Tag: pandemic

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 334

a whole lot­ta mag­ic tricks at the end of this one

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. A Nation of Chris­tians Is Not Nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “There are influ­en­tial peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in this coun­try who’ve tak­en the posi­tion that ortho­dox expres­sions of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al moral­i­ty rep­re­sent noth­ing more than big­otry and hatred.  But as much hos­til­i­ty as I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from some sec­u­lar left­ists in response to the pub­lic expres­sion of my Chris­t­ian val­ues, noth­ing com­pares to hos­til­i­ty I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians when I root­ed my oppo­si­tion to Don­ald Trump in the same Chris­t­ian val­ues that some­times earned me scorn in the Ivy League.”
    • Con­tra French on Chris­tian­i­ty’s Decline (Ross Douthat, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to Mar­tin Luther King Jr. you see two things hap­pen­ing togeth­er: the pri­vate prac­tice of faith becomes pret­ty steadi­ly more robust, and the gov­ern­ment becomes more com­mit­ted to what most of us, reli­gious and not, now con­sid­er basic ele­ments of jus­tice and mer­cy. Over this mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional process, you could rea­son­ably say that Amer­i­ca remained man­i­fest­ly imper­fect but came clos­er, how­ev­er lurch­ing­ly, to the com­bi­na­tion of wide­spread per­son­al faith and greater polit­i­cal jus­tice that French argues char­ac­ter­izes the Chris­t­ian soci­ety. That this hap­pened, quite often, through con­flict between Protes­tants (both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, etc.) is unde­ni­able but not, it seems to me, a par­tic­u­lar­ly telling cri­tique: In a heav­i­ly Protes­tant soci­ety how else would change come?” A very impres­sive response.
    • America’s Chris­t­ian His­to­ry Is Broad­er Than Its White Protes­tant Past (David French, The Dis­patch): “Because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can progress has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action. But also because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can oppres­sion has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action as well. And a move­ment that’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and Chris­t­ian needs to remem­ber that sober­ing fact.” A sol­id sur­re­join­der, but I think I award the match point to Douthat even though I usu­al­ly agree with French more.
  2. Pan­dem­ic stuff:
    • One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I will not live in fear. And I sus­pect that this is at the heart of all of it — for com­plex soci­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, [our] elites are made up of peo­ple who suf­fer from anx­i­ety and inse­cu­ri­ty at vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates, and they go through life need­ing their own feel­ings to be val­i­dat­ed by every­one else. This is very scary for them, and if it’s not scary for some of the rest of us, they expe­ri­ence that as implied judg­ment.” This is very, very good once you get past the Syr­ia stuff up top (which is help­ful as a fram­ing device, but goes on a lit­tle too long).
    • Why UCSF COVID expert Bob Wachter will soon be ‘over’ the pan­dem­ic (Eric Ting, SF Gate): “I believe it’s like­li­est that it peaks soon and comes down in Feb­ru­ary, and we’ll find our­selves in a world where the risk to ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed indi­vid­u­als is quite low, and it gets low for a few rea­sons. For one, every­one should have some immu­ni­ty because with the unvac­ci­nat­ed, most if not all will have been infect­ed by the time this wave ends. This vari­ant of the virus, which is now dom­i­nant, is more mild on aver­age. And the risk is low­er for immuno­com­pro­mised and high-risk indi­vid­u­als because of the increas­ing avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tions that decrease the chance they’ll get super sick.” The inter­vie­wee is chair of the Depart­ment of Med­i­cine at UCSF.
    • Dear Stan­ford: don’t force boost­ers on stu­dents (Monte Fis­ch­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When Paul Offit — direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, decades-long ene­my of the anti-vax move­ment and co-inven­tor of a rotavirus vac­cine — tells his own twen­ty-some­thing son not to get boost­ed, you might start to ask some ques­tions about the wis­dom of Stanford’s lat­est man­date.” The author is a PhD can­di­date in MS&E.
  3. Is the West Becom­ing Pagan Again? (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Ms. Delsol’s inge­nious approach is to exam­ine the civ­i­liza­tion­al change under­way in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Chris­tians brought what she calls a ‘nor­ma­tive inver­sion’ to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in con­tempt and con­demned much that the Romans prized, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters relat­ed to sex and fam­i­ly. Today the Chris­t­ian over­lay on West­ern cul­tur­al life is being removed, reveal­ing a lot of pagan urges that it cov­ered up. To state Ms. Delsol’s argu­ment crude­ly, what is hap­pen­ing today is an undo­ing, but it is also a redo­ing. We are invert­ing the nor­ma­tive inver­sion. We are repa­ganiz­ing.”
  4. New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field (Rachel Crow­ell, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “A new orga­ni­za­tion called the Asso­ci­a­tion for Math­e­mat­i­cal Research (AMR) has ignit­ed fierce debates in the math research and edu­ca­tion com­mu­ni­ties since it was launched last Octo­ber.… The AMR claims to have no posi­tion on social jus­tice issues, and crit­ics see its silence on those top­ics as part of a back­lash against inclu­siv­i­ty efforts.… The con­tro­ver­sy reflects a grow­ing divi­sion between researchers who want to keep sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal pur­suits sep­a­rate from social issues that they see as irrel­e­vant to research and those who say even pure math­e­mat­ics can­not be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate­ly from the racism and sex­ism in its cul­ture.”
  5. We need to be able to talk about trans ath­letes and women’s sports (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Male puber­ty makes you taller, con­fers greater mus­cle and bone mass, larg­er heart and lung capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to your size, and more hemo­glo­bin. For cis­gen­der men, this trans­lates to rough­ly a 6 to 10 per­cent advan­tage over bio­log­i­cal women in sports such as run­ning and swim­ming, though the gap can be larg­er in oth­er domains, and in a few sports female biol­o­gy actu­al­ly con­veys some advan­tage. That 6 to 10 per­cent might sound mod­est, but at the elite lev­el, where 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent dif­fer­ences can eas­i­ly make the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, it’s over­whelm­ing. Jamaica’s Elaine Thomp­son-Her­ah, the fastest woman in the world, would lose to America’s best high school boys, and the fastest pitch ever record­ed by a woman would be unim­pres­sive for many high school base­ball teams.”
  6. The Bad Guys Are Win­ning (Anne Apple­baum, The Atlantic): “As Vladimir Putin fig­ured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnec­es­sary if you can jail, tor­ture, or pos­si­bly mur­der just a few key peo­ple. The rest will be fright­ened into stay­ing home. Even­tu­al­ly they will become apa­thet­ic, because they believe noth­ing can change.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­na.
  7. Why the Catholic Church is Los­ing Latin Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Luciana Mag­a­l­haes & Saman­tha Pear­son, The Wall Street Jour­nal): “The rise of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy in the 1960s and  ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin Amer­i­ca increas­ing­ly stressed its mis­sion as one of social jus­tice, in some cas­es draw­ing on Marx­ist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protes­tant faiths. Or, in the words of a now-leg­endary quip, var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted to Catholic and Protes­tant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opt­ed for the poor and the poor opt­ed for the Pen­te­costals.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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 333

