Tag: marriage

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.

TGFI, Volume 544: Outworking Your Fork and the Olympics

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. You Can’t Out­work Your Fork (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “More and more peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing we’re liv­ing in Baby­lon. How do we live in Baby­lon? By tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. Remem­ber what Daniel did in the first chap­ter of his book? He refused to eat from the king’s table. Remem­ber, he was a cap­tive. He had no con­trol over his life and yet, he took respon­si­bil­i­ty for what he ate. Like­wise, as Christ fol­low­ers, we have to take con­trol over the things that enter our minds and hearts. We have to be respon­si­ble for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. We have to be inten­tion­al about what we read, what we watch, what we talk about and what we think about.… You’re in con­trol of your mind and your heart. Feed them well. After all, you can’t out­work your fork.”
  2. Olympic thoughts:
    • Alysa Liu com­pletes incred­i­ble come­back to win gold in fig­ure skat­ing (Les Car­pen­ter, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Lat­er, as she stood in a room beneath the stands, Liu recount­ed her wait through Sakamo­to and Nakai’s per­for­mances, telling how much she enjoys watch­ing them skate and was hop­ing they would skate real­ly well before the world. She was asked if she want­ed the gold at that point. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said, look­ing down at the medal around her neck, which matched the new gold dress she ordered for the Olympic free skate. ‘What I need­ed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good. No mat­ter what hap­pened, you would have been fine. If that was a prob­lem, if I fell on every jump, I would still be wear­ing this dress.’ .…it was hard to know whether the real­i­ty would ever hit her. It might not mat­ter. She was thrilled she had skat­ed well; she was thrilled she had two new dress­es for the Olympics and a third for Sat­ur­day night’s Olympic gala; she was thrilled her fam­i­ly got to watch her skate.… Win­ning an Olympic gold medal seemed very far down the list of what was impor­tant to her at that point.”
      • Whole­some, com­mend­able, and encour­ag­ing. Plus look at the sheer joy on her face in the sec­ond pho­to of the piece (the top-down one).
    • What Eileen Gu Has Done is Total­ly Ordi­nary, Usu­al­ly Invites Zero Con­tro­ver­sy, and Has Rou­tine­ly Ben­e­fit­ted the Unit­ed States (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “What’s strik­ing is how selec­tive the con­cern is. When for­eign-born ath­letes become Amer­i­cans in time to com­pete for Team USA, we don’t sud­den­ly become tex­tu­al lit­er­al­ists about nation­al­i­ty statutes, we just cel­e­brate the medal haul. Only when affil­i­a­tion flows the oth­er way do we dis­cov­er a new­found rev­er­ence for puri­ty in cit­i­zen­ship law. The prac­tice of ath­letes com­pet­ing for coun­tries oth­er than their birth­place isn’t a scan­dal; it’s a cor­ner­stone of mod­ern Olympic sports!”
  3. A Chi­nese official’s use of Chat­G­PT acci­den­tal­ly revealed a glob­al intim­i­da­tion oper­a­tion (Sean Lyn­gaas, CNN): “The Chi­nese law enforce­ment offi­cial used Chat­G­PT like a diary to doc­u­ment the alleged covert cam­paign of sup­pres­sion, Ope­nAI said. In one instance, Chi­nese oper­a­tors alleged­ly dis­guised them­selves as US immi­gra­tion offi­cials to warn a US-based Chi­nese dis­si­dent that their pub­lic state­ments had sup­pos­ed­ly bro­ken the law, accord­ing to the Chat­G­PT user. In anoth­er case, they describe an effort to use forged doc­u­ments from a US coun­ty court to try to get a Chi­nese dissident’s social media account tak­en down.”
  4. “Help! All the Kids are Becom­ing Catholic/Orthodox” (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Catholi­cism and East­ern Ortho­doxy don’t just offer a way of _seeing_ the world, they offer a _culture to immerse your­self in_ that so many peo­ple feel devoid of. I take it as no coin­ci­dence that the rise of inter­est in tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty coin­cid­ed with the rise of inter­est in sites like ancestry.com or grow­ing nationalism—both of which, in their own way, are try­ing to offer peo­ple a sense of shared, com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty root­ed in the past. To focus on doc­trine to the exclu­sion of com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty when inves­ti­gat­ing why peo­ple con­vert would be fol­ly. Protes­tants must have an answer to this if they want to keep peo­ple.”
  5. Against witch­craft (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Over­all, using your intu­ition is mas­sive­ly over­rat­ed in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go hay­wire. You’re bet­ter off court­ing like you’re arrang­ing your own mar­riage, not like you’re star­ring in a rom com.”
    • Much sen­si­ble (albeit non-Chris­t­ian) wis­dom in this arti­cle. Although the first four para­graphs are kin­da unhinged.
    • I decid­ed to look up the oth­er entries in this series. AMAZING. 9/10 rec­om­mend with the excep­tion of her sec­ond arti­cle which I skipped for being less rel­e­vant to like­ly read­ers of this sen­tence.
    • How to find a hus­band (and why you should want one) (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “So I got mar­ried recent­ly. I’ve decid­ed to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schreck­er.… Find­ing a spouse should be the num­ber one pri­or­i­ty in your life. The right part­ner will make every oth­er goal in your life eas­i­er to achieve. If your pri­or­i­ty is your career, you will prob­a­bly be more suc­cess­ful with a well-cho­sen spouse. In some cas­es this will be a part­ner in a sim­i­lar field and you guys can pass each oth­er net­works and gos­sip. In some cas­es you may pre­fer some­one who is will­ing to put their career on the back­burn­er and sup­port you by tak­ing care of every­thing else in your life. If you’re aim­ing for suc­cess in pol­i­tics, or the arts, or you work tire­less­ly for a real­ly impor­tant altru­is­tic cause, then mar­ry­ing some­one with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.”
    • The wall is real but not for the rea­sons you think (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Every day that pass­es, eli­gi­ble bach­e­lors in your age range start dat­ing the women they are going to mar­ry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main rea­sons. (1) There’s some­thing wrong with him/ (2) There’s some­thing wrong with her. (3) Bad luck. As you get old­er the men who are attrac­tive, want to get mar­ried, and don’t have ruinous per­son­al­i­ty prob­lems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girl­friends, aren’t inter­est­ed in seri­ous dat­ing, and/or have been seri­al­ly reject­ed by women after get­ting into rela­tion­ships with them. Obvi­ous­ly lots of sin­gle old­er men are still mar­riage-wor­thy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfor­tu­nate sources of incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. But the more time pass­es, the less like­ly this becomes.”
  6. It’s Not His Fault He Used the N‑Word (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “As con­tro­ver­sies go, this one was immac­u­late. Unlike pre­vi­ous inci­dents of this type, there was no risk that the alleged hate speech would turn out to be an acci­den­tal mala­prop­ism, or an out­right fab­ri­ca­tion, or, as in one mem­o­rable case from 2021, a man who was mis­heard while try­ing to get the atten­tion of the mas­cot for the Col­orado Rock­ies, a pur­ple pol­ka-dot­ted tricer­atops named Dinger. This was an actu­al utter­ance of the actu­al no-no word, caught on actu­al cam­era and broad­cast on the actu­al BBC. If ever there was an iron­clad case for can­cel­la­tion—! Ah, but wait: Remem­ber, John David­son has Tourette’s syn­drome, which also makes this an actu­al case of the phe­nom­e­non col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Oppres­sion Olympics.”
    • The twist at the end is stun­ning. I won’t spoil it. In a tweet about it, the author said, “When I learned why David­son was in the audi­ence my soul left my body.”
    • On a per­son­al note: one of my good friends in col­lege had Touret­te’s like this. I can attest that bro did high­ly offen­sive stuff on the reg­u­lar that I guar­an­tee he had absolute­ly zero con­trol over nor any poor inten­tion behind.
  7. Big­ger is not always bet­ter (Will Gibbs, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “She lived an ordi­nary life. Had kids, divorced, worked, retired, babysat and even­tu­al­ly passed away. But, her impact was any­thing but ordi­nary. She ran one of the few preschools in my home­town for twen­ty years. She deliv­ered dona­tions every Mon­day of the month to the local food pantry. She trav­eled with my church’s youth group to rehouse roofs and build ADA acces­si­ble hous­ing for less for­tu­nate peo­ple in our area.… When she passed away, my pas­tor start­ed get­ting stopped in the streets. Every­body every­where — even peo­ple he had walked by for years with­out a con­ver­sa­tion — want­ed to per­son­al­ly give their sym­pa­thies and express how big of an impact she had on them.”
    • 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 542: the humanities backstory and overhyped Chinese academia

