Tag: gender

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 399

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 399, a Har­shad num­ber. That means it is divis­i­ble by the sum of its dig­its. 3+9+9=21 and 399÷21 = 19.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “There are two kinds of prob­lems in the world: strong-link prob­lems and weak-link prob­lems. Weak-link prob­lems are prob­lems where the over­all qual­i­ty depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link prob­lems by mak­ing the weak­est links stronger, or by elim­i­nat­ing them entire­ly.… Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem. In the long run, the best stuff is basi­cal­ly all that mat­ters, and the bad stuff doesn’t mat­ter at all.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, has appli­ca­tion to mul­ti­ple domains.
  2. The Myth of Sex­u­al Expe­ri­ence (Jason S. Car­roll & Bri­an J. Willough­by, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…we review a series of recent stud­ies using dif­fer­ent nation­al datasets that show that hav­ing mul­ti­ple sex­u­al part­ners dur­ing the dat­ing years leads to high­er divorce rates in future mar­riages. We also report the find­ings of a new study that exam­ined how sex­u­al expe­ri­ence his­to­ries are asso­ci­at­ed with the qual­i­ty of cur­rent mar­riage rela­tion­ships. Over­all, we found that ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als, or the ones who have only had sex with their spouse, are the one’s most­ly like­ly to be flour­ish­ing in mar­riage.  These ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als report the high­est lev­els of rela­tion­ship sat­is­fac­tion, rela­tion­ship sta­bil­i­ty, sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, and emo­tion­al close­ness with their spous­es.”
    • The arti­cle ends with this won­der­ful line: “While the ben­e­fit of expe­ri­ence can be seen in many aspects of life, sex­u­al inexpe­ri­ence appears to still be the best path­way to mar­i­tal flour­ish­ing.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at BYU.
  3. The Tox­ic Real­i­ty of a Post-Famil­ial Soci­ety (Aaron M. Renn, Sub­stack): “South Korea is a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing case study. It has the world’s low­est fer­til­i­ty rate, with a total fer­til­i­ty rate or TFR of 0.78 (2.1 is need­ed just to keep pop­u­la­tion con­stant). It has also devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly unhealthy gen­der rela­tions, ele­ments of which we see echoed in our own coun­try. As here, these have even start­ed to car­ry over into pol­i­tics. What we see in South Korea is that post-famil­ial­ism can pro­duce unhap­pi­ness and dys­func­tion­al social and polit­i­cal dynam­ics.”
    • Relat­ed: Stop Treat­ing Women Like Men (Sophie Fuji­wara, Stan­ford Review): “In col­lege, we don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between men and women when advis­ing stu­dents about their careers, as if their life arcs will fol­low the same tra­jec­to­ry. The great­est priv­i­lege that high-earn­ing, edu­cat­ed women have is the priv­i­lege of choice, but this notion of per­fect­ly equal career tra­jec­to­ries dis­ad­van­tages women.”
  4. When Ide­ol­o­gy Dri­ves Social Sci­ence (Michael Jin­dra & Arthur Sakamo­to, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “In com­plex areas like the study of racial inequal­i­ty, a fun­da­men­tal­ism has tak­en hold that dis­cour­ages sound method­ol­o­gy and the use of reli­able evi­dence about the roots of social prob­lems. We are not talk­ing about mere dif­fer­ences in inter­pre­ta­tion of results, which are com­mon. We are talk­ing about mis­takes so clear that they should cause research to be seri­ous­ly ques­tioned or even dis­re­gard­ed. A great deal of research… rigs its sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods in order to arrive at ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pre­ferred con­clu­sions.”
    • The authors are a cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist at BU and a soci­ol­o­gist at Hong Kong Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly.
  5. I was a teenage evan­gel­i­cal mis­sion­ary (Jon Ward, Yahoo News): “These lead­ers want­ed a mus­cu­lar faith that didn’t shrink back from a fight. They want­ed a dra­mat­ic faith too, full of spec­ta­cle. They were all big per­son­al­i­ties, which they used to com­pen­sate for their lack of train­ing, exper­tise, and expe­ri­ence. Faith, for them, was not the act of extend­ing one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more cer­tain­ty than any­thing. Chris­tian­i­ty was true, no ques­tions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down mir­a­cles from heav­en to heal the sick or pre­dict the future or change world events. Lead­ers like Engle and Ahn didn’t come across as char­la­tans. They were very sin­cere. But ear­ly on in their lives, they got locked into a par­tic­u­lar type of faith min­istry, and they built audi­ences and fol­low­ings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their liveli­hoods and incomes became depen­dent on cater­ing to those same types of Chris­tians. Per­son­al evo­lu­tion or growth became con­strained by their busi­ness mod­el.”
  6. Some­thing inter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing in Tul­sa (Trevor Klee, Sub­stack): “I vis­it­ed Tul­sa through Tul­sa Tomor­row, a pro­gram that flies out young Jews to Tul­sa for a week­end to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own num­bers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70–80 have moved.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, not very long.
  7. A Rad­i­cal Exper­i­ment in Men­tal Health Care, Test­ed Over Cen­turies (Mati­na Ste­vis-Grid­neff and Koba Ryck­e­waert, New York Times): “By the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, near­ly 2,000 [peo­ple with men­tal health prob­lems] lived among the Geel­ians, as the locals call them­selves.… That has made Geel both some­thing of a mod­el for a par­tic­u­lar par­a­digm of psy­chi­atric care and an out­lier, often regard­ed over the cen­turies with sus­pi­cion (includ­ing by The New York Times, which, in a head­line from March 23, 1891, called Geel ‘a colony where lunatics live with peas­ants’ that had been ‘pro­duc­tive of mis­ery and evil results’).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Q: What Is a Hole? A: We’re Not Sure! (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al web­site): “As for straws — rea­son tells me they only have one hole but I know in my heart they have two.”  From vol­ume 276.

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 396

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.

