Tag: Israel

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 501: college students, colleges, and youth in general



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

I’ve had a scat­tered week, so a lil’ less con­tent than usu­al here. Enjoy!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sec­u­lar Col­lege Stu­dents Find Ordi­nary Chris­tian­i­ty Per­sua­sive (Dylan Muss­er, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I serve as a cam­pus min­is­ter at one of the most pres­ti­gious and sec­u­lar uni­ver­si­ties in the South, and I’ve noticed that many stu­dents have become dis­en­chant­ed with sec­u­lar­ism.… The vis­i­ble beau­ty of ordi­nary Chris­t­ian liv­ing is a per­sua­sive apolo­getic for today’s stu­dents. It may encour­age even skep­ti­cal stu­dents to recon­sid­er a faith they’ve dis­missed.”
    • The author does cam­pus min­istry at Van­der­bilt.
  2. How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Gen­er­a­tion (Cather­ine Kim, Politi­co): “It’s a star­tling real­i­ty about Gen Z, backed up by mul­ti­ple stud­ies and what we can all see for our­selves: The most online gen­er­a­tion is also the worst at dis­cern­ing fact from fic­tion on the inter­net.”
  3. The Road to Cam­pus Serf­dom (John O. McGin­nis, Law & Lib­er­ty): “Today’s cir­cum­stances stark­ly illus­trate how expan­sive fed­er­al con­trol over civ­il soci­ety, orig­i­nal­ly cel­e­brat­ed by pro­gres­sives, returns to haunt its archi­tects. The left’s out­rage ought to focus not on this par­tic­u­lar admin­is­tra­tion but on its own reck­less empow­er­ment of the state.”
    • The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern.
  4. The Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish Israelis Pro­tect­ing West Bank Pales­tini­ans (Jill Nel­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Jonathan Pex is con­cerned about his Pales­tin­ian Bedouin neigh­bors in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills. They’re sheep­herders who live in an expan­sive cave out­fit­ted with solar elec­tric­i­ty, ten min­utes from Pex’s home. The region has seen an uptick in Israeli set­tler vio­lence against Pales­tini­ans since the Octo­ber 2023 Hamas attacks, and the Pales­tin­ian fam­i­ly is afraid they may be next on the set­tlers’ hit list, as they’ve had sev­er­al dis­putes with their neigh­bors over graz­ing rights.… ‘I’m going to do what­ev­er I can to sup­port them,’ Pex said. ‘Jesus would have real­ly had a heart for these peo­ple.’”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry.
  5. Make Chris­tian­i­ty cool again: Why Gen Z is flock­ing to church (Helen Cof­fey, The Inde­pen­dent): “Inter­est­ing­ly, a major piece of research on teenage well­be­ing con­duct­ed by sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford and Swansea Uni­ver­si­ty last year found that just three ele­ments strong­ly cor­re­lat­ed with bet­ter ado­les­cent men­tal health: get­ting enough sleep, reg­u­lar exer­cise and – wait for it – attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices.”
    • A British per­spec­tive on reli­gious renew­al among young peo­ple.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 499: OCD, Morality, and Tariffs



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

Next week is vol­ume 500. I can’t decide whether it will be just anoth­er issue or some­thing a lil’ dif­fer­ent.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. In his own words: Colts RT Braden Smith’s des­per­ate, life-threat­en­ing fight vs OCD (Joel A. Erick­son, Indi­anapo­lis Star): “Smith has always gone to church, but he’d com­mit­ted ful­ly to his Chris­t­ian faith, and an obses­sive-com­pul­sive dis­or­der began to warp his faith into some­thing sin­is­ter. From the out­side, it looked like Smith was div­ing deep into his faith. He devoured the Bible, quot­ed Scrip­ture, sought out believ­ers for con­ver­sa­tions. He prayed con­stant­ly and start­ed lis­ten­ing to Chris­t­ian music exclu­sive­ly. Inter­nal­ly, a dis­or­der Smith didn’t real­ize he had was twist­ing the words. ‘There’s the actu­al, real, true, liv­ing God,’ Smith said. ‘And then there’s my OCD god, and the OCD god is this con­demn­ing (deity). It’s like every wrong move you make, it’s like smack­ing the ruler against his hand. “Anoth­er bad move like that and you’re out of here.“ ‘”
    • A grip­ping sto­ry.
  2. Appeal­ing to Moral Sen­ti­ments in an Amoral Age (O. Alan Noble, Sub­stack): “…the moral sen­ti­ments peo­ple have can be real indi­ca­tions of spir­i­tu­al real­i­ties.
    The anx­i­ety a young woman feels about her iden­ti­ty may be a real indi­ca­tion that expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism is hol­low. The lone­li­ness a young woman feels in vapid, greedy sex­u­al rela­tion­ships may be a real indi­ca­tion that sex was cre­at­ed for union (and pro­cre­ation). Instead of treat­ing emo­tions as ran­dom or irrel­e­vant or con­ced­ing that neg­a­tive emo­tions are exclu­sive­ly the purview of the ther­a­pist and psy­chi­a­trist, we acknowl­edge that the felt expe­ri­ences of young women are a sign point­ing them to who they were cre­at­ed to be. And this isn’t just true for young women. I think there are many young men who need to hear this approach as well.”
  3. About the tar­iffs:
    • Trade deficits do not make a coun­try poor­er (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Does using your cred­it card to buy a wash­ing machine from Tar­get mean that Tar­get has ripped you off? No. Does it make you poor­er when you use your cred­it card to buy a wash­ing machine from Tar­get? Nope. You now have less mon­ey, but you have more stuff. In just the same way, a trade deficit means that the U.S. has less mon­ey and more stuff. It does not mean Amer­i­ca is poor­er, or that it has been ripped off by for­eign­ers.”
      • This is a help­ful explain­er of some key con­cepts which are in the news.
    • Don­ald Trump’s eco­nom­ic mas­ter­plan (Yanis Varo­ufakis, Unherd): “Though we risk the abyss star­ing back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his think­ing on three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions: why does he believe that Amer­i­ca is exploit­ed by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new inter­na­tion­al order in which Amer­i­ca can be ‘great’ again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we pro­duce a sen­si­ble cri­tique of Trump’s eco­nom­ic mas­ter­plan.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus. The things I find most inter­est­ing about this one is (a) it’s by a for­eign expert [an econ­o­mist who served as the Greek min­is­ter of finance] and (b) although writ­ten in Feb­ru­ary it antic­i­pat­ed the type of tar­iff that was imple­ment­ed (trade imbal­ance tar­iffs) instead of what had been expect­ed (rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iffs).
    • There’s a Method to Trump’s Tar­iff Mad­ness (Jen­nifer Burns, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s tar­iffs aren’t real­ly about tar­iffs. They are the open­ing gam­bit in a more ambi­tious plan to smash the world’s eco­nom­ic and geopo­lit­i­cal order and replace it with some­thing intend­ed to bet­ter serve Amer­i­can inter­ests. This plan is often referred to as the Mar-a-Lago Accord.”
      • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford.
  4. What Age Do Peo­ple Around the World Think Is Best to Reach Major Life Mile­stones? (Janell Fet­terolf et al, Pew Research): “When is the right time in life to get mar­ried or have a child? What is the best age to buy a home? Is there an ide­al age for retire­ment? We asked adults in 18 most­ly mid­dle-income coun­tries what they think is the best age to reach these life mile­stones. Over­all, there is a lot of agree­ment around the world. On aver­age across the coun­tries sur­veyed, peo­ple say it is best to get mar­ried and have a first child around 26 years old.… Gen­er­al­ly, peo­ple across the 18 coun­tries sur­veyed think it’s best to get mar­ried in one’s mid-20s. Aver­age ide­al ages range from 21.2 in Bangladesh to 28.9 in Argenti­na.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Why Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians Feel Betrayed by Amer­i­can Chris­tians (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Few­er than 2 per­cent of West Bank Pales­tini­ans today are Chris­t­ian, but they are an influ­en­tial minor­i­ty who endure the same land grabs and hard­ships as the major­i­ty Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion.”
    • It is a short col­umn, but one thing I wish Kristof had parsed out were the dif­fer­ences between Pales­tin­ian evan­gel­i­cals and Pales­tin­ian Catholics and Pales­tin­ian main­line Protes­tants. I think they each have dif­fer­ent things to say.
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Near­ly 300 Stu­dents Have Had Visas Revoked and Could Face Depor­ta­tion (Vimal Patel, Miri­am Jor­dan & Hali­na Ben­net, New York Times): “Near­ly 300 inter­na­tion­al stu­dents were abrupt­ly stripped of their abil­i­ty to stay in the Unit­ed States in recent days, accord­ing to uni­ver­si­ties and media reports, sow­ing fear among stu­dents and con­fu­sion at schools scram­bling to help stu­dents fac­ing deten­tion and pos­si­ble depor­ta­tion.… In some cas­es, immi­gra­tion offi­cers have arrest­ed inter­na­tion­al stu­dents relat­ed to their involve­ment in pro-Pales­tin­ian caus­es. In oth­er cas­es, stu­dents had com­mit­ted legal infrac­tions, such as dri­ving over the speed lim­it or while intox­i­cat­ed, often years ago, sev­er­al immi­gra­tion lawyers said in inter­views. But lawyers said the Trump admin­is­tra­tion had often giv­en no rea­son at all, leav­ing them to guess why stu­dents were tar­get­ed.… The Unit­ed States issued more than 400,000 visas to stu­dents in 2024.”
    • While I am sure almost all inter­na­tion­al stu­dents find the poli­cies dis­tress­ing, they should find the data in this arti­cle reas­sur­ing. To date few­er than one tenth of one per­cent of inter­na­tion­al stu­dents have had their visas revoked. 300/400000 = .00075 
  7. Insti­tu­tions Don’t Main­tain Them­selves (James Did­dams, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Jesus told Peter to for­give the broth­er or sis­ter who sins against him ‘not sev­en times, but sev­en­ty-sev­en times’ (Matt. 18:21–22). I’ve come to think Chris­tians have some oblig­a­tion of for­give­ness to our insti­tu­tions, too—some duty of love and sac­ri­fice to pre­serve and repair these right­ful­ly time-hon­ored ways of orga­niz­ing and shap­ing our lives.… Where did we ever get the idea that these insti­tu­tions would some­how main­tain them­selves? That they would always be there for us, meet­ing all our hopes, in per­fect work­ing order, with­out repair or for­give­ness from us?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 485



