything if the party opposite your own wins an election, just the continuation of a 235-year long argument that, Lord willing, will go on for another 235.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Doctor admits wearing disguise to poison mom’s partner with fake covid shot (Leo Sands, Washington Post): “A British doctor has been found guilty of attempting to kill his mother’s longtime partner by disguising himself as a nurse and injecting his elderly victim with a flesh-eating toxic substance while pretending to administer a routine coronavirus vaccination.” 
    • I do not mean to suggest that attempted murder is less serious than the sorts of things included above — but I do mean to suggest this is a story you will read because it is wild more than because it has anything to do with your life.
  • The ‘Goth’ Volleyball Player Was Actually Toning Things Down (Callie Holtermann, New York Times): “I was in a film study meeting with my whole team, and I was telling one of my teammates that I was so confused why my Instagram was blowing up. And Allison [Voigt, her team’s head coach] turned to me and showed me Twitter, and was like, ‘You’re going viral. You have two million views right now.’ I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do or what was going to happen from this.”

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 470



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 470, a relatively uninteresting number. There are fewer links than usual this week owing to some travel. I didn’t have much time to read and I’m exhausted today. 

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Can AI Help a Student Get Into Stanford or Yale? (Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed): “Lee is among hundreds of students trying out Esslo—whose name is a mashup of the words ‘essay’ and ‘Elo,’ a ranking system used in chess and esports. The program is the brainchild of two Stanford University students looking to tackle what they believe is one of the most stressful parts of college applications: the admissions essay.” 
    • The two Stanford students in question are part of Chi Alpha. Way to go, guys! The website: https://www.esslo.org/ — if you know any high school seniors, pass the link their way.
  2. Evangelize Like You’re a Sinner (Claude Atcho, Gospel Coalition): “The Samaritan woman’s bold witness teaches us a truth sometimes deemed too simplistic: the key to apologetics isn’t pithy answers or irrefutable arguments but a sense of awe in Jesus that can’t be silenced.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  3. As a Single Man, I Felt Little Pressure to Get Married. I Wish I Had. (Brett McCracken, The Gospel Coalition): “Singleness and marriage can both be good when they’re done for God’s glory and take a cruciform shape. And when chosen for selfish reasons or lived out in unhealthy ways, both singleness and marriage can also be bad. I’m not making an argument for one being universally better than the other. I’m simply observing that in our cultural moment, and perhaps in certain cultural contexts (like mine in Southern California), arguments for the good of marriage need to be sounded more urgently.”
  4. How Stanford and Its West Coast Brethren Planned for Long Road Trips in Conference Realignment (Pat Forde, Sports Illustrated): “The Cardinal are making their Atlantic Coast Conference debut on Sept. 20, at Syracuse. The following week, Stanford will visit Clemson. Of all the hands realigning schools have been dealt, this is the single worst one in football. None of the other Pac-12 diaspora—in the ACC, Big Ten or Big 12—will play league road games on consecutive weeks. And these are three-time-zone sojourns of 5,000 miles or more round trip.”

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 467



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 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

  1. 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.”
  2. 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.”
  3. 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.
  4. 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.”
  5. 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.
  6. 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.”
  7. 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

