Tag: Supreme Court

TGFI, Volume 528: Halloween, China, and Nihilistic Violent Extremists

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chris­tians Don’t Cel­e­brate Hal­loween (Tyler Krug, Sub­stack): “For years now, when some­one asks me if our fam­i­ly cel­e­brates Hal­loween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t cel­e­brate any­thing on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neigh­bors for can­dy.’ My reply brings to the sur­face two relat­ed concepts—one explic­it, one implied. The first con­cept is cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion is ‘the action of mark­ing one’s plea­sure at an impor­tant event or occa­sion.’ Cel­e­bra­tion, there­fore, involves knowl­edge, intent and endorse­ment.… But my Hal­loween retort also implies a sec­ond con­cept: par­tic­i­pa­tion. While cel­e­bra­tion requires par­tic­i­pa­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion does not require celebration—playing in a foot­ball game and cel­e­brat­ing the sport are two dif­fer­ent things. Fur­ther, a defen­sive back might par­tic­i­pate in a play result­ing in a touch­down, but they won’t be cel­e­brat­ing in the end zone.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. Amer­i­ca Is Los­ing the Gray Zone War for the South Chi­na Sea (Ray­mond Pow­ell, The Dis­patch): “America’s con­tin­ued inabil­i­ty to devel­op any­thing approach­ing a counter-gray-zone strat­e­gy is exact­ly why Chi­na employs it. The CCP has fig­ured out that we real­ly like our neat cat­e­gories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or ille­gal; an asset is either mil­i­tary or civil­ian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoid­ed and de-esca­lat­ed, not used as oppor­tu­ni­ties to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strat­e­gy is designed to exploit the myr­i­ad gaps and seams that define our con­ven­tion­al and ordered pol­i­cy frame­works and deter­rence mod­els.”
  3. The Sus­pect­ed LA Arson­ist and the Rise of the Nihilis­tic Vio­lent Extrem­ists (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Don­ald Trump, peo­ple who ate meat, peo­ple who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chat­bot that he ‘lit­er­al­ly burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amaz­ing. I felt so lib­er­at­ed.’ …Rinderknecht came from a reli­gious home. His par­ents, Joel and Jen­nifer, were Bap­tist mis­sion­ar­ies who lived in France.”
  4. We All Live in a Vil­lage Now (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “We all live in a vil­lage again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its atten­dant free­doms from neigh­bor­ly super­vi­sion and col­lec­tive con­straint, was real­ly just a short inter­lude in the his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Facil­i­tat­ed by social media, the vil­lage has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and super­charged by the cru­el­ty of the crowd.”
  5. Blue State Blues (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “[The guid­ing prin­ci­ple of blue states] is pater­nal­ism for the law-abid­ing mass­es and per­mis­sive­ness for society’s anti­so­cial under­bel­ly. In oth­er words, liv­ing in a blue state means that the gov­ern­ment treats you like a child and does every­thing in its pow­er to make your life just a lit­tle more annoy­ing and inconvenient—unless you start open­ly smok­ing crack on the street.… I still sup­port labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dig­ni­ty and san­i­ty too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
  6. Is ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-John­ston, Sub­stack): “As a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, my first thoughts when encoun­ter­ing reports [of ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty] are that they can’t pos­si­bly be real. By the time patients with severe demen­tia actu­al­ly die, their brains are cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly dam­aged. They typ­i­cal­ly show no signs of rec­og­niz­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers. They often haven’t respond­ed mean­ing­ful­ly to their envi­ron­ment in months or years. Their brains are rid­dled with plaques and tan­gles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synap­tic con­nec­tions — so much that their brains have vis­i­bly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty keeps being report­ed.… The only prospec­tive study, which fol­lowed 100 hos­pice deaths, found it in 6% of cas­es. That’s not ubiq­ui­tous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thou­sand cas­es per year.”
    • An inter­est­ing com­ple­ment to the Charles Mur­ray arti­cle argu­ing for the exis­tence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
    • The author is a research sci­en­tist at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia.
  7. The Debate Divid­ing the Supreme Court’s Lib­er­al Jus­tices (Jodi Kan­tor, New York Times): “Bad­ly out­num­bered, seat­ed for the long haul of life tenure, Jus­tices Kagan and Jack­son in par­tic­u­lar are divid­ed on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sen­tenced to fail.… Like many oth­ers across the left in the era of Don­ald J. Trump, the lib­er­al jus­tices are in a gen­er­a­tional and philo­soph­i­cal strug­gle over whether to safe­guard insti­tu­tions from with­in or protest their decline. But unlike politi­cians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tra­di­tion-bound and deco­rous that clos­ing an opin­ion ‘I dis­sent’ instead of ‘I respect­ful­ly dis­sent’ is con­sid­ered a dra­mat­ic state­ment.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How easy is it to fudge your sci­en­tif­ic rank? Meet Lar­ry, the world’s most cit­ed cat (Christie Wilcox, Sci­ence): “Lar­ry Richard­son appeared to be an ear­ly-career math­e­mati­cian with poten­tial. Accord­ing to Google Schol­ar, he’d authored a dozen papers on top­ics rang­ing from com­plex alge­bras to the struc­ture of math­e­mat­i­cal objects, rack­ing up more than 130 cita­tions in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the stud­ies weren’t com­plete gib­ber­ish. And Lar­ry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not with­out prece­dent] In 1975, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Jack Het­her­ing­ton added his Siamese to one of his sin­gle-author papers so the ref­er­ences to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domes­ti­cus Chester Willard’ has 107 cita­tions.”
    • Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit out­dat­ed. I did check FDC Willard and his cita­tion count has gone up to 113.
  • AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
  • Sexy Cos­tumes for your Church Fall Fes­ti­val (Matthew Pierce, Sub­stack): “Prob­a­bly the sex­i­est man in the Bible is Sam­son, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Chris­t­ian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Sam­son is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pret­ty girls, and in five min­utes he will be talk­ing to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on pro­ba­tion for stab­bing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he nev­er will.”
  • Your Brain’s Job (The Oat­meal)
  • Doc­u­ment Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
  • What’s Miss­ing From Your Favorite Choco­late Bar? It May Be Choco­late. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Hal­loween sea­son boosts demand, some can­dy com­pa­nies are replac­ing expen­sive cocoa but­ter with oth­er fats, a swap that means their prod­ucts no longer meet the U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry def­i­n­i­tion of milk choco­late and can no longer be called that on pack­ag­ing.”
  • The Night­mare Is Over: Supreme Court Out­laws Can­dy Corn (Baby­lon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 465



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

This is vol­ume 465, the 30th tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 457



