Tag: history

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 515: go deep in community, plus missionaries with shotguns

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Com­pound Inter­est in an Atten­tion Econ­o­my (Austin Car­ty, Front Porch Repub­lic): “The pre­vail­ing log­ic of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can cul­ture sug­gests that the pur­suit of new expe­ri­ence is, in and of itself, a nec­es­sary form of cap­i­tal with­out which one is ipso fac­to barred from the pos­si­bil­i­ty of liv­ing a rich life. But my own expe­ri­ence, cor­rob­o­rat­ed by many of the peo­ple I’ve talked with, sug­gests that the pur­suit of new expe­ri­ence is, just as often as not, the cause of our despair not the cure; for to keep shift­ing atten­tion from one thing to the next is almost always to drain one’s spir­i­tu­al and men­tal and emo­tion­al bank account, not to deliv­er a mean­ing­ful return. Mean­while, con­tra pop­u­lar opin­ion, there is some­thing life-giv­ing about root­ing one­self in a sin­gle community—about invest­ing our­selves in a mutu­al fund, so to speak—and watch­ing the invest­ment slow­ly grow at com­pound inter­est.”
  2. ‘A com­put­er, a radio, a drone and a shot­gun’: how mis­sion­ar­ies are reach­ing out to Brazil’s iso­lat­ed peo­ples (John Reid and Daniel Biaset­to, The Guardian): “Mis­sion­ary activ­i­ty now threat­ens 13 of the 29 iso­lat­ed peo­ples that Brazil offi­cial­ly recog­nis­es as defin­i­tive­ly con­firmed, accord­ing to the fed­er­al prosecutor’s office.”
    • This was actu­al­ly a pret­ty encour­ag­ing arti­cle over­all, despite the use of lan­guage like “threat­ens.”
  3. Trend­ing thoughts about Gaza:
    • The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Cri­sis in Gaza (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “Dis­cussing these find­ings, The Free Press’s Haviv Ret­tig Gur high­light­ed Spitzer’s key chal­lenge in con­vinc­ing Israelis that Gaza is indeed fac­ing a hunger cri­sis: ‘It’s hard to con­vince Israelis of that because lit­er­al­ly every­thing said to them for 22 months on this top­ic has been a fic­tion.’ ”
    • Is Gaza Starv­ing? Search­ing for the Truth in an Infor­ma­tion War. (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake mas­sacres and rapes. The country’s actions are lied about almost dai­ly by peo­ple describ­ing them­selves as jour­nal­ists, ana­lysts, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Unit­ed Nations, often using sta­tis­tics that are them­selves untrue. For peo­ple here in Israel, the con­stant bar­rage of libel—like the more lit­er­al bar­rages of rockets—is sim­ply a fact of life. After years of this, aver­age Israelis do what peo­ple do when con­front­ed with lunatics on the New York sub­way: They tune it out.… a senior fig­ure in the Israeli mil­i­tary told one of my col­leagues at the end of last week that while there isn’t mass star­va­tion as claimed by pro-Hamas pro­pa­gan­da, Gaza real­ly is on the brink this time.”
    • How Israel’s War Became Unjust (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…Israel has made a strate­gic choice, try­ing to sep­a­rate food dis­tri­b­u­tion from a sys­tem that it argues Hamas was exploit­ing for its own pur­pos­es. But if your strate­gic choice leads to chil­dren dying of star­va­tion when the food is avail­able to feed them, then a civ­i­lized nation has to make a dif­fer­ent choice — even if that makes things eas­i­er for its ene­mies to some degree.”
  4. Till Words Do Us Part (Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dis­patch): “Clas­si­cal­ly, the mar­riage vows are not about the par­tic­u­lar cou­ple stand­ing at the altar—they’re about the insti­tu­tion the cou­ple is choos­ing to enter. Clas­si­cal vows (for bet­ter, for worse, etc) have last­ed with only minor revi­sions for a thou­sand years. They are intend­ed to suit every cou­ple, uncus­tomized, and they enu­mer­ate the promis­es that must be kept for a mar­riage to be a mar­riage. But cus­tomized vows fre­quent­ly min­gle seri­ous promis­es with ones that can­not or should not be kept.”
  5. The Nat­ur­al Law Is Not Enough. The Nat­ur­al Law Is All We Have. (Andrew T. Walk­er, Pub­lic Dis­course): “…any attempt to con­struct a moral and polit­i­cal order must grap­ple with two com­pet­ing truths: the ima­go Dei makes moral rea­son­ing pos­si­ble, but orig­i­nal sin ensures that moral rea­son­ing will often be con­test­ed, sup­pressed, cor­rupt­ed, or ignored. This is the para­dox of our moment. The nat­ur­al law is writ­ten on every heart (Romans 2:15), but hearts are wound­ed and rea­son cloud­ed. We have access to moral truth, but not con­sen­sus. Hence, the nat­ur­al law is not enough. But it is still the best we have.”
  6. Desider­a­ta for a Protes­tant The­ol­o­gy of the Body (Sub­stack): “But I think there are, in fact, dis­tinc­tive­ly Protes­tant ways to approach the ques­tion of sex­u­al­i­ty and repro­duc­tion- and I sus­pect some of the dearth of con­ver­sa­tion about these top­ics reflects a cer­tain Protes­tant sen­si­bil­i­ty. It also reflects the bound­aries of what might be pos­si­ble with a Protes­tant view. So here are a few ‘desider­a­ta’- a fan­cy way of say­ing ‘things we ought to con­sid­er’, in order to build a Protes­tant the­ol­o­gy of the body.”
    • The author is a the­olo­gian at Gor­don-Con­well.
  7. How the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing Helped Make Amer­i­ca (Thomas Kidd, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­cans might assume that the height of their nation’s reli­gious com­mit­ment was around its Found­ing. Some like­wise fig­ure that spir­i­tu­al­ly, it’s been going down­hill ever since. But in many ways, Amer­i­ca became increas­ing­ly reli­gious through the first half of the 19th cen­tu­ry.”
