Tag: science

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 449

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 449, which is not a super inter­est­ing num­ber. It has this going for it: its base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion (121122) begins with the same dig­its as its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion (1211).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Wor­ship Atten­dance in Amer­i­ca: Evi­dence from Cell­phone Data (Devin G. Pope, NBER): “I estab­lish sev­er­al key find­ings. First, 73% of peo­ple step into a reli­gious place of wor­ship at least once dur­ing the year on the pri­ma­ry day of wor­ship (e.g. Sun­days for most Chris­t­ian church­es). How­ev­er, only 5% of Amer­i­cans attend ser­vices ‘week­ly’, far few­er than the ~22% who report to do so in sur­veys. The num­ber of occa­sion­al vs. fre­quent atten­ders varies sub­stan­tial­ly by reli­gion. I esti­mate that approx­i­mate­ly 45M Amer­i­cans attend wor­ship ser­vices in a typ­i­cal week of the year, but with large changes around Hol­i­days (e.g. East­er).”
    • Excerpt is from the abstract. Author is a prof of behav­ioral sci­ence and eco­nom­ics at U Chica­go.
    • See also this (some­what harsh) cri­tique by Lyman Stone: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1779889740260499820 (read the whole thread for the cri­tique)
    • Response from Devin Pope, on reli­gious atten­dance (Devin Pope, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “There are def­i­nite­ly lim­i­ta­tions with the cell­phone data (I’ve had about 100 peo­ple tell me that I’m not doing a good job track­ing Ortho­dox Jews!). I know that these issues exist. But sur­vey data has its own issues. Social desir­abil­i­ty bias and oth­er issues could lead to wide­ly incor­rect esti­mates of the num­ber of peo­ple who fre­quent­ly attend ser­vices (and sur­veys are going to have a hard time sam­pling Ortho­dox Jews too!). Giv­en the dif­fi­cul­ty of mea­sur­ing some of these ques­tions, I think that a new method – even with lim­i­ta­tions – is use­ful.”
    • Lyman Stone help­ful­ly replies to Devin Pope (Twit­ter thread)
    • Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. If you don’t have time to dive in then just read the abstract of the ini­tial arti­cle and the Stone’s final Twit­ter thread.
  2. Amer­i­cans are still not wor­ried enough about the risk of world war (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “So if you were liv­ing at any point in 1931 through 1940, you would already be wit­ness­ing con­flicts that would even­tu­al­ly turn into the blood­i­est, most cat­a­clysmic war that human­i­ty has yet known — but you might not real­ize it. You would be stand­ing in the foothills of the Sec­ond World War, but unless you were able to make far-sight­ed pre­dic­tions, you wouldn’t know what hor­rors lurked in the near future. In case the par­al­lel isn’t blind­ing­ly obvi­ous, we might be stand­ing in the foothills of World War 3 right now. If WW3 hap­pens, future blog­gers might list the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in a time­line like the one I just gave.”
    • This was pub­lished before Iran attacked Israel. btw.
  3. How to Stop Los­ing 17,500 Kid­neys (San­ti Ruiz, Sub­stack): “Greg and the researchers that he worked with showed that there are 17,500 kid­neys, 7,500 liv­ers, 1,500 hearts, and 1,500 lungs that go untrans­plant­ed every year from poten­tial Amer­i­can organ donors. For scale, that means the Unit­ed States does not need to have a wait­ing list for liv­ers, hearts, or lungs with­in three years, and the kid­ney wait­ing list should come way down. That data con­vinced not only the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, but also the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. This reform move­ment has now crossed three admin­is­tra­tions, and that almost nev­er hap­pens.”
  4. Should We Change Species to Save Them? (Emi­ly Anthes, New York Times): “In some ways, assist­ed evo­lu­tion is an argu­ment — or, per­haps, an acknowl­edg­ment — that there is no step­ping back, no future in which humans do not pro­found­ly shape the lives and fates of wild crea­tures. To Dr. Harley, it has become clear that pre­vent­ing more extinc­tions will require human inter­ven­tion, inno­va­tion and effort.”
    • Includ­ing part­ly for the amaz­ing head­er art. Unlocked.
  5. Abol­ish Grades (Bethany Lor­den, Stan­ford Review): “I have earned an ‘A’ on archi­tec­ture draw­ings which were not my most care­ful, on physics prob­lem sets that I did not ful­ly under­stand, on sto­ries which were not my most cre­ative. Some­thing is bro­ken in the grad­ing sys­tem. Feed­back on work ought to be in words, not let­ters, and it should be rel­a­tive to a stu­den­t’s best work, not to the per­for­mance of the class.”
    • Bethany is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  6. Mate Poach­ing: Social Taboo or Healthy Way to Find Love? (Kevin Ben­nett, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “Psy­cho­log­i­cal research sug­gests that 10 to 20 per­cent of new rela­tion­ships among het­ero­sex­u­al cou­ples are formed direct­ly from mate poach­ing. One study found that 10 to 15 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants’ cur­rent rela­tion­ships were the result of suc­cess­ful mate poach­ing. Anoth­er study sur­veyed under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and found that 20 per­cent were cur­rent­ly involved in a rela­tion­ship that began this way.… Research sug­gests that mate poachers—and those most sus­cep­ti­ble to poaching—share some char­ac­ter­is­tics. There is a link between nar­cis­sism, infi­deli­ty, uncom­mit­ted sex, and mate poach­ing, and these find­ings are not lim­it­ed to mod­ern indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries.”
    • That’s a lot of rela­tion­ships begun on the shady side! A bit of advice from a long­time observ­er of col­lege romances: if they cheat with you they are like­ly to cheat on you.
  7. Switch to Web-Based Sur­veys Dur­ing COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic Left Out the Most Reli­gious, Cre­at­ing a False Impres­sion of Rapid Reli­gious Decline (Schn­abel et al, Soci­ol­o­gy of Religion):  “Although at first glance it appears that intense reli­gion declined dra­mat­i­cal­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion reveals how this shift is a func­tion of changes in how the sur­vey was field­ed rather than Amer­i­cans turn­ing away from reli­gion dur­ing a time of cri­sis.… reli­gion is more per­sis­tent than it appears, intense­ly reli­gious peo­ple are less like­ly to agree to par­tic­i­pate in sur­veys, and data col­lec­tion efforts like the typ­i­cal in-per­son GSS are invalu­able for accu­rate­ly esti­mat­ing reli­gion and oth­er ide­o­log­i­cal fac­tors in the Unit­ed States asso­ci­at­ed with the like­li­hood of par­tic­i­pat­ing in sur­veys.”
    • The authors are soci­ol­o­gists at Cor­nell, Har­vard, and NYU. Fas­ci­nat­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Sticky Sit­u­a­tion (Load­ing Artist) — there are two kinds of peo­ple
  • A Dun­geons & Drag­ons actu­al play show is going to sell out Madi­son Square Gar­den (Aman­da Sil­ber­ling, Tech Crunch): “Dropout’s Dun­geons & Drag­ons actu­al play show, Dimen­sion 20, is get­ting pret­ty close to sell­ing out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after tick­et sales opened to the gen­er­al pub­lic. To the unini­ti­at­ed, it may seem absurd to go to a mas­sive sports are­na and watch peo­ple play D&D. As one Red­di­tor com­ment­ed, ‘This bog­gles my mind. When I was play­ing D&D in the ear­ly eight­ies, I would have nev­er believed that there was a future where peo­ple would watch live D&D at Madi­son Square Gar­den. It’s incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me.’ ”

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 424

lots of arti­cles from an emo­tion­al­ly drain­ing week

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

This is vol­ume 424, which is sym­met­ri­cal and also the sum of 10 con­sec­u­tive primes. 424 = 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Today’s roundup was dif­fi­cult to assem­ble. First, there are the obvi­ous emo­tion­al chal­lenges of read­ing too much about the hor­rif­ic raid by Hamas. If you are won­der­ing whether you should dive deeply into orig­i­nal sources (Insta­gram sto­ries from on the field, etc), no you should not. It will harm your soul. Sec­ond, there is a whole sea of infor­ma­tion and opin­ions and I have a very small buck­et. Third, it was a busy week (and today in par­tic­u­lar was quite hec­tic for me). All that hav­ing been said, if you find oth­er inter­est­ing sto­ries about the unfold­ing sit­u­a­tion in Israel, please send them my way.

