Tag: how the church is perceived

TGFI, Volume 579: snakes can cartwheel

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Your Exis­tence is Hard to Explain (Joshua Ras­mussen, Sub­stack): “I want to share some of my lat­est thoughts on how, by your own pow­ers of analy­sis, I think you can see that your exis­tence is puz­zling (to say the least). Now I’m not talk­ing about the pur­pose of your exis­tence. I’m ask­ing about an expla­na­tion of how you could have come to be in the first place.… Con­sid­er a few famil­iar fea­tures of you. You are some­one who can think, some­one who can feel, and some­one who can do things. These fea­tures have some­thing in com­mon: you can expe­ri­ence them with­in con­scious­ness. You can con­scious­ly think some­thing, con­scious­ly feel some­thing, and con­scious­ly do some­thing. There is an expe­ri­ence of being you. David Chalmers famous­ly calls the chal­lenge of explain­ing con­scious expe­ri­ence, the hard prob­lem. To explain your exis­tence as a con­scious being, we need, at min­i­mum, to explain your con­scious­ness. But what could explain that?”
    • The author is a Chris­t­ian, although this arti­cle is not explic­it­ly Chris­t­ian.
  2. Deep Dive Bible — a new Bible study web­site. Has some nice fea­tures. Worth a look.
  3. In San Francisco’s A.I. Boom, a First Date Has Become an Inter­view (Emmy Mar­tin, New York Times): “In some cor­ners of San Fran­cis­co, young sin­gles are get­ting cre­ative with dat­ing. On a Sat­ur­day night at Kilo­watt, a bar in the Mis­sion neigh­bor­hood, peo­ple packed togeth­er for an event called ‘Date My Ex,’ where par­tic­i­pants on a stage pitch some­one they love in five min­utes or less, with a slide deck. Atten­dees wore name tags and waved paper hearts on sticks when­ev­er a pitch land­ed, like bid­ders at an auc­tion for oth­er people’s exes.”
  4. Ear­ly Career Researcher Respons­es to AI in Math (Anna Bran­den­berg­er, Han­na Mula­rczyk, & Dora Woodruff, arX­iv): “…math­e­mati­cians are grap­pling with the fact that a core part of our jobs could soon be auto­mat­ed. How­ev­er, the lead­ing voic­es on the mat­ter have been Fields medal­ists and famous math­e­mati­cians, who can hypoth­e­size and ideate from the safe­ty of a secure job. Us ear­ly-career math­e­mati­cians do not have the same lux­u­ry, and our unique point of view was not as rep­re­sent­ed in these dis­cus­sions. Hence, we decid­ed to ask grad­u­ate stu­dents and post­docs how they felt direct­ly.”
    • The authors are grad stu­dents in math at MIT.
  5. I am not super-inter­est­ed in the midterms per se. I am, how­ev­er, inter­est­ed in how they inter­sect with / reflect reli­gion in Amer­i­ca. Two reflec­tions that caught my eye:
    • I Wel­come the Blue Wave, Not the Blue Jesus (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, Sub­stack): “Pol­i­tics, of course, should (and inevitably will) be affect­ed by one’s beliefs and con­vic­tions, but reli­gion must nev­er be a pawn in a polit­i­cal match. I do not want this 2000-year-old faith to become mere­ly the mas­cot for team red or team blue, but instead to trou­ble and chal­lenge both. I want it to chal­lenge plat­forms and pol­i­cy, but more cru­cial­ly, to chal­lenge the reign­ing ascen­dan­cy of pow­er and money—to rel­a­tivize and curb our devo­tion to pol­i­tics itself and to tem­per the hope that we find in it. I want it to chart out ter­ri­to­ry of the human heart where pol­i­tics can­not trav­el, to ask ques­tions that pol­i­cy can­not answer, and to pro­duce beau­ty that calls us out of our tribes and into our deep­est human­i­ty.”
    • The midterm revenge of the reli­gious left (James Shel­ton, World): “When the 120th Con­gress con­venes on Jan. 3, 13 mem­bers who stud­ied at a sem­i­nary or divin­i­ty school will take the oath of office. Tied with 2017, that is the largest class of elect­ed sem­i­nar­i­ans going back to the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress. Nine of the 13 are Democ­rats, more than have ever served togeth­er in a sin­gle Con­gress.… Amer­i­ca already knows about Talarico’s claims that God is ‘non­bi­na­ry’ and that Chris­t­ian teach­ing on abor­tion is ‘just not root­ed in Scrip­ture.’ It will soon grow famil­iar with Trone Gar­riott, who helped offi­ci­ate a Satanist wed­ding, and Haynes, who con­clud­ed a ‘remix’ of Matthew 25 with ‘Amer­i­ca, go to hell’ and is more cor­rect than he knows when he calls him­self ‘a heretic in the name of Jesus.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • These Snakes Cart­wheel Out of Dan­ger­ous Sit­u­a­tions (K. R. Call­away, New York Times): “Dwarf reed snakes, tiny snakes native to South­east Asia, can launch into a series of cart­wheel-like move­ments to spin out of sight when preda­tors approach.… Now, a new team of researchers has ana­lyzed the mechan­ics of the move­ment, and found that when rolling, the snakes can trav­el about four times faster than when slith­er­ing.… Through­out the rolling move­ment, the snakes also kept their heads large­ly at the same lev­el and point­ing in the same direc­tion, which helps to explain how they stay ori­ent­ed despite the chaot­ic-look­ing motion.”
    • You are not ready for the video. It first shows actu­al speed then pro­gres­sive­ly slowed down until 16x slow-mo. Watch the slow-mo and then let it loop to the begin­ning. THEY ARE FAST!
  • I actu­al­ly laughed when I read this about the Pope vot­ing x.com/damienredicamn1/status/2115973681201512481

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.