ways in which many uni­ver­si­ties are mis­guid­ed

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 333, which makes me won­der what I’ll do when I get to vol­ume 666. Halfway to a dis­turb­ing mile­stone!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. COVID per­spec­tives, many crit­i­cal of uni­ver­si­ty poli­cies.
    • Uni­ver­si­ties’ Covid Poli­cies Defy Sci­ence and Rea­son (Mar­ty Makary, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Accord­ing to the CDC, the risk of a ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed adult end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week end­ing in Novem­ber 27. Who was that one per­son? Not a col­lege stu­dent.” The author is a sur­geon at Johns Hop­kins.
    • Uni­ver­si­ty COVID Poli­cies Are Bad for Stu­dents (Emi­ly Oster, The Atlantic): “I don’t know if uni­ver­si­ties were right to go large­ly or ful­ly remote in 2020. The world before vac­cines was a dif­fer­ent one, and the choic­es were dif­fi­cult. I am cer­tain, though, that mov­ing to remote instruc­tion is the wrong choice now.” The author is an econ­o­mist at Brown.
    • Are Prince­ton and Yale impris­on­ing their stu­dents? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I doubt these poli­cies will sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the spread of Covid. But my objec­tion is more fun­da­men­tal: They put uni­ver­si­ties in the unten­able posi­tion of both pan­ick­ing about Covid and treat­ing Covid as triv­ial. Giv­en the pur­pose of a uni­ver­si­ty as an edu­ca­tion­al leader, a uni­ver­si­ty that is hyp­o­crit­i­cal and rhetor­i­cal­ly cor­rupt is fail­ing out­right.” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty. The link is to a non-pay­walled excerpt of a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • Covid 1/6/22: The Blip (Zvi Mow­showitz, Less Wrong): “If you don’t want your stu­dents infect­ed in Jan­u­ary, you have zero options. You do have the option to ensure they are not infect­ed on cam­pus by not open­ing the cam­pus, in which case the infec­tions will not be your fault, but the infec­tions will still hap­pen.” Long and infor­ma­tive about many things.
    • There is good news (Kate­lyn Jetelina, Sub­stack): “Vac­cines are work­ing. And not just work­ing okay, they are work­ing incred­i­bly well. I know this is hard to believe when every­one around us is test­ing pos­i­tive. But vac­cines are doing their pri­ma­ry job: keep­ing peo­ple out of the hos­pi­tal.” The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas sys­tem.
    • I Saw First­hand What It Takes to Keep COVID Out of Hong Kong. It Felt Like a Dif­fer­ent Plan­et. (Car­o­line Chen, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Hong Kong’s quar­an­tine pro­ce­dures are among the strictest in the world. The city is com­mit­ted to a ‘zero-COVID’ pol­i­cy, which means it will take every pos­si­ble mea­sure to pre­vent a sin­gle case. Its poli­cies for trav­el­ers have become pro­gres­sive­ly strin­gent.”
    • The C.D.C. Is Hop­ing You’ll Fig­ure Covid Out on Your Own (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “The gov­ern­ment can help us pull out of this fog, but it should always be based on being hon­est with the pub­lic. We aren’t expect­ing offi­cials to have crys­tal balls about every­thing, but we want them to empow­er and inform us while prepar­ing for even­tu­al­i­ties — good or bad. Two years is too long to still be hop­ing for luck to get through all this.”
  2. Jesus Coor­di­na­tor (Ray­mond Partsch III, The Dai­ly Iber­ian): “For years now, the Ragin’ Cajuns have stayed the night before a home game at the Hilton Gar­den Inn across the street from Cajun Field. The hotel’s swim­ming pool has served for dozens of bap­tisms per­formed by Treuil. ‘The Hilton may have more bap­tisms than the local church­es,’ Wingert­er joked. ‘But in all seri­ous­ness, it is such an incred­i­ble thing to wit­ness. To watch them find their path and Eric help them with that is spe­cial.’ ” This was my cam­pus pas­tor. Real­ly good arti­cle about him.
  3. Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists See Prof­it in Prayer (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…while prayer, Bible read­ing, and Scrip­ture med­i­ta­tion will always be free, the smart­phone apps that help peo­ple do those things in 2022 offer the promise of great poten­tial prof­it.” I have com­plex feel­ings about this.
  4. What It Means To See Jesus (Casey Cep, The New York­er): “What Hud­son calls appear­ances are com­mu­nal visions, with more than one per­son see­ing the same image of Jesus at the same time; appari­tions are when Jesus seems to be present in the phys­i­cal world, as though any­one can see him, yet only the vision­ary actu­al­ly does so; with visions, the vision­ary alone can see Jesus, and is ful­ly aware that no one else can.“This is way more inter­est­ing than I expect­ed.
  5. Chi­na har­vests mass­es of data on West­ern tar­gets, doc­u­ments show (Cate Cadell, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The exact scope of China’s gov­ern­ment pub­lic opin­ion mon­i­tor­ing indus­try is unclear, but there have been some indi­ca­tions about its size in Chi­nese state media. In 2014, the state-backed news­pa­per Chi­na Dai­ly said more than 2 mil­lion peo­ple were work­ing as pub­lic opin­ion ana­lysts. In 2018, the People’s Dai­ly, anoth­er offi­cial organ, said the government’s online opin­ion analy­sis indus­try was worth ‘tens of bil­lions of yuan,’ equiv­a­lent to bil­lions of dol­lars, and was grow­ing at a rate of 50 per­cent a year.”
  6. Trans pris­on­ers ‘switch gen­der again’ once freed from women’s units (Mar­cel­lo Mega and John Booth­man, The Times): “The dis­clo­sure — in a study pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Crim­i­nol­o­gy — has raised fresh con­cerns about self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of gen­der pos­ing a risk to women’s safe­ty as first min­is­ter Nico­la Stur­geon pre­pares to press ahead with gen­der recog­ni­tion leg­is­la­tion this year.”
  7. Top-Down Let­down (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You know what vot­er sup­pres­sion, vot­er fraud, and les­bian vam­pires all have in com­mon? They all played the same role in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, with equal effect.” Gold­berg is a delight­ful word­smith.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not nec­es­sary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. The arti­cle is a tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

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 332

Final 2021 install­ment, includ­ing some good news about a bad dis­ease.

