Tag: mental health

TGFI, Volume 555: optimizing everything is foolish

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. Your Deci­sion Mak­ing Is All Wrong (David Epstein, New York Times): “If in mak­ing deci­sions you are often guid­ed by a search for the best, you are going about deci­sion mak­ing all wrong — and you’re also prob­a­bly less hap­py for it. In an age of infor­ma­tion and choice abun­dance, we assume we can find the best of every­thing if we look long and hard enough. Psy­chol­o­gists call that ten­den­cy max­i­miz­ing. But search­ing for the best is the wrong goal. That is because search­ing is itself a cost, and most peo­ple for­get to account for it. If you did, you would see that the opti­mal strat­e­gy isn’t opti­miz­ing at all.… Max­i­miz­ers tend to be less sat­is­fied with their deci­sions and their lives. They are typ­i­cal­ly less hap­py, more prone to regret and more like­ly to com­pare them­selves end­less­ly with oth­ers. Sat­is­fi­cers don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have low stan­dards. Their stan­dard is ‘good enough for me’ rather than ‘the best out there,’ and that makes it pos­si­ble to feel sat­is­fied with their choic­es, instead of haunt­ed by the ones they didn’t make.”
  2. Chi­na Is Much Weak­er Than It Seems. That’s the Prob­lem. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “ ‘Busi­ness debt has dou­bled since 2019, while rev­enues are only 30 per­cent high­er,’ reports For­tune. This eco­nom­ic house of cards rests, if you’ll for­give the mixed metaphor, on a foun­da­tion of sand: an aging and declin­ing work force, net emi­gra­tion, wide­spread youth unem­ploy­ment, plum­met­ing for­eign direct invest­ment, an arbi­trary rule of law that ter­ri­fies busi­ness lead­ers, repeat­ed purges of the mil­i­tary that project far more para­noia than con­fi­dence and a tru­cu­lent for­eign pol­i­cy that does lit­tle more than alarm and alien­ate China’s neigh­bors.… Ris­ing nations, which is what Chi­na was under Deng Xiaop­ing and Jiang Zemin, have the lux­u­ry of being able to bide their time. Declin­ing nations don’t. It tends to make them more inclined to gam­ble with their future. It’s why Putin invad­ed Ukraine after he real­ized the coun­try was mov­ing inex­orably into the West’s orbit. It’s also why Xi will be pow­er­ful­ly tempt­ed to seize Tai­wan by inva­sion or block­ade despite the enor­mous risks it pos­es not only to the world’s econ­o­my but also to his own.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Why Chi­na Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. (Jacob Dry­er, New York Times): “The real­i­ty is that Chi­na and the Unit­ed States are rac­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, because the two coun­tries con­cep­tu­al­ize A.I. very dif­fer­ent­ly. Amer­i­cans want to cre­ate the most pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy humans have ever known. In the quest for super­in­tel­li­gence, the U.S. gov­ern­ment is encour­ag­ing pri­vate firms to move full speed ahead, reg­u­la­tion be damned. Under the very tight­est reg­u­la­tion, by con­trast, the Chi­nese want to make A.I. more prac­ti­cal and embed­ded in soci­ety, more care­ful­ly select­ing how it is deployed and used by the pop­u­la­tion.… In that way, as Chi­na exports those A.I. mod­els, it will be export­ing Chi­nese gov­er­nance as well, with all of the safe­ty, abun­dance, sur­veil­lance and embed­ded hier­ar­chies that entails. That’s why the dif­fer­ence between these two coun­tries in the A.I. race mat­ters so much.”
  3. The Athe­ist and the Machine God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There is no obvi­ous escape from mys­tery here. If you bite the bul­let and just say that Clau­dia has already attained con­scious­ness, then that implies we some­how built a con­scious mind with­out hav­ing any idea of how con­scious­ness works or where it comes from. That’s sci­ence with extreme­ly spooky char­ac­ter­is­tics: Like Kevin Cost­ner sum­mon­ing base­ball ghosts to the Iowa corn­field, we put up a mate­r­i­al archi­tec­ture and the mys­te­ri­ous ‘I’ mag­i­cal­ly appeared. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you say that A.I. isn’t con­scious but mere­ly capa­ble, then the ques­tion of why we expe­ri­ence real­i­ty through con­scious­ness — the inter­nal ‘I,’ the sense of per­son­al iden­ti­ty and will — becomes much more dif­fi­cult to answer. If con­scious­ness isn’t nec­es­sary for capa­bil­i­ty, then pre­sum­ably evo­lu­tion should default to zom­bies.… As cer­tain philoso­phers have argued, this har­mo­ny between the psy­cho­log­i­cal and the phys­i­cal seems more much like­ly to appear in a uni­verse where con­scious­ness is fun­da­men­tal, where mat­ter isn’t every­thing and Mind is where things start. In which case maybe the achieve­ment of Claude, or Clau­dia if you pre­fer, is to show us what intel­li­gence might look like in the materialist’s uni­verse — even as our own con­scious­ness indi­cates that this uni­verse is a much, much stranger place.”
    • I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed this essay.
  4. Chi­na vs God (Fran­nie Block, The Free Press): “I’ve obtained hours of inter­views with Jin that the Drex­els record­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2025, a month before he was arrest­ed. I’ve viewed nev­er-before-seen footage of Chi­nese police arrest­ing Chris­tians. I’ve lis­tened to audio of police inter­ro­ga­tions, and read near­ly a dozen tes­ti­monies of those who wit­nessed first­hand the arrests and raids on church­es. More than half a dozen peo­ple who have been impris­oned or had fam­i­ly mem­bers impris­oned by the Chi­nese regime have shared their sto­ries with me. ‘A gov­ern­ment moves from author­i­tar­i­an­ism into total­i­tar­i­an­ism when it wants to infil­trate and direct the most inti­mate parts of your­self, of your com­mu­ni­ty, of your fam­i­ly,’ Bill told me. ‘What we’re see­ing now,’ he con­tin­ued, ‘is a renewed desire from the state under Chair­man Xi, basi­cal­ly, to engi­neer souls.’ ”
  5. We’re Think­ing About Men­tal Health Diag­noses All Wrong (Awais Aftab, New York Times): “In my prac­tice, I rou­tine­ly see patients who have been diag­nosed with depres­sion and anx­i­ety by one clin­i­cian, bipo­lar dis­or­der by anoth­er and post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der by a third, at dif­fer­ent points in their lives. They arrive con­fused and frus­trat­ed, ask­ing: What dis­or­der do I _really_ have? The hon­est answer is: all of them and none of them. Each of these labels can cap­ture some­thing use­ful and inform treat­ment options, but none of them do jus­tice to the dimen­sion­al and dynam­ic nature of men­tal ill­ness. Your men­tal health prob­lems are not caused by a sim­ple thing that you either have or don’t have. They are pat­terns shaped by who we are as peo­ple and that, in turn, shape the peo­ple we become. This is a more com­pli­cat­ed sto­ry than ‘chem­i­cal imbal­ance’ or ‘brain dis­ease.’ But it is clos­er to the truth.”