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 457, the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (149 + 151 + 157) and also appar­ent­ly the index of a prime Euclid num­ber, but I would be lying if I said I knew what that is.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The case for show­ing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God (Emma Camp, Amer­i­ca): “But despite my reg­u­lar church atten­dance for almost two years now, I still haven’t devel­oped a rock-sol­id faith. I’ve joked—and said as much on Twitter—that I only believe in God about 30 per­cent of the time on a good day. My ambiva­lence does set me apart from most of my friends from church, a group that includes a few sem­i­nar­i­ans. But it doesn’t keep me from com­ing back.”
  2. The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, Sub­stack): “To for­mal­ize this: ‘Any sys­tem that is not explic­it­ly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pret­ty quick­ly.’ That is because most peo­ple, while lik­ing non-con­formism in the abstract and post-fac­to, are not very will­ing to actu­al­ly put up with the per­son­al­i­ty trade-offs of Weird Nerds in prac­tice. There is an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple right now who are think­ing about how to build bet­ter intel­lec­tu­al insti­tu­tions… it’s worth think­ing about what kind of peo­ple one wants to attract in these insti­tu­tions and how to keep them there. And I believe the con­ver­sa­tion here starts with accept­ing a sim­ple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have cer­tain traits that might be less than ide­al, that these traits come ‘in a pack­age’ with oth­er, very good traits, and if one makes fil­ter­ing or pro­mo­tion based on the absence of those traits a pri­or­i­ty, they will miss out on the pos­i­tives.”
  3. An Object Les­son From Covid on How to Destroy Pub­lic Trust (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If the gov­ern­ment mis­led peo­ple about how Covid is trans­mit­ted, why would Amer­i­cans believe what it says about vac­cines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should peo­ple dis­tin­guish between wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and actu­al con­spir­a­cies?… As the expres­sion goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buck­ets, and this buck­et is going to take a very long time to refill.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. ‘Sham’ Surgery Can Actu­al­ly Fix Our Bod­ies. So Why Are Some Against It? (Jere­my How­ick, Sci­ence Alert): “More broad­ly, a review of 53 place­bo-con­trolled surgery tri­als found that sham surgery was as good as the real thing in over half of the stud­ies. Sham knee and back surgery works as well as real surgery for pain. Pre­tend­ing to put brain implants works as well as real implants for reduc­ing migraine attacks. Fake laser surgery works as well as real laser surgery to stop gas­troin­testi­nal bleed­ing. And fake surgery works as well as real surgery for mak­ing sphinc­ters func­tion more effi­cient­ly.”
  5. The Day My Old Church Can­celed Me Was a Very Sad Day (David French, New York Times): “When I left the Repub­li­can Par­ty, I thought a shared faith would pre­serve my denom­i­na­tion­al home. But I was wrong. Race and pol­i­tics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer wel­come in the church I loved.”
    • Unlocked.
  6. Alito’s ‘God­li­ness’ Com­ment Echoes a Broad­er Chris­t­ian Move­ment (Eliz­a­beth Dias and Lisa Lerer, New York Times): “It’s a phrase not com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with legal doc­trine: return­ing Amer­i­ca to ‘a place of god­li­ness.’ And yet when asked by a woman pos­ing as a Catholic con­ser­v­a­tive at a din­ner last week, Jus­tice Samuel A. Ali­to Jr. appeared to endorse the idea.… Now, Supreme Court jus­tices have become caught up in the debate over whether Amer­i­ca is a Chris­t­ian nation. While Jus­tice Ali­to is hard­ly open­ly cham­pi­oning these views, he is embrac­ing lan­guage and sym­bol­ism that line up with a much broad­er move­ment push­ing back against the declin­ing pow­er of Chris­tian­i­ty as a major­i­ty reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
    • This caveat is sig­nif­i­cant and should per­haps be high­er placed in the sto­ry: “The Times has not heard the full unedit­ed record­ing and has reviewed only the edit­ed record­ing post­ed online, after the woman who record­ed them, a lib­er­al activist, declined to send the Times the full record­ing.” 
    • Relat­ed: What Exact­ly Did Jus­tice Ali­to Say That Was Wrong? (Marc O. DeGiro­la­mi, New York Times): “Where was the justice’s error? He did not men­tion any pend­ing case or lit­i­ga­tion. He did not name any per­son or par­ty. He did not dis­cuss any spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal or moral mat­ter. Most of the exchange con­sists of the filmmaker’s own goad­ing remarks, fol­lowed by the justice’s vague and ano­dyne affir­ma­tions and replies. About what you might expect when cor­nered at a bor­ing cock­tail par­ty.”
    • Relat­ed: Wild Dis­tor­tions of ‘Secret Record­ing’ of Ali­to (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “You are wel­come of course to dis­agree with Ali­to.… But it’s beyond bizarre to find it news­wor­thy that Ali­to made a pri­vate com­ment that mir­rors pub­lic speech­es he has been giv­ing.”
  7. Against Ambi­tion (Grace Car­roll, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Wineb­urg walked into his class­room intend­ing to make a brief open­ing com­ment about the scene out­side. What fol­lowed — a tirade against a cul­ture of careerism so bla­tant­ly prof­it-moti­vat­ed that stu­dents were being lured, lit­er­al­ly, to flash­ing salaries like moths to flame — ‘sort of took on a life of its own,’ he recalled recent­ly. It’s known col­lo­qui­al­ly among some stu­dents as ‘the rant.’ I was one of the frosh sit­ting in Wineburg’s class that fall. I remem­ber the rant.… most­ly I remem­ber feel­ing like some­one was lift­ing some­thing very heavy off of me, a weight I hadn’t real­ized I was car­ry­ing until it was gone.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 439