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. Learn­ing in dou­ble time: The effect of lec­ture video speed on imme­di­ate and delayed com­pre­hen­sion (Mur­phy et al, Applied Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­o­gy): “We pre­sent­ed par­tic­i­pants with lec­ture videos at dif­fer­ent speeds and test­ed imme­di­ate and delayed (1 week) com­pre­hen­sion. Results revealed min­i­mal costs incurred by increas­ing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but per­for­mance declined beyond 2x speed. We also com­pared learn­ing out­comes after watch­ing videos once at 1x or twice at 2x speed. There was not an advan­tage to watch­ing twice at 2x speed but if par­tic­i­pants watched the video again at 2x speed imme­di­ate­ly before the test, com­pared with watch­ing once at 1x a week before the test, com­pre­hen­sion improved. Thus, increas­ing the speed of videos (up to 2x) may be an effi­cient strat­e­gy, espe­cial­ly if stu­dents use the time saved for addi­tion­al study­ing or rewatch­ing the videos, but learn­ers should do this addi­tion­al study­ing short­ly before an exam.” The authors are researchers at UCLA.
  2. The pan­dem­ic:
    • Our play­book to fight covid-19 is out­dat­ed. Here are 10 updates for 2022. (Joseph G. Allen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Pub­lic health’s cred­i­bil­i­ty is on the line now. The pub­lic and busi­ness­es see that pub­lic health guid­ance isn’t keep­ing up with the times, and they’re right.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal health at Har­vard.
    • Pan-coro­n­avirus “super” vac­cine (Kate­lyn Jetelina, Sub­stack): “This clin­i­cal tri­al has tak­en longer than expect­ed because peo­ple can only par­tic­i­pate if they have not been pre­vi­ous­ly vac­ci­nat­ed or infect­ed with COVID. As you can imag­ine, the pool of eli­gi­ble and will­ing par­tic­i­pants is get­ting small­er and small­er.” The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Health Cen­ter.
    • Covid 12/30: Infin­i­ty War (Zvi Mow­showitz, Less Wrong): “For five weeks, we’ve seen Omi­cron dou­ble and dou­ble again. That which can’t go on for­ev­er, won’t. There aren’t many dou­blings left. This is it. The CDC’s revised guide­lines made it even more clear that we’re going to col­lec­tive­ly make the right deci­sion, let it hap­pen, and hope for the best. It’s not like we have any choice in the mat­ter.” Long and full of time­ly infor­ma­tion.
  3. The Miss­ing Data in the Infla­tion Debate (Aus­tan Gools­bee, New York Times): “…the pain of infla­tion may not be shared equal­ly.… In Novem­ber, online prices fell 0.2 per­cent as the C.P.I. rose 0.8 per­cent. In oth­er words: The more some­one shops online rather than in stores, the less infla­tion the indi­vid­ual has faced. Notably, shop­ping online is far more com­mon among high-income peo­ple. And dur­ing the pan­dem­ic the prac­tice has grown more preva­lent.” The author is an econ prof at U Chica­go.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cals a Ris­ing Force Inside Argentina’s Pris­ons (Ger­man de los San­tos & Rodri­go Abd, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Many here began ped­dling drugs as teenagers and got stuck in a spi­ral of vio­lence that led some to their graves and oth­ers to over­crowd­ed pris­ons divid­ed between two forces: drug lords and preach­ers. Over the past 20 years, Argen­tine prison author­i­ties have encour­aged, to one extent or anoth­er, the cre­ation of units effec­tive­ly run by evan­gel­i­cal inmates—sometimes grant­i­ng them a few extra spe­cial priv­i­leges, such as more time in fresh air.” An Asso­ci­at­ed Press sto­ry.
  5. The secret truth of the stu­dent debt cri­sis (Ryan Coop­er, The Week): “The truth is the ques­tion of whether stu­dent debt should be can­celed is large­ly irrel­e­vant. Most stu­dent debt will be can­celed soon­er or lat­er, because an ever-grow­ing share of bor­row­ers can­not pos­si­bly repay their loans. Ever.”
  6. Build­ing Trust Across the Polit­i­cal Divide (April Law­son, Com­ment): “The Blue-inflect­ed tra­di­tion­al empa­thy-build­ing forms of bridge-build­ing have a great deal to rec­om­mend them. But there is a flaw: the implic­it belief under­ly­ing this style of bridg­ing is that we can learn to love each oth­er by see­ing that we are all deeply the same. While true in some sens­es, this miss­es a fun­da­men­tal insight about rela­tion­ship that most of us know from expe­ri­ence: We have the capac­i­ty to build rela­tion­ship through con­flict.” Hon­est­ly describes very real dynam­ics. Almost a year old but I’m just see­ing it now.
  7. Musko­gee stu­dent hon­ored for sav­ing 2 lives (Cathy Spauld­ing, Enid News & Eagle): “Davy­on, who attends the 6th and 7th Grade Acad­e­my, used an abdom­i­nal thrust on a school mate who was chok­ing on a bot­tle cap. Lat­er that day, Davy­on res­cued a woman from a burn­ing house.”
    • First, this 6th grad­er deserves huge props. Sec­ond, the sto­ries are actu­al­ly a lit­tle com­i­cal when you read the details. So much so that “saved” might be gen­er­ous on the burn­ing house. Still, boss.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Worth watch­ing as you pre­pare to return to cam­pus. First shared in vol­ume 181.

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 331

the Christ­mas Eve edi­tion

Mer­ry Christ­mas! 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 331, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mark Lowry, Did You Know Your Mary Song Would Be Con­tro­ver­sial? (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “He added that most of the ques­tions he had did not make their way into the song—only the ones that rhymed made it.”
  2. Kid­napped Mis­sion­ar­ies Made Dar­ing Escape from Their Cap­tors, Fled for Their Lives on Foot at Night (Steve War­ren, CBN News): “ ‘After much dis­cus­sion and prayer, they became solid­ly unit­ed that God seemed to be lead­ing them [to escape]. He said they sought spe­cif­ic signs from God, and He con­firmed over and over that the tim­ing was­n’t right yet. Then, the night of Wednes­day, Decem­ber 15 arrived. When they sensed the tim­ing was right, they found a way to open the door that was closed and blocked, filed silent­ly to the path that they had cho­sen to fol­low, and quick­ly left the place that they were held despite the fact that numer­ous guards were close by,’ Showal­ter said.”
  3. COVID relat­ed news
    • Media Ignores GOOD NEWS On Pan­dem­ic (Break­ing Points, YouTube): thir­teen encour­ag­ing min­utes. The title is a lit­tle click­baity, but I guess they got­ta pay the bills.
    • The F.D.A. clears Pfizer’s Covid pills for high-risk patients 12 and old­er. (Rebec­ca Rob­bins and Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With­in a week of autho­riza­tion, Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States enough of its pills to cov­er 65,000 Amer­i­cans. At cur­rent infec­tion rates, that would be enough sup­ply for less than one day if it were giv­en to half of peo­ple in the Unit­ed States who test pos­i­tive for the virus. Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States anoth­er 200,000 treat­ment cours­es in Jan­u­ary and then anoth­er 150,000 treat­ment cours­es in Feb­ru­ary. The pace of deliv­er­ies is expect­ed to increase sharply after that.” This is tremen­dous news.
    • Pro­fes­sion­al Sports Are Learn­ing to Live With COVID. We’re Next. (Will Leitch, NY Mag): “The leagues are now admit­ting what most of us are real­iz­ing but wary of say­ing out loud: COVID is just a part of our lives now, and if we don’t learn to live with it, we’re nev­er going to be able to do any­thing.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part three (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “It’s fair to say that the ‘con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists’ have had a good pan­dem­ic.”
    • Covid Pan­ic is a Site of Inter-Elite Com­pe­ti­tion (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Rare and fatal events some­times occur; that’s life. When you can you mit­i­gate the risk. Death from a car acci­dent is far more like­ly for me than death from Covid. It’s still rare, but there’s a risk, and putting on a seat­belt is a rea­son­able mit­i­ga­tion tac­tic. Sim­ply nev­er get­ting in a car, though, would not be rea­son­able. The risk reduc­tion would not out­weigh the con­sid­er­able costs. So I don’t make that bar­gain. And thus with Covid. I’m vac­ci­nat­ed, I mask in most indoor set­tings, and if I devel­op symp­toms I’ll imme­di­ate­ly seek a test and quar­an­tine myself. Those are accept­able trade­offs, for me. As a now triple-vaxxed per­son who has had the virus pre­vi­ous­ly I am intent on liv­ing my life as nor­mal­ly as pos­si­ble, which includes not undu­ly wor­ry­ing about it or demand­ing oth­ers do so. And I would argue that expect­ing oth­er­wise from me would make you func­tion­al­ly an anti-vaxxer.”
    • Why the Supreme Court Hasn’t Ruled (For Now) on Vac­cine Man­dates (Mark Movs­esian, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “The Court has not explained its rea­sons in these cas­es. But the jus­tices’ cau­tion is not sur­pris­ing, for a few rea­sons. First, reli­gious exemp­tion claims gen­er­al­ly pose hard ques­tions, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­ble­some in this con­text. The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has inten­si­fied divi­sions about the val­ue of reli­gion and reli­gious free­dom in our coun­try, and the jus­tices might wish to avoid doing some­thing to pro­voke fur­ther con­flict. Sec­ond, the Maine and New York law­suits are cur­rent­ly at the pre­lim­i­nary injunc­tion stage, and the fac­tu­al records in the cas­es are still unclear. The Court might rea­son­ably think that it should allow the low­er courts an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er the claims fur­ther before it issues any rul­ings. Final­ly, the Court might think that state and local gov­ern­ments will them­selves see the pru­dence of offer­ing reli­gious exemp­tions, as many already have done, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties vac­cine man­dates have cre­at­ed for health­care and oth­er ser­vices.”
  4. COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about the FDA
    • The FDA Has Punt­ed Deci­sions About Luvox Pre­scrip­tion To The Deep­est Recess­es Of The Human Soul (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “As a psy­chi­a­trist, I’m not sup­posed to say flip­pant things like ‘we give SSRIs out like can­dy’. We do care­ful risk-ben­e­fit analy­sis and when appro­pri­ate we screen patients for var­i­ous risk fac­tors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Amer­i­cans, com­pared to 12% of Amer­i­cans who got can­dy last Hal­loween. So you can draw your own con­clu­sion about how severe we think the risks are.”
    • This Sci­en­tist Cre­at­ed a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pan­dem­ic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It. (Lydia DePil­lis, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Amer­i­can med­ical device reg­u­la­tors have nev­er been enthu­si­as­tic about let­ting peo­ple test them­selves. In the 1980s, the FDA banned home tests for HIV on the grounds that peo­ple who test­ed pos­i­tive might do harm to them­selves if they did not receive simul­ta­ne­ous coun­sel­ing. In the 2010s, the agency cracked down on home genet­ic test­ing kits, con­cerned that peo­ple might make rash med­ical deci­sions as a result.”
  5. Also COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about Face­book: Rapid Response: Open let­ter from The BMJ to Mark Zucker­berg (Fiona Godlee & Kam­ran Abbasi, The BMJ): “We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion provider to have been affect­ed by the incom­pe­tence of Meta’s fact check­ing regime.… Rather than invest­ing a pro­por­tion of Meta’s sub­stan­tial prof­its to help ensure the accu­ra­cy of med­ical infor­ma­tion shared through social media, you have appar­ent­ly del­e­gat­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty to peo­ple incom­pe­tent in car­ry­ing out this cru­cial task.”
  6. Why the **** Do You Trust Har­vard? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Har­vard exists to make sure our soci­ety is not equal. That is Harvard’s func­tion. You get that they just want to make it eas­i­er to turn down the poor but bril­liant chil­dren of Asian immi­grants, right? You under­stand that what Har­vard and its feck­less peers would like is to admit few­er stu­dents whose Kore­an par­ents clear $40,000 a year from their con­ve­nience stores, right? And you think, what, they’re going to be walk­ing around Brownsville, hand­ing out admis­sions let­ters to kids with holes in their pock­ets and a dream in their hearts? To the extent that any Black stu­dents are added to the mix by these poli­cies, it’s going to be the Jaden and Wil­low Smiths of the world. If you think Har­vard has any actu­al, gen­uine desire to fill its cam­pus with more poor Amer­i­can-born descen­dants of African slaves you are out of your fuck­ing mind.” Lan­guage warn­ing, in case that was not obvi­ous from the title. Also, much more cor­rect than many peo­ple would like to believe
  7. For­eign Drones Tip the Bal­ance in Ethiopia’s Civ­il War (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Mr. Singer, the drone expert, said the exper­i­men­ta­tion with drone war­fare in Ethiopia and Libya has par­al­lels with the Span­ish Civ­il War in the 1930s, when out­side pow­ers used the fight to test new mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies and to gauge inter­na­tion­al reac­tion to deter­mine what they could get away with. ‘It’s a com­bi­na­tion of war and bat­tle lab,’ he said.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 330