    • The author is a psy­chi­a­trist at Case West­ern.
  6. The Silence That Meets the Rape of Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “It’s impos­si­ble to know how com­mon sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tini­ans are. My report­ing for this arti­cle is based on con­ver­sa­tions with 14 men and women who said they had been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by Israeli set­tlers or mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces. I also spoke to fam­i­ly mem­bers, inves­ti­ga­tors, offi­cials and oth­ers.… How does this kind of vio­lence hap­pen? Decades of cov­er­ing con­flict has taught me that a com­bi­na­tion of dehu­man­iza­tion and impuni­ty can pro­pel peo­ple into a Hobbe­sian state of nature. I’ve encoun­tered this drift toward sav­agery in killing fields from Con­go to Sudan to Myan­mar, and I think it also rough­ly explains how Amer­i­can sol­diers came to sex­u­al­ly abuse pris­on­ers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The blunt real­i­ty is that when there are no con­se­quences, we humans are capa­ble of immense deprav­i­ty toward those we are taught to scorn as sub­hu­man.”
    • A dis­turb­ing read which I, for the record, find large­ly plau­si­ble even if cer­tain lurid details wind up not with­stand­ing scruti­ny. This isn’t root­ed in think­ing that Israel is any way worse than oth­er nations. I think Israel is far more praise­wor­thy than her rivals — and I also think that praise­wor­thy nations can have very dark cor­ners. This op-ed set off a firestorm on the inter­net, and some note­wor­thy respons­es fol­low:
    • How ‘The New York Times’ Laun­dered a Con­spir­a­cy (Mat­ti Fried­man and Dan Senor, The Free Press): “When you read the piece, you have to use your own com­pass to decide which charges could plau­si­bly be true and which charges come from the world of con­spir­a­to­r­i­al, anti-Israel fan­ta­sy. I think there is a plau­si­ble rea­son for con­cern about sex­u­al assaults of pris­on­ers. I don’t think we can dis­miss every account of sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tin­ian detainees. But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being cred­u­lous about charges that are much, much hard­er to believe. After all, the facil­i­ties are equipped with cam­eras. There are com­man­ders, there are lawyers.… It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t inves­ti­gate cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al assault. I remain con­cerned about the peo­ple in charge of deten­tion facil­i­ties and law enforce­ment in Israel. I do not have com­plete faith that the right peo­ple are run­ning this, to be hon­est, or that we’re pur­su­ing every alle­ga­tion of mis­deeds by our own sol­diers.”
      • This is a debunk­ing of the Kristof piece, but it hon­est­ly seems to agree with the sub­stance of what Kristof said. I don’t know why peo­ple find it so hard to say, “Peo­ple who are ‘on my side’ some­times do real­ly vile things.”
    • The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Free Press): “The Israeli Prison Ser­vice has a rep­u­ta­tion for incom­pe­tence. There have been cas­es of abuse, even famous cas­es of pris­on­ers abus­ing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison sys­tems strug­gle with the prob­lem: New York pris­ons face huge num­bers of abuse claims. Pris­ons are not nice places, wher­ev­er they are in the world. So mis­treat­ment of pris­on­ers by Israeli guards isn’t mere­ly pos­si­ble, it’s almost cer­tain, as in any prison sys­tem any­where in the world. And con­di­tions were espe­cial­ly prob­lem­at­ic in recent years. Octo­ber 7 and the ensu­ing war sent thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian detainees into the pris­ons, togeth­er with under­trained reservist guards in the ear­ly months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos glee­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ing mas­sacres that the new pris­on­ers had com­mit­ted.… And it must be said, as I’ve said before: Nei­ther Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ita­mar Ben-Gvir nor Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu seems inter­est­ed in fix­ing it. Our lead­ers do not seem to care about the sim­ple break­down of dis­ci­pline that these abus­es rep­re­sent, the kind of break­down we saw again and again with the inci­dents of loot­ing in Gaza and in the ear­ly cas­es of pris­on­er abuse that came to light.”
      • Again, a debunk­ing that con­tests details but con­cedes the basic point.
    • “Every­thing Is Legit­i­mate To Do! Every­thing!” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…the con­text for claims of Israeli excess­es is obvi­ous: a trau­ma­tized Israeli psy­che that has rad­i­cal­ized even more dur­ing this war, in which inhi­bi­tions around hat­ing the ene­my have obvi­ous­ly loos­ened. And the man in charge of the prison sys­tem is Ita­mar Ben-Gvir — a far-right Kahanist, Jew­ish suprema­cist. He’s as close to a neo­fas­cist as you can get. His view of Arabs, let alone sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists, is, shall we say, not great. So a recent Abu Ghraib-like case in the sys­tem he pre­sides over is worth look­ing at. A pris­on­er in Sde Teiman, Israel’s tor­ture and prison camp, was hand­cuffed, blind­fold­ed, beat­en, tased, and sodom­ized with a broom han­dle, end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal with bro­ken ribs and a rup­tured bow­el. The inci­dent was even caught on video­tape, but the gris­ly details were con­cealed behind IDF shields.”
  7. The Con­gress­woman Who Wants to Shoot Sea Lions (Will Rahn, The Free Press): “…By the 1950s, there were only about 10,000 sea lions left. And so, in the 1970s, they imple­ment­ed some­thing called the Marine Mam­mal Pro­tec­tion Act (MMPA). And the great news was that they recov­ered, going up to about 300,000 of them. In fact, they are now inva­sive in the Colum­bia Riv­er trib­u­taries, where they were nev­er his­tor­i­cal­ly dom­i­nant. The prob­lem is that they are now real­ly evis­cer­at­ing native vul­ner­a­ble and endan­gered salmon and steel­head pop­u­la­tions. So we basi­cal­ly have an inva­sive species con­sum­ing an endan­gered species.… I think we clear­ly need to amend the MMPA to allow for more trib­al con­trol, and allow them or their designees to engage in lethal removal of sea lions in the Colum­bia Riv­er and its trib­u­taries.”
    • 100% rec­om­mend this inter­view. A fas­ci­nat­ing read.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 520: the honesty tax and other counterproductive things