    • Kidd is one of the great­est liv­ing evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ri­ans.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 514: Jephthah, Europe, and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Jesus Is the Key to All Scrip­ture (Peter Lei­thart, First Things): “We’re incred­u­lous. ‘All things’ in Scrip­ture are ful­filled in him? Real­ly? Every­thing? Ehud thrust­ing a sword into obese Eglon? Jael crack­ing Sisera’s skull with a tent peg? David clip­ping and heap­ing up two hun­dred Philis­tine fore­skins? Jehu glee­ful­ly slaugh­ter­ing sons of Ahab? We dodge and backpedal, pro­tect­ing Jesus from his hermeneu­ti­cal excess. ‘Every episode and per­son con­tributes to the sto­ry of Jesus,’ we say. ‘But not every sin­gle per­son or event is direct­ly about Jesus.’ There’s some­thing to that, but it’s often a cop-out. And it keeps us from grasp­ing the height and depth of Jesus’s glo­ry. Jeph­thah is a test case.”
    • An engag­ing arti­cle with strong insights about Jeph­thah’s sto­ry.
  2. I Once Thought Euro­peans Lived as Well as Amer­i­cans. Not Any­more. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “I was shocked recent­ly to learn that more Euro­peans die of heat death—largely due to lack of air-conditioning—than Amer­i­cans die from gun­shot wounds. I’m not say­ing Amer­i­ca isn’t more dan­ger­ous in cer­tain ways: We have high­er non-gun mur­der rates and per­ilous weath­er pat­terns, among oth­er prob­lems. But it turns out Euro­pean bureau­cra­cy is lit­er­al­ly dead­ly.… Cir­ca 2025, my sub­jec­tive judg­ment is that Amer­i­can liv­ing stan­dards are 20 to 30 per­cent high­er than those in West­ern Europe. That dif­fer­ence is like­ly to grow.”
  3. Uni­ver­si­ty sus­pends EBF, Kairos after Title VI inves­ti­ga­tions (Francesca Pin­ney, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Fol­low­ing stu­dent com­plaints to Stanford’s Title VI Office, the Uni­ver­si­ty deter­mined that both hous­es vio­lat­ed Title VI, the fed­er­al law that pro­hibits harass­ment and dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race, col­or or nation­al ori­gin in edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions.”
    • The details are kind of wild and may shock you if you’re not used to Stan­ford rhetoric. One stu­dent com­ment­ed, “Tbh, that’s what most of NSO and my first quar­ter at Stan­ford felt like, and I was def­i­nite­ly told sim­i­lar things by folks in my dorm, etc.”
  4. Some reflec­tions on exer­cise:
    • Don’t Skip Leg Day or the Lord’s Day (Sean DeMars, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Exer­cise pre­vents me from falling into two seri­ous sins: sloth and idol­a­try. When I stop car­ing about my body, I drift toward pas­siv­i­ty and excuse-mak­ing, and I become sloth­ful. When I over­pri­or­i­tize fit­ness, I start build­ing my iden­ti­ty around per­for­mance or image, which is a form of idol­a­try. But when fit­ness is teth­ered to call­ing and is viewed as fuel for long-term min­istry, exer­cise finds its right­ful place. It’s not ulti­mate, but it’s impor­tant. The heart­beat of this lit­tle the­ol­o­gy of exer­cise is that redeemed bod­ies should be used in the ser­vice of joy, love, and mis­sion.”
    • How Exer­cise Fights Anx­i­ety and Depres­sion (Erik Vance, New York Times): “Decades of research have estab­lished that exer­cise has a pos­i­tive effect on men­tal health. In stud­ies of patients with mild to mod­er­ate depres­sion, for exam­ple, a wide range of exer­cise reg­i­mens has been shown to be as effec­tive as med­ica­tions like SSRIs (though the best results gen­er­al­ly involve a com­bi­na­tion of the two).”
  5. Inclu­siv­i­ty In Health­care Should Not Be Val­ued Above Our Para­mount Man­date: First, Do No Harm (Jan­havi Nilekani, Sub­stack): “In the spring of 2022, a 50-year-old grand­fa­ther in North Car­oli­na decid­ed that he want­ed his daughter’s new­born to suck­le at his nip­ple.… Because this par­tic­u­lar man iden­ti­fied as a trans­gen­der woman, doc­tors and aca­d­e­mics from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port­ed his ‘unique desire’. Indeed, they pub­lished a research paper in Breast­feed­ing Med­i­cine, pro­vid­ing details of the cock­tail of hor­mones and drugs they used. With these, he was able to pro­duce secre­tions, that were admin­is­tered to his grand­child. The paper does not have a sin­gle sen­tence about the poten­tial impact on the grand­child. It is an unimag­in­able breach of ethics. An adult male’s desire to be affirmed as a woman should nev­er be met by feed­ing an exper­i­men­tal drug-infused sub­stance to new­borns with no capac­i­ty to con­sent.… Such exper­i­ments are pos­si­ble only because med­i­cine, in the push towards inclu­siv­i­ty, is for­get­ting our own core val­ue: first, do no harm.”
    • Shar­ing most­ly for the shock­ing intro­duc­to­ry sto­ry. The entire thing is long and prob­a­bly does not cov­er new ground for reg­u­lar read­ers. It is well-argued, though.
  6. The Per­verse Eco­nom­ics of Assist­ed Sui­cide (Louise Per­ry, New York Times): “There is a very clear prob­lem with assist­ed sui­cide in its new guise: The state, with its almighty pow­er, is tasked with both pay­ing for the sup­port of the old and dis­abled and reg­u­lat­ing their dying.… organs of the state that are tasked with solv­ing an impos­si­ble finan­cial prob­lem — how to pay for more old peo­ple with less mon­ey — will be inex­orably tugged toward what looks to a mind­less bureau­cra­cy like a ‘solu­tion.’ ”
  7. Rea­son, Rev­e­la­tion, and Rev­o­lu­tion (Joseph Locon­te, The Dis­patch): “Colo­nial assump­tions about nat­ur­al rights, human equal­i­ty, reli­gious lib­er­ty, gov­ern­ment by con­sent, the right of rev­o­lu­tion: Each drew heav­i­ly from Locke’s writ­ings, which were con­sid­ered manda­to­ry read­ing for edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans. As we’ll see, the colonists were heirs of the Lock­ean tra­di­tion. As a result, free­dom, rea­son, and rev­e­la­tion formed a con­cep­tu­al trin­i­ty in the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. The pow­er­ful alliance of these ideas helps to explain the aston­ish­ing and endur­ing influ­ence of the Amer­i­can exam­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, non­sense talk about the mean­ing and legit­i­ma­cy of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment is almost as ingrained in the New Right as in the pro­gres­sive left.”
    • A strong defense of Locke against his crit­ics on the right. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor and a Chris­t­ian pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al.

