Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 461



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 461, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. So You’ve Decid­ed to Vote for an Unfit Can­di­date (O. Alan Noble, Sub­stack): “Come Novem­ber, most vot­ers will choose between two pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, nei­ther of whom are fit for office, as I have pre­vi­ous­ly argued. I’m not just argu­ing that they are sin­ners and there­fore ‘evil’ in the sense that every­one is fall­en; I’m argu­ing that they are specif­i­cal­ly unjust and immoral and unfit for posi­tions of nation­al lead­er­ship.… There are many issues to take into account when vot­ing for a can­di­date, but one of them is how your vote will form your own soul.”
  2. Arti­cles mak­ing obser­va­tions rarely heard in high-sta­tus soci­ety:
    • New Research Finds Huge Dif­fer­ences Between Male and Female Brains (Leonard Sax, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “As you can see, there wasn’t a con­tin­u­um: the female fin­ger­prints of brain activ­i­ty were quite dif­fer­ent from the male fin­ger­prints of rest­ing brain activ­i­ty, with no over­lap. These find­ings strong­ly sug­gest that what’s going on in a woman’s brain at rest is sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from what’s going on in a man’s brain at rest.”
    • How divorce nev­er ends (Brid­get Pheta­sy, The Spec­ta­tor): “All of this is to say some­thing you don’t hear that often: divorce will affect your kids for the rest of their lives, well into adult­hood. They will have split hol­i­days and sum­mers. They will have step­par­ents. Their kids will have step-grand­par­ents. What­ev­er inher­i­tance they would have been enti­tled to is often being divvied up with oth­er spous­es and their kids. More impor­tant than the mon­ey, how­ev­er, is the atten­tion they’ll nev­er get because their par­ents are dat­ing or remar­ry­ing or what­ev­er. They will only be with one par­ent half of the year — if they’re lucky: we only saw my dad twice a year. They will have to choose who gets Christ­mas, for­ev­er. Or they will be bounc­ing around at hol­i­day time with their kids, just like the old days.”
    • The Real Prob­lem With Legal Weed (Charles Fain Lehman, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “While mar­i­jua­na may not be as bad as some crit­ics claim, the med­ical evi­dence is clear that it can do sub­stan­tial harm. Mar­i­jua­na is addic­tive — around 30 per­cent of users use com­pul­sive­ly, even as their use harms them­selves and the peo­ple around them.… Mar­i­jua­na does hurt a sub­stan­tial por­tion of its con­sumers, often quite bad­ly. And there is no rea­son to think that busi­ness­es won’t sell mar­i­jua­na to those it hurts, if they’re allowed to. What the alco­hol and tobac­co mar­kets show us, rather, is that addic­tion and prof­it don’t mix well.”
      • Unlocked.
    • We deserve a more nuanced con­ver­sa­tion about work­ing moms (Rachel M. Cohen, Vox): “After the essay on moth­er­hood dread was pub­lished, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty soci­ol­o­gist who stud­ies rela­tion­ships and gen­der. She had recent­ly pub­lished a paper on gen­der wage gaps in the com­put­er sci­ence field and found that moth­ers in com­put­er sci­ence actu­al­ly earned more than child­less women (though this ‘wage pre­mi­um’ was sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than what fathers earned). ‘It was dif­fi­cult for me to find a home for the attached arti­cle because review­ers can­not fath­om that moth­ers might out-earn sin­gle women, though there is a grow­ing body of evi­dence that [they] do,’ she wrote in her email to me. ‘It might be selec­tion [bias] … but giv­en that folks have found this across dis­ci­plines sug­gests that the moth­er­hood penal­ty real­ly needs to be reassessed.’ I was curi­ous about Sassler’s sug­ges­tion that moms might actu­al­ly earn more and that we don’t often hear that because gate­keep­ers ‘seem to like the nar­ra­tive that women are always screwed by family.‘”