  1. The best/most inter­est­ing sto­ries I’ve seen about the Hamas attack on Israel.
    • ‘We’re Going to Die Here’ (Yair Rosen­berg, The Atlantic): “First I’m hear­ing this gun­fire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neigh­bor­hood, and then I hear it out­side my win­dow. I’m in the room with my wife, and I hear the gun­fire direct­ly out­side my win­dow, as well as shout­ing. I under­stand Ara­bic. I under­stood exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing: that Hamas has infil­trat­ed our kib­butz, that there are ter­ror­ists out­side my win­dow, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if any­one is going to come to save us.”
      • This is an amaz­ing sto­ry. 100% worth read­ing.
    • The attacks on Israel, and the response. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Am I pro-Israel or pro-Pales­tine? I have no idea. I’m pro-not-killing-civil­ians. I’m pro-not-trap­ping-mil­lions-of-peo­ple-in-open-air-pris­ons. I’m pro-not-shoot­ing-grand­mas-in-the-back-of-the-head. I’m pro-not-flat­ten­ing-apart­ment-com­plex­es. I’m pro-not-rap­ing-women-and-tak­ing-hostages. I’m pro-not-unjust­ly-impris­on­ing-peo­ple-with­out-due-process. I’m pro-free­dom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we nev­er see in this con­flict any­more. What­ev­er this is, I want none of it.”
      • This is a well-done roundup fea­tur­ing diverse view­points.
    • Dark­ness Vis­i­ble (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its found­ing was both a moral neces­si­ty and a prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty. The moral neces­si­ty is proven by last week­end. If Jews can be sub­ject to a medieval pogrom in their own coun­try in 2023, what hope could they ever have with­out a coun­try at all? The prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty lies in the sim­ple fact that the state of Israel was cre­at­ed on land laden with deep reli­gious sym­bol­ism, where much of the exist­ing pop­u­la­tion did not give con­sent, and despite the ear­ly promise, no coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans was ever con­struct­ed along­side it.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive essay than many I’ve read so far.
    • What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS (David French, New York Times): “…Israel’s goal is not to pun­ish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from pow­er in Gaza the way the Iraqi mil­i­tary, the Unit­ed States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Fal­lu­ja, Rama­di and every oth­er city ISIS con­trolled in Iraq. That can’t be accom­plished by air pow­er alone. If remov­ing Hamas from pow­er is the goal, then that almost cer­tain­ly means sol­diers and tanks fight­ing in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of rough­ly two mil­lion peo­ple. The pur­pose of this newslet­ter is to give you a primer on both the mil­i­tary dif­fi­cul­ty of the task and the human­i­tar­i­an con­straints on it, along with the lim­i­ta­tions that are unique to Israel.”
      • Unlocked — a thor­ough arti­cle from an author with high­ly rel­e­vant exper­tise.
    • Hamas prac­ticed in plain sight, post­ing video of mock attack weeks before bor­der breach (Michael Beiseck­er &  Sarah El Deeb, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “A slick­ly pro­duced two-minute pro­pa­gan­da video post­ed to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12 shows fight­ers using explo­sives to blast through a repli­ca of the bor­der gate, sweep in on pick­up trucks and then move build­ing by build­ing through a full-scale recon­struc­tion of an Israeli town, fir­ing auto­mat­ic weapons at human-sil­hou­et­ted paper tar­gets. The Islam­ic mil­i­tant group’s live-fire exer­cise dubbed oper­a­tion ‘Strong Pil­lar’ also had mil­i­tants in body armor and com­bat fatigues car­ry­ing out oper­a­tions that includ­ed the destruc­tion of mock-ups of the wall’s con­crete tow­ers and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions anten­na, just as they would do for real in the dead­ly attack last Sat­ur­day.”
    • As Deaths Soar in Gaza From Israeli Strikes, Egypt Offers Aid, but No Exit (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Egypt has long insist­ed that Israel must solve the Pales­tin­ian issue with­in its bor­ders, to keep alive aspi­ra­tions for a future Pales­tin­ian state. Allow­ing large num­bers of Gazans to cross over, even as refugees, would ‘revive the idea that Sinai is the alter­na­tive coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans,’ said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty. A relat­ed sce­nario that wor­ries Egypt is that it could end up as the de fac­to admin­is­tra­tor of Gaza.”
      • Egypt, of course, is the only nation besides Israel that shares a bor­der with the Gaza Strip. It is often over­looked by Amer­i­cans because we don’t know our geog­ra­phy very well, but Egypt is equal­ly involved in pre­vent­ing the migra­tion of the Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.
    • How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wal­l’ (Samuel Grana­dos, Ruby Mellen, Lau­ren Tier­ney, Artur Galocha, Cate Brown and Aaron Steck­el­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fence was breached at 29 points, accord­ing to the Israel Defense Forces. Though there wereIs­raeli guard tow­ers posi­tioned every 500 feet along the perime­ter of the wall at some points, the fight­ers appeared to encounter lit­tle resis­tance. The bor­der was min­i­mal­ly staffed, it soon became apparent,with much of Israel’s mil­i­tary divert­ed to focus on unrest in the West Bank.”
      • Detailed and quite inter­est­ing. Also not very long to read.
    • The Pro­gres­sives Who Flunked the Hamas Test (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “In the fevered world of social media, pro­gres­sive activists have often sought to dis­cred­it hate­ful state­ments and unjust poli­cies by describ­ing them as ‘vio­lence,’ even ‘geno­cide.’ This ten­den­cy seems grotesque if the same activists are not pre­pared to crit­i­cize Hamas, a group whose found­ing char­ter is explic­it­ly geno­ci­dal… Fit­ting Israel into the inter­sec­tion­al frame­work has always been dif­fi­cult, because its Jew­ish cit­i­zens are both his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed—the sur­vivors of an attempt to wipe them out entire­ly—and cur­rent­ly in a dom­i­nant posi­tion over the Pales­tini­ans, as demon­strat­ed by the Netanyahu government’s deci­sion to restrict pow­er and water sup­plies to Gaza. The sim­plis­tic log­ic of pop inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty can­not rec­on­cile this, and the sub­ject caused schisms with­in the left long before Saturday’s attacks.”
      • This one is espe­cial­ly worth read­ing for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. It high­lights weak­ness­es in a per­spec­tive you are often taught from.
    • A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer one (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Times of Israel): “Hamas seemed to do every­thing pos­si­ble to shift Israeli psy­chol­o­gy from a com­fort­able faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. And it will soon learn the scale of that mis­cal­cu­la­tion. A strong Israel may tol­er­ate a bel­liger­ent Hamas on its bor­der; a weak­er one can­not. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources wor­ry­ing about the human­i­tar­i­an fall­out from a Gaza ground war; a more vul­ner­a­ble Israel can­not. A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tol­er­a­ble threat. It just made itself an intol­er­a­ble one, all while con­vinc­ing Israelis they are too vul­ner­a­ble and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
  2. Some theological/Christian per­spec­tives:
    • The Way Out is Through: Peace Must Start with the End of Hamas (Marc LiVec­che, Prov­i­dence): “Israel must do every­thing pos­si­ble to min­i­mize the toil on the inno­cent, and to mul­ti­ply hell on the mon­sters.”
      • The author is a research fel­low at the Naval War Col­lege and is writ­ing about just war the­o­ry as it applies to the con­flict between Israel and Hamas.
    • Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Chris­tians Seek Right­eous Anger and Gospel Hope (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Nothing about this sit­u­a­tion is right or good,” said Lisa Loden, a Mes­sian­ic Jew­ish mem­ber of the Beth­le­hem Insti­tute of Peace and Jus­tice. “But there is a strong desire to see the Lord use these events to draw peo­ple to himself.”
    • Israel’s 9/11: The Need for Moral Clar­i­ty (Bernard N. Howard and Ivan Mesa, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Moral clar­i­ty also allows for suit­ably one-sided prayer. It’s right to pray for the swift defeat of Hamas. The mur­der­ous oper­a­tions room of Hamas will nev­er pro­vide good lead­er­ship for the Pales­tini­ans liv­ing in Gaza. We should by all means pray for both-sided things too: the sal­va­tion of peo­ple on both sides; the pro­tec­tion, heal­ing, and com­fort of peo­ple on both sides; and the growth of the church that lives inside the bor­ders of both nations. Even as we pray for these both-sided things, let us bold­ly call on our God to thwart, frus­trate, and defeat the one side that is hell-bent on ter­ror­ism.”
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tians Should Stand with Israel under Attack (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some­times, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly moments of any war, we may be uncer­tain about who is right and who is wrong. There is no such moral con­fu­sion here. Hamas—and its state sponsors—attacked inno­cent peo­ple, as they have done repeat­ed­ly in the past, this time employ­ing a force and bru­tal­i­ty pre­vi­ous­ly unseen.… As Chris­tians, we should pay spe­cial atten­tion to vio­lence direct­ed toward Israel—just as we would pay spe­cial atten­tion to a vio­lent attack on a mem­ber of our extend­ed fam­i­ly. After all, we are graft­ed on to the promise made to Abra­ham (Rom. 11:17). Our Lord Jesus was and is a Jew­ish man from Galilee.”
  3. Some Stan­ford-con­nect­ed arti­cles:
    • This Was Nev­er Sup­posed to Hap­pen (Amichai Magen, Per­sua­sion): “Ana­lysts keen to con­vey the mag­ni­tude of Octo­ber 7th to Amer­i­can audi­ences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Har­bor or 9/11. Nei­ther label ade­quate­ly cap­tures the day’s true sig­nif­i­cance. A more accu­rate name might be some­thing like ‘Israel’s civic Yom Kip­pur.’ Why? Because the very exis­tence of the State of Israel was sup­posed to guar­an­tee that a day like this would nev­er hap­pen. In the Yom Kip­pur War of Octo­ber 1973—when Egypt and Syr­ia launched a sur­prise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 sol­diers, but it man­aged to effec­tive­ly pro­tect its civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. No Israeli towns or vil­lages were ever breached. The social con­tract was hon­ored, albeit at a ter­ri­ble price. On Octo­ber 7, 2023, it was pri­mar­i­ly civil­ians who were killed, maimed, and kid­napped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the peo­ple it was cre­at­ed to pro­tect.”
      • The author, him­self Israeli, is a Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor and Fel­low in Israel Stud­ies at the Free­man-Spogli Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The impact of Hamas’ dev­as­tat­ing attack (Matthew Wigler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Like most Jews, I seek the peace and secu­ri­ty of Israel as a Jew­ish state in the indige­nous home­land of the Jew­ish peo­ple, a safe haven after mil­len­nia of per­se­cu­tion where Jews can final­ly claim con­trol over their own des­tiny. Like­wise, like most Jews, I also dream of a future of dig­ni­ty and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, who, by the very same prin­ci­ples of self-deter­mi­na­tion, deserve a state of their own in a land that they too have called home for many cen­turies. How­ev­er, Hamas’ ide­ol­o­gy of hate and meth­ods of ter­ror­ism are con­trary to that vision.”
  4. Oth­er inter­est­ing stuff not relat­ed to the war:
    • 5 Rea­sons Gen Z Is Primed for Spir­i­tu­al Renew­al (Kyle Richter & Patrick Miller, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Our last meet­ing of the year was big­ger than the first. We start­ed with 300 stu­dents and end­ed with 400. That nev­er hap­pens. Then in the fall of this year, it hap­pened again: 500 stu­dents attend­ed our first meet­ing; 600 showed up the next week. This doesn’t hap­pen.But it did. And it’s not unique to us. As we talk to cam­pus min­is­ters and pas­tors from San Fran­cis­co to Jack­sonville, Billings to Atlanta, DC to Dal­las, we know we aren’t alone. Some will urge cau­tion before draw­ing con­clu­sions. Isn’t this the era of dechurch­ing, decon­struc­tion, and ris­ing “nones”? But data lags behind real­i­ty and we don’t want the church to miss what may be hap­pen­ing.”
    • The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics (Jai, Sub­stack): “The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics says that when you observe or inter­act with a prob­lem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the prob­lem worse, even if you make it slight­ly bet­ter, the eth­i­cal bur­den of the prob­lem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In par­tic­u­lar, if you inter­act with a prob­lem and ben­e­fit from it, you are a com­plete mon­ster. I don’t sub­scribe to this school of thought, but it seems pret­ty pop­u­lar.”
      • A few years old, but real­ly good.
    • Repro­ducibil­i­ty tri­al: 246 biol­o­gists get dif­fer­ent results from same data sets (Anil Oza, Nature): “In a mas­sive exer­cise to exam­ine repro­ducibil­i­ty, more than 200 biol­o­gists analysed the same sets of eco­log­i­cal data — and got wide­ly diver­gent results. The first sweep­ing study1 of its kind in ecol­o­gy demon­strates how much results in the field can vary, not because of dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment, but because of sci­en­tist­s’ ana­lyt­i­cal choic­es.”