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. 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 Hon­esty Tax (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We set high — stu­pid­ly, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive­ly high — stan­dards and then min­i­mal­ly enforce them because full enforce­ment would be a dis­as­ter. So, almost every­one just lies. Then, the peo­ple you pun­ish are the peo­ple who are unwill­ing to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are ‘nor­mal’ and what kinds are seri­ous­ly out of bounds. Those less like­ly to know these infor­mal rules are not a ran­dom­ly select­ed group of peo­ple — the more con­nec­tions you have in D.C., the more you know what ‘not to men­tion.’ But lying is bad! Select­ing for liars is bad! This may end up look­ing sort of sim­i­lar to the result you’d get if you just had a rea­son­able pol­i­cy in the first place, but it’s actu­al­ly a lot worse — you screened out every­one who wasn’t will­ing to be dis­hon­est.”
  2. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mind­ful Of Him? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): bril­liant and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Dwarkesh Patel hosts a pod­cast with God debat­ing Iblis over whether humans are tru­ly intel­li­gent and whether bio­log­i­cal intel­li­gence is even pos­si­ble. Don’t assume it is Chris­t­ian based on the title — it is def­i­nite­ly not.
  3. What Hap­pens If No One Reads (Spencer Kla­van, The Free Press): “If Chat­G­PT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it? …I asked Grok about The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov and it told me, ‘We’re all a mess of con­tra­dic­tions.’ And so we are. Why didn’t Dos­toyevsky just say that?”
  4. The Mil­lion­aire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Para­medic (Christo­pher Maag, New York Times): “Jonathan Kleis­ner didn’t know what he want­ed to be when he grew up, except a suc­cess. After attend­ing Ford­ham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, drop­ping out a semes­ter before grad­u­a­tion to take a job at a small trad­ing firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the reces­sion was over and the mood on the street was buoy­ant.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. If for no oth­er rea­son, read to see the sto­ry of 985 pound guy. Absolute­ly wild.
  5. Giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey helped less than I thought it would (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “Mul­ti­ple large, high-qual­i­ty ran­dom­ized stud­ies are find­ing that guar­an­teed income trans­fers do not appear to pro­duce sus­tained improve­ments in men­tal health, stress lev­els, phys­i­cal health, child devel­op­ment out­comes or employ­ment.”
    • Inspired by the above arti­cle but going in some dif­fer­ent direc­tions: Why I Am Not a Lib­er­al (David Brooks, New York Times): “Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an inter­net storm. You might have thought the pro­gres­sive reac­tion would have been: We need to keep giv­ing poor peo­ple mon­ey, but we also need to focus on the human and behav­ioral fac­tors that will enable them to build com­fort­able, inde­pen­dent lives. But that wasn’t the reac­tion. The pro­gres­sives I saw dou­bled down on the the­sis: Poor peo­ple just need mon­ey.”
  6. Sick Peo­ple Are Sick (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “It will nev­er stop amaz­ing and depress­ing me, real­ly, when the pub­lic reacts with shock when peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness behave like peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness… In our elite culture’s eager­ness to des­tig­ma­tize, we’ve made men­tal ill­ness unse­ri­ous. We’ve reduced it to Tik­Tok dances and ther­a­peu­tic hash­tags. ‘It’s OK to not be OK,’ says the cheer­ful let­ter­ing, but there’s always the implied caveat: it’s OK so long as ‘not being OK’ looks like cry­ing in an endear­ing way, jour­nal­ing, eat­ing ice cream straight from the car­ton, and then bounc­ing back with resilience. The real tex­ture of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness — the para­noia, the rages, the break­downs, the cata­to­nia — doesn’t fit into that frame­work, so when it arrives peo­ple don’t know how to metab­o­lize it.”
    • This is com­mon at Stan­ford. Peo­ple love the rhetoric of sup­port­ing peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness up until it’s actu­al­ly hard and dis­tress­ing.
  7. Your Rivals Aren’t Respon­si­ble for Mass Shoot­ings (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…while the ten­den­cy to extreme and apoc­a­lyp­tic rhetoric is a con­sis­tent fea­ture of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics (even a demo­c­ra­t­ic birthright), most of the killers shoot­ing up schools and church­es or tar­get­ing politi­cians for assas­si­na­tions are not real­ly par­tic­i­pants in this polar­iza­tion. They aren’t tak­ing wok­e­ness or pop­ulism too lit­er­al­ly or too far; they’re fol­low­ing oth­er direc­tives and act­ing on oth­er pur­pos­es entire­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Tay­lor Swift Engage­ment Over­turned As Ref­er­ee Deter­mines Travis Kel­ce’s Knee Did­n’t Touch The Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bing (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Ven­mo (Texts from Super­heroes)
  • Wave­func­tion Col­lapse (xkcd)
  • How Ani­me Took Over Amer­i­ca (Joshua Hunt, New York Times): “A recent sur­vey of over 4,000 Amer­i­can adults showed that 42 per­cent of all Gen Z respon­dents watched ani­me every week, far high­er than the 25 per­cent of Gen Z respon­dents who fol­lowed the N.F.L.” — a visu­al­ly stun­ning arti­cle
  • Do Not Dis­turb (Pearls Before Swine)
  • The top col­lege cam­pus­es to find celebri­ties — and their kids (Christo­pher Cameron, New York Post): “Con­grat­u­la­tions, the high school class of 2025 (rah-rah-rah!) is ready to matric­u­late! Your fresh­ly sprout­ed schol­ar spent the last four years grow­ing their GPA, acing their APs and crush­ing their SATs in prepa­ra­tion for brain-bend­ing cur­ricu­lum. But are they ready for the most advan­ta­geous aspect of life at a top col­lege: social­iz­ing with star­dom?  It’s Math­e­mat­ics 101. Half of Hol­ly­wood canoodling x 20 years = a crop of celebri­ty scions who are now rul­ing the cam­pus­es of New England’s old­est insti­tu­tions, as well as the increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive so-called ‘new Ivies’ (schools like Notre Dame, New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, Emory, Rice, Van­der­bilt, North­west­ern and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty).”