  3. This Is What Elite Fail­ure Looks Like (Oren Cass, New York Times): “Tak­ing the majority’s pref­er­ences seri­ous­ly, even when they con­flict with the pref­er­ences of more sophis­ti­cat­ed experts, is often dis­par­aged as pop­ulism. But while elect­ed offi­cials and their tech­no­crat­ic advis­ers may have spe­cial insight into how the people’s goals are best achieved, only the peo­ple can deter­mine what those goals should be and whether they are being met…. While pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives so often seek to max­i­mize effi­cien­cy and growth, move peo­ple to oppor­tu­ni­ty and redis­trib­ute from the economy’s win­ners to the losers, the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can has an attach­ment to place, a focus on fam­i­ly, a com­mit­ment to mak­ing things, and would accept eco­nom­ic trade-offs in pur­suit of those pri­or­i­ties.… The impor­tant fea­ture of all these pref­er­ences is that they are inher­ent­ly valid. No set of facts or sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses, to which an expert might have supe­ri­or access, over­rides what peo­ple actu­al­ly val­ue and what trade-offs they would choose to make. Lead­ers might seek to shape pub­lic opin­ion and alter pref­er­ences — indeed, that is part of lead­ing — but they must yield to the out­come. Their oblig­a­tion is to pur­sue the community’s pri­or­i­ties, not their own.”
  4. Mis­sion­ar­ies Have Gone to Thai­land for 200 Years. Why Aren’t There More Chris­tians? (Rebec­ca Brit­ting­ham, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Yet the free­dom that Chris­tians enjoy in Thai­land hasn’t trans­lat­ed into a wide accep­tance of Chris­tian­i­ty by local Thais. Despite near­ly 200 years of Protes­tant mis­sions, only about 1.2 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion are Chris­tians. The ques­tion of why Thai­land is such dif­fi­cult soil for the seed of the gospel to grow has plagued mis­sion­ar­ies, as many have seen lit­tle fruit for the years they’ve spent learn­ing Thai, build­ing rela­tion­ships, and try­ing to intro­duce locals to the gospel.”
  5. I Went From Fos­ter Care to Yale. This Is What I Learned About ‘Luxury Beliefs.’ (Rob K. Hen­der­son, New York Times on YouTube): six minute video.
    • This is worth watch­ing even if you’re famil­iar with his ‘lux­u­ry beliefs’ con­cept.
    • I actu­al­ly had din­ner in a group with Rob on Sun­day night. We’re not friends — I just saw that he was in town and will­ing to meet up with peo­ple so I DMd him on Twit­ter. Nice guy.
  6. How Lib­er­al Col­lege Cam­pus­es Ben­e­fit Con­ser­v­a­tive Stu­dents (Lau­ren A. Wright, The Atlantic): “Con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture war­riors argue that edu­ca­tion at high­ly selec­tive col­leges is worth­less, and rec­om­mend that con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents who don’t want to be silenced or indoc­tri­nat­ed opt out. I dis­agree. Con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents expe­ri­ence what high­er edu­ca­tion has long claimed to offer: expo­sure to dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, reg­u­lar prac­tice build­ing and defend­ing coher­ent argu­ments, intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenges that spur cre­ativ­i­ty and growth. Lib­er­al acad­e­mia has large­ly robbed lib­er­al stu­dents of these rewards.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton. No pay­wall.
  7. Reli­able Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Ger­ard Laun­ders His Grudges Into the Pub­lic Record (Trac­ing Wood­grains, Sub­stack): “Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reli­able Sources say. David Gerard’s mis­sion is to deter­mine what Reli­able Sources are, using any argu­ments at his dis­pos­al that instru­men­tal­ly favor sources he finds agree­able.… From there, it’s sim­ple: Wikipedia edi­tors duti­ful­ly etch onto the page, with a neu­tral point of view, that Huff­in­g­ton Post writ­ers think this, PinkNews edi­tors think that, and expe­ri­enced Har­vard pro­fes­sors who make the mis­take of writ­ing for The Free Press think noth­ing fit for an ency­clo­pe­dia.”
    • This is a long, wild arti­cle about inter­net minu­ti­ae. But if you’ve ever won­dered about bias on Wikipedia, dive in.