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 439, which is not only a prime num­ber and the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (139 + 149 + 151), but also the sum of nine con­sec­u­tive primes (31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67). Which is, you know, a lot­ta primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Dig­i­tal Apps Are Chang­ing How We Read the Bible (John Dyer, Text & Canon): “I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Inter­est­ing­ly, two oppo­site trends emerged. The print read­ers said they felt Jude was about God’s judg­ment while the phone read­ers tend­ed to empha­size God’s faith­ful­ness. But then, on the sec­ond ques­tion, their answers seemed to split. The print read­ers, who felt the book was about God’s judg­ment, said they were encour­aged by the read­ing. The phone read­ers on the oth­er hand who said Jude was about God’s faith­ful­ness, said after read­ing it that they felt dis­cour­aged and con­fused. So what can account for that dif­fer­ence? Why is a judg­men­tal God encour­ag­ing and a faith­ful God dis­cour­ag­ing?”
  2. The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­haps the most strik­ing diver­gence between elite and non-elite opin­ion: Although the major­i­ty of ordi­nary vot­ers oppose the strict rationing of meat, elec­tric­i­ty, and gas to fight cli­mate change, 89% of Ivy grad­u­ates and 77% of elites over­all are in favor of it.”
  3. What Hap­pened When My Church Encoun­tered Neg­a­tive World (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You can tell our church’s sto­ry in a way that makes us the vic­tims of the pro­gres­sives, but that’s not our full sto­ry. Nor is it the sto­ry of most non-coastal church­es that refused to go pro-Trump or pro-Biden in 2020. Pas­tors at such church­es will tell you the same sto­ry: The neg­a­tive world bows before gold­en don­keys and ele­phants.”
  4. Sarah Isgur’s Major­i­ty Report (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “Through the eyes of Isgur and French, the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem gen­er­al­ly appears to be a place where smart peo­ple assess good-faith argu­ments and com­pose thought­ful essays explain­ing their deci­sions. Their under­ly­ing con­tention is that the Supreme Court is good, even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, in its cur­rent incar­na­tion.… In an era of aggriev­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, Isgur is some­thing unusu­al: a com­men­ta­tor who tru­ly seems to love the gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion she cov­ers.”
    • Advi­so­ry Opin­ions is one of my favorite pod­casts and I’m not remote­ly a lawyer. Isgur and French are amaz­ing.
  5. The Devil’s Face in Gaza (Ger­ald McDer­mott, First Things): “The min­is­ter of tourism, a rab­bi, told an Israeli Chris­t­ian leader, ‘We hope you send mis­sion­ar­ies to the Arabs here.’ The Chris­t­ian was shocked: ‘Don’t you hate mis­sion­ar­ies?’ The gov­ern­ment min­is­ter replied, ‘If you teach them what you believe, we will have peace in the Mid­dle East.’”
  6. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Sit-in on Islam­o­pho­bia replaces pro-Israel tent in White Plaza (Dilan Gohill, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Orga­niz­ers set up the Sit-in to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia on the White Plaza lawn — a space pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by the Blue and White Tent. Tent orga­niz­ers told The Dai­ly they made an indef­i­nite reser­va­tion through Car­di­nal Engage. Accord­ing to Feige­lis, Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion told the Sit-In to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia that the space was reserved for the Blue and White Tent. He said as long as the sit-in refus­es to relo­cate, the tent can­not reassem­ble. The Dai­ly has reached out to the Uni­ver­si­ty for com­ment. ‘We did not move your stuff — the wind destroyed it, you cleaned it up. We saw an open space, we set up here, we’re hap­py to coex­ist.’ El Boudali said. He added that orga­niz­ers set up in White Plaza due to its high traf­fic.”
    • Stan­ford stu­dents protest new ban on overnight sit-in camp­ing (Lau­ren Irwin, The Hill): “Stan­ford said its lev­el of con­cern has risen to a point that it can no longer sup­port overnight activ­i­ties.”
    • Read the offi­cial Stan­ford state­ment: Pre­serv­ing free speech and safe­ty on White Plaza (Stan­ford News): “Mov­ing for­ward, any tents, tables, chairs, or oth­er sim­i­lar items will need to be removed from White Plaza between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Any overnight dis­plays and/or camp­ing items left unoc­cu­pied are sub­ject to removal for health and safe­ty rea­sons. Stu­dents who vio­late the no-camp­ing pol­i­cy will be sub­ject to a dis­ci­pli­nary refer­ral to the Office of Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards and may also be cit­ed for tres­pass for fail­ing to com­ply with a uni­ver­si­ty direc­tive.”
    • And not exact­ly Stan­ford news, but not not Stan­ford news: Law schools must adopt free speech poli­cies to main­tain ABA accred­i­ta­tion (Lexi Lonas, The Hill): “The new stan­dard requires schools to adopt a pol­i­cy that would allow fac­ul­ty, stu­dents and staff ‘to com­mu­ni­cate ideas that may be con­tro­ver­sial or unpop­u­lar, includ­ing through robust debate, demon­stra­tions or protests,’ and would for­bid activ­i­ties that dis­rupt or impinge on free speech. But it wouldn’t impose spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy lan­guage,’”’ the state­ment added.”
  7. The Polit­i­cal Pref­er­ences of LLMs (David Roza­do, Sub­stack): “When probed with questions/statements with polit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions most con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs tend to gen­er­ate respons­es that are diag­nosed by most polit­i­cal test instru­ments as man­i­fest­ing pref­er­ences for left-of-cen­ter view­points. This does not appear to be the case for base (i.e. foun­da­tion) mod­els upon which LLMs opti­mized for con­ver­sa­tion with humans are built. Though not con­clu­sive, our results pro­vide sup­port­ing evi­dence for the intrigu­ing hypoth­e­sis that the embed­ding of polit­i­cal pref­er­ences into LLMs might be hap­pen­ing most­ly post-pre­train­ing. Name­ly, dur­ing the super­vised fine-tun­ing (SFT) and/or Rein­force­ment Learn­ing (RL) stages of the con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs train­ing pipeline.”
    • In oth­er words, the AI tools we see appear to have polit­i­cal pref­er­ences trained into them by the com­pa­nies that are cre­at­ing them, although it is not clear to what extent this is delib­er­ate­ly being done.
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of data sci­ence in New Zealand — https://drozado.github.io/

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • His­to­ry of Japan (Bill Wurz, YouTube): nine amaz­ing min­utes — gen­uine­ly worth your time if you have any inter­est in Japan at all. Or in how to teach his­to­ry using video. He leaves a bunch out and def­i­nite­ly throws his opin­ion around, but it’s hard to see how he could have done any­thing else in nine min­utes. Real­ly good.

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 409

Read it for the amus­ing bits at the end.

