Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 481

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. Sales of Bibles Are Booming, Fueled by First-Time Buyers and New Versions (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal): “Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period.”
  2. Does Politics Belong in the Church? Does the Church Belong in Politics? (Carl S. H. Henry, Juicy Ecumenism): “Does the church belong in politics? Insofar as it owns land and buildings the church clearly has civic obligations and should render to Caesar what is properly Caesar’s. As an institution grounded on a divine disclosure of truth and morality, moreover, the church is mandated to proclaim publicly the revealed principles by which Christ the King of kings will ultimately judge nations and states and does so even now. The church as such must also stimulate members to apply scriptural principles with sound reason and in good conscience to current political concerns, in quest of preferred policies and programs promotive of justice and peace. Since God wills the state as an instrumentality for preserving justice and restraining disorder, the church should urge members to engage in political affairs to their utmost competence and ability, to vote faithfully and intelligently, to engage in the political process at all levels, and to seek and hold public office. The church is not, however, to use the mechanisms of government to legally impose upon society at large her theological commitments. The church must increasingly clarify when obedience to God requires disobedience to the state and, no less, when disobedience to the state constitutes disobedience to God.” 
    • From 1984, a transcription of a speech by a key voice in the emergence of American evangelicalism. This speech, with updates to replace 80’s references, could be given today.
  3. Ryugu asteroid sample rapidly colonized by terrestrial life despite strict contamination control (Justin Jackson, Phys.org): “NASA tries to avoid introducing Earth microbes to Mars by constructing probes and landers in cleanroom environments and has found the task nearly impossible. There have been species of microbes discovered in NASA clean rooms that not only evade disinfection methods but also adapt to using cleaning agents as a food source.” 
    • That last sentence is stunning. This is how British researchers tried (and failed) to prevent contamination of an asteroid sample: “Transported to Earth in a hermetically sealed chamber, the sample was opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room to prevent contamination. Individual particles were picked with sterilized tools and stored under nitrogen in airtight containers. Before analysis, the sample underwent Nano-X-ray computed tomography and was embedded in an epoxy resin block for scanning electron microscopy.”
  4. Deus in machina: Swiss church installs AI-powered Jesus (Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian):“The small, unadorned church… in the Swiss city of Lucerne… installed an artificial intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different languages. After training the AI program in theological texts, visitors were then invited to pose questions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a latticework screen… More than 1,000 people – including Muslims and visiting tourists from as far as China and Vietnam – took up the opportunity to interact with the avatar… two-thirds of them had found it to be a ‘“‘spiritual experience.’” 
    • Recommended by a student who calls the article “harrowing.”
  5. Why housing shortages cause homelessness (Salim Furth, Works in Progress): “…most people at risk of homelessness manage to remain housed by staying with others. The higher rate of homelessness in high-cost areas is mostly explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space.” 
    • Some thoughts in response: https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1864706992369205381
    • This article matches my experience: plenty of people in Louisiana and Missouri had spare rooms to let people use. Almost no one I know has a spare room in Silicon Valley. People barely even have yards here.
  6. Why Christians Should Care About Oak Flat (Robert P. George, First Things): “For those of us who gather in traditional houses of worship, Apache spiritual practices might feel remote or alien. A patch of Arizona wilderness bears little resemblance to the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples we regard as sacred space. Yet our tradition of religious freedom, properly understood, has never been about protecting only what is familiar or convenient. Nor has it been a simple live-and-let-live compromise, a fragile truce in which we agree to tolerate one another’s practices for the sake of peace. It is instead a commitment to a fundamental principle that acknowledges our nature as rational beings, bearers of profound, inherent, and equal dignity, capable of ordering our lives toward the good, the true, and the holy.” 
    • Robbie George is, of course, a law prof at Princeton and an outspoken Catholic.
  7. America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued (Jesse Singal, The Economist): “Ms Breen said she is doing significantly better today—partly, she believes, simply because she ceased taking testosterone. But well before that, she ditched the therapist Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her to, who she said fixated entirely on her gender identity. She switched to a dialectical behavioural therapist whom she described as a godsend, with whom she had her first-ever in-depth conversations about the physical and sexual abuse she endured earlier in life. Ms Breen said she was fairly confident that if she’d had these conversations at age 12, she wouldn’t have pursued medical transition. She has been left with permanent medical consequences: a lower voice than she wants, an Adam’s Apple that distresses her, the prospect of breast reconstruction if she wants to partially regain a female shape, and the possibility that she is infertile due to the years she spent on testosterone.” 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Defender of the Basic (YouTube, CollegeHumor): five minutes with only one mildly off-color interchange. I agree with this video directionally but happen to have different (but equally basic) aesthetic preferences than many of those highlighted. 
  • NASA Rocket Engine Fireplace (NASA, YouTube): want a nerdy fireplace on your TV during the holidays? NASA’s got you. 8 hours of a rocket in a fireplace in 4k.
  • Who Needs Congress When You Have Cameo? (Joseph Bernstein, New York Times): “He’s available for birthday wishes (‘Any time you hit a zero it’s a big one, but turning 70 is pretty epic’), wedding congratulations (‘Marriage is an amazing institution’) and pep talks (‘Even on tough days, find the good in it, find the pride in the work’) — all starting at $500. Mr. Gaetz is happy to poke fun at his professional setback, contrasting his failed nomination with the success of one of his Cameo customers who just became a partner in a law firm.” 