a sur­pris­ing con­cen­tra­tion of med­ical arti­cles this week

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 330, which is the num­ber of ways to put 11 items into groups of 4.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “What is wrong with physi­cians?” (from the com­ments) (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “There is a wild dis­con­nect between ‘being a physi­cian’ as under­stood by the pub­lic and what you actu­al­ly live.” Well worth read­ing for any­one con­sid­er­ing med school.
  2. On Cards, Cryp­to, and Christ (Pratyush Bud­di­ga, Sub­stack): “All I can remem­ber was singing a song and sud­den­ly feel­ing an inter­nal res­o­nance with­in me, a one­ness with some­thing far greater and more pow­er­ful than any­thing I had ever expe­ri­enced. It took me out of where I was in that small church in Sin­ga­pore and con­nect­ed me with the divine. The sec­ond before I didn’t believe in God. After that moment that felt like a life­time, I knew He was real.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Research: Reli­gious Amer­i­cans Less Like­ly to Divorce (Lyman Stone & Brad Wilcox, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ear­li­er mar­riage is a known risk fac­tor for divorce. Pre­mar­i­tal cohab­i­ta­tion is too. Since reli­gios­i­ty tends to moti­vate ear­li­er mar­riage but less cohab­i­ta­tion, the effects on divorce are not easy to guess. What we real­ly want to know is: Do reli­gious peo­ple get divorced less? The answer appears to be yes.”
  4. Leaked SoCal hos­pi­tal records reveal huge, auto­mat­ed markups for health­care (David Lazarus, LA Times): “[The nurse’s] screen­shots, tak­en ear­li­er this year, speak for them­selves. What they show are price hikes rang­ing from 575% to 675% being auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed by the hospital’s soft­ware. The eye-pop­ping increas­es are so rou­tine, appar­ent­ly, the soft­ware even dis­plays the for­mu­la it uses to con­vert rea­son­able med­ical costs to billed amounts that are much, much high­er.… This is sep­a­rate from any addi­tion­al charges for the doc­tor, anes­the­si­ol­o­gist, X‑rays or hos­pi­tal facil­i­ties.” Shared with me by an alum­nus.
  5. Destruc­tion is Still Mutu­al­ly Assured (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Do I think it would be good if Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine? No. Do I think that Rus­sia invad­ing Ukraine would be as bad as a nuclear war between the coun­tries with the two largest nuclear stock­piles? Also no. Not even close, actu­al­ly.”
  6. Rob Hen­der­son: How “Lux­u­ry Beliefs” Hurt the Rest of Us (Bari Weiss, pod­cast). This is a real­ly inter­est­ing inter­view.
  7. Some COVID links:
    • The Phrase “No Evi­dence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Sci­ence Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tors are using the same term — ‘no evi­dence’ — to mean: 1. This thing is super plau­si­ble, and hon­est­ly very like­ly true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure. 2. We have hard-and-fast evi­dence that this is false, stop repeat­ing this eas­i­ly debunked lie. This is utter­ly cor­ro­sive to any­body trust­ing sci­ence jour­nal­ism.”
      • I found the title con­fus­ing. What the author means is that when­ev­er you see the phrase “no evi­dence” in a head­line you should antic­i­pate an unhelp­ful arti­cle. This comes up often in COVID-relat­ed arti­cles.
    • The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wear­ing Masks in School (David Zweig, The Atlantic): “…the CDC has promised to ‘fol­low the sci­ence’ in its COVID poli­cies. Yet the cir­cum­stances around the Ari­zona study seem to show the oppo­site. Dubi­ous research has been cit­ed after the fact, with­out trans­paren­cy, in sup­port of exist­ing agency guid­ance.”
    • Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID (Matthew Walther, The Atlantic): “…out­side the world inhab­it­ed by the pro­fes­sion­al and man­age­r­i­al class­es in a hand­ful of major met­ro­pol­i­tan areas, many, if not most, Amer­i­cans are lead­ing their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.” Maybe not worth using the free pay­wall view unless you’re par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the top­ic.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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 327

Two weeks of con­tent dis­tilled into one. It’s like juice con­cen­trate!