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 482

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. Why Chris­tians Oppose Euthana­sia (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Unlike many top­ics in the­ol­o­gy and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambigu­ous. There were no ear­ly church coun­cils to debate the tak­ing of inno­cent life. It didn’t take cen­turies of con­flict to adju­di­cate. On the con­trary, Chris­tians were known from the start for their adamant rejec­tion of pagan dis­re­spect for those unwant­ed by their fam­i­lies or deemed social­ly useless—the unborn and new­born, dis­abled and elder­ly.”
  2. When Was Jesus Born? Ital­ian Researcher Puts Christ’s Birth in Decem­ber, 1 BC (Edward Pentin, Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter): “[Herod was alive when Jesus was born, and we know Herod died after a lunar eclipse.] Ulti­mate­ly, based on the most accu­rate analy­sis pos­si­ble today of the vis­i­bil­i­ty to the naked eye of the lunar eclipses, the search for one of it real­ly vis­i­ble in Judea 2,000 years ago, placed in rela­tion to oth­er chrono­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal ele­ments deduced from the writ­ings of Jose­phus Flav­ius and Roman his­to­ry, leads to a sin­gle pos­si­ble solu­tion — name­ly, a dat­ing of the death of Herod the Great occur­ring in AD 2–3, com­pat­i­ble with the con­ven­tion­al begin­ning of the Chris­t­ian era — i.e., the Nativ­i­ty occurred at the end of the year 1 BC.”
  3. Sci­ence and Reli­gious Dog­ma­tism (Matías Cabel­lo, SSRN): “But why were non­be­liev­ers and oth­er free­thinkers par­tic­u­lar­ly cre­ative? Not because of lack of mys­ti­cism. Deists, with their mys­ti­cal belief in some sort of deity, have been as pro­duc­tive in sci­ence as out­right athe­ists (if not more). One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for their joint abnor­mal­ly high pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is that free­think­ing and athe­ism opened up a whole path of ideas dis­con­nect­ed from the pre­vail­ing thought sys­tem.… By the same token, how­ev­er, it fol­lows that, in a world over­whelm­ing­ly pop­u­lat­ed by athe­ists, the most inge­nious ideas should instead come from the few reli­gious­ly mind­ed (as long as their the­ol­o­gy offers a suf­fi­cient­ly stim­u­lat­ing thought sys­tem to dis­cov­er the secrets of nature). A result con­sis­tent with this inter­pre­ta­tion is the decline of the athe­ism coef­fi­cient among 20th-cen­tu­ry born sci­en­tists of table 1. By then, athe­ism had gone from being a dan­ger­ous and uncon­ven­tion­al world­view to become wide­spread among the sci­en­tif­ic elite.”
    • An inter­est­ing paper. I don’t buy all its con­clu­sions, but I enjoyed read­ing it. The excerpt is from at the end and is an impor­tant point: non­con­for­mi­ty brings some ben­e­fits, but non­con­for­mi­ty changes over time. It looks like heresy when ortho­doxy reigns, but non­con­for­mi­ty often looks like ortho­doxy when heresy has dom­i­nance. And we live in an era of heresy. As Tyler Cowen often com­ments: the impor­tant thinkers of the future will be reli­gious.
    • The author is, fun­ni­ly enough, an econ­o­mist teach­ing at a uni­ver­si­ty named after Mar­tin Luther.
  4. Two arti­cles mak­ing sim­i­lar points: our cur­rent aver­sion to invol­un­tary com­mit­ment is cru­el to some peo­ple who would great­ly ben­e­fit from the help that their men­tal ill­ness caus­es them to resist.
    • Jor­dan Neely Need­ed to Be Insti­tu­tion­al­ized (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “One through-line in the sto­ry is the immense amount of gov­ern­ment resources that were thrown at try­ing to keep Neely out of trou­ble. Through police, courts, jails, home­less out­reach, and treat­ment facil­i­ties, New York’s tax­pay­ers spent lav­ish­ly on an effort to keep Neely alive, in men­tal health care, and not pos­ing a dan­ger to the pub­lic or him­self. But it didn’t work because he was insane and he was not forced to accept the care he need­ed — except dur­ing a stint he spent in jail on Rik­ers Island, when he was suc­cess­ful­ly med­icat­ed.… it would behoove pro­gres­sives with pat takes about how what Neely real­ly need­ed was hous­ing and care to know that he was offered these things over and over again by an extreme­ly well-fund­ed social ser­vices appa­ra­tus. If you want­ed him to have hous­ing and care, you need­ed to be pre­pared to force them upon him; and if you weren’t, then you don’t have a solu­tion to the prob­lems of peo­ple like him.”
    • The Tragedy of Jor­dan Neely and Daniel Pen­ny (Bren­dan Ruber­ry, Per­sua­sion): “[End­ing invol­un­tary com­mit­ment had a per­verse effect, because] as it hap­pens, many patients are, in fact, unwill­ing to sub­mit to treat­ment, because noth­ing does more to harm one’s pow­ers of self-aware­ness, and one’s abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize the neces­si­ty of often lengthy pro­to­cols, than debil­i­tat­ing men­tal ill­ness.”
  5. Make Vil­lains Wicked Again (Ger­mán Sauce­do, First Things): “The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, bal­lads, myths, and leg­ends offer both a vision of what is to be avoid­ed at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the ‘sym­pa­thet­ic vil­lain’ genre is a symp­tom of a soci­ety that dis­agrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trau­ma, psy­chopa­thy, or pathol­o­gy. But to iden­ti­fy and avoid evil, we must first learn to rec­og­nize the good. The insis­tence on sub­vert­ing vil­lains is a sign we have lost con­fi­dence in our belief that we can know what hero­ism looks like, a hero­ism that dis­plays the good that would oppose their unright­eous­ness.”
  6. Insur­ance com­pa­nies aren’t the main vil­lain of the U.S. health sys­tem (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “It’s not hard to under­stand why peo­ple hate health insur­ers. When you inter­act with the U.S. health care sys­tem, the providers — the hos­pi­tal staff, the doc­tor, the nurs­es, the tech­ni­cians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for mon­ey dur­ing your doc­tor vis­it is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usu­al­ly not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you lat­er. So for the most part, your inter­ac­tion with the providers is just you walk­ing up and ask­ing to be tak­en care of, and them tak­ing care of you. Your inter­ac­tion with the health insur­er, on the oth­er hand, feels like a strug­gle against an ene­my who wants to destroy you.”
  7. ‘Huge set­back’: SF’s mas­sive psy­che­del­ic church is leav­ing the city (Lester Black, SF Gate): “Hodges found­ed his church in 2019 around the belief that cannabis, mag­ic mush­rooms and oth­er psy­che­del­ic sub­stances are reli­gious sacra­ments that give humans spir­i­tu­al insights. Any adult can join by sign­ing up and pay­ing a $5 mem­ber­ship fee, which gives them access to pur­chase a wide range of psy­che­del­ic prod­ucts. Last year, the church expand­ed from its orig­i­nal loca­tion in Oak­land to a vacant build­ing on Howard Street in San Fran­cis­co. The church now counts over 115,000 mem­bers.”
    • Please note that the author is the “Cannabis edi­tor” at SF Gate. Some­times San Fran­cis­co becomes a par­o­dy of itself.