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 462



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 462, which my simple math brain likes because 4, 6, and 2 are related numbers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sebastian Junger was a skeptic of the afterlife. Then he nearly died. (Steven Petrow, Washington Post): “Junger, a confirmed atheist and an adherent of the scientific method, had been raised by a physicist (his father) and a painter (his mother). His upbringing had left little room for a spiritual experience like this one, which turns out to be the central conundrum of this book and, I’d venture, his life. The meeting with his father was understandably unnerving. ‘He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him.’ But, it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only visited him but opened the door to the idea that an afterlife might actually exist.… Ever the reporter, Junger is unwilling to write off these experiences as hallucinations (or any of the other medical explanations). He admits he was hoping for evidence of an afterlife, finding hints of it in the universality of NDEs that feature seeing the dead. After all, he writes, ‘there are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing.’ ” 
    • Unlocked.
  2. Why Is the U.S. Still Pretending We Know Gender-Affirming Care Works? (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Imagine a comprehensive review of research on a treatment for children found ‘remarkably weak evidence’ that it was effective. Now imagine the medical establishment shrugged off the conclusions and continued providing the same unproven and life-altering treatment to its young patients. This is where we are with gender medicine in the United States.” 
    • Unlocked.
  3. We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Questions About Leaving Religion (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The most popular reason [for leaving religion] by a significant margin was ‘religious hypocrisy.’ About 42% of the sample chose that reason for leaving. That was seven points higher than the second most popular — ‘religion doesn’t make sense.’ That was chosen by 35% of the sample. The only other response that scored above 30% was religious bigotry (31%).”
  4. Various pieces about the assassination attempt on Trump: 
    • Photo Appears to Capture Path of Bullet Used in Assassination Attempt (John Ismay, New York Times): “In documenting the Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday afternoon that turned into an attempt on a former president’s life, Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer, appeared to capture the image of a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump’s head.”
    • It’s 1968 All Over Again (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “The near assassination of Trump is an echo of the violence of 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down in a two-month span in the spring of that year. Both were the victims of lone gunmen, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, respectively. The murders threw America into a cycle of riots and crackdowns that culminated with the Democratic convention in Chicago at the end of August.”
    • Why Are There So Few Assassinations? (Richard Hanania, Substack): “Consider that there are a lot of crazy people out there who get agitated about politics. There is also an endless number of nihilists with nothing to live for, but who would probably like to see their names in the history books. Powerful firearms are widely available in many advanced nations, particularly the United States. In this country, it is common for malls or schools to get shot up by disturbed young men who expect to get nothing out of the act except that they might end up being part of a news story for a few days. Why don’t more of these types go after major politicians?” 
    • Video Shows Crowd Warning Law Enforcement About Gunman Before He Fired at Trump (David Botti, Haley Willis and Malachy Browne, New York Times): “Video taken by a bystander shows people pointing to the man suspected of shooting at former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania and frantically warning law enforcement, just two minutes before the first burst of gunfire rang out, according to an analysis of the footage by The New York Times.”
  5. Why slavery is not America’s original sin (Wilfred Reilly, Spiked): “Modern Americans tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad. What we don’t understand is that contemporary Western beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc, are the exception, not the norm.… Even a few open slave societies continue to exist today. In the Islamic republic of Mauritania, ‘the very structure of society reinforces slavery’.… CNN reporters and analysts claimed that between ’10 per cent to 20 per cent of the [Mauritanian] population lives in slavery’.” 
    • The author is a political scientist at Kentucky State. The article is an excerpt from his new book, which I have not read.
  6. The Hidden Marriage Market (Rob K. Henderson, Substack): “Today, colleges and universities function as arranged matchmaking services. Charles Murray’s term of art in Coming Apart is ‘the college sorting machine.’ The mechanism whereby people with distinctive tastes and preferences are brought together into educational institutions and the labor force.… It’s true that most college graduates don’t meet their spouse in college. But by graduating, you then, as Caplan notes, enter a refined dating pool for the rest of your life.”
  7. Some stuff from the election and election-adjacent realm, focused on the Republican side because they just had their convention and Trump put forth Vance as his VP: 