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 409, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gion Has Become a Lux­u­ry Good (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “More edu­cat­ed peo­ple are more like­ly to claim a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion on sur­veys. It’s true in every sin­gle wave of the Coop­er­a­tive Elec­tion Study. It’s also the case in the Nation­scape sur­vey, which is 477K respon­dents. They even have 4,000 peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees in their sam­ple. The most like­ly to be non-reli­gious? Those who didn’t fin­ish high school. As edu­ca­tion increas­es, so does reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. The group with the high­est lev­el of reli­gious affil­i­a­tion are those with a master’s degree.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. When the Ser­mon Fiz­zles Instead of Siz­zles (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the pow­er of the preach­ing is entire­ly in the hands of the preach­er? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to pre­pare the ser­mon while the congregation’s task is mere­ly to pre­pare their own hearts to hear it? What if preach­ing is pow­er­less not because of the pastor’s lack of prepa­ra­tion but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preach­ing is not the con­se­quence of any fail­ure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?”
  3. Why I’m Not a Lib­er­al Catholic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But I just don’t see how you can look at the mod­ern world, writ large, and its most devel­oped precincts espe­cial­ly — the world of sex edu­ca­tion via ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy, fal­ter­ing mar­riage rates, col­laps­ing birthrates, the alien­ation of the sex­es from one anoth­er, the ris­ing exis­ten­tial angst attend­ing all these trends and the creep of euthana­sia as a ‘mer­ci­ful’ solu­tion — and say that clear­ly what the church needs to do at this his­tor­i­cal moment is water down or just talk less about its teach­ings on sex and mar­riage and fam­i­ly, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.”
    • The whole thing is specif­i­cal­ly about the Roman Catholic Church, but is rel­e­vant to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty as well.
    • While we’re on the sub­ject The 5 Minute Case for Protes­tantism (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube): five min­utes
  4. Is There An Illu­sion Of Moral Decline? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I’ve been read­ing the bias­es and heuris­tics lit­er­a­ture for fif­teen years now, and devel­oped the fol­low­ing heuris­tic: if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about how many marsh­mal­lows to take in a rigged exper­i­ment, this is prob­a­bly an inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about their most foun­da­tion­al real-life beliefs, prob­a­bly those ordi­nary peo­ple are being com­plete­ly sen­si­ble, and it’s the researcher who’s try­ing to shoe­horn their rea­son­ing into some mode it was nev­er intend­ed to address.”
  5. ‘Exhaust­ed’ pas­tors suf­fer­ing decline in over­all health, respect, friend­ship: study (Jon Brown, Fox News): “Pas­tors who report­ed that their men­tal and emo­tion­al health was below aver­age spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excel­lent men­tal and emo­tion­al health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
    • This cor­re­sponds with what I am hear­ing anec­do­tal­ly. Which is bizarre to me, because min­istry is awe­some and reward­ing
  6. Sau­di Ara­bia Wants Tourists. It Didn’t Expect Chris­tians. (Vivian Nereim, Yahoo News): “No one in the con­ser­v­a­tive Islam­ic king­dom had planned for the Chris­tians. Yet Chris­tians of many stripes — includ­ing Bap­tists, Men­non­ites and oth­ers who call them­selves ‘chil­dren of God’ — were among the first peo­ple to use the new Sau­di tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadi­ly in num­bers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos argu­ing that Sau­di Ara­bia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures describe God reveal­ing the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
  7. The recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • I don’t have any arti­cles about the Supreme Court deci­sion in favor of the web design­er who refus­es to design web­sites for gay mar­riages, sim­ply because I haven’t read any­thing very good about it. Most arti­cles seem to mis­un­der­stand both the case and the deci­sion entire­ly. It was a won­der­ful out­come and should be praised — the gov­ern­ment can­not com­pel you to say some­thing you do not believe or to cel­e­brate some­thing you do not approve. Sug­ges­tions for thought­ful arti­cles wel­come, even those with which you think I will dis­agree.
    • Affir­ma­tive Action Thoughts in an Inel­e­gant List For­mat (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…we demand that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem be both a lad­der of suc­cess, a sort­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a hier­ar­chy of excel­lence, and a great equal­iz­er, a way to make soci­ety more equi­table. These are flat­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry pur­pos­es. They are direct­ly antag­o­nis­tic to each oth­er.”
    • Burn Down the Admis­sions Sys­tem (Yascha Mounk, Per­sua­sion): “When­ev­er I think of the role that per­son­al state­ments play in America’s land­scape of high­er edu­ca­tion, I remem­ber a class­mate of mine at Cam­bridge. He came from an aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly, grew up in Lon­don, and attend­ed Eton. He was, in oth­er words, about as priv­i­leged as you can be in the Unit­ed King­dom. But when it came time to apply for admis­sion to a pres­ti­gious schol­ar­ship that would send him to Har­vard, he wrote mov­ing­ly about how his pas­sion for pub­lic pol­i­cy was awak­ened when he grew up among the rav­ages of the trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land; at one point, he sug­gest­ed, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him real­ized that this was one of his family’s ances­tral cas­tles, not his pri­ma­ry fam­i­ly home, a fact he obvi­ous­ly omit­ted from his appli­ca­tion.)  These kinds of absur­di­ties are not a bug of the strange Amer­i­can rev­er­ence for per­son­al state­ments; they are a fea­ture of it.”
    • I Teach at an Elite Col­lege. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gam­ing of Admis­sions (Tyler Austin Harp­er, New York Times): “Near­ly every col­lege admis­sions tutor­ing job I took over the next few years would come with a ver­sion of the same behest. The Chi­nese and Kore­an kids want­ed to know how to make their appli­ca­tion mate­ri­als seem less Chi­nese or Kore­an. The rich white kids want­ed to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids want­ed to make sure they came across as Black enough. Dit­to for the Lati­no and Mid­dle East­ern kids. Seem­ing­ly every­one I inter­act­ed with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, stu­dent or par­ent — believed that get­ting into an elite col­lege required what I came to call racial gam­i­fi­ca­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Bates Col­lege and is him­self black.
    • 10 Notes on the End of Affir­ma­tive Action (Cole­man Hugh­es, Sub­stack): “My per­son­al view is that diver­si­ty is like love. When it hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly, it’s the most beau­ti­ful thing in the world. But the moment it’s arranged, leg­is­lat­ed, or man­dat­ed, you’ve some­what missed the point.”