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 327, and 327 is the largest num­ber such that it togeth­er with its dou­ble and triple con­tain every dig­it 1–9 once: 327 dou­bled is 654 and tripled it is 981. Odd but cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Teacher Who Nev­er Spoke (Mau­reeen Swinger, Plough): “The sum­mer my broth­er Duane turned twen­ty, a for­mi­da­ble young man stayed with us on a break from the Ivy League. He had nev­er, to anyone’s knowl­edge, lost an argu­ment. Sev­er­al weeks into his vis­it, my moth­er walked into the din­ing room where my broth­er and his friend were, in the­o­ry, eat­ing lunch. In real­i­ty, both men were sit­ting at the table with locked jaws. One didn’t have to say, ‘I need you to eat.’ The oth­er didn’t need to say, ‘Hell, no.’ They both knew exact­ly what was going on: the Ivy Lea­guer was los­ing an argu­ment to my broth­er, who had nev­er learned to speak.”
    • This is from a while ago (2017), but I must have missed it. Sim­ply astound­ing. I wept while read­ing it. Any­one tak­ing a class where Peter Singer’s phi­los­o­phy is high­ly regard­ed should read this ASAP.
  2. She was sold to a stranger so her fam­i­ly could eat as Afghanistan crum­bles (Anna Coren, Jessie Yeung and Abdul Basir Bina, CNN): “Mag­ul, a 10-year-old girl in neigh­bor­ing Ghor province, cries every day as she pre­pares to be sold to a 70-year-old man to set­tle her fam­i­ly’s debts. Her par­ents had bor­rowed 200,000 Afgha­nis ($2,200) from a neigh­bor in their vil­lage — but with­out a job or sav­ings, they have no way of return­ing the mon­ey.”
    • This is one of the most depress­ing things I have read in some time.
  3. What hap­pens when peo­ple in Texas can’t get abor­tions: ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds’ (Casey Parks, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I always tell peo­ple, ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds.’ ” Har­ing said. “I don’t want an ultra­sound machine. I want tons of dia­pers. Buy me $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of dia­pers because if you have a woman who comes in with four kids — yeah, look­ing at the baby, she real­izes it’s a human being. But if you tell her, ‘I’m going to give you dia­pers for all four kids,’ believe me, the dia­pers for all four kids is going to save that baby a lot quick­er than a lit­tle pen­nant on the screen.”
    • It’s rare to read a sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry about a pro-life cen­ter in a major Amer­i­can news­pa­per.
  4. Philip Yancey’s Mes­sage of Grace (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Yancey told the par­ents in the audi­ence that, bib­li­cal­ly, God grieves as much as they do; that God loves their chil­dren as much as they do; and that God is deeply pained by the state of this bro­ken world. To his sur­prise, he found his faith affirmed rather than shat­tered. He wit­nessed in per­son some­thing the the­olo­gian Miroslav Volf wrote on the day after the New­town shoot­ings: ‘Those who observe suf­fer­ing are tempt­ed to reject God; those who expe­ri­ence it often can­not give up on God, their solace and their agony.’ ”
    • This is one of the most gospel-cen­tric arti­cles I have read in a major pub­li­ca­tion in quite some time.
  5. When All The Media Nar­ra­tives Col­lapse (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major sto­ries, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Don­ald Trump accused the MSM of being ‘fake news’ the more assid­u­ous­ly they tried to prove him right.”
  6. His Rea­sons for Oppos­ing Trump Were Bib­li­cal. Now a Top Chris­t­ian Edi­tor Is Out. (Ben Smith, New York Times): “As the long­time edi­tor of World, a Chris­t­ian news orga­ni­za­tion that has a web­site, a biweek­ly mag­a­zine and a set of pod­casts, Mr. Olasky has deliv­ered a mix of hard news and watch­dog arti­cles about the evan­gel­i­cal realm under a jour­nal­is­tic phi­los­o­phy he calls ‘bib­li­cal objec­tiv­i­ty.’ It involves tak­ing strong stands where the Bible is clear, which has led World to oppose abor­tion rights and sup­port refugees, he says, and to fol­low reportable facts where the Bible doesn’t pro­vide clear guid­ance.”
  7. Some pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • The Covid pan­dem­ic is not tak­ing the very best of turns (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “While the fog of war is thick right now, the ear­ly data on Nu sug­gests that it may be a big deal. Even if it’s not, how­ev­er, it has been obvi­ous since we got the vac­cines that vac­cine escape is a con­cern. You can debate whether the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a vac­cine escap­ing vari­ant is 20% or 80%, but in any case we need effec­tive con­tin­gency plans in place. If we fail to respond effec­tive­ly to Nu, that will be a con­sid­er­ably greater insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure than any­thing that hap­pened at the out­set of the pan­dem­ic. We’ve had almost two years since the first COVID case and one year from the vac­cine approvals to pre­pare. So I ask: what is the plan for the vac­cine-escap­ing vari­ant?”
    • The Weird­ness of Gov­ern­ment Vari­a­tion in COVID-19 Respons­es (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “But imag­ine at the start of the pan­dem­ic, some­one had said to you ‘Every­one will face the exis­tence of the same dis­ease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU coun­tries or US states, peo­ple won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cov­er their faces in pub­lic. In oth­er places, gov­ern­ment will just leave peo­ple alone. Vast dif­fer­ences of this sort will exist across juris­dic­tions that are sim­i­lar on objec­tive met­rics of how bad the pan­dem­ic is at any par­tic­u­lar moment.’ I would’ve found this to be a very unlike­ly out­come! You could’ve con­vinced me EU states would do very lit­tle on COVID-19, or that they would do lock­downs every­where. I would not have believed that you could have two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries that have sim­i­lar num­bers, but one of them forces every­one to stay home, while the oth­er doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme vari­a­tion in pol­i­cy we don’t see in oth­er areas.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part one (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “Covid is a rev­e­la­tion. It has lain bare splits in the social fab­ric that were always there but could be ignored in bet­ter times. It has revealed the com­pli­ance of the lega­cy media and the pow­er of Sil­i­con Val­ley to curate and con­trol the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion. It has con­firmed the sly dis­hon­esty of polit­i­cal lead­ers, and their ulti­mate obei­sance to cor­po­rate pow­er. It has shown up ‘The Sci­ence’ for the com­pro­mised ide­ol­o­gy it is. Most of all, it has revealed the author­i­tar­i­an streak that lies beneath so many peo­ple, and which always emerges in fear­ful times.”
    • A tweet that made me laugh: “The WHO chose Omi­cron over Nu for the vari­ant of con­cern, prob­a­bly because it sounds too much like ‘new.’ But the next let­ter is not Omi­cron but Xi. Was that a lit­tle too on the nose?” (Jared Wal­czak, Twit­ter)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 326

I had to cut this down from 20 can­di­date links to 7. It was gru­el­ing. Only gold remains.

