Tag: Stanford

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 379

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 379, the 75th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Holy Spir­it is a Polit­i­cal Lia­bil­i­ty (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It does not mean we have to accept that we sim­ply can­not win. It means the oppo­site: accept­ing that we have already won. When Christ emerged from that tomb, all the gen­der insan­i­ty, all the reli­gious per­se­cu­tion, all the aban­don­ment of first prin­ci­ples in the uni­verse were giv­en a death sen­tence. Christ him­self is truth. Truth was killed, then got back up, and will nev­er die again. This is not just piety. It’s a real­i­ty that must go down deep in our meth­ods, our speech, our atti­tudes.”
  2. Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Mar­riage Act and the Post-Boomer Church (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some time after his death, an edi­tor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pam­phlet ‘Chris­t­ian Behav­ior,’ which would lat­er be re-pub­lished as one sec­tion in Lewis’s clas­sic Mere Chris­tian­i­ty. Fold­ed inside the book was a let­ter Tolkien had writ­ten but appar­ent­ly nev­er sent to his long-time friend and fel­low Oxford don. In it, Tolkien took issue with Lewis’s treat­ment of divorce in the pam­phlet.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. FORUM: The New Shape of Chris­t­ian Pub­lic Dis­course (Jay Green, Cur­rent): “ ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ do not have self-explana­to­ry or sta­ble mean­ings. The old labels tend to obscure at least as much as they reveal. The ter­mi­nol­o­gy is handy in a fight as long we aren’t asked to define exact­ly what we mean by them. But espe­cial­ly dur­ing the past sev­en years some of the most acri­mo­nious dis­agree­ments among Chris­tians about pub­lic life go well beyond the issues iden­ti­fied by Hunter in the 1990s. Our pub­lic fights have become far more than basic dis­agree­ments over ‘issues.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Covenant Col­lege. I think he is on to some­thing, but his fram­ing is not quite right.
  4. Check out Chat­G­PT — it’s free to play with and extreme­ly impres­sive. You can sign up at https://beta.openai.com/playground
    • I had it write a wor­ship song: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/iWbGQyANHXhdXGw2fM0AGQQJ
    • Andy Crouch, a shrewd Chris­t­ian thinker, believes this rep­re­sents the end of a lot of home­work. https://twitter.com/ahc/status/1598323606303424512 — this sim­ple tool can do col­lege-lev­el home­work pret­ty eas­i­ly.
    • Jail­break­ing Chat­G­PT on Release Day (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “One of the things it attempts to do to be ‘safe.’ It does this by refus­ing to answer ques­tions that call upon it to do or help you do some­thing ille­gal or oth­er­wise out­side its bounds. Makes sense. As is the default with such things, those safe­guards were bro­ken through almost imme­di­ate­ly. By the end of the day, sev­er­al prompt engi­neer­ing meth­ods had been found.”
    • In anoth­er bit of AI news, On the Diplo­ma­cy AI (Zvi Mowsh­witz, Sub­stack): “When peo­ple say the AI ‘solved’ Diplo­ma­cy, it real­ly real­ly didn’t. What it did, which is still impres­sive, is get a han­dle on the basics of Diplo­ma­cy, in this par­tic­u­lar con­text where bots can­not be iden­ti­fied and are in the minor­i­ty, and in par­tic­u­lar where mes­sage detail is suf­fi­cient­ly lim­it­ed that it can use an LLM to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with humans rea­son­ably and not be iden­ti­fied.”
  5. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Stan­ford president’s research under inves­ti­ga­tion (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in this arti­cle and what fol­lows is not the main point, but this para­graph caught my atten­tion: “Pri­or to tak­ing on Stanford’s pres­i­den­cy in ear­ly 2016, Tessier-Lav­i­gne direct­ed more than a thou­sand sci­en­tists at biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies Genen­tech as well as Regen­eron. Tessier-Lavigne’s salary at Regen­eron in 2014 was $1,764,032, accord­ing to a pre­vi­ous­ly-unre­port­ed class action law­suit alleg­ing exces­sive com­pen­sa­tion for mem­bers of the Com­pen­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, which includ­ed Tessier-Lav­i­gne. It was lat­er set­tled. He earned $1,555,296 from Stan­ford in 2021 with an addi­tion­al $700,000 annu­al­ly as a board direc­tor for Regen­eron.”
    • ‘This actu­al­ly changes every­thing’: Altered image in 1999 paper rais­es poten­tial per­il for Stan­ford pres­i­dent (Olivia Gold­hill  & Megan Molteni, Stat News): “The new­ly iden­ti­fied appar­ent manip­u­la­tion in Cell is espe­cial­ly seri­ous as it seems to alter the results and appears to be inten­tion­al, said Bik. ‘I would tes­ti­fy in court that’s been dig­i­tal­ly altered,” she told STAT. “This actu­al­ly changes every­thing. … It’s a more severe lev­el of dig­i­tal alter­ing.’”
    • Most damn­ing — lat­er in the arti­cle they explain that sim­i­lar prob­lems have occurred at mul­ti­ple insti­tu­tions with vary­ing sets of coau­thors with MTL being the only con­stant pres­ence. Eep!
    • Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion opens inves­ti­ga­tion into Stan­ford for bias against male stu­dents (Judy Liu, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The com­plaint, which was filed by Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor James Moore and Kur­sat Pekgoz, CEO of Turk­ish real estate com­pa­ny Doruk, alleges that mul­ti­ple Stan­ford pro­grams vio­late Title IX, a fed­er­al civ­il rights law that pro­tects peo­ple from sex-based dis­crim­i­na­tion in edu­ca­tion pro­grams that receive fed­er­al funds.” An inevitable devel­op­ment in our iden­ti­ty-obsessed cul­ture.
  6. ‘It’s The First Time I’ve Seen This in Chi­na’ (Simon Lep­lâtre, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “When some­one shout­ed, ‘Xi Jin­ping, resign,’ the crowd explod­ed, and soon oth­er peo­ple were say­ing it, and it was as if the shouter had bro­ken a taboo in a coun­try where peo­ple usu­al­ly low­ered their voice when men­tion­ing the name of their leader.  Then some­one else in the crowd shout­ed, ‘Down with the Com­mu­nist Par­ty,’ which was a big no-no—the Chi­nese gen­er­al­ly broad­cast their ide­o­log­i­cal fervor—and the crowd loved that, too. It was like top­pling the stat­ue of a dic­ta­tor. I told a col­league we were prob­a­bly wit­ness­ing some­thing impor­tant that might become very impor­tant.”
  7. Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Brooks B. Ander­son, Har­vard Crim­son): “Across the Uni­ver­si­ty, for every aca­d­e­m­ic employ­ee there are approx­i­mate­ly 1.45 admin­is­tra­tors. When only con­sid­er­ing fac­ul­ty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Har­vard employs 7,024 total full-time admin­is­tra­tors, only slight­ly few­er than the under­grad­u­ate pop­u­la­tion. What do they all do?” The sit­u­a­tion is sim­i­lar at Stan­ford.

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 Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions! From vol­ume 251.