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 418

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 418, and 418 has the inter­est­ing prop­er­ty that the sum of its prime fac­tors is equal to the prod­ucts of its dig­its. In oth­er words, 2+11+19=32=4·1·8

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This 5 minute Tik­Tok on Twit­ter is very much worth your time: https://twitter.com/deejayfaremi/status/1694972810978799727 — it gets bet­ter and bet­ter. I’m strong­ly tempt­ed to show it dur­ing a wor­ship ser­vice.
  2. Daniel’s 3 Tips for Sur­viv­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Baby­lon (Catie Robert­son & Andrew M. Sel­by, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Try­ing to feel vague­ly close to God and frat­er­niz­ing fre­quent­ly with the lost (in the name of win­some love) may be nice, but it like­ly won’t be effec­tive as a long-term strat­e­gy for evan­ge­lism, let alone for the health of our own faith.…If we form pock­ets of resis­tance with believ­ers, the uni­ver­si­ty itself will be saved.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Nutri­tion Science’s Most Pre­pos­ter­ous Result (David Mer­ritt Johns, The Atlantic): “Back in 2018, a Har­vard doc­tor­al stu­dent named Andres Ardis­son Korat was pre­sent­ing his research on the rela­tion­ship between dairy foods and chron­ic dis­ease to his the­sis com­mit­tee. One of his stud­ies had led him to an unusu­al con­clu­sion: Among dia­bet­ics, eat­ing half a cup of ice cream a day was asso­ci­at­ed with a low­er risk of heart prob­lems. Need­less to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with sat­u­rat­ed fat and sug­ar might actu­al­ly be good for you raised some eye­brows at the nation’s most influ­en­tial depart­ment of nutri­tion.”
    • Unlocked. Fun to read, and with impli­ca­tions beyond diet.
  4. Everyone’s tired of pol­i­tics (Sale­na Zito, Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette): “If you spent your time watch­ing the news or trolling social media every day — which is lit­er­al­ly the job descrip­tion for many nation­al jour­nal­ists — you might assume that near­ly every per­son in the coun­try is invest­ed in either Trump or Biden. How­ev­er, when you dri­ve to places where the speed lim­it is 35 miles an hour, you find a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty. And that’s the prob­lem with how the coun­try too often is cov­ered these days. Our pol­i­tics would like­ly improve — some­what at least — if more in the media checked their assump­tions and lis­tened to the peo­ple they pur­port to cov­er.”
    • I cer­tain­ly feel this. I haven’t been shar­ing arti­cles about the Trump indict­ment or the Biden fam­i­ly cor­rup­tion or the age of politi­cians or the Repub­li­can debate because I sim­ply don’t find the arti­cles I read about them inter­est­ing.
  5. An anguished ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er shakes up coun­try music estab­lish­ment (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “As for faith, Antho­ny added: ‘I spent a long time being an angry lit­tle agnos­tic punk. … I had sort of per­vert­ed what my vision of God was, because I looked at the reli­gion of man as God and not God Him­self. But there is a Divine Cre­ator who loves you and some­times it takes falling down on your knees and get­ting ready to call things quits before it becomes obvi­ous that He’s there. But He’s always there.’ It would appear, said Wat­son, that this hill­bil­ly song­writer is – to use a pop­u­lar research term – a ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er, one with­out ties to orga­nized reli­gion. This is pre­cise­ly the kind of Amer­i­can that many church lead­ers are strug­gling to under­stand.”
    • I think many of you have heard me say that the delight of some sec­u­lar pun­dits over the rise of the “nones” is mis­placed. They aren’t athe­ists. They’re just not real­ly church­go­ers.
    • Relat­ed to the “nones”: Fresh off a Supreme Court Win, the Pray­ing Coach Takes the Field (Julia Duin, The Free Press): “He has also left his church—Newlife South Kit­sap in Port Orchard—chiefly because then-school super­in­ten­dent Leavell also attend­ed the con­gre­ga­tion. The pas­tors at the church ‘kind of dis­tanced them­selves from the very begin­ning,’ Kennedy said. They met with Kennedy and Leavell sep­a­rate­ly ‘and asked if we could get along and work this out. They didn’t want to choose sides.’ Though Kennedy said he wasn’t ful­ly sup­port­ed by his church, he feels ‘bad’ for Leavell and his kids, because ‘they were asked, ‘Why doesn’t your dad like praying?’ and ‘Why don’t they like Christians?’’ Peo­ple, Kennedy said, ‘don’t under­stand this was a big polit­i­cal and Con­sti­tu­tion­al thing.’ Kennedy said he and his wife have been ‘spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less’ since 2020.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing details in here I’ve not seen any­where else.
      • Note that as a “spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less” non-church atten­der this guy would now qual­i­fy as one of the “nones” in most sur­veys, and he was at the heart of a major reli­gious lib­er­ty case. The “nones” are not always who peo­ple think they are.
  6. No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Cana­da (Dana Kennedy, NY Post): “Tom Flana­gan, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary, told The Post Wednes­day that he sees the issue as a ‘moral pan­ic’ sim­i­lar to the hys­te­ria over repressed mem­o­ries and alleged Satan­ic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s.”
    • Relat­ed: 2021 Cana­di­an church burn­ings. (Wikipedia): “A series of van­dal­iza­tions, church arsons, and sus­pi­cious fires in June and July 2021 des­e­crat­ed, dam­aged, or destroyed 68 Chris­t­ian church­es in Cana­da. Coin­ci­dent with fires, van­dal­ism and oth­er destruc­tive events dam­aged church­es in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States, pri­mar­i­ly in British Colum­bia. Of these, 25 were the results of fires of all caus­es. Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment offi­cials, church mem­bers, and Cana­di­an Indige­nous lead­ers have spec­u­lat­ed that the fires and oth­er acts of van­dal­ism have been reac­tions to the May 2021 reports of alleged dis­cov­ery of over 1,000 unmarked graves at Cana­di­an Indi­an res­i­den­tial school sites.”
  7. Dri­ver­less cars may already be safer than human dri­vers (Tim­o­thy B. Lee, Sub­stack): “For this sto­ry, I read through every crash report Way­mo and Cruise filed in Cal­i­for­nia this year, as well as reports each com­pa­ny filed about the per­for­mance of their dri­ver­less vehi­cles (with no safe­ty dri­vers) pri­or to 2023. In total, the two com­pa­nies report­ed 102 crash­es involv­ing dri­ver­less vehi­cles. That may sound like a lot, but they hap­pened over rough­ly 6 mil­lion miles of dri­ving. That works out to one crash for every 60,000 miles, which is about five years of dri­ving for a typ­i­cal human motorist. These were over­whelm­ing­ly low-speed col­li­sions that did not pose a seri­ous safe­ty risk. A large major­i­ty appeared to be the fault of the oth­er dri­ver.”