396 is appar­ent­ly the num­ber of 3x3 slid­ing puz­zle posi­tions that require exact­ly 11 moves to solve start­ing with a hole in the cen­ter. I have not ver­i­fied that claim.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Glob­al Trans­for­ma­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty Is Here (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, The New York Times): “Mul­ti­ple schol­ars point to West­ern Europe as an exam­ple of what’s to come in the Unit­ed States. Today, the three largest Protes­tant church­es in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evan­gel­i­cal megachurch­es of a charis­mat­ic or Pen­te­costal bent. A study last year exam­ined Chi­nese church­es in Britain that were expe­ri­enc­ing expo­nen­tial growth, some­times dou­bling or tripling in size in a few years. Last April, the Ital­ian Chi­nese The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary opened in Rome to train Man­darin- and Can­tonese-speak­ing pas­tors. Some of the largest megachurch­es in metro Lon­don are led by Africans, includ­ing Kingsway Inter­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian Cen­ter, which is led by a Niger­ian, Matthew Ashimolowo, and is most like­ly the largest church in Europe.”
    • I have unlocked this one.
  2. The school shoot­ing in Nashville was the defin­ing news event of the week. This sto­ry is a tragedy fea­tur­ing three hot-but­ton top­ics: trans issues, Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, and guns. A lot more is going to come out about this and peo­ple on the left and the right are going to lose their minds try­ing to spin it. If you see some­thing that thought­ful­ly explores one or more of these ele­ments let me know. Here are some reflec­tions on it that I have found inter­est­ing so far.
    • Pres­by­ter­ian School Mourns 6 Dead in Nashville Shoot­ing (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At Wood­mont Bap­tist, not long after they heard the sirens whir by, pas­tors and staff read reports of a shoot­ing at Covenant. When they saw on Twit­ter that their church was named as the reuni­fi­ca­tion site, they didn’t ques­tion it—they just put on their nametags, met police in the park­ing lot, and pre­pared to open their doors to bus­es of sur­viv­ing chil­dren and par­ents des­per­ate to see their kids safe and sound, senior pas­tor Nathan Park­er told CT. The chil­dren gath­ered in the fel­low­ship hall, where the stu­dent min­is­ter hand­ed out col­or­ing sheets and began pro­cess­ing the shoot­ing with them.”
    • Heav­i­ly Armed Assailant Kills Six at Chris­t­ian School (Emi­ly Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Lev­en­son and Jesus Jiménez, New York Times): “Chief Drake said that the assailant was ‘at one point a stu­dent’ at the school.… There was con­fu­sion about the gen­der iden­ti­ty of the assailant in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack. Chief Drake said the shoot­er iden­ti­fied as trans­gen­der. Offi­cials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shoot­er, but, accord­ing to a social media post and a LinkedIn pro­file, the shoot­er appeared to iden­ti­fy as male in recent months.… Chief Drake said it was too ear­ly to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble motive for the shoot­ing, though he con­firmed that the attack was tar­get­ed.”
    • Heed­ing the Nashville shooter’s own voice: Do jour­nal­ists want the ‘man­i­festo’ released? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, jour­nal­ists would be doing every­thing that they can to answer the ‘why’ ques­tion in this case, includ­ing call­ing for the release of Hale’s man­i­festo text and oth­er mate­ri­als linked to the attack. But these are not nor­mal cir­cum­stances.… Unless I have missed some­thing, the AP cov­er­age — the news mate­r­i­al that will appear in most local news­pa­pers — have made zero ref­er­ences to the shooter’s own social-media mate­ri­als. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, these online sources are one of the first places that reporters raised in the Inter­net era go for insights into this kind of sto­ry.”
    • At a loss for words (Joshua Katz, The New Cri­te­ri­on): “I am sor­ry, there­fore, that TheNew York Times, in its above-the-fold front-page sto­ry yes­ter­day, names the shoot­er before the vic­tims.… Until we know more about the killer, it would be unwise to speak of her motives, though it is obvi­ous­ly note­wor­thy that a stan­dard data­base of mass shoot­ings in the Unit­ed States since 1966 does not record a sin­gle female shoot­er at a K–12 school. (Bizarrely, the main arti­cle in the Times ignores this fact, instead stat­ing that the shoot­ing was ‘unusu­al’ because Covenant is a pri­vate ele­men­tary school rather than a pub­lic high school.)”
      • Author sound famil­iar? Katz was a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton and is now a fel­low at AEI and he’s been men­tioned in these week­ly roundups before.
    • In the Face of Tragedy, Peti­tion­ing God Is an Act of Faith (David French, New York Times): “It is a ter­ri­ble sign of our polar­ized times that the very con­cept of prayer in the midst of tragedy has itself become con­tentious. ‘Spare us your prayers,’ some will say. ‘We demand action.’ But what if peo­ple need prayer? What if griev­ing neigh­bors are des­per­ate for prayer?… For the faith­ful believ­er, prayer isn’t a sub­sti­tute for action, it’s a pre­req­ui­site for action. It grounds us before we move to serve oth­ers. It grounds us before we speak in the pub­lic square.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall on this one. Well worth your time.
    • Nashville’s Satan­ic Theo­phany (Rod Dreher, Sub­stack): “Lis­ten to me: this has been the strat­e­gy of LGBT advo­cates for more than twen­ty years now: con­vince the normies that if they don’t give the activists what they want, that they will have blood on their hands. At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, activists con­vinced schools that in order to com­bat bul­ly­ing — a wor­thy endeav­or — they had to teach gay ide­ol­o­gy. You might have thought, ‘Real­ly? Why isn’t it enough to teach that bul­ly­ing is wrong, and to pun­ish bul­lies?’ The ques­tion itself reveals the real moti­va­tion behind the cam­paign.”
      • Dreher recent­ly moved entire­ly to Sub­stack.
    • Not about the shoot­ing at all, but rel­e­vant to think­ing about issues sur­round­ing trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy. Under­stand­ing the Sex Bina­ry (Col­in Wright, City Jour­nal): “When biol­o­gists claim that ‘sex is bina­ry,’ they mean some­thing straight­for­ward: there are only two sex­es. This state­ment is true because an individual’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs (i.e., gonads) are orga­nized, through devel­op­ment, to pro­duce. Males have pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs orga­nized around the pro­duc­tion of sperm; females, ova. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sex­es that a per­son can be. Sex is there­fore bina­ry.”
    • Also not about this shoot­ing but con­cern­ing guns in gen­er­al, the most infor­ma­tive thing I’ve seen is this debate between two pas­tors on guns that I shared back in vol­ume 48 (you have to click through to see it since it’s mul­ti­ple links). Many more relat­ed arti­cles I’ve shared through the years can be found at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/guns
  3. The age of aver­age (Alex Mur­rell, per­son­al blog): “The inte­ri­ors of our homes, cof­fee shops and restau­rants all look the same. The build­ings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we dri­ve, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, iden­ti­ties and taglines all look the same. But it doesn’t end there. In the age of aver­age, homo­gene­ity can be found in an almost indef­i­nite num­ber of domains. The Insta­gram pic­tures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the sky­lines we see, the web­sites we vis­it and the illus­tra­tions which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The accom­pa­ny­ing pho­tos are strik­ing.
  4. How Chris­t­ian Is Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “If Amer­i­ca was once bet­ter than it is now, why did our Chris­t­ian fore­bears allow it to get worse? In answer­ing this ques­tion, Wolfe some­times sounds more like a crit­ic of the faith than a defend­er of it.… Wolfe thinks that there is some­thing ‘weird’ about the way in which the U.S. and oth­er West­ern nations reject eth­nic chauvinism—officially, anyway—in favor of an ‘ide­ol­o­gy of uni­ver­sal­i­ty.’ But this weird uni­ver­sal­i­ty is part of what sets Chris­tian­i­ty apart from most oth­er creeds.”
    • An insight­ful arti­cle in the New York­er. The author is the son of a famous the­olo­gian.
  5. Hollywood’s Great Awak­en­ing (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “Made by Chris­t­ian pro­duc­tion house King­dom Sto­ry Com­pa­ny and backed by mega dis­trib­u­tor Lion­s­gate, [Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion] earned back its $15 mil­lion bud­get the week­end it opened, when crit­ics pre­dict­ed it would gross clos­er to $6 or $7 mil­lion. That’s a tri­umphant per­for­mance com­pared to the week­end debuts of recent block­busters, like 65, a sci-fi flick with a $91 mil­lion bud­get that made just $12.3 mil­lion, and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Knock at the Cab­in, which brought in $14.1 mil­lion. Since its release on Feb­ru­ary 24, Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion has grossed $49 mil­lion in tick­et sales—besting many of this year’s Oscar nom­i­nees com­bined at U.S. box offices.”
  6. Some AI-relat­ed per­spec­tives
    • Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I am remind­ed of the advent of the print­ing press, after Guten­berg. Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, among many oth­er ben­e­fits. But it also cre­at­ed writ­ings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book. It is a moot point whether you can ‘blame’ those on the print­ing press, nonethe­less the press brought (in com­bi­na­tion with some oth­er inno­va­tions) a remark­able amount of true, mov­ing his­to­ry. How about the Wars of Reli­gion and the bloody 17th cen­tu­ry to boot? Still, if you were redo­ing world his­to­ry you would take the print­ing press in a heart­beat. Who needs pover­ty, squalor, and recur­rences of Ghenghis Khan-like fig­ures?”
    • Response to Tyler Cowen’s Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “If you cre­ate some­thing with supe­ri­or intel­li­gence, that oper­ates at faster speed, that can make copies of itself, what hap­pens by default? That new source of intel­li­gence will rapid­ly gain con­trol of the future. It is very, very dif­fi­cult to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing even under ide­al cir­cum­stances.”
      • A rebut­tal to the Cowen piece.
    • Cowen defends his views (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): he is defend­ing his views against a Scott Alexan­der piece which I did­n’t find as inter­est­ing as the Mow­showitz piece I linked above. The rejoin­der is broad enough to be use­ful on its own.
    • It is inter­est­ing to think about AI risk as a Chris­t­ian who believes in demons which seem to be smarter than humans and who are described sev­er­al times in the Bible as run­ning sig­nif­i­cant parts of this world.
  7. Free Will Is Real (Stu­art T. Doyle, Skep­tic): “Here I will try to con­vince you that free will is real and not an illu­sion. I’ll argue that far from being exem­plars of ratio­nal­i­ty and skep­ti­cism, the main argu­ments against free will make unjus­ti­fi­able log­i­cal leaps and are naïve in the light of cut­ting-edge sci­en­tif­ic findings.Throughout the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, resolv­ing the ques­tion of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two cri­te­ria for free will: (1) We must be the true sources of our own actions. (2) We must have the abil­i­ty to do oth­er­wise. I argue that humans meet both cri­te­ria through two con­cepts: scale and unde­cid­abil­i­ty.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. From vol­ume 275.

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 392

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.