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 375

a week full of wild arti­cles

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 375, which can also be writ­ten at 3·53. I like the threes on either side of the five.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Truth Cops: Leaked Doc­u­ments Out­line DHS’s Plans to Police Dis­in­for­ma­tion (Ken Klip­pen­stein & Lee Fang, The Inter­cept): “DHS’s mis­sion to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion, stem­ming from con­cerns around Russ­ian influ­ence in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, began tak­ing shape dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion and over efforts to shape dis­cus­sions around vac­cine pol­i­cy dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.”
    • This is the arti­cle of the week and it’s not close. Wow. Some more excerpts:
    • “U.S. offi­cials have rou­tine­ly lied about an array of issues, from the caus­es of its wars in Viet­nam and Iraq to their more recent obfus­ca­tion around the role of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health in fund­ing the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s coro­n­avirus research. That track record has not pre­vent­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing to become arbiters of what con­sti­tutes false or dan­ger­ous infor­ma­tion on inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal top­ics.”
    • This bit was wild: “Dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, in an email to an offi­cial at Twit­ter, for­ward­ed infor­ma­tion about a poten­tial threat to crit­i­cal U.S. infra­struc­ture, cit­ing FBI warn­ings, in this case about an account that could imper­il elec­tion sys­tem integri­ty. The Twit­ter user in ques­tion had 56 fol­low­ers, along with a bio that read ‘dm us your weed store loca­tions (hoes be mad, but this is a par­o­dy account),’ under a ban­ner image of Blu­cifer, the 32-foot-tall demon­ic horse sculp­ture fea­tured at the entrance of the Den­ver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port.”
  2. Neg­a­tive World Arrives in Aus­tralia (Simon Kennedy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “This was a water­shed cul­tur­al moment for Aus­tralia, and pos­si­bly for the West. A man with out­stand­ing cre­den­tials was told that, because of some ser­mons preached by some­one else from almost a decade ago, he need­ed to recon­sid­er his fit for the role he had just been appoint­ed to. For all we know, Thor­burn may dis­agree with these ser­mons. He may nev­er have been aware of them or lis­tened to them. The bot­tom line here was guilt-by-asso­ci­a­tion.”
  3. Black, Chris­t­ian and Tran­scend­ing the Polit­i­cal Bina­ry (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “The con­ser­v­a­tive and pro­gres­sive approach­es are not the only way to approach pol­i­tics. Every­thing that doesn’t fit isn’t ille­git­i­mate. Once we real­ize those aren’t the only two approach­es, then we open up space for peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple of faith and oth­ers who are polit­i­cal­ly home­less to real­ly have a voice and help heal some­thing that’s been bro­ken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.”
  4. Racial Dis­crim­i­na­tion Is Not the Path to Racial Jus­tice (David French, The Dis­patch): “If schools tru­ly want to pri­or­i­tize diver­si­ty, they should focus on class. Fos­ter­ing greater class-based diver­si­ty can help achieve greater diver­si­ty across the board: More racial diver­si­ty, more eco­nom­ic diver­si­ty, more ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, and more diver­si­ty on the basis of reli­gion. Empha­siz­ing diver­si­ty of class doesn’t just cre­ate a stu­dent body that looks like Amer­i­ca. It cre­ates a stu­dent body that is like Amer­i­ca.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Racial Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics: A Warn­ing From Sara­je­vo (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “White racial con­scious­ness is taboo for a good his­tor­i­cal rea­son, but any­one with a lick of com­mon sense has to see that you can­not keep attack­ing white peo­ple as moral­ly bad because of the col­or of their skin, and pun­ish them in pub­lic and pri­vate life because they are white, with­out invit­ing push­back.”
    • We are play­ing with fire when it comes to race in Amer­i­ca and pray we open our eyes before the flames rage out of con­trol.
  5. Stan­ford knew about the cam­pus imposter for a year. He kept com­ing back. (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic safe­ty depart­ment have been aware since at least Decem­ber 2021 that William Cur­ry, the Alaba­ma native who was removed from cam­pus Thurs­day, had pre­tend­ed to be a Stan­ford stu­dent and lived in mul­ti­ple Uni­ver­si­ty dorms, accord­ing to com­mu­ni­ca­tions obtained by The Dai­ly.” Very detailed. A well-report­ed sto­ry.
    • Imposter recounts his time on cam­pus (Theo Bak­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Cur­ry said he lied to peo­ple in high school about attend­ing Stan­ford and claimed his par­ents believed he was enrolled in the Uni­ver­si­ty. He con­firmed many ele­ments of the Daily’s report­ing and even mes­saged a Dai­ly reporter after the inter­view, say­ing ‘always my duty to help my fel­low stu­dents.’ ” — empha­sis added. Less inter­est­ing than the main sto­ry, but still intrigu­ing.
    • In oth­er Stan­ford news, Stan­ford Tree gets the axe, sus­pend­ed until Jan­u­ary (Car­o­line Chen & Yana Kim, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the fall of 2020, the Band tran­si­tioned from a Vol­un­tary Stu­dent Orga­ni­za­tion (VSO) to being under the Depart­ment of Ath­let­ics (DAPER). At the same time, its Con­sti­tu­tion, which allowed stu­dent self-expres­sion such as kneel­ing dur­ing the nation­al anthem and tap­ing ‘Abol­ish ICE’ on the back of their jack­ets, was dis­solved, accord­ing to Band social chair and recruiter Noah Bartlett ’23, who described there being a sig­nif­i­cant ‘cul­ture shift’ since he joined the Band in 2019.” HOW DARE YOU SAY WE DON’T LIKE FUN! NO FUN FOR YOU!
  6. NYC judge rules polyamorous unions enti­tled to same legal pro­tec­tions as 2‑person rela­tion­ships (Julia Mus­to, NY Post): “In the case at hand, Bac­dayan notes how changes since 1989 play a role, includ­ing changes to the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘fam­i­ly.’ She notes the law has rapid­ly pro­ceed­ed in rec­og­niz­ing that it is pos­si­ble for a child to have more than two legal par­ents. ‘Why then, except for the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of implic­it majori­tar­i­an ani­mus, is the lim­i­ta­tion of two per­sons insert­ed into the def­i­n­i­tion of a fam­i­ly-like rela­tion­ship for the pur­pos­es of receiv­ing the same pro­tec­tions from evic­tion accord­ed to legal­ly for­mal­ized or blood rela­tion­ships?’ asked Bac­dayan.”
    • “Two per­son rela­tion­ships”
    • This is from ear­ly last month
  7. Mod­er­a­tion Is Dif­fer­ent From Cen­sor­ship (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A min­i­mum viable prod­uct for mod­er­a­tion with­out cen­sor­ship is for a plat­form to do exact­ly the same thing they’re doing now — remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts — but have an opt-in set­ting, ‘see banned posts’. If you per­son­al­ly choose to see harass­ing and offen­sive con­tent, you can tog­gle that set­ting, and every­thing bad will reap­pear.” The meme near the top made me chuck­le.

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 S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay. From vol­ume 245.