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 A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty. From 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 358

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

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 hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 356

from the week abor­tion fell

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 356, which is a hap­py num­ber (some­thing I learned about only today). A hap­py num­ber is a num­ber whose dig­its when squared sum to 1 if the process is repeat­ed long enough. 356 takes six iter­a­tions.

  1. 356 ==> 32+52+62 = 9+25+36 = 70.
  2. 70 ==> 72+02 = 49.
  3. 49 ==> 42+92 = 16+81 = 97.
  4. 97 ==> 92+72 = 81+49 = 130
  5. 130 ==> 12+32+02 = 1+9+0 = 10
  6. 10 ==> 12 + 02 = 1

I got way more into that than I expect­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The huge news today is that abor­tion is no longer a con­sti­tu­tion­al right in Amer­i­ca. I expect deep­er analy­ses to appear by next week — most colum­nists appear to be sav­ing their big pieces for the Sun­day papers. Send rec­om­men­da­tions my way!
    • What changed from Jus­tice Alito’s draft opin­ion to final rul­ing on Roe (Kel­ly Hoop­er, Politi­co): “…Ali­to did add to his orig­i­nal opin­ion, with a fierce rebut­tal of the court’s lib­er­al dis­senters, plus a direct shot at Chief Jus­tice John Roberts in the final text. Roberts was the only con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice on the court to side with its three lib­er­als, mak­ing the final vote 5–4 in the deci­sion to strike down Roe and give states the green light to ban abor­tion.”
    • Supreme Court over­turns con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Stare deci­sis, Ali­to stressed, ‘is not a strait­jack­et’ when a rul­ing is griev­ous­ly incor­rect.… Notably, the dis­senters fin­ished by not­ing only that they dis­sent­ed, omit­ting the word ‘respect­ful­ly’ that com­mon­ly accom­pa­nies the dis­sent.”
      • A good sum­ma­ry of the opin­ion. The author used to teach at Stan­ford Law School. That last sen­tence is impor­tant.
    • From the right: The Land is Bright (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some desire to down­play this vic­to­ry or even to lament the man­ner of it. We should not. Fed­er­al law in Amer­i­ca once rec­og­nized a right to kill unborn chil­dren. Now it does not. Our feel­ings should be unam­bigu­ous: it is a great good that over half the states in our union are soon like­ly to have laws grant­i­ng sweep­ing pro­tec­tions to the unborn. And we can just say that it is good.”
    • From the left: Which rights are next on the Supreme Court’s chop­ping block? (Ian Mill­houser, Vox): “In any event, the future of rights oth­er than abor­tion will like­ly need to be lit­i­gat­ed. There is no doubt that Thomas would hap­pi­ly light many exist­ing rights on fire. And there is lit­tle doubt that Ali­to, based on his Oberge­fell dis­sent, would also hap­pi­ly tear down same-sex mar­riage. But it takes five votes to strip away an exist­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al right, and it remains to be seen whether Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Bar­rett — con­ser­v­a­tives who some­times break with Alito’s most aggres­sive attempts to dri­ve the law to the right — will sup­port mass roll­backs of exist­ing rights.”
      • Mill­houser is often hyper­bol­ic and fails to read ideas he dis­agrees with fair­ly, but this is a pret­ty good sum­ma­ry.
    • From the right: The Supreme Court strikes down Roe and Casey (Albert Mohler, World): “…pro-life Amer­i­cans have learned not to assume any­thing and to wait to see any deci­sion in the black and white of plain text. Well, we have the plain text. It is explo­sive. It is earth­shak­ing.… It is an answer to prayer.”
      • The author is a sem­i­nary pres­i­dent and also the pres­i­dent of the Evan­gel­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety.
    • From the left: Get­ting Real About the Post-‘Roe’ World (Scott Lemieux, The Amer­i­can Prospect): “The the­o­ry went that Repub­li­can elites didn’t real­ly want to over­rule Roe, but were mere­ly pre­tend­ing to for the sake of pan­der­ing to their base. This nar­ra­tive was always false; the sur­vival of Roe was always a high­ly con­tin­gent fluke, the prod­uct of sev­er­al mis­takes by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents.”
    • From the right: The Long Bat­tle to Over­turn Roe (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “There are at least two large rea­sons that the long bat­tle to over­turn Roe has suc­ceed­ed. First, pro-lif­ers did not heed Casey’s com­mand that they give up on work­ing to defend the lives of unborn human beings, and they remained a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal force in the Repub­li­can par­ty, all the more so as near­ly all Democ­rats had aban­doned the pro-life cause. Sec­ond, the con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment grew and flour­ished, thanks in large part to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and to Jus­tice Scalia and Jus­tice Thomas.”
    • From the left: Repub­li­cans Are Will­ing to Pay a Polit­i­cal Price to Ban Abor­tion. It’s Up to Democ­rats to Make Them Pay It. (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “After the draft deci­sion leaked, Democ­rats brought a wish-list bill to the floor of both cham­bers that even pro-choice Repub­li­cans — even Sen. Susan Collins — were able to com­fort­ably vote against on the grounds that it was too extreme, more expan­sive than Casey. Democ­rats need to break the agen­da into pieces.… Unlike a catch-all bill, there are many indi­vid­ual ideas about pro­tect­ing abor­tion rights that are very broad­ly pop­u­lar — bring­ing them to the floor puts Repub­li­cans in the posi­tion of either vot­ing for poli­cies to pro­tect abor­tion rights, or going home to defend votes that are actu­al­ly hard to defend in elec­tion cam­paigns.”
      • Both par­ties should do this on a whole host of issues. Pol­i­tics would change quick­ly if our lead­ers gov­erned this way. Bar­ro is right about the shrewd strat­e­gy, but I think it unlike­ly that his par­ty will heed him.
  2. Made in Amer­i­ca: Goods Exports by State (Raul Amoros, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): “Texas has been the top export­ing state in the U.S. for an incred­i­ble 20 years in a row. Last year, Texas export­ed $375 bil­lion worth of goods, which is more than Cal­i­for­nia ($175 bil­lion), New York ($85 bil­lion), and Louisiana ($77 bil­lion) com­bined. The state’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ing export cat­e­go­ry is petro­le­um and coal prod­ucts, but it’s also impor­tant to men­tion that Texas led the nation in tech exports for the ninth straight year. Cal­i­for­nia was the sec­ond high­est exporter of goods in 2021 with a total val­ue of $175 bil­lion, an increase of 12% from the pre­vi­ous year.”
    • Sur­pris­es here, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  3. Mike Pence and the Chris­t­ian Con­flict on Jan­u­ary 6 (David French, The Dis­patch): “A healthy nation­al cul­ture both con­demns cow­ardice and hon­ors val­or, even when val­or is sim­ply part of the job. And we should do both with an immense mea­sure of humil­i­ty. How many of us have proven our own courage under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances? Pence faced threats to his fam­i­ly, threats to him­self, threats to his pow­er, and threats to the rest of his career. How many of us have pre­vailed in the face of such pres­sure?  To scorn courage in such cir­cum­stances fur­ther incen­tivizes cow­ardice. At least the cow­ard­ly retain their polit­i­cal pow­er and their polit­i­cal home.”
  4. In Defense of Polit­i­cal Esca­la­tion (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “If our ulti­mate goal is return­ing to a nor­mal­cy in which gov­ern­ment agen­cies and cor­po­ra­tions treat all Amer­i­cans fair­ly regard­less of view­point, how are we to achieve this? At a min­i­mum, we must acknowl­edge that these insti­tu­tions are already weaponized and their artillery points only in one direc­tion: against the oppo­nents of the left.”
    • To my knowl­edge Shri­er is not reli­gious and is in no way con­ser­v­a­tive, but she is artic­u­lat­ing an argu­ment that I see fre­quent­ly on the right (most famous­ly in the French/Ahmari dust­up). It ani­mates Trump­ism and is one of the rea­sons DeSan­tis is so pop­u­lar on the right and that Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives have such a fas­ci­na­tion with Orban in Hun­gary.
  5. Pen­te­costals’ Polit­i­cal War­fare (Miguel Pet­rosky, The Reveal­er): “Issues like abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage, and even fears of creep­ing ‘Marx­ism,’ have long been of con­cern to some fac­tions of Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism. But in parts of the Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic world, these issues con­tain cos­mic impli­ca­tions for the country’s rela­tion­ship with God. In the Hebrew Scrip­tures, each of Israel’s kings either ‘did what was right’ or ‘did what was evil’ in the eyes of God—with either bless­ings or curs­es for the king­dom. Since Pen­te­costals view them­selves as being a con­tin­u­a­tion of the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, they are cer­tain God will judge Amer­i­ca by the issues they view as stray­ing from the Bible.”
  6. Leaked Audio From 80 Inter­nal Tik­Tok Meet­ings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeat­ed­ly Accessed From Chi­na (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed News): “Law­mak­ers’ fear that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment will be able to get its hands on Amer­i­can data through ByteDance is root­ed in the real­i­ty that Chi­nese com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the whims of the author­i­tar­i­an Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, which has been crack­ing down on its home­grown tech giants over the last year. The risk is that the gov­ern­ment could force ByteDance to col­lect and turn over infor­ma­tion as a form of ‘data espi­onage.’ There is, how­ev­er, anoth­er con­cern: that the soft pow­er of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment could impact how ByteDance exec­u­tives direct their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s pow­er­ful ‘For You’ algo­rithm, which rec­om­mends videos to its more than 1 bil­lion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called Tik­Tok ‘a Tro­jan horse the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty can use to influ­ence what Amer­i­cans see, hear, and ulti­mate­ly think.’ ”
  7. Quest to Con­quer a Dis­ease (Amy Lynn Smith, AG News): “Gib­son met Hong as he ate lunch with anoth­er intern in the stu­dent union. Hong asked to join them, and after­ward Gib­son and Hong began meet­ing for tea or cof­fee every week. Gib­son learned that Hong, the night before he intro­duced him­self, had a dream in which a man encour­aged Hong to meet peo­ple on cam­pus. Hong lat­er came to rec­og­nize the man in the dream as Jesus. A friend­ship devel­oped between Hong and Gib­son.”
    • This is about two of our alum­ni: Dan Gib­son, who did his min­istry train­ing with Chi Alpha Stan­ford sev­er­al years ago, and Guosong “Frank” Hong who did his PhD here and is now a pro­fes­sor.

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 How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