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 326, which makes me a lit­tle hap­py because last week I observed that 3 +2 = 5 and this week we can see a sim­i­lar coin­ci­dence with mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: 3 â‹… 2 = 6.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. U.S. mis­sion­ar­ies have long tried to con­vert the ‘unreached’ in the Ama­zon. Now Indige­nous groups are fight­ing back. (Ter­rence McCoy, Wash­ing­ton Post): “But the bib­li­cal com­mis­sion that fol­low­ers of Jesus ‘make dis­ci­ples of all nations’ is increas­ing­ly col­lid­ing with the laws of man in Brazil, where the right to vol­un­tary iso­la­tion is enshrined in the con­sti­tu­tion and where it’s ille­gal to con­tact iso­lat­ed Indige­nous groups with­out gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion.”
    • The details in the sto­ry show that things are more com­plex than the head­line leads you to believe. The indige­nous peo­ple are divid­ed — some want the mis­sion­ar­ies and some do not. The ones who do not are rep­re­sent­ed by a lawyer and he is the focus of this sto­ry. Sure­ly the rights of those who wish to hear new ideas should also be respect­ed? The peo­ple who applaud this devel­op­ment are almost cer­tain­ly glad that they don’t believe what their ances­tors believed, but they appar­ent­ly hope these peo­ple are not exposed to mul­ti­ple reli­gious per­spec­tives.
    • There is prob­a­bly close to a 100% inverse cor­re­la­tion between those who believe the indige­nous peo­ple should be able to keep out­siders away and those who believe Amer­i­ca should build a wall. It’s an inter­est­ing ide­o­log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy test. And this would be more than a wall with con­trolled access — this would be a force field.
  2. How I Became Extreme­ly Open-Mind­ed (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “When I set out to write about the entire chron­ic-ill­ness expe­ri­ence, I hes­i­tat­ed over whether to tell this kind of sto­ry. After all, if you’re try­ing to con­vince skep­ti­cal read­ers to take chron­ic sick­ness seri­ous­ly, and to make the case for the med­ical-out­sider view of how to treat Lyme dis­ease, report­ing that you’ve been dab­bling in pseu­do­science and that it works is a good way to con­firm every stereo­type about chron­ic ail­ments and their treat­ment…” Engross­ing.
  3. Truth, jus­tice and the tor­tur­ing of tol­er­ance (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Too many in the church have tol­er­at­ed too much for too long. To be sure, sit­u­a­tions can be com­pli­cat­ed. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be dis­put­ed. Per­spec­tives can dif­fer. Pic­tures can be incom­plete. Nev­er­the­less, some things are clear­ly and sim­ply wrong. It takes wis­dom to dis­cern what should be tol­er­at­ed and what should not.” The sto­ry starts in one place and winds up some­where com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. Some pan­dem­ic and pan­dem­ic-adja­cent news:
    • Vac­cines for Chil­dren (5–11 years old) (Matt Shapiro, Sub­stack): “There seemed to be a resilient faith among the doc­tors in this dis­cus­sion that the only appro­pri­ate way to move for­ward would be to make the vac­cine avail­able and then trust par­ents and care­givers to take into con­sid­er­a­tion all the risks and make the right deci­sions giv­en the evi­dence that is avail­able. Hear­ing them say this is so strange to me because that is exact­ly my posi­tion.” This is good, sane com­men­tary.
    • How SARS-CoV­‑2 in Amer­i­can deer could alter the course of the glob­al pan­dem­ic (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Now vet­eri­nar­i­ans at Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty have found active SARS-CoV­‑2 infec­tions in at least 30% of deer test­ed across Iowa dur­ing 2020. Their study, pub­lished online last week, sug­gests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reser­voir for SARS-CoV­‑2. That is, the ani­mals could car­ry the virus indef­i­nite­ly and spread it back to humans peri­od­i­cal­ly. If that’s the case, it would essen­tial­ly dash any hopes of elim­i­nat­ing or erad­i­cat­ing the virus in the U.S. — and there­fore from the world — says vet­eri­nary virol­o­gist Suresh Kuchipu­di at Penn State, who co-led the study.”
      • Have they tried mask­ing the deer?
    • Good morn­ing. Is it time to start mov­ing back to nor­mal­cy? (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “The bot­tom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple that we unthink­ing­ly accept in oth­er parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to head­lines pro­claim­ing that Covid is defeat­ed. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived. All of which rais­es the ques­tion of which pre­cau­tions should end — now or soon — and which should become per­ma­nent.”
      • Gonna tip my hand here: we should accept that COVID is not going away, lament those we have lost, rejoice that we have vac­cines and are even start­ing to see effec­tive treat­ments emerge, and get on with life. Unvac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple have made their choice and I’m hap­py to respect it, dou­bly so now that deer seem to be repos­i­to­ries for COVID (wide­spread ani­mal infec­tions under­mine the only strong argu­ment I know for vac­cine man­dates — name­ly that the unvac­ci­nat­ed allow the virus to cir­cu­late and per­haps mutate).
    • God’s Mer­cy in a New Malar­ia Vac­cine (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra inter­views Kel­ly Chibale, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Sci­ence is a gift from God, out of his mer­cy for us. As a sci­en­tist, I am doing God’s work, attempt­ing to alle­vi­ate human suf­fer­ing in part­ner­ship with God. And oth­er Chris­tians can­not say that we don’t need the sci­en­tif­ic part of the body of Christ. The fin­ger can­not say it doesn’t need the nose (1 Cor. 12:12–27).” The inter­vie­wee is a pro­fes­sor of Organ­ic Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Meta-analy­sis sug­gests that emo­tion­al intel­li­gence is declin­ing among col­lege stu­dents (Beth Ell­wood, Psy Post): “West­ern cul­ture has under­gone remark­able change in the past 20 years. For one, a rise in eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­ism and free-mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism has encour­aged an envi­ron­ment of com­pet­i­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism. Sec­ond­ly, social media emerged and has grown rapid­ly, along with smart­phone tech­nol­o­gy. Stud­ies sug­gest these changes may have led to gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in per­son­al­i­ty, reveal­ing gen­er­a­tional ris­es in nar­cis­sism, self-esteem, self-focus, and mate­ri­al­ism.”
    • This feels relat­ed: A “pro­lif­er­a­tion of admin­is­tra­tors”: fac­ul­ty reflect on two decades of rapid expan­sion (Philip Mousav­izadeh, Yale Dai­ly News): “Lau­ren Noble, the founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the William F. Buck­ley Jr. pro­gram at Yale, point­ed to the fact that the num­ber of Yale’s admin­is­tra­tors today exceeds the num­ber of fac­ul­ty — 5,066 com­pared to 4,937 — which ‘rais­es impor­tant ques­tions about the university’s allo­ca­tion of resources,’ she said. ‘It’s unclear how such a sig­nif­i­cant increase advances Yale’s mis­sion.’ ”
    • For con­text, there are only 4,664 under­grads at Yale: more than one admin­is­tra­tor per stu­dent! Not all admin­is­tra­tors deal with stu­dents (some work with fac­ul­ty, for exam­ple), but that is still a stun­ning com­par­i­son.
  6. Some thoughts about crit­i­cal race the­o­ry in schools:
    • The Woke Meet Their Match: Par­ents (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “And when the Democ­rats and the main­stream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K‑12 kids in Virginia’s pub­lic schools are not explic­it­ly read­ing the col­lect­ed works of Der­rick Bell or Richard Del­ga­do — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are study­ing cri­tiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school sys­tem now thor­ough­ly com­mit­ted to the ide­ol­o­gy and world­view of CRT, by teach­ers who have been mar­i­nat­ed in it, and whose unions have cham­pi­oned it.… To use a term the woke might under­stand, it is, in fact, struc­tur­al.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part one (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Stan­dard­ized test­ing has become a weird dis­course flash­point, but I think every­one agrees that you can, in prin­ci­ple, assess someone’s com­pe­tence in a giv­en sub­ject area with a test. And if you want to com­pare dif­fer­ent peo­ple, you need to give them the same test. It’s only by mak­ing com­par­isons across class­rooms and across time that we are able to per­sua­sive­ly demon­strate that par­tic­u­lates are bad for school per­for­mance, healthy meals are good for school per­for­mance, and air con­di­tion­ing improves school per­for­mance in the sum­mer.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part two (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “That said, my view on [teach­ing his­to­ry] as a K‑12 edu­ca­tion issue has always had two parts:
      • Pub­lic schools are pub­lic, and to some extent, they inevitably have to reflect mass opin­ion. You can try to buck that trend and lose the school board elec­tion, hand­ing all con­trol over to right-wingers who don’t even think pub­lic schools should exist, or you can acknowl­edge that in a patri­ot­ic coun­try you basi­cal­ly have to come up with a way to craft a patri­ot­ic nar­ra­tive that’s also inclu­sive.
      • This is not actu­al­ly very sig­nif­i­cant. The kids who are good at school will go on to attend selec­tive col­leges where they will absolute­ly be exposed to left-wing intel­lec­tu­als’ thoughts on patri­o­tism and Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. The kids who are not good at school, mean­while, are not pay­ing close atten­tion to the con­tent of his­to­ry class­es.”
  7. How NFTs Cre­ate Val­ue (Steve Kaczyn­s­ki and Scott Duke Komin­ers, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “But NFTs don’t just pro­vide a kind of dig­i­tal ‘deed.’ Because blockchains are pro­gram­ma­ble, it’s pos­si­ble to endow NFTs with fea­tures that enable them to expand their pur­pose over time, or even to pro­vide direct util­i­ty to their hold­ers. In oth­er words, NFTs can do things — or let their own­ers do things — in both dig­i­tal spaces and the phys­i­cal world. In this sense, NFTs can func­tion like mem­ber­ship cards or tick­ets, pro­vid­ing access to events, exclu­sive mer­chan­dise, and spe­cial dis­counts — as well as serv­ing as dig­i­tal keys to online spaces where hold­ers can engage with each oth­er. More­over, because the blockchain is pub­lic, it’s even pos­si­ble to send addi­tion­al prod­ucts direct­ly to any­one who owns a giv­en token. All of this gives NFT hold­ers val­ue over and above sim­ple own­er­ship — and pro­vides cre­ators with a vec­tor to build a high­ly engaged com­mu­ni­ty around their brands.” This is the first expla­na­tion of NFTs I’ve read that makes them sound use­ful.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Eat, Pray, Code: Rule of St. Bene­dict Becomes Tech Developer’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “SQLite—a data­base man­age­ment engine used in most major browsers, smart phones, Adobe prod­ucts, and Skype—adopted a code of ethics pulled direct­ly from the bib­li­cal pre­cepts set by the ven­er­at­ed sixth-century monk.” This arti­cle blew my mind. First shared in vol­ume 175.