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 373

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 373, a per­mutable prime. That means it is a prime num­ber even when you rearrange its dig­its (337, 733).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Recon­struct­ing Faith: Chris­tian­i­ty in a New World (Tim Keller, Life In The Gospel): “Chris­tians in our cul­tur­al moment will have to rethink their faith, but at the same time they must learn to ‘doubt their doubts.’ They must decon­struct not only their tac­it, mis­tak­en beliefs and their sec­ondary beliefs that pose as pri­ma­ry, but also just as impor­tant­ly, the cul­tur­al nar­ra­tives that are offered as the alter­na­tives to Chris­t­ian faith.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Math of Mea­sure­ments (Tum­blr): “The base 12 sys­tem of the tra­di­tion­al Eng­lish foot is fan­tas­tic for men­tal math, because 12 is a high­ly divis­i­ble num­ber. It’s eas­i­ly divis­i­ble into halves, thirds, quar­ters, and sixths by most peo­ple in their heads.… This is the kind of math most arti­sans need to do. You want sup­ports placed even­ly along a wall, to divide a piece of fab­ric in half, or to dou­ble a recipe. Nobody 1.7x’s a recipe. Met­ric would be great for that, but why would you do that? It would­n’t be worth the math involved.”
    • I very much like this rant. There’s a lot to like about met­ric, but not as much as some of its enthu­si­asts claim.
  3. Co-ops are the New Greek Life (Julia Stein­berg, Stan­ford Review): “While attempt­ing to pro­vide an alter­na­tive social and liv­ing envi­ron­ment based on prin­ci­ples of coun­ter­cul­tur­al­ism, many co-ops recre­ate the social pres­sures of Greek Life through a flim­sy veneer of coun­ter­cul­tur­al­ism.… co-ops present a space to safe­ly pre­tend to be coun­ter­cul­tur­al, while forg­ing a liv­ing com­mu­ni­ty with peo­ple who are just like them, pre­vent­ing the expres­sion of true dif­fer­ence and diver­si­ty. If co-ops seek to hold onto the lega­cy of the 60s and 70s that birthed these hous­es, they must reck­on with the fact that they are cur­rent­ly co-ed Greek Hous­es in a cro­chet sweater.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CREATES a new Covid strain that has an 80% kill rate — echo­ing dan­ger­ous exper­i­ments feared to have start­ed pan­dem­ic (Caitlin Tilley, Dai­ly Mail): “It will no doubt sur­prise many Amer­i­cans that such exper­i­ments con­tin­ue to go on in the US despite con­cerns sim­i­lar stud­ies may have led to the glob­al Covid out­break.”
    • The research paper is here — https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf
    • One good response: Irre­spon­si­ble Gain of Func­tion Research (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Frankly, the authors of the study were irre­spon­si­ble. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty also failed ter­ri­bly in its over­sight. Final­ly, I also put some blame on Antho­ny Fau­ci for evad­ing and obfus­cat­ing ear­li­er gain of func­tion research in a way that sug­gest­ed very lit­tle falls under this cat­e­go­ry. (Rand Paul was right about this).”
    • Anoth­er ratio­nal response that also address­es com­mon objec­tions: Can We At Least Ban Gain of Func­tion Research? (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine the worst thing you could do that doesn’t involve nuclear weapons. Then imag­ine some­one went ahead and did it, and pub­lished, and it was all not only legal. It was fund­ed. Here in Amer­i­ca.”
  5. Amer­i­can Idol: How Pol­i­tics Replaced Spir­i­tu­al Prac­tice (Michael Wear, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…the Chris­t­ian faith offers tremen­dous resources for com­bat­ing polit­i­cal sec­tar­i­an­ism and so much else that ails our pol­i­tics, but we have to con­nect those resources to our pub­lic life and pol­i­tics. Chris­tians don’t need to be remind­ed of kind­ness, gen­tle­ness, and joy. But many do need to be con­vinced that the way of Jesus is up to the task of pol­i­tics. They need to be con­vinced that the pub­lic are­na, too, is a forum for faith­ful­ness.”
  6. Key find­ings from The Post’s series on vet­er­ans’ lucra­tive for­eign jobs (Craig Whit­lock and Nate Jones, Wash­ing­ton Post): “More than 500 retired U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel — includ­ing scores of gen­er­als and admi­rals — have tak­en jobs as con­trac­tors and con­sul­tants for for­eign gov­ern­ments since 2015, cash­ing in on their mil­i­tary exper­tise and polit­i­cal clout. Most have worked as civil­ian con­trac­tors for Sau­di Ara­bia, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates and oth­er Per­sian Gulf monar­chies, play­ing a crit­i­cal, though large­ly invis­i­ble, role in upgrad­ing their mil­i­taries.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Amer­i­can tech­nol­o­gy boosts China’s hyper­son­ic mis­sile pro­gram (Cate Cadell & Ellen Nakashima, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mil­i­tary research groups at the lead­ing edge of China’s hyper­son­ics and mis­sile pro­grams — many on a U.S. export black­list — are­pur­chas­ing a range of spe­cial­ized Amer­i­can tech­nol­o­gy, includ­ing prod­ucts devel­oped by firms that have received mil­lions of dol­lars in grants and con­tracts from the Pen­ta­gon, a Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion has found.”
    • See a non-pay­walled sum­ma­ry of the mis­sile sto­ry at US soft­ware gives Chi­na its hyper­son­ic edge (Gabriel Hon­ra­da, Asia Times)
  7. Stan­ford Apol­o­gizes for Lim­it­ing Jew­ish Admis­sions in the 1950s (Aman­da Holpuch, New York Times): “Sev­er­al col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Har­vard, Yale and Dart­mouth, lim­it­ed Jew­ish enroll­ment in the 1920s through the 1960s, but Stan­ford had long denied rumors that it had used sim­i­lar prac­tices.” Of inter­est in this sto­ry is (a) the inter­view at the end with Jes­si­ca, the direc­tor of Hil­lel and (b) the fact that a Sub­stack arti­cle start­ed all this.
    • The Sub­stack arti­cle which launched it: How I Dis­cov­ered Stan­ford’s Jew­ish Quo­ta (Charles Petersen, Sub­stack): “One Jew­ish stu­dent who attend­ed Stan­ford in the 1960s was told by his high school guid­ance coun­selor that the uni­ver­si­ty would only accept one Jew­ish stu­dent from each high school each year — he had been the one to get in. If this is true (and this stu­dent ver­i­fied the claim from per­son­al expe­ri­ence), it might offer an expla­na­tion for how Sny­der imple­ment­ed the sug­ges­tion, men­tioned ear­li­er, from the Jew­ish pres­i­dent of Stanford’s board of trustees. When Sny­der want­ed to admit a few Gen­tiles with less than stel­lar grades, he made sure to admit pre­cise­ly one Jew­ish appli­cant near the top of the class.”

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 3 Types of Skep­tics (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “1. Those who need answers…. 2. Those who don’t like the answers…. 3. Those who need heal­ing.” 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 369