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

In this first email of 2025, I’d like to pass along an alum­nus’s obser­va­tion that 2025 is equal to 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93 which is also equal to (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)2.

Even cool­er, he point­ed out that 2025 equals (20+25)(20/(2*5)) or just (20+25)2

Num­bers do fun things.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Intel­lec­tu­als Found God (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “Instead of smirk­ing at reli­gion, some of our most impor­tant philoso­phers, nov­el­ists, and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als are now reassess­ing their con­tempt for it. They are won­der­ing if they might have missed some­thing.”
  2. H5N1: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I con­clude that the most plau­si­ble esti­mate for the chance of an H5N1 pan­dem­ic in the next year is 5%.”
    • Pret­ty much exact­ly how much I want­ed to know and explained well. Reas­sur­ing.
  3. How to like every­thing more (Sasha Chapin, Sub­stack): “In my expe­ri­ence, high-lev­el enjoy­ment, like a sport, is com­posed of many inter­lock­ing micro-skills that must be trained indi­vid­u­al­ly, but which rein­force each oth­er.”
  4. Amer­i­ca, the beau­ti­ful (Chris Arnade, Sub­stack): “We are an ide­al for a large por­tion of the world, and while that ide­al isn’t always a real­i­ty that we live up to, very few peo­ple come here, then turn around and go back, because with enough ded­i­ca­tion, you can cre­ate your own form of ful­fill­ment here. The US is a vast fed­er­a­tion of micro com­mu­ni­ties and micro cul­tures, all bound togeth­er by the belief, how­ev­er ten­ta­tive and neb­u­lous, in the Amer­i­can Dream.”
    • A fre­quent crit­ic of Amer­i­ca explains why he loves it nonethe­less.
  5. Africa Has Entered a New Era of War (Gabriele Stein­hauser, Andrew Bar­nett and Emma Brown, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Africa is now expe­ri­enc­ing more con­flicts than at any point since at least 1946, accord­ing to data col­lect­ed by Upp­sala Uni­ver­si­ty in Swe­den and ana­lyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Insti­tute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two insti­tutes have iden­ti­fied 28 state-based con­flicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 coun­tries, more than in any oth­er region in the world and dou­ble the count just a decade and a half ago. That tal­ly doesn’t include con­flicts that don’t involve gov­ern­ment forces, for instance between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, and whose num­ber has also dou­bled since 2010.”
    • Vast­ly under­re­port­ed in Amer­i­ca. If you ask most Amer­i­cans what wars are rag­ing right now they’d be able to iden­ti­fy Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas and not much else. But there’s a lot else. Wikipedi­a’s sum­ma­ry puts the cur­rent tal­ly at 19 full-blown wars, 20 sig­nif­i­cant con­flicts and 15 skir­mish­es.
  6. Can You Can­cel a Coun­try? (Russ Roberts, Sub­stack): “The fans of set­tler colo­nial­ism love hat­ing Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return Amer­i­ca to 1619, say. In Amer­i­ca, there are over 325 mil­lion set­tlers and only 7 mil­lion Native Amer­i­cans. Decol­o­niz­ing the Unit­ed States is unimag­in­able. So is decol­o­niz­ing Israel, real­ly. But it’s more imag­in­able than the Unit­ed States. The defend­ers of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fight­ing against ter­ror­ism and Jihadism. For the those who use the set­tler colo­nial­ism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against set­tler colo­nial­ism.”
    • Roberts is an econ­o­mist, a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion, and the pres­i­dent of Shalem Col­lege in Jerusalem.
  7. A Cen­tu­ry of Human Detri­tus, Visu­al­ized (Den­nis Over­bye, New York Times): “ ‘The web­site enables many com­par­isons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,’ he said. For instance, humans out­weigh wild ani­mals 10 to 1, a fact that sur­prised Dr. Ménard. (‘In my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple expect the oppo­site.’) But we weigh only half as much as the live­stock herds we main­tain to eat. Per­haps more omi­nous­ly, humans use 100 times their own mass in plas­tic.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 465