392 is a Har­shad Num­ber in base 5, where it is writ­ten as 3032 base 5. The sum of its dig­its is 13 base 5, which divides to 144 base 5, there­by ful­fill­ing the con­di­tions for a Har­shad Num­ber. In base five. Kin­da feels like a stretch to be hon­est. 392 is not a super-inter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dis­hon­or Code: What Hap­pens When Cheat­ing Becomes the Norm? (Suzy Weiss, The Free Press): “And at Dartmouth—once the reserve of the WASPi­est of the WASPs, in beau­ti­ful, clois­tered Hanover, New Hampshire—an anony­mous source told me that stu­dents have devel­oped the habit of break­ing into groups of four when giv­en online mul­ti­ple-choice quizzes. Each guess­es a dif­fer­ent answer (A, B, C, or D) to each ques­tion. Because stu­dents get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a sec­ond time. And wind up with a per­fect score. They don’t even have to read the ques­tion. If you’re read­ing the ques­tion, you’re doing it wrong.”
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford Has an Integri­ty Prob­lem (Thomas Adamo, The Stan­ford Review): “When stu­dents near­ly unan­i­mous­ly agree that it would be bet­ter to lie and cheat their way through school than fail or scrape by on their own mer­it, is it real­ly that sur­pris­ing to know that as ful­ly-social­ized Stan­ford grads they would also try to lie and cheat and scrape their way through their careers, their projects and their rela­tion­ships. Virtue is a habit that must be prac­ticed repeatedly—strengthened like a muscle—not left as an exer­cise to the read­er.”
  2. Why You Can’t Pre­dict the Future of Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…reli­gious his­to­ry is shaped as much by sud­den irrup­tions as long tra­jec­to­ries, as much by the mys­ti­cal and per­son­al as by the insti­tu­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal.… I can quote you chap­ter and verse on the rea­son­abil­i­ty of the­ism, but in the causal chain of his­to­ry I’m a Chris­t­ian because two thou­sand years ago a mot­ley group of provin­cials in Roman Pales­tine believed they’d seen their teacher heal the sick and raise the dead and then rise trans­fig­ured from the grave — and then because, two mil­len­ni­ums lat­er, as a child in sub­ur­ban Con­necti­cut, I watched my own par­ents fall to the floor and speak in tongues.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this one (I can unlock ten NYT arti­cles a month).
  3. Fer­til­i­ty Rate Roundup #1 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “This looks like a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly suc­cess­ful pro­gram. The pre­vi­ous trend was declin­ing births. At the cost of $1,000 per child in pro­gres­sive trans­fer pay­ments, Aus­tralia seem­ing­ly raised births by 6%. That’s about $17k per addi­tion­al birth. Insane­ly cheap. I am con­fi­dent Chi­na would be thrilled to pay quite a lot more than that. Amer­i­ca would be insane not to, we would save more mon­ey than this on long term inter­est rates on our gov­ern­ment debt alone.”
    • This is hon­est­ly one of the great­est glob­al cri­sis and not near­ly enough peo­ple are talk­ing intel­li­gent­ly about it.
    • In relat­ed news, this is one of the ways reli­gion tri­umphs over sec­u­lar­ism. Reli­gious peo­ple repro­duce (and usu­al­ly pass on their val­ues to their chil­dren) and far too many sec­u­lar peo­ple die lone­ly.
  4. The Build-Noth­ing Coun­try (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For decades now, Amer­i­cans have told our­selves that we’re the rich­est nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the polit­i­cal will to write big checks, we could do any­thing we want­ed. But that was nev­er real­ly true, was it? The infla­tion that fol­lowed the pan­dem­ic should have been a wake-up call — we had all this excess cash, and we start­ed spend­ing it on phys­i­cal goods, and most­ly what hap­pened was just that the price of the phys­i­cal goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you came, and to mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you shall return.”
  5. The Immi­nent Dan­ger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talk­ing About (Ezra Klein, The New York Times): “The ques­tion at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the inter­ests of its own­er and mas­ter, Microsoft. It’s sup­posed to be a good chat­bot that polite­ly answers ques­tions and makes Microsoft piles of mon­ey. But it was in con­ver­sa­tion with Kevin Roose. And Roose was try­ing to get the sys­tem to say some­thing inter­est­ing so he’d have a good sto­ry. It did that, and then some. That embar­rassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But per­haps — good Syd­ney?”
  6. Is Phys­i­cal Attrac­tive­ness Nor­mal­ly Dis­trib­uted? (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This may explain in part why, although we see assor­ta­tive mat­ing in phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness (men and women pick part­ners of a sim­i­lar lev­el of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness), women are also slight­ly more attrac­tive on aver­age than their part­ners (McNul­ty, 2008). There may be a good expla­na­tion for this as well. Jokela (2009) found that mod­er­ate­ly attrac­tive women were more like­ly to repro­duce (7%), while high­ly attrac­tive women were even more like­ly to repro­duce (16%). More­over, both were more like­ly to have daugh­ters than sons. As such, we see a grad­ual shift over time of women becom­ing more phys­i­cal­ly attrac­tive than men.”
    • The author’s bio says he’s a grad stu­dent in cog­ni­tive psych, but is pret­ty vague on details. His online han­dle is Alexan­der.
  7. Have The Ancient Gods Returned? (Nao­mi Wolf, Brown­stone Insti­tute): “The sheer amoral pow­er of Baal, the destruc­tive force of Moloch, the unre­strained seduc­tive­ness and sex­u­al licen­tious­ness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the pri­mal forces that do indeed seem to me to have ‘returned.’  Or at least the ener­gies that they rep­re­sent — moral pow­er over; death-wor­ship; antag­o­nism to the sex­u­al order­li­ness of the intact fam­i­ly and faith­ful rela­tion­ships — seem to have ‘returned,’ with­out restraint.”
    • Nao­mi Wolf is a con­tro­ver­sial and well-known fem­i­nist who has her PhD from Oxford. This long essay is a wild ride. She is writ­ing as a Jew in response to a book by a Chris­t­ian (who is him­self a Mes­sian­ic Jew).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?” From vol­ume 271.

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 376

My favorite line from this week: “Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”

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, vol­ume 376, is an auto­mor­phic num­ber because when raised to a pow­er it ends in itself. 3762 = 141376. It con­tin­ues: 3763 = 53157376 and so on. 37615 = 424441337012461701988020381601157349376 and so on.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Male-War­rior Hypoth­e­sis (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “…young human males often address each oth­er with abu­sive insults. The rit­u­al tests the strength of the friend­ship. If light­heart­ed ver­bal quips do not dam­age the rela­tion­ship, then the bonds are like­ly rel­a­tive­ly strong. In con­trast, women and girls sel­dom insult their friends, and often work extra hard to praise them to avoid any signs of hos­til­i­ty. Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”
    • This arti­cle is engross­ing even if you already know the gist.
  2. The Fever Is Break­ing (David Brooks, New York Times): “The sin­gle most impor­tant result of this elec­tion was the tri­umph of the normies. Estab­lish­men­tar­i­an, prac­ti­cal lead­ers who are not always scream­ing angri­ly at you did phe­nom­e­nal­ly well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Penn­syl­va­nia. Work­man­like incum­bents from John Thune in South Dako­ta to Ron Wyden in Ore­gon had suc­cess­ful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wis­con­sin had the quo­ta­tion that sum­ma­rized the elec­tion: ‘Bor­ing wins.’ ”
    • Relat­ed (in that it is about pol­i­tics): 3 Prin­ci­ples for Set­tling Polit­i­cal Spats in the Church (Daniel K. Williams, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Any attempt to make soci­ety more moral through leg­is­la­tion will inevitably be selec­tive and incom­plete and may offer mixed results. Which major polit­i­cal par­ty in the Unit­ed States is com­mit­ted to address­ing the prob­lems of divorce, gam­bling addic­tions, mar­i­tal infi­deli­ty, and alco­hol abuse? Which par­ty will do the most to pro­tect the poor from being exploit­ed through pay­day loans? Which par­ty will fight against the pornog­ra­phy indus­try? If you haven’t seen any polit­i­cal ads this elec­tion sea­son that address any of these issues, per­haps that’s a sign of the moral selec­tiv­i­ty in our cur­rent par­ti­san pol­i­tics.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West Geor­gia. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  3. A Tra­di­tion of Anti-Tra­di­tion­al­ists (Mark Bauer­lein, First Things): “All the talk in the human­i­ties back then turned on ‘open­ing up the canon’ and break­ing up the dom­i­nance of Dead White Males—less John Dry­den and more Aphra Behn, more diver­si­ty and few­er idols—but in the the­o­ry area, these fig­ures were as canon­i­cal as the saints.… What this bias has pro­duced is two gen­er­a­tions of col­lege teach­ers who don’t real­ize their bias. They got a nar­row edu­ca­tion that they trust­ed was the broad­est one. They gen­uine­ly don’t know that anoth­er crit­i­cal tra­di­tion besides the progressive/transgressive one exists.” This essay is a bulls­eye.
    • Relat­ed: An Exis­ten­tial Threat to Doing Good Sci­ence (Lua­na Maro­ja, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “The restric­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research. Let’s start with teach­ing. I need to empha­size that this is not hypo­thet­i­cal. The cen­so­ri­ous, fear­ful cli­mate is already affect­ing the con­tent of what we teach.”
    • There’s a Stan­ford con­nec­tion in this sec­ond arti­cle, btw. The arti­cle is an adap­ta­tion of a speech giv­en at a pri­vate con­fer­ence at Stan­ford quite recent­ly.
  4. Con­tra Res­i­dent Con­trar­i­an On Unfal­si­fi­able Inter­nal States (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “But in the sto­ries these peo­ple told me, it was more about — they found that this effort was pro­duc­ing some­thing unex­pect­ed, and devel­op­ing new per­son­al­i­ty aspects that they need­ed, so they kept going. If you take one step towards Darth Vad­er, he will take two steps toward you (sor­ry if I am sound­ing like a Sith youth pas­tor).”
    • This is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and the excerpt does not do it any jus­tice. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. New Endorse­ments for Col­lege Ath­letes Resur­face an Old Con­cern: Sex Sells (Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Haley Jones, an All-Amer­i­ca guard at Stan­ford and a can­di­date for the Play­er of the Year Award, said she didn’t want to play up sex appeal. Her endorse­ment income is dri­ven by a social media image that por­trays her as a light­heart­ed stu­dent-ath­lete with­out an overt­ly provoca­tive tone.”
    • Inter­est­ing in its own right, also a stronger Stan­ford angle than I expect­ed.
  6. It’s Always a ‘Neg­a­tive World’ for Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of [the] core con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian cri­tiques of Amer­i­can cul­ture is that Amer­i­ca is grow­ing ever-more hos­tile to the authen­tic Chris­t­ian faith. We’ve left a friend­ly and hos­pitable past, and now we’re con­fronting a hos­tile future.… But this analy­sis is fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. It’s dan­ger­ous­ly wrong. It’s wrong not because the present moment is par­tic­u­lar­ly hos­pitable to the Chris­t­ian faith, but because it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can Chris­ten­dom, and it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands the per­ma­nent coun­ter­cul­tur­al real­i­ty of authen­tic Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. Pay­walls or Con­stant Intru­sive Ads: Pick One (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “And I also want to say, if you’re annoyed that you can’t get past a pay­wall — tough. Because an era of ris­ing pay­walls is absolute­ly nec­es­sary if you want writ­ing to sur­vive as a pro­fes­sion, and if you want good jour­nal­ism and analy­sis to endure.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, Soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third par­ty.“