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 478

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. When a Stanford Bible Study Led to an AI Startup (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim met at a Christian fellowship at Stanford in 2022 and got to know each other by leading a Bible study together. Soon the duo—with their backgrounds in data organizing and computer science—was building an artificial intelligence startup.” 
    • The article never names Chi Alpha, but they are both leaders in our ministry. Super cool! Their startup is Esslo, which helps students with their college application essays.
  2. I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them. (David French, New York Times): “As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okediji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Christian fellowship, and she’s now a professor at Harvard Law School. I’ll never forget her first words. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘The Lord has healed you.’ My initial reaction was frustration. I was resigned to the surgery, and I wanted encouragement, not false hope. As a Christian, I believe that God is real and works miracles. But I didn’t consider that he would work a miracle on me. My prayers were of the conventional kind that I grew up with — prayers that doctors would have wisdom and that I’d have the courage to face the challenge of the surgery. But Ruth’s prayer was different. She asked God for healing, and she said that God had granted her prayer. I woke up the next morning without any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doctors reintroduced bland, solid food to my diet, and I consumed it voraciously. By Thanksgiving, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy later showed no evidence of the disease at all. My doctor was surprised. I was surprised (and overjoyed). I knew that ulcerative colitis could have remission periods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve never had a recurrence.”
  3. The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports. It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.… The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).… When the home team suffers an upset loss while sports betting is legal, domestic violence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lingering effects.”
  4. Artificial Intelligence and Relationships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Partners Could Replace Real-life Romance (Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano, Institute for Family Studies): “Young men are more likely than young women to believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships (28% vs. 22%). As shown earlier, young men are generally more open to AI friendships than young women, which parallels the gender difference in their views of AI’s potential for romance.… Among single young adults, those who watch porn online at least once a day are twice as likely as those who rarely, if ever watch porn to say they are open to an AI romance.”
  5. The Right Without Wrong (Dustin Guastella, Jacobin): “For secular liberals who have made ‘believing science’ their own kind of religion, the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn’t?… In the Christian story, we are all equally fallen. Our original sin unites us in a kind of negative equilibrium. By recasting Christianity as a unique perversion, a cancerous growth that destroyed the glorious Roman Empire from within (or a virus introduced by Jews, that ancient enemy of the Right, from without), reactionaries can freely reject our primordial equality to instead embrace the supposedly natural hierarchies evident in the outcome of market competition, the body-obsessed ‘vitalism’ that privileges physical strength over the effete idealism of the Enlightenment, and also, seemingly without fail, an aggressive, unashamed form of scientific racism.” 
    • Jacobin is a socialist magazine — fascinating to see how one of their authors feels about the rise of the post-religious right.
  6. We Need to Fix Voting in America Now (Wilfred Reilly, National Review): “Simply put, there is no way to know the real rate of voter fraud in America, so long as the U.S.A. does not require citizens to vote in person or show an ID when they vote.… Recall that a competently done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of magnitude more registered noncitizens than the number that The Experts™ discovered nationwide — fully 0.5 percent–1 percent of the state’s electorate in some off-year races. Saying that these folks do not exist because they have never been jailed is like saying that there cannot really be 1 million-plus daily users of The Pirate Bay and similar sites, because there are so few annual prosecutions for internet crimes.” 
    • The author is a political science professor. He presents data I’ve never heard before.
  7. A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives (Musa al-Gharbi, Substack): “According to Forbes, more than 50 other billionaires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the preferred narrative. But here’s the twist: even more billionaires — 83 to be precise — supported the Democratic nominee. Kamala had 60 percent more billionaire backers than Donald Trump did. And billionaires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the campaign trail serving as surrogates for Harris in much the same way as Musk supported Trump. If we want to look at who ‘big money’ tried to push into office this cycle, the answer is disconcerting.… Overall, this cycle, Democrats raised roughly twice as much money as their opponents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democrats raised more than $1 billion – more than three times as much as Republicans brought in over the same period – largely thanks to enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris within Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Law.”