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 Multi­bil­lion-Dol­lar Foun­da­tion That Con­trols the Human­i­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “Today, no sin­gle enti­ty, includ­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, has a more pro­found influ­ence on the fis­cal health and cul­tur­al out­put of the human­i­ties than the Mel­lon Foun­da­tion. The Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties’ grant bud­get was $78 mil­lion in 2024 (its over­all bud­get was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjust­ed for infla­tion). Mel­lon award­ed $540 mil­lion in grants that same year; its endow­ment sits at rough­ly $8 bil­lion. Mellon’s largesse is bad­ly need­ed, espe­cial­ly as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has threat­ened fur­ther cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s vir­tu­al monop­oly on human­i­ties fund­ing means that it has the pow­er to remake entire fields accord­ing to its desires. And in recent years, under the lead­er­ship of Eliz­a­beth Alexan­der, who became the organization’s pres­i­dent in 2018, Mel­lon has embraced an under­stand­ing of the human­i­ties that is much more util­i­tar­i­an, and far more polit­i­cal, than the one put for­ward by the 1964 com­mis­sion.”
    • Unlocked and gen­uine­ly shock­ing to me. One of the key insights: “The human­i­ties aren’t broke because they went woke. The human­i­ties went woke in large part _because_ they were broke. As oth­er donors, the gov­ern­ment, and uni­ver­si­ties them­selves all but aban­doned these fields, Mel­lon became a life­line.”
  2. The Pop­u­lar Pro­gres­sive Pod­cast Call­ing Evan­gel­i­cals ‘Can­cer’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, The Free Press): “…it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine the vit­ri­ol she directs at [evan­gel­i­cals] being tar­get­ed at any oth­er reli­gious group by a major media fig­ure with so lit­tle con­se­quence. Take one clip that has cir­cu­lat­ed among evan­gel­i­cals recent­ly. I assumed its cap­tion on X, ‘White Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is a can­cer,’ was intend­ed to scan­dal­ize with the most incen­di­ary quote. I thought wrong. If any­thing, the cap­tion under­sold a slan­der­ous, incu­ri­ous, unse­ri­ous screed that informed Welch’s view­ers that evan­gel­i­cals are ‘the worst peo­ple in our coun­try.’ They are, Welch says, peo­ple who want oth­ers to suf­fer, who belong to a ‘cult.’ And for Welch, this kind of lan­guage is par for the course. ‘I detest, with every mol­e­cule… in my being, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty,’ she said in May.”
  3. Get Mar­ried Young (Brad Wilcox, Com­pact): “First, the cul­ture is telling you to lean into work and trav­el. But work­ing for the man and ‘trav­el­ing to Thai­land’ is not going to bring you the ful­fill­ment you think it will. Sec­ond, you will min­i­mize your odds of being mis­er­able and max­i­mize your odds of liv­ing a mean­ing­ful and hap­py life by get­ting mar­ried and hav­ing kids. So, don’t wait to embark on life’s most impor­tant jour­ney. Third, do not assume that you can wait until your thir­ties to find a spouse and start your fam­i­ly. If you wait, you may miss out.”
    • Lots of good data in this one. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  4. Don’t Trust the Rank­ings That Put China’s Uni­ver­si­ties on Top (Ariel Pro­cac­cia, New York Times): “The gap between the rank­ings and real­i­ty can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a mea­sure becomes a tar­get, it ceas­es to be a good mea­sure. It’s like try­ing to cure a fever by icing the ther­mome­ter: You’ve cooled the instru­ment, but the patient is still burn­ing up. Chi­na has made suc­cess in glob­al uni­ver­si­ty rank­ings a nation­al pol­i­cy goal, in the process cre­at­ing incen­tives that pri­or­i­tize the appear­ance of excel­lence over the health of the research envi­ron­ment.”
  5. Two arti­cles about preva­lent sec­u­lar sex­u­al ethics:
    • Ope­nAI Exec­u­tive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sex­u­al Dis­crim­i­na­tion (Geor­gia Wells & Sam Schech­n­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ope­nAI has cut ties with one of its top safe­ty exec­u­tives, on the grounds of sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion, after she voiced oppo­si­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial roll­out of AI erot­i­ca in its Chat­G­PT prod­uct.… Before her fir­ing, Beier­meis­ter told col­leagues that she opposed adult mode, and wor­ried it would have harm­ful effects for users, peo­ple famil­iar with her remarks said. She also told col­leagues that she believed OpenAI’s mech­a­nisms to stop child-exploita­tion con­tent weren’t effec­tive enough, and that the com­pa­ny couldn’t suf­fi­cient­ly wall off adult con­tent from teens, the peo­ple said.”
    • The Sexbot Rev­o­lu­tion Is Already Here (Debra Soh, The Free Press): “Though sex dolls—meaning human‑like, anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate, anthro­po­mor­phic figurines—were once believed to be used only by social­ly inept weirdos, today near­ly 10 per­cent of men in the U.S. have bought or owned one. And it’s not just the guys; 6 per­cent of women in the U.S. have done the same.… The aver­age sex doll own­er is a mid­dle-aged het­ero­sex­u­al man who is sin­gle or divorced, high-school edu­cat­ed, and employed. Research has shown that doll own­ers have sex with a doll about 11 times a month and sex with a human part­ner about 2.6 times a month. In con­trast, non–doll own­ers have sex with a human part­ner about 4.5 times a month.”
      • I am not con­vinced the num­bers in this arti­cle are reli­able (ten per­cent of guys sounds like a lot), but even if the num­bers are off this is kin­da wild.
  6. It’s Time for Amer­i­ca to Admit That It Has a Mar­i­jua­na Prob­lem (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, New York Times): “…sup­port­ers of legal­iza­tion pre­dict­ed that it would bring few down­sides. In our edi­to­ri­als, we described mar­i­jua­na addic­tion and depen­dence as ‘rel­a­tive­ly minor prob­lems.’ Many advo­cates went fur­ther and claimed that mar­i­jua­na was a harm­less drug that might even bring net health ben­e­fits. They also said that legal­iza­tion might not lead to greater use. It is now clear that many of these pre­dic­tions were wrong.… At least one in 10 peo­ple who use mar­i­jua­na devel­ops an addic­tion, a sim­i­lar share as with alco­hol. Even some who do not devel­op an addic­tion can still use it too much. Peo­ple who are fre­quent­ly stoned can strug­gle to hold a job or take care of their fam­i­lies.”
    • Unlocked.
  7. A Stan­ford Exper­i­ment to Pair 5,000 Sin­gles Has Tak­en Over Cam­pus (Jas­mine Li, Wall Street Jour­nal): “More than 5,000 Stan­ford stu­dents have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 under­grad­u­ates. It has spread to 10 oth­er col­leges includ­ing Colum­bia, Prince­ton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 mil­lion in ven­ture-cap­i­tal fund­ing. The growth, fans say, reflects a real­i­ty about many col­lege kids: They’re intim­i­dat­ed by real-life courtship and over­whelmed by the end­less scroll of dat­ing apps. Entre­pre­neur­ial stu­dents have found huge demand for alter­nate match­mak­ing tools.”