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

This is vol­ume 465, the 30th tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Did Planned Par­ent­hood Become One of the Country’s Largest Sup­pli­ers of Testos­terone? (Jen­nifer Block, The Free Press): “The orga­ni­za­tion would not give spe­cif­ic num­bers, or respond to mul­ti­ple requests for com­ment, but the insur­ance claim data (esti­mates that do not include patients who pay out of pock­et) sug­gest that 1 in 6 U.S. teens and young adults who sought gen­der hor­mones last year were seen at Planned Par­ent­hood. Between 2017 and 2023, affil­i­at­ed clin­ics filed gen­der-relat­ed insur­ance claims for 12,000 youths aged 12–17.”
  2. At 28, I Taught Myself to Be Lik­able. Here’s How I Did It (Sub­stack): “The guide­lines you’ll see below are going to seem real­ly rigid and judg­men­tal. But that’s kind of what I need­ed. Plat­i­tudes about how I need­ed to ‘be myself’ and ‘let my freak flag fly’ did way more harm than good. When I asked peo­ple for advice, a lot of them gave the knee­jerk response, ‘Just don’t care what oth­er peo­ple think of you,’ which is much eas­i­er said than done, espe­cial­ly when it’s bla­tant­ly obvi­ous that oth­er peo­ple can’t stand you.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. ‘I Just Have Some Ques­tions’: An Inter­view With Jus­tice Gor­such (David French, New York Times): “I didn’t get to ask every ques­tion I want­ed to, but our con­ver­sa­tion cov­ered a lot of ground, includ­ing Gorsuch’s indict­ment of the reg­u­la­to­ry state, his approach to eval­u­at­ing agency exper­tise, the prob­lem of mass incar­cer­a­tion and coer­cive plea bar­gain­ing, his jurispru­dence hold­ing the Unit­ed States account­able for its oblig­a­tions to Native Amer­i­cans and his def­i­n­i­tion of orig­i­nal­ism and the role of his­to­ry in under­stand­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Israel-relat­ed:
    • For col­lege stu­dents arrest­ed protest­ing the war in Gaza, the fall­out was only begin­ning (Christo­pher Heller et all, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Some 3,200 peo­ple were arrest­ed this spring dur­ing a wave of pro-Pales­tin­ian tent encamp­ments protest­ing the war in Gaza. While some col­leg es end­ed demon­stra­tions by strik­ing deals with the stu­dents, or sim­ply wait­ed them out, oth­ers called in police when pro­test­ers refused to leave. Many stu­dents have already seen those charges dis­missed. But the cas­es have yet to be resolved for hun­dreds of peo­ple at cam­pus­es that saw the high­est num­ber of arrests, accord­ing to an analy­sis of data gath­ered by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press and part­ner news­rooms.”
    • Why Israel Esca­lates (Dalia Dasse Kaye, For­eign Affairs): “…Israeli defense offi­cials do not nec­es­sar­i­ly feel com­fort­able rely­ing on deter­rence by denial—that is, by con­vinc­ing adver­saries that attacks would not succeed—as the Unit­ed States prefers. In these offi­cials’ view, the April defense of Israel was not a total suc­cess because, ulti­mate­ly, the defen­sive coali­tion did not pre­vent the attack; it only lim­it­ed the dam­age. Israeli defense plan­ners pre­fer deter­rence by punishment—showing adver­saries that attacks will pro­voke con­se­quences.”
    • Israel Isn’t ‘Risk­ing’ a Region­al War (Kevin Williamson, The Dis­patch): “…Israel is not ‘risk­ing a region­al war.’ Israel is involved in a region­al war, one that was forced upon it by Iran, some­times using prox­ies and some­times using its own forces direct­ly, as it did on April 13, when it attacked Israel with more than 300 mis­siles and drones. The Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, are wag­ing war on Israel—including a recent drone attack on Tel Aviv—as well as wag­ing a war on the Unit­ed States, attack­ing a U.S. Navy ves­sel in May, and con­duct­ing a wider mil­i­tary cam­paign against ship­ping in the Red Sea.” May be pay­walled.
  5. Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er ‘Dark Oxy­gen’ on the Ocean Floor Generated—Surprisingly—by Lumps of Met­al (Shi En Kim, Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine): “Twelve thou­sand feet under the ocean sur­face is a world of eter­nal mid­night. No sun­light can pen­e­trate to this depth to pro­mote pho­to­syn­the­sis, so no plants are pro­duc­ing oxy­gen there. Yet, the life-sup­port­ing gas is abun­dant in this dark­ness-cloaked region, thanks to an unlike­ly oxy­gen fac­to­ry: pota­to-sized, ‘bat­tery rocks’ on the seafloor.”
  6. US abor­tion num­bers have risen slight­ly since Roe was over­turned, study finds (Geoff Mul­vi­hill & Kim­ber­lee Krue­si, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The num­ber of women get­ting abor­tions in the U.S. actu­al­ly went up in the first three months of 2024 com­pared with before the Supreme Court over­turned Roe v Wade, a report released Wednes­day found, reflect­ing the lengths that Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled states went to expand access.”
    • Relat­ed: Kamala’s Abor­tion Extrem­ism (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “…the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty under Har­ris is as rad­i­cal­ly pro-abor­tion as it can pos­si­bly be. Short of com­ing out for killing tod­dlers, there sim­ply is no way to be more extreme than Kamala Har­ris and her par­ty now are. Kamala Har­ris is a hard-core ideologue—an abor­tion extremist—and has been since her first days as an elect­ed offi­cial. As pres­i­dent, she would be no dif­fer­ent.”
  7. Polit­i­cal or polit­i­cal-adja­cent (the dis­claimers at the bot­tom real­ly mat­ter — I did­n’t write these arti­cles, I just found them inter­est­ing and pass them along with non­par­ti­san intent — wait long enough and you’ll see arti­cles mak­ing point­ed obser­va­tions in all direc­tions. They’re focused one way this week because that’s how the news cycle rolled this time around):
    • Are Democ­rats real­ly more like­ly to be child­less cat ladies? (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…we had no idea what our friend Julie Zauzmer Weil was get­ting at when she asked if there was any evi­dence to sup­port the notion of the ‘child­less left.’ Weil, who you’ll rec­og­nize from her tremen­dous tax and data sto­ries for The Wash­ing­ton Post, clar­i­fied fur­ther: ‘Do Repub­li­cans have more kids than Democ­rats? It doesn’t seem obvi­ous to me that it would be true.’ The sim­ple answer, how­ev­er? Yes! About 38 per­cent of Democ­rats had nev­er had chil­dren as of 2022, com­pared with 26 per­cent of Repub­li­cans, accord­ing to the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey from the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved NORC at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.”
    • Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s choice of Har­ris was unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic − and the lat­est evi­dence of par­ty lead­ers dis­trust­ing par­ty vot­ers (Daniel Kling­hard, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “But for the first time since 1968, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee will win the nom­i­na­tion with­out win­ning a sin­gle pri­ma­ry vote. This may not be as much of a demo­c­ra­t­ic back­slide as that of the pre­vi­ous so-called ‘mixed peri­od.’ But it would be a cul­mi­na­tion of the elite-ori­ent­ed trends that have shaped the nom­i­nat­ing process since 1984, in which par­ty elites have played an increas­ing­ly large role in shap­ing the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who said “this arti­cle left me with many thoughts to chew on.”
    • Five faith facts about Har­ris pick Tim Walz, a ‘Min­neso­ta Luther­an’ Dad (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Walz is Luther­an.… He does not often dis­cuss his faith pub­licly but has post­ed about attend­ing wor­ship dur­ing Christ­mas and oth­er ser­vices at var­i­ous Luther­an church­es. Walz refers to Pil­grim Luther­an Church in St. Paul — a con­gre­ga­tion in the Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, a main­line denom­i­na­tion — as ‘my parish.’ ”
    • Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Luther­an Among Min­neso­ta Evan­gel­i­cals (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For the aver­age Mis­souri Syn­od mem­ber, both pas­tor and lay mem­ber, [Walz] absolute­ly will not be seen as one of us,” Hans Fiene, a Luther­an pas­tor in Mis­souri and cre­ator of Luther­an Satire, a mul­ti­me­dia project to teach about the Luther­an faith, told CT. “So there won’t be any kind of sit­u­a­tion like with Biden being a Catholic, where Catholics go, Well, he doesn’t real­ly rep­re­sent us, but he’s still a Catholic.”
      • Luther­an Satire guy! Great YouTube videos.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 458