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 399

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 399, a Har­shad num­ber. That means it is divis­i­ble by the sum of its dig­its. 3+9+9=21 and 399÷21 = 19.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “There are two kinds of prob­lems in the world: strong-link prob­lems and weak-link prob­lems. Weak-link prob­lems are prob­lems where the over­all qual­i­ty depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link prob­lems by mak­ing the weak­est links stronger, or by elim­i­nat­ing them entire­ly.… Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem. In the long run, the best stuff is basi­cal­ly all that mat­ters, and the bad stuff doesn’t mat­ter at all.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, has appli­ca­tion to mul­ti­ple domains.
  2. The Myth of Sex­u­al Expe­ri­ence (Jason S. Car­roll & Bri­an J. Willough­by, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…we review a series of recent stud­ies using dif­fer­ent nation­al datasets that show that hav­ing mul­ti­ple sex­u­al part­ners dur­ing the dat­ing years leads to high­er divorce rates in future mar­riages. We also report the find­ings of a new study that exam­ined how sex­u­al expe­ri­ence his­to­ries are asso­ci­at­ed with the qual­i­ty of cur­rent mar­riage rela­tion­ships. Over­all, we found that ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als, or the ones who have only had sex with their spouse, are the one’s most­ly like­ly to be flour­ish­ing in marriage.  These ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als report the high­est lev­els of rela­tion­ship sat­is­fac­tion, rela­tion­ship sta­bil­i­ty, sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, and emo­tion­al close­ness with their spous­es.”
    • The arti­cle ends with this won­der­ful line: “While the ben­e­fit of expe­ri­ence can be seen in many aspects of life, sex­u­al inexpe­ri­ence appears to still be the best path­way to mar­i­tal flour­ish­ing.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at BYU.
  3. The Tox­ic Real­i­ty of a Post-Famil­ial Soci­ety (Aaron M. Renn, Sub­stack): “South Korea is a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing case study. It has the world’s low­est fer­til­i­ty rate, with a total fer­til­i­ty rate or TFR of 0.78 (2.1 is need­ed just to keep pop­u­la­tion con­stant). It has also devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly unhealthy gen­der rela­tions, ele­ments of which we see echoed in our own coun­try. As here, these have even start­ed to car­ry over into pol­i­tics. What we see in South Korea is that post-famil­ial­ism can pro­duce unhap­pi­ness and dys­func­tion­al social and polit­i­cal dynam­ics.”
    • Relat­ed: Stop Treat­ing Women Like Men (Sophie Fuji­wara, Stan­ford Review): “In col­lege, we don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between men and women when advis­ing stu­dents about their careers, as if their life arcs will fol­low the same tra­jec­to­ry. The great­est priv­i­lege that high-earn­ing, edu­cat­ed women have is the priv­i­lege of choice, but this notion of per­fect­ly equal career tra­jec­to­ries dis­ad­van­tages women.”
  4. When Ide­ol­o­gy Dri­ves Social Sci­ence (Michael Jin­dra & Arthur Sakamo­to, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “In com­plex areas like the study of racial inequal­i­ty, a fun­da­men­tal­ism has tak­en hold that dis­cour­ages sound method­ol­o­gy and the use of reli­able evi­dence about the roots of social prob­lems. We are not talk­ing about mere dif­fer­ences in inter­pre­ta­tion of results, which are com­mon. We are talk­ing about mis­takes so clear that they should cause research to be seri­ous­ly ques­tioned or even dis­re­gard­ed. A great deal of research… rigs its sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods in order to arrive at ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pre­ferred con­clu­sions.”
    • The authors are a cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist at BU and a soci­ol­o­gist at Hong Kong Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly.
  5. I was a teenage evan­gel­i­cal mis­sion­ary (Jon Ward, Yahoo News): “These lead­ers want­ed a mus­cu­lar faith that didn’t shrink back from a fight. They want­ed a dra­mat­ic faith too, full of spec­ta­cle. They were all big per­son­al­i­ties, which they used to com­pen­sate for their lack of train­ing, exper­tise, and expe­ri­ence. Faith, for them, was not the act of extend­ing one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more cer­tain­ty than any­thing. Chris­tian­i­ty was true, no ques­tions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down mir­a­cles from heav­en to heal the sick or pre­dict the future or change world events. Lead­ers like Engle and Ahn didn’t come across as char­la­tans. They were very sin­cere. But ear­ly on in their lives, they got locked into a par­tic­u­lar type of faith min­istry, and they built audi­ences and fol­low­ings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their liveli­hoods and incomes became depen­dent on cater­ing to those same types of Chris­tians. Per­son­al evo­lu­tion or growth became con­strained by their busi­ness mod­el.”
  6. Some­thing inter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing in Tul­sa (Trevor Klee, Sub­stack): “I vis­it­ed Tul­sa through Tul­sa Tomor­row, a pro­gram that flies out young Jews to Tul­sa for a week­end to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own num­bers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70–80 have moved.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, not very long.
  7. A Rad­i­cal Exper­i­ment in Men­tal Health Care, Test­ed Over Cen­turies (Mati­na Ste­vis-Grid­neff and Koba Ryck­e­waert, New York Times): “By the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, near­ly 2,000 [peo­ple with men­tal health prob­lems] lived among the Geel­ians, as the locals call them­selves.… That has made Geel both some­thing of a mod­el for a par­tic­u­lar par­a­digm of psy­chi­atric care and an out­lier, often regard­ed over the cen­turies with sus­pi­cion (includ­ing by The New York Times, which, in a head­line from March 23, 1891, called Geel ‘a colony where lunatics live with peas­ants’ that had been ‘pro­duc­tive of mis­ery and evil results’).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Q: What Is a Hole? A: We’re Not Sure! (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al web­site): “As for straws — rea­son tells me they only have one hole but I know in my heart they have two.”  From vol­ume 276.

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 374

More Stan­ford-relat­ed links than nor­mal, includ­ing an absolute­ly wild one about a fake stu­dent.

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.