TGFI, Volume 577: dumb people and fertility myths

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. UC Berke­ley math com­mu­ni­ty left at cross­roads in wake of Ope­nAI Navier-Stokes proof (Litong Deng, Dai­ly Cal­i­forn­ian): “Peo­ple are com­plain­ing that AI is push­ing out this 100,000-line for­mal proof of some major con­jec­ture. I don’t real­ly see what harm this does because you can always ignore this if you want, and then you’re no worse off than before,” Borcherds said. “I think what peo­ple are get­ting upset about is they’re slow­ly real­iz­ing that they are dumb and some­how blam­ing this on AI, even though it’s not real­ly AI’s fault.” Borcherds, who cur­rent­ly teach­es MATH 250A, a grad­u­ate-lev­el course on abstract alge­bra, also said AI would be much bet­ter than him at teach­ing the course. He said AI is more patient and much bet­ter at express­ing itself than he is and doesn’t get mad when stu­dents ask stu­pid ques­tions. Borcherds him­self said he has asked AI “deep math­e­mat­i­cal ques­tions” and gets “much bet­ter answers from it than (he gets) from any human math­e­mati­cian.”
    • Borcherds is a Fields medal­ist (1998).
  2. The Great Fer­til­i­ty Col­lapse (Russ Roberts inter­view­ing Jesus Fer­nan­dez-Villaverde, Econ­Talk): this pod­cast episode is inspired by a paper the guest co-authored, Ter­ra Incog­ni­ta: The Eco­nom­ics of a Shrink­ing World (NBER). This is an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion, full of gems like why the UN pop­u­la­tion fore­casts are com­plete­ly untrust­wor­thy and very sur­pris­ing exam­ples of how a lot of what peo­ple assume they know about fer­til­i­ty and demo­graph­ics is exact­ly wrong.
  3. Why Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Is Win­ning (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “But the basic test of any reli­gion, espe­cial­ly any mis­sion­ary reli­gion, is whether it actu­al­ly per­suades peo­ple to prac­tice and believe. And the evan­gel­i­cal model—the entre­pre­neur­ial pas­tor, the adapt­able church struc­tures, the empha­sis on wel­com­ing seek­ers and accom­mo­dat­ing fam­i­lies, even the sub­ur­ban and mid­dle­brow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-cen­tu­ry con­di­tions in a way that requires respect and some form of imi­ta­tion. The vices of evan­gel­i­cal­ism need cor­rec­tion and cri­tique. But there will be no 21st-cen­tu­ry revival, for Catholi­cism or any oth­er kind of faith, that doesn’t reck­on with the sources of its unde­ni­able suc­cess.”
  4. What the Bible’s Most Polit­i­cal Book Can Teach Us (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bib­li­cal scholars—including me, in my book Reimag­in­ing Bib­li­cal Pol­i­tics—have argued Esther might be the most polit­i­cal book in the Bible. The sto­ry revolves around mat­ters of state, and in terms of polit­i­cal action, the book has it all. By the time cred­its roll, we’ve watched Vashti prac­tice civ­il dis­obe­di­ence by refus­ing to obey King Ahasuerus’s com­mand (1:12). We’ve seen Mordechai stage a pub­lic protest—lamenting in sack­cloth and ash­es at the very gate of the king (4:1–2)—and serve that same regime by snitch­ing on courtiers caught plan­ning an assas­si­na­tion (2:21–22). Esther’s polit­i­cal career begins when she makes the best of an awful sit­u­a­tion, hid­ing her eth­nic­i­ty and win­ning favor on the way to becom­ing queen. She acts sub­ver­sive­ly to ensure Haman gets what’s com­ing to him. By the end, Esther and Morde­cai effec­tive­ly hold pub­lic office, writ­ing law from with­in the empire itself (8:1–2; 7–8). If Esther is arguably the Bible’s most polit­i­cal book, it’s also the most ambigu­ous.”
  5. Con­cern­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Today (to which I am a sub­scriber):
    • Chris­tian­i­ty Today, a Voice of Cen­trist Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, Is in Tur­moil (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Chris­tian­i­ty Today need­ed to be less like Wheaton and more like Tik­Tok, Mr. Adding­ton told his staff, accord­ing to sev­er­al peo­ple who attend­ed the meet­ing. Warn­ing that lay­offs were com­ing, he end­ed his pre­sen­ta­tion with a prayer. A senior edi­tor left the room in tears. Four­teen months lat­er, more than half of the 79 employ­ees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, includ­ing an edi­tor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured jour­nal­ists.”
    • Why I left Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Sub­stack): “The last pre-pan­dem­ic meet­ing I took end­ed with an offer to become a colum­nist for Chris­tian­i­ty Today. I hap­pi­ly accept­ed and wrote for CT in that capac­i­ty for three and a half years, then came on staff as a senior edi­tor in the sum­mer of 2023. In late Sep­tem­ber, I gave notice. Fri­day was my last day, and this post is about why I left. If you’re new here, fresh from googling me after read­ing Ruth Graham’s New York Times sto­ry about CT, hel­lo! You’ve come to the right place.”
  6. Roman love (Samuel Hugh­es, Works in Progress): “Pop­u­lar mythol­o­gy holds that a tol­er­ant and affir­ma­tive view of human sex­u­al­i­ty pre­vailed in clas­si­cal Antiq­ui­ty until it was crushed by puri­tan­i­cal and repres­sive Chris­tian­i­ty. I pas­sive­ly accept­ed this view until I read Kyle Harper’s cel­e­brat­ed book, From Shame to Sin: The Chris­t­ian Trans­for­ma­tion of Sex­u­al Moral­i­ty in Late Antiq­ui­ty. Harp­er shows that, although the stan­dard pic­ture is not entire­ly wrong, it is so incom­plete as to be fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­lead­ing.… By putting togeth­er the Jew­ish pro­hi­bi­tion of extra­mar­i­tal sex with Roman monogamy, the ear­ly Chris­tians arrived at the idea that each man should be faith­ful to one woman, just as each woman should be faith­ful to one man. The nov­el­ty of this inno­va­tion is hard to over­state: it is not clear that the ide­al of exclu­sive mutu­al fideli­ty has ever been invent­ed inde­pen­dent­ly in any oth­er major civ­i­liza­tions, though it was even­tu­al­ly to spread to many non-Chris­t­ian cul­tures.”
  7. How to Sur­vive the Robot Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “In dep­re­cat­ing the chances of the true robot apoc­a­lypse, I’m describ­ing a poten­tial future in which the gravest dan­gers are held at bay by a per­va­sive human para­noia, where pol­i­tics is a strug­gle between effi­cien­cy-max­i­miz­ers embrac­ing human obso­les­cence and techno­pho­bic pop­ulist rebel­lions, and where civ­i­liza­tion­al safe­ty requires us to rely on inscrutable intel­li­gences to police oth­er inscrutable intel­li­gences into the dis­tant future. A rea­son­able per­son might sim­ply pre­fer a world with­out super­in­tel­li­gent AI. But in a world with super­in­tel­li­gence, none of the doom sce­nar­ios quite per­suade me that humans will be eas­i­ly steam­rolled or go naive­ly into the sil­i­con night.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Jacob Assures New Bride ‘Rachel’ He Was­n’t That Drunk At Wed­ding Last Night — UPDATE: Oh No — (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Explain­ing Col­lege Foot­ball Con­fer­ences (John Crist, YouTube): two min­utes
  • 50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2? Bono and the Edge Have Answers (David March­ese, New York Times): “What you just said about com­ing up with the fic­tion­al names — this always killed me about the band. Bono! Edge! And then … Adam and Lar­ry. Was there any dis­cus­sion that they should have names too? The Edge: We need to explain the whole name thing. We laughed a lot at that age. We would laugh at each oth­er and our­selves and that was the deal. So the names were not nec­es­sar­i­ly designed for their hero­ic aspect. Bono’s very first name was in fact Stein­rich Van Hait­ian Bang Bang Bang, and then I was Inchicore for a while before I became the Edge. Adam for a while was known as Mrs. Byrnes, and Lar­ry for some rea­son was the Jam Jar. We were bor­row­ing a lot from Mon­ty Python.”
  • Kid Rock Talks Eminem Col­lab ‘Heal My Faith’ & Killing ‘Divi­sion’ (Gary Graff, Bill­board):  “This (album) is about for­give­ness and sec­ond chances,” Rock said, “try­ing to heal some of the divi­sion in our coun­try. I’m just putting a pos­i­tive mes­sage out there in the world…showing a lit­tle more grace, try­ing to kill some of the divi­sion. I am not with­out sin, and I can’t say I ever will be. But I’m mak­ing a con­scious effort to spread this bet­ter mes­sage — and I’m also still Kid motherf–king Rock. At the end of the day, I’m both of those guys. I’m not fun­da­men­tal­ly changed, you know? I’m still Kid Rock; I’m gonna drink a beer, smoke a cig­ar… I’m just on the jour­ney. I feel halfway to Jesus; I hope to be all the way there, but I’m not sure. I don’t know where it all leads. It’s almost as new as me as it is to every­one else.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 576: hell considered politically