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 500: faith, China, and Trump

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

This is the 500th time I’ve com­posed this email. I thought I might do some­thing spe­cial this week to com­mem­o­rate that mile­stone, but there are too many inter­est­ing arti­cles I’ve run across — this will a reg­u­lar install­ment. Enjoy!

Maybe when we get to vol­ume 520 — that will sig­ni­fy ten years of emails.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­cans Haven’t Found a Sat­is­fy­ing Alter­na­tive to Reli­gion (Lau­ren Jack­son, New York Times): “America’s sec­u­lar­iza­tion was an immense social trans­for­ma­tion. Has it left us bet­ter off? Peo­ple are unhap­pi­er than they’ve ever been and the coun­try is in an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness. It’s not just sec­u­lar­ism that’s to blame, but those with­out reli­gious affil­i­a­tion in par­tic­u­lar rank low­er on key met­rics of well-being. They feel less con­nect­ed to oth­ers, less spir­i­tu­al­ly at peace and they expe­ri­ence less awe and grat­i­tude reg­u­lar­ly.”
    • Unlocked. Note that this is not in the opin­ion sec­tion (some­what sur­pris­ing­ly, it is in the style sec­tion). The author is an ex-Mor­mon.
  2. Ross Douthat: Why It’s Log­i­cal to Believe in God (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “The book of Gen­e­sis begins with an admo­ni­tion: Fill the Earth, and sub­due it. We’ve done that. We have reached an inter­est­ing point in his­to­ry from a reli­gious point of view. And there’s a real­ly open question—where do we go next? Do we col­lapse? Do we go to the stars? Do we become tran­shu­man? Do we merge with the machines and so on? So, it’s a high-stakes moment. And if God exists and he has inten­tions for us, it’s real­ly impor­tant at a high-stakes moment to take those inten­tions into account. I think of peo­ple like Musk and Alt­man. The con­test for their lit­er­al souls is real­ly impor­tant to the whole future of the human race. If God exists, it’s a big moment. You want belief to win out over the alter­na­tives.”
  3. The Con­ven­tion­al Wis­dom Is That Chi­na Is Beat­ing Us. Non­sense. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “The bot­tom line is that the smartest enti­ties in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be West­ern but like­ly even Amer­i­can in their intel­lec­tu­al and ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions for some while to come.… Mov­ing to a world where the AIs are the smartest enti­ties in Chi­na, rather than the CCP, is for Chi­na a rad­i­cal change—and one the CCP is prob­a­bly very afraid of. Much of the legit­i­ma­cy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise man­ag­er of the Chi­nese lega­cy. But now it will be out­sourc­ing that man­age­ment to West­ern-based AI mod­els. From a West­ern geopo­lit­i­cal point of view, that could end up a lot bet­ter, and more effec­tive, than plant­i­ng a bunch of spies in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Chris Tomlin’s New Song Res­ur­rects The World’s Old­est Known Hymn (Bob Smi­etana, The Roys Report): “A new ver­sion of the Oxyrhynchus Hymn debuted last week, cour­tesy of a new trans­la­tion from Dick­son and help from Chris Tom­lin and Ben Field­ing, two of the most pop­u­lar mod­ern wor­ship song­writ­ers.… ‘I think the most the­o­log­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant thing is that it’s a hymn to the Trin­i­ty — Father, Son and Holy Spir­it, the cen­tu­ry before the Nicene Creed,’ he said.”
  5. Belief in an After­life is Increas­ing in the Unit­ed States (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “In that first data col­lec­tion in 1973, about 76% of folks believed in some­thing beyond this life. But by 1990, that fig­ure had crept up to just about 80% and it con­tin­ued to rise very slow­ly from there. Real­ly, from 2000 all the way through 2022, the esti­mates are all basi­cal­ly the same. Even today, the share of Amer­i­cans who believe in life after death is 82%. When peo­ple ask me, “Is the Unit­ed States a reli­gious coun­try?” This is the stat that I’m going to trot out.’ ”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. The Rot­ten Fruit of Oberge­fell: On the Kel­ly Lov­ing Act (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For the past ten years we have already held, as a nation, that the state defines mar­riage. Why then should the state not also get to define what a par­ent is or what good par­ent­ing is? The Kel­ly Lov­ing Act, in oth­er words, is an obvi­ous out­work­ing of the log­ic of Oberge­fell, the Supreme Court rul­ing that rede­fined mar­riage.”
  7. Trump is all over the news. Here are some things that caught my inter­est. Remem­ber that my shar­ing an arti­cle is not a sign that I agree with it com­plete­ly, it is a mere­ly a sign that I think it makes points or tells a sto­ry worth con­sid­er­ing. See the dis­claimers at the bot­tom: I assure you they are heart­felt.
    • Get Out by Good Fri­day, Feds Say to Afghan Chris­tians (John McCor­ma­ck, The Dis­patch): “Ahmad’s con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty after attend­ing a uni­ver­si­ty in Afghanistan led to his impris­on­ment by the Taliban—where he said he was beat­en and tor­tured via elec­tric shock—before fel­low Chris­tians were able to ran­som him from Tal­iban cap­tiv­i­ty. The same Chris­tians who got Ahmad out of prison then got him out of Afghanistan by help­ing him trav­el to Brazil. Ahmad tra­versed on foot the Dar­ién Gap that con­nects Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca for three days and ultimately—after pre­sent­ing him­self at the south­ern U.S. bor­der seek­ing asylum—made a home for him­self in Raleigh.…  Ahmad, like some oth­er Afghans legal­ly liv­ing in the Unit­ed States, received a let­ter from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty (DHS) telling him he must leave the coun­try by Good Fri­day.”
    • Prece­dent Trump (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It has been a dream of the left for ages to get rid of the tax-exempt sta­tus and rel­a­tive auton­o­my of reli­gious institutions—Christian uni­ver­si­ties, char­i­ties, hos­pi­tals, etc. If Trump suc­ceeds in mak­ing the IRS revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt sta­tus, based in no small part on per­son­al oppo­si­tion to what Har­vard teach­es, what will be the prin­ci­pled objec­tion to a Pres­i­dent Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez or Eliz­a­beth War­ren when the Eye of Mor­dor swings right­ward?”
    • No, the Pres­i­dent Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Rul­ing (Jeb Ruben­feld, The Free Press): “Due process is a bul­wark of the Con­sti­tu­tion and the rule of law, and the courts must not allow its vio­la­tion. But Trump oppo­nents, like Pro­fes­sor Sny­der, are mak­ing a mis­take when they try to paint this case as a mas­sive assault on due process. For now at least, this case is anoth­er exam­ple of the hyper­bole over a Trump run-in with the courts out­run­ning the facts of the case.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al law at Yale. I found this arti­cle reas­sur­ing in the abstract, while still being dis­pleased over the par­tic­u­lars of this case. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between deport­ing some­one from the coun­try and deport­ing them into a for­eign prison.
    • Inside the ‘Trop­i­cal Gulag’ in El Sal­vador Where U.S. Detainees Are Being Held (Annie Cor­re­al, New York Times): “Deaths and phys­i­cal abuse in CECOT remain undoc­u­ment­ed because of a lack of access to inmates or any­one who has been released, said Juani­ta Goe­ber­tus, Amer­i­c­as direc­tor at Human Rights Watch. But, she added, ‘Based on the tor­ture and mis­treat­ment we have doc­u­ment­ed in oth­er pris­ons in El Sal­vador, we have every rea­son to believe that peo­ple sent to CECOT are at high risk of abuse.’ The U.S. gov­ern­ment itself spot­light­ed atroc­i­ties in El Salvador’s pris­ons in 2023. At El Salvador’s two dozen oth­er jails, rights groups have doc­u­ment­ed sys­tem­at­ic tor­ture, forced con­fes­sions and what Noah Bul­lock, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Sal­vado­ran human rights group Cristos­al, calls ‘the inten­tion­al denial of access to basic neces­si­ties like food, water, health care, hygiene.’”
      • I find these alle­ga­tions plau­si­ble because of my belief in deprav­i­ty. Humans do bad things when they have peo­ple com­plete­ly under their con­trol, espe­cial­ly when there is lit­tle exter­nal over­sight or account­abil­i­ty. We may learn in time that the details are off, but the essen­tial com­plaint is almost cer­tain­ly cor­rect.
    • White House of Wor­ship: Chris­t­ian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump (Eliz­a­beth Dias & Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Rou­tine­ly, and often at Mr. Trump’s enthu­si­as­tic direc­tion, senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and allied pas­tors are infus­ing their brand of Chris­t­ian wor­ship into the work­ings of the White House itself, sug­gest­ing that his cam­paign promise to ‘bring back Chris­tian­i­ty’ is tak­ing tan­gi­ble root.… Mr. Trump’s team has host­ed brief­in­gs and lis­ten­ing ses­sions billed as oppor­tu­ni­ties for the lead­ers to share their par­tic­u­lar con­cerns, which have ranged wide­ly: reli­gious lib­er­ty, adop­tion and fos­ter care, the break­down of the nuclear fam­i­ly, human traf­fick­ing, urban pover­ty and anti­semitism, among oth­ers.”
    • All the President’s Pas­tors: Who’s Advis­ing Trump? (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pres­i­dent hasn’t pub­licly attend­ed a church ser­vice since his inau­gu­ra­tion day, he doesn’t hold mem­ber­ship in a par­tic­u­lar con­gre­ga­tion or denom­i­na­tion, he’s gone back and forth over whether he needs to ask for God’s for­give­ness, and he avoids speak­ing in detail about his per­son­al devo­tion­al life, so what we know about Trump’s faith comes large­ly from the pas­tors around him at the White House—starting with Paula White-Cain.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 483