Accord­ing to peo­ple who know such things, 374 is the small­est num­ber that can be expressed as the sum of 3 pos­i­tive squares 8 dif­fer­ent ways: 374 = 1^2 + 7^2 + 18^2 = 2^2 + 3^2 + 19^2 = 2^2 + 9^2 + 17^2 = 3^2 + 13^2 + 14^2 = 5^2 + 5^2 + 18^2 = 6^2 + 7^2 + 17^2 = 6^2 + 13^2 + 13^2 = 7^2 + 10^2 + 15^2

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford-relat­ed:
    • Inside “Stanford’s War On Fun”: Ten­sions mount over University’s han­dling of social life (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The stu­dent said the Uni­ver­si­ty is ‘exces­sive­ly bureau­crat­ic’ and those try­ing to host events are ‘burnt out’ from try­ing to nav­i­gate a rule­set that ‘has expand­ed and [adds] chal­lenges that don’t need to be there.’ Har­ris, who also respond­ed on behalf of the Office of Stu­dent Engage­ment, wrote that the Uni­ver­si­ty has worked to expand social oppor­tu­ni­ties. ‘Stu­dent Affairs, stu­dent lead­ers, and cam­pus part­ners have been work­ing earnest­ly to pro­vide many and vibrant social options for under­grad­u­ates this fall,’ Har­ris wrote.”
    • Imposter stu­dent caught, removed from Crothers Hall (Cas­sidy Dal­va, Theo Bak­er and Ori­ana Riley, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stu­dents liv­ing in the dorm told The Dai­ly Thurs­day night that the man, who iden­ti­fied him­self as William Cur­ry, has lived in the dorm since the sec­ond week of the quar­ter, social­ized with the oth­er res­i­dents and was let into the dorm reg­u­lar­ly by sym­pa­thet­ic RAs.”
    • The Review Inter­views Dr. Scott Atlas (Stan­ford Review): “I want to high­light that lock­downs were not the stan­dard pan­dem­ic pre­scrip­tion (nei­ther in 2006, nor in ear­li­er pan­demics). It was known that they were extreme­ly harm­ful. Also, I want to high­light that the uni­ver­si­ty-side of sci­ence became high­ly politi­cized, pos­si­bly because it was an elec­tion year. I was warned by Stan­ford pro­fes­sors that I should not help the Pres­i­dent. This was moral­ly repug­nant: to let peo­ple die sim­ply because you didn’t like the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion.”
    • A Closed Dis­cus­sion on Aca­d­e­m­ic Free­dom? (Colleen Fla­her­ty, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers told FIRE that they’d invit­ed numer­ous pro­gres­sives to par­tic­i­pate [in the con­fer­ence at Stan­ford], Per­ri­no also said, but over time ‘more con­ser­v­a­tives said yes, and very few of the big-name pro­gres­sives said yes. The polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion and trib­al­ism is dispir­it­ing.’ Abbot said that orga­niz­ers invit­ed sev­er­al dozen pro­gres­sives who’d pre­vi­ous­ly expressed a ‘neg­a­tive view’ of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, who ulti­mate­ly declined.”
  2. Don’t Even Go There (James Lee, City Jour­nal): “A pol­i­cy of delib­er­ate igno­rance has cor­rupt­ed top sci­en­tif­ic insti­tu­tions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that pres­ti­gious jour­nals will often reject sub­mis­sions that offend pre­vail­ing polit­i­cal orthodoxies—especially if they involve con­tro­ver­sial aspects of human biol­o­gy and behavior—no mat­ter how sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly sound the work might be.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy, Bioin­for­mat­ics and Com­pu­ta­tion­al Biol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta.
    • Relat­ed: Blas­phe­my is dead. Long live blas­phe­my (Mary Har­ring­ton, Sub­stack): “…if some­thing looks a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s prob­a­bly a duck. And when a move­ment with an instant­ly recog­nis­able sym­bol, a dis­tinc­tive meta­physics (iden­ti­ty pre­cedes biol­o­gy, all desire must be cel­e­brat­ed) and a cal­en­dar of feast days cel­e­brat­ed by gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, uni­ver­si­ties and pub­lic bod­ies acquires the abil­i­ty to pun­ish those who deface its sym­bols, the only pos­si­ble thing you can call it is an emerg­ing faith — one with a tight­en­ing grip on insti­tu­tion­al pow­er across the West.”
  3. Most trans chil­dren just going through a phase, advis­es NHS (Eleanor Hay­ward, The Times of Lon­don): “Most chil­dren iden­ti­fy­ing as trans­gen­der are sim­ply going through a ‘tran­sient phase’, new NHS guid­ance states. Doc­tors car­ing for young­sters dis­tressed about their gen­der have been told that it is not a ‘neu­tral act’ to help them tran­si­tion social­ly by using their pre­ferred new names or pro­nouns.”
  4. New­som vs. DeSan­tis Is Our Inevitable Cul­ture War (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…in gen­er­al you need lib­er­al­ism plus some over­ar­ch­ing vision to sus­tain sol­i­dar­i­ty, ener­gy and hope. And you def­i­nite­ly need the ‘plus’ to ful­ly resolve ques­tions like, ‘Is abor­tion a form of mur­der or a fun­da­men­tal right?’ or ‘Is it child abuse to give teenagers puber­ty block­ers or child abuse to refuse them?’ ”
  5. Woman: My Dad Was Ser­i­al Killer; I Helped Bury the Bod­ies (Arden Dier, News­er): “Studey says she long ago went to ‘law enforce­ment all over Iowa and Nebras­ka try­ing to get some­thing done’ but ‘they could­n’t trust the mem­o­ry of a child.’ Yet her mem­o­ry is vivid. She says her father would kill sex work­ers and tran­sients, often in the fam­i­ly’s trail­er, then get his chil­dren to help move the bod­ies using a wheel­bar­row or tobog­gan.”
  6. Mayra Flo­res Pre­vent­ed From Join­ing the Con­gres­sion­al His­pan­ic Cau­cus (Julio Rosas, Town­hall): “Flo­res is not only first Mex­i­can-born woman to serve in Con­gress, but she also rep­re­sents a dis­trict along the U.S.-Mexico bor­der that is over­whelm­ing­ly Lati­no.… The CHC’s web­site web­sites states the Cau­cus ‘address­es nation­al and inter­na­tion­al issues and crafts poli­cies that impact the His­pan­ic com­mu­ni­ty. The func­tion of the Cau­cus is to serve as a forum for the His­pan­ic Mem­bers of Con­gress to coa­lesce around a col­lec­tive leg­isla­tive agen­da.’ The web­site does not state in its ‘About’ sec­tion that only Democ­rats can join the orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • Lat­er in the arti­cle we learn “Sim­i­lar­ly, Rep. Byron Don­alds (R‑FL) was pre­vent­ed from join­ing the Con­gres­sion­al Black Cau­cus last year.”
    • This is fas­ci­nat­ing to me and I share it in an entire­ly non-par­ti­san way. I some­times hear state­ments from these cau­cus­es and while I assumed they lean Demo­c­rat because their con­stituen­cy over­whelm­ing­ly leans Demo­c­rat, I had no idea Repub­li­cans were lit­er­al­ly for­bid­den from join­ing them.
  7. Nan­cy Pelosi: Intrud­er was search­ing for US Speak­er in attack on hus­band (Sam Cabral, BBC): “Paul Pelosi, 82, was tak­en to hos­pi­tal after a break-in at their Cal­i­for­nia home on Fri­day morn­ing. The sus­pect has been iden­ti­fied as a 42-year-old man and is fac­ing crim­i­nal charges includ­ing attempt­ed homi­cide. He broke a glass rear door and — after con­fronting Mr Pelosi — report­ed­ly shout­ed: ‘Where is Nan­cy?’ ” Yikes!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Are Mor­mons Chris­tians?: A Review of “The Saints of Zion: An Intro­duc­tion to Mor­mon The­ol­o­gy” (Tim Miller, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “He makes clear that Mor­mons are not Chris­tians, but does so by point­ing out that this has been the claim of the Mor­mon church itself through­out his­to­ry (despite recent attempts to argue differently).” From vol­ume 244.

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 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.‘”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Martin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of justice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 328

Every­thing from bap­tisms to abor­tion to per­ceived noos­es. Also self-repli­cat­ing robots which is noth­ing to wor­ry about at all.