    • The changes in vibes — why did they happen? (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “Another way to put it is that Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next election. In conceptual terms, how exactly did that happen? I had been thinking it would be a good cognitive test to ask people why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intelligence, insight, and intellectual honesty.” 
      • Cowen offers interesting hypotheses.
    • How J.D. Vance Rejected Evangelicalism (Aaron Renn, Substack): “He explicitly sees religion through the lens of socio-economic status. Once he saw that it was possible to be Christian in the world of the elites, it became interesting and credible to him again. Note again that it’s Catholics and Mormons who are key to this, not any sort of Protestants. At the time of this interview, Vance was still exploring Catholicism, to which he later converted.… There’s also something in evangelicalism that’s just off-putting to a lot of people like Vance. It’s not just the working class Pentecostal congregations like the one I was raised in (which was very similar to Vance’s experience). The average suburban megachurch is also incredibly cringe. I like to distinguish between middle class and striver class. Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class.” 
      • Renn is not wrong about the dynamics at play, but he is overlooking the presence of ministries like Chi Alpha on these elite campuses which are usually larger (in terms of weekly attendance) and perceived to be more vibrant than the Catholic ministries. 
      • A foll0w-up Catholic Conversionism (Aaron Renn, Substack): “It’s worth noting that although intellectuals often convert from evangelicalism to Catholicism, a lot more people over all convert the other direction, from Catholicism to evangelicalism.”
      • If anyone thinks Catholicism is correct on the merits, then become a Catholic. I strongly disagree with you, but follow your convictions. But to anyone tempted to convert to Catholicism or anything else primarily because it makes your social life / career prospects better, I urge you to reconsider.
    • How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Sofia Nelson, a former classmate who is transgender and was once a close friend of both Mr. Vance and his wife, recalled that Mr. Vance delivered home-baked treats when they underwent top surgery. But years of friendship ended in 2021 over his support for an Arkansas bill opposing transgender care for minors.” 
      • Interesting when you ignore the partisan dynamic and instead focus on the cultural collision at Yale.
    • The Populist GOP and its Yale Law and Harvard Law Leaders (Orin S. Kerr, The Volokh Conspiracy): “…populist conservative voters are fine with voting for conservative graduates of elite law schools because having attended those school affords conservative politicians a sort of veteran status of its own. The politicians running for GOP office don’t speak fondly of their time at these schools. Instead, they present their time at Harvard Law or Yale Law as a difficult test of strength that they passed. They spent three years in the trenches of liberalism and they emerged victorious. They are now battle-hardened and ready to fight the liberals while in political office. From that perspective, graduating from these schools isn’t a problem. Instead, like a medal on a military uniform, it’s a credential.” 
      • This piece is pretty good, but it overlooks the deliberate pipeline that both sides have set up to scout and route promising young candidates from elite universities into political tracks. There are all kinds of conferences and grants and internships to facilitate this.
    • Is the Republican Party Becoming Pro-Choice? (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The Republican National Committee proposed its 2024 GOP party platform in Milwaukee on July 8, and for the first time in forty years, this platform does not include support for a national abortion ban. Instead, the GOP’s anti-abortion positions are softened and many of the party’s previous pro-life commitments have been removed.… the GOP appears to be pivoting. Trump claims to hold a federalist position on abortion, but in practice he condemns only states that pass pro-life protections—such as Florida—while saying nothing about states with permissive abortion regimes.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “Dr. Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is better for mating or eating based on the strength of his calls. This means males take a huge risk when trying to attract mates. ‘You’ve really got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to reproduce,’ Dr. Gould said.”
  • Denominations Host Game Night (Keith Foskey, YouTube): two minutes of funny with some talkey-talkey at the end
  • The Death of Hobbies (Sherry Ning, Substack): “Scrolling through an endless trail of short videos and watching cooking shows is pleasurable because it feels good, but it would be wrong to say you actually enjoy it. It would be much more enjoyable to learn how to cook and roll up your sleeves in the kitchen. When we participate in the motion, we turn from a consumer into a creator. And the act of creation is vital to us because we all unconsciously strive to seek meaning beyond the material world: There is something divine about creating. To bring forth something out of nothing, to have something exist because of you, to leave your mark on the world. Every creative act—from developing a software to writing a book to making a large bowl of salad—is a miniature Genesis.” 
    • This one really belongs above, but I didn’t have space for it with my self-imposed limit of 7 big bullet points. I convinced myself it belongs here since it has to do with recreation.