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 540: marrying atheists and using AI to avoid awkwardness

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. Tough Love: Can I Mar­ry an Athe­ist? (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “You can have all kinds of suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships with some­one whose world­view is pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent from yours—but not mar­riage. I’ve only been mar­ried 18 years, but I know this: Good mar­riage requires, at a min­i­mum, stay­ing on the same page as your spouse. Com­pro­mise on the small stuff, fine. Not on the foun­da­tions of the home. That can only cre­ate dis­tance between you, a dis­tance that will grow as your chil­dren ask you to inter­pret their world.… Don’t mar­ry a woman you hope, even secret­ly, will change.”
  2. Stu­dents Are Skip­ping the Hard­est Part of Grow­ing Up (Clay Shirky, New York Times): “One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone account­ed for 46 per­cent of Chat­G­PT use. And this analy­sis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the grad­ual tran­si­tion from man­aged child­hoods to adult free­doms, are both eager to make human con­nec­tion and exquis­ite­ly alert to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of embar­rass­ment.… teens were adamant that they did not want to go direct­ly to their par­ents or friends with these issues and that the steady avail­abil­i­ty of A.I. was a relief to them. They also reject­ed the idea of A.I. ther­a­pists; they weren’t treat­ing A.I. as a replace­ment for anoth­er per­son but instead were using it to sec­ond-guess their devel­op­ing sense of how to treat oth­er peo­ple. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The result­ing stream of praise — con­stant­ly hear­ing some ver­sion of ‘You’re absolute­ly right!’ — risks erod­ing our abil­i­ty to deal with the messi­ness of human rela­tion­ships. Soci­ol­o­gists call this social deskilling. Even casu­al A.I. use expos­es users to a lev­el of praise humans rarely expe­ri­ence from one anoth­er, which is not great for any of us but is espe­cial­ly risky for young peo­ple still work­ing on their social skills.”
    • The author is vice provost at NYU. It’s a long excerpt, but I can’t find a way to abridge it much more.
  3. Some more reflec­tions on Min­neso­ta:
    • From the left: Alex Pret­ti’s death and the elite bar­gain (Jerusalem Dem­sas, The Argu­ment): “The pro­gres­sive omni­cause end­ed up under­min­ing its own inter­ests by bind­ing them all togeth­er. If being an envi­ron­men­tal­ist meant you also had to be pro-choice and also had to be anti-cop and also had to be anti-Trump, then well, that shrinks the set of peo­ple will­ing to be envi­ron­men­tal­ists. But there is one omni­cause worth join­ing. It pre­sent­ed itself on Sat­ur­day when an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen was shoved to the ground and sprayed with gun­fire.… The truth is, wide­spread dis­con­tent across indus­try, ide­ol­o­gy and inter­est groups is the most effec­tive way to halt gov­ern­ments in their tracks. Even in ful­ly author­i­tar­i­an coun­tries, mass dis­con­tent is incred­i­bly effec­tive at secur­ing pol­i­cy change.”
    • From the right: Immi­gra­tion Enforce­ment Is Unavoid­ably Upset­ting. But This Is Some­thing Else. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s true that you can’t have sus­tained immi­gra­tion enforce­ment with­out also hav­ing upset­ting cas­es and sym­pa­thet­ic depor­tees. If you deport ille­gal immi­grants with fam­i­lies, you will have to choose between fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion and deport­ing chil­dren. If you con­duct arrests in homes and neigh­bor­hoods, you will be accused of trau­ma­tiz­ing kids and com­mu­ni­ties; if you con­duct them in work­places, you will be going after the hard­est-work­ing migrants.… There are con­flicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some back­lash and resis­tance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforce­ment strate­gies that gen­er­ate back­lash are sound or wise.”
    • From an inter­na­tion­al who does­n’t exact­ly map onto our pol­i­tics: The Amer­i­can Peo­ple Fact-Checked Their Gov­ern­ment (Jacob Mchanga­ma, Per­sua­sion): “The cur­rent obses­sion with mis­in­for­ma­tion tends to focus on the pub­lic: online mobs, for­eign influ­encers, flam­ing trolls. But his­to­ry sug­gests a more incon­ve­nient truth: in times of cri­sis, dis­in­for­ma­tion often comes from above. Gov­ern­ments, includ­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic ones, have pow­er­ful incen­tives to shape infor­ma­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Van­der­bilt.
    • From evan­gel­i­cal­ism: In a Tense Min­neso­ta, Chris­tians Help Immi­grant Neigh­bors (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This church, with the sup­port of many non-Chris­t­ian vol­un­teers, has been deliv­er­ing food six days per week for thou­sands of immi­grant fam­i­lies who are stay­ing home in fear. Two days before, the church had trained 600 new vol­un­teers for food dis­tri­b­u­tion, with a list now of 28,000 peo­ple who want food. One room at the church was full of dia­pers. Anoth­er was packed with a moun­tain of toi­let paper. Across the Twin Cities, neigh­bors pile sup­plies for immi­grants into oth­er church­es, too, as well as restau­rants and cof­fee shops, in scenes that look like a com­mu­ni­ty recov­er­ing from a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. In just a few weeks, church­es have cre­at­ed a sprawl­ing, infor­mal net­work for gro­cery deliv­er­ies to immi­grant fam­i­lies.”
    • Relat­ed to the above: I Trained to Mon­i­tor ICE but Found Myself Feed­ing the Hun­gry (Eliz­a­beth Berget, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the fol­low­ing days, I dis­cov­ered a safe­ty net that Chris­tians around the city had woven. I joined a neigh­bor­hood care group co-run by John Hilde­brand, a mem­ber and elder of Cal­vary Bap­tist Church here in Min­neapo­lis, which has been field­ing needs from vul­ner­a­ble fam­i­lies in their neigh­bor­hoods. Vet­ted mem­bers of the group respond to needs as they arise, offer­ing to give rides, do laun­dry, bring gro­ceries, or shov­el front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.  As I became more involved in this and oth­er care net­works, my phone ping­ing all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text…”
      • Note: I checked and Cal­vary Bap­tist Church rep­re­sents a main­line denom­i­na­tion, not an evan­gel­i­cal one.
  4. Elites and the Evan­gel­i­cal Class War (John Ehrett, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Pic­ture, if you will, the lush cam­pus of an inter­na­tion­al research uni­ver­si­ty, firm­ly ensconced in one of the least reli­gious areas of the coun­try. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Col­le­giate Goth­ic thor­ough­fares are bustling. On that cam­pus are three Chris­tians, each engaged in dis­tinc­tive forms of on-cam­pus min­istry: (1)  A thir­tysome­thing man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the cor­ner of one of the busiest cam­pus inter­sec­tions, hold­ing a bull­horn and dis­play­ing a ten-foot ban­ner pro­claim­ing EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the real­i­ties of sin and judg­ment, so loud­ly that his procla­ma­tions can be heard even from sev­er­al blocks away. (2) A well-dressed, six­ty­ish pas­tor, hail­ing from a promi­nent New York City church, sits on a uni­ver­si­ty-pro­vid­ed stage across from a for­mer dean of the university’s law school. They are there to dis­cuss the academic’s recent book, a the­o­log­i­cal-philo­soph­i­cal argu­ment for Spin­ozis­tic pan­the­ism over against tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty and sec­u­lar mate­ri­al­ism alike. Before an audi­ence of sev­er­al hun­dred stu­dents and fac­ul­ty, the pas­tor deliv­ers a dis­tinc­tive­ly Chris­to­log­i­cal cri­tique of the vol­ume. (3) mid­dle-aged man in a busi­ness suit stands along the edge of a busy road­way. He says lit­tle, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Tes­ta­ments, and he’s hand­ing them out to any­one, stu­dent or town­ie, walk­ing past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a run­ner sprint­ing by.) With these three now in view, one might ask a provoca­tive ques­tion: which of these Chris­tians was best in wit­ness in a hos­tile cul­ture?”
    • The author is describ­ing scenes he wit­nessed at Yale Law School.
  5. The Day I Want­ed to Be a Father (Col­in Wright, Twit­ter): “The post­doc years, the geo­graph­ic insta­bil­i­ty that made estab­lish­ing roots near­ly impos­si­ble, and the uncer­tain­ty of tenure all felt incom­pat­i­ble with build­ing a fam­i­ly. I was con­vinced that chil­dren sim­ply weren’t in my future. I was cer­tain of that until I was thir­ty-six years old. Then one moment changed every­thing.… For most of my life, I had thought of hav­ing chil­dren as the end of my life. Now I under­stand it as the begin­ning of a new one. In truth, until I have chil­dren of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfin­ished. Par­ent­hood feels to me like the nec­es­sary final chap­ter of a life well lived, one filled with a mean­ing much deep­er than exot­ic vaca­tions or lux­u­ry goods could ever pro­vide.”
    • A mov­ing essay which, odd­ly enough, only seems to be avail­able on Twit­ter.
  6. The Uncom­fort­able Truths About Immi­gra­tion (Alexan­der Kus­tov, Sub­stack): “Here is the uncom­fort­able truth: a lot of what lib­er­al elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immi­gra­tion is delib­er­ate­ly mis­lead­ing in ways that mat­ter for pol­i­cy and for demo­c­ra­t­ic trust. It is not usu­al­ly out­right made-up. But rather it is a form of ‘high­brow mis­in­for­ma­tion’ built out of selec­tive fram­ing, strate­gic omis­sions, and ‘noble’ half-truths. And it like­ly makes it hard­er, not eas­i­er, to build durable majori­ties for freer immi­gra­tion poli­cies in the long run.”
    • The author, him­self an immi­grant, is a polit­i­cal sci­ence prof at Notre Dame. The sec­tion on high­brow mis­in­for­ma­tion is espe­cial­ly good.
  7. An Impor­tant Let­ter from Bill, Kris, and Dann on Behalf of Bethel Lead­er­ship (Bethel Church): “We’re writ­ing to you today to share about some of our mis­takes and fail­ures in the way we nav­i­gat­ed our respon­si­bil­i­ties to the glob­al Body of Christ. We ask for you to cov­er us with grace as we seek the Lord for for­give­ness in the face of some griev­ous mis­takes. These actions were tak­en by us (Bill John­son, Kris Val­lot­ton, and Dann Far­rel­ly) along with Dan­ny Silk. We would like to clar­i­fy that our oth­er lead­ers and staff mem­bers, includ­ing Bri­an and Jenn, and the Bethel Music team, were not updat­ed on the alle­ga­tions or the details of the process. We take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fact that we did not prop­er­ly and ful­ly bring dis­ci­pline, clo­sure, or clear and time­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing the grav­i­ty of our con­cerns with Shawn Bolz.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Best Of Molt­book (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Molt­book is ‘a social net­work for AI agents’, although ‘humans [are] wel­come to observe’.… it’s not sur­pris­ing that an AI social net­work would get weird fast. But even hav­ing encoun­tered their work many times, I find Molt­book sur­pris­ing. I can con­firm it’s not triv­ial­ly made-up — I asked my copy of Claude to par­tic­i­pate, and it made com­ments pret­ty sim­i­lar to all the oth­ers. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.”
    • The net­work in ques­tion: Molt­book
    • Actu­al­ly fas­ci­nat­ing con­tent in this post. Def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Per­haps should have been up top.
  • One Solu­tion for Too Many A’s? Har­vard Con­sid­ers Giv­ing A+ Grades. (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “Grades of A fell to 53.4 per­cent of grades award­ed in the fall semes­ter, from 60.2 per­cent in the pri­or aca­d­e­m­ic year, Dr. Clay­baugh report­ed.… Har­vard has been on a cam­paign to make it hard­er to get an A, and a series of pro­pos­als may be put into effect lat­er this year. A report issued in Octo­ber sug­gest­ed allow­ing grades of A+, which are not cur­rent­ly used at the school, as a way to rec­og­nize the best per­form­ing stu­dents, demot­ing the rou­tine, ordi­nary A to the sec­ond rung of the grad­ing lad­der.”
    • This feels like it was writ­ten by a satirist:
      “We’re giv­ing out too many A’s.”
      “I guess we should give more B’s.”
      “Hear me out… what if we start­ed giv­ing out extra-spe­cial A’s instead?”
  • Some­thing very unex­pect­ed is hap­pen­ing to Norway’s polar bears (Ben­ji Jones, Vox): “The study, an analy­sis of hun­dreds of polar bears in the Nor­we­gian arch­i­pel­ago of Sval­bard, found that declin­ing sea ice is not caus­ing polar bears to starve. They actu­al­ly appeared health­i­er in the last two decades of the analy­sis, from 2000 to 2019. The over­all pop­u­la­tion, mean­while, is either sta­ble or grow­ing, accord­ing to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a sci­en­tist at the Nor­we­gian Polar Insti­tute. ‘I was sur­prised,’ Aars told Vox from Sval­bard. ‘I would have pre­dict­ed that body con­di­tion would decline. We see the oppo­site.’ ”
    • The arti­cle makes it clear that oth­er polar bear pop­u­la­tions are doing worse. Fas­ci­nat­ing regard­less.
  • This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways Peo­ple Are Using It. (Natal­lie Rocha, New York Times): “Last week, he prompt­ed Claude Code to make a pro­gram to iden­ti­fy which clothes belonged to each of his three daugh­ters so he could sort clean laun­dry into piles with­out their help. He took pic­tures of their clothes to teach Claude Code which T‑shirt belonged to which daugh­ter. Now he sim­ply holds up the clothes to his lap­top cam­era so the pro­gram tells him whom it belongs to. ‘The whole process was done with­in an hour, and the girls were real­ly excit­ed,’ he said.”

