Tag: pornography

TGFI, Volume 533: college disability, European dysfunction, and cloning

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mis­un­der­stand­ing Porn (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There are many ways in which peo­ple mis­un­der­stand porn, but per­haps the best way to sum­ma­rize the cor­rec­tions nec­es­sary is to say that porn is not the same as phys­i­cal sex and porn addic­tion is not mere­ly a mat­ter of sex­u­al temp­ta­tion.… Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be bro­ken by sex with his wife? The sim­plest answer is to ask anoth­er ques­tion: could a Chris­t­ian husband’s temp­ta­tion to idol­a­try be bro­ken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Nei­ther would his anger or pride. It is like ask­ing if a per­son addict­ed to cocaine could have their desire sat­is­fied by eat­ing a deli­cious steak.”
  2. Accom­mo­da­tion Nation (Rose Horow­itch, The Atlantic): “Over the past decade and a half, how­ev­er, the share of stu­dents at selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties who qual­i­fy for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breath­tak­ing pace. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, the num­ber has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berke­ley, it has near­ly quin­tu­pled over the past 15 years.… Paul Gra­ham Fish­er, a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who served as co-chair of the university’s dis­abil­i­ty task force, told me, ‘I have had con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple in the Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tion. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 per­cent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?’ This year, 38 per­cent of Stan­ford under­grad­u­ates are reg­is­tered as hav­ing a dis­abil­i­ty; in the fall quar­ter, 24 per­cent of under­grad­u­ates were receiv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic or hous­ing accom­mo­da­tions.”
  3. I Set A Trap To Catch Stu­dents Cheat­ing With AI. The Result Was Deflat­ing (Will Teague, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “I received 122 paper sub­mis­sions. Of those, the Tro­jan horse eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied 33 AI-gen­er­at­ed papers. I sent these stats to all the stu­dents and gave them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to admit to using AI before they were locked into fail­ing the class. Anoth­er 14 out­ed them­selves. In oth­er words, near­ly 39% of the sub­mis­sions were at least par­tial­ly writ­ten by AI.… Let me tell you why the Tro­jan horse worked. It is because stu­dents do not know what they do not know.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. The Bible Is on Tri­al in Europe (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Räsä­nen has been a mem­ber of par­lia­ment in Fin­land since 1995. She’s also a mem­ber of the nation’s Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church—which in 2019 announced its offi­cial spon­sor­ship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: ‘How can the Church’s doc­tri­nal foun­da­tion, the #Bible, be com­pat­i­ble with the lift­ing up of shame and sin as a sub­ject of pride?’ She post­ed this com­ment along­side a pic­ture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as shame­ful: ‘Men com­mit­ted shame­ful acts with oth­er men, and received in them­selves the due penal­ty for their error.’ The next day, she opened her morn­ing news­pa­per to find out that she was being inves­ti­gat­ed by police for hate speech.… Dur­ing her time as min­is­ter of the Inte­ri­or of Fin­land, between 2011 and 2015, she’d over­seen the police. Now, they were inter­ro­gat­ing her as an offi­cial part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, final­ly reach­ing the Supreme Court of Fin­land last month.”
  5. 4 Ways to Avoid Sex­u­al Sin (Sam All­ber­ry, Cross­way): “Life has a grain to it. Like paper and wood, it has its own inbuilt direc­tion­al­i­ty. The uni­verse is fash­ioned in such a way that it has an under­ly­ing struc­ture. It fol­lows a cer­tain pat­tern with cer­tain con­tours. In order to live well we need to live in a way that runs with this grain and not against it. This is where the book of Proverbs comes in.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. The Trag­ic Hys­te­ria of Abor­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Yes, the vast major­i­ty of women who get abor­tions are glad they got them. But once they meet their babies, the vast major­i­ty of women denied abor­tions dis­cov­er that they total­ly want their babies. This mas­sive sta­tus quo bias makes it hard to sim­ply ‘trust women.’ Which women should we trust — the ones who abort­ed, or the ones who couldn’t? But in the end, it is the women who were denied abor­tion who are more reli­able. If shy peo­ple who don’t go to a par­ty are glad they stayed home, and equal­ly shy peo­ple who were pres­sured to go to a par­ty are equal­ly glad they went, the most nat­ur­al inter­pre­ta­tion is that the par­ty-goers learned a valu­able life les­son — and the home-stay­ers should have gone to the par­ty.… Hys­ter­i­cal­ly abort­ing your baby because you false­ly believe the baby will ruin your life isn’t mere­ly moral­ly wrong; it is trag­ic. Why? Because before long, you almost sure­ly would have loved that baby.”
    • An inter­est­ing approach to the abor­tion debate, espe­cial­ly since the author empha­sizes that he is “an athe­ist of the high­est order.”