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 461



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 461, a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. So You’ve Decided to Vote for an Unfit Candidate (O. Alan Noble, Substack): “Come November, most voters will choose between two presidential candidates, neither of whom are fit for office, as I have previously argued. I’m not just arguing that they are sinners and therefore ‘evil’ in the sense that everyone is fallen; I’m arguing that they are specifically unjust and immoral and unfit for positions of national leadership.… There are many issues to take into account when voting for a candidate, but one of them is how your vote will form your own soul.”
  2. Articles making observations rarely heard in high-status society: 
    • New Research Finds Huge Differences Between Male and Female Brains (Leonard Sax, Psychology Today): “As you can see, there wasn’t a continuum: the female fingerprints of brain activity were quite different from the male fingerprints of resting brain activity, with no overlap. These findings strongly suggest that what’s going on in a woman’s brain at rest is significantly different from what’s going on in a man’s brain at rest.”
    • How divorce never ends (Bridget Phetasy, The Spectator): “All of this is to say something you don’t hear that often: divorce will affect your kids for the rest of their lives, well into adulthood. They will have split holidays and summers. They will have stepparents. Their kids will have step-grandparents. Whatever inheritance they would have been entitled to is often being divvied up with other spouses and their kids. More important than the money, however, is the attention they’ll never get because their parents are dating or remarrying or whatever. They will only be with one parent half of the year — if they’re lucky: we only saw my dad twice a year. They will have to choose who gets Christmas, forever. Or they will be bouncing around at holiday time with their kids, just like the old days.”
    • The Real Problem With Legal Weed (Charles Fain Lehman, New York Times Magazine): “While marijuana may not be as bad as some critics claim, the medical evidence is clear that it can do substantial harm. Marijuana is addictive — around 30 percent of users use compulsively, even as their use harms themselves and the people around them.… Marijuana does hurt a substantial portion of its consumers, often quite badly. And there is no reason to think that businesses won’t sell marijuana to those it hurts, if they’re allowed to. What the alcohol and tobacco markets show us, rather, is that addiction and profit don’t mix well.” 
      • Unlocked.
    • We deserve a more nuanced conversation about working moms (Rachel M. Cohen, Vox): “After the essay on motherhood dread was published, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University sociologist who studies relationships and gender. She had recently published a paper on gender wage gaps in the computer science field and found that mothers in computer science actually earned more than childless women (though this ‘wage premium’ was significantly less than what fathers earned). ‘It was difficult for me to find a home for the attached article because reviewers cannot fathom that mothers might out-earn single women, though there is a growing body of evidence that [they] do,’ she wrote in her email to me. ‘It might be selection [bias] … but given that folks have found this across disciplines suggests that the motherhood penalty really needs to be reassessed.’ I was curious about Sassler’s suggestion that moms might actually earn more and that we don’t often hear that because gatekeepers ‘seem to like the narrative that women are always screwed by family.’”
  3. This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like (Oren Cass, New York Times): “Taking the majority’s preferences seriously, even when they conflict with the preferences of more sophisticated experts, is often disparaged as populism. But while elected officials and their technocratic advisers may have special insight into how the people’s goals are best achieved, only the people can determine what those goals should be and whether they are being met…. While policy initiatives so often seek to maximize efficiency and growth, move people to opportunity and redistribute from the economy’s winners to the losers, the typical American has an attachment to place, a focus on family, a commitment to making things, and would accept economic trade-offs in pursuit of those priorities.… The important feature of all these preferences is that they are inherently valid. No set of facts or statistical analyses, to which an expert might have superior access, overrides what people actually value and what trade-offs they would choose to make. Leaders might seek to shape public opinion and alter preferences — indeed, that is part of leading — but they must yield to the outcome. Their obligation is to pursue the community’s priorities, not their own.”
  4. Missionaries Have Gone to Thailand for 200 Years. Why Aren’t There More Christians? (Rebecca Brittingham, Christianity Today): “Yet the freedom that Christians enjoy in Thailand hasn’t translated into a wide acceptance of Christianity by local Thais. Despite nearly 200 years of Protestant missions, only about 1.2 percent of the population are Christians. The question of why Thailand is such difficult soil for the seed of the gospel to grow has plagued missionaries, as many have seen little fruit for the years they’ve spent learning Thai, building relationships, and trying to introduce locals to the gospel.”
  5. I Went From Foster Care to Yale. This Is What I Learned About ‘Luxury Beliefs.’ (Rob K. Henderson, New York Times on YouTube): six minute video. 
    • This is worth watching even if you’re familiar with his ‘luxury beliefs’ concept.
    • I actually had dinner in a group with Rob on Sunday night. We’re not friends — I just saw that he was in town and willing to meet up with people so I DMd him on Twitter. Nice guy.
  6. How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students (Lauren A. Wright, The Atlantic): “Conservative culture warriors argue that education at highly selective colleges is worthless, and recommend that conservative students who don’t want to be silenced or indoctrinated opt out. I disagree. Conservative students experience what higher education has long claimed to offer: exposure to different perspectives, regular practice building and defending coherent arguments, intellectual challenges that spur creativity and growth. Liberal academia has largely robbed liberal students of these rewards.” 
    • The author is a political science professor at Princeton. No paywall.
  7. Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record (Tracing Woodgrains, Substack): “Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable.… From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.” 
    • This is a long, wild article about internet minutiae. But if you’ve ever wondered about bias on Wikipedia, dive in.