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 436

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 436, which isn’t an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing num­ber. It is, appar­ent­ly, non­to­tient, but even after read­ing about totients I remain unin­ter­est­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. From Vex­ing Uncer­tain­ty to Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty (Michael Dick­son, Schiz­o­phre­nia Bul­letin):  “I am a 55-year-old hus­band, father, friend, and pro­fes­sion­al philoso­pher. In 1992, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, a porter found me amongst the cows in the mead­ows of King’s Col­lege, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad phys­i­cal shape, hav­ing eat­en noth­ing, and appar­ent­ly get­ting water from the riv­er. He asked what I was doing. I replied: ‘I’m solv­ing a prob­lem about sto­chas­tic cal­cu­lus.’ This state­ment was true, but did not answer his ques­tion. He took me to the hos­pi­tal, where I remained for some weeks. It wasn’t the first time that I was psy­chot­ic, but it was, maybe, the first time that any­body noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from oth­ers, and there­fore from myself.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na. A remark­able (and fair­ly brief) arti­cle. 
  2. Gov­Docs to the Res­cue! Debunk­ing an Immi­gra­tion Myth (Rose­mary Meszaros and Kather­ine Pen­navaria, Pol­i­cy Com­mons): “No one’s fam­i­ly name was changed, altered, short­ened, butchered, or ‘writ­ten down wrong’ at Ellis Island or any Amer­i­can port. That idea is an urban leg­end. Many names did get changed as immi­grants set­tled into their new Amer­i­can lives, but those changes were made sev­er­al years after arrival and were done by choice of some­one in the fam­i­ly.”
  3. A Peace­ful Solu­tion on Tai­wan Is Slip­ping Away (Michael Beck­ley, New York Times): “…Tai­wan pro­vokes Chi­na sim­ply by being what it is: A pros­per­ous and free soci­ety. Taiwan’s bloom­ing nation­al iden­ti­ty threat­ens Chi­na with the prospect of per­ma­nent ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­mem­ber­ment; and Taiwan’s elec­tions, rule of law and free press make a mock­ery of Beijing’s claim that Chi­nese cul­ture is incom­pat­i­ble with democ­ra­cy. America’s words can’t change any of that. Chi­nese law explic­it­ly states that Bei­jing may use force if pos­si­bil­i­ties for peace­ful uni­fi­ca­tion are ‘com­plete­ly exhaust­ed.’ Because of pol­i­tics in Tai­wan and the Unit­ed States, those pos­si­bil­i­ties are dwin­dling.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Tufts.
    • Relat­ed: Tai­wan’s Chi­na-skep­tic rul­ing-par­ty can­di­date wins pres­i­den­tial elec­tion (Emi­ly Feng, NPR): “For secu­ri­ty rea­sons, Tai­wan does not allow absen­tee vot­ing, man­dat­ing that all vot­ers cast their bal­lots in-per­son, on paper only. The phys­i­cal bal­lots are then count­ed by hand at every polling sta­tion, a process that is com­plete­ly open to the pub­lic.” The impli­ca­tion being that they are so wor­ried about Chi­nese med­dling that they engage in rad­i­cal trans­paren­cy. Wow.
  4. Xi Jin­ping Is Not Try­ing to Make Chris­tian­i­ty More Chi­nese (Feng­gang Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Through­out Decem­ber, the author­i­ties once again tried hard to con­tain and curb Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions inside and out­side church­es, pro­hib­it­ed stu­dents and oth­ers from par­tic­i­pat­ing in Christ­mas activ­i­ties, and detained some house church lead­ers to pre­vent them from orga­niz­ing con­gre­ga­tion­al gath­er­ings. Yet most church­es, both the offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned church­es and unreg­is­tered house church­es, held Christ­mas Eve and Christ­mas Day wor­ship ser­vices. The online evan­ge­lis­tic galas by Bei­jing Zion Church and oth­er house church­es on Zoom and oth­er plat­forms are of high artis­tic qual­i­ty. Chris­tians shared dis­creet­ly on social media that church lead­ers bap­tized a num­ber of new believ­ers despite the cur­rent ‘bit­ter win­ter’ for church­es in Chi­na.”
    • I found this bit fas­ci­nat­ing: “Many peo­ple in the West may not know that in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal sys­tem, the party’s pol­i­cy is supe­ri­or to state laws and trumps the con­sti­tu­tion. The Chi­nafi­ca­tion pol­i­cy has led to the pro­mul­ga­tion of a series of admin­is­tra­tive reg­u­la­tions and mea­sures, includ­ing the vast­ly expand­ed Reg­u­la­tions of Reli­gious Affairs that took effect in 2018.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Pur­due.
  5. You Need To Be Cringe­maxxing (Mary Har­ring­ton, Sub­stack): “There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is try­ing. Here’s the thing though: data con­sis­tent­ly show that the hap­pi­est peo­ple — those who feel that their lives are most filled with pur­pose and ful­fil­ment — are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those with kids — it’s those who go to church. Those, in oth­er words, who are not just to be indif­fer­ent to cool, but active­ly anti-cool. The first step to a hap­py and ful­filled life, it appears, is cringe­maxxing.”
    • Some oth­er vague­ly-relat­ed life advice: Risk-Aver­sion Is Killing Romance (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Some­times it seems to me we’ve become so sus­pi­cious of each other’s inten­tions that we pathol­o­gise romance and com­mit­ment, and end up psy­cho­analysing to death behav­iour that’s actu­al­ly decent. Now we take every­thing that comes with real love—being affect­ed by some­one else’s emo­tions, putting your partner’s needs first, depend­ing on them—and call it dam­age or anx­ious attach­ment or trau­ma. No! It’s called deep con­nec­tion! And God, yes, wouldn’t it be much eas­i­er if it was a pathol­o­gy, a dis­ease, one we could diag­nose and solve because it’s scary and it comes with­out guar­an­tees. But it isn’t.”
  6. “How Do I Find the Main Point of a Psalm?” (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “So, the point is to look at the pieces very care­ful­ly, to fit them togeth­er in mid­size units, to jot down the main points of the mid­size units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to orga­nize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all togeth­er until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, sev­en, eight, nine points of the mid­size units are in a flow that make one big over­ar­ch­ing point. You will be sur­prised, if you take up pen­cil and paper and do this, what you will see.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
  7. Death by a Thou­sand Paper Cuts (David Brooks, The New York Times): “…[some­times I] find a prob­lem so mas­sive that I can’t believe I’ve ever writ­ten about any­thing else. This lat­ter expe­ri­ence hap­pened as I looked into the grow­ing bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of Amer­i­can life. It’s not only that grow­ing bureau­cra­cies cost a lot of mon­ey; they also ener­vate Amer­i­can soci­ety. They redis­trib­ute pow­er from work­ers to rule mak­ers, and in so doing sap ini­tia­tive, dis­cre­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty and dri­ve. Once you start pok­ing around, the sta­tis­tics are stag­ger­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: No joke: Feds are ban­ning humor­ous elec­tron­ic mes­sages on high­ways (AP News): “Among those that will be dis­ap­pear­ing are mes­sages such as ‘Use Yah Blinkah’ in Mass­a­chu­setts; ‘Vis­it­ing in-laws? Slow down, get there late,’ from Ohio; ‘Don’t dri­ve Star Span­gled Ham­mered,’ from Penn­syl­va­nia; ‘Hocus pocus, dri­ve with focus’ from New Jer­sey; and ‘Hands on the wheel, not your meal’ from Ari­zona.”
      • You think Stan­ford hates fun? Try the fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 416