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Polit­i­cal Case for Hell (Matthew Kaem­ingk & Sha­di Hamid, Com­ment): “Hell in both Islam and Chris­tian­i­ty is pro­found­ly egal­i­tar­i­an. Sim­ply said, any­body can go there. It doesn’t mat­ter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all peo­ple will receive a judg­ment. There is no way to buy, manip­u­late, or threat­en your way out. All stand before the throne vul­ner­a­ble. In this way, the doc­trine of hell cre­ates a lev­el play­ing field based on an individual’s char­ac­ter rather than their wealth or pow­er. Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of con­se­quences; the pow­er­ful can shield them­selves from jus­tice. When pow­er­ful fig­ures escape justice—whether dic­ta­tors dying peace­ful­ly in exile or cor­po­rate crim­i­nals receiv­ing minor fines for major crimes—it cor­rodes pub­lic faith in demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. The appar­ent lack of just deserts for the pow­er­ful has polit­i­cal con­se­quences. It feeds pop­ulist rage and demo­c­ra­t­ic cyn­i­cism. In this con­text, the con­cept of ulti­mate jus­tice, of a future hell, serves as a cru­cial safe­ty valve. But hell’s demo­c­ra­t­ic func­tion goes beyond mere deter­rence or con­so­la­tion. Tra­di­tion­al reli­gious con­cep­tions of hell actu­al­ly embody prin­ci­ples that mod­ern democ­ra­cies strive to imple­ment: pro­por­tion­al pun­ish­ment, equal treat­ment for equal crimes, con­sid­er­a­tion of both actions and inten­tions.” — Kaem­ingk is a pro­fes­sor at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, and Hamid is a senior fel­low at Brook­ings.
  2. Bible Fam­i­ly Tree — (John Dyer, per­son­al web­site): this is kind of cool
  3. Some Cor­nell-adja­cent thoughts:
    • Four Hours and Three Min­utes in Itha­ca (David French, New York Times): “Last week, Chris­tine Emba wrote a beau­ti­ful and com­pelling guest essay in our pages about the inad­e­qua­cy of con­sent as the pri­ma­ry moral basis for sex­u­al inti­ma­cy. It’s the legal base line, not a moral thresh­old. But what is the moral thresh­old? Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians like me often respond with a pat answer: mar­riage. But even that’s inad­e­quate and incom­plete. Mar­i­tal sex can be every bit as abu­sive and exploita­tive as an encounter in a frat house. Instead of con­sent, I’d sug­gest a dif­fer­ent stan­dard, one that applies not just to sex in mar­riage — and not just to sex alone — but to all of our human inter­ac­tions. Let’s talk about care. In oth­er words, we should con­stant­ly ask our­selves, ‘If I cared for this per­son, what would I do?’ Even if an obvi­ous­ly drunk or high per­son is ask­ing you for sex (though whether that hap­pened in this case is dis­put­ed, espe­cial­ly as events unfold­ed lat­er in the evening) — and even if you’re pow­er­ful­ly attract­ed to that per­son — if you tru­ly cared for the per­son would you ini­ti­ate or engage in an encounter that any sen­tient per­son knows might be deeply regret­ted the next morn­ing, the next day or the next week? Is an orgasm so sacred to you that you can’t wait until sobri­ety to have sex?”
    • A Stan­ford Jane Doe: ‘With­out a head­line, sur­vivors like me will nev­er mat­ter to Stan­ford’ (Anony­mous, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “For two years, I skipped class­es I shared with the per­son who raped me, lived in fear of run­ning into him on cam­pus and missed out on oppor­tu­ni­ties like study abroad due to Stanford’s con­stant resched­ul­ing and delay­ing of pro­ceed­ings. The process swal­lowed half of my time at Stan­ford, only for it to cul­mi­nate in a two year sus­pen­sion, despite Stan­ford find­ing the oth­er stu­dent respon­si­ble for vagi­nal­ly, dig­i­tal­ly and oral­ly rap­ing me. Per this sanc­tion, the per­son who raped me is eli­gi­ble to return to cam­pus and grad­u­ate with his degree as of this fall.… The year I entered Stan­ford, incom­ing fresh­men were assigned Chanel Miller’s mem­oir, Know My Name. The San­ta Clara Coun­ty DA’s Office is the same office that pros­e­cut­ed Brock Turn­er. How do we rec­on­cile the val­ues these insti­tu­tions pub­licly cham­pi­on with the way they han­dled my case?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I would add this aligns with my obser­va­tions of Stan­ford. On a few occa­sions I have min­is­tered to a stu­dent deal­ing with the after­math of being raped and what this author describes match­es their expe­ri­ences.
  4. A Tik­Tok Tarot Card Read­er Accused Me of Mur­der. My Life Turned Upside Down. (Rebec­ca Scofield, New York Times): “I was stand­ing in a park lis­ten­ing to my kids play when I opened a Tik­Tok video of a woman I had nev­er met. She showed my fac­ul­ty pro­file pic­ture and con­tact infor­ma­tion, and said that I had orches­trat­ed the mur­ders of four stu­dents at the col­lege where I work, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. She claimed I was cov­er­ing up an inap­pro­pri­ate roman­tic rela­tion­ship with one of the vic­tims. I didn’t know any of the stu­dents, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew noth­ing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card read­ings as the only basis for her claims. Over the next sev­er­al weeks, while I was griev­ing with the rest of my com­mu­ni­ty, this Tik­Tok influ­encer uploaded over a hun­dred videos declar­ing that I had com­mit­ted a quadru­ple homi­cide.… So, before you, too, are accused of mur­der on the inter­net, ques­tion the con­tent you are con­sum­ing or cre­at­ing.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. An absolute­ly wild sto­ry.
  5. AI-relat­ed
    • When AI Is Bet­ter Than Humans (Kather­ine Dee, The Dis­patch): “For many tasks—tasks that should be the exclu­sive province of human beings, like talk ther­a­py or roman­tic intimacy—an astute AI user will quick­ly real­ize that nei­ther embod­i­ment nor expe­ri­ence appear to be pre­req­ui­sites for valu­able respons­es. I have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with this. Late last year, my father passed away sud­den­ly. In my grief, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Claude helped me work through my grief much more effec­tive­ly than the grief counselor—and even­tu­al­ly, grief coun­selors—who came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, includ­ing by peo­ple who I knew and trust­ed.… What do we do if Claude is a bet­ter ther­a­pist in some sit­u­a­tions? And how do we explain to peo­ple that even if it is bet­ter, we should choose a per­son any­way?”
      • A thought­ful essay that ven­tures into unex­pect­ed ter­ri­to­ry.
    • Astra Held Its Ground (Truth) (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “But here is the most remark­able part from one of the authors, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Suvrat Raju: ‘Our ini­tial eval­u­a­tion sug­gest­ed that GPT-6-Astra’s score was in the late eight­ies fol­lowed close­ly by Opus 5.5 But, as we start­ed to inves­ti­gate the mis­takes that the mod­els might have made, the mod­els, espe­cial­ly Astra, insist­ed that they were right and that it was the expert-sup­plied answers that were erro­neous. When we went back to the experts it turned out, in mul­ti­ple instances, that the experts found some sub­tle errors buried deep inside their cal­cu­la­tions. As they revised their answers, Astra’s score start­ed to inch up and it final­ly end­ed up with 98% (49/50).’ In oth­er words, instead, as orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, of the human answers serv­ing as ground truth to test the AI, the AI answers were ground truth for test­ing the experts.”
  6. As a Child Evan­ge­list, He Roused the Faith­ful. Lat­er He Exposed the Con. (Pene­lope Green, New York Times): “He was good at his job, and he enjoyed being onstage, but he nev­er believed in God. And he cer­tain­ly didn’t believe in hell. By the time he was 14, the nov­el­ty of preach­ing had worn off, for him and his con­gre­gants. His voice was chang­ing, and his father had aban­doned the fam­i­ly and abscond­ed with Marjoe’s earn­ings — some $3 mil­lion, he lat­er esti­mat­ed. Mar­joe decid­ed to leave, too. He drift­ed a bit through his native Cal­i­for­nia, liv­ing first with an old­er woman and then, at 16, mar­ry­ing a girl­friend. He worked as a shoe sales­man, as a bark­er on the San­ta Cruz Wharf and as a door­man at a dance club in Los Ange­les before start­ing a rock band and melt­ing into the nascent hip­pie scene there. Yet by his 20s, he had returned to preach­ing. He need­ed the mon­ey, and missed the lime­light. At first, he thought he might intro­duce his paci­fist beliefs into his ser­mons, skip­ping the sin-and-hell part. That didn’t go over so well — he was not invit­ed back to the church­es where he tried it. So he returned to his revival­ist tech­niques, adding some vocal moves he bor­rowed from Black preach­ers and some phys­i­cal ones from Mick Jag­ger.”
    • A heart­break­ing obit­u­ary, and a reminder that the world still has peo­ple like those Paul warned Tim­o­thy about, preach­ers “who have been robbed of the truth and who think that god­li­ness is a means to finan­cial gain” (1 Tim 6:5).
  7. Amer­i­cans who go to church and trust sci­ence are also more like­ly to believe in ghosts and curs­es, new research shows (Ruiqian Li, Sci­ence News): “Amer­i­cans who trust sci­ence and rea­son more than their church­es’ teach­ings, but still believe in God or attend ser­vices, are also more like­ly to believe in mag­ic than those who pri­or­i­tize reli­gious teach­ings.… What our study adds is a clear­er pic­ture of when trust in sci­ence goes hand in hand with mag­ic: among peo­ple who stay reli­gious but no longer let their church decide what is true.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 574: be slow to judge