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 457



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 457, the sum of three consecutive primes (149 + 151 + 157) and also apparently the index of a prime Euclid number, but I would be lying if I said I knew what that is.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The case for showing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God (Emma Camp, America): “But despite my regular church attendance for almost two years now, I still haven’t developed a rock-solid faith. I’ve joked—and said as much on Twitter—that I only believe in God about 30 percent of the time on a good day. My ambivalence does set me apart from most of my friends from church, a group that includes a few seminarians. But it doesn’t keep me from coming back.”
  2. The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs (Ruxandra Teslo, Substack): “To formalize this: ‘Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly.’ That is because most people, while liking non-conformism in the abstract and post-facto, are not very willing to actually put up with the personality trade-offs of Weird Nerds in practice. There is an increasing number of people right now who are thinking about how to build better intellectual institutions… it’s worth thinking about what kind of people one wants to attract in these institutions and how to keep them there. And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, that these traits come ‘in a package’ with other, very good traits, and if one makes filtering or promotion based on the absence of those traits a priority, they will miss out on the positives.”
  3. An Object Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times): “If the government misled people about how Covid is transmitted, why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?… As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.” 
    • Unlocked.
  4. ‘Sham’ Surgery Can Actually Fix Our Bodies. So Why Are Some Against It? (Jeremy Howick, Science Alert): “More broadly, a review of 53 placebo-controlled surgery trials found that sham surgery was as good as the real thing in over half of the studies. Sham knee and back surgery works as well as real surgery for pain. Pretending to put brain implants works as well as real implants for reducing migraine attacks. Fake laser surgery works as well as real laser surgery to stop gastrointestinal bleeding. And fake surgery works as well as real surgery for making sphincters function more efficiently.” 
  5. The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day (David French, New York Times): “When I left the Republican Party, I thought a shared faith would preserve my denominational home. But I was wrong. Race and politics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer welcome in the church I loved.” 
    • Unlocked.
  6. Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement (Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, New York Times): “It’s a phrase not commonly associated with legal doctrine: returning America to ‘a place of godliness.’ And yet when asked by a woman posing as a Catholic conservative at a dinner last week, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. appeared to endorse the idea.… Now, Supreme Court justices have become caught up in the debate over whether America is a Christian nation. While Justice Alito is hardly openly championing these views, he is embracing language and symbolism that line up with a much broader movement pushing back against the declining power of Christianity as a majority religion in America.” 
    • This caveat is significant and should perhaps be higher placed in the story: “The Times has not heard the full unedited recording and has reviewed only the edited recording posted online, after the woman who recorded them, a liberal activist, declined to send the Times the full recording.” 
    • Related: What Exactly Did Justice Alito Say That Was Wrong? (Marc O. DeGirolami, New York Times): “Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.”
    • Related: Wild Distortions of ‘Secret Recording’ of Alito (Ed Whelan, National Review): “You are welcome of course to disagree with Alito.… But it’s beyond bizarre to find it newsworthy that Alito made a private comment that mirrors public speeches he has been giving.”
  7. Against Ambition (Grace Carroll, Stanford Daily): “Wineburg walked into his classroom intending to make a brief opening comment about the scene outside. What followed — a tirade against a culture of careerism so blatantly profit-motivated that students were being lured, literally, to flashing salaries like moths to flame — ‘sort of took on a life of its own,’ he recalled recently. It’s known colloquially among some students as ‘the rant.’ I was one of the frosh sitting in Wineburg’s class that fall. I remember the rant.… mostly I remember feeling like someone was lifting something very heavy off of me, a weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying until it was gone.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 456