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

This is vol­ume 458, a num­ber with very few fac­tors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anx­i­ety (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “We’re see­ing the inter­na­tion­al trans­mis­sion of a nov­el West­ern the­o­ry of men­tal health. It’s the glob­al­iza­tion of Western—and, just maybe, Amer­i­can—despair.… Accord­ing to the pod­cast search engine Lis­ten Notes, more than 5,500 pod­casts have the word trau­ma in their title. In celebri­ty media, men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als are so com­mon that they’ve spawned a sub­genre of sum­maries of celebri­ty men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als, includ­ing ’39 Celebri­ties Who Have Opened Up About Men­tal Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebri­ties Have Said About Hav­ing Depres­sion,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Men­tal Health.’ ”
    • Poly­math Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most impor­tant pieces of the year.” Unlocked.
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the week­end, but most peo­ple think they know how to save the chil­dren, fix the schools, reform the pris­ons, over­haul health­care, repair pol­i­tics, restore civil­i­ty, and bring about world peace. Per­haps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those oth­er things.”
    • This is a hum­bling essay.
  3. Chat­G­PT is bull­shit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy): “The machines are not try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing they believe or per­ceive. Their inac­cu­ra­cy is not due to mis­per­cep­tion or hal­lu­ci­na­tion. As we have point­ed out, they are not try­ing to con­vey infor­ma­tion at all. They are bull­shit­ting.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow. Apolo­gies for the lan­guage, but the lan­guage is at the heart of the point the authors are mak­ing.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hay­den, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For Paul, what makes sin­gle­ness ‘bet­ter’ is not the absence of sex as such, for nei­ther sex nor mar­riage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, sin­gle­ness is the ‘hap­pi­er’ state because it pro­vides believ­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be ‘anx­ious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘world­ly things’ because the ‘appoint­ed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all sin­gles should live devot­ed to the Lord… one either lever­ages sin­gle­ness for the Lord, like Paul; or one lever­ages it for world­ly or sin­ful pur­pos­es, like idle wid­ows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich essay about sin­gle­ness.
  5. Evo­lu­tion May Be Pur­pose­ful And It’s Freak­ing Sci­en­tists Out (Andrea Mor­ris, Forbes): “Noble is neu­tral on reli­gious mat­ters. Yet he sees com­pelling evi­dence that pur­pose may be fun­da­men­tal to life. He’s deter­mined to debunk the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digm and replace the ele­vat­ed impor­tance of genes with some­thing much more con­tro­ver­sial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained sup­port from the next gen­er­a­tion of ori­gins-of-life researchers work­ing to top­ple the reign of gene-cen­trism.”
  6. Some arti­cles about the war in Gaza:
    • Israelis Are Not Watch­ing the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of secu­ri­ty and casu­al­ties. And all of a sud­den, peo­ple under­stand that this was not fea­si­ble for the long run. That is to say that we will prob­a­bly have to see more sol­diers fight­ing in the north and in the south for the com­ing years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a per­ma­nent war but maybe a per­ma­nent state of ongo­ing oper­a­tions.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing (albeit a tad long) inter­view with an Israeli intel­lec­tu­al.
    • Get­ting Aid Into Gaza (Ger­man Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, cit­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid ship­ments for its own use.”
      • A rea­son­ably fair-mind­ed arti­cle. Exam­ines mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jes­si­ca Con­tr­era, Jenn Abel­son, John D. Hard­en, Hay­den God­frey & Nate Jones, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion has found that over the past two decades, hun­dreds of law enforce­ment offi­cers in the Unit­ed States have sex­u­al­ly abused chil­dren while offi­cials at every lev­el of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem have failed to pro­tect kids, pun­ish abusers and pre­vent addi­tion­al crimes… The Post iden­ti­fied at least 1,800 state and local law enforce­ment offi­cers who were charged with crimes involv­ing child sex­u­al abuse from 2005 through 2022.”
    • I have long said that the peo­ple throw­ing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sex­u­al abuse cri­sis would be stunned with the far worse num­bers on child sex­u­al abuse in the pub­lic school sys­tem (and I stand by that). But I did not fore­see this one and I should have. There is author­i­ty, there­fore there is abuse of author­i­ty.
    • Unlocked.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 455



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

This is vol­ume 455, which is the result of 15 choose 3 — how many ways you can select three objects from a col­lec­tion of fif­teen.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What I’ve Learned From a Decade on the Dat­ing Apps (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “Dat­ing apps are not a neu­tral tool for find­ing love. Like all tech­nolo­gies, they act on us, even as we think we are in con­trol, act­ing on them. They shape how we see oth­er peo­ple, and our­selves, and roman­tic love itself. Accord­ing to the apps, love is the opti­miza­tion of traits that yield the high­est rates of mutu­al sat­is­fac­tion and per­son­al growth for two atom­ized indi­vid­u­als. This self-expres­sive mod­el of romance may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s a major depar­ture from the basis of love in pre­vi­ous eras.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • I also liked this bit: “It’s as if these apps don’t want users to find romance, because they are incen­tivized, to the tune of $5.3 bil­lion in 2022, to keep us swip­ing and search­ing.”
  2. Are Gaza Protests Hap­pen­ing Most­ly at Elite Col­leges? (Marc Novi­coff & Robert Kelchen, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Count­ing Con­sor­tium and news reports of encamp­ments, we matched infor­ma­tion on every insti­tu­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion that has had pro-Pales­tin­ian protest activ­i­ty (start­ing when the war broke out in Octo­ber until ear­ly May) to the col­leges in our 2023 col­lege rank­ings. Of the 1,421 pub­lic and pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encamp­ments. By match­ing that data to per­cent­ages of stu­dents at each cam­pus who receive Pell Grants (which are award­ed to stu­dents from mod­er­ate- and low-income fam­i­lies), we came to an unsur­pris­ing con­clu­sion: Pro-Pales­tin­ian protests have been rare at col­leges with high per­cent­ages of Pell stu­dents. Encamp­ments at such col­leges have been rar­er still.”
    • Con­tains inter­est­ing charts.
  3. Spy­ing Arrests Send Chill Through Britain’s Thriv­ing Hong Kong Com­mu­ni­ty (Megan Spe­cia, New York Times): “This month, three men were charged in Lon­don with gath­er­ing intel­li­gence for Hong Kong and forc­ing entry into a British res­i­dence. While the men have not yet been found inno­cent or guilty — the tri­al will not begin until Feb­ru­ary — the news of the arrests threw a spot­light on many activists’ exist­ing con­cerns about China’s abil­i­ty to sur­veil and harass its cit­i­zens abroad, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who have been crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Two arti­cles about sur­viv­ing can­cer:
    • Mar­i­tal Sta­tus and Sur­vival in Patients With Can­cer (Aiz­er et al, Jour­nal of Clin­i­cal Oncol­o­gy): “For five can­cers stud­ied (prostate, breast, col­orec­tal, esophageal, and head/neck can­cers), the sur­vival ben­e­fit asso­ci­at­ed with mar­riage was larg­er than the pub­lished sur­vival ben­e­fit of chemother­a­py. The impor­tance of this study is that it high­lights the con­sis­tent and sub­stan­tial impact that fea­tures of mar­riage, par­tic­u­lar­ly social sup­port, can have on can­cer detec­tion, treat­ment, and sur­vival.”
      • From 2013. Mar­riage is bet­ter than chemother­a­py. To be clear: if you have can­cer also receive med­ical treat­ment even if you’re mar­ried.
    • Tri­al results for new lung can­cer drug are ‘off the charts’, say doc­tors (Andrew Gre­go­ry, The Guardian): “Lung can­cer is the world’s lead­ing cause of can­cer death, account­ing for about 1.8m deaths every year. Sur­vival rates in those with advanced forms of the dis­ease, where tumours have spread, are par­tic­u­lar­ly poor. More than half of patients (60%) diag­nosed with advanced forms of lung can­cer who took lor­la­tinib were still alive five years lat­er with no pro­gres­sion in their dis­ease, data pre­sent­ed at the world’s largest can­cer con­fer­ence showed. The rate was 8% in patients treat­ed with a stan­dard drug, the tri­al found.”
      • Amaz­ing!
  5. Two arti­cles about the job mar­ket:
    • Why Can’t Col­lege Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some The­o­ries — and Fix­es. (Peter Coy, New York Times): “Even though the unem­ploy­ment rate is low, few­er peo­ple are quit­ting, so few­er jobs are becom­ing avail­able, accord­ing to Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics data. LinkedIn’s esti­mate of the nation­al hir­ing rate was down 9.5 per­cent in April from a year ear­li­er.”
      • The arti­cle con­tains oth­er sub­stan­tive insights, but that one stood out to me.
    • The case of the angry his­to­ry post­doc (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Why is no one hir­ing his­to­ri­ans? There are four basic rea­sons. The first and most impor­tant — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s sup­posed to be so obvi­ous — is that the U.S. uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is large­ly done expand­ing. The 20th cen­tu­ry saw a mas­sive build-out of uni­ver­si­ties, which required hir­ing a mas­sive num­ber of tenure-track pro­fes­sors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the depart­ments at the exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties are clogged with a ton of old profs who will nev­er leave until they age out. New hires must there­fore slow to a trick­le, since as long as the num­ber of profs is rough­ly con­stant, they can only be hired to replace peo­ple who retire or die.”
  6. Live by the Law or Die on the Cross (Jere­my Eng­land, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What would Jesus do if a Hamas fight­er held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while fir­ing? Hard to say for sure, but any­one who argues that a prop­er­ly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Chris­tian­i­ty. The image of the Cru­ci­fix­ion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accept­ing cor­po­re­al defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spir­i­tu­al vic­to­ry in the world of tomor­row. You will not hear Jesus men­tioned when West­ern lead­ers speak on how impor­tant it is that Israel adhere to inter­na­tion­al laws of war, but the con­cept of the inno­cent civil­ian enshrined in these laws grew prac­ti­cal­ly out of wars fought with­in Chris­ten­dom dur­ing the last sev­er­al hun­dred years.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who does not endorse all of the argu­ment but found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  7. A Redemp­tive The­sis for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Andy Crouch with oth­ers, Prax­is Labs): “Like the Inter­net, elec­tric­i­ty, and agri­cul­ture, AI is a gen­er­al-pur­pose tech­nol­o­gy that can be har­nessed to many ends. Redemp­tive entre­pre­neurs can lead the way in demon­strat­ing that AI can be deployed — in fact, is best deployed — in ways that dethrone pride, mag­ic, and Mam­mon and that ele­vate the dig­ni­ty of human beings and their capac­i­ty to flour­ish as image bear­ers in the world.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 452