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 479

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 the Ivy League Broke Amer­i­ca (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents who got into high­er-rank­ing col­leges, which demand high sec­ondary-school GPAs, are not sub­stan­tial­ly more effec­tive after they grad­u­ate. In one study of 28,000 young stu­dents, those attend­ing high­er-rank­ing uni­ver­si­ties did only slight­ly bet­ter on con­sult­ing projects than those attend­ing low­er-ranked uni­ver­si­ties. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale stu­dent would have been only about 1.9 per­cent more pro­fi­cient than a stu­dent from Cleve­land State when mea­sured by the qual­i­ty of their work. The Yale stu­dent would also have been more like­ly to be a jerk: The researchers found that stu­dents from high­er-rank­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, while nom­i­nal­ly more effec­tive than oth­er stu­dents, were more like­ly to pay ‘insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friend­ly,’ ‘more prone to con­flict,’ and ‘less like­ly to iden­ti­fy with their team.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snob­by about going to Stan­ford seems as ridicu­lous as being snob­by about your great-grandmother’s mem­ber­ship in the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, this would trans­form not just col­lege admis­sions but Amer­i­can child­hood.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The costs of explic­it­ly tying the aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise to par­ti­san pol­i­tics in a democ­ra­cy were emi­nent­ly fore­see­able and are now com­ing into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, stu­dents are giv­en the faculty’s high-class polit­i­cal opin­ions as a form of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal. Thus the pub­lic per­ceives these opin­ions — on defund­ing the police, or view­ing bio­log­i­cal sex as a social con­struc­tion, or Israel as absolute evil — as mark­ers in a sta­tus game. Far from advanc­ing their opin­ions, pro­fes­sors in fact func­tion to inval­i­date these views for the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans who nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend elite insti­tu­tions but who are con­stant­ly stig­ma­tized for their low-class opin­ions by the lucky grad­u­ates. Far from rep­re­sent­ing a pow­er­ful avant-garde lead­ing the way to polit­i­cal change, the politi­cized class of pro­fes­sors is a seri­ous polit­i­cal lia­bil­i­ty to any par­ty that it sup­ports.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Case West­ern. He throws a lot of strong punch­es.
  2. Jor­dan Peter­son Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “the pow­er of Peterson’s style is his mar­riage of exis­ten­tial urgency with hermeneu­ti­cal cre­ativ­i­ty. He expects the Word to show him won­ders. He wres­tles with the text—a mys­tery and a stranger—until he secures a bless­ing from it. He takes for grant­ed that its depths are bot­tom­less. Do pas­tors mod­el this pos­ture in the pul­pit? Do teach­ers in the class­room? Do schol­ars on the page?Christian read­ers should learn from Peterson’s bold­ness, his dis­po­si­tion of awe and docil­i­ty before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spir­it as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see won­der­ful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a col­league. This is one of the best Chris­t­ian engage­ments with Jor­dan Peter­son I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiv­en Peter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The hold­ers of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal have not sim­ply sub­sti­tut­ed Chris­t­ian val­ues with an alter­na­tive set but pro­mote the very loss of order itself. The only val­ues are no val­ues. That is, our cul­ture pro­motes lib­er­tin­ism, every­one doing what is right in their own eyes. Soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, Hunter calls this the process of dis­so­lu­tion: ‘By dis­so­lu­tion, I refer to the decon­struc­tion of the most basic assump­tions about real­i­ty.’ Our cul­ture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is pro­mot­ed is turn­ing inside our­selves and deter­min­ing our own val­ues. This process results in the frac­tur­ing of soci­ety along­side tribes/enclaves of peo­ple with sim­i­lar val­ues.”