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 325

Vol­ume 325. Since 3+2=5, I con­sid­er that aus­pi­cious.

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 325, which I think is kind of cool since 3 + 2 = 5 (I am, as they say, eas­i­ly amused).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some faith & pol­i­tics con­tent. The last two are a bit par­ti­san.
    • A Chris­t­ian Defense of Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “There is no per­fect form of gov­ern­ment on this side of the new heav­ens and the new earth. But the alter­na­tives to clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism suf­fer by com­par­i­son to the imper­fect sys­tem we pos­sess. When post-lib­er­als mag­ni­fy the pow­er of the state, they risk degrad­ing the dig­ni­ty of the indi­vid­ual. When they trust the wis­dom of rulers, they neglect their own fall­en nature. Peo­ple are of incal­cu­la­ble worth, and we are stained with sin. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism rec­og­nizes both real­i­ties. We dis­re­gard its pro­tec­tions at our pro­found per­il.”
    • The “Chop” and Lib­er­al­is­m’s Cri­sis of Mean­ing (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “With­out a coher­ent moral frame­work, con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sivism has to con­stant­ly man­u­fac­ture norms and enforce them not through shared com­mu­ni­ty stig­mas but by author­i­ty struc­tures. The new norms, though, are not infused with mean­ing. Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty is Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy with rig­or mor­tis: the cold, clam­my remains of long dead Protes­tant social eth­ic.” That final sen­tence… wow.
    • The Cau­tion­ary Tale of Fran­cis Collins (Justin Lee, First Things): “[Collins] showed that it was pos­si­ble for an evan­gel­i­cal from a work­ing-class back­ground to rise to the heights of sci­en­tif­ic and bureau­crat­ic accom­plish­ment. His pres­ence in the halls of med­ical pow­er was also a tes­ta­ment to the har­mo­ny of faith and rea­son. Collins has cham­pi­oned the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of sci­ence and reli­gion and encour­aged Chris­tians to accept the­is­tic evo­lu­tion through his best­selling 2006 book The Lan­guage of God and a spin-off orga­ni­za­tion, BioL­o­gos. His wit­ness is sin­gu­lar, and sin­gu­lar­ly powerful—if we don’t look too close­ly.” I have con­flict­ed feel­ings about this arti­cle (I think it is undu­ly harsh on Dr. Collins), but it is a per­spec­tive I have encoun­tered sev­er­al times. I’m also not sure it belongs under the pol­i­tics bul­let point, but it’s at least adja­cent.
    • Faith trumps Trump in Vir­ginia (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “Youngkin goes to an evan­gel­i­cal Epis­co­pal church Holy Trin­i­ty Church and pro­vides a retreat cen­ter for FOCUS (Fel­low­ship of Chris­tians in Uni­ver­si­ties & Schools), an evan­gel­i­cal out­reach to prep school stu­dents. In UK Youngkin served on the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee of Holy Trin­i­ty Bromp­ton (the home church of the Alpha course). The GOP Lt Gov­er­nor-elect Win­some Sears is an African Amer­i­can who head­ed a home­less min­istry for the Sal­va­tion Army (as well as being vice pres­i­dent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion for Vir­ginia, an elect­ed offi­cial, and a Marine). Attor­ney Gen­er­al-elect Jason Miyares is a Lati­no Chris­t­ian, a mem­ber of Galilee Epis­co­pal Church, an evan­gel­i­cal lean­ing Epis­co­pal church.” Brief but super inter­est­ing.
    • Pence says James Madi­son and the Bible helped him cer­ti­fy elec­tion results against Trump’s wish­es (Tim­o­thy Bel­la, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The for­mer vice pres­i­dent, whose answer was met with applause from the Iowa City audi­ence, denied that he was advised it would hurt his chances of run­ning for pres­i­dent if he fol­lowed Trump’s plan. ‘Every­thing you’ve recit­ed rel­a­tive to me is false,’ he said to the audi­ence mem­ber. Pence, refer­ring to the oath he took to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion, also cit­ed a Bible verse he said he leaned on: ‘Psalm 15 says he who keeps his oath even when it hurts.’ ”
  2. Pan­dem­ic restric­tions were a blow to reli­gious lib­er­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, NY Post): “Of all the unequal impacts of the pan­dem­ic, the costs of state and local restric­tions that fell square­ly on reli­gious house­holds seem under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed. Although every­one felt the effects of nation­al and state quar­an­tines, and Amer­i­cans strug­gled with men­tal health more broad­ly, my paper shows that reli­gious adher­ents, espe­cial­ly Catholics or oth­er Chris­tians, expe­ri­enced unique harm. Even more trou­bling is that the costs of shut­downs for places of wor­ship were not lim­it­ed to the con­gre­gants. Evi­dence from a Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty study led up by Byron John­son shows that faith-based orga­ni­za­tions shoul­der the bulk of the home­less­ness bur­den in cities, car­ing for the least for­tu­nate. In this sense, cut­ting off in-per­son wor­ship simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cuts off one of the pri­ma­ry ways that hous­es of wor­ship serve their broad­er com­mu­ni­ties.”
  3. Bil­lion­aire Seeks to Build Large­ly Win­dow­less Dorm In ‘Social and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Exper­i­ment’ (Aaron Gor­don, Vice): “Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent, 94 per­cent of dorm rooms in Munger Hall [at UCSB] will be tiny, win­dow­less pods that open onto a cen­tral com­mon area. And it will stuff so many stu­dents [4,500] into such a small space that Den­nis McFad­den, the archi­tect who resigned from the university’s review com­mit­tee, said in his res­ig­na­tion let­ter it ‘would qual­i­fy as the eighth dens­est neigh­bor­hood on the plan­et, falling just short of Dha­ka, Bangladesh.’ McFad­den said the uni­ver­si­ty had pro­vid­ed no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for ignor­ing estab­lished research that nat­ur­al light and views of the out­doors are vital to healthy liv­ing, except to say they were bound to Munger’s vision.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    1. Munger rebuts: Munger on con­tro­ver­sial UCSB dorm: Fake win­dows are bet­ter than real win­dows (CNN). He is total­ly and awe­some­ly intran­si­gent.
  4. What Hap­pened to Matt Taib­bi? (Ross Barkan, New York Mag­a­zine): “ ‘One of the moments that solid­i­fied in my mind the dif­fi­cult path I’d have going for­ward in main­stream media, and that pushed me toward the deci­sion to do Sub­stack full-time, came when I did a cam­paign piece on Biden for Rolling Stone,’ Taib­bi said. ‘I was notic­ing what every­one else saw, that the man was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing things, among oth­er issues. I called back some of the med­ical sources who were glad to vio­late the ‘Gold­wa­ter rule’ against diag­nos­ing peo­ple from afar to talk to me about Trump being crazy, just to ask for their assess­ment of Biden. None respond­ed, and one lit­er­al­ly hung up on me. Even off the record they wouldn’t talk about it. It hit me in that moment that Trump had so fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the busi­ness that even sources were behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly, and I’d have to adapt one way or the oth­er.’ ”
  5. Katharine Bir­bals­ingh is right: chil­dren do have orig­i­nal sin (Theo Hob­son, The Spec­ta­tor): “When my son was about six he heard some­thing at school about slav­ery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was some­one that some­one else owned and ordered around and prob­a­bly mis­treat­ed. I wait­ed for the prop­er response of moral hor­ror to show on his inno­cent fea­tures. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’” What a phe­nom­e­nal open­ing anec­dote.
  6. Lib­er­als Read, Con­ser­v­a­tives Watch TV (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­ser­v­a­tive media per­fect­ing the ‘info­tain­ment’ genre of news com­men­tary brought peo­ple into pol­i­tics that a gen­er­a­tion ear­li­er would’ve paid more atten­tion to pro­fes­sion­al wrestling or mon­ster truck ral­lies instead. Lib­er­al­ism has cap­tured a com­bi­na­tion of an overe­d­u­cat­ed class with more desire for sta­tus than intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty along with men­tal­ly ill indi­vid­u­als who in the 1990s might have joined some apo­lit­i­cal sub­cul­ture instead of becom­ing pas­sion­ate about race and gen­der issues.” Very long and insight­ful arti­cle (9,000ish words)
  7. Sur­vey: One-third of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents have expe­ri­enced anti­semitism (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “…the most com­mon form of anti­semitism was offen­sive com­ments online. Only 1% of stu­dents were vic­tims of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence, and only 1% were threat­ened with vio­lence. In all, the sur­vey found 43% of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents had expe­ri­enced and/or wit­nessed anti­se­mit­ic activ­i­ty in the past year. Among those who wit­nessed it, the most com­mon expe­ri­ence was see­ing swastikas around cam­pus or van­dal­ism to Jew­ish fra­ter­ni­ties, soror­i­ties and cul­tur­al build­ings.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165.