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

452 is a prod­uct of 113. Specif­i­cal­ly, 452 = 4 · 113. A web­site informed that it is also the clos­est inte­ger to 7Ï€, but that’s a weird fact.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘I Knew I Would Pay a Price for My Faith’: Chi­na Releas­es Mis­sion­ary After Sev­en Years (CJ Wu inter­view­ing John Cao, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I did not have a Bible while in prison. Although both my moth­er and my lawyer brought Bibles to my prison, the cor­rec­tion­al staff refused to hand them over to me. My moth­er would write down Bible vers­es in her let­ters to me. Yet the police checked our cor­re­spon­dence: If faith was men­tioned in my let­ters, they would not be deliv­ered. Both pris­ons had small libraries with hun­dreds of books. I would search for Leo Tolstoy’s books, since there are some Bible vers­es in his books. When I found them, I’d be very, very hap­py and copy the vers­es in my note­book. In the four years I was there, I copied dozens of vers­es.”
  2. The ado­les­cent men­tal health mess (Lucy Foulkes, Medi­um): “We are in a sit­u­a­tion where some ado­les­cents are very legit­i­mate­ly expe­ri­enc­ing men­tal health crises, with­out decent treat­ment, while oth­ers are inac­cu­rate­ly describ­ing typ­i­cal devel­op­men­tal stress with the lan­guage of dis­or­der.… The whole thing is a mess, and a thou­sand miles away from the orig­i­nal goal of men­tal health aware­ness.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gist at Oxford.
    • Ampli­fied by the New York Times: Are We Talk­ing Too Much About Men­tal Health? (Ellen Bar­ry, New York Times): “[The] train­ing could encour­age ‘co-rumi­na­tion,’ the kind of long, unre­solved group dis­cus­sion that churns up prob­lems with­out find­ing solu­tions.… Co-rumi­na­tion appears to be high­er in girls, who tend to come into the pro­gram more dis­tressed, as well as more attuned to their friends, he said. ‘It might be,’ he said, ‘that they kind of get togeth­er and make things a lit­tle bit worse for each oth­er.’”
  3. Per­spec­tives and news about the col­lege protests
    • The Peo­ple Set­ting Amer­i­ca on Fire (Park Mac­Dougald, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In fact, it is a mis­take both to view the cam­pus protests as a ‘stu­dent’ move­ment and to regard the out­siders as ‘infil­tra­tors’ or some­how sep­a­rate from the move­ment. Rather, stu­dent activists have been work­ing togeth­er with out­siders, with whom they are linked via over­lap­ping activist net­works and nation­wide orga­ni­za­tions.… wealthy donors have been sub­si­diz­ing months of rolling dis­rup­tive street protests by a grab bag of rev­o­lu­tion­ary and anti-Israel rad­i­cals. That leads nat­u­ral­ly to a ques­tion: To what end?”
    • An Inside Look at the Stu­dent Takeover of Columbia’s Hamil­ton Hall (Sharon Otter­man, New York Times): “[The main­te­nance work­er] said he tried to block them and they tried to rea­son with him to get out of the way, telling him ‘this is big­ger than you.’ One per­son, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Some­one tried to offer him ‘a fist­ful of cash.’ He said he replied: “I don’t want your mon­ey, dude. Just get out of the build­ing.” … Both Mr. Tor­res and Mr. Wil­son said they strong­ly object­ed to the tac­tics of the occu­piers, which they said had tak­en a toll on them. Nei­ther man ever wants to work in Hamil­ton Hall again.”
      • A pret­ty wild sto­ry told from a unique per­spec­tive
    • How Coun­ter­pro­test­ers at U.C.L.A. Pro­voked Vio­lence, Unchecked for Hours (EIGHT JOURNALISTS!, New York Times): “A New York Times exam­i­na­tion of more than 100 videos from clash­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, found that vio­lence ebbed and flowed for near­ly five hours, most­ly with lit­tle or no police inter­ven­tion. The vio­lence had been insti­gat­ed by dozens of peo­ple who are seen in videos coun­ter­protest­ing the encamp­ment.… Fif­teen peo­ple were report­ed­ly injured in the attack, accord­ing to a let­ter sent by the pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia sys­tem to the board of regents.”
    • Behind the Ivy Intifa­da (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Con­trary to ear­li­er claims by uni­ver­si­ty and city offi­cials about a large pro­por­tion of ‘out­side agi­ta­tors,’ more than 70 per­cent of those arrest­ed at Colum­bia had a direct insti­tu­tion­al tie to the uni­ver­si­ty. This was reflect­ed in how they were treat­ed after arrest. Most of those swept up were released with­out charges. Among Colum­bia affil­i­ates who were for­mal­ly charged, none faced more than a sin­gle mis­de­meanor charge. Mean­while, those who faced charges at City Col­lege, the near­by pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty raid­ed by police the same night, were all hit with felonies. While it’s pos­si­ble that the City Col­lege kids just engaged in more extreme and unlaw­ful activ­i­ty, it seems more like­ly that belong­ing to the elite paid crim­i­nal-jus­tice div­i­dends for the Colum­bia arrestees.”
      • Wow. Well worth read­ing. Full of snarky insight. The author is a pro­fes­sor of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Stony Brook and is pro-Pales­tin­ian.
    • Check Your Priv­i­lege (Nick Catog­gio, The Dis­patch): “Acad­e­mia could select for kids who show intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty and curios­i­ty, to bor­row a point from my col­league Sarah Isgur. Instead they’ve select­ed for kids who feel not mere­ly enti­tled to demand that their elders ‘check their priv­i­lege’ but moral­ly jus­ti­fied in act­ing aggres­sive­ly to make sure they do. All told, one might say that pro­gres­sives, the great ene­mies of colo­nial­ism, have … col­o­nized high­er edu­ca­tion over the past half-cen­tu­ry. And you know how set­tler-colo­nial­ists are. They can be very defen­sive when you demand that they vacate ter­ri­to­ry they regard as right­ly theirs. The behav­ior of cam­pus pro­gres­sives this month has radi­at­ed the sense that Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties are ‘theirs’ in a way that isn’t true of oth­er stu­dents. It’s been point­ed out repeat­ed­ly but can’t be empha­sized enough that the sort of dis­rup­tion in which they’ve engaged wouldn’t be tol­er­at­ed from those whose polit­i­cal beliefs offend­ed the administration’s left­ist ortho­doxy.”
  4. Per­spec­tives and news about the war in Gaza
    • One Pho­to That Cap­tures the Loss in Gaza (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “An Amer­i­can sur­geon who vol­un­teered in Gaza sent me a pho­to that sears me with its glimpse of over­whelm­ing grief: A woman mourns her young son.… The nurs­es and oth­er doc­tors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of com­pli­ca­tions from mal­nu­tri­tion.”
    • Israel orders Al Jazeera to close its local oper­a­tion and seizes some of its equip­ment (Tia Gold­en­berg and Jon Gam­brell, AP News): “The extra­or­di­nary order, which includes con­fis­cat­ing broad­cast equip­ment, pre­vent­ing the broad­cast of the channel’s reports and block­ing its web­sites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shut­tered a for­eign news out­let oper­at­ing in the coun­try.… While includ­ing on-the-ground report­ing of the war’s casu­al­ties, its Ara­bic arm often pub­lish­es ver­ba­tim video state­ments from Hamas and oth­er region­al mil­i­tant groups.… Al Jazeera has been closed or blocked by oth­er Mideast gov­ern­ments.”
    • Kol Hakavod (Russ Roberts, Sub­stack): “Israel going to the finals real­ly shouldn’t float my boat and make my heart sing. But it did. Because here’s the thing. The deci­sion about who advanced to the Euro­vi­sion finals tomor­row night was done by a pop­u­lar vote. There’s no pan­el of judges in the semi­fi­nal round.… Golan advanced. Despite the thou­sands who marched in the streets and the dozens who booed Golan in the rehearsal hall, prob­a­bly mil­lions, from the safe­ty of their homes, were able to cast an anony­mous vote for Israel.”
  5. The Heresy of Chris­t­ian Bud­dhism (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “…while many men can eas­i­ly recog­nise the moral evil of debauch­ery and world­li­ness, not many see the dan­ger of an ascetic puri­tanism that push­es too far. Too much empha­sis on sin, too much empha­sis on humil­i­ty, too much empha­sis on heav­en and even too much empha­sis on Christ to the exclu­sion of man soon leads to a Chris­tian­i­ty that hates the indi­vid­ual, indi­vid­u­a­tion and the cre­at­ed world. Chris­tian­i­ty starts to resem­ble Bud­dhism.”
    • Fol­low-up: The Bud­dhist Mood in Evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “…the de fac­to def­i­n­i­tion of idol­a­try is want­i­ng any­thing so much that, if you don’t get it, you are very upset. Hence, the path to avoid­ing sin and idol­a­try, the way to please God, is to purge one­self of desires. This is Bud­dhism. Undoubt­ed­ly it would be pos­si­ble for some­one to be engaged in idol­a­try in some of these cas­es. But there are a lot of things in this world you should be upset about.”
  6. When Intru­sive Thoughts Come (John Bee­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Nur­ture men­tal play­grounds of gospel creativity.Many of us expend so much ener­gy try­ing to knock down destruc­tive intru­sive thoughts that we have no ener­gy to build con­struc­tive imag­i­na­tions. We believe our minds are dan­ger­ous and need to be shut down. But your mind is a gift God intends to be lever­aged for his glo­ry. He desires to reshape your mind to become a fac­to­ry of God-glo­ri­fy­ing curios­i­ty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cruise ship sails into New York City port with 44-foot dead whale across its bow (ABC News): “A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot dead whale across its bow, marine author­i­ties said. The whale, iden­ti­fied as an endan­gered sei whale, was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brook­lyn on Sat­ur­day, Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion fish­eries spokesper­son Andrea Gomez said.”
    • I guess it’s the nau­ti­cal equiv­a­lent of a car hit­ting a deer. Yikes.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 451