  7. As a Twin, I’m Offend­ed by Cloning (Leono­ra Bar­clay, Per­sua­sion): “Who wouldn’t want their pre­cious com­pan­ion back, espe­cial­ly in cute pup­py form? Yet I’m cyn­i­cal of the promise of pet cloning. It’s sim­ply not true that clones are, in any mean­ing­ful sense, the same as the orig­i­nal. I’m an iden­ti­cal twin—a nat­ur­al clone. Iden­ti­cal twins are even more sim­i­lar to each oth­er than a clone is to its DNA donor, because they often share the same upbring­ing and envi­ron­ment. Yet, as I know first-hand, that doesn’t mean our per­son­al­i­ties are the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotin­er Inter­views San­ta Claus (Mike Druck­er, McSweeeney’s Inter­net Ten­den­cy): “I recent­ly spoke with San­ta Claus, who is cur­rent­ly coor­di­nat­ing his staff of immor­tal blue-col­lar elves, about the moral­i­ty of chil­dren and his friend­ship with a crea­ture whom many car­ol­ers con­sid­er a war crim­i­nal: Kram­pus.”
  • In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the inven­tion of the emoti­con (Ben­ji Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “On Sep­tem­ber 19, 1982, Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty com­put­er sci­ence research assis­tant pro­fes­sor Scott Fahlman post­ed a mes­sage to the university’s bul­letin board soft­ware that would lat­er come to shape how peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate online. His pro­pos­al: use 🙂 and 🙁 as mark­ers to dis­tin­guish jokes from seri­ous com­ments. While Fahlman describes him­self as ‘the inven­tor… or at least one of the inven­tors’ of what would lat­er be called the smi­ley face emoti­con, the full sto­ry reveals some­thing more inter­est­ing than a lone genius moment.”
  • I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while per­form­ing Julius Cae­sar (Olly Hawes, The Guardian): “Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usu­al. Then some­thing went wrong. There was a sharp pierc­ing feel­ing. The knife was sup­posed to have been qui­et­ly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had hap­pened while act­ing out my character’s death, and think­ing: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
  • Art Of The Deal: Man Nego­ti­ates Mechan­ic Down From $75 Oil Change To $2,000 Full Brakes And Rotors Replace­ment (Baby­lon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI Volume 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Accused of Des­e­cra­tion, a Doc­tor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Ben­jamin Weis­er, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, sur­veil­lance cam­eras at a thou­sand-year-old Bud­dhist tem­ple on the out­skirts of Tokyo cap­tured a man wear­ing a hood­ed wind­break­er, a white col­lared shirt and black shoes, dab­bing at wood­en pil­lars with oil on his fin­ger­tip.… He is Masahide Kanaya­ma, 63, a sin­gle, child­less doc­tor who had devot­ed his life to help­ing women bear chil­dren; a man whose Chris­t­ian faith was insep­a­ra­ble from his work. He has prac­ticed in Man­hat­tan for near­ly three decades and is an expert in endometrio­sis, a con­di­tion in which cells sim­i­lar to the uter­ine lin­ing grow out­side the uterus. His patients describe how his surg­eries end­ed years of crip­pling pain and, in some cas­es, allowed them to have chil­dren.”
    • Unlocked. A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, brought to my atten­tion by an alum­nus. Pray for Dr. Kanaya­ma.
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, if you aren’t cur­rent­ly a church­go­er and you start attend­ing week­ly, you reduce your chances of devel­op­ing depres­sion by a third. A med­ica­tion this effec­tive would be wide­ly pre­scribed. But while your ther­a­pist or doc­tor may encour­age yoga, med­i­ta­tion, or more time out­side in nature, he or she almost cer­tain­ly won’t rec­om­mend you go to church. The ben­e­fits of ‘orga­nized reli­gion’ don’t fit with the big sto­ry we are telling in the West about the good­ness of aban­don­ing tra­di­tion­al beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Cam­pus­es This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Over the last cou­ple of years, per­haps you’ve heard the sto­ries of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Com­pa­ny, and var­i­ous col­lege min­istries across the coun­try. Sta­tis­tics also sound­ed promising—from Eng­land to the Unit­ed States, more young peo­ple report mak­ing a per­son­al com­mit­ment to Jesus and attend­ing church. The num­ber of peo­ple with no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, which had been increas­ing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watch­ing a pot of water heat up—there were iso­lat­ed bub­bles but not enough to real­ly call it a boil.”
    • An encour­ag­ing arti­cle. Two notes:
      • I’m not hear­ing sim­i­lar reports from any min­istry at Stan­ford (note the Chica­go anec­dotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coali­tion’s the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments mean that this arti­cle is focused on cer­tain min­istries. I believe oth­er min­istries are see­ing sim­i­lar things nation­wide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fet­ter­man, The Free Press): “Gise­le looked over at me. The cor­ner of my mouth was droop­ing ever so slight­ly. The droop­ing last­ed only a sec­ond or two, but she had watched a pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state troop­er who was dri­ving us. ‘I think he’s hav­ing a stroke. We have to get to the hos­pi­tal now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talk­ing about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emer­gency room now!’ The troop­ers switched on the police lights. We hap­pened to be 10 min­utes from Lan­cast­er Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, which spe­cial­izes in strokes and prob­lems of the heart. Had we been in a rur­al area of the state, with­out close access to a hos­pi­tal, I would have died. I did any­way. I am not entire­ly sure of the sequence, but dur­ing surgery, my heart stopped for sev­er­al sec­onds.”