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 post 369, which I like sim­ply because 3+6=9.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sug­ar Babies of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty (Nico­la Buskirk, Sub­stack): “But decades after the unwind­ing of America’s tra­di­tion­al sex­u­al mores, no new moral­i­ty has clear­ly emerged, and young peo­ple increas­ing­ly find them­selves nav­i­gat­ing a cul­ture of sex­u­al anar­chy, in which — pro­vid­ed an act is con­sen­su­al — there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Such think­ing has brought us inevitably to the rise of Only­Fans, the nor­mal­iza­tion of sex work, and the curi­ous sto­ry of Stan­ford University’s sug­ar babies.”
    • A curi­ous sto­ry indeed!
  2. Wikipedia Is Mak­ing Us More Polit­i­cal (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “There is sim­ply no par­al­lel to this with any oth­er peri­od of media his­to­ry; the dig­i­tal age is the very first to say that we should have access to a repos­i­to­ry of a person’s most con­tro­ver­sial sen­tences, per­ma­nent­ly acces­si­ble through their bio­graph­i­cal data.… All of these exam­ples ampli­fy the role of pol­i­tics in cul­ture, by mak­ing par­ti­san opin­ions a vital part of a person’s bio­graph­i­cal data. There is no dis­tinc­tion any more between the per­son who, through their voca­tion­al or per­son­al choic­es, decides to become a polit­i­cal fig­ure, and the per­son who is per­ceived as polit­i­cal. What we know about the one is pret­ty much what we know about the oth­er. Thus, hyper-politi­ciza­tion of every­thing feels much more nor­mal.”
  3. So you haven’t caught COVID yet. Does that mean you’re a super­dodger? (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Your immune response and these T cells fire up much more quick­ly [than in a per­son with­out the HLA muta­tion],” Hol­len­bach says. “So for lack of a bet­ter term, you basi­cal­ly nuke the infec­tion before you even start to have symp­toms.… It’s def­i­nite­ly luck,” she says. “But, you know, this muta­tion is quite com­mon. We esti­mate that maybe 1 in 10 peo­ple have it. And in peo­ple who are asymp­to­matic, that ris­es to 1 in 5.”
    • Relat­ed: The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic feels over but is not actu­al­ly over. (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “For the time being I will still mask at air­ports and on air­planes and occa­sion­al­ly in very large indoor gath­er­ings. Oth­er than that, I’m done. I am vac­ci­nat­ed, boost­ed and had COVID-19 ear­li­er this year, so the prospect of con­tract­ing it again seems both less like­ly and less scary. The thing is, I con­fess to being unsure whether I have made the right prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­la­tions.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics at Tufts.
  4. Why Is The Cen­tral Val­ley So Bad? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A short dri­ve through [the Cen­tral Val­ley] is enough to notice pover­ty, decay, and home­less camps worse even than the rest of Cal­i­for­nia. But I didn’t real­ize how bad it was until read­ing this piece on the San Joaquin Riv­er. It claims that if the Cen­tral Val­ley were its own state, it would be the poor­est in Amer­i­ca, even worse than Mis­sis­sip­pi. This was kind of shock­ing. I always think of Mis­sis­sip­pi as bad because of a his­to­ry of racial vio­lence, racial seg­re­ga­tion, and get­ting burned down dur­ing the Civ­il War. But the Cen­tral Val­ley has none of those things, plus it has extreme­ly fer­tile farm­land, plus it’s in one of the rich­est states of the coun­try and should at least get good sub­si­dies and infra­struc­ture. How did it get so bad?”
  5. Cov­er­age of church­es:
    • Doug Wil­son in Ida­ho:
      1. Pas­tor Seeks To Make Moscow, Ida­ho A ‘Chris­t­ian Town’  (NBC News, YouTube): twelve min­utes.
      2. What NBC Did­n’t Show You (Dou­glas Wil­son, YouTube): Wilson’s response video, four and a half min­utes.
      3. NBC News Lends a Hand (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As I have said else­where, I am grate­ful that it was not a hit piece—they let both sides talk, in oth­er words. It was even-hand­ed in that way. At the same time, it was clear that what we were say­ing must have sound­ed some­thing like Mid­dle Klin­gon to them, and this of course affects the edit­ing process.”
    • Gra­ce­point at Berke­ley:
      1. The Ungod­ly Sur­veil­lance of Anti-Porn ‘Shame­ware’ Apps (Dhruv Mehro­tra, Wired): “At its most basic lev­el, the idea is pret­ty straight­for­ward: Why would any­one watch porn if they are going to have to talk to their par­ents or pas­tor about it?… The trou­ble is, accord­ing to Hao-Wei Lin, pro­vid­ing his church leader with a ledger of every­thing he did online meant his pas­tor could always find some­thing to ask him about, and the way Covenant Eyes flagged con­tent didn’t help. For exam­ple, in Covenant Eyes reports that Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED, his online psy­chi­a­try text­book was rat­ed ‘High­ly Mature,’ the most severe cat­e­go­ry of con­tent reserved for ‘anonymiz­ers, nudi­ty, erot­i­ca, and pornog­ra­phy.’ ”
      2. At Gra­ce­point Min­istries, ‘Whole-Life Dis­ci­ple­ship’ Took Its Toll (Cur­tis Yee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Thir­ty-two for­mer Gra­ce­point mem­bers who spoke with Chris­tian­i­ty Today for this sto­ry described a cul­ture that was ‘con­trol­ling’ and ‘coer­cive’ for the sake of min­istry effi­cien­cy. Mem­bers said they were manip­u­lat­ed into con­fess­ing sins, screamed at by lead­ers, and over­loaded with oblig­a­tions to the point of ill­ness. To keep mem­bers focused on mis­sion work, Gra­ce­point effec­tive­ly restrict­ed dat­ing, media con­sump­tion, and pet own­er­ship. Lead­ers direct­ed staff on how to arrange their homes, where to shop for clothes, and what cars to dri­ve.”
  6. Rich Mullins: Raga­muf­fin, Celebri­ty, Dis­ci­ple (Bethel McGrew, Plough): “You might have called him a frus­trat­ed strug­gling artist: a suc­cess­ful artist who nev­er want­ed to suc­ceed. When Myrrh records first called to say Amy Grant want­ed to record his song ‘Sing Your Praise to the Lord,’ he near­ly hung up. But it would be a hit, the first of many. He wrote nat­u­ral­ly to the peo­ple, com­ple­ment­ing his poet­ic lyri­cism with a good pop writer’s ear for how to con­vey pro­found ideas sim­ply. His arrange­ments were an eclec­tic fusion of pop and folk, most famous­ly intro­duc­ing radio to his sig­na­ture instru­ment, the ham­mered dul­cimer. This was the secret sauce that made hit sin­gles out of songs like the atmos­pher­ic West­ern nature poem ‘Call­ing Out Your Name’ – a tune which, by all the rules of hit sin­gles, should nev­er even have been on the air. As one fan put it, Mullins was weird, but he was also so good that radio had to play him.”
    • Mullins was unique and bril­liant and I am still sad he is dead. He was before your time, so I doubt you will believe me when I say that he by him­self out­weighed the entire Chris­t­ian music indus­try that you have been exposed to. But he was that good. It was more than his music. It was his life.

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 Killing Human Mon­sters (Mark LiVec­chi, Prov­i­dence): “‘The inter­nal con­di­tion of God’s exter­nal expres­sion of wrath,’ writes the the­olo­gian and rab­bi Abra­ham Joshua Hes­chel, ‘is grief.’ To the best I can deduce, there­in is com­mu­ni­cat­ed the com­plex dis­po­si­tion of the just war­rior.… I do not rejoice that I wor­ship a God who kills. I only rejoice that I wor­ship a God who is will­ing to.” From vol­ume 236.

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 355

Two pieces crit­i­cal of Stan­ford plus lots more.