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 460



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 460, a large­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber. It’s a mul­ti­ple of 23, so I guess that’s kin­da cool (for a cer­tain def­i­n­i­tion of cool).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Your Con­sti­tu­tion­al Right to Be a Pirate (A.J. Jacobs, The Free Press): “It may not get much pub­lic­i­ty, but there it is, smack-dab in Arti­cle I, Sec­tion 8 of the Con­sti­tu­tion: Con­gress has the pow­er to grant cit­i­zens ‘let­ters of mar­que and reprisal.’ Mean­ing that, with Congress’s per­mis­sion, pri­vate cit­i­zens can load weapons onto their fish­ing boats, head out to the high seas, cap­ture ene­my ves­sels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patri­ot­ic pirates were known as ‘pri­va­teers.’ ”
  2. the Pen­ta­teuch in brief out­line (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “As Robert Alter has point­ed out, the long-time obses­sion with sources among schol­ars of the Hebrew Bible — their slight­ly mad-eyed teas­ing out of the con­tri­bu­tions of their posit­ed authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assump­tion that ‘the redac­tors were in the grip of a kind of man­ic trib­al com­pul­sion, dri­ven again and again to include units of tra­di­tion­al mate­r­i­al … for rea­sons they them­selves could not have explained.’ Yet if that were true, why does an out­line of the Pen­ta­teuch look so order­ly — indeed, almost exces­sive­ly so?”
  3. The Codger-in-Chief (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “[We are see­ing] cov­er­age that bears more of a pass­ing resem­blance to what I saw dur­ing the Tod­dler-in-Chief days. In oth­er words, there are some dis­turb­ing par­al­lels in how Biden’s staffers are talk­ing about him to the press when com­pared to Trump’s White House staffers. Fur­ther­more, I strong­ly sus­pect the staffers now talk­ing to the press are high­er-rank­ing than, say, the deputy direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy.”
    • I read a lot of post-debate arti­cles, most of them strong­ly par­ti­san one way or the oth­er. This one sum­ma­rizes a lot of threads well. The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Tufts.
    • Not direct­ly relat­ed, but also relat­ed to the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion — My Unset­tling Inter­view With Steve Ban­non (David Brooks, New York Times): “I should empha­size that I wasn’t try­ing to debate Ban­non or rebut his beliefs; I want­ed to under­stand how he sees the cur­rent moment. I want­ed to under­stand the glob­al pop­ulist surge from the inside.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Unlocked.
  4. Notes From a For­mer­ly Unpromis­ing Young Per­son (Rebec­ca Sny­der, New York Times): “My sit­u­a­tion was this: I was fin­ish­ing my sopho­more year of high school and had prob­a­bly attend­ed few­er days than I’d missed. I’d failed near­ly all my class­es, and my tran­script boast­ed a 0.47. (I say ‘boast­ed’ because you real­ly do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spec­tac­u­lar­ly.) Then there were the fist­fights. The weed. The acid.… [Yet] some­one had tak­en the time to meet me, to lis­ten and to ulti­mate­ly believe I had poten­tial. When Mr. Spencer sat in the admis­sions office of North Cen­tral Col­lege and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Sny­der,’ those were prob­a­bly the most impor­tant words of my life.”
  5. Why a New Con­ser­v­a­tive Brain Trust Is Reset­tling Across Amer­i­ca (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The idea was a ‘fra­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ty,’ as one leader put it, that pri­or­i­tized in-per­son meet­ings. The result was the all-male Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, an invi­ta­tion-only social orga­ni­za­tion reserved for Chris­tians.… Mem­bers must be male, belong to a ‘Trini­tar­i­an Chris­t­ian’ church, a broad cat­e­go­ry that includes Catholics and Protes­tants, but not mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints. Mem­bers must also describe them­selves as ‘unhy­phen­at­ed Amer­i­cans,’ a ref­er­ence to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urg­ing the full assim­i­la­tion of immi­grants.”
    • Both the exis­tence of this move­ment and the way it is report­ed on are inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  6. Lov­ing Amer­i­ca Means Expect­ing More From It (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Too often we wor­ry that if we tell our chil­dren about our com­plex and some­times dark his­to­ry, their response will be debil­i­tat­ing shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gap­ing chasm between our ideals and prac­tices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pur­sue new goods.”
  7. Revival and Rev­o­lu­tion (John Fea, Com­mon­weal): “Since Evan­gel­i­cal­ism is an inher­ent­ly pop­ulist and anti-intel­lec­tu­al move­ment, most born-again Chris­tians do not trust aca­d­e­mics and rely instead on such ‘experts.’ When they need to know some­thing about sci­ence, they turn to Ken Ham, host of the pop­u­lar radio show Answers in Gen­e­sis and founder of the Cre­ation Muse­um in Peters­burg, Ken­tucky. They get their psy­chol­o­gy and social phi­los­o­phy from James Dob­son, the long­time cul­ture war­rior and founder of the lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion Focus on the Fam­i­ly. Their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy comes from sources like Fox News’s Sean Han­ni­ty, the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Stand­ing for Free­dom Cen­ter, or the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Pat Robertson’s Regent Uni­ver­si­ty. And for Amer­i­can his­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cals turn to David Bar­ton, the founder and CEO of Wall­Builders, an Evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion in Ale­do, Texas.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry prof at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school.