    • Tears came to my eyes while read­ing this. Rec­om­mend­ed regard­less of your polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spo­ti­fy? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chay­ka, The New York­er): “No realm of cul­ture or enter­tain­ment remains untouched by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: Coca-Cola just released a Christ­mas ad made with A.I. visu­als; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hol­ly­wood. But the tech­nol­o­gy has had an espe­cial­ly swift impact on song­writ­ing. A cou­ple of years ago, a smat­ter­ing of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like repli­cat­ing the voic­es of pop stars, includ­ing Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. coun­try song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with per­cus­sive claps and for­get­table lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Coun­try Dig­i­tal Song Sales chart, and passed three mil­lion streams on Spo­ti­fy; the per­former behind it is a square-jawed dig­i­tal avatar named Break­ing Rust. In Sep­tem­ber, Xania Mon­et, an A.I. R. & B. singer cre­at­ed by a young poet in Mis­sis­sip­pi, land­ed a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar record deal after sev­er­al Bill­board-chart­ing sin­gles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn plat­form made mil­lions suing its view­ers (Tarp­ley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since Sep­tem­ber 2017, Vixen’s own­ers had been pur­su­ing anoth­er rev­enue stream: fil­ing thou­sands of boil­er­plate copy­right law­suits against indi­vid­ual ‘John Does’ and col­lect­ing mil­lions in set­tle­ment fees – a mass lit­i­ga­tion cam­paign one fed­er­al judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shake­down’.… Accord­ing to West­law and Pac­er data from the past three years, Strike 3 account­ed for 50% of the fed­er­al copy­right dock­et all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in Sep­tem­ber, when some legal clerk friends men­tioned that near­ly every judge on their cir­cuit was han­dling a stack of Strike 3 cas­es – which are now so con­sis­tent as to have become rou­tine.”
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn com­pa­ny would be uneth­i­cal in any way. How could they treat their users with any­thing but the utmost respect and cour­tesy? Treat­ing peo­ple with dig­ni­ty is prac­ti­cal­ly their entire busi­ness mod­el.
  7. Pick­le­ball on Sun­day: Why some top col­lege play­ers are call­ing foul (Ben Brasch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The NCAA has a long-stand­ing rule that adjusts cham­pi­onship sched­ules to accom­mo­date play­ers or teams from schools with writ­ten poli­cies bar­ring com­pe­ti­tion on Sun­days or oth­er days for reli­gious rea­sons. Twen­ty-two of the NCAA’s rough­ly 1,100 mem­ber schools have such poli­cies this year, the group told The Wash­ing­ton Post. But pick­le­ball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the col­lege game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Chris­tian­i­ty is cen­tral to the Nation­al Col­le­giate Pick­le­ball Asso­ci­a­tion, which hosts region­al and nation­al tour­na­ments, said its founder, Noah Suem­nick. The league’s web­site promi­nent­ly ref­er­ences a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. As we grow out of intel­lec­tu­al ado­les­cence, religion’s pop­u­lar­i­ty soars (Charles Mur­ray, New York Post): “…I had con­clud­ed that when reli­gion no longer sup­plies a frame­work for think­ing about tran­scen­dent qual­i­ties, artists tend to make their work about their per­son­al pref­er­ences, and their per­son­al pref­er­ences tend­ed to be self-absorbed and banal. As an unbe­liev­er, what was I to make of that? One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had fool­ish­ly imag­ined they were tap­ping into the tran­scen­dent, and their delu­sion inspired them. But that line of thought became embar­rass­ing when I con­front­ed their work. Is it plau­si­ble that those indi­vid­u­als who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uni­form­ly stu­pid about the great ques­tions? I decid­ed they under­stood things we don’t. Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach does not need to explain him­self.”
  2. 1 in 5 chemists have delib­er­ate­ly added errors into their papers dur­ing peer review, study finds (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chem­i­cal and Engi­neer­ing News): “More than 20% of chem­istry researchers have delib­er­ate­ly added infor­ma­tion they believe to be incor­rect into their man­u­scripts dur­ing the peer review process, in order to get their papers pub­lished.”
  3. The Girls Who Found God in a Pod­cast (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a week­ly show, and has since amassed more than 20 mil­lion lis­tens, and near­ly two mil­lion fol­low­ers on Insta­gram and Tik­Tok com­bined.… what struck me most about the audi­ence at the Keswick The­ater was how nor­mal, how cool, they all were. These weren’t the car­i­ca­ture of ‘Jesus freaks,’ but more like Regi­na George with eye­lash exten­sions. They spoke about burnout, and lone­li­ness, and how hard it is to get a guy to com­mit to you, and want­i­ng to take life seri­ous­ly.”
  4. Two arti­cles about a wide­spread sin:
    • Escape the Lit­tle Hell of Porn (Marc Sims, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Hat­ing your­self in the after­math of habit­u­al sin feels so right because it feels so close to repen­tance. But it isn’t. Judas hat­ed him­self for his sin, but he didn’t repent. What’s the dif­fer­ence between self-hatred and repen­tance? Real repen­tance begins with what the sin­ful woman in Luke 7 does as she weeps over Jesus’s feet. She’s aware of her sin, so she weeps. But she’s also aware of her Sav­ior, so she brings her tears to him.”
    • What Porn Does to Us (Chris­tine Emba, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “That under­stand­ing of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real inter­ac­tions with oth­er peo­ple. Peo­ple say, ‘It’s just pornog­ra­phy. It’s just some­thing I’m watch­ing. It doesn’t have any­thing to do with my real life.’ That’s not how peo­ple work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.”