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 477

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. Some post-election analysis, with the reminder that I do not endorse everything I share. I share them because they made me think. 
    • Amazing quote from the Stanford Review: It’s Time For Stanford to Accept President Donald Trump (Again) (Editorial, Stanford Review): “Stanford students often forget to consider that the world around them votes too—and that the world does not have the same concerns. As one peer remarked, ‘I found out some of the dining hall staff voted for Trump and lowkey forgot they got to vote too.’ ”
    • 10 Reasons You Didn’t See This Coming (Konstantin Kisin, Substack): “Americans are extremely practical people. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we produce great writers and intellectuals. In America they produce (and attract) great engineers, businessmen and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump’s rhetoric than you do and more about his policies than you do.” 
      • Kisin is a Russian-born immigrant to Britain. Interesting to see how at least one foreigner perceives the results US election.
    • Donald Trump Is the President for Post-Christian America (Aaron Renn, Substack): “It’s hard to complain that he’s crude when we live in a crude society and people like that way — except when it comes to him. In fact, compared to the rest of the country, Trump is a retro model of rectitude when it comes to not drinking or doing drugs, having a relentless work ethic, wearing suits, etc.”
    • Democrats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “Democrats bet big on ‘reproductive rights’ this election cycle, even offering free abortions at their national convention. But the strategy didn’t pay off. Not only was abortion a flop with the electorate, it was Republicans—not Democrats—who pushed the winning women’s‑rights issue: fighting the encroachment of biological men into women’s spaces and sports.”
    • How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory (Daniel McCarthy, The Spectator): “The fact is that left-wing cultural attitudes in America, and in the West as a whole, are themselves very ‘European’ and seem often irrelevant or repugnant to people of other cultures and racial backgrounds. White progressive Americans think of their views as being universal, but they are really very specific to their own group. White liberals believe, for example, that masculinity is ‘toxic’ and the world needs more female leaders. They also believe that ‘anti-racism’ requires ‘affirmative action’ or racial quotes to give blacks in particular more representation in positions of power and prestige. White liberalism is the reason Kamala Harris was named as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. She wasn’t a popular politician – and as this election proved, she still isn’t. But she was the right sex and colour to satisfy the requirements of white liberals. Latinos are not white liberals.”
    • How Different Groups Voted in the 2024 Election (Brian McGill, Anthony DeBarros and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal): “Here are the results of a survey of over 120,000 registered voters, compiled by the Associated Press, which offer a look at voting patterns and trends among various groups in the electorate and what issues were the most important to voters heading into Election Day. Numbers will update as responses are added and the survey’s weighting adjusts.” 
      • A LOT of graphs. One detail fascinating detail: people who voted for Trump were MORE concerned that Kamala Harris would lead America in an authoritarian direction than the people who voted for Harris were concerned about Trump doing the same. It was tight, but the greater fear was of a Harris administration.
    • How Could Trump and Abortion Rights Both Win? (Jill Filipovic, New York Times): “How could significant numbers of voters cast their ballots for legal abortion and also for the man who helped make it possible to criminalize abortion in the first place? Mr. Trump boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade and being the most pro-life president in American history, while Kamala Harris pledged to use her presidential power to protect and expand a broad range of reproductive freedoms. Yet, according to the vote tallies released so far, in every state where abortion was up for a vote, more voters cast those ballots for abortion rights than for Ms. Harris.” 
      • Recommended by a student.
    • Prediction Markets for the Win (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “The prediction markets predicted the election outcome more accurately and more quickly than polls or other forecasting methods, just as expected from decades of research.”
    • Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Why [do I think the market was mispriced]? In order for an American to use Polymarket, you have to get a VPN, a Coinbase account, and a Metamask wallet, use the VPN, get crypto on the Coinbase account, transfer it to the Metamask wallet, connect the Metamask wallet to Polymarket, and buy the shares you want. Ability to do this rules out 99% of the US population.… I think prediction markets are among our single best sources of truth, but that (as with every source of truth) we need to think critically about them and notice the rare times when they fail. If you can’t think critically, you’re going to have a hard time, but in that case I would still trust prediction markets over any other source (except Metaculus, which is so similar to a prediction market that it belongs in the same category anyway).” 