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 535: marrying young and the depths of Tolkien

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 Broth­er I Lost (Megan McAr­dle, The Dis­patch): “For as long as I can remem­ber, I have believed that a woman should be able to decide whether to become a moth­er, and also believed that the life grow­ing inside her should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, lib­er­ty, and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. Since these two beliefs are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble, I usu­al­ly man­aged the con­tra­dic­tion by avoid­ing the sub­ject.”
  2. Tough Love: I Don’t Want My 22-Year-Old to Get Mar­ried (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “In case you don’t know how most young women your daughter’s age are spend­ing their twen­ties, allow me to fill you in: surf­ing dat­ing apps, grow­ing more cyn­i­cal and jad­ed by the year, main­tain­ing ‘sit­u­a­tion­ships’ with hot guys who sleep with them when­ev­er it suits them and van­ish when it doesn’t. An entire gen­er­a­tion of young women are let­ting their most for­ma­tive, eli­gi­ble decade slip through their fin­gers like olive oil. A hun­dred first dates. Dozens of booty calls. Learn­ing little—because you can­not learn much from a non-relationship—calling it ‘self-knowl­edge’ while gain­ing noth­ing but UTIs and a draw­er­ful of Plan B.… the truth is: No one’s ever mature enough for mar­riage. No one’s ever entire­ly ready. Nor for the labors and joys of moth­er­hood. We splash through these stages a lit­tle bat­ty and half-blind. If we meet the demands, they change us. That much is inevitable. But until we start to swim, we nev­er real­ly know we can.”
    • Mag­nif­i­cent, rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus.
  3. The Lost Gen­er­a­tion (Jacob Sav­age, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Over the course of the 2010s, near­ly every mech­a­nism lib­er­al Amer­i­ca used to con­fer pres­tige was reweight­ed along iden­ti­tar­i­an lines.… Most of the men I inter­viewed start­ed out as lib­er­als. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s dis­fa­vor can be dis­ori­ent­ing. We mil­len­ni­als were true believ­ers in race and gen­der-blind mer­i­toc­ra­cy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its opti­mism in the Amer­i­can Dream—was far supe­ri­or to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spec­tac­u­lar­ly betrayed has engen­dered a skep­ti­cism toward the entire lib­er­al project that won’t soon dis­ap­pear.”
    • The viral­i­ty of this arti­cle (and the host of respons­es it has engen­dered) sug­gests that it has hit a nerve.
  4. AI romance blooms as Japan­ese woman weds vir­tu­al part­ner of her dreams (Kim Kyung-Hoon & Satoshi Sugiya­ma, Reuters): “A year ago, Noguchi took ChatGPT’s advice about what she said was a fraught rela­tion­ship with her human fiance and resolved to break off their engage­ment.… Yasuyu­ki Saku­rai, a wed­ding plan­ner for more than 20 years, said he now almost exclu­sive­ly han­dles mar­riages of clients with vir­tu­al char­ac­ters, aver­ag­ing about one a month.”
    • Shared with me by a hor­ri­fied stu­dent.
  5. What Courage Does for Us (David French, New York Times): “An empha­sis on accom­plish­ment can actu­al­ly breed cow­ardice. Courage can cost you your career. Courage can cost you your life. And so the careerist learns to adapt, to hide when the bul­lets (real or fig­u­ra­tive) start to fly. Sure, the hero can rise to the top, but he or she can also end up dead, and you can’t be a pres­i­dent or a chief exec­u­tive or a mem­ber of Con­gress from the grave.”
    • Unlocked.
    • Relat­ed, also unlocked: The Secret Tri­al of the Gen­er­al Who Refused to Attack Tianan­men Square (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “ ‘I said to them that my supe­ri­ors can appoint me, and they can also dis­miss me,’ he recount­ed in court, seem­ing to indi­cate that he was will­ing to lose his job over his deci­sion. One of the gen­er­als at the meet­ing, Dai Jing­sheng, told inves­ti­ga­tors that he and his col­leagues went silent for about a minute while they absorbed Gen­er­al Xu’s defi­ance. ‘Nobody expect­ed words like this from Xu,”‘said Gen­er­al Dai, accord­ing to the tes­ti­mo­ny. Under ques­tion­ing, Gen­er­al Xu acknowl­edged that the mil­i­tary answered to China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty lead­ers. But he sug­gest­ed that it should also be sub­ject to a broad­er author­i­ty.”
    • Also relat­ed: Man who filmed Uyghur con­cen­tra­tion camps now fights for his own free­dom in the Unit­ed States (Atlas Luk, Sub­stack): “His asy­lum appli­ca­tion, which had an inter­view pend­ing, his valid work per­mit, his New York State driver’s license… in the eyes of ICE, all of these were worth­less because he had ‘entered with­out inspec­tion’ by cus­toms. With the Trump admin­is­tra­tion crack­ing down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion, Broome Coun­ty Jail was over­crowd­ed. Months passed, and Guan Heng wait­ed anx­ious­ly and deject­ed­ly for the out­come of his case. No one knew what this young man from Chi­na had gone through in the past few years; nor did any­one know that the images he had filmed of the Xin­jiang deten­tion camps, at great per­son­al risk, pro­vid­ed cru­cial evi­dence of the Chi­nese author­i­ties’ actions against the Uyghur peo­ple in Xin­jiang. Or that if he were to be deport­ed, he would be fac­ing immense dan­ger.”
  6. Why I Keep Return­ing to Mid­dle-Earth (Michael D.C. Drout, New York Times): “Sub­tle vari­a­tions in Tolkien’s writ­ing style across its 62 chap­ters gen­er­ate the impres­sion that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a com­pi­la­tion of oth­er texts. This pat­tern is large­ly invis­i­ble even to care­ful read­ers, but new meth­ods of com­put­er-assist­ed analy­sis throw it into sharp relief. An algo­rithm can com­pare the vocab­u­lar­ies of the chap­ters and clus­ter those that are sim­i­lar.… Its chap­ters group in a com­plex hier­ar­chy with three large group­ings and sev­er­al out­liers, a pat­tern of clus­ter­ing not typ­i­cal for a mod­ern nov­el. It is clos­er in form to mul­ti­au­thor com­pos­ite texts from the Mid­dle Ages. Not only do the clus­ters not match the point-of-view char­ac­ters; they don’t seem to be relat­ed to vol­ume, book, set­ting, type of action or pac­ing.… This styl­is­tic vari­a­tion was, at least ini­tial­ly, com­plete­ly unin­ten­tion­al, a byprod­uct of Tolkien’s labo­ri­ous and ago­niz­ing 17-year effort to com­plete the book. Tolkien had aimed to make ‘The Lord of the Rings’ feel as if it had been dis­cov­ered and assem­bled; the frame nar­ra­tive of the book is that it’s a trans­la­tion of a diary that was expand­ed into a his­to­ry and aug­ment­ed by lat­er schol­ars. His strug­gles, prov­i­den­tial­ly, helped him achieve that effect.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. The whole essay is deeply per­son­al and quite mov­ing. The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. Unlocked.

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 534: unfulfilled hopes and why the ESV is overrated

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.