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 350

Few­er main top­ics than nor­mal, but a bunch of arti­cles in the top­ics

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 350, and 350 is a very respectable num­ber. I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Pol­i­tics Poi­soned the Evan­gel­i­cal Church (Tim Alber­ta, The Atlantic): “Hav­ing grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pas­tor at anoth­er church in town, I’ve spent my life watch­ing evan­gel­i­cal­ism morph from a spir­i­tu­al dis­po­si­tion into a polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. It’s heart­break­ing. So many peo­ple who love the Lord, who give their time and mon­ey to the poor and the mourn­ing and the per­se­cut­ed, have been reduced to a car­i­ca­ture. But I under­stand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became com­pul­sive­ly polit­i­cal, allow­ing spe­cif­ic eth­i­cal argu­ments to snow­ball into full-blown par­ti­san advo­ca­cy, often in ways that dis­tract­ed from their mis­sion of evan­ge­liz­ing for Christ.”
  2. Being a Polit­i­cal Jour­nal­ist Made Me a Bet­ter Chris­t­ian (Jon Ward, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But Chris­tians can­not be the con­science of the state if we are not first the con­science of whichev­er polit­i­cal par­ty we belong to. We have the dif­fi­cult task of belong­ing to polit­i­cal par­ties and work­ing for the good of the coun­try through those insti­tu­tions, while also stand­ing apart from those par­ties to crit­i­cize them at times for their weak­ness­es, errors, and cor­rup­tions.” The entire essay is delight­ful.
  3. A con­tro­ver­sy about how Chris­tians should engage in the pub­lic square:
    • How I Evolved on Tim Keller (James R. Wood, First Things): “If we assume that win­some­ness will gain a favor­able hear­ing, when Chris­tians con­sis­tent­ly receive heat­ed push­back, we will be tempt­ed to think our con­vic­tions are the prob­lem. If win­some­ness is met with hos­til­i­ty, it is easy to won­der, ‘Are we in the wrong?’ Thus the slide toward sec­u­lar culture’s rea­son­ing is greased. A ‘sec­u­lar-friend­ly’ pol­i­tics has prob­lems sim­i­lar to ‘seek­er-friend­ly’ wor­ship. An exces­sive con­cern to appeal to the unchurched is plagued by the accom­mo­da­tion­ist temp­ta­tion.”
    • A Cri­tique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devo­lu­tion of the New Chris­t­ian Right (The Dis­patch, David French): “Yet even if the des­per­ate times nar­ra­tive were true, the des­per­ate mea­sures ratio­nal­iza­tion suf­fers from pro­found moral defects. The bib­li­cal call to Chris­tians to love your ene­mies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhib­it the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faith­ful­ness, gen­tle­ness, and self-control—does not rep­re­sent a set of tac­tics to be aban­doned when times are tough but rather a set of eter­nal moral prin­ci­ples to be applied even in the face of extreme adver­si­ty…
    • Is it Time to Move Past Tim Keller? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The ques­tion is not whether love of neigh­bor doesn’t work and should be for­got­ten, the ques­tion is what love of neigh­bor demands from us, and whether such love might look dif­fer­ent when the pre­sent­ing moral and spir­i­tu­al needs of our neigh­bors might not be what they were a gen­er­a­tion ago.”
    • some thoughts on Tim Keller (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Like Dio­genes with his lantern, I’m look­ing for one crit­ic of Tim Keller who shows some aware­ness that Chris­tians are com­mand­ed by their Lord to act in cer­tain ways and to refrain from act­ing in oth­ers. To think only in terms of what is effec­tive or strate­gic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground.”
    • This Arti­cle is Not About Tim Keller (James Wood, Amer­i­can Reformer): “How do we know what the future holds for the public’s per­cep­tion of Chris­tians and their attempts to love their neigh­bors through polit­i­cal action? We might be sur­prised what the judg­ments of his­to­ry have in store. Not only do I ques­tion the cer­tain­ty we can have in these assess­ments about how our polit­i­cal actions will impact our long-term gospel wit­ness, but I also think this is a cat­e­go­ry error. Pol­i­tics is not about min­i­miz­ing offense in order to max­i­mize open­ness to the evan­ge­lis­tic mes­sage. Pol­i­tics is, rather, focused on the pur­suit of jus­tice and the just order­ing of soci­ety.”
  4. Against longter­mism (Phil Tor­res, Aeon): “…longter­mism might be one of the most influ­en­tial ide­olo­gies that few peo­ple out­side of elite uni­ver­si­ties and Sil­i­con Val­ley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a for­mer longter­mist who pub­lished an entire book four years ago in defence of the gen­er­al idea, I have come to see this world­view as quite pos­si­bly the most dan­ger­ous sec­u­lar belief sys­tem in the world today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who thinks this is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for Sil­i­con Val­ley peo­ple to hear. From Oct 2021.
  5. More on the Supreme Court and abor­tion
    • How Roe Warped the Repub­lic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And the way Roe was decid­ed made this polar­iza­tion worse. From the per­spec­tive of geog­ra­phy and class, a group of robed lawyers in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., demand­ing that the coun­try sim­ply accept their set­tle­ment on one of the gravest moral ques­tions imag­in­able is the per­fect primer for a pop­ulist revolt. What has hap­pened in sim­i­lar ways with oth­er issues — immi­gra­tion, most notably — hap­pened with abor­tion first: The elite set­tle­ment failed to set­tle the issue, and the back­lash encom­passed not just the issue itself but elite legit­i­ma­cy writ large.”
    • Protest sup­port­ing Roe v. Wade takes over cam­pus (Bryan Steven Mon­ge Ser­ra­no, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “About 250 stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and staff came togeth­er to chant and march.” ]
      • “Takes over cam­pus” is an exag­ger­a­tion. 250 peo­ple? There are class­es larg­er than that. Hav­ing said that, the bulk of the stu­dent body at Stan­ford is unde­ni­ably on the pro-Roe side. I won­der if the small ral­ly indi­cates a lev­el of apa­thy or sim­ply a desire to wait for the actu­al ver­dict to be released.
    • Why I wel­come the prospect of Roe v. Wade being over­turned (Avi Shafran, NBC News): “Roe was a sledge­ham­mer, and wrong­ly wield­ed. In the wake of its rever­sal, cit­i­zens in each state would be charged with using a scalpel to instead craft laws that treat nascent life with respect while accom­mo­dat­ing the pro­tec­tion of women’s well-being.”
      • Inter­est­ing thoughts from a Rab­bi. He comes down in a dif­fer­ent place than most peo­ple you have heard from.
    • How Dare They! (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “What strikes me most in these takes is the under­ly­ing con­tempt for and sus­pi­cion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process — from many of the same peo­ple who insist they want to save it. How dare vot­ers have a say on abor­tion rights! The issue — which divides the coun­try today as much as it has for decades — is one that appar­ent­ly can­not ever be put up for a vote. On this ques­tion, Democ­rats real­ly do seem to believe that sev­en men alone should make that deci­sion — once, in 1973. Women today, includ­ing one on SCOTUS? Not so much.”
    • Pro-Life Min­istries Have Been Car­ing For Women And Babies For Gen­er­a­tions (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “More than 2500 pro-life Preg­nan­cy Resource Cen­ters (PRCs) are a com­pas­sion­ate army of staff, donors, and vol­un­teers that num­ber in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. They are com­mit­ted to help­ing women make life-giv­ing choic­es, and they often sup­port these women for years after their babies are born. The total amount of mon­ey these orga­ni­za­tions spend in sup­port of women and babies is not known, but it like­ly exceeds $1 bil­lion annu­al­ly. We should also note that the vast major­i­ty of adop­tions in this coun­try are done by Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies and through Chris­t­ian adop­tion agen­cies.”
    • The Supreme Court Leak Was an Unplanned Com­pli­ca­tion for Preg­nan­cy Cen­ters (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I try to shield my team from it here,” she said, telling them not to get online and try to defend them­selves. “I saw a post on Insta­gram: ‘I’ve nev­er met a pro-life per­son who is address­ing access to health care, acces­si­ble child­care, col­lege edu­ca­tion.’ Hun­dreds of peo­ple are com­ment­ing, ‘Yeah I’ve nev­er met one of those.’ I’m think­ing I’m going to lose my mind. We’re here! We’re get­ting women into hous­ing same day, we’re get­ting them out of domes­tic vio­lence same day, we’re get­ting them fur­ni­ture the same day,” Marten con­tin­ued. “For my team to go home every day and turn on the news and social media and get gaslit, say­ing, ‘If you real­ly cared …’ It’s an emo­tion­al toll.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • China’s Bizarre Author­i­tar­i­an-Lib­er­tar­i­an COVID Strat­e­gy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “On the one hand, Chi­na has con­fined mil­lions of peo­ple to their homes, even to the extent of out­law­ing walk­ing out­side or hav­ing food deliv­ered. Many thou­sands of oth­er peo­ple have been tak­en from their homes and put into quar­an­tine cen­ters. On the oth­er hand, vac­ci­na­tion is not manda­to­ry! I can under­stand author­i­tar­i­an­ism. I can under­stand lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how jail­ing peo­ple, poten­tial­ly with­out food, is ok but requir­ing vac­ci­na­tions is not.”
    • Dra­mat­ic sto­ry of Kyr­gyz Chris­t­ian swept up in Chi­na’s Uyghur repres­sion gets very lit­tle ink (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “While unimag­in­able hor­rors per­sist­ed in the camp, Joseph tes­ti­fied about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no pri­va­cy in any part of the com­plex, with cam­eras in their rooms and micro­phones for mon­i­tor­ing. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the show­er room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the show­er heads made enough noise to mask their con­ver­sa­tions.  In the first few months, there was hard­ly any­one who would talk to him about God. Then the ques­tion began. ‘How could God let us be here in this place?’ they would ask. ‘How could God allow our chil­dren to be aban­doned?’ ” Crazy details, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low the links in the arti­cle.
    • Tik­Tok May Be More Dan­ger­ous Than It Looks (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Tik­Tok is owned by ByteDance, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny. And Chi­nese com­pa­nies are vul­ner­a­ble to the whims and the will of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.… TikTok’s real pow­er isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and cre­ate. It’s over the opaque algo­rithm that gov­erns what gets seen and what doesn’t. Tik­Tok has been thick with videos back­ing the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive on the war in Ukraine. Media Mat­ters, for instance, tracked an appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign dri­ven by 186 Russ­ian Tik­Tok influ­encers who nor­mal­ly post beau­ty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that Chi­na has been ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da world­wide. How com­fort­able are we with not know­ing whether the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty decid­ed to weigh in on how the algo­rithm treats these videos?”
    • Why Chi­nese Cul­ture Has Not Con­quered Us All (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Out­side of its own bor­ders, post-Deng Chi­na has a poor record sell­ing the intan­gi­ble. Chi­nese cul­tur­al influ­ence is not com­men­su­rate with China’s eco­nom­ic pow­er or geopo­lit­i­cal heft. For the last two decades observers of Chi­na have pon­dered this mys­tery. Why has China’s grow­ing glob­al promi­nence, pros­per­ous com­mer­cial­ized econ­o­my, and huge glob­al dias­po­ra not led to cul­tur­al influ­ence? Why have both China’s intel­lec­tu­al high cul­ture and its expan­sive pop cul­ture offer­ings failed to take root out­side of the Sinos­phere?” Very thought­ful, as I have come to expect from Greer.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 349