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 328, which is the year that one of my favorite church lead­ers became a bish­op: Athana­sius.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Supreme Court recon­sid­ers abor­tion:
    • The Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Mississippi’s abor­tion law. (Adam Lip­tak, New York Times): “The Supreme Court seemed poised on Wednes­day to uphold a Mis­sis­sip­pi law that bans abor­tions after 15 weeks of preg­nan­cy, based on some­times tense and heat­ed ques­tion­ing at a momen­tous argu­ment in the most impor­tant abor­tion case in decades. Such a rul­ing would be flat­ly at odds with what the court has said was the cen­tral hold­ing of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 deci­sion that estab­lished a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion and pro­hib­it­ed states from ban­ning the pro­ce­dure before fetal via­bil­i­ty, or around 23 weeks. But the court’s six-mem­ber con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty seemed divid­ed about whether to stop at 15 weeks, for now at least, or whether to over­rule Roe entire­ly, allow­ing states to ban abor­tions at any time or entire­ly.”
    • For a free, non­pay­walled analy­sis check out Major­i­ty of court appears poised to roll back abor­tion rights (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog)
    • Why Roe Will Fall And Oberge­fell Won’t (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In Roe, the Court tried to jump­start a con­sen­sus and failed to secure it, with pub­lic opin­ion very sim­i­lar now to where it was half a cen­tu­ry ago. In Oberge­fell, the Court wait­ed until there was major­i­ty sup­port, which arrived, accord­ing to Gallup, in 2011, and the Court then val­i­dat­ed a still-grow­ing soci­etal con­sen­sus four years lat­er.”
  2. Low­er­ing the Vot­ing Age (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Peo­ple who dis­cuss low­er­ing the vot­ing age – not only those for it but also those against – assume that it would mean a trans­fer of polit­i­cal influ­ence to the young. That is absurd. It would mean no such thing. Although the very young are often very sure of their opin­ions and con­vinced that they have made up their own minds, they lack the matu­ri­ty to form their minds independently. So to low­er the vot­ing age would not mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal influ­ence of the young. It would only mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal clout of those who have influ­ence through the young.”
    • That’s a real­ly good point I had­n’t con­sid­ered. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy and of gov­ern­ment at UT Austin.
  3. Horse Troughs, Hot Tubs and Hash­tags: Bap­tism Is Get­ting Wild (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Con­tem­po­rary evan­gel­i­cal bap­tisms are often rau­cous affairs. Instead of sub­dued hymns and mur­murs, think roar­ing mod­ern wor­ship music, fist pumps, tears and bois­ter­ous cheer­ing. There are pho­tog­ra­phers, self­ie sta­tions and hash­tags for social media. One church in Texas calls its reg­u­lar mass bap­tism event a ‘plunge par­ty.’ ”
    • This is an inter­est­ing arti­cle most­ly for how inter­est­ing utter­ly nor­mal things can seem to NY Times read­ers.
  4. She set out to save her daugh­ter from fen­tanyl. She had no idea what she would face on the streets of San Fran­cis­co (Heather Knight, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “I asked Jes­si­ca if she thought she would ever leave San Fran­cis­co. ‘It’s like a vor­tex,’ she said. ‘I want to get out of here. But why the f— would I leave here if I have every­thing I need giv­en to me? It might be enabling or it might be keep­ing you in a cycle, but at least you can sur­vive,’ she con­tin­ued. ‘That’s bet­ter than a lot of places.’ ”
    • The wages of sin is death. What a gut-punch of a sto­ry.
  5. Race Pan­ic! Stan­ford inves­ti­gates “cords with loops that may rep­re­sent noos­es” (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “Call­ing out and address­ing racism? No, these Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors are com­mit­ted to invent­ing racism. Though, I must hand it to them: Dean Hicks and her ‘insti­tu­tion­al equi­ty’ side­kick Mr. Dunk­ley might not real­ize it, but there is a beau­ti­ful, almost poet­ic irony to the tim­ing of their email. They rushed to inform Stan­ford stu­dents of an alleged race inci­dent on the very day that the crim­i­nal tri­al of Jussie Smol­lett, the great­est of all race hoax­ers, began in Chica­go. That lit­tle coin­ci­dence is the cher­ry on top of this giant farce.”
    • Mey­er’s take is, as far as I can tell, entire­ly cor­rect. If those loops looked at all like noos­es we’d have pho­tos.
  6. Team builds first liv­ing robots—that can repro­duce (Joshua Brown, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont press release): “Some peo­ple may find this exhil­a­rat­ing. Oth­ers may react with con­cern, or even ter­ror, to the notion of a self-repli­cat­ing biotech­nol­o­gy. For the team of sci­en­tists, the goal is deep­er under­stand­ing.”
  7. The Busi­ness of Extract­ing Knowl­edge from Aca­d­e­m­ic Pub­li­ca­tions (Markus Strass­er, per­son­al blog): “I had to wrap my head around the fact that close to noth­ing of what makes sci­ence actu­al­ly work is pub­lished as text on the web. Research ques­tions that can be answered log­i­cal­ly through just read­ing papers and con­nect­ing the dots don’t require a biotech corp to be formed around them. There’s much less log­ic and deduc­tion hap­pen­ing than you’d expect in a sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline.”
    • Long and poor­ly for­mat­ted, but with an inter­est­ing core idea. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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 310

short and sweet this week

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

This is vol­ume 310 — which in base 6 is ren­dered as the much cool­er vol­ume 1234.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Can Sil­i­con Val­ley Find God? (Lin­da Kin­stler, New York Times): “Over the course of my report­ing, I often thought back to the expe­ri­ence of Rob Bar­rett, who worked as a researcher at IBM in the ’90s. One day, he was out­lin­ing the default pri­va­cy set­tings for an ear­ly web brows­er fea­ture. His boss, he said, gave him only one instruc­tion: ‘Do the right thing.’ It was up to Mr. Bar­rett to decide what the “right thing” was. That was when it dawned on him: ‘I don’t know enough the­ol­o­gy to be a good engi­neer,’ he told his boss. He request­ed a leave of absence so he could study the Old Tes­ta­ment, and even­tu­al­ly he left the indus­try.” One of the inter­vie­wees, Sherol Chen, used to serve on our wor­ship team. Inter­est­ing arti­cle!
  2. A horn-wear­ing ‘shaman.’ A cow­boy evan­ge­list. For some, the Capi­tol attack was a kind of Chris­t­ian revolt. (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For many, their reli­gious beliefs were not tied to any spe­cif­ic church or denom­i­na­tion — lead­ers of major denom­i­na­tions and megachurch­es, and even Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s faith advis­ers, were absent that day. For such peo­ple, their faith is indi­vid­u­al­is­tic, large­ly free of struc­tures, rules or the approval of cler­gy.… part of the mix, say experts on Amer­i­can reli­gion, is the fact that the coun­try is in a peri­od when insti­tu­tion­al reli­gion is break­ing apart, becom­ing more indi­vid­u­al­ized and more dis­con­nect­ed from denom­i­na­tions, the­o­log­i­cal cre­den­tials and over­sight.”
    • You may have heard me say it before: “If you think orga­nized reli­gion is bad, wait until you catch a glimpse of dis­or­ga­nized reli­gion.”
  3. I tried to report sci­en­tif­ic mis­con­duct. How did it go? (Joe Hil­gard, per­son­al blog): “I was curi­ous to see how the self-cor­rect­ing mech­a­nisms of sci­ence would respond to what seemed to me a rather obvi­ous case of unre­li­able data and pos­si­ble research mis­con­duct. It turns out Brandolini’s Law still holds: ‘The amount of ener­gy need­ed to refute bull­shit is an order of mag­ni­tude larg­er than to pro­duce it.’ How­ev­er, I was not pre­pared to be resist­ed and hin­dered by the self-cor­rect­ing insti­tu­tions of sci­ence itself.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The author is a psych prof at Illi­nois State.
  4. Anti-Racism is an Inter-White Strug­gle (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­Stack): “Anti-racism has become a kind of high-stakes pok­er game for edu­cat­ed white peo­ple: you risk los­ing your shirt at any time, but those who have the savvy and the guts to bluff their way to the top reap social and pro­fes­sion­al rewards.”
  5. Book Review: Crazy Like Us (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…does nam­ing and point­ing to a men­tal health prob­lem make it worse? This was clear­est in Hong Kong, where a seem­ing­ly very low base rate of anorex­ia explod­ed as soon as peo­ple start­ed launch­ing men­tal health aware­ness cam­paigns say­ing that it was a com­mon and impor­tant dis­ease (as had appar­ent­ly hap­pened before in Vic­to­ri­an Europe and 70s/80s Amer­i­ca). But it also showed up in the sec­tion on how increas­ing aware­ness of PTSD seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with more PTSD, and how debrief­ing trau­ma vic­tims about how they might get PTSD makes them more like­ly to get it.”
  6. Can the Black Rifle Cof­fee Com­pa­ny Become the Star­bucks of the Right? (Jason Zenger­le, New York Times): “Some­times it seems as if Hafer and his part­ners invent jobs at Black Rifle for vet­er­ans to do. A for­mer Green Beret medic helps Black Rifle with events and out­reach and was recent­ly made the direc­tor of its new­ly formed char­i­ty orga­ni­za­tion. Four years ago, Black Rifle received a Face­book mes­sage from an Afghan Army vet­er­an with whom Hafer once served; he wrote that he was now work­ing at a gas sta­tion and liv­ing with his fam­i­ly in pub­lic hous­ing in Char­lottesville. ‘We hon­est­ly assumed he was dead,’ Hafer says. Black Rifle found a home for the man and his fam­i­ly in Utah, and he now does build­ing and grounds main­te­nance at the company’s Salt Lake City offices. At those offices, I met a qui­et, haunt­ed-seem­ing man who had been a C.I.A.-contractor col­league of Hafer’s and who, for a time, lived in a trail­er he parked on the office grounds. Lat­er, I asked Hafer what, exact­ly, the man did for Black Rifle. ‘He just gets bet­ter,’ Hafer replied. ‘He gets bet­ter.’ ”
    • This was WAY more inter­est­ing than I expect­ed.
  7. The His­to­ry of Canada’s Res­i­den­tial Schools (Dou­glas Far­row, First Things): “How could this be? Who is respon­si­ble? Are the reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions who oper­at­ed the res­i­den­tial schools the real cul­prits, as many sup­pose? A care­ful exam­i­na­tion shows that sup­po­si­tion to be flawed. The tragedy, and the crimes it involved—crimes some are false­ly char­ac­ter­iz­ing as genocide—began with gov­ern­ment-man­dat­ed vio­la­tion of parental rights, an error gain­ing cur­ren­cy again today.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of the­ol­o­gy and ethics at McGill Uni­ver­si­ty in Mon­tre­al.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Book Review: See­ing Like A State (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Peasants didn’t like per­ma­nent sur­names. Their own sys­tem was quite rea­son­able for them: John the bak­er was John Bak­er, John the black­smith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Under­hill, John who was real­ly short was John Short. The same per­son might be John Smith and John Under­hill in dif­fer­ent con­texts, where his sta­tus as a black­smith or place of ori­gin was more impor­tant. But the gov­ern­ment insist­ed on giv­ing every­one a sin­gle per­ma­nent name, unique for the vil­lage, and track­ing who was in the same fam­i­ly as whom. Resis­tance was intense.” This is long and amaz­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 95)