      • Interesting contrarian take on the prediction market’s success in the election.
  2. Why Women Use Pornography and How the Church Can Help (Helen Thorne-Allenson, The Gospel Coalition): “The biggest driver of pornography use among the women I’ve met with is anxiety. Life feels overwhelming at times; pornography brings some relief… Maybe unsurprisingly, another big driver among the women I’ve walked alongside (particularly younger women) is a desire to know what sex is like.… The driver we probably miss most often in the church is that of managing pain.”
  3. Be Perfect (Ross Byrd, Mere Orthodoxy): “In the Bible, the word ‘perfect’ doesn’t mean what we tend to mean by it today. For the writers of Scripture, perfection has more to do with finished-ness than flawlessness. A thing is called ‘perfect’ when it is brought to its full maturity, when it becomes everything it is meant to be. Now, if we apply this definition to the Garden of Eden, we are forced to conclude that Eden was not, in fact, perfect. Eden was good, as Genesis tells us over and over. He created this and that, and it was good. He created human beings, and it was very good. But it doesn’t say perfect. In a very important sense, it was not yet perfect, because it was not yet complete. Eden was the beginning. The garden was, among other things, a place of potential.” 
    • Emphasis in original. I like the core insight in this essay a lot.
  4. Why We’re Still Atheists (Katja Hoyer, Plough): “I, on the other hand, often wondered even as a child what the point of life was if all you did is grow up, work, die, and be erased. When I lost relatives, friends, and pets, I knew I had lost them forever, while others held out for some form of reunion in another life or at least the idea that souls continued to exist somewhere. On an abstract level, I began to understand why most of humanity finds comfort, surety, and purpose in religion. But by the time I worked this out, it was entirely an intellectual mind game to me. I had grown up in a world that made sense without God and nothing could change that now.” 
    • A very interesting essay about why East Germany is so atheist, written by an atheist reflecting on it.
  5. Are Religious People More Fearful? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I am really surprised at how few of these factors actually ‘pop’ in this analysis. That was true for things like income, age, marital status, view of the Bible, and religious importance. None of those had a measurable impact on the fear index. Also, I didn’t find a single factor that clearly led to higher levels of expressed fear. However, there were four variables in this analysis that predicted a lower score on the fear index. They were: being white, being male, having a higher level of education, and increased church attendance.” 
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  6. St. Junipero Serra: An Unjustly Controversial Figure (Brian Gabriel, The European Conservative): “In present-day discourse, the actions of the missionaries and the Spanish soldiers are often conflated, but the missionaries’ paternalistic attitude toward the tribes actually often led them to protect the tribes from the more rapacious and unsavory behavior of the soldiers. It’s true enough that the tribes were sometimes forced to labor in the fields, and their freedom of movement was restricted once they converted to Catholicism. The missions themselves were often built in part, at least, by the tribesmen, sometimes under duress. But the harsh treatment, while striking the modern observer as cruel and tortuous, was seen by the missionaries as essential to the natives’ spiritual salvation. Today, many of their descendants remain Catholic. The value of the missionaries’ actions can never be recognized by a modern world that doesn’t allow for spiritual effects.” 
    • I have long believed, even as a very Protestant person, that Junipero Serra has gotten a bum rap in California (and at Stanford).
  7. Rodney Alcala Didn’t Kill Me. Forty Years Later, I Asked Him Why (Alice Feiring, New York Magazine): “Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his familiar face and orange jumpsuit: ‘Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.’ It couldn’t be the same man, I’d thought to myself. But after hours of Googling I had to accept the truth: Jon Burger was an alias; he was the winning bachelor on The Dating Game nine years after I met him; and he is believed to have been one of the most prolific of serial killers, officially responsible for at least seven murders with authorities estimating his real body count at about 130.” 
    • Recommended by a student who says, “Very well written, chilling story. The author is lucky to be alive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How to Do Action Comedy (Every Frame a Painting, YouTube): nine minutes about what makes Jackie Chan so great, and why his foreign films are better than his American films in important ways.
  • Harvey Epstein for New York City Council (Saturday Night Live, YouTube): two and a half minutes I found absolutely hilarious. What’s even funnier is that it’s about a real politician.
  • Vote (Texts From Superheroes)
  • Diet (Pearls Before Swine) — actually, though