much about Dobbs, Roe, and the impli­ca­tions there­of

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.

I wish this issue was less rushed (and there­fore bet­ter edit­ed and more com­pact), but I’ve been deal­ing with a fam­i­ly emer­gency and have had less time to read and write than nor­mal.

This is vol­ume 349, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The big news this week is the leak of the Supreme Court draft opin­ion por­tend­ing a rever­sal of Roe v Wade.
    • It’s not often that I inter­ject my own views into one of these week­ly roundups, but giv­en the con­tentious­ness of this issue I think it is only fair you know where I am com­ing from. I am pro-life. In sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Christ­mas sto­ry (where­in God became incar­nate in the womb) and with Chris­tians through­out the ages, I believe abor­tion is a bad thing and the rare cas­es where it is med­ical­ly nec­es­sary to save the life of the moth­er are trag­ic. I am grate­ful that the Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of right­ing a great injus­tice for which they are respon­si­ble in the first place. Fur­ther­more, I do not view this as a par­ti­san issue even though it is com­mon­ly per­ceived that way: there are pro-life Democ­rats as well as pro-life Repub­li­cans. In fact, there would be many more pro-life Democ­rats in office were it not for a con­cert­ed effort to mar­gin­al­ize them with­in the par­ty.
    • If you have not read this clas­sic arti­cle in the Atlantic I sug­gest you read it before any­thing else: The Dis­hon­esty of the Abor­tion Debate (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The truth is that the best argu­ment on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowl­edge that fact, you aren’t speak­ing or even think­ing hon­est­ly about the issue. You cer­tain­ly aren’t going to con­vince any­body. Only the truth has the pow­er to move.”
    • If Roe Is Dead (Col­in Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion): “If Roe is dead, more chil­dren will live.… this is the day so many of us have labored and prayed to see. We can rejoice that God has heard our pleas that he would rec­ti­fy this injus­tice. And we can move for­ward in every way pos­si­ble to pro­tect as many chil­dren as we can: by ban­ning abor­tion where pos­si­ble, by bol­ster­ing cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters, by build­ing stronger fos­ter care sys­tems, and much more.”
    • Receiv­ing Jus­tice with Grat­i­tude (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It has com­mon­ly been sug­gest­ed that oppos­ing Roe v Wade is moral­ly ille­git­i­mate unless it is accom­pa­nied with a kind of max­i­mal­ist sup­port for a social safe­ty net. In oth­er words, it has been sug­gest­ed that you’re not real­ly pro-life if you oppose abor­tion but sup­port cap­i­tal­ism; you’re not real­ly pro-life if you hate Roe v. Wade but don’t vote for can­di­dates who vow to redis­trib­ute wealth; you’re not real­ly pro-life if all you want is to stop abor­tion rather than pro­vid­ing exten­sive care and sup­port for baby and moth­er.… Receive jus­tice with grat­i­tude.” This gets to close to some­thing I’ve been try­ing to artic­u­late to myself, but it’s not quite what I want to say. But it’s close.
    • State­ment on the leaked Ali­to draft opin­ion in Dobbs (Robert George, Mir­ror of Jus­tice): “If, as the leaked draft opin­ion seems to sug­gest, the Supreme Court has decid­ed to reverse Roe and return the ques­tion of abor­tion entire­ly to the leg­isla­tive domain, then the pro-life move­ment faces a new set of challenges—challenges even more daunt­ing than over­turn­ing Roe. In the face of pro­found oppo­si­tion from the wealth­i­est, most pow­er­ful, and most influ­en­tial forces and insti­tu­tions in the coun­try, the move­ment needs to extend the pro­tec­tions of law on terms of fair­ness and equal­i­ty to moth­ers and chil­dren alike. Going still fur­ther, it needs to work in both the pub­lic and pri­vate spheres to pro­vide nec­es­sary sup­port for moth­ers and chil­dren, nev­er allow­ing their inter­ests or well-being to be pit­ted against each oth­er. To its great cred­it, the pro-life move­ment has been doing this since before Roe v. Wade—again, in the face of hos­til­i­ty from the most pow­er­ful forces. We will need now to do more and bet­ter. We can and we will.” Robert George is a law pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton.
    • If Roe v. Wade Is Over­turned, What’s Next? (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “It may also be only a mat­ter of time, if Mis­sis­sip­pi pre­vails, before pro-life legal efforts turn toward get­ting the Supreme Court to rec­og­nize the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of the fetus. These efforts would focus on the same part of the Con­sti­tu­tion that was pre­vi­ous­ly held to pro­vide the right to abor­tion, the Four­teenth Amend­ment, which pro­hibits states from depriv­ing ‘any per­son of life, lib­er­ty, or prop­er­ty with­out due process of law.’” The author is a Har­vard Law prof.
    • About post-Roe pol­i­tics and Biden’s evolv­ing doc­trines on choos­ing to ‘abort a child’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Once upon a time, Sen. Joe Biden was almost a pro-life Catholic Demo­c­rat. This may be the rea­son — as jour­nal­ists fre­quent­ly note — that he seems uncom­fort­able say­ing ‘abor­tion’ in pub­lic remarks.”
    • An arti­cle by some­one out­raged: Of Course the Con­sti­tu­tion Has Noth­ing to Say About Abor­tion (Jill Lep­ore, The New York­er): “This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to is sur­prised that there is so lit­tle writ­ten about abor­tion in a four-thou­sand-word doc­u­ment craft­ed by fifty-five men in 1787. As it hap­pens, there is also noth­ing at all in that doc­u­ment, which sets out fun­da­men­tal law, about preg­nan­cy, uterus­es, vagi­nas, fetus­es, pla­cen­tas, men­stru­al blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is noth­ing in that doc­u­ment about women at all.”
      • Over­all a good arti­cle (although I think it demon­strates the oppo­site of what it intends to demon­strate). Also, although the rhetoric in the excerpt is pow­er­ful, it’s unfair — there’s also noth­ing in the Con­sti­tu­tion about testes, sperm or penis­es. I find this is often the case in the abor­tion debate: pow­er­ful rhetoric that cov­ers over weak­ness­es in the the sub­stance of the argu­ment.
    • Anoth­er not-thrilled per­spec­tive: God Damn Amer­i­ca (Jack Mirkin­son, Sub­stack): “The final opin­ion could dif­fer, but what we have in front of us is an extrem­ist, ille­git­i­mate opin­ion from an extrem­ist, ille­git­i­mate court, one that sees women as serfs and breed­ers, that sees queer peo­ple as sub­hu­man, that sees minori­ties of every kind as dirt under its col­lec­tive shoe. It is hap­pi­ly drag­ging us into the dark ages. Ali­to and every­one who joins him are evil peo­ple. No hell is too hot for them.”