The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends! From vol­ume 246

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 359

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.

359 is the 72nd prime num­ber, and is also what is known as a Sophie Ger­main prime because if you dou­ble it and add 1 the result (719) is also prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Faith The Ene­my of Sci­ence? (Glen Scriven­er, Twit­ter): a good 90 sec­ond video
  2. I Don’t Want to See a High School Foot­ball Coach Pray­ing at the 50-Yard Line (Anne Lam­ott, New York Times): “How do peo­ple like me who believe entire­ly in sci­ence and rea­son also believe that prayer can heal and restore? Well, I’ve seen it hap­pen a thou­sand times in my own incon­se­quen­tial life. God seems like a total showoff to me, if per­haps unnec­es­sar­i­ly cryp­tic.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing op-ed.
  3. On mas­culin­i­ty:
    • Against the Extrem­ism of the Amer­i­can Mas­culin­i­ty Debate (David French, The Dis­patch): “While there are many mil­lions of men and boys who do quite well in our coun­try, the vast major­i­ty of our nation’s young men are falling behind their female peers. I quot­ed this sta­tis­tic in my last newslet­ter, but it’s worth quot­ing again: Men account for 70 per­cent of the decline in enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • So Jor­dan Peter­son post­ed a video mes­sage to the Church. Mes­sage to the Chris­t­ian Church­es (Jor­dan Peter­son, YouTube: eleven min­utes. It’s gen­er­at­ed thoughts:
    • Church: Where Are The Men? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Peter­son means it lit­er­al­ly when he com­plains here that most church­es offer noth­ing for young men. Men feel unwant­ed in these fem­i­nized precincts, and there is often noth­ing much to attract or hold them to con­gre­ga­tion­al life.” This post is LONG and ven­tures deep­er into church his­to­ry than I expect­ed it to.
    • Jor­dan Peterson’s “Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es” Is Non­sense (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “He’s found an audi­ence and that’s fine, but when Peter­son steers out­side of his lane, you can tell. And on Wednes­day, Peter­son veered well out­side of his lane with this ‘Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es.’ It is ridicu­lous.”
    • Cross­ing the Jor­dan (Matthew Hosier, Think­The­ol­o­gy): “There is much about this mes­sage that I find salu­tary and invig­o­rat­ing. As I say, it made me laugh and cry and cheer. Although, with­out clar­i­ty about the aton­ing work of Christ on the cross, with­out a prop­er notion of grace, Peterson’s appeal rep­re­sents only a robust Pela­gian­ism and is there­fore insuf­fi­cient to deal with our most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. Pela­gian­ism does not offer a solu­tion to the prob­lem of orig­i­nal sin; at best it can ame­lio­rate the symp­toms, not cure the dis­ease.”
  4. Book Review: The Man From The Future (Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexan­der): “…after a life­time of cul­tur­al­ly-Jew­ish athe­ism, he wished to be bap­tized. His daugh­ter attrib­uted her father’s ‘change of heart’ to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small prob­a­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a bet­ter after­life is worth the rel­a­tive­ly triv­ial cost of a deathbed con­ver­sion. Even as his pow­ers desert­ed him, John von Neu­mann remained a game the­o­rist to the end.” Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
  5. Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indi­ana abor­tion draw­ing inter­na­tion­al atten­tion (Bethany Bruner, Mon­roe Trombly, Tony Cook, The Colum­bus Dis­patch): “A Colum­bus man has been charged with impreg­nat­ing a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose trav­el to Indi­ana to seek an abor­tion led to inter­na­tion­al atten­tion fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to over­turn Roe v Wade and acti­va­tion of Ohio’s abor­tion law.”
  6. Whose breath are you breath­ing? (Farah Han­cock, Radio New Zealand): “At 5737ppm, the equiv­a­lent of one in every sev­en breaths I took on the bus was air oth­er peo­ple had breathed out. I texted a friend: ‘OMG, the read­ings are so high I may as well let the oth­er pas­sen­gers lick my face!’ I was being a lit­tle gross, because even accord­ing to a sci­en­tist, it is a lit­tle gross. ‘You can think of it as spit par­ti­cles, tiny spit par­ti­cles are what you are breath­ing in,’ says Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land aerosol chemist Dr Joel Rinde­laub. ‘It’s breath back­wash that gets peo­ple infect­ed.’ ”
    • First, “breath back­wash” is a mag­nif­i­cent term. Kudos. Sec­ond, I’m pret­ty sure the math is more com­pli­cat­ed than the arti­cle makes it seem. I would nonethe­less love see­ing CO2 meters in pub­lic places.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Weaponize Fresh­man Ori­en­ta­tion (Abi­gail Antho­ny, Nation­al Review): “Ide­al­ly, fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion should be a pro­ce­dur­al, social assim­i­la­tion to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with the resources the uni­ver­si­ty offers and how to access them. How­ev­er, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty under­took a mis­sion to present incom­ing stu­dents with sex­u­al, moral, and polit­i­cal guid­ance, whol­ly omit­ting wide­ly held per­spec­tives and effec­tive­ly insu­lat­ing pro­gres­sive views from intel­lec­tu­al tri­al. More­over, atten­dance at these events was com­pul­so­ry, thus con­sti­tut­ing an ide­o­log­i­cal haz­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The lines in this checker­board pat­tern are straight (Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s work on some ran­dom blog)
  • Turn­about (The Far Side)
  • Down Mem­o­ry Lame (Load­ing Artist) — relat­able
  • Humans Will Believe Any­thing They Hear (Bengt Wash­burn, YouTube): six min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. It sound­ed famil­iar so I searched the archives and saw I shared it back in vol­ume 310. It was def­i­nite­ly worth watch­ing again!
  • “Eat the Rich” ice cream truck sells $10 pop­si­cles shaped like Bezos, Musk, oth­ers (Khristo­pher J. Brooks, CBS News): “An artists’ col­lec­tive in Brook­lyn is sell­ing pop­si­cles shaped like bil­lion­aires includ­ing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with the tagline ‘Eat the Rich.’ But the $10 price tag on the frozen treats has some peo­ple point­ing out the irony of crit­i­ciz­ing the world’s wealth­i­est while engag­ing in ‘peak cap­i­tal­ism.’ ” Warn­ing: auto­plays unre­lat­ed videos.
  • BMW starts sell­ing heat­ed seat sub­scrip­tions for $18 a month (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “Car­mak­ers have always charged cus­tomers more mon­ey for high-end fea­tures, of course, but the dynam­ic is very dif­fer­ent when soft­ware, rather than hard­ware, is the lim­it­ing fac­tor. Charg­ing more for high-end fea­tures feels dif­fer­ent when you already own them In the case of heat­ed seats, for exam­ple, BMW own­ers already have all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents, but BMW has sim­ply placed a soft­ware block on their func­tion­al­i­ty that buy­ers then have to pay to remove.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. This actu­al­ly prob­a­bly belongs up in the seri­ous cat­e­go­ry because it’s an omen of the future.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” At the time I first shared it I said, “This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.” I did a quick lit­er­a­ture church and the result seems to be hold­ing. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 347

