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 475

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. Is the World Ready for a Reli­gious Come­back? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get non­be­liev­ers to offer kind words for ‘cul­tur­al’ Chris­tian­i­ty or endorse the soci­o­log­i­cal util­i­ty of church­go­ing. The chal­lenge is to go fur­ther, to per­suade anx­ious mod­erns that reli­gion is more than mere­ly prag­mat­i­cal­ly use­ful, more than just a wist­ful hope — that a reli­gious frame­work actu­al­ly makes much more sense of real­i­ty than the alleged­ly hard­head­ed mate­ri­al­ist alter­na­tive.”
    • Dis­cuss­es three books Douthat thinks are help­ful.
  2. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Dou­bled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Con­fes­sore, New York Times): “Striv­ing to touch ‘every indi­vid­ual on cam­pus,’ as the school puts it, Michi­gan has poured rough­ly a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars into D.E.I. since 2016, accord­ing to an inter­nal pre­sen­ta­tion I obtained.… Michigan’s own data sug­gests that in striv­ing to become more diverse and equi­table, the school has also become less inclu­sive: In a sur­vey released in late 2022, stu­dents and fac­ul­ty mem­bers report­ed a less pos­i­tive cam­pus cli­mate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belong­ing. Stu­dents were less like­ly to inter­act with peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent race or reli­gion or with dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics — the exact kind of engage­ment D.E.I. pro­grams, in the­o­ry, are meant to fos­ter.”
    • Relat­ed: I Don’t Want to Live in a Mono­cul­ture, and Nei­ther Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my expe­ri­ence, the more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or the­o­log­i­cal­ly ‘pure’ an insti­tu­tion becomes, the more wrong it is like­ly to be, espe­cial­ly if it takes on a dif­fi­cult or com­plex task. Ide­o­log­i­cal mono­cul­tures aren’t just bad for the minor­i­ty that’s silenced, harassed or can­celed when­ev­er its mem­bers raise their voic­es in dis­sent. It’s ter­ri­ble for the con­fi­dent major­i­ty — and for the con­fi­dent majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puber­ty Block­ers Goes Unpub­lished Because of Pol­i­tics, Doc­tor Says (Azeen Gho­rayshi, New York Times): “An influ­en­tial doc­tor and advo­cate of ado­les­cent gen­der treat­ments said she had not pub­lished a long-await­ed study of puber­ty-block­ing drugs because of the charged Amer­i­can polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment.… She said she was con­cerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use block­ers because it doesn’t impact them,’ refer­ring to trans­gen­der ado­les­cents.”
    • JK Rowl­ing sum­ma­rized the sto­ry well: ‘We must not pub­lish a study that says we’re harm­ing chil­dren because peo­ple who say we’re harm­ing chil­dren will use the study as evi­dence that we’re harm­ing chil­dren, which might make it dif­fi­cult for us to con­tin­ue harm­ing chil­dren.’
  4. Our Robot Sto­ries Haven’t Pre­pared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these sto­ries, the defin­ing aspects of human­i­ty are some com­bi­na­tion of free will, strong emo­tion and moral­i­ty. The robot begins as a being fol­low­ing its pro­gram­ming and mys­ti­fied by human emo­tion­al­i­ty, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ulti­mate­ly to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and there­fore need to be guid­ed out of mere­ly intel­lec­tu­al self-con­scious­ness into a deep­er aware­ness of emo­tion­al­i­ty, of heart as well as head. We are get­ting a real­i­ty where our bots seem so deeply emo­tion­al — lov­ing, car­ing, heart­felt — that it’s hard to dis­tin­guish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their appar­ent warmth a refuge from a dif­fi­cult or cru­el world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Crit­i­ciz­ing Every­thing (Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “I’m not sad that I read those crit­i­cal the­o­rists. I think it’s a use­ful per­spec­tive to have. My prob­lem is that I deformed the world to fit a nar­row world­view, and I let it direct my life. The big­ger prob­lem is that this par­a­digm has become a regime in cer­tain quar­ters of high­er edu­ca­tion. You are coerced into hold­ing that world­view and pun­ished if you utter ideas out­side of its scope. Crit­i­cal the­o­ry is like a sharp kitchen knife: very use­ful for some things, like cut­ting meat, but if you eat your cere­al with it, you’ll hurt your­self. And if you point it at some­one else, then it’s a weapon. In some cir­cles, on some cam­pus­es, every oth­er uten­sil has been removed from the intel­lec­tu­al cut­lery draw­er, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans can pass the Ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing Test (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “We first chal­lenged each side to pre­tend to be the oth­er side, and then we had both sides try to dis­tin­guish between the truth-tellers and the fak­ers. If par­ti­sans have no idea who the oth­er side is or what they believe, it should be hard for peo­ple to do a con­vinc­ing impres­sion of the oppo­site par­ty. So let’s see!”
    • Inter­est­ing study. In the foot­notes he men­tioned he gath­ered the data in 2019 but nev­er got around to pub­lish­ing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Ratio­nal And Humane To Lack Strong Polit­i­cal Beliefs (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “We don’t need the aver­age per­son to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-pover­ty pol­i­cy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to some­thing like that, because it’s hope­less­ly com­plex and even experts who devote their lives to that sub­ject dis­agree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every oth­er sub­ject — are them­selves incom­pe­tent, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly cap­tured, or oth­er­wise unlike­ly to help lead you clos­er to use­ful insights.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Sub­stack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

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.