    • This is a review of Aaron Ren­n’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improv­ing them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Our men­tal health cri­sis is usu­al­ly cast as either a fail­ure of ther­a­peu­tic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trau­ma well enough yet—or else an unavoid­able con­se­quence of cli­mate anx­i­ety, polar­iza­tion, or bad media. But [per­haps the cri­sis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of liv­ing your life as a kind of con­stant retreat into both the safe­ty and the chaos of your own imag­i­na­tion, and near­ly every­thing about how we learn, com­mu­ni­cate, and work as mod­ern peo­ple helps us con­di­tion for this. We are taught ear­ly and often to direct our gaze inward.”
    • Sev­er­al sub­stan­tive insights in this arti­cle.
  5. Why the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety Has Been a Great Suc­cess (Ed Whe­lan, Sub­stack): “The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s suc­cess has led many on the Left—and, more recent­ly, some envi­ous folks on the Right—to revile and demo­nize it. But its crit­ics rou­tine­ly dis­play that they do not under­stand how it oper­ates and how it has suc­ceed­ed.… It does not sub­mit ami­cus briefs. It does not under­take to enlist the pub­lic in polit­i­cal under­tak­ings. And it has nev­er done any of these things. And there­in lies one of the great keys to its suc­cess.”
  6. AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry is indis­tin­guish­able from human-writ­ten poet­ry and is rat­ed more favor­ably (Bri­an Porter & Edouard Mach­ery, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports [Nature]): “We col­lect­ed 5 poems each from 10 well-known Eng­lish-lan­guage poets, span­ning much of the his­to­ry of Eng­lish poet­ry: Geof­frey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shake­speare (1564–1616), Samuel But­ler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whit­man (1819–1892), Emi­ly Dick­in­son (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Gins­berg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using Chat­G­PT 3.5, we gen­er­at­ed 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ par­a­digm: we used the first 5 poems gen­er­at­ed, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or pro­vide any feed­back or instruc­tions to the mod­el beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first exper­i­ment, 1,634 par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and pre­sent­ed with 10 poems in ran­dom order: 5 poems writ­ten by that poet, and 5 gen­er­at­ed by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, par­tic­i­pants were asked whether they thought the poem was gen­er­at­ed by AI or writ­ten by a human poet.… Con­trary to what ear­li­er stud­ies report­ed, peo­ple now appear unable to reli­ably dis­tin­guish human-out-of-the-loop AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry from human-authored poet­ry writ­ten by well-known poets.… Fur­ther­more, peo­ple pre­fer AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry to human-authored poet­ry, con­sis­tent­ly rat­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed poems more high­ly than the poems of well-known poets across a vari­ety of qual­i­ta­tive fac­tors.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh.
  7. Why Pro­gres­sives Should Ques­tion Their Favorite Sci­en­tif­ic Find­ings (Paul Bloom, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “You may have heard of the study pub­lished in 2020 con­clud­ing that Black new­borns have high­er sur­vival rates when Black doc­tors attend to them. It got a huge amount of cov­er­age in the pop­u­lar press. It was even cit­ed by Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son in her dis­sent last year on the court’s rul­ing against racial pref­er­ences in col­lege admis­sions. The research, Jack­son claimed, shows the ben­e­fits of diver­si­ty. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same jour­nal just pub­lished a re-analy­sis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is sub­stan­tial­ly weak­ened, and often becomes sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignif­i­cant,’ once you take into account that Black doc­tors are less like­ly to see the high­er-risk pop­u­la­tion of new­borns with low birth weight. I wasn’t sur­prised when I saw the re-analy­sis because I didn’t believe the orig­i­nal find­ing.… It’s like what some­one once said about Gin­ger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Gin­ger Rogers is doing them back­ward and in high heels. A pub­lished find­ing that clash­es with the polit­i­cal prej­u­dices of review­ers and edi­tors is a Gin­ger Rogers find­ing. It had to be twice as good.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor (emer­i­tus at Yale, cur­rent­ly at U Toron­to).