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 456, a very satisfying number: each digit increases and I like it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Holy Haggling: Learn to Pray like Abraham (Justin Dillehay, The Gospel Coalition): “We’re often ready to write off an otherwise good church or organization because of a few bad apples within it. But Abraham is the exact opposite—he asks God to spare an entire city of bad apples for the sake of a few good apples within it.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  2. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City (Jonathan Ireland, American Affairs): “Whoever came up with the idea of calling these organizations ‘nonprofits’ was a marketing genius on the level of Steve Jobs. When someone hears the word nonprofit, they assume that such an organization is working for the public good; that it serves the homeless, protects the weak, exists for the benefit and the betterment of society at large.… Consequently, nonprofits receive a benefit of the doubt that would not be granted to any other form of private corporation. Yet nonprofit organizations are frequently the exact opposite of what they appear to be.” 
    • Stunning stories in here. 100% worth your time.
  3. Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points (Alina Chan, New York Times): “Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.…” 
    • Unlocked. Emphasis removed for readability. The author is a molecular biologist at a joint MIT/Harvard institute.
  4. Men Only Want One Thing (Nathan Beacom, Comment): “Over a hundred years ago, William James, the father of American psychology, argued that men need a ‘moral equivalent of war.’ To retain virtue, James thought, men needed the soul-shaping force of military life without war’s destructive consequences.” 
    • This is a solid article, especially recommended for guys. Ladies, you can eavesdrop if you like.
  5. Why No One Will Save Sudan (Cameron Hudson, Persuasion): “For those tracking events in the country, a seemingly endless thread of headlines and editorials lament this ‘forgotten conflict.’ But this is the wrong framing. The crisis in Sudan is neither forgotten nor ignored. It is de-prioritized. And that is worse.… Over the past several weeks, a new Benghazi-like slaughter has been taking shape in the North Darfur city of El Fasher. With nearly one million internally displaced already taking refuge there and more than one million more awaiting a coming onslaught by the Rapid Support Forces militia, which has promised to take the city and complete their takeover of all of Darfur, the specter of genocide once again hangs over the region. Egress out of the city has been cut off, as have aid flows into the city, leading analysts to refer to the city as a ‘kill box.’ ”
  6. Does Divorce Make You Hotter? (Kat Rosenfield, The Free Press): “…[celebratory stories about divorce are] a product of a popular ‘woman empowered by everything woman does’ paradigm, where all choices made by women are a product of liberation, hence feminist, hence good. There is no error or disappointment that can’t be yass-kweened away.… It’s only women who are seen as requiring this particular brand of cheerleading, who are relentlessly encouraged to reframe all their negative experiences as the best thing they ever did.” 
    • Straight fire throughout. Recommended.
  7. Speech Under the Shadow of Punishment (Jeannie Suk Gersen, New Yorker): “…administrators have become accustomed to using punishment as a go-to solution rather than as a last resort. The emphasis on disciplinary action became particularly pronounced in the twenty-tens, when universities were under urgent pressure to address campus sex discrimination and harassment.… [furthermore] some students may have been disciplined not merely for participating in an encampment but for violating discrimination, harassment, or bullying policies. The pressure to enforce those policies cannot be overstated. In the twenty-tens, the Department of Education investigated many schools, including Harvard, for failing to adequately address allegations of sexual misconduct; universities today are once again under federal scrutiny, which threatens their federal funding and tax-exempt status, for failing to address allegations of antisemitism.” 
    • The author is a law prof at Harvard.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 454