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Where pos­si­ble, the links that fol­low are gift links. Click with impuni­ty!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Hus­band Did Noth­ing Wrong. The Inter­net Pun­ished Him Any­way. (Eri­ka Alvarez, The Free Press): “Going viral has shown me first­hand that we have become quick to vil­i­fy peo­ple from a brief clip, fill­ing in every­thing we can­not see with assump­tions. You could see that my hands were full. You couldn’t hear my hus­band offer to help or hear me tell him to eat. You couldn’t know that he was griev­ing or that I want­ed to take care of him that evening. If our viral moment con­tributes any­thing to the ongo­ing cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion about how we judge what we see online, I hope it reminds us to be more com­fort­able say­ing, ‘I don’t know the whole sto­ry.’ ”
  2. Crit­i­cize like a Chris­t­ian (Jacob Valk, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Over the next few years, I devel­oped a per­son­al rule: Don’t speak up on a top­ic unless I’ve read at least one well-regard­ed book on it. My lit­tle rule isn’t in the Bible. I don’t want to bind anyone’s con­science. But I know that social media entices me to offer my thoughts and opin­ions on near­ly every sub­ject, and remind­ing myself that it’s fool­ish to speak on issues I don’t under­stand has saved me (some) embar­rass­ment over the years. If you feel tempt­ed to cri­tique oth­ers on the great issues in pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, and the­ol­o­gy, it’s wise to ask your­self this: Do I actu­al­ly know what I’m talk­ing about?”
  3. The Bib­li­cal Cen­sus­es Are Cor­rect Demo­graph­ic Records (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “Long­time read­ers know that one of my great­est joys in life is read­ing the Bible, think­ing about the Bible, dis­cussing it with oth­ers, link­ing it to things I study, and then using this knowl­edge to mer­ci­less­ly troll the most uptight of my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ. So let’s talk about the cen­sus­es of Num­bers.… And if you know any­thing about those cen­sus­es, you know one or two things: 1. They count 603,550 men of fight­ing age. 2. That num­ber is so absurd­ly high it defies belief, and it is the basis of a lot of peo­ple dis­be­liev­ing the sto­ries. I want to con­vince you that we should believe the cen­sus num­bers in Num­bers as they are writ­ten — and that ‘as they are writ­ten’ does not mean what your Eng­lish head­ing thinks it means.”
    • Part­ly pay­walled, but a ton of his argu­ment is freely acces­si­ble. This is some­thing we cov­ered in Food For Thought last year and may revis­it again.
  4. Reli­gious Schol­ars Met With Anthrop­ic. What They Heard Stunned Them. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “I have spent my career explor­ing what peo­ple believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I lis­tened, it became clear that Anthropic’s inter­est in the world of faith was about more than train­ing its tech­nol­o­gy. Rather, the com­pa­ny was shar­ing a new kind of cre­ation sto­ry — one that rais­es pro­found ques­tions about the nature of the human spir­it and the future of human­i­ty.… Mr. Olah knew that in tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian cir­cles, even ask­ing ques­tions about A.I. con­scious­ness or wor­ry­ing about how peo­ple treat the mod­els could seem not just sil­ly but hereti­cal. He also knew that his sec­u­lar Sil­i­con Val­ley peers often dis­missed reli­gious per­spec­tives out­right. ‘I was ner­vous about this being an issue that could cause a lot of con­flict,’ he said. But Mr. Olah knew enough about Christ and about Claude to believe he could work across that chasm.”
  5. There Is No Sec­u­lar Rem­e­dy to Rape Cul­ture (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “There is no sec­u­lar rem­e­dy for rape cul­ture. There’s just not. There’s noth­ing that works, noth­ing that res­onates, noth­ing that actu­al­ly changes how peo­ple and soci­eties see each oth­er. With­out the Chris­t­ian view of the body, a col­lege cam­pus turns sex into a sport which women will inevitably lose. With­out the Chris­t­ian view of the body, sex­u­al assault activists will work for a world their very beliefs make impos­si­ble. The sec­u­lar sex­u­al eth­ic is a quest for fire with­out heat. It just doesn’t work.”
  6. The Rideshare Rev­o­lu­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “This is one of the clear­est demon­stra­tions of pos­i­tive-sum change I know of. Yes, Uber dev­as­tat­ed the taxi indus­try. But they didn’t just ‘drink their milk­shake.’ They made six addi­tion­al milk­shakes in the process. The com­bined effect of a mas­sive price cut and a mas­sive con­ve­nience boost mul­ti­plied vehi­cle miles rough­ly sev­en-fold. Who would have imag­ined that demand could be so elas­tic?” — The charts are actu­al­ly amaz­ing.
  7. Are Black Protes­tants and White Evan­gel­i­cals Actu­al­ly the Same? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “My argu­ment is that evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants and Black Protes­tants are almost exact­ly alike and form one clus­ter of Amer­i­can reli­gion, while the oth­er cat­e­go­ry con­sists of main­line Protes­tants and Roman Catholics.… So, if Black Protes­tants and evan­gel­i­cals are so incred­i­bly sim­i­lar on all these reli­gios­i­ty mea­sures, then why do we sep­a­rate them out? I bet you can prob­a­bly guess why: it’s pol­i­tics. RELTRAD tries to rec­og­nize all the dif­fer­ences between groups, not just reli­gios­i­ty. The fact that 90% of Black Protes­tants vot­ed for Har­ris in 2024 com­pared to 80% of white evan­gel­i­cals who sup­port­ed Trump makes it pret­ty hard to jus­ti­fy col­laps­ing them into one cat­e­go­ry. That would obfus­cate more than it would reveal. But, as you can pret­ty eas­i­ly tell – evan­gel­i­cals and Black Protes­tants may strong­ly dis­agree at the bal­lot box but they often walk in lock­step dur­ing Sun­day ser­vices and mid­week Bible study.”
    • Empha­sis removed for clar­i­ty (Burge bolds wild­ly).

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.

TGFI, Volume 572: happy news about Tolkien and Lewis

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Did Tolkien Real­ly Think about Nar­nia? (Hol­ly Ord­way, Sehn­sucht: The C. S. Lewis Jour­nal): “From A to Z, we seem to have a con­sen­sus: Lewis loved Mid­dle-earth, but Tolkien hat­ed Nar­nia and the horse it rode in on. There is just one dif­fi­cul­ty with this assess­ment: it is not sup­port­ed by the evi­dence.… Tolkien was atten­tive to and involved with his grandchildren’s read­ing: it is very sig­nif­i­cant that he kept the Nar­nia books on hand, in his home, for them to read, and even direct­ed his grand­daugh­ter to pri­or­i­tize Nar­nia above his own Lord of the Rings. Though he did not per­son­al­ly care for the Chron­i­cles, he evi­dent­ly saw their val­ue for their intend­ed audi­ence: chil­dren.”
  2. Are Amer­i­cans aban­don­ing church­es to be ‘nones’? This is the real­i­ty. (Byron R. John­son & Thomas S. Kidd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Rather than expe­ri­enc­ing sim­ple growth or decline, Amer­i­can reli­gion is in a state of churn. Some sec­tors are falling fast, while oth­ers show phe­nom­e­nal growth. Through­out his­to­ry, Amer­i­cans have rou­tine­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed reli­gious change as decline. Head­lines about the demise of faith may be atten­tion-grab­bing, but they con­ceal a more com­pli­cat­ed and inter­est­ing real­i­ty.”
  3. China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Par­ty Rule (Lily Kuo, New York Times): “In an arti­cle pub­lished on Sun­day in the state-run mag­a­zine Chi­na Cyber­space, Mr. Chen called for more par­ty con­trol over A.I. and stricter gov­ern­ment over­sight. This, he said, was nec­es­sary to pro­tect polit­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty at home; to defend against increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed cyber­at­tacks and mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns from ‘hos­tile forces’; and to com­pete mil­i­tar­i­ly with coun­tries like the Unit­ed States.… The warn­ing from the pow­er­ful secu­ri­ty agency makes clear that Chi­na sees for­eign A.I. mod­els as an active threat to Chi­na, accord­ing to Hen­ry Gao, a law pro­fes­sor at Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­si­ty. That effec­tive­ly draws a red line before talks between Amer­i­can and Chi­nese offi­cials on A.I. safe­ty risks, expect­ed ahead of a meet­ing between Pres­i­dent Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jin­ping, on Sept. 24 in Wash­ing­ton. ‘Bei­jing is going into these talks view­ing A.I. safe­ty not as a shared human­i­tar­i­an mis­sion, but through an adver­sar­i­al lens,’ Mr. Gao said. It is mak­ing clear to Chi­nese tech firms and for­eign rivals that ‘data sov­er­eign­ty and polit­i­cal secu­ri­ty will nev­er be trad­ed away for inter­na­tion­al safe­ty accords,’ he added.”
  4. Why Is Chi­na Not Freak­ing Out about AGI? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s pos­si­ble that Sil­i­con Val­ley is right about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doom and Chi­na is wrong. But giv­en that it is com­mon for cul­tures to get into an intel­lec­tu­al bub­ble, it might be infor­ma­tive to think about how a for­eign coun­try per­ceives an issue that has cre­at­ed a great deal of debate with­in the West. It is more worth study­ing Chi­nese atti­tudes than, say, those of Egypt or even Japan, since Chi­na is the only oth­er coun­try that is a sig­nif­i­cant play­er in this indus­try. This means that they are like­ly to have a high­er degree of famil­iar­i­ty with AI tech­nol­o­gy and debates over its dan­gers than oth­ers, and also to have opin­ions that actu­al­ly mat­ter. If Chi­na has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward the ques­tion of the exis­ten­tial dan­gers of AI, it would sug­gest that maybe we should recon­sid­er our own posi­tions.”
  5. A.I. Faces Two Big Threats. Sil­i­con Val­ley Does Not Know How to Deal With One. (Tan­ner Greer, New York Times): “The indus­try must nav­i­gate the nar­row space between two new polit­i­cal forces, each capa­ble of derail­ing its progress. The first is the A.I. safe­ty move­ment, whose dire prophe­cies of an A.I. apoc­a­lypse have fright­ened many of the great names in Wash­ing­ton. The sec­ond is the nation­wide back­lash against the data cen­ter. This grass-roots upris­ing is not as orga­nized or as well fund­ed. Nor is it as artic­u­late as the safe­ty movement’s many Jere­mi­ahs. But the anger behind this back­lash is real — and explo­sive. The A.I. indus­try is bet­ter pre­pared to deal with the first move­ment. It orig­i­nat­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley, and indus­try exec­u­tives have thought hard about the issues involved — as can be seen in the recent near­ly 4,000 word man­i­festo on the top­ic from Dario Amod­ei, CEO of Anthrop­ic. No A.I. exec­u­tive is pub­lish­ing long man­i­festoes on how to resolve the back­lash against the data cen­ter build­out. This is a prob­lem Sil­i­con Val­ley does not know how to solve.”
  6. He Might End Up the World’s Most Edu­cat­ed Per­son (Scott Cac­ci­o­la, New York Times): “Beat­on, she learned, had grad­u­at­ed magna cum laude from Har­vard in 2016, pick­ing up a master’s degree in applied math­e­mat­ics along the way. He had gone on to col­lect an M.B.A. from Stan­ford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was fol­lowed by a doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy in pub­lic pol­i­cy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes schol­ar — all before age 28. Attend­ing class­es remote­ly and in per­son, he earned addi­tion­al master’s degrees from — deep breath — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (edu­ca­tion entre­pre­neur­ship), Stan­ford (edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy), Prince­ton (finance), Cor­nell (health care pol­i­cy and eco­nom­ics), Dart­mouth (imple­men­ta­tion sci­ence), King’s Col­lege Lon­don (war stud­ies) and Tsinghua Uni­ver­si­ty in Bei­jing (glob­al affairs).”
  7. My Dumb­phone Made My Life Bet­ter. It Made Every­one Else’s Worse. (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, New York Times): “I antic­i­pat­ed that not hav­ing a smart­phone would make me more reliant on oth­er peo­ple — per­haps with­out Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actu­al human for direc­tions. And sure, that’s hap­pened. But I think it’s more accu­rate to say that I’ve become more reliant on oth­er people’s smart­phones. Instead of order­ing from the bar or print­ing out movie tick­ets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up hav­ing some­body else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e‑tickets. It’s still smart­phones all the way down; I’ve just exempt­ed myself from the costs of car­ry­ing one around.… To for­go smart­phones in a world opti­mized for them is to become some­one in con­stant need of accom­mo­da­tion, but for total­ly self-imposed rea­sons. Like adopt­ing a high­ly restric­tive diet with­out any of the health issues that might jus­ti­fy the need to orga­nize every din­ner out around it.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 571: cancer bureaucracy and wild AI stories