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 476



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 a shorter-than-normal edition because I’ve had a busy week and haven’t read as much as I normally do.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There’s more herding in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands (Nate Silver, Substack): “How many [recent polls] showed the race in either direction within 2.5 percentage points, close enough that you could basically call it a tie? Well, 193 of them did, or 78 percent. That’s way more than you should get in theory — even if the candidates are actually exactly tied in all seven states, which they almost certainly aren’t.… Based on a binomial distribution — which assumes that all polls are independent of one another, which theoretically they should be — it’s realllllllllllllly unlikely. Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin.”
  2. Christianity Today’s podcast The Bulletin ran interviews with three Christians voting different ways. Presented in the order in which they aired: 
    • Voting Third Party (Matt Martens): “He’s a trial lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, a seminary graduate, a legal ethics professor, and an award-winning author. Martens’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other outlets, and he has spoken at numerous universities across the country.”
    • Voting Democrat (David French): “He’s a columnist for The New York Times and a former senior editor of The Dispatch. He’s the author most recently of Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
    • Voting Republican (Eric Teetsel): “Teetsel was vice president of government relations at The Heritage Foundation, was chief of staff to US senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, and served as president of the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas.”
  3. What economists don’t know (Scott Sumner, Substack): “I am not impressed when someone tells me that a small homogeneous country has less inequality than the US. I am impressed by the fact that almost every single ethnic group in America is more successful than the equivalent ethnic group in their home country.… Right now, the US economy is the envy of the world. Before we replace free markets with an industrial policy, we might wish to compare upside and downside risks from interventionism. Given that our living standards are currently the highest in the world (at least for countries of more than 10 million), in which direction are the risks the greatest?” 
    • The author is an econ professor at Bentley.
  4. How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. (Matt Kaplan, New York Times): “The dispute arises in part because there are really two types of continents: Those recognized by cultures around the world, and those recognized by geologists. Cultures can define a continent any way they want, while geologists have to use a definition. And geological research in recent years has made defining continental boundaries less simple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evidence of unexpected continental material.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 473