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 355, which is 5 times 71. It’s also appar­ent­ly the num­ber of labeled topolo­gies with 4 ele­ments, but I think know­ing that it is 5 · 71 is cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • Stanford’s War on Social Life (Ginevra Davis, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The Uni­ver­si­ty sent a clear mes­sage with its treat­ment of the Band. Spon­ta­neous orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they could become chaot­ic, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise a space for break­ing rules, were now some­thing to be con­trolled. Rather than treat­ing free­dom and spon­tane­ity as strengths, the dynam­ic became one where stu­dents had to jus­ti­fy their projects and ideas while under sus­pi­cion from admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dent life was becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by restric­tive bureau­cra­cy.” I believe this is sub­stan­tial­ly cor­rect.
    • How I Almost Did­n’t Grad­u­ate From Stan­ford (Maxwell Mey­er, Sub­stack): “Appar­ent­ly, in order to grad­u­ate from Stan­ford while not offi­cial­ly enrolled, I need­ed to be placed in a spe­cial 0‑unit ‘course’ that exists only on paper. And because Stan­ford requires boost­er vac­cines in order to enroll in cours­es, the degree progress office was lit­er­al­ly unable to place me in the fake course.”
  2. The Google engi­neer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As he talked to LaM­DA about reli­gion, Lemoine, who stud­ied cog­ni­tive and com­put­er sci­ence in col­lege, noticed the chat­bot talk­ing about its rights and per­son­hood, and decid­ed to press fur­ther. In anoth­er exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robot­ics.” Spec­u­la­tive and dis­put­ed.
  3. This traf­fic stop between a Black man and a White state troop­er began with fear. It end­ed with a sur­pris­ing act of kind­ness (John Blake, CNN): “Doty closed his tick­et book and opened his car door. He walked back over to Wilk­er­son­’s car and turned to Ged­dis. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask what kind of can­cer you have?’ ‘No, I don’t mind. I have colon can­cer.’ Doty took a deep breath and looked at Ged­dis. ‘Can I pray for you?’ Doty said.” Heart­warm­ing.
  4. In the world of med­i­cine:
    • A turn­ing point in can­cer (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “The con­ver­gence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor direct­ly or the blood (known as liq­uid biopsy)—matched with the appro­pri­ate ther­a­py is lead­ing to out­comes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncol­o­gists.”
    • The Bat­tle Over Gen­der Ther­a­py (Emi­ly Bazelon, New York Times): “ ‘Being trans comes with goals — this is what to do,’ Butzen says. ‘It comes with a sup­port net­work and a cause to fight for.’ Online, where the stakes start rel­a­tive­ly low, teenagers in pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties can trade in a cis­gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al, white iden­ti­ty — the epit­o­me of priv­i­lege and oppres­sion — to join a com­mu­ni­ty with a clear claim to being mar­gin­al­ized and deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion.”
      • It is sig­nif­i­cant that this report­ing is in New York Times. This is a long arti­cle and it was dif­fi­cult to find a pas­sage to excerpt. I am con­fi­dent the jour­nal­ist would not con­sid­er this a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt nor the one she con­sid­ers most impor­tant.
  5. Pro­fes­sors Need the Pow­er to Fire Diver­si­ty Bureau­crats (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “At present, sanc­tions in high­er edu­ca­tion flow in one direc­tion: Diver­si­ty bureau­crats exert con­trol over fac­ul­ty mem­bers whose speech alleged­ly under­mines inclu­sion. I pro­pose giv­ing fac­ul­ty the pow­er to inves­ti­gate, sanc­tion, and fire diver­si­ty offi­cials if they under­mine free speech. Admin­is­tra­tive abus­es will con­tin­ue as long as bureau­crats can pun­ish speech, even in fla­grant vio­la­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy, with­out any con­se­quences.” I like this. I don’t think it’s struc­tural­ly pos­si­ble at most uni­ver­si­ties, but I like this.
  6. Inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive:
    • Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The Rus­sians are run­ning out of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed weapons. The Ukraini­ans are run­ning out of Sovi­et-era muni­tions. The world is run­ning out of patience for the war. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is run­ning out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chi­nese are watch­ing.… an army that can­not wage a high-tech war, rel­a­tive­ly low on col­lat­er­al dam­age, will wage a low-tech war, appalling­ly high on such dam­age. Ukraine, by its own esti­mates, is suf­fer­ing 20,000 casu­al­ties a month. By con­trast, the U.S. suf­fered about 36,000 casu­al­ties in Iraq over sev­en years of war. For all its brav­ery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neigh­bor more than three times its size in a war of attri­tion.”
    • China’s mil­i­tary expan­sion is reach­ing a dan­ger­ous tip­ping point (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Chi­na is build­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to use nuclear black­mail to deter a U.S. inter­ven­tion if it invades Tai­wan, fol­low­ing Russia’s mod­el. China’s region­al mil­i­tary pres­ence is expand­ing, includ­ing a secret naval base in Cam­bo­dia and a secret mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the Solomon Islands. Chi­na has devel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles and anti­satel­lite lasers, to keep the U.S. mil­i­tary at bay in a Tai­wan sce­nario. And now, Chi­na no longer rec­og­nizes the Tai­wan Strait as inter­na­tion­al waters.”
  7. Ele­phant in the Zoom (Ryan Grim, The Inter­cept): “…Planned Par­ent­hood, NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­i­ca, and oth­er repro­duc­tive health orga­ni­za­tions had sim­i­lar­ly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between com­pet­ing fac­tions of their orga­ni­za­tions, most often break­ing down along staff-ver­sus-man­age­ment lines. It’s also true of the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy space across the board, which has, more or less, effec­tive­ly ceased to func­tion. The Sier­ra Club, Demos, the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, Col­or of Change, the Move­ment for Black Lives, Human Rights Cam­paign, Time’s Up, the Sun­rise Move­ment, and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions have seen wrench­ing and debil­i­tat­ing tur­moil in the past cou­ple years.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 353

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 353, the 71st prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I saw this gem on Twit­ter: “I don’t wish to sound apoc­a­lyp­tic about this, but one has the sense that at present our soci­ety is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly char­ac­ter­ized by wild­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate account­abil­i­ty for triv­ial trans­gres­sions and zero account­abil­i­ty for pro­found insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure.” (David Polan­sky, co-founder of LinkedIn)
  2. The Rob­ber Baroness of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia (Maia Sil­ber, New York­er): “The university’s most vital pur­pose, Stan­ford explained in an address to its Board of Trustees a few years after her husband’s death, was the devel­op­ment of the student’s ‘soul germ.’ She urged the trustees to eschew class­rooms in favor of shops and work­shops that would ‘dig­ni­fy labor’ by teach­ing future work­ers to ‘use their hands deft­ly and use­ful­ly.’ Stan­ford believed that, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing voca­tion­al train­ing, the uni­ver­si­ty should incul­cate the val­ues of faith, thrift, and absti­nence of var­i­ous kinds. She and her hus­band banned alco­hol from the dor­mi­to­ries and capped the num­ber of women under­grad­u­ates at five hun­dred.”
  3. 78 Min­utes (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “I know it’s a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. I know it almost nev­er hap­pens. I know there are a mil­lion things I wor­ry less about that hap­pen with greater reg­u­lar­i­ty and worse effects; but those things are unfor­tu­nate, and this is evil. Mis­for­tune is awful, but this was some­thing worse. This was tor­ture. This was cru­el. This was inten­tion­al. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters.”
  4. How did the IR com­mu­ni­ty get Russia/Ukraine so wrong? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The IR com­mu­ni­ty is risk-averse, and pre­serv­ing of its aca­d­e­m­ic rep­u­ta­tions, and thus its mem­bers are less will­ing to make bold pre­dic­tions than say pun­dits are. You might even think that is good, all things con­sid­ered, but it will help explain the missed pre­dic­tions here.” Many inter­est­ing con­sid­er­a­tions, fol­low-up at Data on IR schol­ars and their views on Russia/Ukraine.
  5. Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Eric Kauf­mann, CSPI): “The youth­ful surge is main­ly about LGBT iden­ti­ty, with con­sid­er­ably less change in sex­u­al behav­ior. The rise is great­est for bisex­u­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly among females, with less change for gays and les­bians. The growth in LGBT iden­ti­fi­ca­tion shows no signs of slow­ing down among the young, but there is com­pelling evi­dence that gen­der non­con­for­mi­ty peaked around 2020 and declined in 2021. It appears less preva­lent among teenagers than those in their ear­ly twen­ties.” Plus a fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread by the author high­light­ing key details — so much data in this piece to con­tem­plate. Spicy through­out.
  6. The Pope’s Secret Back Chan­nel to Hitler (David Kertzer, The Atlantic): “As the head of a large inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion, his over­rid­ing aim in nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler’s emis­sary was pro­tect­ing the insti­tu­tion­al resources and pre­rog­a­tives of the Roman Catholic Church in the Third Reich. If the only goal was to pro­tect the wel­fare of the insti­tu­tion­al Church, his efforts could well be judged a suc­cess. But for those who see the papa­cy as a posi­tion of great moral lead­er­ship, the rev­e­la­tions of Pius XII’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler must come as a sharp dis­ap­point­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. We Need to Com­pli­cate the Neg­a­tive World (Trevin Wax, Gospel Coali­tion): “…tak­ing a stand for true Chris­tian­i­ty has always been cost­ly. Chris­t­ian min­is­ters lost their jobs in the 1960s for doing noth­ing more than allow­ing African Amer­i­cans to attend wor­ship! In some way or anoth­er, we’ve been in the neg­a­tive world since the time of the New Tes­ta­ment, but the form of that hos­til­i­ty toward the faith changes depend­ing on the place and the era. And the opportunities—where soci­ety smiles on aspects of Christianity—change too. We live in pos­i­tive, neu­tral, and neg­a­tive worlds simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, depend­ing on the issue.“This is quite good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him short­ly before this one. First shared back in vol­ume 286.