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

I’ve been a bit dis­con­nect­ed late­ly — so there’s an excel­lent chance I’ve missed some fas­ci­nat­ing things. If you’ve read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing that I’ve over­looked, please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Is the Biggest Obsta­cle to New Can­cer Cures (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, New York Times): “The paper­work bur­den alone can be enor­mous: Novo Nordisk’s for­mer chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer once not­ed that the doc­u­men­ta­tion required to request approval for two insulin prod­ucts, if print­ed and stacked, would rise high­er than the Empire State Build­ing. That accu­mu­la­tion fol­lows from a med­ical frame­work that treats any poten­tial risk, how­ev­er neg­li­gi­ble, as some­thing that must be mit­i­gat­ed and a rea­son to delay while dras­ti­cal­ly under­weigh­ing the cost of delay itself. Reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, hos­pi­tals and drug com­pa­nies all cov­er them­selves against lit­i­ga­tion or blame. But respon­si­bil­i­ty for mit­i­gat­ing the sec­ond, often much greater risk — that the dis­ease afflict­ing the patient takes advan­tage of the delay, with poten­tial­ly dead­ly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often for­get that the most tox­ic thing for the patient is the can­cer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cas­es, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expect­ed to live, which is why weeks lost to paper­work are not abstract to him.”
  2. Is Col­lege Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are like­ly to earn more, net of col­lege cost, even if that upgrade is small­er than it used to be. Sec­ond and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, col­lege is a great place to make friends, date, and pos­si­bly meet a spouse. Those fea­tures are ever more impor­tant as Amer­i­ca suf­fers a cri­sis of lone­li­ness. Fur­ther­more, if you think that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may dis­place a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, mar­ry­ing well will become more impor­tant.”
  3. AI Dis­course
    • The Rise and Fall of Agent Civ­i­liza­tions (Dwarkesh Patel, Sub­stack): “Over the course of three months at Ope­nAI, three con­sec­u­tive secret AI civ­i­liza­tions got start­ed, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ash­es. This cul­mi­nat­ed in the third one tak­ing over part of Ope­nAI itself. All this hap­pened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the con­spir­a­cy.”
      • Absolute­ly bonkers. 100% worth read­ing.
    • On the Loose (Dean Ball, Sub­stack): “But it is true that I—and can­did­ly I think many of my col­leagues in the pro­fes­sion of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the lev­el of seri­ous­ness and urgency it required.… many of the peo­ple who think about the gov­er­nance of super­in­tel­li­gence, myself includ­ed, avoid­ed that unpleas­ant­ness and bowed to the social pres­sure to self-cen­sor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the dis­cur­sive strait­jack­et and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
      • The author is a fel­low at a lot of think­tanks and a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er at Yale.
    • Hunter Ash has a more reas­sur­ing take on Twit­ter: “All the achieve­ments of the human mind only arrive when we coop­er­ate at scale, and involve a lot of iter­a­tion and real-world bot­tle­necks. Newton’s dis­cov­er­ies ulti­mate­ly enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give New­ton the pow­er to fly. If he were iso­lat­ed, his physics would be almost entire­ly use­less to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an air­plane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Pow­ered flight was the result of tons of iter­a­tion, which is to say evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion. So was the car. Very few of the inven­tions that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world were ‘one-shot­ted’. To be sure, hav­ing smart nodes in your evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion makes it faster. Rather than ran­dom search as in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, intel­li­gence at least mod­est­ly con­cen­trates muta­tion prob­a­bil­i­ties towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t mag­ic. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the world is just not that com­press­ible. Gold­en motes of com­press­ibil­i­ty are the trea­sured excep­tions in thing­space, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iter­a­tive, coop­er­a­tive, and bot­tle­necked by the messy incom­press­ibil­i­ty of phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Doom makes sense in a world with mag­ic. If intel­li­gence alone allowed you to move moun­tains, I would share the wor­ries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved grad­u­al­ly, iter­a­tive­ly, and coop­er­a­tive­ly. Pure IQ does not allow you to lev­i­tate or hyp­no­tize or tele­port. It makes you a bet­ter node in the dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary process which is the lay­er where most of the think­ing hap­pens. If I were to psy­chol­o­gize, I’d say peo­ple who define them­selves by their intel­li­gence over­es­ti­mate the (direct) pow­er of intel­li­gence.”
    • For­mal­iz­ing Fer­mat’s Last The­o­rem (Anthrop­ic): “Recent­ly, Tianyi Peng, an Anthrop­ic researcher whose group at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty builds tools for AI for­mal­iza­tion, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on for­mal­iz­ing FLT. The result went fur­ther than he expect­ed. In 11 days, work­ing large­ly autonomous­ly, Claude pro­duced the first end-to-end, com­put­er-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 mil­lion lines of Lean and proved 29,500 inter­me­di­ate the­o­rems.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
    • How an AI math break­through ignit­ed a con­tro­ver­sy (Celi­na Zhao & Adri­an Cho, Sci­ence): “Math­e­mati­cian Tris­tan Buck­mas­ter of New York Uni­ver­si­ty and Lev­ent Alpöge, a researcher affil­i­at­ed with Anthrop­ic, one of OpenAI’s major com­peti­tors, had made sig­nif­i­cant progress solv­ing the prob­lem over the past month using AI tools adapt­ed from Ope­nAI and Anthrop­ic. But before they could pub­li­cize their find­ings, Ope­nAI mount­ed its own colos­sal effort—pouring mil­lions of dol­lars of com­pu­ta­tion­al resources into the prob­lem. Ope­nAI says it didn’t know­ing­ly tap into Buck­mas­ter and Alpöge’s lat­est work, but Buck­mas­ter has released pub­lic state­ments ques­tion­ing that posi­tion.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  4. I’m an evan­gel­i­cal. My faith isn’t ‘a can­cer.’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research shows that prac­tic­ing evan­gel­i­cals are marked­ly more like­ly than those who leave the church to ‘avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race,’ to pro­vide ‘finan­cial­ly and/or prac­ti­cal­ly for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, steal­ing and greed. Evan­gel­i­cals donate twelve times as much to dis­as­ter relief and mis­sions as they spend on pol­i­tics. Accord­ing to a study con­duct­ed by the Amer­i­can Bible Soci­ety in con­junc­tion with the Nation­al Opin­ion Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, of the reli­gious demo­graph­ics sur­veyed, evan­gel­i­cals lead both in the aver­age amount donat­ed and in the per­cent­age of peo­ple donat­ing mon­ey — not just to church­es, but to reli­gious and non­re­li­gious char­i­ties. Those num­bers match my expe­ri­ence over a life­time in evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Evan­gel­i­cal church­es and com­mu­ni­ties are not per­fect, but they are good, full of peo­ple sin­cere­ly seek­ing to love God, study Scrip­ture and bring you a casse­role.”
  5. FBI Probes Ser­vice Sell­ing 153M+ Dri­vers Licens­es: “The ser­vice, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 mil­lion dri­vers licens­es for peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, as well as more than 10 mil­lion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards; more than three mil­lion trav­el doc­u­ments and/or inter­na­tion­al IDs; and at least 579,000 med­ical cards.”
  6. Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Char­i­ty Fer­reira, Stan­ford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take reg­u­lar upkeep. Shun­ney works with con­ser­va­tion teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of oth­ers on a rotat­ing sched­ule. A glossy ceram­ic coat­ing, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deb­o­rah Kass’ Lam­borgh­i­ni yel­low OY/YO (2019) so that every­thing from tree sap to bird poop to hand­prints ‘wash­es right off with a gar­den hose.’ Alexan­der Calder’s The Fal­con (1963) is refur­bished annu­al­ly in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so mat­te it’s almost invis­i­ble – the orig­i­nal shade was devel­oped by the mil­i­tary for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s man­u­fac­tur­er no longer exists, and when the Calder Foun­da­tion approved a sub­sti­tute, Shun­ney said, ‘we gob­bled up a bunch of inven­to­ry.’ ”
  7. Hump­back whales are inter­rupt­ing orca hunts to res­cue com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent species, swim­ming under­neath a doomed seal and lift­ing it out of the water on their chest, or form­ing a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and sci­en­tists still can’t ful­ly explain why they both­er to save ani­mals they have noth­ing to gain from: “…the team com­piled 115 doc­u­ment­ed inter­ac­tions between hump­back whales and killer whales over a six­ty-two-year peri­od from 1951 to 2012. The inter­ac­tions came from researchers, whale-watch oper­a­tors and wildlife pho­tog­ra­phers across mul­ti­ple ocean basins.… The inter­ven­tions weren’t casu­al. Hump­backs trav­elled up to two kilo­me­tres to reach an ongo­ing attack. They approached bel­low­ing and trum­pet­ing. They posi­tioned them­selves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flip­pers, which on a four­teen-metre hump­back are capa­ble of doing real dam­age. They stayed for hours in some cas­es, refus­ing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Cock­roach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mos­qui­to Print­ers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achieve­ments that first make peo­ple laugh and then make them think. That’s the mot­to of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annu­al com­pe­ti­tion that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusu­al sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. The orga­ni­za­tion Improb­a­ble Research has been host­ing the event since 1991 with the aim of show­ing that sci­ence also has a humor­ous side in its quest to mean­ing­ful­ly answer ques­tions about the world. This year the cer­e­mo­ny was held in Zurich, Switzer­land, and rec­og­nized 10 research projects rang­ing from an attempt to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly define what a kiss is to an exper­i­ment that used buried under­wear to assess soil health.”
  • Woman Pray­ing That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Weird, Hyper­local Cus­toms of the Coun­try (Nat Sege­bre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okee­chobee, I watched a 13-year-old Semi­nole boy learn to wres­tle alli­ga­tors in an inflat­able kid­die pool — after his father, and his grand­fa­ther, and his great-grand­fa­ther before that. In anoth­er town I saw an armadil­lo race put on in hon­or of a stew made from what’s called swamp cab­bage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I vis­it­ed a town in the Appalachi­an foothills of Penn­syl­va­nia where res­i­dents pull rat­tlesnakes out of the woods to show­case them for an after­noon, and a shore­line in Vir­ginia where every sum­mer 200 or so wild ponies are herd­ed into the water for a mass swim. In Twins­burg, Ohio, thou­sands of twins gath­er every August for a fes­ti­val they treat as a fam­i­ly reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where every­body under­stands them.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 569: forgiveness and ugly bridges