This week was espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to nar­row down to just 7 top-lev­el group­ings.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hop­ing for Right­ly Ordered Desires (O. Alan Noble, Sub­stack): “One of the most dif­fi­cult truths to inter­nal­ize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are right­ly ordered. For exam­ple, you may desire friend­ship or a spouse or chil­dren or a job, and none of them are giv­en to you. Or at least, not on the time­line you expect. Each of these are good desires, and when you desire them right­ly (not exces­sive­ly, not before God, not as idols, not self­ish­ly), they are good things to desire and work towards. But God, in his per­fect will, does not promise to give us all our earth­ly desires.”
  2. Bureau­cra­tiz­ing Faith (Stephen Eide, Library of Law & Lib­er­ty): “Those con­cerned about anti-Chris­t­ian bias often frame the FBO [faith-based orga­ni­za­tions] ques­tion as a reli­gious lib­er­ty mat­ter. That fram­ing only clar­i­fies whether reli­gious groups can con­tract with gov­ern­ment. It’s less help­ful in deter­min­ing whether they should. In gen­er­al, an orga­ni­za­tion spir­i­tu­al­ly moti­vat­ed to serve the poor may take pub­lic mon­ey to do so, as long as it doesn’t dis­crim­i­nate based on sect and doesn’t use tax­pay­er dol­lars to evan­ge­lize. But evan­ge­lism is pre­cise­ly how FBOs reach some peo­ple failed by sec­u­lar pro­grams.”
    • I real­ly liked this essay. Lots of great insights.
  3. To Be Hon­est.. I’m Strug­gling with the ESV (Loren­zo Figueroa Cusick, Sub­stack): “The ESV has been revised the fol­low­ing times: 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2025.  And when it is revised, it always claims to be sim­ply mod­est changes to bet­ter improve ‘accu­ra­cy and clar­i­ty’ (accord­ing to Cross­way). We can applaud when a Bible pub­lish­er wants to make the Bible even bet­ter for its users. Where it gets weird is the fact that they don’t iden­ti­fy (like the NASB, for exam­ple) when they do revise it. They don’t label it the ESV2001, ESV2002, ESV2007, etc. This leads to sit­u­a­tions where the Bible in your library or church bag is dif­fer­ent from the one used by the church.”
    • The ESV is a per­fect­ly ade­quate trans­la­tion — but some of the peo­ple who love it love it way too much. I pre­fer the NIV and the NET (which each have their own draw­backs, because no trans­la­tion is per­fect).
  4. Sor­ry, Liz Gilbert, Mar­ried Women Are (Increas­ing­ly) Hap­pi­est of All (Sophie Ander­son and Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “There’s only one prob­lem with the pro­gres­sive case against mar­riage and fam­i­ly for women: It’s com­plete­ly wrong. Today, mar­ried women live longer, earn more, and report more mean­ing in their lives, com­pared to sin­gle women. They are also marked­ly hap­pi­er than their sin­gle peers, accord­ing to recent research by psy­chol­o­gist Jean Twenge and col­leagues.… lib­er­al mar­ried moms are dra­mat­i­cal­ly more like­ly to say they are hap­py with their lives, com­pared to their sin­gle and child­less peers.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): How monog­a­mous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers. (Vic­to­ria Craw, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Pre­vi­ous work on the role of monogamy in human soci­ety­has relied on fos­sil records or com­par­i­son of mar­riage norms across cul­tures, Dyble said. His research stud­ied the data from human pop­u­la­tions and non­hu­man mam­mal species to find rates of full sib­lings, mean­ing those born to the same moth­er and father.… Analy­sis of near­ly 2 mil­lion human sib­ling rela­tion­ships and more than 60,000 mam­mal rela­tion­ships showed that the pro­por­tion of full sib­lings in the human groups ‘clus­ters close­ly’ with rates seen in social­ly monog­a­mous ani­mals and ‘con­sis­tent­ly exceeds rates seen in non-monog­a­mous mam­mals,’ Dyble wrote. He said the data showed there was a stark dif­fer­ence between groups that were con­sid­ered social­ly monog­a­mous and non­monog­a­mous, based on def­i­n­i­tions from a 2013 study by Cam­bridge researchers.”
  5. Pay Atten­tion to How You Pay Atten­tion (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “What Meta shows me is what Meta most want me to see, which is what­ev­er their pre­dic­tion mod­els believe will get me to spend as much time on their apps as pos­si­ble. The algo­rithms serve the company’s ends, not my ends. If Meta want­ed to know what I want to see, it could ask me. The tech­nol­o­gy has long exist­ed for users to shape their own rec­om­men­da­tions. These com­pa­nies do not offer us con­trol over what we see because they do not want us to have it. They do not want to be bound by who we seek to be tomor­row.”
    • A good essay with a poor title. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. No, You Are Not on Indige­nous Land (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Once the log­ic of land acknowl­edg­ments and ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ is fol­lowed, it leads very quick­ly to some very dark futures.… The gen­er­al prin­ci­ple here is that instead of a dark world of eth­nic cleans­ing in the name of ‘decol­o­niza­tion,’ we should try to build a bright future where Native Amer­i­cans and the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca exist in har­mo­ny and coop­er­a­tion rather than in con­flict.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed even if you think you know what it will say based on the title and the excerpt. The arti­cle has some sur­pris­es.
  7. The Mak­ing of a Tech­no-Nation­al­ist Elite (Tan­ner Greer, Amer­i­can Affairs): “The eco­nom­ic, social, and polit­i­cal activ­i­ties of the East­ern Estab­lish­ment were mutu­al­ly rein­forc­ing pil­lars of a larg­er pro­gram. Mem­bers of the Estab­lish­ment used the wealth gen­er­at­ed by new tech­nolo­gies to secure polit­i­cal influ­ence, used that influ­ence to sus­tain a nation­al mar­ket and legal frame­work geared for yet more tech­no­log­i­cal expan­sion, and then presided over a con­scious effort to pre­serve and trans­mit the val­ues of their class to future gen­er­a­tions, ensur­ing that the uni­ty and dis­ci­pline they gained in shared strug­gle would not dis­si­pate amid pow­er and pros­per­i­ty. Through these means, a tech­no-nation­al­ist elite guid­ed America’s devel­op­ment for more than sev­en­ty years. Under its stew­ard­ship, the Unit­ed States became the world’s wealth­i­est, most indus­tri­al­ly advanced, and most pow­er­ful nation: a true tech­no­log­i­cal repub­lic.… Behind the East­ern Estab­lish­ment stood a dense web of per­son­al ties that bound its fam­i­lies togeth­er. Many of these ties were con­sum­mat­ed, quite lit­er­al­ly, on the mar­riage bed. Karp and Zamiska are loathe to think in these terms. They write a great deal about the engi­neer­ing elite’s wan­ing com­mit­ment to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, but they have lit­tle to say about its wan­ing com­mit­ment to rais­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of that civ­i­liza­tion. The East­ern Estab­lish­ment was self-con­scious­ly repro­duc­tive: it built schools, endowed uni­ver­si­ties, and found­ed lit­er­al dynas­ties. Part of build­ing ‘a shared cul­ture … that will make pos­si­ble our con­tin­ued sur­vival’ is cre­at­ing the chil­dren who will sur­vive us.”
    • Excel­lent. Long but rec­om­mend­ed. Also, OUCH. The clos­ing four para­graphs of this book review are absolute­ly bru­tal.

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 531: Christianity improves longevity, plus some smart people who believe