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 467



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 467, a number which has strictly increasing digits when written normally as well as when written in bases 7 (12357) and 9 (5689).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned (David French, New York Times): “In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a number of universities were taken by surprise by the sheer sustained disruption and by the antisemitic animosity on their campuses. They struggled to respond effectively. As the war continues — and as the conflict with Hezbollah escalates on Israel’s northern border — universities can no longer claim to be surprised. They know what might happen this school year, and this knowledge has legal significance. If they fail to protect the free speech of students or to protect students from antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment, there will be consequences.”
  2. Stranded in Space? NASA Doesn’t See the Starliner Astronauts That Way. (Kenneth Chang, New York Times): “If you go somewhere expecting an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most people would consider that ‘stranded.’… All summer, NASA and Boeing officials have been reluctant to use the words, ‘stuck’ and ‘stranded,’ which would add another black mark to a spacecraft that has been delayed for years by technical setbacks.”
  3. Augustine, AI, and the Demon Heuristic (Robert Cotton, Mere Orthodoxy): “One does not have to dig deep into the comments section of a ChatGPT demo video to find someone convinced that there’s something demonic about it. At the risk of keeping company with the most paranoid of the terminally online, I would like to add another point which makes this position plausible–that there is something of the demonic to recent AI developments.… I think we should be quite alarmed by how we are approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how it appears to look. If this theurgic vision of idolatry is Biblically true, we should be worried that there are malignant actors attempting to gain a foothold. The veneer of disenchantment to which technology so effectively pretends is, in fact, quite capable of hiding a very old and very magical stratagem.” 
    • Fascinating and brings completely unexpected (to me) evidence to the table.
  4. Faith abounds at the Democratic National Convention, but don’t be surprised (Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service): “The faith-fueled messaging [at the DNC] may have surprised some conservatives, but it’s hardly news to anyone who kept a close eye on liberals over the past decade or so. The Democratic Party, although home to a growing (and sizable) subset of religiously unaffiliated voters, remains majority religious and majority Christian, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. More to the point: Although people of faith have long been at home among its ranks, religious rhetoric at Democratic Party conventions has garnered more headlines in recent years, with the 2016 gathering featuring a primetime address from a prominent pastor and the 2020 event including an entire section dedicated to faith.”
  5. College Freshman, Stick the Landing (Vince Greenwald, Gospel Coalition): “Know ahead of time that you won’t find a perfect church. There are no perfect churches. You’re just looking for a healthy and faithful one. So after your short church-shopping phase, make the pivot from evaluation to participation. Pursue membership. Look for opportunities to serve. Bring some friends. And resist the urge to church shop indefinitely. Plants don’t grow well when they’re constantly uprooted and transplanted. Neither do Christians.” 
    • Recommended by a student. I would add to the article: look for an on-campus fellowship such as Chi Alpha. They will help you find a church as well as in many other practical ways.
  6. The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite (Tanner Greer, blog): “I laugh sometimes at the complaints I see on humanities twitter bewailing the shallow reading habits of the tech-bro. The technology brothers read—a lot! I am sure more novels are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capitol Hill. Washington functionaries simply do not live a life of the mind. If Silicon Valley technologists do not always live such a life, they at least pretend to.… You can divide most of these [beloved by Silicon Valley] titles into five overarching categories: works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, math, or cognitive science; books that outline the operating principles and business strategy of successful start-ups; and finally, narrative histories of successful start-ups themselves.”
  7. Praise for Price Gouging (John Cochrane, Substack): “We should praise price-gouging. Yes, pass a new federal law, one that overrides the many state laws against price gouging.… Price gouging directs scarce supply to the people who really need it, encourages new supply to come in, encourages holding stockpiles for a rainy day, encourages efficient use of stockpiles we have sitting around, and encourages people to substitute for less scarce goods when they can.” 
    • The author is an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 466



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 465



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

This is volume 465, the 30th triangular number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 464