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 307

my favorite arti­cle this week is about a guy who could quench flames by singing at them

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 the 307th instal­la­tion, which I like because 307 is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Endur­ing Les­son of the Galileo Myth (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “While I first heard the sto­ry of Galileo in ele­men­tary school, it wasn’t until about a decade after I had grad­u­at­ed from col­lege that I final­ly learned the truth. No doubt some peo­ple are just now hear­ing about it for the first time. How is that pos­si­ble?”
    • Unless you have done some read­ing on Galileo, you almost cer­tain­ly believe untrue things about what hap­pened.
  2. Social Media, Iden­ti­ty, and the Church (Tim Keller, Life In The Gospel): “While extrem­ists can only gain sta­tus and belong­ing on-line, mod­er­ates (right­ly) fear say­ing some­thing that will anger oth­ers and jeop­ar­dize their career or rela­tion­ships. And so, while extrem­ist­s’ frag­ile iden­ti­ties get a great deal of cov­er on the inter­net, mod­er­ates’ iden­ti­ties are threat­ened by it.”
  3. The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “This exper­i­ment excit­ed such skep­ti­cism that Kel­logg was enlist­ed to repeat it for a team of Berke­ley sci­en­tists. The result­ing pub­lic test on Sep­tem­ber 6, broad­cast live over KGO, is one of the most remark­able events in the his­to­ry of radio.”
    • I’ve actu­al­ly heard (and used) the clos­ing sto­ry before in a ser­mon, but there were details I did­n’t know. It’s nice to have the full sto­ry. Com­ing once again to a ser­mon near you.
  4. Some arti­cles about self-cen­sor­ship and can­cel­la­tion:
    • Why I’m Leav­ing Mum­ford & Sons (Win­ston Mar­shall, Medi­um): “The truth is that report­ing on extrem­ism at the great risk of endan­ger­ing one­self is unques­tion­ably brave. I also feel that my pre­vi­ous apol­o­gy in a small way par­tic­i­pates in the lie that such extrem­ism does not exist, or worse, is a force for good.” Courage and class.
    • Meet the Cen­sored: Bret Wein­stein (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “This is a sig­nif­i­cant moment in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can media. If a show with the audi­ence that Wein­stein and Hey­ing have can be put out of busi­ness this eas­i­ly, it means that inde­pen­dent media going for­ward will either have to oper­ate out­side the major Inter­net plat­forms, or give up its tra­di­tion­al role as a chal­lenger of main­stream nar­ra­tives.”
    • The Ene­mies of the Open Soci­ety (Mar­tin Gur­ri, Dis­course Mag­a­zine): “In oth­er words, this was a cul­tur­al rather than a polit­i­cal event. It con­cerned our ideals, not our rights: and the ideals of a great many impor­tant Amer­i­cans appear at this time to be drift­ing away from the open soci­ety.”
    • The Books Are Already Burn­ing (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “But why do so few oppose the pres­sure, lies, and the cor­rupt­ing force of these bul­ly­ing cam­paigns? The silent sup­port­ers have each per­formed the same risk-ben­e­fit cal­cu­la­tion and arrived at the same con­clu­sion: Speak­ing up isn’t worth it.”
    • A Con­ver­sa­tion with Daniel Elder, the Choral Music Com­pos­er Who Was Can­celled for Oppos­ing Arson (Quil­lette): “The media prefers to focus on how hor­ri­ble this expe­ri­ence was for me, but an impor­tant facet eas­i­ly lost in this nar­ra­tive is how free I’ve felt since I made the choice.… I say this as an encour­age­ment to the silent major­i­ty all around us: If you’re will­ing to endure the painful tri­al of self, you will be bet­ter for it in the end. And, with enough of us, the world will be bet­ter, too.”
  5. Some arti­cles on sex­u­al­i­ty and sex­u­al ethics.
    • A Pecu­liar Dis­ap­proval of Gay Pride (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “When a per­son becomes a Chris­t­ian, he under­goes a trans­for­ma­tion not just of what he dis­ap­proves, but of how he dis­ap­proves. There is noth­ing pecu­liar­ly Chris­t­ian about the mere dis­ap­proval of any human behav­ior. There­fore, dis­ap­proval of sin­ful behav­iors is no evi­dence of sav­ing grace. Becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is far more pro­found than chang­ing what we dis­ap­prove of.”
    • How Should I Respond to a Colleague’s Same-Sex Wed­ding? (Char­lie Self, The Gospel Coali­tion): “But even with a hum­ble and lov­ing spir­it, pru­dent speech, and gen­uine love for the co-work­ers, there’s a risk of los­ing pro­mo­tions and even employ­ment. This is where faith must con­quer fear, and holy love tri­umph over com­pro­mise. As these deci­sions are dis­cerned, may they be bathed in bless­ing our co-work­ers with tear­ful inter­ces­sion.” Char­lie is a friend who has spo­ken at Chi Alpha before.
    • How Should I Address My Trans­gen­der Col­league? (Char­lie Self, The Gospel Coali­tion): “As Chris­tians, we want to tell the truth, and using the wrong pro­nouns isn’t truth-telling. On the oth­er hand, insist­ing on using cor­rect pro­nouns for a per­son who has asked you not to can come across as dis­re­spect­ful and antag­o­nis­tic.”
    • Homo­phobes don’t care about same-sex love. They object to the sex. (Bri­an Broome, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Love isn’t the prob­lem. I don’t believe that homo­phobes object to whether same-sex cou­ples love each oth­er. No, it’s not the love. It’s the sex.”
  6. The Great Awok­en­ing (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This brings us ulti­mate­ly back to reli­gion. You can­not fight some­thing with noth­ing. You can­not fight a reli­gious war just by being against that reli­gion. You must fight it with a com­pet­ing reli­gion. And there is one that has deep roots here in Amer­i­ca. Evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tantism, in its var­i­ous iter­a­tions, is what found­ed the coun­try. The woke will even admit it (when it is use­ful to accuse the Chris­tians who built Amer­i­ca of geno­cide). It formed the reli­gious core of Amer­i­ca ages ago and if wok­e­ness will ever be com­bat­ed it will again.”
  7. This is an old­er (1992) arti­cle shared with me by a stu­dent: Research Sup­ports Bible’s Account of Red Sea Part­ing : Weath­er: Gulf of Suez’s geog­ra­phy would make it pos­si­ble, mete­o­rol­o­gist and oceanog­ra­ph­er say. (Thomas H. Maugh II, LA Times): “Because of the pecu­liar geog­ra­phy of the north­ern end of the Red Sea, researchers report Sun­day in the Bul­letin of the Amer­i­can Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Soci­ety, a mod­er­ate wind blow­ing con­stant­ly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water lev­el to drop 10 feet, leav­ing dry land in the area where many bib­li­cal schol­ars believe the cross­ing occurred.” I have not looked into the under­ly­ing research, but quite inter­est­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selective pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools.… To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