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 320

deli­cious news nuggets of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to thought­ful Chris­tians and peo­ple con­nect­ed to Stan­ford

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 320, which is 28 + 26.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Mis­takes We Can­not Make Again (David French, The Dis­patch): “…if peo­ple of faith are to be con­cerned about jus­tice (and they are!), then jus­tice is rarely more imme­di­ate and impor­tant than when con­fronting both the scourge of crime and the tragedy of excess enforce­ment and mass incar­cer­a­tion.”
  2. A Cog in the Col­lege Admis­sions Scan­dal Speaks Out (Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “Van­de­mo­er, unlike the oth­ers accused in the plot, did not per­son­al­ly gain in the trans­ac­tions. He hand­ed checks total­ing $770,000 from Singer to Stan­ford devel­op­ment offi­cers, who planned to use the mon­ey for new boats.… So as he told his sto­ry to Stanford’s inves­ti­ga­tors, he won­dered why no one had ever come to him when the indict­ments came down, not­ing that even fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors had acknowl­edged he did not enrich him­self from the scheme. It rein­forced the notion that he was sim­ply an asset — a name­less, expend­able cog in a cor­po­ra­tion with a $29 bil­lion endow­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Stan­ford does not come off look­ing good at all.
  3. Stan­ford stu­dents are more like­ly to wear masks on bicy­cles than hel­mets (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “In April of this year, I wit­nessed some­thing on the Stan­ford cam­pus that will be seared into my mem­o­ry for­ev­er: a stu­dent on a bicy­cle, wear­ing flip-flops, Air­Pods in ear, going the wrong way through a round­about in an active con­struc­tion zone, with no hel­met. But like any good fol­low­er of sci­ence, the stu­dent was wear­ing a dis­pos­able blue face mask — for safe­ty, I guess.” Should he desire to, Mey­er will become a well-known nation­al com­men­ta­tor some­day. He’s quite good.
  4. Why I Am a Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rist (Hans Boers­ma, First Things): “When rulers man­date vac­cine pass­ports and estab­lish elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic sys­tems to police com­pli­ance, it doesn’t take a great deal of imag­i­na­tion to see how the same sys­tem might be used—and in the eyes of many should be used—to reg­u­late car­bon emis­sions, expen­di­tures, and even opin­ions. After all, it’s not just the coro­n­avirus that is dan­ger­ous. So are cli­mate change, social inequal­i­ty, and cer­tain moral and reli­gious con­vic­tions. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, trav­el­ing from vac­cine pass­ports to a social cred­it system—the kind that Chi­na already has in place—takes no time at all.… This is not an argu­ment against vac­ci­na­tion per se. It is an argu­ment to take con­spir­a­cy theorists—David fore­most among them—seriously.” The author is an Angli­can the­olo­gian.
  5. The Pub­lic Con­tin­ues to Under­es­ti­mate COVID’s Age Dis­crim­i­na­tion (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “After 18 months of pub­lic-health guid­ance pro­mot­ing uni­ver­sal vig­i­lance, I think hard­ly any Amer­i­can has a clear view of just how dra­mat­ic these dif­fer­en­tials are. All else being equal, an unvac­ci­nat­ed 66-year old is about 30 times more like­ly to die, giv­en a con­firmed case, than an unvac­ci­nat­ed 36-year-old, and some­one over 85 is over 10,000 times more at risk of dying than a child under 10.… a vac­ci­nat­ed 80-year-old has about the same mor­tal­i­ty risk as an unvac­ci­nat­ed 50-year-old, and an unvac­ci­nat­ed 30-year-old has a low­er risk than a vac­ci­nat­ed 45-year-old.”
  6. Inside the Church That Preach­es ‘Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand’ (Sarah Stanko­rb, Vice): “Moth­er Kirk can be a joy­ous, faith­ful com­mu­ni­ty. But the con­ser­v­a­tive con­gre­ga­tion also is at odds with Moscow’s more lib­er­al pop­u­la­tion (sur­round­ing Latah coun­ty vot­ed for Pres­i­dent Biden in 2020). Depend­ing upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvin­ist utopia or a patri­ar­chal cult in which women must sub­mit or face dis­ci­pline at home and at church. At the cen­ter of it all is noto­ri­ous­ly con­tro­ver­sial Dou­glas Wil­son, the fire­brand pas­tor who has been pre­sid­ing over his Moth­er Kirk fief­dom for more than 40 years.” Many of the details in this sto­ry are very bad.
    • A Taste of Novem­ber in the Air (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Inci­den­tal­ly, in case you are curi­ous, I haven’t read the Vice piece because I did read the ques­tions that the writer sent to Nan­cy and to me while ‘research­ing,’ and the said ques­tions were all more loaded than the entrees at Tater’s, Home of the Grand Stuffed Pota­to Buf­fet. Way too many bacon bits.… If you read any­thing that unset­tles you, and you would like par­tic­u­lar answers to spe­cif­ic ques­tions, we have made them read­i­ly avail­able. On the top of this page, over to the right, we have a box called Crit­i­cal Ques­tions.” Wilson’s response to the Vice piece. 
  7. Unpop­ulism (David Leon­hardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, New York Times): “In elite cir­cles, includ­ing Capi­tol Hill, peo­ple often mis­un­der­stand Amer­i­can pub­lic opin­ion in a spe­cif­ic way. They imag­ine that the medi­an vot­er resem­bles a type of polit­i­cal mod­er­ate who is quite com­mon in those elite cir­cles — some­body who is social­ly lib­er­al and fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive.… In the rest of the coun­try, how­ev­er, this ide­o­log­i­cal com­bi­na­tion is not so com­mon, polls show. If any­thing, more Amer­i­cans can accu­rate­ly be described as the oppo­site — social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­al. That’s true across racial groups, includ­ing among Black and His­pan­ic vot­ers.” Not pay­walled.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 319

a brief roundup

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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