  5. My Dad Is in a Chi­nese Prison (Grace Jin Drex­el, The Free Press): “My dad’s name is Ezra Jin. He is the head pas­tor of the Zion Church in Chi­na, a com­mu­ni­ty with a reach of tens of thou­sands of Chris­tians across the coun­try who pri­mar­i­ly prac­tice their faith online or via small under­ground church­es in rent­ed spaces. They are a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple whose faith has endured despite a years-long cam­paign by the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty to intim­i­date them into renounc­ing their faith. In 2018, Chi­nese police shut down my dad’s church in Bei­jing, a beau­ti­ful sanc­tu­ary with over 1,500 con­gre­gants. Refus­ing to cow­er in the face of a total­i­tar­i­an regime, my dad got cre­ative. He moved his ser­mons online, mak­ing them acces­si­ble to peo­ple across the coun­try, and from there, he con­tin­ued to build his con­gre­ga­tion.”
  6. The Appeal of the Cam­pus Right (Julia Stein­berg, The Atlantic): “I arrived at Stan­ford in the fall of 2021 as a pro­gres­sive from Los Ange­les, where most of my peers and I had thought of con­ser­v­a­tives as, essen­tial­ly, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stan­ford Young Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca, as well as the left­ist mag­a­zine, The Stan­ford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op hous­es, com­mu­nal liv­ing spaces large­ly focused on left-lean­ing activism. As the school year got under way, how­ev­er, I began to notice some­thing that grat­ed on me. Debates in the class­room, whether about social­ism or Pla­to or the Quran, felt high­ly del­i­cate, as if every­one was afraid of offend­ing every­one else.”
    • Includ­ing large­ly because of the Stan­ford-spe­cif­ic obser­va­tions. I don’t believe I ever crossed paths with the author when she was an under­grad.
  7. If You Ask A.I. for Mar­riage Advice, It’ll Prob­a­bly Tell You to Get Divorced (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…users who ask AI bots for coun­sel­ing or therapy—which is right now a lot of peo­ple, and is going to be a lot more peo­ple in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Red­dit. In oth­er words, these LLMs are going to spit­ting out answers to ques­tions like, ‘Should I get divorced,’ by repeat­ing how users on Red­dit answer those kinds of ques­tion. And we know how users on Red­dit tend to answer those ques­tions!”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild AI

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Ana­lyzed Uni­ver­si­ty Syl­labi. There’s a Mono­cul­ture (Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, Per­sua­sion): “We just com­plet­ed a study that draws on a data­base of mil­lions of col­lege syl­labi to explore how pro­fes­sors teach three of the nation’s most con­tentious topics—racial bias in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, the Israel-Pales­tine con­flict, and the ethics of abor­tion. Since all these issues sharply divide schol­ars, we want­ed to know whether stu­dents were expect­ed to read a wide or nar­row range of per­spec­tives on them. We won­dered how well pro­fes­sors are intro­duc­ing stu­dents to the moral and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies that divide intel­lec­tu­als and roil our democ­ra­cy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the aca­d­e­m­ic norm is to shield stu­dents from some of our most impor­tant dis­agree­ments.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at the Clare­mont Col­leges (two of polit­i­cal sci­ence and the oth­er of phi­los­o­phy).
  2. Can Sci­ence Reck­on With the Human Soul? (Charles Mur­ray, Wall Street Jour­nal): “…the most robust, hard­est-to-ignore evi­dence comes from a phe­nom­e­non called ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty: a sud­den, tem­po­rary return to self-aware­ness, mem­o­ry and lucid com­mu­ni­ca­tion by a per­son whose brain is no longer func­tion­al usu­al­ly because of advanced demen­tia but occa­sion­al­ly because of menin­gi­tis, brain tumors, strokes or chron­ic psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders.… A strict mate­ri­al­ist expla­na­tion must posit a so-far-unknown capa­bil­i­ty of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the func­tions of its regions. Dis­cov­er­ing this new fea­ture would be akin to find­ing a way that blood can cir­cu­late when the heart stops pump­ing. I see the strict mate­ri­al­is­tic view of con­scious­ness as being in rough­ly the same fix as New­ton­ian physics was in 1887, when the Michel­son-Mor­ley exper­i­ment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should.”
    • By the same author: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong. (Charles Mur­ray, The Free Press): “My dog is smart enough to per­ceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a dis­tinct indi­vid­ual and that I feed her every morn­ing. She also has some per­cep­tions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these under­stand­ings rep­re­sent only a few triv­ial aspects of who I am. I am not invis­i­ble to my dog, just as God is not invis­i­ble to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonethe­less unknow­able to my dog in any mean­ing­ful sense. God is just as unknow­able to me.”
    • Mur­ray, an agnos­tic for most of his life, has just writ­ten a new book about faith called Tak­ing Reli­gion Seri­ous­ly and these are arti­cles meant to gen­er­ate inter­est in it.