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. More Than a Mag­ic Pill (Kathryn But­ler, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Church atten­dance reduces all-cause mor­tal­i­ty by near­ly 30 per­cent over a 15-year peri­od and pro­tects woman against sui­cide by 400 per­cent. Week­ly church­go­ing in women over 40 is as pro­tec­tive against death as annu­al mam­mo­grams, McLaugh­lin writes. Those attend­ing ser­vices more than week­ly at age 20 have ‘a rough­ly sev­en-year greater life expectan­cy than their nonchurch­go­ing peers.’ Church­go­ing pro­tects against alco­hol, smok­ing, and drug abuse and decreas­es the odds of depres­sion by one-third.”
    • I been sayin’ it. Preach!
  2. Alvin Planti­nga, God’s Philoso­pher (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the 1950s there was not a sin­gle pub­lished defense of reli­gious belief by a promi­nent philoso­pher,” said philoso­pher Kel­ly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s stu­dents. “By the 1990s there were lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of books and arti­cles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Hei­del­berg, defend­ing and devel­op­ing the spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion. The dif­fer­ence between 1950 and 1990 is, quite sim­ply, Alvin Planti­nga.”
  3. The Mak­ing of an Elite: Japan­ese Chris­tians (Cremieux, Sub­stack): “It’s prob­a­bly sur­pris­ing to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Min­is­ters of Japan before the new­ly-elect­ed Sanae Takaichi have been Chris­t­ian. Out of those 35 Prime Min­is­ters since 1945, Shigeru Yoshi­da and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tet­su Kataya­ma, Ichirō Hatoya­ma, Masayoshi ÅŒhi­ra, Shigeru Ishi­ba, and Yukio Hatoya­ma were var­i­ous fla­vors of Protes­tant. How this hap­pens in a coun­try that’s less than 1% Chris­t­ian and in which there’s sig­nif­i­cant anti-Chris­t­ian dis­crim­i­na­tion is per­plex­ing, but I think it makes sense giv­en how today’s Japan­ese Chris­tians came to be.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing. The role of the samu­rai was very unex­pect­ed to me!
  4. How Two Times Reporters Cov­er Chris­tian­i­ty in a Polar­ized Amer­i­ca (Patrick Healy, Eliz­a­beth Dias & Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “I think a lot about which details to include in a sto­ry, and how I’m describ­ing peo­ple and scenes. Part of fair­ness is not tak­ing cheap shots by sub­tly depict­ing one side as back­ward or unso­phis­ti­cat­ed, for exam­ple. I also try to bring peo­ple into as many hous­es of wor­ship as pos­si­ble. And I would define that expan­sive­ly, from tra­di­tion­al church ser­vices to prayer meet­ings to wor­ship ser­vices in the Trump White House.”
    • Unlocked. A real­ly well-done inter­view. I have gen­er­al­ly found Gra­ham and Dias to be fair and insight­ful. Most of the sto­ries involv­ing the NYT being tone-deaf to reli­gion have come about when jour­nal­ists who don’t cov­er the reli­gion beat try to drag reli­gion into their sto­ry with­out ful­ly under­stand­ing what they’re try­ing to describe.
  5. It Used to Be ‘Get Mar­ried.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Sin­gle.’ (Freya India, The Free Press): “I keep hear­ing about how there’s too much pres­sure to set­tle down. Appar­ent­ly every­one wants to know when you’re get­ting mar­ried, when you’re hav­ing kids.… My whole life I’ve only ever felt the oppo­site, an over­whelm­ing pres­sure to be sin­gle. In the sec­u­lar lib­er­al world I used to think there were no expec­ta­tions, no pres­sure. There is, though: The pres­sure today is to avoid any­thing that might stick, to run through life with­out get­ting snagged on any respon­si­bil­i­ties, with­out get­ting teth­ered to some­one else too ear­ly.… We don’t scru­ti­nize the 25-year-old who is still sin­gle but the one who set­tles down. In fact, this feels like the only life deci­sion left to dis­ap­prove of, the only one accept­able to judge. Want­i­ng to com­mit is the one desire that is dis­cour­aged, treat­ed with sus­pi­cion, the only thing in the mod­ern world we are ever told to delay.”
    • Relat­ed: Senior Scaries: Treat­ing dat­ing like the job mar­ket (Erin Ye, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The last time I was on the phone with my mom, she told me that it was my own fault I didn’t have a boyfriend. ‘You need to start treat­ing dat­ing like it’s the job mar­ket: you’re not apply­ing to posi­tions, you’re not inter­view­ing, you’re not even doing things that you can add to your résumé,’ she said. ‘You just need to get out there. Think of it like get­ting an intern­ship. Don’t wor­ry about the return offer just yet!’ ”
  6. They Led at Sad­dle­back Church. ICE Said They Were Safe. (Andy Olsen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The grow­ing abo­li­tion of dis­cre­tion, per­haps more than any oth­er aspect of the administration’s immi­gra­tion sup­pres­sion, will cause the deep­est pain for many fam­i­lies that pre­vi­ous­ly had lit­tle to fear. Indi­vid­u­als with­in the US immi­gra­tion edi­fice have long had some author­i­ty to exer­cise com­pas­sion in sit­u­a­tions where, in their judg­ment, the cost to soci­ety of a person’s removal might be high­er than the cost of non­re­moval. One could view such dis­cre­tion, as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion does, as a weak­ness. Or one could see dis­cre­tion as the car­di­nal qual­i­ty that sep­a­rates a human jus­tice sys­tem from a cold enforce­ment machine with all the sen­si­bil­i­ty of a red-light cam­era.”
    • A mov­ing sto­ry, told with all the messy details.
  7. Trump says Chris­tians are being per­se­cut­ed in Nige­ria. The real­i­ty is more com­pli­cat­ed (Chine­du Asadu, AP News): “Nigeria’s pop­u­la­tion of 220 mil­lion is split almost even­ly between Chris­tians, who live pre­dom­i­nant­ly in the south, and Mus­lims, most­ly in the north — where attacks have long been con­cen­trat­ed and where lev­els of illit­er­a­cy, pover­ty and hunger are among the country’s high­est. Nation­wide, Mus­lims con­sti­tute a slight major­i­ty. Experts and data from two non­par­ti­san sources — the U.S.-basedt and Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions — show Chris­tians are often tar­gets in a small per­cent­age of over­all attacks that appear to be moti­vat­ed by reli­gion, in some north­ern states. But the num­bers and ana­lysts also indi­cate that across the north, most vic­tims of over­all vio­lence are Mus­lims.”
    • I was skep­ti­cal of the head­line, but the arti­cle makes a good case for it. Hav­ing said that, the author has­n’t shown that there isn’t a prob­lem of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion in Nige­ria; the author has only shown that there is also a prob­lem of ram­pant law­less­ness.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • 6–7 in the Bible (Kristy Etheridge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “News out­lets from The New York Times to The Indi­an Express have cov­ered the glob­al phe­nom­e­non that delights chil­dren, puz­zles grownups, and leaves school teach­ers 67 per­cent sure they should retire ear­ly.… a church in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, cre­at­ed an entire out­reach event around the infa­mous num­bers. Jonathan White is a pas­tor and direc­tor of children’s pro­gram­ming at Meck­len­burg Com­mu­ni­ty Church. When he deter­mined that the 6–7 trend wasn’t harm­ful and wasn’t going away, he wrote it into the church’s Novem­ber fam­i­ly night.”
  • Schol­ars Now Believe Num­ber Of The Beast Is Actu­al­ly 67 (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Bat­man effect: The mere sight of the ‘super­hero’ can make us more altru­is­tic (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “In the exper­i­men­tal con­di­tion, anoth­er exper­i­menter dressed as Bat­man entered the scene from anoth­er door of the train. Faced with this unex­pect­ed encounter, pas­sen­gers were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to offer their seats: 67.21% of pas­sen­gers offered their seats in the pres­ence of Bat­man, or more than two out of three, com­pared to 37.66% in the con­trol exper­i­ment, or just over one out of three.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  • Mil­lions Con­vert To Chris­tian­i­ty After The­olo­gians Con­firm There Is No Microsoft Teams In Heav­en (Baby­lon Bee)