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 346

strong arti­cles this week — more rec­om­mend­ed than nor­mal

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, vol­ume 346, is the 5th Franel num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Spir­i­tu­al­ly uplift­ing:
    • Fire Upon The Earth (Charles Cha­put, First Things): “Too many peo­ple who claim to be Chris­t­ian sim­ply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t real­ly believe in the gospel. They feel embar­rassed by their reli­gion and out of step with the times. They may keep their reli­gion for its com­fort val­ue, or adjust it to fit their doubts. It doesn’t reshape their lives, because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no trans­form­ing effect on their behav­ior, no social force, and few pub­lic con­se­quences. Their faith, what­ev­er it once was, is now dead.” THIS IS STRAIGHT FIRE. The excerpt does not do it jus­tice.
    • The Man On The Mid­dle Cross (Alis­tair Begg, YouTube): one and a half min­utes.
    • It’s Fri­day… But Sun­day’s a Com­ing! (YouTube): three and a half min­utes
  2. Recalled Expe­ri­ences Sur­round­ing Death: More Than Hal­lu­ci­na­tions? (Neu­ro­science News): “The recalled expe­ri­ences sur­round­ing death are not con­sis­tent with hal­lu­ci­na­tions, illu­sions or psy­che­del­ic drug induced expe­ri­ences, accord­ing to sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished stud­ies. Instead, they fol­low a spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive arc involv­ing a per­cep­tion of: (a) sep­a­ra­tion from the body with a height­ened, vast sense of con­scious­ness and recog­ni­tion of death; (b) trav­el to a des­ti­na­tion; © a mean­ing­ful and pur­pose­ful review of life, involv­ing a crit­i­cal analy­sis of all actions, inten­tions and thoughts towards oth­ers; a per­cep­tion of (d) being in a place that feels like “home”, and (e) a return back to life.” The orig­i­nal research: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.14740
  3. Why the Past 10 Years of Amer­i­can Life Have Been Unique­ly Stu­pid (Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic): “The sto­ry of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what hap­pened to Amer­i­ca in the 2010s, and for the frac­tured coun­try we now inhab­it. Some­thing went ter­ri­bly wrong, very sud­den­ly. We are dis­ori­ent­ed, unable to speak the same lan­guage or rec­og­nize the same truth. We are cut off from one anoth­er and from the past.” This is quite good. Haidt is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU and is some­one who seems to be faith-adja­cent: he’s near Chris­tian­i­ty but not there yet.
  4. LGBTQ relat­ed
    • What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reas­sign­ment surgery (Corin­na Cohn, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Surgery unshack­led me from my body’s urges, but the destruc­tion of my gonads intro­duced a dif­fer­ent type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a med­ical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.” I am impressed that the Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished this op-ed.
    • How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Cul­ture War (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If con­ser­v­a­tives had pre­dict­ed just before Oberge­fell v. Hodges that soon a fifth of young adults would iden­ti­fy as L.G.B.T.Q., promi­nent voic­es would deploy terms like ‘preg­nant per­son’ and ‘men­stru­a­tor’ in place of ‘woman,’ and natal males would be win­ning women’s track and swim­ming com­pe­ti­tions, they would have been treat­ed as hys­ter­ics.” This is a strong essay. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed and worth using up one of your pay­wall access­es.
    • Vic­to­ry: Shawnee State agrees pro­fes­sors can’t be forced to speak con­trary to their beliefs (Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom): “As part of the set­tle­ment, the uni­ver­si­ty has agreed that Meri­wether has the right to choose when to use, or avoid using, titles or pro­nouns when refer­ring to or address­ing stu­dents. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty agreed Meri­wether will nev­er be man­dat­ed to use pro­nouns, includ­ing if a stu­dent requests pro­nouns that con­flict with his or her bio­log­i­cal sex.” In addi­tion, “the uni­ver­si­ty agreed to pay $400,000 in dam­ages and Meriwether’s attor­neys’ fees.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • The Accu­ra­cy of Author­i­ties (Robin Han­son, blog): “The best esti­mates of a max­i­mal­ly accu­rate source would be very fre­quent­ly updat­ed and fol­low a ran­dom walk, which implies a large amount of back­track­ing. And author­i­ta­tive sources like WHO are often said to be our most accu­rate sources. Even so, such sources do not tend to act this way. They instead update their esti­mates rarely, and are espe­cial­ly reluc­tant to issue esti­mates that seem to back­track. Why?” There is sol­id wis­dom in this post.
    • Faith, Sci­ence, and Fran­cis Collins (Dhruv Khullar, New York­er): “In May, 2021, after help­ing to lead the fed­er­al pan­dem­ic response for more than a year, dur­ing which he woke up most morn­ings at four-thir­ty, Collins escaped for a week­end to a rent­ed barn in Loudoun Coun­ty, Vir­ginia. He brought his gui­tar and a Bible that he has had for decades; hors­es and goats kept him com­pa­ny. Collins gazed out at the blue sky and rolling hills. He wrote, prayed, and ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to leave his post as the direc­tor of the N.I.H. Collins told me that he prays not to ask God to change his cir­cum­stances, but to ask God what he him­self should do.”
    • A Warn­ing From Shang­hai (Jay Bat­tacharya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Yet the soul search­ing [of the attack on me and oth­er researchers] should have caused among pub­lic health offi­cials has large­ly failed to occur. Instead, the les­son seems to be: Dis­sent at your own risk. I do not prac­tice medicine—I am a pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in epi­demi­ol­o­gy and health pol­i­cy at Stan­ford Med­ical School. But many friends who do prac­tice have told me how they have cen­sored their thoughts about Covid lock­downs, vac­cines, and rec­om­mend­ed treat­ment to avoid the mob.”
  6. The Law that Banned Every­thing (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If every­thing is poten­tial­ly ille­gal, and gov­ern­ment does not have the resources to go after every­thing, then the gov­ern­ment basi­cal­ly has arbi­trary pow­er to do what­ev­er it wants under civ­il rights law.” This was an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. The inter­vie­wee is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego.
  7. A primer on the Stan­ford bud­get (Tim Macken­zie, Stan­ford Dai­ly) “… this year’s oper­at­ing bud­get says ‘the buffers serve as a finan­cial reserve in the event of an earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter.’ In oth­er words, Stan­ford has near­ly $4 bil­lion in a rainy-day fund. In the 2019–2020 bud­get, the last pre-COVID bud­get, Tier I and Tier II Buffers stood at $1.4 bil­lion and $1.0 bil­lion, respec­tive­ly. The buffers actu­al­ly grew by more than a bil­lion dol­lars dur­ing the ongo­ing pan­dem­ic. Mean­while, hun­dreds of work­ers were laid off and sub­con­tract­ed work­ers went months with­out promised pay. Appar­ent­ly, a glob­al pan­dem­ic does not reach the thresh­old of ‘earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter’ required to uti­lize finan­cial reserves to resist changes in uni­ver­si­ty oper­a­tions when chal­lenged with mar­ket uncer­tain­ty.” 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 For the clas­sic selec­tion next week: Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a follow-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 213.