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 454, a number whose symmetry pleases me.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Nones Have Hit a Ceiling (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The rise of the nones may be largely over now. At least it won’t be increasing in the same way that it did in the prior thirty years. Of course, the question is why? I don’t know if I have a bulletproof answer. I think the easiest explanation is that a lot of marginally attached people switched to ‘no religion’ on surveys over the last decade or two. Eventually, there weren’t that many marginally attached folks anymore. All you had left were the very committed religious people who likely won’t become nones for any reason. The loose top soil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.” 
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  2. ‘Loud-mouthed bully’: CS Lewis satirised Oxford peer in secret poems (Dalya Alberge, The Guardian): “Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name ‘Henry Cecil Wyld’. He added: ‘On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English.’ ” 
    • Even Lewis’s shade was epic and erudite. I love this story. Also, a reminder that every word will be brought into judgement — even words uttered (or penned) in secret. I should mention he would not yet have been a Christian when these poems appear to have been composed.
  3. What Do Students at Elite Colleges Really Want? (Francesca Mari, New York Times): “…everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.” 
    • Unlocked
  4. Redefining the scientific method: as the use of sophisticated scientific methods that extend our mind (Alexander Krauss, PNAS Nexus): “This study reveals that 25% of all discoveries since 1900 did not apply the common scientific method (all three features)—with 6% of discoveries using no observation, 23% using no experimentation, and 17% not testing a hypothesis. Empirical evidence thus challenges the common view of the scientific method.” 
    • From the abstract because it is so succinctly put, but the article itself is easy to read. Recommended. The author is a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics.
  5. American Missionaries Killed in Port-au-Prince (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “Criminal gangs killed nearly 5,000 people in Haiti last year. Then, in 2024, the gangs banded together, turned against the politicians who had once collaborated with them for power, and launched coordinated attacks on the government. The gangs set police stations on fire, shut down the main airport and seaport, and broke open two prisons, releasing an estimated 4,000 inmates. They vandalized government offices, stormed the National Palace, and took control of about 80 percent of the capital.”
  6. Group chats rule the world. (Sriram Krishnan, personal blog): “Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups.… The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them.”
  7. What ‘Tradwives’—and Some of Their Critics—Miss (Hannah Anderson, The Dispatch): “But women haven’t been uniquely lied to. Families have been lied to about what their homes can and should be. Men and women alike have been told that their greatest achievements lie outside of it. And yet, a marriage reduced from two ‘careerists’ to one is still serving corporate interests. At best, a woman sacrificing her career to enable her husband’s career (as Butker asserts his wife does and as he counseled new female graduates) misses the point. At worst, it enables the very marketplace that desires nothing more than to creep into our homes and commodify every expression of goodness and beauty that happens there—even if what we’re selling is traditionalism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Stanford University Tour by Drone (YouTube): six minutes (it’s a little long, but the first bit is nice to watch)
  • Will 18 year old Emma Olson FOOL Penn & Teller with a Rubik’s cube? (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine minutes
  • When an Eel Takes a Bite Then an Octopus Might Claim an Eyeball (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “In each video, the common octopus may sacrifice arms, much as lizards drop their tails to distract predators, Dr. Hernández-Urcera said. In the first video, the octopus loses three arms while the one in the second video loses two — but they can fully regrow limbs in about 45 days, some lab tests show.” 
    • Rarely do I find that news articles are improved by embedded videos. This is one of the exceptions. Very cool.
  • Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad? (Elizabeth A. Harris, New York Times): “Obviously we’re animals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imagining a future with agricultural practices and harvesting practices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capable of and its proclivities. This opens up the world of plant ethics.” 
    • The article itself is interesting. The title made me laugh.

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.