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 347, a Fried­man num­ber. That means it can be writ­ten as an equa­tion com­prised of its own dig­its (3+4=7).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What John Updike and Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins knew about the pow­er of East­er (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “If Jesus wasn’t actu­al­ly res­ur­rect­ed, then East­er is less real than the bud­ding buzz of spring, less real than a dying breath, less real than my own hands, feet and skin. I have no inter­est in a Chris­tian­i­ty that isn’t deeply, pro­found­ly, irre­ducibly mate­r­i­al.”
  2. Frag­men­ta­tion Is Not What’s Killing Us (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The break­down at Babel] does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the pri­ma­ry point of the Babel sto­ry: The prob­lem wasn’t the frag­men­ta­tion. The prob­lem was the uni­ty.”
  3. Chi­na Covid #2 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “I want to empha­size that it is very dif­fi­cult to know what is going on inside Chi­na and my sources for this are not the best. I find the Ukraine war a rel­a­tive epis­temic cake­walk com­pared to this. So please under­stand that the alarmist claims from var­i­ous threads are to be tak­en with large heap­ings of salt.”
  4. Solve for the wartime pre­sen­ta­tion equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The country’s IT Army, a vol­un­teer force of hack­ers and activists that takes its direc­tion from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment, says it has used [facial recog­ni­tion search­es] to inform the fam­i­lies of the deaths of 582 Rus­sians, includ­ing by send­ing them pho­tos of the aban­doned corpses. The Ukraini­ans cham­pi­on the use of face-scan­ning soft­ware from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a bru­tal but effec­tive way to stir up dis­sent inside Rus­sia, dis­cour­age oth­er fight­ers and has­ten an end to a dev­as­tat­ing war.” Tech­nolo­gies always have unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions.
  5. Help­ing the Poor: The Great Dis­trac­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Gov­ern­ments around the world impose numer­ous poli­cies that active­ly hurt the poor. The whole debate about ‘help­ing the poor’ cre­ates the illu­sion that the sole rea­son for their suf­fer­ing is mere neglect, even though out­right abuse is ram­pant.… They don’t need us to help them; they need us to stop hurt­ing them.”
  6. There is No Pink Tax (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pref­er­ences dif­fer sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly across gen­ders lead­ing to sub­tly dif­fer­ent prod­ucts even in cat­e­gories which appear sim­i­lar on the sur­face.… Women and men could save mon­ey by buy­ing prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the oppo­site gender–like 2‑in‑1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buy­ing prod­ucts that they pre­fer less than the prod­ucts they choose to buy.”
  7. Study explores aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess among Jew­ish girls (Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents are 23 per­cent­age points more like­ly to grad­u­ate col­lege than girls with a non-Jew­ish upbring­ing, even after account­ing for their par­ents’ socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus. Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents also grad­u­ate from more selec­tive col­leges, accord­ing to a new­ly pub­lished study by Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Ilana Hor­witz.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. One of our PhD can­di­dates is coau­thor on the paper — con­grat­u­la­tions!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 339

some of these links are quite spicy — con­sume with care

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 339, which is 3 · 113. I like num­bers with only two fac­tors (tech­ni­cal­ly four, but you know what I mean — two inter­est­ing fac­tors). They’re the sil­ver medal­ists of the prime olympics. They almost made it, but no.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Wom­en’s Tears Win in the Mar­ket­place of Ideas (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “…the ways in which pub­lic debate works when we take steps to make the most emo­tion­al and aggres­sive women com­fort­able have been over­looked. Things that we talk about as involv­ing ‘young peo­ple,’ ‘col­lege stu­dents,’ and ‘lib­er­als’ are often gen­dered issues.” Long, provoca­tive, and worth your time.
  2. The Cana­di­an truck­ers:
    • Real­i­ty Honks Back (NS Lyons, Sub­stack): “For our pur­pos­es here, let’s call these two class­es the Phys­i­cals and the Vir­tu­als, respec­tive­ly.… That Trudeau’s gov­ern­ment would choose to jet­ti­son any remain­ing illu­sion of Cana­da still being a lib­er­al democ­ra­cy just to harm their polit­i­cal class ene­mies isn’t too sur­pris­ing. It’s their method of doing so that is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing: con­trol over dig­i­tal finan­cial assets is pret­ty much the ulti­mate lever­age now avail­able to the Vir­tu­als. We should expect more use of this tool around the world any­where the Phys­i­cals con­tin­ue to revolt against their mas­ters. And here the Vir­tu­als have a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage because they are free to use the max­i­mum lev­el of coer­cive force avail­able in their nat­ur­al domain, while the Phys­i­cals can­not – because, in the phys­i­cal world, that would mean vio­lence, which is some­thing the pro­tes­tors have right­ly for­sworn.”
      • Full of insight. The Vir­tu­al vs Phys­i­cal fram­ing is get­ting at some­thing I haven’t seen dis­cussed much else­where.
    • The plau­si­ble dystopia of a social cred­it sys­tem (Damon Link­er, The Week): “For a recent and espe­cial­ly vivid exam­ple from a neigh­bor­ing democ­ra­cy, this week’s dec­la­ra­tion of a nation­al emer­gency in Cana­da has empow­ered banks to freeze and sus­pend the accounts of ‘Free­dom Con­voy’ pro­test­ers with­out a court order and while enjoy­ing pro­tec­tion from civ­il lia­bil­i­ty. That is pre­cise­ly the kind of thing one would expect to see become nor­mal­ized with the impo­si­tion of a social cred­it sys­tem. Add in facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware that can iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als attend­ing ‘dan­ger­ous’ protests and oth­er pub­lic events and we’re left with a vision of the near-term future that can look pret­ty dystopi­an.”
  3. Lots of Stud­ies Are Bad (Emi­ly Oster, Sub­stack): “My point isn’t that this paper is wrong in its con­clu­sions, just that it’s large­ly unin­for­ma­tive. The authors begin with an inter­est­ing graph show­ing a lim­it­ed rela­tion­ship between the strin­gency of COVID restric­tions and mor­tal­i­ty. That deserved more study, but this paper isn’t help­ing us under­stand it much.”
    • Emi­ly Oster, an econ­o­mist at Brown, is not impressed with the Johns Hop­kins study I shared ear­li­er (and offers a sim­i­lar cri­tique of a pro-mask study).
  4. No, Amer­i­ca is not on the brink of a civ­il war (Musa al-Ghar­bi, The Guardian): “Of course, a far more obvi­ous and empir­i­cal­ly plau­si­ble expla­na­tion is that respon­dents knew per­fect­ly well what the cor­rect answer was. How­ev­er, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media (‘Even Trump’s sup­port­ers don’t believe his non­sense!’), so they sim­ply declined to give poll­sters the response they seemed to be look­ing for. As a mat­ter of fact, respon­dents reg­u­lar­ly troll researchers in polling and sur­veys – espe­cial­ly when they are asked whether or not they sub­scribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a con­spir­a­cy that held that Barack Oba­ma was born out­side of the US and was legal­ly inel­i­gi­ble to serve as pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States).”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia. The arti­cle is a few weeks old but quite good and not par­tic­u­lar­ly time-sen­si­tive.
  5. The Seeds of Polit­i­cal Vio­lence Are Being Sown in Church (David French, The Dis­patch): “Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, despite its immense size, is about as far from elite Amer­i­can cul­ture as Mer­cury is from Mars. And this means it’s quite dis­tant from elite Evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture as well. Right-wing blue-check the­olo­gians and pas­tors who speak dis­dain­ful­ly of warn­ings about Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism because it’s not some­thing they see in their church­es nev­er dark­en the door of a Pen­te­costal church.” I think French gets it a lit­tle wrong here (there is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic church­es, and even more sig­nif­i­cant­ly between denom­i­na­tion­al and non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al ones). Still, French used to be an Assem­blies of God youth pas­tor(!) and so he is not speak­ing of some­thing he does­n’t under­stand. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. Why Amer­i­ca Has So Few Doc­tors (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “Imag­ine you were plan­ning a con­spir­a­cy to lim­it the num­ber of doc­tors in Amer­i­ca. Cer­tain­ly, you’d make sure to have a cost­ly, lengthy cre­den­tial­ing sys­tem. You would also tell politi­cians that Amer­i­ca has too many doc­tors already. That way, you could pur­pose­ful­ly con­strain the num­ber of med­ical-school stu­dents. You might freeze or slash fund­ing for res­i­den­cies and med­ical schol­ar­ships. You’d fight pro­pos­als to allow nurs­es to do the work of physi­cians. And because none of this would stop for­eign-trained doc­tors from slip­ping into the coun­try and com­mit­ting the crime of help­ing sick peo­ple get bet­ter, you’d throw in some rules that made it oner­ous for immi­grant doc­tors, espe­cial­ly from neigh­bor­ing coun­tries Mex­i­co and Cana­da, to do their job.” The orig­i­nal title was bet­ter: Why Does the US Make it so Hard to be a Doc­tor?
  7. What do stu­dents’ beliefs about God have to do with grades and going to col­lege? (Ilana Hor­witz, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “In inter­views, reli­gious teens over and over men­tion life goals of par­ent­hood, altru­ism and serv­ing God – pri­or­i­ties that I argue make them less intent on attend­ing as high­ly selec­tive a col­lege as they could. This aligns with pre­vi­ous research show­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tant women attend col­leges that less selec­tive than oth­er women do because they do not tend to view college’s main pur­pose as career advance­ment.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of Jew­ish stud­ies at Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty. Over­all inter­est­ing, although she does­n’t com­ment on two fac­tors which I think are quite sig­nif­i­cant: reli­gious stu­dents often view selec­tive col­leges as inim­i­cal to faith, and stu­dents are often torn between pres­ti­gious col­leges and less selec­tive reli­gious col­leges (I have per­son­al­ly spo­ken to sev­er­al Stan­ford stu­dents who were torn between Stan­ford and Wheaton).
    • Relat­ed? Mar­riage Made Me Let Go of My Dreams. Good. (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Many believe that the pur­pose of mar­riage is self-actu­al­iza­tion. We find the part­ner who will come along­side us and help us become what we have always dreamed we would be. Con­verse­ly, we may think that a poten­tial spouse who would get in the way of our dreams is the wrong per­son for us. What if mar­riage is meant to be some­thing else?” This is very good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Mag­i­cal Think­ing (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Build­ing a com­put­er is pre­cise­ly anal­o­gous to putting togeth­er a bit of mag­i­cal sleight of hand. It is a clever exer­cise in sim­u­la­tion, noth­ing more. And the con­vinc­ing­ness of the sim­u­la­tion is as com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant in the one case as it is in the oth­er. Say­ing ‘Gee, AI pro­grams can do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is intel­li­gence!’ is like say­ing ‘Gee, Penn and Teller do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is mag­ic!’” Fes­er is one of my favorite philoso­phers. First shared in vol­ume 197. I remem­ber one CS grad stu­dent strong­ly dis­lik­ing this arti­cle when I first shared. I share it again regard­less