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

This is vol­ume 451, which feels like it is maybe a prime num­ber but it turns out that 451 = 11 · 41.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Was Paul a Slave? (Mark R. Fairchild and Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Rec­on­cil­ing the Phar­isee, Hebrew of Hebrews, Ara­ma­ic-speak­ing zealot Paul with the Roman cit­i­zen, glo­be­trot­ting, Greek-speak­ing Paul seems impos­si­ble. Unless, that is, we con­sid­er the ear­ly church’s rec­ol­lec­tion of Paul’s upbring­ing as a child in an enslaved fam­i­ly. ‘The man­u­mis­sion of Paul’s father solves these prob­lems,’ Ries­ner told me.”
    • The title is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing — the ques­tion is real­ly whether Paul was born a slave and lat­er freed (they do explain Acts 22:28, “When Paul told the com­man­der in Acts 22:28 that he was ‘born’ a Roman cit­i­zen, that word, gen­nao, can refer to birth or adop­tion. Freed Roman slaves were often adopt­ed into their master’s fam­i­ly and giv­en a Roman name and cit­i­zen­ship.”
    • The authors are schol­ars with rel­e­vant exper­tise. The mid­dle sec­tion of the arti­cle is where all the meat is and makes some good points. The open­ing and clos­ing felt like fluff to me.
    • Unlocked.
  2. Stuff about the col­lege protests
    • For most peo­ple, pol­i­tics is about fit­ting in (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple are try­ing to fig­ure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both direc­tions: peo­ple can be attract­ed to a group or neg­a­tive­ly polar­ized by it.… Notice what’s miss­ing from my list? The notion of pol­i­tics as a bat­tle of ideas.”
    • Col­lege pro­test­ers seek amnesty to keep arrests and sus­pen­sions from trail­ing them (Joce­lyn Geck­er, AP News): “Petocz said protest­ing in high school was what helped get him into Van­der­bilt and secure a mer­it schol­ar­ship for activists and orga­niz­ers. His col­lege essay was about orga­niz­ing walk­outs in rur­al Flori­da to oppose Gov. Ron DeSan­tis’ anti-LGBTQ poli­cies. ‘Van­der­bilt seemed to love that,’ Petocz said.’ ”
    • What Stu­dents Read Before They Protest (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Read­ing the syl­labus explains] the two things that seem so dis­pro­por­tion­ate in these protests and the cul­ture that sur­rounds them. First, it explains why this con­flict attracts such a scale of on-cam­pus atten­tion and action and dis­rup­tion, while so many oth­er wars and crises (Sudan, Con­go, Arme­nia, Bur­ma, Yemen …) are bare­ly noticed or ignored. Sec­ond, it explains why the atten­tion seems to leap so quick­ly past cri­tique into car­i­ca­ture, past sym­pa­thy for the Pales­tini­ans into jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Hamas, past con­dem­na­tion of Israeli pol­i­cy into anti-Semi­tism.”
    • In an Online World, a New Gen­er­a­tion of Pro­test­ers Choos­es Anonymi­ty (Nicholas Fan­dos, New York Times): “On cam­pus­es from New Eng­land to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, stu­dents lead­ing one of the largest protest move­ments in decades have increas­ing­ly strapped on face masks and check­ered Pales­tin­ian kaf­fiyehs in a polar­iz­ing bid to pro­tect their anonymi­ty even as they demand uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ments be held to account. The choice rep­re­sents a sharp break by many, though not all, of these stu­dents from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of uni­ver­si­ty activists, who gained their moral force in part by putting their words on record and their futures in jeop­ardy for a larg­er cause.”
    • How Pro­test­ers Can Actu­al­ly Help Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “…this may sound zany, but how about rais­ing mon­ey to send as many of your stu­dent lead­ers as pos­si­ble this sum­mer to live in the West Bank and learn from Pales­tini­ans there (while engag­ing with Israelis on the way in or out)? West Bank mon­i­tors say that a recent Israeli crack­down on for­eign­ers help­ing Pales­tini­ans, by deny­ing entry or deport­ing peo­ple, has made this more dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble. Stu­dent vis­i­tors must be pru­dent and cau­tious but could study Ara­bic, teach Eng­lish and vol­un­teer with human rights orga­ni­za­tions on the ground. Pales­tini­ans in parts of the West Bank are under siege, peri­od­i­cal­ly attacked by set­tlers and in need of observers and advo­cates.”
  3. Some stuff about gen­der:
    • The Bat­tle of the Sex­es Needs a Truce (Thomas Adamo and Isabel­la Griepp, Stan­ford Review): “We must acknowl­edge how soci­ety has lied to both men and women since they were boys and girls—lies that have done noth­ing but bring about dishar­mo­ny between the sex­es. In seek­ing to empow­er young girls, par­ents and teach­ers have de-empha­sized the innate dif­fer­ences between the sex­es. And, any dif­fer­ences between the sex­es were explained in terms of how men had his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed women, rather than the unique and valu­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that men and women inher­ent­ly pos­sess.”
      • The authors are stu­dents in Chi Alpha.
    • The Mas­culin­i­ty Pyra­mid (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A man who is over­ly con­cerned with how he is dif­fer­ent from women is miss­ing the holy instinct of Adam, who first notices the same­ness of Eve and sec­ond notices their dif­fer­ences (Gen 2:23).”
    • Scripts for Healthy Mas­culin­i­ty (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…men ought to be dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from God, ani­mals, boys, and women. When prop­er­ly con­sid­ered, those four dis­tinc­tions yield the four core mas­cu­line virtues of humil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from God), dis­ci­pline (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from ani­mals), respon­si­bil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from boys), and chival­ry (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from women).”
  4. There’s Real­ly No Good Rea­son to Use Tik­Tok (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Tik­Tok is, in my view, a social media plat­form devoid of pos­i­tive ben­e­fit. I do not mean by that that it is whol­ly evil or can­not be used except sin­ful­ly. Rather, I think Tik­Tok sim­ply lacks any mer­it as a plat­form and is only use­ful in the sense that it is pas­sive­ly enter­tain­ing. This is also how I would describe things like soap operas, pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, and the nation­al hot dog eat­ing con­test. The dif­fer­ence, though, between Tik­Tok and those things, is that Tik­Tok is 1) addic­tive, 2) active­ly cor­ro­sive to think­ing, and 3) mar­ket­ed to and con­sumed by an enor­mous num­ber of chil­dren.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 450