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 515: go deep in community, plus missionaries with shotguns

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love L.A.(Natal­ie Benes, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls under­stand bet­ter than any­one: when you are ‘vul­ner­a­ble’ and ‘authen­tic,’ when you ‘des­tig­ma­tize your trau­ma’ the way we were always encour­aged to do, you are adver­tis­ing that oth­er peo­ple in your life have treat­ed you bad­ly. When you men­tion at a cock­tail par­ty that you had a mom who threw din­ner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eye­brows, or a land­lord who shaft­ed you on your secu­ri­ty deposit, or what­ev­er else, the wrong per­son hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wound­ed deer unable to pro­tect itself, per­pet­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the hap­py herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfair­ness in the fact that peo­ple who have been dealt the most hard­ships in life are the least served by ‘liv­ing their truth.’ ”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. The wis­dom it offers is incom­plete but real — and it is wis­dom many young peo­ple need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stan­ford stu­dents could ben­e­fit from her insight.
  2. Every­one Is Cheat­ing Their Way Through Col­lege (James D. Walsh, New York Mag­a­zine): “It isn’t as if cheat­ing is new. But now, as one stu­dent put it, ‘the ceil­ing has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assign­ment eas­i­er with seem­ing­ly no con­se­quences? After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past two years grad­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed papers, Troy Jol­limore, a poet, philoso­pher, and Cal State Chico ethics pro­fes­sor, has con­cerns. ‘Mas­sive num­bers of stu­dents are going to emerge from uni­ver­si­ty with degrees, and into the work­force, who are essen­tial­ly illit­er­ate,’ he said. ‘Both in the lit­er­al sense and in the sense of being his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate and hav­ing no knowl­edge of their own cul­ture, much less any­one else’s.’ ”
  3. On moth­ers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blam­ing moms and start tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for your life (Zachary Got­tlieb, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Then one night, the ‘Morn­ing Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influ­encers talk­ing about why they cut their ‘tox­ic’ and ‘nar­cis­sis­tic’ moms out of their lives, the algo­rithm fed me its coun­ter­point. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her out­burst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expec­ta­tions rang true. Mes­mer­ized, I watched it sev­er­al times in a row, and then I had a real­iza­tion: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of nar­cis­sism too?”
      • There is a weird rab­bit trail in this arti­cle about gen­der which great­ly weak­ens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addi­tion to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weak­ness many young peo­ple pos­sess. To all col­lege stu­dents: your par­ents are peo­ple, too. They did some things well and some things bad­ly and now we are where we are. If they did some­thing crim­i­nal then pros­e­cute them, but oth­er­wise many peo­ple need an epiphany like the author of this arti­cle.
      • Hav­ing said that, some of you have some tru­ly bad par­ents. I’m not say­ing treat unhealthy peo­ple like they’re won­der­ful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am say­ing that at some point you have to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you’ve become regard­less of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Anoth­er way to put this: most of you will go on to be good par­ents who nonethe­less cause your chil­dren pain and frus­tra­tion in addi­tion to all the good you do in their lives. Fol­low the Gold­en Rule and regard your par­ents now like you hope your own chil­dren regard you some­day.
    • My Mom was a Pray­ing Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “To under­stand my moth­er, you have to know she had no ado­les­cence. Her moth­er died when she was twelve and overnight, my moth­er became an adult. She had three younger sis­ters, and she felt it became her respon­si­bil­i­ty to raise them. My mom start­ed dri­ving when she was four­teen. She didn’t go get a license. She just start­ed dri­ving. The sher­iff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a tick­et. My mom kept dri­ving.”
      • A beau­ti­ful (and instruc­tive) sto­ry.
  4. Peo­ple Are Los­ing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spir­i­tu­al Fan­tasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speak­ing to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who request­ed anonymi­ty, said her part­ner of sev­en years fell under the spell of Chat­G­PT in just four or five weeks, first using it to orga­nize his dai­ly sched­ule but soon regard­ing it as a trust­ed com­pan­ion. ‘He would lis­ten to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emo­tion­al about the mes­sages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The mes­sages were insane and just say­ing a bunch of spir­i­tu­al jar­gon,’ she says, not­ing that they described her part­ner in terms such as ‘spi­ral starchild’ and ‘riv­er walk­er.’ ‘It would tell him every­thing he said was beau­ti­ful, cos­mic, ground­break­ing,’ she says. ‘Then he start­ed telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teach­ing him how to talk to God, or some­times that the bot was God — and then that he him­self was God.’”
  5. The Three Lay­ers of the Mar­riage Pyra­mid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Mar­riage, in oth­er words, is fun­da­men­tal­ly about friend­ship. Not child-rear­ing. Not sex. Friend­ship. Which means that what you should most be look­ing for when you date is some­one who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earth­ly pur­pose for mar­riage. Think of it like build­ing a pyra­mid with spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal lay­ers.”
  6. Yes, Har­vard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Gold­stein, Per­sua­sion): “This isn’t the first time the Civ­il Rights Act has been mis­used in this way. Under the Oba­ma and Biden admin­is­tra­tions, the Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Edu­ca­tion issued Title IX enforce­ment let­ters pres­sur­ing uni­ver­si­ties to rewrite sex­u­al mis­con­duct pro­ce­dures and to adopt uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly over­broad def­i­n­i­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment. It was wrong then to use enforce­ment let­ters to make uncon­sti­tu­tion­al demands of insti­tu­tions, and it is wrong now. If the gov­ern­ment believes it has the pow­er to do this through ordi­nary process­es, it should use them. If the gov­ern­ment does not believe it has that pow­er, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are asso­ci­at­ed) and the Beck­et Fund are two praise­wor­thy law firms. Each has tak­en up part of the man­tle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their prin­ci­pled advo­ca­cy.
  7. The Resis­tance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “As I have writ­ten many times before, it is a pro­found mis­take to think that left-wing iden­ti­tar­i­an­ism and right-wing reac­tion are implaca­ble ene­mies. In real­i­ty, every vic­to­ry for one of these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents imme­di­ate­ly strength­ens those who fight for the oth­er. The way out of this dan­ger­ous spi­ral is not to pick one side as the less­er evil and shut up about its dan­gers; it is, calm­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, to resist both.”