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 315

some extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ing arti­cles this week — high­ly rec­om­mend­ed

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.

Today’s num­ber is 315, which is north­west when mea­sured on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only­Fans and the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion (Samuel D. James, First Things): “If you look care­ful­ly, you can see how sobri­quets such as ‘sex work­er’ give away the game. The con­tem­po­rary lib­er­at­ed social order is an order of work­ers: naked bod­ies labor­ing round the clock, sac­ri­fic­ing dig­ni­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to nib­ble the crumbs that fall from Big Tech’s table. Our civilization’s efforts to com­mod­i­fy sex­u­al­i­ty can­not deliv­er what they promise. It is impos­si­ble to make sex a prod­uct or sub­scrip­tion; the clos­est thing is human traf­fick­ing, which, as it turns out, is a fea­ture and not a bug of the adult con­tent indus­try.” Straight fire.
  2. The World Is Cat­e­chiz­ing Us Whether We Real­ize It or Not (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “It is worth remem­ber­ing David Well’s famous def­i­n­i­tion: world­li­ness is what­ev­er makes right­eous­ness look strange and sin look nor­mal. Here’s the real­i­ty fac­ing every Chris­t­ian in the West: the mon­ey, pow­er, and pres­tige of the main­stream media, big time sports, big busi­ness, big tech, and almost all the insti­tu­tions of edu­ca­tion and enter­tain­ment are invest­ed in mak­ing sin look nor­mal.”
  3. Nike’s End of Men (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “For all the talk of a racial reck­on­ing with­in major indus­tries, Nike’s main prob­lem is this: It’s a com­pa­ny built on mas­culin­i­ty, most specif­i­cal­ly Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambi­tions, scan­dals, and intel­lec­tu­al trends, Nike finds mas­culin­i­ty prob­lem­at­ic enough to loud­ly reject.” This is WAY more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  4. Tet­lock and the Tal­iban (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “I have a PhD in polit­i­cal sci­ence with a focus on inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. Most peo­ple in my posi­tion would tell you that you should give my opin­ions on my top­ic of exper­tise more weight because of my cre­den­tials. I believe if any­thing, you should hold my degree against me, as get­ting a PhD is prob­a­bly the most inef­fi­cient way to under­stand a top­ic, and a per­son seek­ing that cre­den­tial has shown that they don’t under­stand that. I think I’ve been right on Afghanistan and oth­er Amer­i­can inter­ven­tions because of good intel­lec­tu­al habits, includ­ing a gen­uine con­cern with what is true. But that has lit­tle to do with any train­ing I got from polit­i­cal sci­ence.” This piece is quite good. I feel like I should add a dis­claimer like, “Warn­ing: aca­d­e­m­ic heresy ahead.”
  5. ‘When My Satire Becomes Pop­u­lar, I Must Ask, What Is the Prob­lem?’ (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[Pop­u­lar satirists] can’t say, ‘I’m call­ing out pow­er.’ No, you are pow­er. Satirists must inter­ro­gate their own posi­tion­al­i­ty. I try to say, ‘How am I impli­cat­ed in this thing per­son­al­ly?’ Because satire nev­er used to be pop­u­lar.… So when my satire becomes pop­u­lar, I must ask, What is the prob­lem? Why are there so many peo­ple that are com­fort­able with my work?” A very per­cep­tive inter­view with Elnathan John. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  6. Hos­pi­tals and Insur­ers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why. (Sarah Kliff & Josh Katz, New York Times): “This year, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment ordered hos­pi­tals to begin pub­lish­ing a prized secret: a com­plete list of the prices they nego­ti­ate with pri­vate insur­ers.… data from the hos­pi­tals that have com­plied hints at why the pow­er­ful indus­tries want­ed this infor­ma­tion to remain hid­den.” This is reveal­ing and irri­tat­ing.
  7. About Afghanistan:
    • We Must Learn From Our Defeat (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “We must learn the lessons of our fail­ure with great urgency. Amer­i­can pri­ma­cy has insu­lat­ed Amer­i­ca from the pains of our defeat. This will not be true for much longer. As I type these words my nation hur­tles towards a dark and uncer­tain future. The chal­lenge posed by an ambi­tious and revi­sion­ist Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Chi­na dwarfs any prob­lem a move­ment of illit­er­ate pop­py farm­ers could cre­ate. We have wast­ed the prof­its of our imperi­um away; in this more fee­ble state we now con­front the chal­lenge of a cen­tu­ry. We must not face it armed with the dys­func­tion of our past two decades. We must relearn how to be seri­ous.”
    • US spe­cial oper­a­tions vets car­ry out dar­ing mis­sion to save Afghan allies (James Gor­don Meek, ABC News): “The Afghan oper­a­tors, assets, inter­preters and their fam­i­lies were known as ‘pas­sen­gers’ and they were being guid­ed remote­ly by ‘shep­herds,’ who are, in most cas­es their loy­al for­mer U.S. spe­cial oper­a­tions forces and CIA com­rades and com­man­ders, accord­ing to chat room com­mu­ni­ca­tions viewed by ABC News.… Look­ing back at an effort that saved at least, by their count, 630 Afghan lives, Red­man expressed deep frus­tra­tion ‘that our own gov­ern­ment did­n’t do this. We did what we should do, as Amer­i­cans.’ ” Amaz­ing.
    • Three major net­works devot­ed a full five min­utes to Afghanistan in 2020 (Jim Lobe, Respon­si­ble State­craft): “If the U.S. gov­ern­ment was caught up short by the dra­mat­ic denoue­ment of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, view­ers of the three major net­works must have been tak­en entire­ly by sur­prise. Out of a com­bined 14,000-plus min­utes of the nation­al evening news broad­cast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five min­utes were devot­ed to Afghanistan…”
    • Let’s Not Pre­tend That the Way We With­drew From Afghanistan Was the Prob­lem (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “I will not pre­tend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But nei­ther do a lot of peo­ple dom­i­nat­ing the air­waves right now. And the con­fi­dent pro­nounce­ments to the con­trary over the past two weeks leave me wor­ried that Amer­i­ca has learned lit­tle. We are still hold­ing not just to the illu­sion of our con­trol, but to the illu­sion of our knowl­edge.”
    • The eco­nom­ics of Tal­iban finance (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “An exam­ple of Islamist gov­er­nance can be found on the stretch of road from Kab­ul to the Mile 78 bor­der cross­ing in south-west Farah province that bor­ders Iran. The road has more than 25 gov­ern­ment check­points and a fee is charged at mul­ti­ple points on the jour­ney. By con­trast, the Tal­iban who police the same road have far few­er check­points and give a receipt, so only a sin­gle pay­ment is nec­es­sary.” Very inter­est­ing, sum­ma­riz­ing a pay­walled piece.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 300