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 459



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

This is the 459th instal­la­tion, a num­ber I find inter­est­ing sim­ply because 4 + 5 = 9.

I should prob­a­bly men­tion that I’m not shar­ing any arti­cles about last night’s pres­i­den­tial debate today because I want to wait and see how peo­ple are think­ing about the race after a few days. The reac­tions right now are too raw.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A slap in the face for psy­chob­a­b­ble (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “I can’t be the only for­eign­er in the US who has been chid­ed for not hav­ing a ther­a­pist by some­one who — choos­ing my words care­ful­ly here — seems to be get­ting uneven results from theirs. If psy­chob­a­b­ble were con­fined to actors going up to col­lect their big cer­tifi­cates, I’d leave it alone. But, like sand, it gets every­where.”
    • Old­er but gold.
  2. Rebels with a reli­gious cause: Meet New York’s avant-garde con­ser­v­a­tives (Leonar­do Bevilac­qua, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor): “Orig­i­nal­ly from Philadel­phia, Salomé has been a devout Catholic since she was young. She wears a ‘Make Amer­i­ca Great Again’ hat around town some­times as an act of iron­ic defi­ance. And even though she’s a trans­gen­der woman, she prefers the term of an ear­li­er age: castrato.  But first and fore­most, she says, she’s a child of God.”
    • Inter­est­ing and full of sur­pris­es.
  3. A Par­tial Expla­na­tion of Zoomer Girl Derange­ment (Zin­nia, Sub­stack): “Why are young women today so deranged? Because no one is hon­est with them and they can­not be hon­est with them­selves. Par­ents lie to you, teach­ers lie to you, friends lie to you, every­one lies to you. If any­one dares tell you the truth, they are ostra­cized. My teenage self could only find truth smug­gled away in the dark recess­es of obscure online com­mu­ni­ties; usu­al­ly couched in lay­ers of iron­ic (and sin­cere) big­otry. And while I did not enjoy the big­otry (at the time), I found val­ue in engag­ing with the trans­gres­sive mate­r­i­al I came across because I felt that it expressed truths oth­er­wise unavail­able to me. Today, truth lies with­in the domain of inter­net ghet­tos, siloed away from the rest of polite soci­ety. At best, what soci­ety tells you is entire­ly unhelp­ful: ‘You’re beau­ti­ful just the way you are.’ At worst, what soci­ety tells you is entire­ly destruc­tive: ‘If you feel alien­at­ed by your body, you should maybe con­sid­er a mas­tec­to­my.’ ”
    • A bit vul­gar in places, but inter­est­ing. Kin­da long.
  4. Elite mis­in­for­ma­tion is an under­rat­ed prob­lem (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…all this slop­py work and mis­lead­ing rhetoric is both more impact­ful than a lot of peo­ple real­ize, and also a lot less tac­ti­cal­ly savvy than those doing it think. The prob­lem is that it’s about a mil­lion times eas­i­er to per­suade a high­ly engaged mem­ber of your team of some­thing than it is to per­suade a swing vot­er (who is prob­a­bly skep­ti­cal, cyn­i­cal, and not that engaged with pol­i­tics) or a mem­ber of the oppo­si­tion (who instinc­tive­ly assumes you’re lying about every­thing). So when you put some­thing out there that’s false or mis­lead­ing, you’re about a mil­lion times more like­ly to con­fuse peo­ple who are friend­ly to your cause than to actu­al­ly per­suade any­one worth per­suad­ing.”
  5. It Is Time for Rad­i­cal Can­dor (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “It’s anoth­er lit­tle Bat­tle of Stal­in­grad: It’s a pity some­body has to win; all a decent per­son can do is pray for casu­al­ties.… Because we are gov­erned by imbe­ciles and thieves and mis­cre­ants and degen­er­ates and peo­ple who are will­ing to put up with all that imbe­cil­i­ty and thiev­ery and mis­cre­ance and degen­er­a­cy if it gets them even such a pathet­ic prize as a tem­po­rary seat in the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives…”
  6. How (and How Not) to Wait (Mark Vroe­gop, Cross­way): “Focus. Adore. Seek. Trust. That’s how you wait on the Lord. It’s how you live on what’s true about God when you don’t know what’s true about your life.… Rather than allow­ing strong emo­tions to hold you hostage, you can embrace a strat­e­gy (FAST) that wel­comes God’s grace into your uncer­tain­ty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. I feel awk­ward shar­ing this, but I was inter­viewed for a pod­cast. I did not choose the title (nor even the top­ic): Why I am NOT a Calvin­ist: Break­ing Down Every­thing from Calvin­ism, to Can We Lose Our Sal­va­tion (King­dom Come Pod­cast, YouTube): one hour long.