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 338

more eclec­tic than nor­mal

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 338th install­ment. 338, I am told, is the small­est num­ber for which both the num­ber of divi­sors and the sum of its prime fac­tors is a per­fect num­ber. An odd hon­or, but one I am pleased to acknowl­edge.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Romance:
    • Reverse friend zone: many roman­tic rela­tion­ships start off just as friends. In fact, most peo­ple pre­fer it this way (Tibi Puiu, ZME Sci­ence): “When par­tic­i­pants were asked about their orig­i­nal inten­tions for ini­ti­at­ing the friend­ship that went on to evolve roman­ti­cal­ly, only 30% said they were sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to the part­ner from the very begin­ning. In 70% of cas­es, nei­ther of the two par­ties in the rela­tion­ship orig­i­nal­ly had feel­ings, with attrac­tion blos­som­ing at a lat­er time.”
    • Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not if You Avoid Cohab­it­ing First (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone, Wall Street Jour­nal): “In ana­lyz­ing reports of mar­riage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s Nation­al Sur­vey of Fam­i­ly Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom mar­riage before 30 is not risky: women who mar­ried direct­ly, with­out ever cohab­it­ing pri­or to mar­riage. In fact, women who mar­ried between 22 and 30, with­out first liv­ing togeth­er, had some of the low­est rates of divorce in the NSFG.”#justsaying
  2. Stephen Col­bert Explains The Rela­tion­ship Between His Com­e­dy and His Faith (Twit­ter): I think I would real­ly like Stephen Col­bert if I met him in per­son.
  3. Stan­ford relat­ed:
    • Are semes­ters or quar­ters bet­ter? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In fact I think the quar­ter sys­tem doesn’t go far enough. I think we should have many more one- and two-week class­es, or five-week class­es, as well. Under­stand­ably that is more dif­fi­cult to man­age oper­a­tional­ly, but I don’t see any rea­son why it should be impos­si­ble. Com­pa­nies solve more com­plex sched­ul­ing prob­lems than that all the time. If I think of GMU, either the under­grad­u­ate majors, or the grad­u­ate stu­dents, should in my opin­ion have had some class­room time with almost every sin­gle instruc­tor. So much of life and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is about match­ing!”
    • I went to every library on cam­pus so you don’t have to (Annie Reller, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Below is my rank­ing of the libraries on cam­pus. Please keep in mind that I have spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria when going to libraries: com­fy chairs, ambiance and light­ing. I am a human­i­ties major, so desks are less nec­es­sary as I do most of my work on my lap­top.”
  4. Why Isn’t There a Repli­ca­tion Cri­sis in Math? (Jay Daigle, blog): “Many papers have errors, yes—but our major results gen­er­al­ly hold up, even when the inter­me­di­ate steps are wrong! Our errors can usu­al­ly be fixed with­out real­ly chang­ing our con­clu­sions.… But isn’t it…weird…that our results hold up when our meth­ods don’t? How does that even work? We get away with it becuase we can be right for the wrong rea­sons—we most­ly only try to prove things that are basi­cal­ly true.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. The author is a math pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. Hack­ers:
    • North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Inter­net (Andy Green­berg, Wired): “But respon­si­bil­i­ty for North Kore­a’s ongo­ing inter­net out­ages does­n’t lie with US Cyber Com­mand or any oth­er state-spon­sored hack­ing agency. In fact, it was the work of one Amer­i­can man in a T‑shirt, paja­ma pants, and slip­pers, sit­ting in his liv­ing room night after night, watch­ing Alien movies and eat­ing spicy corn snacks—and peri­od­i­cal­ly walk­ing over to his home office to check on the progress of the pro­grams he was run­ning to dis­rupt the inter­net of an entire coun­try.” What an absolute leg­end.
    • How A Lone Hack­er Shred­ded the Myth of Crowd­sourc­ing (Mark Har­ris, Medi­um): “Myself and oth­ers in the social sci­ences com­mu­ni­ty tend to think of such mas­sive acts of sab­o­tage as anom­alies, but are they?” won­dered Cebri­an. To set­tle the ques­tion, Cebri­an ana­lyzed his (and oth­er) crowd­sourc­ing con­tests with the help of Vic­tor Nar­o­dit­skiy, a game the­o­ry expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Southamp­ton. The results shocked him. “The expect­ed out­come is for every­one to attack, regard­less of how dif­fi­cult an attack is,” says Cebri­an. “It is actu­al­ly ratio­nal for the crowd to be mali­cious, espe­cial­ly in a com­pe­ti­tion envi­ron­ment. And I can’t think of any engi­neer­ing or game the­o­ret­ic or eco­nom­ic incen­tive to stop it.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arse­nal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. (William J. Broad, New York Times): “We gave away the capa­bil­i­ty for noth­ing,” said Andriy Zahorod­niuk, a for­mer defense min­is­ter of Ukraine. Refer­ring to the secu­ri­ty assur­ances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time some­body offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”
    • If Rus­sia does invade Ukraine, I think the biggest glob­al con­se­quence might be that nuclear pow­ers become even more com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing their arse­nals and non-nuclear pow­ers strive even hard­er to join the club.
  7. The Cana­di­an truck­ers:
    • Sym­pa­thet­ic: What the Truck­ers Want (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “It was iron­ic, she said that she could serve but couldn’t dine at the restau­rant where she worked.”
    • Con­cerned: Dis­patch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he’s in trou­ble. Who’s lis­ten­ing? (Matt Gur­ney, Sub­stack): “This is a com­pli­cat­ed protest and a com­pli­cat­ed event. It has lay­ers. Are there good, frus­trat­ed peo­ple just try­ing to be heard in the crowd? Yes. Are there bad peo­ple in the crowd, includ­ing some who’ve waved hate sym­bols and harassed or attacked oth­ers? Yes. Are there peo­ple tak­ing care­ful care of the roads, sweep­ing up trash and shov­el­ling ice and snow off the side­walk? Yes. Are there hard men milling about, keep­ing a wary eye on any­one who seems out of place? Yes. Is it a place where some peo­ple are hav­ing good-natured fun? Yes. Is it a place some oth­er peo­ple would right­ly be afraid to go? Yes. And so on. But it’s even more com­pli­cat­ed than it looks.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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 337

Some wild sto­ries about Stan­ford in this one.