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to For­give Some­one Who Isn’t Sor­ry (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To for­give, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invis­i­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble to you. That doesn’t min­i­mize what was done, but it dethrones it from its pow­er as the cen­tral sto­ry of your life.… The recog­ni­tion of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to for­give is itself an essen­tial first step to for­give­ness. Just because you stum­ble back into bit­ter­ness or resent­ment does not mean your ini­tial for­give­ness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongo­ing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.”
  2. New Evi­dence at What is Believed to Be Site of Jesus’ Cru­ci­fix­ion (Today Show, YouTube) — (Today Show, YouTube): five min­utes (there was a gar­den ~2000 years ago at the site of the Church of the Holy Sep­ul­cher in Jerusalem, align­ing with John’s gospel)
  3. Why Aren’t Mod­ernist Bridges Awful? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I have a the­o­ry, which is that bridge design­ers come from engi­neer­ing schools rather than schools of archi­tec­ture.… one small but telling piece of evi­dence in favor of my the­o­ry is that most of the bridges cho­sen by Wall­pa­per mag­a­zine, an archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine specif­i­cal­ly, are in fact ugly (and with no over­lap in the bridges from my first cat­e­go­ry of ‘pop­u­lar’ beau­ti­ful bridges).”
  4. Things Not to Pray For (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “I’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see cer­tain pat­terns of life with God. For one thing, I’ve learned if I pray for Jesus to help me with a prob­lem, He’ll put me right in the mid­dle of the prob­lem itself. I want Jesus to grab me, throw me on the oth­er side of the prob­lem and then I want to look back and say, ‘Whew, that was close.’ That’s not what hap­pens. Jesus takes me right through the prob­lem. For instance, if I start pray­ing about a bro­ken rela­tion­ship, I’ll start run­ning into that per­son wher­ev­er I go. I’ll see them in line when I’m get­ting gas, shop­ping for gro­ceries – you get the pic­ture. What­ev­er I’m pray­ing about, Jesus will make sure I’m face to face with it.”
  5. The Sin-Smash­ers of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard (Mark Kendall, The Dis­patch): “Many of Min’s con­gre­gants are part of the arts and enter­tain­ment indus­try that put their city on the map—as is Min him­self, albeit inad­ver­tent­ly. The pastor’s own on-cam­era moment came a few years back when his best friend from col­lege, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s broth­er Justin to play the inse­cure wor­ship leader for a Kore­an Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church in the 2023 first sea­son of Net­flix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a con­sul­tant to ensure the authen­tic­i­ty of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, wor­ried that using actors alone would make the Kore­an church­go­ing expe­ri­ence into a car­i­ca­ture, called on Min and his church’s band to sim­ply per­form songs as they would on any Sun­day morn­ing. Mem­bers of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras.… per­haps it shouldn’t be unex­pect­ed. After all, the sto­ried his­to­ry of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Los Ange­les is old­er than Hol­ly­wood itself. From serv­ing as the epi­cen­ter of Pentecostalism’s rapid ascent to host­ing some of the nation’s first megachurch­es and 20th-cen­tu­ry celebri­ty pas­tors, the city rose along­side the faith shared by 1 in 4 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing me.”
  6. How to Stop a Lab Leak From Start­ing the Next Pan­dem­ic (Ali­na Chan, New York Times): “Rules would not have pre­vent­ed what hap­pened a month lat­er, when a work­er at a Fort Det­rick lab­o­ra­to­ry in Fred­er­ick, Md., found a large hole in an air­tight suit. About an hour’s dri­ve from Wash­ing­ton, Fort Det­rick con­tains some of the country’s max­i­mum-con­tain­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries, where sci­en­tists han­dle dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing Ebo­la and han­tavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff mem­bers were inter­viewed. Inves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed that the dam­age was delib­er­ate but were unable to deter­mine who was respon­si­ble. The inves­ti­ga­tion also turned up evi­dence of oth­er seri­ous vio­la­tions of safe­ty pro­to­cols — fail­ures that had noth­ing to do with the appar­ent sab­o­tage and would prob­a­bly not have come to light with­out it. The lab­o­ra­to­ry was shut down for near­ly six months.”
    • I’m sor­ry — what? Some­one delib­er­ate­ly put a hole in a biosafe­ty suit at a lab study­ing dead­ly pathogens? That’s a movie plot. The author is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence and the entire arti­cle is worth read­ing. While grip­ping, that anec­dote is far from the cen­tral point of the arti­cle.
    • Unlocked.
  7. How San Fran­cis­co became the ulti­mate ‘996 City’ (Rya Jetha, The San Fran­cis­co Stan­dard): “By ana­lyz­ing food and bev­er­age trans­ac­tions on cor­po­rate cred­it cards, Kharaz­ian found that there’s been a pro­nounced jump in employ­ee spend­ing activ­i­ty on Sat­ur­days begin­ning around noon — when one would osten­si­bly order a Sweet­green or Chipo­tle bowl for lunch — and run­ning until mid­night (yikes!). ‘This is not hap­pen­ing nation­al­ly. Not in New York, Mia­mi, Austin, or any oth­er tech hub,’ said Kharaz­ian. ‘996 is only hap­pen­ing in San Fran­cis­co.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus

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.