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 464, which only has two prime factors: 2 and 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stanford in Paris 2024 (Stanford News): “A school-record 60 Stanford-affiliated athletes have qualified to compete at the Olympic Games Paris 2024.… Nations represented include the United States (38), Canada (5), Australia (3), Israel (2), Switzerland (2), Egypt (1), France (1), Germany (1), Greece (1), Hong Kong (1), Nigeria (1), Philippines (1), Singapore (1), Spain (1) and Venezuela (1).”
  2. Teachers and the Transmission of Excellence (Matt Clancy, New Things Under The Sun): “Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor.” 
    • Mentorship matters, and not just in academia. I have a friend who once told me, “You always need to learn up. Look above you and find people who have already achieved what you hope to achieve and spend as much time around them as you can.”
  3. There Is Almost No ‘Liberalizing Religion’ in the United States (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The more people go to church, the less liberal they are. That’s true across racial lines. That’s also true in a lot of major Protestant traditions including a few mainline stalwarts like the United Methodist Church and the PCUSA.” 
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  4. The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally (McKay Coppins, The Atlantic): “To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.” 
    • Interesting concept for an article. Note that the author is Mormon, so factor that in when evaluating his religious commentary. 
  5. People Say Queer People Are Born That Way. It’s More Complicated. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “ ‘Born this way’ may, unfortunately, have been an oversimplification. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that people are ‘formed this way.’ As the complexity of human sexuality has become clearer, scientists and writers have attempted to add necessary nuance to the subject. But the slogan remains entrenched in the culture.… It is not only unsupportable by science but also does not capture the full reality of queer experience and is unjust to some members of the queer community itself.” 
    • I am old enough to remember when the “born this way” argument was the dominant reason homosexuality gained widestream acceptance in America. Unlocked.
  6. Should Pornography Be Completely Banned? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The share of Americans who want no restrictions on porn has never been that high. It was 10% of the sample back in the early 1970s and today it’s dropped to a very small fraction — just 4% of those who took the survey in 2022. So, there’s little appetite for a laissez-faire approach to pornography.”
  7. Couples, Stop Writing Your Own Wedding Vows (Cheryl Mendelson, The Atlantic): “Traditional vows create an intense moment of quiet speech that heightens the exuberance of the toasts, drinking, and dancing that follow. Replacing them with sentimental or jokey words turns the vow-taking into an ironic performance of something the couple is implicitly disavowing. One of my friends regards taking vows other than the traditional ones as ‘like being on the witness stand and answering the questions you wish you had been asked.’ He and his wife wanted ‘no irony’ or attempts at wit in their vows, and ‘redacted’ theirs from a church rite.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 463



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 463, a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why your smartphone might be stopping you from following Jesus (Martin Saunders, Premiere Christianity): “[Haidt] argues that smartphones actually drive spiritual degradation: ‘[social media] trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourselves first; be materialistic, judgemental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.’… our digital culture isn’t neutral; it’s offering a kind of anti-discipleship.”
  2. Move Over, Mathematicians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siobhan Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google DeepMind models tried their luck with the problem set in the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of London at the University of Bath. The event is said to be the premier math competition for the world’s ‘brightest mathletes,’ according to a promotional post on social media. The human problem-solvers — 609 high school students from 108 countries — won 58 gold medals, 123 silver and 145 bronze. The A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-worthy performance on an Olympiad’s problems.”
  3. Standing Out, Crafting Hooks, and Accidentally Revealing Everything That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussenbaum, Substack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s natural instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psychological issues in their profiles, but it actually is. They just don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
  4. Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results, especially for young people and Hispanic adults (Andrew Mercer, Courtney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called ‘bogus respondents.’ These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards. Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors, such as ingesting bleach to protect against COVID-19, belief in conspiracies like Pizzagate or support for political violence.”
  5. Patronage vs. Constituent Parties (Or Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones) (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “…many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.”
  6. Evangelicals Must Stop Their Preferential Treatment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, centrists and those on the right are more fertile soil, I believe, because they are more open to reality. They recognize that the cultural revolutionaries’ projects to rewrite reality are destroying civilization. These refugees crave clarity about basic moral realities because of how much confusion the negative world has produced. They are looking for voices who stand up to the civilizational destroyers—maybe even voices who boldly proclaim supernatural truths.Like the ‘god-fearers’ that early church missionaries often targeted, we today need to consider the ‘reality-respecters’ in our mission.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  7. Stanford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 million deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her transfer to Texas Tech on Wednesday, with multiple reports quickly coming out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and likeness (NIL) collective Matador Club, the group of boosters supporting Texas Tech by signing the school’s athletes to endorsement deals, signed the pitcher to a one-year deal for over $1 million.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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