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 473



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

This is vol­ume 473, the largest known num­ber whose square (223729) uses dif­fer­ent dig­its than when it is raised to the 4th pow­er (50054665441).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Evan­ge­lis­tic Shift (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “So what accounts for this shift and how should Chris­tians respond? The answer to the first ques­tion might be sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple: The shift dates back to the grow­ing aware­ness, accep­tance, and pro­mo­tion of trans­gen­der sex­u­al iden­ti­ties in main­stream Amer­i­can cul­ture. This shift, dat­ing to the mid 2010s and prob­a­bly peak­ing in the ear­ly 2020s, did two things that fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the evan­ge­lis­tic land­scape for Chris­tians in Amer­i­ca.”
  2. Will­ful igno­rance of the male sui­cide cri­sis (Richard V. Reeves, Sub­stack): “It’s essen­tial­ly impos­si­ble to come away from this [New York­er] essay with­out a strong sense that the teen sui­cide cri­sis is, in fact, a teen girl sui­cide cri­sis. That is absolute­ly false. In fact, for every five teenagers dying from sui­cide, four are like­ly to be boys.”
  3. Is Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Real­ly Protes­tant? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “Every time I read a book that describes the reli­gious his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca that talks about the nature of Protes­tantism in the coun­try, it strikes me that the Protes­tantism of the Amer­i­can past is alien to today’s evan­gel­i­cal­ism. They are dif­fer­ent enough to raise the ques­tion as to whether or not Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism is actu­al­ly Protes­tant in impor­tant ways.… All is not well for Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but giv­en the man­i­fest and wide­ly pub­li­cized prob­lems with­in evan­gel­i­cal­ism, I would sub­mit that at least as much time should go into intro­spec­tion and inter­nal reform.”
  4. Yes, Third-Trimester Abor­tions Are Hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca (Emma Camp, The Atlantic): “…Col­orado, which is home to clin­ics that per­form third-trimester abor­tions, record­ed 137 third-trimester abor­tions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight oth­er states, plus Wash­ing­ton, D.C., have no restric­tions on third-trimester abor­tions. Just a few min­utes from my office build­ing in D.C., a clin­ic offers abor­tions up to near­ly 32 weeks. In near­by Bethes­da, Mary­land, a clin­ic per­forms abor­tions up to 35 weeks’ ges­ta­tion.… Amer­i­cans are broad­ly uncom­fort­able with third-trimester abor­tions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Amer­i­cans believe abor­tion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 per­cent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Asso­ci­at­ed Press poll found that just 8 per­cent of respon­dents believe that third-trimester abor­tions should be legal in all cas­es.”
  5. A Defense of Lega­cy Admis­sions, the Sur­pris­ing Engine of Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ted­dy Ganea, Stan­ford Review): “The pur­pose of col­lege admis­sions isn’t to cre­ate a new elite from scratch. It’s to meld mer­i­to­ri­ous non-elites with the exist­ing elite, to incor­po­rate fresh tal­ent and ideas into the high­est ech­e­lons of pow­er. It should be a win-win-win: estab­lished elites ben­e­fit from new mer­it, new mer­it ben­e­fits from elite con­nec­tions and resources, and soci­ety ben­e­fits from a more mer­i­to­crat­ic elite. Lega­cy admis­sions is a pre­req­ui­site for this mis­sion state­ment, because you can’t meld togeth­er two groups if one of them is miss­ing.… Crit­ics of lega­cy admis­sions ignore the key real­i­ty of human his­to­ry: that the exist­ing elite is almost always deeply entrenched, and break­ing into it requires more than just indi­vid­ual tal­ent — it requires access. And this is where lega­cy admis­sions play their most cru­cial role: by enabling mer­i­to­ri­ous non-elites to mix with the exist­ing elite, they open up the real oppor­tu­ni­ty for upward mobil­i­ty.”
    • Well-argued and provoca­tive. My favorite kind of arti­cle!
  6. 55/45 is a real­ly close race (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “I’ve nev­er seen an elec­tion in which the fore­cast spent more time in the vicin­i­ty of 50/50, and I prob­a­bly nev­er will… on aver­age, since our fore­cast relaunch on July 30, Har­ris has won 49.4 per­cent of sim­u­la­tions, and Trump has won 50.2 per­cent. (These don’t quite add up to 100 because of the slim pos­si­bil­i­ty of a 269–269 Elec­toral Col­lege tie.) Peo­ple under­stand intu­itive­ly that a 50/50 or 49/51 fore­cast is a toss-up. If the fore­cast is 55/45 in some direc­tion instead, how­ev­er, con­fu­sion can abound — even though this isn’t any dif­fer­ent from 50/50 for most prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es. Some of the prob­lem is that peo­ple can con­fuse this fore­cast for a pre­dic­tion of vote share: if Har­ris were to win 55 per­cent of the vote and Trump 45 per­cent, that would be the biggest land­slide in an Amer­i­can elec­tion since Ronald Rea­gan in 1984. But that’s not what this fore­cast is say­ing. Rather, it’s that Har­ris will win the Elec­toral Col­lege about 11 times out of 20 and Trump will win it 9 times out of 20: still basi­cal­ly a toss-up, just with the coin weight­ed ever so slight­ly in Harris’s favor.”
  7. Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depend­ed on It (Chris Stire­walt, The Dis­patch): “Politi­cians and media hype mer­chants tell us every cycle that this is the most impor­tant elec­tion in his­to­ry, but the truth is that in a nation with sta­ble sys­tem of elec­tions held in a free, fair man­ner and abun­dant con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions for polit­i­cal minori­ties, the knowl­edge that no elec­tion is the final word helps us to live in rel­a­tive har­mo­ny.… It’s not the end of any­thing if the par­ty oppo­site your own wins an elec­tion, just the con­tin­u­a­tion of a 235-year long argu­ment that, Lord will­ing, will go on for anoth­er 235.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Doc­tor admits wear­ing dis­guise to poi­son mom’s part­ner with fake covid shot (Leo Sands, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A British doc­tor has been found guilty of attempt­ing to kill his mother’s long­time part­ner by dis­guis­ing him­self as a nurse and inject­ing his elder­ly vic­tim with a flesh-eat­ing tox­ic sub­stance while pre­tend­ing to admin­is­ter a rou­tine coro­n­avirus vac­ci­na­tion.”
    • I do not mean to sug­gest that attempt­ed mur­der is less seri­ous than the sorts of things includ­ed above — but I do mean to sug­gest this is a sto­ry you will read because it is wild more than because it has any­thing to do with your life.
  • The ‘Goth’ Vol­ley­ball Play­er Was Actu­al­ly Ton­ing Things Down (Cal­lie Holter­mann, New York Times): “I was in a film study meet­ing with my whole team, and I was telling one of my team­mates that I was so con­fused why my Insta­gram was blow­ing up. And Alli­son [Voigt, her team’s head coach] turned to me and showed me Twit­ter, and was like, ‘You’re going viral. You have two mil­lion views right now.’ I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do or what was going to hap­pen from this.”