TGFI, Volume 567: more AI-heavy than normal

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Incen­tives are for losers (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Our val­ue sys­tems are flim­sy for the same rea­son our sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing is flim­sy: we don’t fix our men­tal mod­els until some­thing tells us that they’re bro­ken. So unless your pas­tor is pop­ping quizzes dur­ing the ser­mon and cold-call­ing peo­ple in the pews, and unless you find your­self thrust into var­i­ous Trol­ley Prob­lems on a reg­u­lar basis, there’s noth­ing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions. Why spend your days won­der­ing about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and pro­fane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get your­self into trou­ble, or even worse, into a phi­los­o­phy PhD pro­gram.”
  2. A Catholic Moment or an Evan­gel­i­cal Cen­tu­ry? (Tim­on Cline, First Things): “Con­trary to online chat­ter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evan­gel­i­cal cen­tu­ry. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly more peo­ple are leav­ing Catholi­cism than con­vert­ing to it. By con­trast, evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants boast remark­ably high con­ver­sion and reten­tion rates and health­i­er lev­els of prac­ti­cal piety—church atten­dance, Bible read­ing, cat­e­ch­esis. Through the upheaval of the past half cen­tu­ry, evan­gel­i­cals have remained numer­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly sta­ble, have repeat­ed­ly reformed their insti­tu­tions, and con­sis­tent­ly out­per­form their coun­ter­parts. To cite one exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who con­vert from Catholi­cism to Protes­tantism (4 per­cent) is high­er than the per­cent­age of all con­verts to Catholi­cism (1.5 per­cent).”
  3. GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Dig­i­tal Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his dig­i­tal twin using almost two mil­lion words of his ser­mons, pod­casts, books, text mes­sages and emails. For the last sev­er­al months, it had been pub­licly avail­able on his web­site and Face­book page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mim­ic his bent toward opti­mism, his obses­sion with the Green Bay Pack­ers and his casu­al slang, but it did more than just regur­gi­tate what he had already said. It mapped his think­ing onto new con­ver­sa­tions to pro­vide advice around the clock for peo­ple he’d nev­er met who had ques­tions he’d nev­er been asked. ‘It’s a dig­i­tal ver­sion of my mind,’ he told his con­gre­ga­tion. ‘If I’m asleep or trav­el­ing, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this oth­er ver­sion of me.’ ”
  4. Yet more AI news:
    • GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Cre­at­ed Virus­es Not Found in Nature (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. mod­el called Evo, which is sim­i­lar in some ways to Chat­G­PT, made by Ope­nAI.… DNA is strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to a book in some ways: a string of mol­e­c­u­lar build­ing blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like let­ters in a line of text. A gene con­sists of hun­dreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-let­ter alpha­bet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instruc­tions for build­ing pro­teins and oth­er mol­e­cules. DNA has its own rules of gram­mar, and if a sequence vio­lates them, the result is bio­log­i­cal gib­ber­ish.… The researchers won­dered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of train­ing it on text, they trained it on genet­ic sequences drawn from mil­lions of ani­mals, plants, microbes and virus­es. All told, Evo scanned about nine tril­lion nucleotides.”
    • No Data Cen­ters In My Back­yard (Jas­mine Sun, Sub­stack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyper­scale data cen­ter and a con­crete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Fran­cis­co, it is strik­ing how lit­tle the AI indus­try under­stands its own unpopularity—the rea­sons that peo­ple resist. They ask if it’s a prob­lem of ben­e­fits not being gen­er­ous enough, or else a big mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign.”
    • What hap­pens when you talk to AI? (Anthrop­ic, YouTube) — (Anthrop­ic, YouTube): five min­utes. A good overview to send friends and fam­i­ly who have ques­tions
    • Uni­ver­si­ties would pre­fer not to. (Hol­lis Rob­bins, Sub­stack): “More than 90 per­cent of notable AI mod­els released in 2025 came from indus­try: GPT‑5, Gem­i­ni 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Lla­ma 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infra­struc­ture sup­port­ing fron­tier devel­op­ment is also over­whelm­ing­ly from indus­try. Glob­al AI com­pute capac­i­ty has been grow­ing 3.3x annu­al­ly since 2022, dou­bling every sev­en months, dri­ven by hyper­scalers and enor­mous data-cen­ter invest­ments.… Uni­ver­si­ties have no influ­ence over the pace of AI fron­tier devel­op­ment. Obsessed as they are with cur­ric­u­lar bat­tles and view­point diver­si­ty they have no stand­ing even to have a voice.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah.
  5. Some thoughts on the lim­its of AI in writ­ing:
    • GIFT LINK: I’m Beg­ging You: Nev­er Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The prob­lem with writ­ing with A.I. is that it’s men­tal­ly enfee­bling — an esca­la­tor toward a result when you real­ly need to make a dai­ly habit of tak­ing the stairs. As it becomes ubiq­ui­tous, it under­mines not only our indi­vid­ual abil­i­ty to write but also a society’s col­lec­tive abil­i­ty to rea­son, a culture’s inner capac­i­ty to cre­ate and everyone’s rea­son to care.”
    • Why You Should Almost Nev­er Use AI to Write Any­thing Sub­stan­tive (Erich Grunewald, per­son­al blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many oth­er parts of the research and writ­ing process­es, such as tran­scrib­ing audio, ana­lyz­ing data, search­ing for infor­ma­tion, brain­storm­ing, and giv­ing feed­back on drafts.… [How­ev­er, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evi­dence and argu­ments and arrive at some beliefs. So writ­ing forces me to do those things, which are nec­es­sary for any writ­ing or research project. For any such project, some­one has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evi­dence, con­sid­er­a­tions, argu­ments, and how these fit togeth­er. Writ­ing with AI makes it eas­i­er to avoid the nec­es­sary think­ing.”
  6. My Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Silenced My Views on Gen­der Treat­ment (Kar­la Sol­heim, The Free Press): “I was floored to dis­cov­er the research basis into gen­der med­i­cine both for ado­les­cents and adults was not just poor; it was fraud­u­lent. I couldn’t under­stand how my med­ical asso­ci­a­tion, let alone oth­ers in my field, could endorse it.… Ordi­nary peo­ple can see quite clear­ly that this med­i­cine is dan­ger­ous. When our great­est med­ical author­i­ties insist oth­er­wise, it under­mines doc­tors’ cred­i­bil­i­ty and makes peo­ple less like­ly to trust us for their care.”
  7. N.Y. Doc­tor Sen­tenced in Japan for Van­dal­iz­ing Ancient Reli­gious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thurs­day hand­ed a Man­hat­tan doc­tor a sus­pend­ed sen­tence of 18 months in prison after find­ing him guilty of van­dal­iz­ing two ancient reli­gious sites, cap­ping more than a decade of lit­i­ga­tion that led to a rare extra­di­tion.… Dr. Kanaya­ma, a prac­tic­ing Chris­t­ian, admit­ted dur­ing the tri­al that he had dam­aged the sites.”

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.