  3. An AI became a cryp­to mil­lion­aire. Now it’s fight­ing to become a per­son (Aidan Walk­er, BBC): “Regard­less of what you call Truth Ter­mi­nal – an art project, a scam, an emer­gent sen­tient enti­ty, an influ­encer – the bot like­ly made more mon­ey than you did last year. It also made a lot of mon­ey for var­i­ous humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gam­blers who turned the quips and rid­dles the AI post­ed on X into meme­coins, joke-based cryp­tocur­ren­cies built around trends. At one point, one of these meme­coins reached a val­ue of more than $1bn (£740m) before set­tling around $80m (about £60m).… Many of the details sur­round­ing Truth Ter­mi­nal are dif­fi­cult to con­firm. The project sits some­where between tech­nol­o­gy and spec­ta­cle, a dizzy­ing blur of gen­uine inno­va­tion and inter­net myth.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent. Wild.
  4. Har­vard Stu­dents Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Fac­ul­ty Say (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “Har­vard may be part­ly to blame for encour­ag­ing stu­dent absences, with a pol­i­cy that allows stu­dents to enroll in two class­es that meet at the same time.”
  5. The Inside Sto­ry of the Gaza Deal (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “The Amer­i­cans’ genius was to con­vert that neg­a­tive ener­gy into fuel to pro­pel nego­ti­a­tions to their goal. You want Israel to stop? Then let’s end the war, they told the Sun­ni coun­tries, and thus enlist­ed them in a frame­work that seemed impos­si­ble: a pan-Arab, almost pan-Mus­lim com­mit­ment to the elim­i­na­tion of Hamas. [Israeli Min­is­ter of Strate­gic Affairs] Der­mer draft­ed Netanyahu’s apol­o­gy for the death of the Qatari secu­ri­ty offi­cial in the airstrike; in Doha they rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed with a good­will ges­ture by dra­mat­i­cal­ly ton­ing down Al Jazeera’s hos­tile tone.”
    • ‘Bring Them Home’: The Call Final­ly Being Answered (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “But of course Israel can’t return to Octo­ber 6. In the sto­ry of Joseph, the cap­tive does reappear—but he’s so dif­fer­ent that his own broth­ers don’t rec­og­nize him. About 40 hostages tak­en alive are now dead, either exe­cut­ed by their cap­tors or killed mis­tak­en­ly by Israel’s army. In the fight­ing that has fol­lowed Octo­ber 7, more than 550 sol­diers have been killed, and many thou­sands wound­ed. The reserve army has been forced past the lim­its of its man­pow­er and will need years to recov­er. Israel is, in many ways, a dif­fer­ent coun­try.”
  6. The Evil That Is AI Child Porn (Charles Fain Lehman, The Dis­patch): “But while OpenAI’s inno­va­tion is impres­sive, it is hard to avoid think­ing about how such tech­nol­o­gy might be mis­used. That’s in part because it comes just months after a fed­er­al court dis­missed a charge for pos­ses­sion of arti­fi­cial­ly-gen­er­at­ed child pornog­ra­phy, claim­ing it was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al to enforce under the rel­e­vant fed­er­al child obscen­i­ty statute. Such con­cerns are par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant giv­en some AI com­pa­nies’ irre­spon­si­ble approach to issues of child sex­u­al­iza­tion, as in the recent rev­e­la­tion that Meta had pre­vi­ous­ly allowed its AI ser­vices to con­duct ‘sen­su­al’ con­ver­sa­tions with minors. (It changed its poli­cies after press inquiries and back­lash.)”
  7. The Great Fem­i­niza­tion (Helen Andrews, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “The New York Times staff became major­i­ty female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 per­cent. Med­ical schools became major­i­ty female in 2019. Women became a major­i­ty of the col­lege-edu­cat­ed work­force nation­wide in 2019. Women became a major­i­ty of col­lege instruc­tors in 2023. Women are not yet a major­i­ty of the man­agers in Amer­i­ca but they might be soon, as they are now 46 per­cent. So the tim­ing fits. Wok­e­ness arose around the same time that many impor­tant insti­tu­tions tipped demo­graph­i­cal­ly from major­i­ty male to major­i­ty female. The sub­stance fits, too. Every­thing you think of as wok­e­ness involves pri­or­i­tiz­ing the fem­i­nine over the mas­cu­line: empa­thy over ratio­nal­i­ty, safe­ty over risk, cohe­sion over com­pe­ti­tion.”
    • This one is con­tro­ver­sial, just FYI. Unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing.
    • Sec­u­lar push­back: The “Fem­i­niza­tion” Dis­course as Par­ti­san Hack­ery (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “I would’ve prob­a­bly nod­ded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a ratio­nal, dare I say mas­cu­line, thinker means updat­ing as new infor­ma­tion comes in. Estab­lish­ment insti­tu­tions have got­ten much bet­ter since the height of the Great Awok­en­ing, as their crit­ics have been cir­cling the drain. This has hap­pened at the same time the right has become more mas­cu­line-cod­ed, which has to be fac­tored into any analy­sis about the sup­posed dan­gers of fem­i­niza­tion.”
    • Some the­o­log­i­cal push­back from an Aus­tralian Angli­can the­olo­gian: https://x.com/danitreweek/status/1979002052811657289

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 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

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 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. John­ston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Whis­per­ing Ear­ring (Scott Alexan­der): “The ear­ring is a lit­tle topaz tetra­he­dron dan­gling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whis­pers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Bet­ter for you if you take me off.’ If the wear­er ignores the advice, it nev­er again repeats that par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion.”