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 416, which is mild­ly inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing equa­tion: ‑4162+7682 = 416,768 (note the neg­a­tive in front of 4162)

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. To Be Hap­py, Mar­riage Mat­ters More Than Career (David Brooks, New York Times): “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about mar­riage. Please respect the tru­ism that if you have a great career and a crap­py mar­riage you will be unhap­py, but if you have a great mar­riage and a crap­py career you will be hap­py. Please use your youth­ful years as a chance to have roman­tic rela­tion­ships, so you’ll have some prac­tice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to mar­ry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the mas­ters.”
    • Unlocked. I am sure the com­ments sec­tion on this arti­cle will explode with out­raged New York Times read­ers, but Brooks is cor­rect and obvi­ous­ly so.
    • Relat­ed: He’s The One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “The woman who dis­cards the tra­di­tion­al ‘Men have to ask me’ social norm has a super­pow­er. Just pro­file guys who meet your stan­dards and take the ini­tia­tive, and you gen­er­ate a menu of prime options. Yes, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says that a woman can sub­tly let a guy know that she likes him. But this over­looks men’s abject clue­ness­ness and timid­i­ty. Instead, be forth­right. Crazy as it seems, earnest­ly telling your first choice, ‘I should be your girl­friend’ will almost nev­er be mis­tak­en for ‘throw­ing your­self’ at a guy.”
      • Caplan’s fol­low-up to his ear­li­er post help­ing guys screen gals. This one helps gals screen guys. Most of his insights ring true to me.
    • Relat­ed: You Don’t Have Plen­ty of Time (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “There’s an odd pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in our cul­ture with ‘readi­ness,’ as if it were a uni­ver­sal truth. But ‘readi­ness’ is nev­er defined. We’re giv­en the vague, unhelp­ful advice to ‘wait until we’re ready’ to get mar­ried or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re ‘ready’ for that kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty? You won’t. You’ll nev­er be ready. Aside from choos­ing a good part­ner, there’s no amount of prepa­ra­tion that will make child-rear­ing eas­i­er or smoother or sim­pler. You become ready through the very act of being mar­ried and rais­ing chil­dren. Lord will­ing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occa­sion and put fears of ‘readi­ness’ to rest.”
  2. Does God Con­trol His­to­ry? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Indeed, while allow­ing for the com­plex­i­ty of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God mere­ly per­mits, prov­i­den­tial­ism is basi­cal­ly inescapable once you posit a divin­i­ty who made the world and acts in his­to­ry. Which is why prov­i­den­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions endure among the most lib­er­al Chris­tians as well as the most tra­di­tion­al, with both pro­gres­sive and con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gies jus­ti­fy­ing them­selves through read­ings of the ‘signs of the times,’ the sea­sons of his­to­ry, the action of the Holy Spir­it and the like.”
    • Unlocked. I real­ly liked this one.
  3. What Rise of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Jesse Smith, Cur­rent): “What has surged in recent years isn’t Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism so much as the rejec­tion of reli­gion in the pub­lic square. The per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans report­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion has sky­rock­et­ed in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from lit­tle over 5% in 1990 to near­ly 30% in 2021. Most of these peo­ple belonged to a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty at some point. Many did not part on the best of terms and would be hap­py to see the sta­tus of Amer­i­can reli­gion tak­en down a peg.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege.
  4. The Man Who Knows What the World’s Rich­est Peo­ple Want (and How To Get It) (Maxwell Stra­chan, Vice): “To Flem­ings, the con­cept that the world’s rich­est peo­ple are con­spir­ing togeth­er to rig the game in their favor seems fool­ish. He believes the clos­est the rich have come to assem­bling as an illu­mi­nati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christ­mas and New Year’s Eve, because he’s been there. ‘I got­ta tell you, some of the rich­est peo­ple in the world are strug­gling to talk to a girl,’ he said. ‘There is no way these peo­ple are lead­ing some fuck­ing glob­al con­spir­a­cy.’ ”
    • Over­all quite inter­est­ing. From back in June.
  5. Lega­cy admis­sions are cru­cial to America’s high­er edu­ca­tion dom­i­nance (Jamie Beat­on, The Hill): “Oxford was found­ed in 1096. Despite its sto­ried his­to­ry, it has a far small­er dona­tion cul­ture and less engaged alum­ni. Its biggest donors — among them Bill Gates and Steven Schwarz­man — didn’t even attend the uni­ver­si­ty. It has no lega­cy admis­sions, and at points in its his­to­ry, it has strug­gled finan­cial­ly. In con­trast, Har­vard cul­ti­vates an amaz­ing­ly engaged alum­ni com­mu­ni­ty with fre­quent, well-attend­ed reunions, advi­so­ry boards fea­tur­ing all of their promi­nent alum­ni and an aspi­ra­tional mes­sage that once you are a part of this com­mu­ni­ty, it will become your com­mu­ni­ty for life. Lega­cy admis­sions — the prac­tice of pref­er­en­tial­ly admit­ting the chil­dren of alum­ni — is one of the pow­er­ful, tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics that helps fos­ter that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • I have nev­er seen some­one con­trast the elite US schools with their inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts this way. I am sure there is a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to be made, but this made for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing and I find his argu­ment plau­si­ble.
  6. Stan­ford WBB Star Cameron Brink Opens Up On How NIL Wealth Allowed Her Stay In School Over WNBA (Grayson Weir, Out­kick): “NIL has made it so that Brink can earn just as much mon­ey as an ‘ama­teur’ as she can in the WNBA. It is prob­a­bly more lucra­tive to stay in school than to go pro.… Brink said that her NIL wealth has set her up for the rest of her life. If bas­ket­ball didn’t work out, she could be self-suf­fi­cient. She would ‘con­tin­ue to live com­fort­ably.’ ”
  7. The real rea­son the high­est-paid doc­tors are in the Dako­tas (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Over­all, the aver­age U.S. lawyer can expect about $7.1 mil­lion in life­time income, a bit high­er than a pri­ma­ry-care doc­tor ($6.5 mil­lion) but well behind the broad­er physi­cian aver­age of $10 mil­lion, accord­ing to a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of about 2 mil­lion tax records from lawyers and more than 10 mil­lion tax records from doc­tors.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 321