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

450 is a cool num­ber because it ends in 50. Which is just cool.

It’s also some­thing called an Ara­bi­an Nights fac­to­r­i­al, mean­ing that 450! has 1001 dig­its. What a fun con­cept!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pro-Pales­tin­ian Encamp­ments Spread, Lead­ing to Hun­dreds of Arrests (Anna Betts, New York Times): “In the week since Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty start­ed crack­ing down on pro-Pales­tin­ian pro­test­ers occu­py­ing a lawn on its cam­pus, protests and encamp­ments have sprung up at oth­er col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Police inter­ven­tions on sev­er­al cam­pus­es have led to more than 400 arrests so far.”
    • Scenes of Protests Spread at Elite Cam­pus­es (Troy Clos­son, New York Times): “Near­ly 50 peo­ple were arrest­ed at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty in New Haven, Conn., on Mon­day morn­ing, fol­low­ing the arrests last week of more than 100 pro­test­ers at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across oth­er cam­pus­es.… The flur­ry of protests has pre­sent­ed a steep chal­lenge for uni­ver­si­ty lead­ers, as some Jew­ish stu­dents say they have faced harass­ment and anti­se­mit­ic com­ments. Ear­ly Mon­day morn­ing, Colum­bia announced a same-day shift to online class­es because of the protests. Barnard Col­lege, across the street, fol­lowed suit hours lat­er.”
    • The Car­nage Is the Point (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Uni­ver­si­ties like Colum­bia have han­dled this poor­ly, although their response pales in com­par­i­son to how some elect­ed offi­cials want them to respond. An awful lot of politi­cians have been call­ing on the use of force against pro­tes­tors. Sen­a­tors Tom Cot­ton and Josh Haw­ley have called for the Nation­al Guard to be deployed in Colum­bia, as has Speak­er of the House Mike John­son. Ear­li­er this week Texas gov­er­nor Greg Abbott enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sent Texas state troop­ers to con­duct mass arrests, break­ing up an unsanc­tioned but non­vi­o­lent demon­stra­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin. Cot­ton, Haw­ley, John­son, and Abbott are a lot of things, but stu­pid they are not. Why would they call for coer­cion when they must be ful­ly aware that such an approach would fur­ther fan the flames of protest?”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Worth your time.
  2. No, There Are No “Trans” Ani­mals (Emma Hilton and Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “Do some crea­tures change sex? Absolute­ly. But this isn’t new infor­ma­tion. It’s a fact that biol­o­gists have known about for a long time. What is also well-known is that none of these sex-chang­ing crea­tures are mam­mals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine inver­te­brates whose biol­o­gy is dif­fer­ent from our own in count­less (fas­ci­nat­ing) ways. What’s more, in every sin­gle case described above, there are always (at most) just two dis­tinct sex­es at play—no mat­ter how those two sex­es may switch or com­bine. One of those sex­es is male, a sex asso­ci­at­ed with gonads that pro­duce sperm (testes); and the oth­er is female, with gonads that pro­duce eggs (ovaries). There’s noth­ing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Ex-ath­let­ic direc­tor accused of fram­ing prin­ci­pal with AI arrest­ed at air­port with gun (Kris­ten Grif­fith & Justin Fen­ton, The Bal­ti­more Ban­ner): “Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was sim­u­lat­ed, made dis­parag­ing com­ments toward Black stu­dents and the sur­round­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, was wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed on social media.”
    • AI crimes are fix­ing to get wild. In case you haven’t been keep­ing up, AI-gen­er­at­ed video and audio is shock­ing­ly good. https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/1783145009153450374 <– check this wild exam­ple. Reid Hoff­man (one of the so-called ‘Pay­pal Mafia’, founder of LinkedIn) inter­views an AI avatar of him­self for about 14 min­utes.
  4. What Is a Woman? What Is a Man? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The key is to under­stand who men and women are, bio­log­i­cal­ly, soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly. What we will see is that evan­gel­i­cals have very lit­tle to say about this.”
  5. How do you get sib­lings to be nice to each oth­er? Lati­no fam­i­lies have an answer (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “I ask Cindy the same ques­tion I posed to sci­en­tists: How do you teach chil­dren to find joy in help­ing their sib­lings? And she answers exact­ly the same as the sci­en­tists answered: ‘We mod­el it.’ Cindy says. Cindy mod­els not just help­ing her sib­lings, but also the joy she receives from the rela­tion­ships she has with her broth­ers and sis­ters.”
  6. Changes in Col­lege Admis­sions (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Start­ing in August 2024, LSAT to elim­i­nate the Log­ic Games (Ana­lyt­ic Rea­son­ing) sec­tion, the hard­est, most fun and most objec­tive and intel­li­gence-test­ing part of the whole test. Nor­mal­ly I would be against dumb­ing down our test­ing, but keep­ing smart peo­ple from becom­ing lawyers is not the worst idea.”
    • The whole thing is inter­est­ing. The excerpt is amus­ing.
  7. Astronomers Find Evi­dence Of A Mas­sive Object Beyond The Orbit Of Nep­tune (James Fel­ton, IFL Sci­ence): “Car­ry­ing out sim­u­la­tions to try and dis­cov­er what best explains the orbits of these objects, the team found that a mod­el that includes a mas­sive plan­et beyond the region of Nep­tune explained the steady state of these objects much bet­ter than in sim­u­la­tions where plan­et 9 was not includ­ed. In the mod­el, the team includ­ed oth­er vari­ables, such as the galac­tic tide and the grav­i­ta­tion­al influ­ence of pass­ing stars.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 448