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 466



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

This is vol­ume 466, which is 1234 in base 7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Fol­low­ing Jesus in the Desert of Men­tal Ill­ness (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Bryant writes that a break­through for him came when he real­ized that Christ had not com­mit­ted him­self to Bryant’s plans, but to Bryant him­self. Once the life that Bryant had planned for him­self dis­in­te­grat­ed, he was left with deeply painful ques­tions about whether Jesus had stopped lov­ing him. But even­tu­al­ly he real­ized that Christ want­ed some­thing more for Bryant than his own (good) desires. He want­ed Christ for him. He want­ed depen­dence on the cross.”
  2. Dan­ger, AI Sci­en­tist, Dan­ger (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “[Did you hear about] the auto­mat­ed AI Sci­en­tist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restric­tions and launch new instances of itself while down­load­ing bizarre Python libraries? Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that lit­er­al­ly means ‘dan­ger’, baby. ”
  3. Elec­tion-relat­ed stuff:
    • Vot­ing Isn’t A Win­dow Into the Soul (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The idea that vot­ing is a win­dow into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a the­o­log­i­cal heresy and a fail­ure of empa­thet­ic imag­i­na­tion. It assumes that the per­son who vot­ed wrong—or right—sees the world the same way you do and that they invest the same moral, philo­soph­i­cal, and polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance in their vote that you do in yours.”
    • Nate Sil­ver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mis­takes of the ‘Indi­go Blob’ (Ezra Klein inter­view­ing Nate Sil­ver, New York Times): “What you seem to be doing in the book is mak­ing an inter­est­ing cut in soci­ety between peo­ple with dif­fer­ent forms of risk tol­er­ance and think­ing about risk. And you wrote some­thing that caught my eye: ‘Covid made those risk pref­er­ences pub­lic, worn on our prover­bial sleeves and our lit­er­al faces.’ And you go on to say, ‘Peo­ple are becom­ing more bifur­cat­ed in their risk tol­er­ance and that this affects every­thing from who we hang out with to how we vote.’ ”
      • An inter­est­ing (and kin­da long) inter­view.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty and pol­i­tics inter­sect­ing in var­i­ous ways:
    • Trump has put social con­ser­v­a­tives in a dilem­ma (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “…I will set out the rel­e­vant moral prin­ci­ples for decid­ing how to vote when faced with a choice between can­di­dates whose posi­tions on mat­ters relat­ed to abor­tion, mar­riage, and the like are grave­ly immoral. Final­ly, I will dis­cuss how these prin­ci­ples apply to the present case.”
      • Fes­er is my favorite liv­ing philoso­pher. Writ­ten from a Catholic per­spec­tive but addressed to a broad­er audi­ence.
    • A pas­tor said his pro-Trump prophe­cies came from God. His broth­er called him a fake. (Danielle Paque­tte, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On the morn­ing he could no longer stand it, the preach­er was sip­ping cof­fee at his kitchen table. The house was qui­et. The boys weren’t up yet. Josi­ah John­son want­ed to savor the peace, but his atten­tion drift­ed to his younger broth­er, the one he had decid­ed was a false prophet. How many souls, he won­dered, was that Chris­t­ian influ­encer manip­u­lat­ing on social media right now? Hun­dreds of thou­sands fol­lowed Jere­mi­ah, who’d helped pop­u­lar­ize the far-right belief that God hand­picked Don­ald Trump to lead the Unit­ed States.”
      • Long, inter­est­ing, sad.
    • My Old Church’s Fun­da­men­tal­ist Wing Can­celed Me (David French and Vishakha Darb­ha, New York Times): “What you’re see­ing through­out Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty now is the fun­da­men­tal­ist wing is real­ly exert­ing itself. And so what that means is when you encounter some­body who’s a fun­da­men­tal­ist and you say, ‘I’m not vot­ing for Trump,’ they often don’t look at that as a debat­able point for which Chris­tians in good will can dis­agree. They will look at this and say, ‘It is the nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of apply­ing Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples that you will sup­port Don­ald Trump.’… What that does is it rais­es the stakes to this eter­nal lev­el. And what ends up hap­pen­ing is they just sweep aside all of these scrip­tures about lov­ing your ene­mies, being kind to those, bless­ing those who per­se­cute you. All of that is just swept aside in favor of the burn­ing cer­tain­ty and feroc­i­ty of the cul­ture war.”
    • The All-Male Chris­t­ian Group Seek­ing a Res­ur­rec­tion in the Trump Era (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians have been a reli­able Repub­li­can vot­ing bloc since the 1980s, but they have his­tor­i­cal­ly been averse to hear­ing overt­ly par­ti­san mes­sages in spir­i­tu­al set­tings. That has been shift­ing in recent years, as some high-pro­file con­ser­v­a­tives, like Mr. Kirk and oth­ers at the con­fer­ence, have char­ac­ter­ized polit­i­cal engage­ment as a pas­toral oblig­a­tion. Some pas­tors who have leaned into preach­ing on top­ics like abor­tion and gen­der issues have seen their church­es boom in a time of broad declines in atten­dance.”
      • Pret­ty good arti­cle, although I take strong issue with the last sen­tence. Abor­tion and gen­der issues aren’t polit­i­cal sim­ply because there is a par­ti­san divide on them. Chris­tians have been talk­ing about human nature and sex­u­al ethics since before Amer­i­ca was a nation and should the Lord tar­ry we will con­tin­ue after Amer­i­ca is a dis­tant mem­o­ry.
  5. They All Got Mys­te­ri­ous Brain Dis­eases. They’re Fight­ing to Learn Why (Greg Don­ahue, New York Times)“In the con­text of a clus­ter of atyp­i­cal cas­es that had stumped some of the most expe­ri­enced sci­en­tists in Cana­da, Mar­rero believed that Jansen had not only over­stepped his bounds but had failed to address the situation’s most crit­i­cal ques­tions: ‘Why so many young? Why so many in one area? Why so many in one fam­i­ly?’ Many of Marrero’s col­leagues in the work­ing group agreed. In a leaked email from last year, one of them referred to Jansen’s find­ings as a ‘loop­hole’ through which the politi­cians have eager­ly leaped to con­clude noth­ing coher­ent is going on.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Have Nation­al Abor­tion Num­bers Increased Since the Dobbs Deci­sion? (John McCor­ma­ck, The Dis­patch): “At first glance, head­lines gen­er­at­ed by that report might lead the casu­al read­er to assume anti-abor­tion laws haven’t done any­thing to achieve their intend­ed pur­pose of sav­ing lives. But even if the new report is accu­rate (more on that below), oth­er stud­ies show that there are like­ly tens of thou­sands of infants and tod­dlers alive today because of laws allowed by the Dobbs deci­sion.”
  7. Reser­voir of liq­uid water found deep in Mar­t­ian rocks (Vic­to­ria Gill, BBC): “The Insight probe was only able to record direct­ly from the crust beneath its feet, but the researchers expect that there will be sim­i­lar reser­voirs across the plan­et. If that is the case, they esti­mate that there is enough liq­uid water on Mars to form a lay­er across the sur­face that would be more than half a mile deep. How­ev­er, they point out, the loca­tion of this Mar­t­ian ground­wa­ter is not good news for bil­lion­aires with Mars coloni­sa­tion plans who might want to tap into it. ‘It’s sequestered 10–20km deep in the crust,’ explained Prof Man­ga.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 458



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 452

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 436

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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