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 293

fea­tur­ing sev­er­al per­spec­tives about the mur­ders in Atlanta

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 293 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Arti­cle relat­ed to vio­lence against Asian-Amer­i­cans:
    • Reli­gion, Race, and the Atlanta Mur­ders (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slow­ly untan­gled. There are ele­ments relat­ed to pornog­ra­phy, sex traf­fick­ing, reli­gion, evan­gel­i­cal­ism, South­ern Bap­tists, and many oth­ers just out­side our periph­ery. But nei­ther the com­plex­i­ty of this event nor the trib­al­ism of our cul­tur­al dis­course must not allow us to avoid self-reflec­tion and scruti­ny. We must con­front the real­i­ty that some­thing is hor­ri­bly wrong in our midst when a per­son kills to ‘elim­i­nate’ temp­ta­tion.”
    • We Need to Put a Name to This Vio­lence (Jay Caspi­an Kang, New York Times): “There is no shared his­to­ry between, say, Thai immi­grants who saw images of one of their own attacked in San Fran­cis­co, and the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion of Oak­land alarmed by the assault in Chinatown.Asian-American iden­ti­ty is frac­tured and often inco­her­ent because it assumes kin­ship between peo­ple who do not speak the same lan­guage, and, in many cas­es, dis­like one anoth­er.” This was writ­ten before the Atlanta mur­ders and is dis­cussing the trend wave of vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly.
    • The Mud­dled His­to­ry of Anti-Asian Vio­lence (Hua Hsu, New York­er): “Some have won­dered if these hor­rif­ic, viral videos con­sti­tute a wave, or if they were just ran­dom inci­dents. When your con­cerns have gone unrec­og­nized for decades, it’s under­stand­able why some with­in the Asian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty remain so invest­ed in using these high­ly vis­i­ble moments as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to call atten­tion to hate, even if the inci­dents seem more var­ied than that. The wave in ques­tion isn’t just two or three inci­dents.” Also writ­ten before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Racial­iz­ing The Atlanta Mas­sage Par­lor Killings (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It is strik­ing to see how quick­ly our media has racial­ized the nar­ra­tive of the hor­rif­ic mur­ders at the Geor­gia mas­sage par­lors. From what we know so far, the alleged mur­der­er was a young man tor­ment­ed by his com­pul­sive sex­u­al desires. He vis­it­ed mas­sage par­lors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depend­ed on to grat­i­fy his desires. From all the avail­able evi­dence, these killings were the misog­y­nis­tic act of a sex­u­al­ly depraved man.” As is often the case with Dreher, some of the best mate­r­i­al is in the updates at the end (usu­al­ly a com­ment from a read­er that Dreher thought sig­nif­i­cant).
    • When The Nar­ra­tive Replaces The News (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Mass killers, if they are moti­vat­ed by big­otry or hate, tend to let the world know… This mass mur­der­er in Atlanta actu­al­ly denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evi­dence for it — and that has been true from the very start.”
    • The Media Got It Wrong: Police Cap­tain Did­n’t Say the Atlanta Spa Killer Was Hav­ing a ‘Bad Day’ (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “A police offi­cer excus­ing Long’s actions as mere­ly the result of him hav­ing a ‘bad day’ would indeed be con­temptible. But that’s not what Bak­er did. In fact, many of the peo­ple so infu­ri­at­ed about the quote were mis­led by Rupar’s edit of the video. The full video (the rel­e­vant sec­tion starts at about 13:50) makes clear that Bak­er was not pro­vid­ing his own com­men­tary, but rather sum­ma­riz­ing what Long had told the inves­ti­ga­tors.”
  2. Third Places and the Hori­zons of Male Friend­ships (Ryan McCormick, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, typ­i­cal male friend­ship is dif­fer­ent from typ­i­cal, con­tem­po­rary female friend­ship. A fail­ure to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent ways that men and women form inti­mate bonds in friend­ship is what breeds so much con­fu­sion and leads to the mis­di­ag­no­sis of ‘tox­ic masculinity.‘” I will add one extra lay­er of diag­no­sis that the author did­n’t address: many in our cul­ture have a hor­ror of male-only spaces. How are we sur­prised to dis­cov­er a dearth of male friend­ships when we view the very exis­tence of mas­cu­line com­mu­ni­ties as evi­dence of some­thing amiss?
  3. The False and Exag­ger­at­ed Claims Still Being Spread About the Capi­tol Riot (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Despite this alleged bru­tal mur­der tak­ing place in one of the most sur­veilled build­ings on the plan­et, filled that day with hun­dreds of cell­phones tap­ing the events, nobody saw video of it. No pho­tographs depict­ed it. To this day, no autop­sy report has been released. No details from any offi­cial source have been pro­vid­ed.”
    • Fol­low-up: As the Insur­rec­tion Nar­ra­tive Crum­bles, Democ­rats Cling to it More Des­per­ate­ly Than Ever (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “As I detailed sev­er­al weeks ago, so many of the most har­row­ing and wide­spread media claims about the Jan­u­ary 6 riot proved to be total fab­ri­ca­tions. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Bri­an Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extin­guish­er. No pro­test­er brought zip-ties with them as some pre­med­i­tat­ed plot to kid­nap mem­bers of Con­gress (two riot­ers found them on a table inside). There’s no evi­dence any­one intend­ed to assas­si­nate Mike Pence, Mitt Rom­ney or any­one else.”
    • Relat­ed: Two are charged in the assault of a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died after the Jan. 6 riot. (Katie Ben­ner and Adam Gold­man, New York Times): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment has charged two men in the assault on Bri­an D. Sick­nick, a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died the day after he fought riot­ers storm­ing the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial briefed on the case and court doc­u­ments.… It is not clear whether Offi­cer Sick­nick died because of his expo­sure to the spray.”
  4. Covid’s Par­ti­san Errors (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “ ‘Repub­li­cans con­sis­tent­ly under­es­ti­mate risks, while Democ­rats con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate them.‘  …The rea­sons for these ide­o­log­i­cal bias­es aren’t com­plete­ly clear, but they are not shock­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tives tend to be more hos­tile to behav­ior restric­tions and to sci­en­tif­ic research. And lib­er­als some­times over­re­act to social prob­lems.”
  5. Tim­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 index case in Hubei province (Sci­ence, Jonathan Pekar et al):  “Empir­i­cal obser­va­tion through­out the SARS-CoV­‑2 pan­dem­ic has shown the out­sized role of super­spread­ing events in the prop­a­ga­tion of SARS-CoV­‑2, where­in the aver­age infect­ed per­son does not trans­mit the virus. Our results sug­gest the same dynam­ics like­ly influ­enced the ini­tial estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2 in humans, as only 29.7% of sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics from the pri­ma­ry analy­sis went on to estab­lish self-sus­tain­ing epi­demics. The remain­ing 70.3% of epi­demics went extinct.… Fur­ther­more, the large and high­ly con­nect­ed con­tact net­works char­ac­ter­iz­ing urban areas seem crit­i­cal to the estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2. When we sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics where the num­ber of con­nec­tions was reduced by 50% or 75% (with­out rescal­ing per-con­tact trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty), to reflect emer­gence in a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty, the epi­demics went extinct 94.5% or 99.6% of the time, respec­tive­ly.”
    • This is real­ly inter­est­ing. The researchers are large­ly at UCSD. One impli­ca­tion is that there are a LOT more ani­mal-to-human COVID-like infec­tions that sim­ply nev­er make the leap to becom­ing wide­spread. Kind of like music: there are a ton of great musi­cians who just nev­er catch their big break. With­out super­spread­ers, this kind of pan­dem­ic appears unlike­ly. I hope researchers can find a way to address what­ev­er caus­es some­one to be a super­spread­er.
  6. Rais­ing Beef Cat­tle (Tom Blan­ton, Quil­lette): “It is by cher­ry-pick­ing images of the times of con­fine­ment from around the world that the grue­some image of ‘fac­to­ry farms’ is cre­at­ed. Often the images are tak­en from coun­tries that don’t have the human­i­tar­i­an reg­u­la­tions that most West­ern nations have.… If those gen­uine­ly con­cerned for the suf­fer­ing of ani­mals could find it with­in them­selves to rec­og­nize that it is not immoral to slaugh­ter ani­mals humane­ly for food, they would find many allies for the cause of reduc­ing ani­mal suf­fer­ing amongst the peo­ple who raise and work with these ani­mals on a dai­ly basis.”
  7. Could It Be… Genes? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “This is an arti­cle about how fam­i­ly influ­ences chil­dren with­out a con­sid­er­a­tion of the most direct and pow­er­ful way. The words ‘gene’ and ‘genes’ and ‘genet­ic’ do not appear in this paper. Nei­ther do ‘her­i­ta­ble’ or ‘hered­i­ty’ or ‘hered­i­tary.’ The con­cept of the trans­fer of genet­ic infor­ma­tion from par­ent to off­spring sim­ply does not exist in this men­tal space… in a paper about how fam­i­lies influ­ence the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their chil­dren. I would call this odd, but it’s par for the course in social sci­ence research.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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.