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

This is vol­ume 448, an untouch­able num­ber. Which is an absolute­ly cool des­ig­na­tion for a num­ber to have.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gos­sip is good, Stan­ford sci­en­tist sug­gests (Sarayu Pai, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Although gos­sip­ing is typ­i­cal­ly cast in a neg­a­tive light, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land found that gos­sip­ing may be a ben­e­fi­cial prac­tice, as long as infor­ma­tion remains ‘reli­able.’ Study co-author Michele Gelfand, who is a pro­fes­sor at the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, esti­mates that peo­ple gos­sip an hour a day on aver­age — defined as the ‘exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, who said “these peo­ple need a dose of the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week : gos­sip is cor­ro­sive!” [Glen’s note — the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week is a thing we do in our Chi Alpha, and “gos­sip is cor­ro­sive” is one of them]
    • Indeed they do, and this is use­ful launch­ing point for a brief dis­course on gos­sip. In this study, gos­sip is defined as “exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.” But that’s not what we’re con­demn­ing when we con­demn gos­sip! If some­one tells you, “wow — that Caleb guy is super charm­ing and hand­some” and you reply, “You know he’s mar­ried, right?” then you’ve done noth­ing wrong — that’s not the sin of gos­sip. But if you spread a false neg­a­tive rumor about Caleb “you know he does drugs, right?”, that is the sin of gos­sip. This study con­flates those two very dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions.
    • The sin of gos­sip can be described as bear­ing bad news behind some­one’s back with a bad heart. The bad news can be bad in the sense of being untrue or it can be bad in the sense of unnec­es­sary and unhelp­ful. For more on this help­ful fram­ing, check out What Is Gos­sip? Expos­ing a Com­mon and Dan­ger­ous Sin (Matt Mitchell, Desir­ing God).
    • This is a recur­ring pat­tern, by the way: some researcher wants to study some­thing inter­est­ing but needs to oper­a­tional­ize a vari­able in some unortho­dox way to make the research fea­si­ble. Then they do their research and find some­thing that would be coun­ter­in­tu­itive rel­a­tive to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the word they’re using (although maybe not that sur­pris­ing giv­en their oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the vari­able), and then the media repeats it as a com­men­tary on the actu­al thing — a thing which the sci­en­tists nev­er stud­ied. In this case, the study did­n’t actu­al­ly ana­lyze the sin of gos­sip, but nonethe­less near the end of the arti­cle we learn that “some stu­dents with pre­vi­ous­ly neg­a­tive views of gos­sip report see­ing it dif­fer­ent­ly in light of this study.”
  2. Why We Fast (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Fast­ing is no mag­ic fix. In fact, it’s almost the exact oppo­site of a mag­ic fix. It takes time, patience, and discipline—dare I say, suffering—to see its fruit. But the fruit is no less than the abil­i­ty to see more of God. Here are three ways to under­stand Chris­t­ian fast­ing: 1. Fast­ing makes space for God. 2. Fast­ing inter­rupts and reori­ents our uncon­scious pat­terns. 3. Fast­ing gives us eyes to see the unseen.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Lots of good insights in this one.
  3. ‘Lit­tle Women’ and the Art of Break­ing Gram­mat­i­cal Rules (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “Curzan notes, for exam­ple, that the use of ‘lit­er­al­ly’ to exag­ger­ate is no recent anom­aly but rather goes back to, for exam­ple, our ‘Lit­tle Women,’ in which Louisa May Alcott has it that at a gath­er­ing ‘the land lit­er­al­ly flowed with milk and hon­ey.’ The March girls, also, would have said ‘sneaked’ where, since just the 1970s, as Curzan charts, we have been increas­ing­ly like­ly to say ‘snuck.’ Are you a lit­tle irked by the youngs say­ing ‘based off of’ rather than ‘based on’? That one threw me when I start­ed hear­ing my stu­dents say­ing it about 15 years ago; Curzan calms us down and demon­strates how ordi­nary and even log­i­cal it is. Curzan is also good on the use of ‘hope­ful­ly’ to mean ‘it is hoped.’ This became a punch­ing bag only in the 1960s — until then, not even gram­mar scolds cared, too busy com­plain­ing that, for exam­ple, the ‘prop­er’ mean­ing of obnox­ious is ‘sub­ject to harm.’” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some more Israel/Hamas com­men­tary
    • Frac­tured Are the Peace­mak­ers (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I spent a week in Israel and the West Bank meet­ing Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians and Mes­sian­ic Jews who are pas­tors, youth lead­ers, YMCA lead­ers, tour guides, lawyers, and stu­dents. Many of them aren’t pro­fes­sion­al peace activists, but all of them, from what I could tell, take seri­ous­ly Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount and strive to embody his procla­ma­tion that ‘blessed are the peace­mak­ers, for they will be called chil­dren of God’ (Matt. 5:9). The prob­lem is, I spoke to about two dozen indi­vid­u­als about what peace­mak­ing means and got almost two dozen dif­fer­ent answers.” Unlocked.
    • Israel Has Cre­at­ed a New Stan­dard for Urban War­fare. Why Will No One Admit It? (John Spencer, Newsweek): “In my long career study­ing and advis­ing on urban war­fare for the U.S. mil­i­tary, I’ve nev­er known an army to take such mea­sures to attend to the ene­my’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, espe­cial­ly while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly com­bat­ing the ene­my in the very same build­ings. In fact, by my analy­sis, Israel has imple­ment­ed more pre­cau­tions to pre­vent civil­ian harm than any mil­i­tary in history—above and beyond what inter­na­tion­al law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
      • The author is the chair of urban war stud­ies at the Mod­ern War Insti­tute at West Point. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid: Amer­i­can Lib­er­ty and the Jews (Mike Cosper, Acton Insti­tute): “His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the emer­gence of anti-Semi­tism is always a sign of some­thing poi­so­nous tak­ing root in a soci­ety. It doesn’t just spell dan­ger for Jews; it spells dan­ger for every­one. As Bari Weiss has put it, ‘What starts with the Jews nev­er ends with the Jews.’ The rise of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many, Sovi­et Rus­sia, and half a dozen Mid­dle East­ern states was quick­ly fol­lowed by oth­er forms of vio­lence, tyran­ny, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” This is a long and sol­id arti­cle that cov­ers much more than anti-Semi­tism (although that is at its heart).
  5. Schools are using research to try to improve children’s learn­ing – but it’s not work­ing (Sal­ly Rior­dan, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “A series of ran­domised con­trolled tri­als, includ­ing one look­ing at how to improve lit­er­a­cy through evi­dence, have sug­gest­ed that schools that use meth­ods based on research are not per­form­ing bet­ter than schools that do not.”
    • British con­text, hence the spelling.
  6. The Anti-Frag­ile Bren­dan Eich (Andrew Beck, First Things): “I am not here to com­plain about can­cel cul­ture. Bren­dan Eich does not. He is too busy. He refus­es to be defined by the evil done to him, or by the pur­port­ed het­ero­doxy of his beliefs, but by the work he does and by his char­ac­ter, as known by those clos­est to him. Rather than tak­ing to the air­waves and lean­ing into the role of mar­tyr, as have so many oth­ers who have endured sim­i­lar abuse, Eich nev­er speaks pub­licly about the wrong done to him—not once even in pri­vate to me. Instead, he dili­gent­ly pur­sues his voca­tion.”
  7. The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Move­ment (David French, New York Times): “The old­er I get, the more I’m con­vinced that we sim­ply don’t know who we are — or what we tru­ly believe — until our val­ues car­ry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has made the case that life begins at con­cep­tion. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Repub­li­can Par­ty can’t live with its own phi­los­o­phy. There is no tru­ly pro-life par­ty in the Unit­ed States.”

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.