    • A pret­ty extreme out­raged per­spec­tive: As the US supreme court moves to end abor­tion, is Amer­i­ca still a free coun­try? (Moira Done­gan, The Guardian): “Some have raised doubts about whether Amer­i­ca can call itself a democ­ra­cy, now that pol­i­cy­mak­ing pow­er has been large­ly tak­en over by the unelect­ed courts – whose deci­sions, like this one, are so rad­i­cal­ly out of step with, and indif­fer­ent to, pub­lic opin­ion. But it is also worth won­der­ing whether any coun­try can call itself a democ­ra­cy that does not pro­tect abor­tion rights.”
      • It is odd to claim now as the point when courts have tak­en over elec­toral pow­er when it was the Supreme Court itself that imposed abor­tion upon every state out­side of their demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es. If this draft is ille­git­i­mate because it’s not a byprod­uct of an elec­toral process, then that’s one more rea­son that Roe v Wade was itself ille­git­i­mate.
    • You can see oth­er abor­tion-relat­ed con­tent from pre­vi­ous week­ly roundups at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/abortion
  2. Not relat­ed but relat­ed: Is Sup­port for Sin­gle Moth­er­hood and Cohab­i­ta­tion Falling in the U.S.? (Alysse ElHage, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…as more Amer­i­cans have expe­ri­enced cohab­i­ta­tion, either per­son­al­ly or through watch­ing friends or fam­i­ly cohab­it, more peo­ple are real­iz­ing that liv­ing togeth­er just does not com­pare to mar­riage in terms of rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty or sta­bil­i­ty. That could explain why Pew found a dif­fer­ence based on age. A Pew spokes­woman told me via email, ‘adults ages 30 to 49, 50 to 64, and ages 65+ were more like­ly than in 2018 to say [cohab­i­ta­tion] is a bad thing for soci­ety.’ How­ev­er, there was no sim­i­lar shift among 18 to 29-year-olds.”
  3. About the leak itself:
    • Why the Dobbs Leak Is Dan­ger­ous (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “In dis­clos­ing the draft opin­ion now, rather than in Feb­ru­ary when it cir­cu­lat­ed, the leak­er pre­sum­ably means to do one of two things. First, the leak­er might hope that pub­lic pres­sure will intim­i­date one or more of the jus­tices and affect the out­come of the case. Pos­si­bly, the leak­er is a con­ser­v­a­tive clerk try­ing to keep Alito’s major­i­ty intact, on the the­o­ry that it would be too embar­rass­ing for a jus­tice to change his or her mind in these cir­cum­stances. More like­ly, though, the leak­er is a pro­gres­sive who hopes an angry pub­lic reac­tion will make a mem­ber of Alito’s major­i­ty recon­sid­er.  Alter­na­tive­ly, the leak­er might know that Jus­tice Ali­to’s major­i­ty is sol­id and that try­ing to change any­one’s mind is use­less. In that case, the leaker’s goal like­ly would be, quite sim­ply, to wreck the Court as an institution—because that is what a leak like this accom­plish­es.” The author is a for­mer Supreme Court clerk and cur­rent­ly a law pro­fes­sor at St. John’s Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • How rare is a Supreme Court breach? Very rare (Josh Ger­stein, Politi­co): “[Law prof and Supreme Court biog­ra­ph­er] Wer­miel said the jus­tices typ­i­cal­ly argue that con­fi­den­tial­i­ty is crit­i­cal to the high court’s oper­a­tion and col­le­gial­i­ty. ‘They think it will chill their delib­er­a­tion with one anoth­er and their can­dor and will­ing­ness to be open in exchange of views,’ Wer­miel said. Some also con­tend that such reports dis­tract from the court’s most endur­ing work: its opin­ions.”
    • Who­dun­nit? (Josh Black­man, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “And a Jus­tice must know that autho­riz­ing this leak would prob­a­bly lead to impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings. I do not think this leak came from a chambers.There is [anoth­er] option: the leak did not come from a cham­bers.… Rather, the leak may have come from some­one with access to the Supreme Court’s draft opin­ions. And his­to­ry sug­gest that this sort of leak is pos­si­ble.” The author is a law prof at South Texas Col­lege of Law.
    • What If The SCOTUS Leak Came From A For­eign Hack? (Josh Black­man, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “But there is anoth­er enti­ty that may want to burn down the Supreme Court, and tear apart the Amer­i­can peo­ple: a for­eign gov­ern­ment. If that was the intent, the plan was suc­cess­ful. Look no fur­ther than the groups pub­lish­ing the address­es of Supreme Court jus­tices. Plus, as a ben­e­fit to for­eign states, the tor­rent of news has tak­en Ukraine out of the head­lines. Through this lens, the hack becomes much more plau­si­ble.”
  4. 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known (Kevin Kel­ly, per­son­al blog): this is some­thing he does every year. My two favorites were: “There is no such thing as being ‘on time.’ You are either late or you are ear­ly. Your choice.” and “Aim to die broke. Give to your ben­e­fi­cia­ries before you die; it’s more fun and use­ful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funer­al home and it should bounce.
  5. What if You Didn’t Have to File a Tax Return? (Jere­my Hor­pedahl, blog): “In ‘Auto­mat­ic Tax Fil­ing: Sim­u­lat­ing a Pre-Pop­u­lat­ed Form 1040,’ the authors use a large sam­ple of tax returns to esti­mate how many tax­pay­ers a pre-filled return would work for. The results are almost split down the mid­dle: it would work well for maybe half of US tax­pay­ers (41–48% of tax­pay­ers, depend­ing on how we are defin­ing suc­cess­ful). For the oth­er half, it wouldn’t give you an accu­rate esti­mate of how much tax you owed. And the errors can be large.“The author is an econ prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Arkansas (home of a great Chi Alpha, inci­den­tal­ly). I had assumed this was sim­ply a byprod­uct of lob­by­ing, not that there were actu­al tech­ni­cal rea­sons not to do it.
  6. The UFO brief­in­gs on Capi­tol Hill have begun. Law­mak­ers aren’t impressed. (Bryan Ben­der, Politi­co): “Law­mak­ers receiv­ing the lat­est secret brief­in­gs on UFOs say nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies still aren’t tak­ing seri­ous­ly the reports of high­ly advanced air­craft of unknown ori­gin vio­lat­ing pro­tect­ed air­space.”
  7. Amer­i­ca flex­es its mar­itime mus­cles! U.S. Air Force suc­cess­ful­ly tests 2,000-pound air-launched ‘quicksink’ bomb and blasts car­go ship out of the sea in one strike (Tom Brown, Dai­ly Mail): “Quicksink risks rel­a­tive­ly low-cost air­craft when com­pared with the dan­ger of los­ing a sub­ma­rine to ene­my retal­i­a­tion after a tor­pe­do strike.… A sin­gle F‑15EX costs $87.7 mil­lion per air­craft, where­as a US sub­ma­rine can cost up to $2.8 bil­lion per unit, accord­ing to Aero Cor­ner.” The accom­pa­ny­ing video is impres­sive.

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 How Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” First shared in vol­ume 216.

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.