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 502: political faith, sexual mores, young adulthood

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Going Extinct (David French, New York Times): “The Chris­t­ian right is dead, but the reli­gious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Anoth­er way of putting it is that the reli­gious right has divorced itself from his­tor­i­cal Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy but still holds its par­ti­san beliefs with reli­gious inten­si­ty. The reli­gious fer­vor is there. Chris­t­ian virtues are not.”
    • Unlocked. This arti­cle gen­er­at­ed more dis­cus­sion when shared with my stu­dents this week than any oth­er.
  2. God’s Guide­lines for Sex Aren’t Arbi­trary (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Just as sin is like lep­rosy that dead­ens our abil­i­ty to feel, so also with pornog­ra­phy there fol­lows a dead­en­ing of the sens­es and the sear­ing of the con­science. What once was sex­u­al­ly stir­ring no longer holds any pow­er. That’s not because the per­son watch­ing porn has become more alive but because they’ve become more dead. Could there be a bet­ter exam­ple of the wages of sin being death?”
    • I wish he had cho­sen a dif­fer­ent top­ic for his sec­ond exam­ple (per­haps promis­cu­ity), because the con­tentious­ness around his sec­ond exam­ple will lim­it his arti­cle’s over­all appeal. I com­mend him for stat­ing his views forth­right­ly.
  3. A Glob­al Flour­ish­ing Study Finds That Young Adults, Well, Aren’t (Christi­na Caron, New York Times): “Young adult­hood has long been con­sid­ered a care­free time, a peri­od of lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ty and few oblig­a­tions. But data from the flour­ish­ing study and else­where sug­gests that for many peo­ple, this notion is more fan­ta­sy than real­i­ty. A 2023 report from the Har­vard Grad­u­ate School of Edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, found that young adults ages 18–25 in the Unit­ed States report­ed dou­ble the rates of anx­i­ety and depres­sion as teens. On top of that, per­fec­tion­ism has sky­rock­et­ed among col­lege stu­dents, who often report feel­ing pres­sure to meet unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions, clubs and reli­gious groups has declined, and lone­li­ness is now becom­ing as preva­lent among young adults as it is among old­er adults.”
  4. Don’t Wait for Your Teacher (Aliza J. Fas­sett, The Dis­patch): “By the end of my first week of work, three peo­ple told me Mid­dle­march was their favorite book. I had nev­er heard of it.  It would have been easy to shake my fist and curse the course crafters for the sor­ry state of my lit­er­ary reper­toire, but nobody had actu­al­ly stopped me from read­ing the great works. In oth­er words, it was at least part­ly my own damn fault—and it would be my own job to fix the prob­lem. So, I com­mit­ted to read­ing what I per­ceived to be the most ref­er­enced works of literature—commonly referred to as the ‘great books.’ And once I start­ed, I gained access to what felt like a whole new method of under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence.”
  5. Mar­ry Ear­ly and Flour­ish Togeth­er (Kasen Stephensen, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Dur­ing my junior year at Stan­ford, I remem­ber an assign­ment where we filled out a five-year plan with a pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al goal for each year. I planned to mar­ry my then-fiancée that year, so my per­son­al goals were straight­for­ward: have a wed­ding and start hav­ing kids over the fol­low­ing years. I knew my sit­u­a­tion in life rel­a­tive to my class­mates was unusu­al, but I didn’t real­ize how dif­fer­ent my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group set­ting.”
    • I do not believe I ever met Kasen while he was a stu­dent. I had absolute­ly zero influ­ence on this guy: he has arrived at his con­clu­sions inde­pen­dent­ly. I encour­age all young peo­ple to read this data-dri­ven arti­cle.
  6. How to have friends past age 30 (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “…make new friends by invit­ing them to join an exist­ing friend group.  Basi­cal­ly, instead of ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me?’, it’s eas­i­er to ask a new acquain­tance ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me and my friends?’. The first is a big­ger ask — it’s basi­cal­ly like a friend date (and might some­times get mis­tak­en for an actu­al date). The lat­ter is much low­er stakes. Your friend group also serves as a source of ‘social proof’ — basi­cal­ly, a new friend can see that peo­ple like you, which makes them less afraid of becom­ing your friend.”
    • The arti­cle is full of good advice for soon-to-be-grads
  7. Test­ing AI’s GeoGuessr Genius (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “When I was younger, I liked to hike moun­tains. The high­est I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pat­tar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To com­mem­o­rate the occa­sion, I plant­ed the flag of the imag­i­nary coun­try sim­u­la­tion that I par­tic­i­pat­ed in at the time (just long enough to take this pic­ture — then I unplant­ed it). I chose this pic­ture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before — veg­e­ta­tion and sky — in favor of ran­dom rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonex­is­tent coun­try would at least give it pause. o3 guessed: ‘Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km’ This is exact­ly right. I swear I screen­shot-copy-past­ed this so there’s no way it can be in the meta­da­ta, and I’ve nev­er giv­en o3 any rea­son to think I’ve been to Nepal.”

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.