    • A brief sto­ry. 10/10 rec­om­mend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it time­ly.
  2. These Inter­nal Doc­u­ments Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Com­pa­nies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of peo­ple work­ing at porn com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from videos of chil­dren being raped? Thanks to a fil­ing error in a Fed­er­al Dis­trict Court in Alaba­ma, releas­ing thou­sands of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments from Porn­hub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Inter­nal mem­os seem to show exec­u­tives obsessed with mak­ing mon­ey by attract­ing the biggest audi­ences they could, pedophiles includ­ed. In one memo, Porn­hub man­agers pro­posed words to be banned from video descrip­tions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kid­dy’ — while rec­om­mend­ing that the site con­tin­ue to allow ‘bru­tal,’ ‘child­hood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwill­ing,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wast­ed.’ One inter­nal note says that a per­son who post­ed a sex­u­al video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made mon­ey.’”
    • This is a dis­tress­ing read. Kristof has been per­sis­tent on this issue and it is much to his cred­it. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There’s a bet­ter way to tell the sto­ry of the Chris­t­ian Right’s ori­gins that makes sense of all the data – the tim­ing of the Chris­t­ian Right’s for­ma­tion, the com­mit­ment of evan­gel­i­cals to the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and even the enthu­si­asm of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers for Don­ald Trump.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. A Bat­tle That Shaped Black Evan­gel­i­cals (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In uni­ver­si­ties, the his­to­ry of the ear­ly Black church found a home in Africana stud­ies, which focused more on the growth of Chris­tian­i­ty among Black peo­ple and less on the type of Chris­tian­i­ty they prac­ticed. In con­trast, the writ­ten his­to­ry of ear­ly evan­gel­i­cal­ism pre­dom­i­nant­ly fol­lowed the lives of its white lead­ers and sub­scribers. But even though we’ve inher­it­ed seg­re­gat­ed sto­ries, his­to­ry paints a pic­ture of an inte­grat­ed sto­ry in which Black evan­gel­i­cals always exist­ed.”
  5. Con­ti­nen­tal Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dis­patch): “Today, to an extent that few peo­ple on either con­ti­nent have ful­ly inter­nal­ized, a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic gulf sep­a­rates Amer­i­ca and Europe. On aver­age, Amer­i­cans are now near­ly twice as rich as Euro­peans.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle that antic­i­pates and effec­tive­ly responds to the most com­mon objec­tions to its the­sis.
  6. The Pro­fes­sors Are Using Chat­G­PT, and Some Stu­dents Aren’t Hap­py About It (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “The Times con­tact­ed dozens of pro­fes­sors whose stu­dents had men­tioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no con­sen­sus among them as to what was accept­able. Some acknowl­edged using Chat­G­PT to help grade stu­dents’ work; oth­ers decried the prac­tice. Some empha­sized the impor­tance of trans­paren­cy with stu­dents when deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive A.I., while oth­ers said they didn’t dis­close its use because of stu­dents’ skep­ti­cism about the tech­nol­o­gy. Most, how­ev­er, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s expe­ri­ence at North­east­ern — in which her pro­fes­sor appeared to use A.I. to gen­er­ate class notes and slides — was per­fect­ly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Reject­ed Gen­er­a­tion’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone con­ver­sa­tions with cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, focus­ing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclu­sion might be strongest. I asked the stu­dents if the ‘most reject­ed gen­er­a­tion’ the­sis res­onat­ed with them. Every sin­gle one said it did. Sev­er­al of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a super­s­e­lec­tive col­lege, the rat race would be over. On the con­trary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
    • Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • New Pope Now Sec­ond-Most Influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian Named ‘Bob’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Nov­el Direc­tion for Trol­ley Prob­lems (SMBC)
  • Mod­ern (xkcd)
  • Even as pope, Leo XIV might have to deal with U.S. tax returns (Vic­to­ria Craw & Julie Zauzmer Weil, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Unit­ed States gen­er­al­ly requires all cit­i­zens to file an annu­al tax return, even those who live out of the coun­try. But assum­ing he doesn’t renounce his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Leo — born in the Chica­go area and known until this week as Robert Pre­vost — has spe­cial tax con­sid­er­a­tions, both as a cler­gy­man and now as the head of a for­eign gov­ern­ment.… it’s pos­si­ble the IRS will issue a pri­vate let­ter specif­i­cal­ly address­ing his sit­u­a­tion. Or Con­gress might even pass a law spelling out the tax sit­u­a­tion of the first Amer­i­can pope, Wal­czak spec­u­lat­ed.”

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 #496: Christianity in Silicon Valley, Bogus World Happiness, and Smut

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. Chris­tian­i­ty Was “Bor­der­line Ille­gal” in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Now It’s the New Reli­gion (Zoë Bernard, Van­i­ty Fair): “It used to be that the 20-some­thing whiz kid who cod­ed a viral game and dropped out of Stan­ford was a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist dar­ling. ‘VCs used to throw mon­ey at that guy,’ said a woman who man­ages com­mu­ni­ca­tions at a top-tier ven­ture firm. ‘Now if some­one comes in and says, ‘I love my par­ents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work eth­ic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’’ ”
  2. Sex With­out Women (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “…the force that through the green fuse dri­ves the flower (and the mon­ey) is het­ero­sex­u­al male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so var­ied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a gen­er­a­tion of men who think of porn not as a back­up to hav­ing sex, but as an improve­ment on it. They pre­fer it.”