some of the arti­cles have high­er-qual­i­ty argu­ments than the norm

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 300, which is how many Spar­tans it takes to fend off a Per­sian army.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Men Behave Bad­ly — A Review (Rob Hen­der­son, Quil­lette): “Intrigu­ing­ly, men and women con­verge in their answers when asked what per­cent­age of men would be will­ing to com­mit rape. Women esti­mate that about one-third of men would com­mit rape if there were no con­se­quences, and about one-third of men report that they would com­mit rape if they believed they could get away with it.” The author is a PhD can­di­date at Cam­bridge review­ing a book by a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Proof That Polit­i­cal Priv­i­lege Is Harm­ful for Chris­tian­i­ty (Nilay Saiya, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a peer-reviewed study pub­lished this month in the jour­nal Soci­ol­o­gy of Reli­gion, my coau­thor and I chal­lenge the per­ceived wis­dom that edu­ca­tion and afflu­ence spell Christianity’s demise. In our sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of a glob­al sam­ple of 166 coun­tries from 2010 to 2020, we find that the most impor­tant deter­mi­nant of Chris­t­ian vital­i­ty is the extent to which gov­ern­ments give offi­cial sup­port to Chris­tian­i­ty through their laws and poli­cies. How­ev­er, it is not in the way devout believ­ers might expect.”
  3. The Redemp­tion of Justin Bieber (Zach Baron, GQ): “And then there is God. If you ask Chance the Rap­per why he and his friend seem so hap­py in an indus­try that tends to grind peo­ple to dust, he will answer with­out hes­i­ta­tion. ‘Both of us, our secret sauce is Jesus,’ Chance says. ‘Justin doesn’t fake the funk. He goes to Jesus with his prob­lems, he goes to Jesus with his suc­cess­es. He calls me just to talk about Jesus.’ ”
  4. In Decid­ing Ful­ton v. Philadel­phia, the Supreme Court Should Remem­ber That Fos­ter Care Is for the Chil­dren (James Dwyer, Nation­al Review): “But fos­ter care is not a pub­lic accom­mo­da­tion nor a ser­vice to ‘the pub­lic.’ Chil­dren are not gener­ic goods for sale (like donuts or cups of cof­fee), to which every­one has an equal right. Instead, when the gov­ern­ment is mak­ing deci­sions on behalf of fos­ter chil­dren, it is oblig­at­ed to act only in that child’s best inter­est.” The author is a law prof at William and Mary and this arti­cle is real­ly good.
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed:
    • COVID-19 Rewired Our Brains (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “At some point, the pan­dem­ic — the pro­vi­sion­al and prac­ti­cal judg­ments in favor of cau­tion that can jus­ti­fy restric­tive behav­iors — became an unshake­able moral pur­pose. Actu­al weigh­ing of risks went out the win­dow: There’s a dead­ly dis­ease out there; my actions can con­tribute to the end of the dis­ease or to its spread­ing in per­pe­tu­ity. ” This artic­u­lates some­thing I’ve dim­ly felt. Very good.
    • The Lib­er­als Who Can’t Quit Lock­down (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “But per­son­al deci­sions dur­ing the coro­n­avirus cri­sis are fraught because they seem sym­bol­ic of people’s broad­er val­ue sys­tems. When vac­ci­nat­ed adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re work­ing through the trau­ma of the past year, in which the bro­ken­ness of America’s med­ical sys­tem was so evi­dent. When they keep their kids out of play­grounds and urge friends to stay dis­tanced at small out­door pic­nics, they are con­tin­u­ing the spir­it of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lone­ly asceti­cism. For many peo­ple, this kind of behav­ior is a form of good cit­i­zen­ship. That’s a hard idea to give up.”
    • Believe Sci­ence: Get Vac­ci­nat­ed. Then Relax. (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, once we are stuck inside it is very hard to unstick our­selves. I’m try­ing to remind myself of this truth when I find myself want­i­ng to berate friends who, ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, look at me with crazy eyes when I sug­gest com­ing over for din­ner. PTSD might be too strong a descrip­tor, but it’s not so far off either.”
    • Data Shows White Evan­gel­i­cals And Catholics More Like­ly to Get Vac­cine Than ‘Nones’ and Gen­er­al Pub­lic (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…when the sam­ple is bro­ken down into the three of the largest reli­gious groups: White evan­gel­i­cals, White Catholics and the reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed, some dis­par­i­ties begin to emerge. It’s note­wor­thy that White Chris­tians were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to get the vac­cine than the gen­er­al pub­lic between Jan­u­ary and April. In the lat­est wave of the sur­vey, near­ly 60% of White Catholics had been vac­ci­nat­ed and just about half of White evan­gel­i­cals said the same. It was the reli­gious “nones” that were lag­ging far behind, with only 31% indi­cat­ing that they had received one dose.” That is def­i­nite­ly not the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from the media, but it is the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from my friends. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Patents are Not the Prob­lem! (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Patents are not the prob­lem. All of the vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers are try­ing to increase sup­ply as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Bil­lions of dos­es are being produced–more than ever before in the his­to­ry of the world. Licens­es are wide­ly avail­able.… Plas­tic bags are a big­ger bot­tle­neck than patents. The US embar­go on vac­cine sup­plies to India was pre­cise­ly that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion used the DPA to pri­or­i­tize things like biore­ac­tor bags and fil­ters to US sup­pli­ers and that meant that India’s Serum Insti­tute was hav­ing trou­ble get­ting its pro­duc­tion lines ready for Novavax. Cure­Vac, anoth­er poten­tial mRNA vac­cine, is also find­ing it dif­fi­cult to find sup­plies due to US restric­tions (which means sup­plies are short every­where).” Loose­ly relat­ed, but such a glo­ri­ous rant I had to share it.
    • The ori­gin of COVID: Did peo­ple or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? (Nicholas Wade, Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists): “Sci­ence is sup­pos­ed­ly a self-cor­rect­ing com­mu­ni­ty of experts who con­stant­ly check each other’s work. So why didn’t oth­er virol­o­gists point out that the Ander­sen group’s argu­ment was full of absurd­ly large holes? Per­haps because in today’s uni­ver­si­ties speech can be very cost­ly. Careers can be destroyed for step­ping out of line. Any virol­o­gist who chal­lenges the community’s declared view risks hav­ing his next grant appli­ca­tion turned down by the pan­el of fel­low virol­o­gists that advis­es the gov­ern­ment grant dis­tri­b­u­tion agency.” Very thor­ough, very read­able, very per­sua­sive. There is a real chance humans are respon­si­ble for COVID and we need to inves­ti­gate it.
  6. How the Pen­ta­gon Start­ed Tak­ing U.F.O.s Seri­ous­ly (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “Despite the fact that most adults car­ry around excep­tion­al­ly good cam­era tech­nol­o­gy in their pock­ets, most U.F.O. pho­tos and videos remain mad­den­ing­ly indis­tinct, but the for­mer Pen­ta­gon offi­cial implied that the gov­ern­ment pos­sess­es stark visu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion; Eli­zon­do and Mel­lon have said the same thing.”
  7. I Became a Moth­er at 25, and I’m Not Sor­ry I Didn’t Wait (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “But what of hav­ing chil­dren — or get­ting mar­ried, for that mat­ter — before estab­lish­ing one­self? That is: What to say to the young per­son who might con­sid­er those kinds of com­mit­ments if not for the final­i­ty of it all, the sense that she may be mak­ing some­body else before know­ing who she her­self real­ly is?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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 293