I always try to trim these to sev­en items. Cut­ting the 8th was bru­tal this week — so many good options!

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 321, which is not only a num­ber but also a count­down.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Top Trans Doc­tors Blow the Whis­tle on ‘Slop­py’ Care (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “[The] new ortho­doxy has gone too far, accord­ing to two of the most promi­nent providers in the field of trans­gen­der med­i­cine: Dr. Mar­ci Bow­ers, a world-renowned vagino­plas­ty spe­cial­ist who oper­at­ed on real­i­ty-tele­vi­sion star Jazz Jen­nings; and Eri­ca Ander­son, a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Francisco’s Child and Ado­les­cent Gen­der Clin­ic. In the course of their careers, both have seen thou­sands of patients. Both are board mem­bers of the World Pro­fes­sion­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Trans­gen­der Health (WPATH), the orga­ni­za­tion that sets the stan­dards world­wide for trans­gen­der med­ical care. And both are trans­gen­der women. Ear­li­er this month, Ander­son told me she sub­mit­ted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warn­ing that many trans­gen­der health­care providers were treat­ing kids reck­less­ly. The Times passed, explain­ing it was ‘out­side our cov­er­age pri­or­i­ties right now.’ ”
    • A sober­ing arti­cle, and also a trag­ic but unsur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion about the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al team.
  2. High­lights From The Com­ments On Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I might be the only per­son in the world who likes McMan­sions. They just look like nice, pleas­ant build­ings made by peo­ple who want to vague­ly enjoy the place where they live. Prob­a­bly the least offen­sive thing peo­ple are mak­ing these days.”
    • Judg­ing from the com­ments he real­ly struck a chord with the “Whith­er Tar­taria?” piece I linked two weeks ago. Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. What Amer­i­can Chris­tians Hear at Church (Casey Cep, New York­er): “Homiletics—the prop­er name for the art of preaching—is still taught in sem­i­nar­ies and divin­i­ty schools, but it is not often stud­ied out­side of those insti­tu­tions. This is regret­table, since many more Amer­i­cans attend church than sub­scribe to a news­pa­per.… Tak­ing advan­tage of the tech­nolo­gies that have allowed church­es to stream ser­vices and post them online, Pew has stud­ied the length, lan­guage, and con­tent of tens of thou­sands of ser­mons, by denom­i­na­tion and tra­di­tion, most recent­ly for the nine Sun­days before and the Sun­day after last fall’s Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.” Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. Slav­ery vs. White Suprema­cy (Van Gosse & Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books): “Anti­slav­ery and anti-racist pol­i­tics appeared only in the 1760s—and only in the Amer­i­can colonies. Those pol­i­tics, hailed by lat­er abo­li­tion­ists as of world-his­tor­i­cal impor­tance, engaged blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Inspired by the Revolution’s egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, anti­slav­ery advo­cates over­came pow­er­ful oppo­si­tion and enact­ed the first eman­ci­pa­tions of their kind in his­to­ry, in sev­en of the thir­teen orig­i­nal states.… The Unit­ed States, in short, was found­ed not on slav­ery and white suprema­cy but amid an unprece­dent­ed strug­gle over slav­ery and white suprema­cy, which the Con­sti­tu­tion left open.” Illu­mi­nat­ing let­ters between two his­to­ry pro­fes­sors.
  5. ‘Some are just psy­chopaths’: Chi­nese detec­tive in exile reveals extent of tor­ture against Uyghurs (Rebec­ca Wright, Ivan Wat­son, Zahid Mah­mood and Tom Booth, CNN): “ ‘Kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen,’ Jiang said, recall­ing how he and his col­leagues used to inter­ro­gate detainees in police deten­tion cen­ters. ‘Until they kneel on the floor cry­ing.’ Dur­ing his time in Xin­jiang, Jiang said every new detainee was beat­en dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion process — includ­ing men, women and chil­dren as young as 14.” The details in this sto­ry are dark. I’ve seen oth­er sto­ries with tes­ti­monies from for­mer pris­on­ers, this one fea­tures one of the guards speak­ing up in addi­tion to sto­ries from pris­on­ers.
  6. Train­ings (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Uni­ver­si­ties don’t usu­al­ly cre­ate their own train­ing mod­ules — they buy prod­ucts from com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in that kind of thing. And those com­pa­nies want to save mon­ey by reusing their old code. So they extract the con­tent of their Title IX cours­es and sim­ply stuff new con­tent into the exist­ing frame­works. Easy-peasy. And the upper-lev­el admin­is­tra­tors of the uni­ver­si­ty, who don’t want to spend any more mon­ey on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged mon­ster they’ve been hand­ed. But that cre­ates a big prob­lem: the kind of struc­ture need­ed to com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple the con­tours of a law and the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by that law is not the kind of struc­ture need­ed to explore the moral devel­op­ment of a com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. Yale and the Edu­ca­tion of Gov­ern­ing Elites (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “A pro­gram con­ceived to teach future elites how to wise­ly use state pow­er has mor­phed into a pro­gram teach­ing them how to wise­ly oppose it. This trans­for­ma­tion is one more illus­tra­tion of Dashan’s the­sis. At Yale we see the Amer­i­can predica­ment made con­crete: an entrenched gov­ern­ing class that enjoys the priv­i­leges of elite sta­tus but refus­es to pre­pare for the respon­si­bil­i­ties of elite sta­tion.”