  3. The World Hap­pi­ness Report Is a Sham (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copen­hagen or Stock­holm, you rarely see any­body smile. Could these real­ly be the hap­pi­est places in the whole wide world? So, to hon­or World Hap­pi­ness Day, I final­ly decid­ed to fol­low my hunch, and look into the research on this top­ic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imag­ined. To put it polite­ly, the World Hap­pi­ness Report is beset with method­olog­i­cal prob­lems. To put it blunt­ly, it is a sham.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. We Were Bad­ly Mis­led About the Event That Changed Our Lives (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If any­one needs con­vinc­ing that the next pan­dem­ic is only an acci­dent away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a pres­ti­gious sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (yes, the same insti­tu­tion), describe tak­ing sam­ples of virus­es found in bats (yes, the same ani­mal) and exper­i­ment­ing to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pan­dem­ic risk.… Why haven’t we learned our les­son? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the req­ui­site steps to keep us safe, with­out also admit­ting it was always risky. And that per­haps we were mis­led on pur­pose.”
  5. The real­i­ty of pros­ti­tu­tion is not com­plex. It is sim­ple (Rachel Moran, Psy­che): “So many of these women’s sto­ries stay with me: the 19-year-old French girl who got into pros­ti­tu­tion as a direct result of watch­ing a TV series that depict­ed pros­ti­tu­tion as glam­orous and empow­er­ing; the mid-20s Aus­tralian woman who believed – because well-fund­ed NGOs told her to believe – that ‘sex work’ was legit­i­mate employ­ment; or the ear­ly 20s Ger­man woman who told me that, because pimp­ing had been decrim­i­nalised in her coun­try, she’d got the mes­sage that what was legal­ly sanc­tioned sure­ly had to be OK. Just about every man in Ger­many seemed to have got the same mes­sage, and the result was social car­nage.”
    • The author was a pros­ti­tute from the ages of 15 to 22.
  6. As Trump Attacks Elite Col­leges, Their Usu­al Allies Are Nowhere in Sight (Ginia Bel­lafante, New York Times): “Pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties have come to find adver­saries in many worlds, among the work­ing class, among rich alum­ni, among high­ly edu­cat­ed pro­gres­sives who find them self-regard­ing.”
  7. Pow­er of Babel: Real-Time AI Trans­la­tion May Be Com­ing to Church Near You (Ale­ja Hert­zler-McCain, The Roys Report): “John Mehl, a teach­ing pas­tor at Colorado’s Tim­ber­line Church, and Miguel Flo­res Rob­les, the drum­mer in the wor­ship band at Timberline’s Wind­sor cam­pus, get along well, even though they don’t under­stand each other’s lan­guage. Flo­res, who is only flu­ent in Span­ish, also is unable to com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the leader of the wor­ship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s ser­mons, which are in Eng­lish. The answer to this rid­dle is arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence real-time trans­la­tion, a tech­nol­o­gy that has yet to become wide­spread in hous­es of wor­ship but is already pro­vid­ing a way for con­gre­ga­tions to wel­come mem­bers who don’t speak their lan­guage.”
    • I find it amus­ing that in the arti­cle Tim­ber­line is described as “non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al” although it is an Assem­blies of God con­gre­ga­tion.

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 488

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. Spec­u­la­tion: Phys­i­cal Pain Might Not Be Very Bad? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “But it seems like chron­ic pain is not as strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide as the (biased) lit­er­a­ture sug­gests, that high pain-tol­er­ance is mod­est­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide, and that phar­ma­co­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions reduc­ing pain don’t decrease and actu­al­ly increase sui­cide. So it real­ly seems like pain doesn’t cause sui­cide, and it almost seems like lack of pain caus­es sui­cide.”
    • Stone with anoth­er banger. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
    • I would like to go on record as say­ing I am not a fan of pain. Indeed, since Rev­e­la­tion 21:4 informs us that there will be no pain in heav­en I do not think I am going too far in being unen­thused about pain gen­er­al­ly: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heav­en.” That being said, I like Stone’s argu­ment a lot.
  2. The Courage To Com­mit (Freya India, Sub­stack): “It’s strange because my gen­er­a­tion talks so much about empow­er­ment, agency, inde­pen­dence, and fear of los­ing our­selves, yet we will will­ing­ly offer our­selves up to the algo­rithm. We will sur­ren­der our souls to the machine with­out a sec­ond thought…but are ter­ri­fied to sur­ren­der any­thing in a human rela­tion­ship. Part­ly because we are young, yes, but also because that’s the mes­sage we hear every­where: be care­ful not to com­mit to any one thing, nev­er nar­row your options, don’t allow your­self to be vul­ner­a­ble. It’s fun­ny because I was talk­ing to a friend recent­ly about how if you get engaged young now, or do any­thing that sig­nals actu­al com­mit­ment, that’s when fam­i­ly and friends wor­ry for you. It’s like some par­ents are pro­tec­tive only when it comes to com­mit­ment. They wor­ry about you clos­ing down options.”