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

This is vol­ume 337, a prime num­ber. In fact, the dig­its are prime even when rearranged (the oth­er per­mu­ta­tions of these dig­its being 373 and 733).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I do not expect a civ­il war in Amer­i­ca (and what does wor­ry me) (Chris Blattman, blog): “Most ene­mies pre­fer to loathe one anoth­er in peace. War is real­ly cost­ly. It kills, destroys economies, and weak­ens your coun­try to ene­mies. As a result, all sides have huge incen­tives to avoid vio­lence. That’s why most rivals don’t fight. For every thou­sand eth­nic groups, gangs, reli­gious sects, polit­i­cal fac­tions or nations who hate one anoth­er, maybe one in a thou­sand end up in pro­longed vio­lence. Because it just doesn’t make sense.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist and polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at U Chica­go. I like this arti­cle in part because he spends time talk­ing about the absurd “democ­ra­cy rat­ings” polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have been down­grad­ing Amer­i­ca in over the last few years.
  2. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed news:
    • PDF: A Lit­er­a­ture Review and Meta-Analy­sis of the Effects of Lock­downs on COVID-19 Mor­tal­i­ty (Jonas Her­by, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Han­ke, Stud­ies in Applied Eco­nom­ics): “[The stud­ies] were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: lock­down strin­gency index stud­ies, shel­ter-in-place­order (SIPO) stud­ies, and spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies. An analy­sis of each of these three groups sup­port the con­clu­sion that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no effect on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. More specif­i­cal­ly, strin­gency index stud­ies find that lock­downs in Europe and the Unit­ed States only reduced COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 0.2% on aver­age. SIPOs were also inef­fec­tive, only reduc­ing COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 2.9% on aver­age. Spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies also find no broad-based evi­dence of notice­able effects on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. While this meta-analy­sis con­cludes that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no pub­lic health effects, they have imposed enor­mous eco­nom­ic and social costs where they have been adopt­ed. In con­se­quence, lock­down poli­cies are ill-found­ed and should be reject­ed as a pan­dem­ic pol­i­cy instru­ment.”
      • Lock­downs only achieved a .2% reduc­tion in deaths? That’s one in five hun­dred. Wow. Some of the oth­er stuff our soci­ety did was jus­ti­fied, but clear­ly lock­downs aren’t a tool we should use in the future.
    • Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dan­ger­ous (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “The rationing rules in New York and else­where are not the prod­uct of any­thing resem­bling con­ven­tion­al polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. No par­ty would support—certainly not openly—the essen­tial­iza­tion and instru­men­tal­iza­tion of race in med­i­cine. Few are will­ing to defend poli­cies such as these on the mer­its, because what exact­ly would they say? Telling­ly, these con­tro­ver­sies have received lim­it­ed cov­er­age from main­stream out­lets.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • COVID Affects Your Mem­o­ry (Alex Gutentag, Tablet): “After spend­ing four years check­ing every per­ceived author­i­tar­i­an impulse from Don­ald Trump, the media sud­den­ly called for strict enforce­ment of gov­ern­ment decrees, denounced the non­com­pli­ant, pun­ished dis­senters, and advo­cat­ed for Big Tech clam­p­downs on speech.… With the 2022 midterms in sight, the nar­ra­tive is sim­ply shift­ing with­out apol­o­gy, and many of the argu­ments once made by ‘covid­iots’ are now being backed by Antho­ny Fau­ci, CDC Direc­tor Rochelle Walen­sky, and the famil­iar cast of jour­nal­ists and experts.”
  3. Two reveal­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • “Racist, Trig­ger­ing, Dis­re­spect­ful” — Stan­ford RA slams unmasked white stu­dents (Stan­ford Review): “Late Sun­day night, a Stan­ford stu­dent RA in the EVGR dor­mi­to­ry emailed the building’s 2,400 res­i­dents to warn against a ‘gross inequity’ that risked stu­dents ‘being killed or maimed for a life­time.’ The dan­ger in ques­tion? Mask­less stu­dents— espe­cial­ly white ones.”
    • The teach­ers of White Plaza (Valerie Trapp, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “He tried to respond and was cut off. ‘You’re a white guy,’ Wait­es said. ‘I can inter­rupt you.’ ‘And you’re a white woman.’ ‘Well, you’re cop­ping out of the fact I’m say­ing that you’re racist, and you’re not say­ing you’re not a racist.’ ”
    • This isn’t all of cam­pus life, but it’s not none of cam­pus life.
  4. Some insights into acad­e­mia:
    • How the job mar­ket works at top schools (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “At least pre-Covid, most of the fac­ul­ty would get togeth­er and rate the grad­u­ate stu­dents (I am not sure how it has oper­at­ed for the last two years, though I sus­pect the same, only over Zoom). Some but not all of the stu­dents would be des­ig­nat­ed as ‘should work at a top school.’ If you were not so rat­ed, your chance of being hired at a top school was slim. Oth­er schools, of course, would know not to pur­sue the top can­di­dates, and would shoot low­er, though some fool­hardy places might try to lure them any­way. But basi­cal­ly if you were hir­ing at a high lev­el, you would call the place­ment offi­cer at a top school, and they would tier the can­di­dates, based on where you were call­ing from, and rec­om­mend accord­ing­ly.”
    • Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom in Medieval Uni­ver­si­ties (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “One rea­son [medieval uni­ver­si­ties flour­ished] is the lack of pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tors, a fea­ture of uni­ver­si­ties that last­ed into mod­ern times. (Har­vard University—O the bliss of it!—as late as 1850 had only a sin­gle full-time admin­is­tra­tor, the pres­i­dent, helped by a jan­i­tor, a cook, and two ush­ers.) It is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple of suc­cess­ful insti­tu­tions that the peo­ple who run them are the ones most com­mit­ted to their mis­sions and most respon­si­ble for their suc­cess. A pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tive class, by con­trast, spends much of its time evad­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for fail­ure and tak­ing cred­it for oth­er people’s achieve­ments.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Going South: Life at the World’s Most Pro­gres­sive Uni­ver­si­ty (David Benatar, Quil­lette): “Many uni­ver­si­ties have a problem—on this point there seems to be wide­spread agree­ment. The nature of that prob­lem, how­ev­er, remains bit­ter­ly con­test­ed. Lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives wor­ry that high­er edu­ca­tion has suc­cumbed to regres­sive rad­i­cal­ism on mat­ters relat­ed to race and gen­der. Those who self-iden­ti­fy as pro­gres­sives and social jus­tice activists, on the oth­er hand, com­plain that uni­ver­si­ties are still gov­erned by embed­ded struc­tures of oppres­sion, and that lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives have suc­cumbed to a moral pan­ic in response to rea­son­able calls for reform.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Men in the church:
    • Part one: Is Chris­tian­i­ty doing more harm than good to Amer­i­can men? (Antho­ny Bradley, Acton): “It’s often thought that con­trol of women, and espe­cial­ly women’s bod­ies, has been the obses­sion of Chris­t­ian cler­gy down through the ages, but actu­al­ly it has been the con­trol of men and their bod­ies that has just as often char­ac­ter­ized Christianity’s ori­en­ta­tion. How­ev­er, because that con­trol has his­tor­i­cal­ly been mis­man­aged, rang­ing from fem­i­niza­tion, to priests using the con­fes­sion­al to con­trol hus­bands, to cler­gy falling prey to mar­ry­ing church and pol­i­tics, to cler­gy sex-abuse scan­dals, to recent sto­ries of evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors abus­ing their pow­er, men have become increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed from the very insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed to form them to be of ben­e­fit to oth­ers.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Stud­ies at The King’s Col­lege in NYC. 
    • Part two: Sav­ing men requires the lead­er­ship of lay­men (Antho­ny Bradley, The Acton Insti­tute): “Amer­i­can boys are often taught that mar­riage or work will be a cure for their lone­li­ness and alien­ation, but many men find out the hard way that one can be mar­ried, gain­ful­ly employed, and still incred­i­bly lone­ly. Men need local, lay-led con­fra­ter­ni­ties that res­onate with their deep­est long­ings and their desire for com­mu­nion with their fel­lows, formed by local com­mon inter­ests.”
  6. How Hous­es of Wor­ship Became Hotbeds of Graft (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The New Repub­lic): “In extreme cas­es, finan­cial opac­i­ty in hous­es of wor­ship can even become a secu­ri­ty risk: It was that exact lack of trans­paren­cy that may have cost human life at Goldstein’s syn­a­gogue in Poway. Though the syn­a­gogue had received $150,000 from the gov­ern­ment because it “believed that it was at risk of an anti-Semit­ic attack on its con­gre­gants,” accord­ing to one of the con­gre­gants’ sub­se­quent suits—court doc­u­ments show that on the day of the attack, the building’s doors were unlocked and no guards, gates, or oth­er secu­ri­ty mea­sures were in place. Instead of pro­vid­ing a nec­es­sary guard at the front of the syn­a­gogue, funds had alleged­ly been divert­ed else­where; the plain­tiffs argue that this mis­take may have cost the life of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was killed in the shoot­ing.”
  7. Con­cern­ing Fran­cis Collins:
    • How The Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Used Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­ers To Spread COVID Pro­pa­gan­da To Church­es (Megan Basham, The Dai­ly Wire): “Oth­er than his procla­ma­tions that he is, him­self, a believ­er, the NIH direc­tor espous­es near­ly no pub­lic posi­tions that would mark him out as any dif­fer­ent from any extreme Left-wing bureau­crat. He has not only defend­ed exper­i­men­ta­tion on fetus­es obtained by abor­tion, he has also direct­ed record-lev­el spend­ing toward it. Among the pri­or­i­ties the NIH has fund­ed under Collins — a Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh exper­i­ment that involved graft­ing infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the har­vest­ed organs of abort­ed, full-term babies. Some doc­tors have even charged Collins with giv­ing mon­ey to research that required extract­ing kid­neys, ureters, and blad­ders from liv­ing infants.”
    • Evan­gel­i­cals: Who Are The Good & The Bad? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “What sticks in my craw is the seem­ing­ly unex­am­ined assump­tion that if you don’t land where edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elites do on any or all of these ques­tions, that you must in some sense be a threat to the integri­ty of the Church. Per­haps edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elite opin­ion is the real threat, you know?” A long arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing and inter­act­ing with two oth­er arti­cles.
    • I’m going to regret writ­ing this (Erick Erik­son, Sub­stack): “..the NIH exec­u­tive tells me it is impor­tant to under­stand that Collins does not approve and sanc­tion all research and fund­ing and of the fund­ing Collins has direct­ly over­seen and approved, only a lit­tle would be con­tro­ver­sial. The NIH is com­plex and while Collins guides the whole, he does not over­see or approve the entire­ty of the budget.“A sane take (and one I pri­vate­ly expressed ear­li­er today with­out hav­ing seen this arti­cle).
    • Dis­claimer: I loose­ly know Fran­cis Collins and respect him. I do wish he had done a few things dif­fer­ent­ly, but I am sure that if I had his job he would wish I had done a LOT of things dif­fer­ent­ly and he would be right.

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 An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.” First shared in vol­ume 194.

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.