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 Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

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 319

a brief roundup

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

This is vol­ume 319, which feels like it ought to be a prime num­ber but real­ly 319 = 11 · 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A giant space rock demol­ished an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city and every­one in it – pos­si­bly inspir­ing the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Sodom (Christo­pher R. Moore, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “As the inhab­i­tants of an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city now called Tall el-Ham­mam went about their dai­ly busi­ness one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speed­ing toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph). Flash­ing through the atmos­phere, the rock explod­ed in a mas­sive fire­ball about 2.5 miles (4 kilo­me­ters) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more pow­er­ful than the Hiroshi­ma atom­ic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blind­ed instant­ly. Air tem­per­a­tures rapid­ly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahren­heit (2,000 degrees Cel­sius). Cloth­ing and wood imme­di­ate­ly burst into flames.”
    • No, it did­n’t “inspire” the Bible sto­ry. The Bible sto­ry is inspired, though. Astound­ing regard­less.
    • A bit of cold water: Sodom Destroyed by Mete­or, Sci­en­tists Say. Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­o­gists Not Con­vinced. (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Archae­ol­o­gists Steve Ortiz, direc­tor of Lip­scomb University’s Lanier Cen­ter of Archae­ol­o­gy, agreed that while Tall el-Ham­mam is an impor­tant site, its destruc­tion date is too late to fit the Sodom sce­nario. He dis­missed the fire­ball hoopla to CT. ‘[Their] destruc­tion does not look any dif­fer­ent than any oth­er destruc­tion,’ he said. ‘We have Assyr­i­an and Egypt­ian destruc­tions at Gez­er that looks just as dra­mat­ic.’ ”
  2. Why Covid reg­u­la­tions may be around longer than you think (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “The US and most Euro­pean coun­tries had aban­doned pass­ports by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In many South Amer­i­can nations, free­dom to trav­el with­out a pass­port was a con­sti­tu­tion­al right. So how did the pass­port come roar­ing back? The answer was the first world war.… Lloyd writes: ‘At the end of the war in 1918, the move­ment to abol­ish pass­ports re-ener­gised itself but it was now fight­ing against gov­ern­ments who had dis­cov­ered how close­ly a pop­u­la­tion could be con­trolled and how eas­i­ly this could be jus­ti­fied.’ ”
    1. The Extreme­ly Weird Pol­i­tics of Covid (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In less than two years, we’ve gone from a world where it was nor­mal for a left-lean­ing pub­li­ca­tion to run an essay gen­tly cel­e­brat­ing the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a bru­tal out­break of the plague, to a world where the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a less lethal pan­dem­ic is cod­ed as incred­i­bly right wing. I don’t know exact­ly why or exact­ly what it means. I just want peo­ple to acknowl­edge that it has hap­pened and it’s real­ly, real­ly weird.” Accu­rate.
  3. My Con­fes­sions (Joshua Katz, First Things): “Though my faith in acad­e­mia, which had been wan­ing for years, is now large­ly gone, my faith in the pow­er of God’s mys­te­ri­ous ways is ascen­dant. Because reli­gion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now instructs those apt­ly dubbed by John McWhort­er ‘The Elect’ to despise reli­gion, I find it remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the peo­ple who have worked so hard to keep me going are reli­gious.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of clas­sics at Prince­ton.
  4. The 1619 Project and Liv­ing in Truth (Sean Wilentz, Opera His­tor­i­ca): “If it were a high school his­to­ry paper, that dis­cus­sion alone would have been grounds for fail­ure. It’s rare, after all, to read a stu­dent get every sin­gle stat­ed fact per­fect­ly wrong, in sup­port of a propo­si­tion for which there is no oth­er evi­dence cit­ed, on two of the most impor­tant top­ics in all of U.S. his­to­ry, indeed, all of mod­ern his­to­ry, the caus­es of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and the ori­gins of anti­slav­ery. But this wasn’t a high school paper, it was the New York Times Mag­a­zine, and the author was, accord­ing to her contributor’s biog­ra­phy, a high­ly acclaimed jour­nal­ist.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Prince­ton. The arti­cle itself is a PDF, direct link here.
  5. The Sci­en­tist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Con­trol Killing Machine (Ronen Bergman and Far­naz Fas­si­hi, New York Times): “The straight-out-of-sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry of what real­ly hap­pened that after­noon and the events lead­ing up to it, pub­lished here for the first time, is based on inter­views with Amer­i­can, Israeli and Iran­ian offi­cials, includ­ing two intel­li­gence offi­cials famil­iar with the details of the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of the oper­a­tion, and state­ments Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s fam­i­ly made to the Iran­ian news media.”
  6. Every­body Hates the Jews (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archae­ol­o­gists for the most minor of microag­gres­sions, the very real macroag­gres­sions tak­ing place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brook­lyn, which have become a reg­u­lar fea­ture of life there, are over­looked or, some­times, jus­ti­fied by the very activists who go to the mat over the ‘cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion’ of a taco.” A bit long, but sober­ing.
  7. Whith­er Tar­taria? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “So I think there’s a gen­uine mys­tery to be explained here: if peo­ple pre­fer tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture by a large mar­gin, how come we’ve stopped pro­duc­ing it?” Much bet­ter than the excerpt indi­cates.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 317