fea­tur­ing sev­er­al per­spec­tives about the mur­ders in Atlanta

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 293 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Arti­cle relat­ed to vio­lence against Asian-Amer­i­cans:
    • Reli­gion, Race, and the Atlanta Mur­ders (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slow­ly untan­gled. There are ele­ments relat­ed to pornog­ra­phy, sex traf­fick­ing, reli­gion, evan­gel­i­cal­ism, South­ern Bap­tists, and many oth­ers just out­side our periph­ery. But nei­ther the com­plex­i­ty of this event nor the trib­al­ism of our cul­tur­al dis­course must not allow us to avoid self-reflec­tion and scruti­ny. We must con­front the real­i­ty that some­thing is hor­ri­bly wrong in our midst when a per­son kills to ‘elim­i­nate’ temp­ta­tion.”
    • We Need to Put a Name to This Vio­lence (Jay Caspi­an Kang, New York Times): “There is no shared his­to­ry between, say, Thai immi­grants who saw images of one of their own attacked in San Fran­cis­co, and the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion of Oak­land alarmed by the assault in Chinatown.Asian-American iden­ti­ty is frac­tured and often inco­her­ent because it assumes kin­ship between peo­ple who do not speak the same lan­guage, and, in many cas­es, dis­like one anoth­er.” This was writ­ten before the Atlanta mur­ders and is dis­cussing the trend wave of vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly.
    • The Mud­dled His­to­ry of Anti-Asian Vio­lence (Hua Hsu, New York­er): “Some have won­dered if these hor­rif­ic, viral videos con­sti­tute a wave, or if they were just ran­dom inci­dents. When your con­cerns have gone unrec­og­nized for decades, it’s under­stand­able why some with­in the Asian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty remain so invest­ed in using these high­ly vis­i­ble moments as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to call atten­tion to hate, even if the inci­dents seem more var­ied than that. The wave in ques­tion isn’t just two or three inci­dents.” Also writ­ten before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Racial­iz­ing The Atlanta Mas­sage Par­lor Killings (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It is strik­ing to see how quick­ly our media has racial­ized the nar­ra­tive of the hor­rif­ic mur­ders at the Geor­gia mas­sage par­lors. From what we know so far, the alleged mur­der­er was a young man tor­ment­ed by his com­pul­sive sex­u­al desires. He vis­it­ed mas­sage par­lors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depend­ed on to grat­i­fy his desires. From all the avail­able evi­dence, these killings were the misog­y­nis­tic act of a sex­u­al­ly depraved man.” As is often the case with Dreher, some of the best mate­r­i­al is in the updates at the end (usu­al­ly a com­ment from a read­er that Dreher thought sig­nif­i­cant).
    • When The Nar­ra­tive Replaces The News (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Mass killers, if they are moti­vat­ed by big­otry or hate, tend to let the world know… This mass mur­der­er in Atlanta actu­al­ly denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evi­dence for it — and that has been true from the very start.”
    • The Media Got It Wrong: Police Cap­tain Did­n’t Say the Atlanta Spa Killer Was Hav­ing a ‘Bad Day’ (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “A police offi­cer excus­ing Long’s actions as mere­ly the result of him hav­ing a ‘bad day’ would indeed be con­temptible. But that’s not what Bak­er did. In fact, many of the peo­ple so infu­ri­at­ed about the quote were mis­led by Rupar’s edit of the video. The full video (the rel­e­vant sec­tion starts at about 13:50) makes clear that Bak­er was not pro­vid­ing his own com­men­tary, but rather sum­ma­riz­ing what Long had told the inves­ti­ga­tors.”
  2. Third Places and the Hori­zons of Male Friend­ships (Ryan McCormick, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, typ­i­cal male friend­ship is dif­fer­ent from typ­i­cal, con­tem­po­rary female friend­ship. A fail­ure to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent ways that men and women form inti­mate bonds in friend­ship is what breeds so much con­fu­sion and leads to the mis­di­ag­no­sis of ‘tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty.’” I will add one extra lay­er of diag­no­sis that the author did­n’t address: many in our cul­ture have a hor­ror of male-only spaces. How are we sur­prised to dis­cov­er a dearth of male friend­ships when we view the very exis­tence of mas­cu­line com­mu­ni­ties as evi­dence of some­thing amiss?
  3. The False and Exag­ger­at­ed Claims Still Being Spread About the Capi­tol Riot (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Despite this alleged bru­tal mur­der tak­ing place in one of the most sur­veilled build­ings on the plan­et, filled that day with hun­dreds of cell­phones tap­ing the events, nobody saw video of it. No pho­tographs depict­ed it. To this day, no autop­sy report has been released. No details from any offi­cial source have been pro­vid­ed.”
    • Fol­low-up: As the Insur­rec­tion Nar­ra­tive Crum­bles, Democ­rats Cling to it More Des­per­ate­ly Than Ever (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “As I detailed sev­er­al weeks ago, so many of the most har­row­ing and wide­spread media claims about the Jan­u­ary 6 riot proved to be total fab­ri­ca­tions. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Bri­an Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extin­guish­er. No pro­test­er brought zip-ties with them as some pre­med­i­tat­ed plot to kid­nap mem­bers of Con­gress (two riot­ers found them on a table inside). There’s no evi­dence any­one intend­ed to assas­si­nate Mike Pence, Mitt Rom­ney or any­one else.”
    • Relat­ed: Two are charged in the assault of a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died after the Jan. 6 riot. (Katie Ben­ner and Adam Gold­man, New York Times): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment has charged two men in the assault on Bri­an D. Sick­nick, a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died the day after he fought riot­ers storm­ing the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial briefed on the case and court doc­u­ments.… It is not clear whether Offi­cer Sick­nick died because of his expo­sure to the spray.”
  4. Covid’s Par­ti­san Errors (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “ ‘Repub­li­cans con­sis­tent­ly under­es­ti­mate risks, while Democ­rats con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate them.’  …The rea­sons for these ide­o­log­i­cal bias­es aren’t com­plete­ly clear, but they are not shock­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tives tend to be more hos­tile to behav­ior restric­tions and to sci­en­tif­ic research. And lib­er­als some­times over­re­act to social prob­lems.”
  5. Tim­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 index case in Hubei province (Sci­ence, Jonathan Pekar et al):  “Empir­i­cal obser­va­tion through­out the SARS-CoV­‑2 pan­dem­ic has shown the out­sized role of super­spread­ing events in the prop­a­ga­tion of SARS-CoV­‑2, where­in the aver­age infect­ed per­son does not trans­mit the virus. Our results sug­gest the same dynam­ics like­ly influ­enced the ini­tial estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2 in humans, as only 29.7% of sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics from the pri­ma­ry analy­sis went on to estab­lish self-sus­tain­ing epi­demics. The remain­ing 70.3% of epi­demics went extinct.… Fur­ther­more, the large and high­ly con­nect­ed con­tact net­works char­ac­ter­iz­ing urban areas seem crit­i­cal to the estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2. When we sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics where the num­ber of con­nec­tions was reduced by 50% or 75% (with­out rescal­ing per-con­tact trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty), to reflect emer­gence in a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty, the epi­demics went extinct 94.5% or 99.6% of the time, respec­tive­ly.”
    • This is real­ly inter­est­ing. The researchers are large­ly at UCSD. One impli­ca­tion is that there are a LOT more ani­mal-to-human COVID-like infec­tions that sim­ply nev­er make the leap to becom­ing wide­spread. Kind of like music: there are a ton of great musi­cians who just nev­er catch their big break. With­out super­spread­ers, this kind of pan­dem­ic appears unlike­ly. I hope researchers can find a way to address what­ev­er caus­es some­one to be a super­spread­er.
  6. Rais­ing Beef Cat­tle (Tom Blan­ton, Quil­lette): “It is by cher­ry-pick­ing images of the times of con­fine­ment from around the world that the grue­some image of ‘fac­to­ry farms’ is cre­at­ed. Often the images are tak­en from coun­tries that don’t have the human­i­tar­i­an reg­u­la­tions that most West­ern nations have.… If those gen­uine­ly con­cerned for the suf­fer­ing of ani­mals could find it with­in them­selves to rec­og­nize that it is not immoral to slaugh­ter ani­mals humane­ly for food, they would find many allies for the cause of reduc­ing ani­mal suf­fer­ing amongst the peo­ple who raise and work with these ani­mals on a dai­ly basis.”
  7. Could It Be… Genes? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “This is an arti­cle about how fam­i­ly influ­ences chil­dren with­out a con­sid­er­a­tion of the most direct and pow­er­ful way. The words ‘gene’ and ‘genes’ and ‘genet­ic’ do not appear in this paper. Nei­ther do ‘her­i­ta­ble’ or ‘hered­i­ty’ or ‘hered­i­tary.’ The con­cept of the trans­fer of genet­ic infor­ma­tion from par­ent to off­spring sim­ply does not exist in this men­tal space… in a paper about how fam­i­lies influ­ence the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their chil­dren. I would call this odd, but it’s par for the course in social sci­ence research.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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.