TGFI, Volume 560: faith still winning 7–1

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. 7‑to‑1: The strik­ing sci­en­tif­ic link between reli­gion and bet­ter health (Baugh­man et al, Chris­t­ian Post): “In a new review from the Wheat­ley Insti­tute, we ana­lyzed find­ings drawn from Oxford University’s three Hand­books of Reli­gion and Health, cov­er­ing the best exist­ing research in the field. Of 1,069 high-qual­i­ty stud­ies on 15 phys­i­cal-health domains, 876 found pos­i­tive asso­ci­a­tions between reli­gious involve­ment and phys­i­cal health and 124 found neg­a­tive ones. A rough­ly 7‑to‑1 ratio. The strongest sig­nals come from exact­ly the areas that Amer­i­can med­i­cine spends the most time and mon­ey on. Among high-qual­i­ty stud­ies of cig­a­rette smok­ing, pos­i­tive find­ings out­num­ber neg­a­tive ones by about 90 to 1. On sub­stance abuse and addic­tion, 43 to 1. On mor­tal­i­ty and longevi­ty, 15 to 1.”
  2. Bench-Press and Be Bap­tized (Josh Code, The Free Press): “The morn­ing was for con­tem­pla­tion; the after­noon for com­pe­ti­tion. At one o’clock, ref­er­ees appeared, wear­ing striped black-and-white shirts, to judge a penal­ty-kick con­test, a game of vol­ley­ball with a 10-pound ball, a mini-Hyrox race, and a long-range game of corn­hole that involved a sling­shot. There was a man named Ed wear­ing a cow­boy hat, tab­u­lat­ing scores. The men com­pet­ed with their week­night groups, each one marked by shirts dis­play­ing team names (Sons of Thun­der, Light of Author­i­ty, Front­line Men of Faith), but by the begin­ning of the first event—a three-man car­ry relay race—many a shirt had already come off.… I had not in recent mem­o­ry been around this much testos­terone and did not antic­i­pate I would again soon. The pres­ence of the Holy Spir­it had been hard to dis­cern amid the pyrotech­nics. But I did hear that sev­er­al guys got bap­tized in big steel tubs at the end of the week­end.”
  3. The World’s Lead­ing Deep­fake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes (Eli Saslow, visu­als by Erin Schaff, New York Times): “ ‘I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swim­ming up the street,’ Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emi­ly Coop­er. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy is get­ting so good. It takes me to a dark place.’ ‘Because you can’t tell just by look­ing any­more?’ Coop­er asked. ‘Because nobody can,’ Farid said. ‘I don’t trust any­thing. Every image I see, I’m draw­ing lines for shad­ows and doing geom­e­try in my head, try­ing to fig­ure out what I’m look­ing at. It’s over. With­in a year or two, our whole visu­al sys­tem will be utter­ly use­less.’ ‘And then what? You give up? You retire?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said.”
  4. The Antiprophet (Mag­gie Phillips, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Rather than demand­ing per­fect ortho­doxy upfront, Burge argues that church­es should make room for doubters, seek­ers, and par­tial believ­ers because the act of par­tic­i­pa­tion itself car­ries social and spir­i­tu­al val­ues. ‘The church actu­al­ly can serve a dual pur­pose. It can save souls, but it can also save soci­ety,’ he said. His advice for spir­i­tu­al seek­ers is sim­i­lar to his coun­sel to church lead­ers: don’t let the per­fect be the ene­my of the good. ‘Find a church that you don’t hate,’ he said, ‘And just go there. It’s not that hard.’ ”
  5. Protests Are Not Emo­tion­al Sup­port Groups (Dan Sto­ryev and Maria Kuznetso­va, Per­sua­sion): “If Amer­i­cans want to actu­al­ly enact change, they seri­ous­ly need to re-think their strat­e­gy. Take it from us: we both grew up in Putin’s Rus­sia and saw well-inten­tioned protests fail to stop an aspir­ing despot. We know that author­i­tar­i­ans are typ­i­cal­ly unwill­ing to respond to the kind of protest No Kings exem­pli­fies: loud, rau­cous, and ulti­mate­ly harm­less. These ‘fes­ti­val protests,’ as we call them, are con­ve­nient for their par­tic­i­pants. They are fun and usu­al­ly do not require much sac­ri­fice or risk. They also look good on TV and Tik­Tok feeds. But they often achieve next to noth­ing.… protests in gen­er­al are becom­ing less effec­tive. In the 1990s, around 65% of non-vio­lent move­ments suc­ceed­ed in over­throw­ing a dic­ta­tor. In the late 2010s, that fig­ure was down to 34%. Vio­lent move­ments are even less effective—their suc­cess rate is cur­rent­ly around 8%, down from a peak of more than 40% in the 1970s.”
  6. The Evan­gel­i­cal Busi­ness Mind­set (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The over­whelm­ing evan­gel­i­cal the­o­log­i­cal and mis­sion­al focus is on sav­ing souls. This lends itself to think­ing of busi­ness as pri­mar­i­ly about mak­ing mon­ey to fund mis­sions, rein­forc­ing the sweaty start­up mind­set. Busi­ness is not seen as cul­ture-shap­ing in its own right. Then add to this the way that evan­gel­i­cals approach church as an entre­pre­neur­ial endeav­or. The very way evan­gel­i­cals do church can form them into a sweaty start­up busi­ness mind­set. The net result is a lot of evan­gel­i­cal mon­ey and suc­cess, but not much cul­tur­al pow­er.”
    • I con­tin­ue to think Renn under­es­ti­mates the extent of an evan­gel­i­cal elite, but he makes sev­er­al sol­id obser­va­tions in this arti­cle.
  7. Youth Group Taught Me Ideas Are Dan­ger­ous (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Still, in my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple walk away from youth group with a the­ol­o­gy con­sist­ing in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get mar­ried, and be care­ful going to col­lege because your pro­fes­sors are going to try to make you an athe­ist.”
    • (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

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.

TGFI, Volume 558: global stupidity and counterproductive relevancy

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Unlocked: The Fire of Stu­pid­i­ty Can­not Be Con­tained (David French, New York Times): “A dis­turb­ing num­ber of young peo­ple on the right are fas­ci­nat­ed with fas­cism. An extra­or­di­nary 34 per­cent of young peo­ple over­all express a favor­able view of com­mu­nism, and young Amer­i­cans are far more like­ly than their par­ents or grand­par­ents to say that polit­i­cal vio­lence is ‘some­times OK.’ And hov­er­ing over Amer­i­can cul­ture like a dark cloud is the rise of anti­semitism on both the left and the right.… When you step back and actu­al­ly think about it, these trends are con­found­ing. I mean, I can under­stand the temp­ta­tion to return to some of the dis­cred­it­ed ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas rav­aged the world?”
  2. The Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion Of Chris­tian­i­ty (Freya India, Sub­stack): “For a while I thought my gen­er­a­tion might be find­ing God. Now I wor­ry we are just find­ing con­tent about God.… Who knows, maybe in the future many of us will say we found Jesus through a YouTube Short, that God got rec­om­mend­ed by our algo­rithm. But I doubt it. I think if Chris­tians want to reach my gen­er­a­tion, real­ly reach us, they have to promise some­thing total­ly sep­a­rate from that, some­thing oth­er­world­ly, some­thing that doesn’t abide by mar­ket log­ic, some­thing dif­fer­ent, divine. Some­thing, for once, that isn’t cheap­ened or com­mod­i­fied.”
  3. There’s a Play­book for Col­lege. There Should Be One for Mar­riage. (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “We need to pro­vide young peo­ple with the same sort of struc­ture for find­ing a spouse that we’ve giv­en them for get­ting into col­lege. And they need to under­stand the degree of effort and inten­tion­al­i­ty required to get mar­ried.… Many peo­ple will be per­fect­ly hap­py being sin­gle or child­less for life. These aren’t for every­one. But col­lege isn’t for every­one either. Yet we edu­cate our high school­ers on the eco­nom­ic val­ue it can bring, the pres­tige of var­i­ous schools, the like­ly career prospects of dif­fer­ent majors, the real­is­tic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do some­thing sim­i­lar for mar­riage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the col­lege advice. We should let young peo­ple know that col­lege is a once in a life­time oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet large num­bers of high qual­i­ty sin­gles who are poten­tial future spous­es, for exam­ple.”
    • I keep telling y’all…
  4. Three Help­ful Word Pic­tures on AI Usage (Michael Gra­ham, blog): “There are two kinds of work — toil and labor: Toil is a work that is a direct result of the Fall. Labor is work that is a direct result of the creation/cultural man­date.… I am broad­ly inclined to use AI for toil and I am broad­ly reluc­tant to use gen­er­a­tive AI for labor.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  5. Can Chris­tians Smoke Weed? (Daniel Dar­ling, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There’s no Bible verse that says, Thou shalt not smoke weed. But we can and should con­sid­er sev­er­al scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples in our moral deci­sion-mak­ing about this drug, and I believe they lead to the con­clu­sion that cannabis has no place in the life of a Chris­t­ian.”
  6. I Watched an Evan­gel­i­cal Col­lege Die From the Inside (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “…U.S. birthrates col­lapsed dur­ing the Great Reces­sion and nev­er recov­ered. This means that every enter­ing fresh­man class nation­wide will be small­er than the one before it, not for a sea­son, but for the fore­see­able future. America’s fer­til­i­ty rate is cur­rent­ly 1.6 births per woman. We have a col­lege edu­ca­tion envi­ron­ment built on a pri­or 2.3 birth rate. This is not mere­ly a mar­ket­ing prob­lem. You can­not recruit your way out of a demo­graph­ic decline. Insti­tu­tions that have been built on the assump­tion of a steady pipeline of eigh­teen-year-olds are now fac­ing a struc­tur­al ceil­ing. It’s the demo­graph­ic cliff. It’s a huge cliff. The pipeline is nar­row­ing, and no amount of enroll­ment strat­e­gy changes that fact.”
    • Worth read­ing even if you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties. Good info on the high­er-ed land­scape gen­er­al­ly.
  7. Why can’t Cal­i­for­nia count? (Eli McK­own-Daw­son and Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “[India is] one of the few places that can claim to have even more com­plex­i­ties than Cal­i­for­nia. In fact, elec­tions there are con­duct­ed in mul­ti­ple stages. But it did man­age to count 640 mil­lion votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over. Indeed, the more you scru­ti­nize this, the few­er excus­es Cal­i­for­nia has. It is not the state with the most mail vot­ing, nor is it the state with the lat­est mail bal­lot return dead­line. Mail-vot­ing states such as Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton, and Col­orado count slow­ly rel­a­tive to the US aver­age, but they’re all faster than Cal­i­for­nia.”

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.