lots of pan­dem­ic and vac­ci­na­tion stuff

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 317 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Did you believe that? I mean, that’s also a pret­ty cool sto­ry, isn’t it? Right-wing news out­lets accuse the so-called ‘lib­er­al media’ of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admit­ted I’m prob­a­bly biased here?”
  2. On vac­ci­na­tions
    • It’s Time to Stop Ratio­nal­iz­ing and Enabling Evan­gel­i­cal Vac­cine Rejec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “For the Chris­t­ian believ­er, the pur­suit of free­dom is insep­a­ra­ble from the pur­suit of virtue. We do not seek lib­er­ty sim­ply to sat­is­fy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pur­sue the free­dom to make our neigh­bors sick, we vio­late the social com­pact and under­mine our moral stand­ing in pol­i­tics, law, and cul­ture. Chris­t­ian lib­er­tin­ism becomes a long-term threat to reli­gious lib­er­ty itself.”
      • Although I am vac­ci­nat­ed myself, I am more sym­pa­thet­ic to vac­cine reluc­tants than French is. I def­i­nite­ly do not think it is a reli­gious lib­er­ty issue, though. It seems to me that this is more a mat­ter of per­son­al auton­o­my and the reluc­tance is large­ly dri­ven by self-inflict­ed dam­age from the author­i­ties. The CDC (for exam­ple) has repeat­ed­ly said and done extra­or­di­nar­i­ly stu­pid things in this pan­dem­ic. Very often you would have been bet­ter off doing the oppo­site of what they advo­cat­ed for. Peo­ple noticed. And so now that the offi­cial advice is to receive the vac­cine, peo­ple who are resis­tant are apply­ing an under­stand­able heuris­tic.
    • I’m a For­mer Pas­tor, and I Don’t Believe in ‘Reli­gious Exemp­tions’ to Vac­cine Man­dates (Cur­tis Chang, New York Times): “Chris­tians who request reli­gious exemp­tions rarely even try to offer sub­stan­tive bib­li­cal and the­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing. Rather, the dri­vers for evan­gel­i­cal resis­tance are non­re­li­gious and are root­ed in deep-seat­ed sus­pi­cion of gov­ern­ment and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to mis­in­for­ma­tion.… The biggest threat to any legit­i­mate right is the ille­git­i­mate abuse of that right.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Cur­tis Chang used to pas­tor near here and although we’ve nev­er met I emailed with him once about a book he had writ­ten.
    • NRB spokesman Dan Dar­ling fired after pro-vac­cine state­ments on ‘Morn­ing Joe’ (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Daniel Dar­ling, senior vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the Nation­al Reli­gious Broad­cast­ers, was fired Fri­day (Aug. 27) after refus­ing to recant his pro-vac­cine state­ments, accord­ing to a source autho­rized to speak for Dar­ling.”
    • The ACLU, Pri­or to COVID, Denounced Man­dates and Coer­cive Mea­sures to Fight Pan­demics (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “What makes the ACLU’s posi­tion so remark­able — besides the inher­ent shock of a civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion cham­pi­oning state man­dates over­rid­ing indi­vid­ual choice — is that, very recent­ly, the same group warned of the grave dan­gers of the very mind­set it is now push­ing. In 2008, the ACLU pub­lished a com­pre­hen­sive report on pan­demics which had one pri­ma­ry pur­pose: to denounce as dan­ger­ous and unnec­es­sary attempts by the state to man­date, coerce, and con­trol in the name of pro­tect­ing the pub­lic from pan­demics.”
  3. The pan­dem­ic more gen­er­al­ly
    1. One in 5,000 (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Here’s one way to think about a one-in-10,000 dai­ly chance: It would take more than three months for the com­bined risk to reach just 1 per­cent… I will con­fess to one bit of hes­i­ta­tion about walk­ing you through the data on break­through infec­tions: It’s not clear how much we should be wor­ry­ing about them. For the vac­ci­nat­ed, Covid resem­bles the flu and usu­al­ly a mild one. Soci­ety does not grind to a halt over the flu.”
    2. New Details Emerge About Coro­n­avirus Research at Chi­nese Lab (Sharon Lern­er & Mara Hvis­ten­dahl, The Inter­cept): “The doc­u­ments con­tain sev­er­al crit­i­cal details about the research in Wuhan, includ­ing the fact that key exper­i­men­tal work with human­ized mice was con­duct­ed at a biosafe­ty lev­el 3 lab at Wuhan Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter for Ani­mal Exper­i­ment — and not at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, as was pre­vi­ous­ly assumed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
    3. New Stud­ies Find Evi­dence Of ‘Super­hu­man’ Immu­ni­ty To COVID-19 In Some Indi­vid­u­als (Michaleen Doucleff, NPR): “In fact, these anti­bod­ies were even able to deac­ti­vate a virus engi­neered, on pur­pose, to be high­ly resis­tant to neu­tral­iza­tion. This virus con­tained 20 muta­tions that are known to pre­vent SARS-CoV­‑2 anti­bod­ies from bind­ing to it. Anti­bod­ies from peo­ple who were only vac­ci­nat­ed or who only had pri­or coro­n­avirus infec­tions were essen­tial­ly use­less against this mutant virus. But anti­bod­ies in peo­ple with the ‘hybrid immu­ni­ty’ could neu­tral­ize it.”
  4. Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Immi­nent Doom Is Wrong (David March­ese, New York Times): “Giv­en that vir­tu­al­ly every cli­mate sci­en­tist believes that human activ­i­ty is warm­ing the plan­et, how could any­one deny it? The answer is, peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly believe what sci­en­tists say because they cor­rect­ly sense that with­in acad­e­mia a per­son can get pun­ished for unortho­dox beliefs.”
    • Includ­ing entire­ly for that excerpt. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is that the jour­nal­ist is dis­mis­sive of this idea, which is not only clear­ly true but at the root of much soci­etal dys­func­tion. We have a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in our cul­ture because our experts seem deter­mined to demon­strate their untrust­wor­thi­ness again and again. Jour­nal­ists are even more to blame than aca­d­e­mics, which is why I think it is so hard for this jour­nal­ist to accept Pinker’s claim.
  5. Per­spec­tive: The moral util­i­ty of his­to­ry (Jon Meacham, Deseret News): “As a mat­ter of observ­able fact, the Unit­ed States, through its spo­radic adher­ence to its finest aspi­ra­tions, is the most durable exper­i­ment in plu­ral­is­tic repub­li­can­ism the world has known. Oth­er nation­al rev­o­lu­tions have descend­ed into dic­ta­tor­ship and per­se­cu­tion; ours has pro­duced envi­able, if frag­ile, demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. In the main, the Amer­i­ca of the 21st cen­tu­ry is, for all its short­com­ings, freer and more accept­ing than it has ever been.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. On the Texas abor­tion law
    1. Texas’ Abor­tion Law Should Force Amer­i­ca to Change Its Ways (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, New York Times): “In Amer­i­ca, of all the preg­nan­cies that don’t end in mis­car­riage, near­ly one in five is abort­ed; this is a soci­ety in which things are wild­ly off track. A world like this, spun by forces that lead to that many lives being undone, doesn’t hap­pen by chance. It takes all of us. It takes a vil­lage to make abor­tion seem like the best choice. We can change our ways, though.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at South­east­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary.
    2. The Pro-Life Move­ment Must Tran­scend Pol­i­tics (David French, The Dis­patch): “To be pro-life does not mean sup­port­ing every pos­si­ble strat­e­gy, even if only tem­porar­i­ly suc­cess­ful (a Texas state court has already issued a broad injunc­tion against the law), designed to ban or lim­it abor­tion. Strate­gies designed to ban abor­tion do not nec­es­sar­i­ly help end abor­tion, and end­ing abor­tion is the ulti­mate aim of the pro-life move­ment.”
    3. How a for­mer SLS pro­fes­sor and Hoover fel­low helped shape the Texas abor­tion ban (Sari­na Deb and Geor­gia Rosen­berg, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Jonathan Mitchell was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford Law School and for­mer fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion when he the­o­rized the legal mech­a­nism which laid the ground­work for the con­tro­ver­sial Texas abor­tion ban that went into effect last week. If states want­ed to cir­cum­vent judi­cial review, Mitchell wrote in a 2018 law review arti­cle, they could del­e­gate the pow­er of enforce­ment to pri­vate cit­i­zens. That is exact­ly what S.B. 8 does.”
  7. Strate­gic Cit­ing (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “[Schol­ars are more like­ly to cite oth­er schol­ars who can help them out]… The find­ing is robust to con­trol­ling for self-cita­tions, own-jour­nal cita­tions, and a vari­ety of oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties. The authors also show that deceased authors get few­er cita­tions than matched liv­ing authors. For exam­ple, liv­ing Nobel prize win­ners get more cita­tions than dead ones even when they were award­ed the prize joint­ly.”

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” At the time of writ­ing, the author had just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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 286

some very strong arti­cles in this roundup

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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.