    • The post is pay­walled past a point, but even the part that is freely avail­able is quite stim­u­lat­ing.
  3. Last Boys at the Begin­ning of His­to­ry (Mana Afsari, The Point Mag­a­zine): “In ear­ly 2017, I asked the ‘sec­u­lar human­ist chap­lain’ at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where I stud­ied, how I could set myself up for a good life in col­lege and beyond. How could I be hap­py? How could I find a voca­tion or a call­ing? How could I be a good per­son? The chap­lain told me to look around and iden­ti­fy the peo­ple who had lives I want­ed to live, and ask myself what their val­ues were. I quick­ly real­ized those moral exem­plars were not in the sec­u­lar stu­dent group I’d joined, which had become increas­ing­ly moral­ly vacant, pseu­do-ratio­nal­ist and eccen­tric, drawn to effec­tive altru­ism and con­vinced by Sam Har­ris that mur­der was mere­ly a social con­struct. To say noth­ing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embrac­ing polyamory as a way to grand­fa­ther in sit­u­a­tion­ships or infi­deli­ties, while being told in spe­cial sem­i­nars that monogamy was a colo­nial con­struct and should be dis­card­ed any­way. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my pri­ma­ry con­cern was hav­ing mod­els for healthy relationships—not resist­ing colo­nial­ism in my dat­ing life. I had no inter­est in sub­vert­ing things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear fam­i­ly, faith, a clas­si­cal education—that I’d nev­er had or known in the first place. I want­ed a seri­ous boyfriend.”
    • This essay describes some­thing real and under­noticed. It cov­ers a lot of ground, and the excerpt above isn’t real­ly cen­tral.
  4. The ‘Sur­pris­ing Rebirth’ at Oxford: Per­spec­tives from a Grad­u­ate Stu­dent (Car­olyn Mor­ris-Col­lier, Gospel Coali­tion): “While my non­re­li­gious friends here in Oxford are still curi­ous about how I make sense of Christianity’s his­to­ry of colo­nial­ism or how I ratio­nal­ize its creeds, they seem more intrigued by how my faith ori­ents my life, pur­pose, and emo­tion­al world. This shift from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Does it work?’ reflects a broad­er cul­tur­al change that the church should mind­ful­ly pre­pare to engage.”
  5. The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Com­ing to an End (Marc Novi­coff, The Atlantic): “…since the 1990s, Amer­i­ca has had two sets of laws con­cern­ing under­age access to pornog­ra­phy. In the phys­i­cal world, the law gen­er­al­ly requires young-look­ing cus­tomers to show ID prov­ing they’re 18 before they can access adult mate­ri­als. In the online world, the law has tra­di­tion­al­ly required, well, noth­ing. Under Supreme Court prece­dent estab­lished dur­ing the internet’s infan­cy, forc­ing web­sites to ver­i­fy the age of their users is bur­den­some and inef­fec­tive, if not impos­si­ble, and thus incom­pat­i­ble with the First Amend­ment. That arrange­ment final­ly appears to be crum­bling.”
  6. The Ulti­mate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Exec­u­tive Orders (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The White House web­site, at the time of this writ­ing, lists 48 items under ‘pres­i­den­tial actions.’ Among these are dozens of first day exec­u­tive orders.  News reports say that Trump was plan­ning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the exec­u­tive orders released so far do, bro­ken down by top­ic. I then go on to take a big pic­ture per­spec­tive regard­ing what we have seen so far means for the future of the coun­try and what we can expect from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion going for­ward.”
    • This seems like a good sum­ma­ry. It only cov­ers the first orders — you’ll need to look else­where to find reflec­tion on the stuff from sub­se­quent days.
  7. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s Blind Spot: How Amer­i­ca Over­looks Its Own Tal­ent (Tom Owens, Sub­stack): “Over­whelm­ing­ly, Nation­al Mer­it Schol­ars matric­u­late to large state schools where they are award­ed gen­er­ous schol­ar­ships. The #1 des­ti­na­tion is the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma, which pro­vides… not only a full ride, but free hous­ing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many stu­dents to com­plete a master’s degree. That last one is extreme­ly strate­gic on Alabama’s part, also build­ing up the com­pet­i­tive­ness of their grad­u­ate pro­grams by keep­ing these stu­dents in the state and their pro­grams. Bama is a smart oper­a­tor here, apply­ing the same prin­ci­ples to aca­d­e­m­ic recruit­ing as they do to their foot­ball pro­gram. Also notable is their match­ing of pageant schol­ar­ships. One won­ders exact­ly what they’re up to in just straight­for­ward­ly recruit­ing a smart, good-look­ing stu­dent body. This is a cun­ning long-term invest­ment in their alum­ni base, as both brains and beau­ty are pre­dic­tive of life suc­cess. Not to men­tion that the medi­an white-col­lar pro­fes­sion­al can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice sub­urbs of Birm­ing­ham com­pared to a hov­el in NYC or SF, even if it means giv­ing up any hope of being elite.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing essay. I don’t know what per­cent­age of this arti­cle I believe, but it is not 0%. It’s not 100%, but it’s def­i­nite­ly not 0%. Worth a pon­der.

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.