Less Serious Things Which Interested 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 458



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 458, a num­ber with very few fac­tors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anx­i­ety (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “We’re see­ing the inter­na­tion­al trans­mis­sion of a nov­el West­ern the­o­ry of men­tal health. It’s the glob­al­iza­tion of Western—and, just maybe, Amer­i­can—despair.… Accord­ing to the pod­cast search engine Lis­ten Notes, more than 5,500 pod­casts have the word trau­ma in their title. In celebri­ty media, men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als are so com­mon that they’ve spawned a sub­genre of sum­maries of celebri­ty men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als, includ­ing ’39 Celebri­ties Who Have Opened Up About Men­tal Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebri­ties Have Said About Hav­ing Depres­sion,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Men­tal Health.’ ”
    • Poly­math Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most impor­tant pieces of the year.” Unlocked.
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the week­end, but most peo­ple think they know how to save the chil­dren, fix the schools, reform the pris­ons, over­haul health­care, repair pol­i­tics, restore civil­i­ty, and bring about world peace. Per­haps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those oth­er things.”
    • This is a hum­bling essay.
  3. Chat­G­PT is bull­shit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy): “The machines are not try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing they believe or per­ceive. Their inac­cu­ra­cy is not due to mis­per­cep­tion or hal­lu­ci­na­tion. As we have point­ed out, they are not try­ing to con­vey infor­ma­tion at all. They are bull­shit­ting.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow. Apolo­gies for the lan­guage, but the lan­guage is at the heart of the point the authors are mak­ing.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hay­den, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For Paul, what makes sin­gle­ness ‘bet­ter’ is not the absence of sex as such, for nei­ther sex nor mar­riage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, sin­gle­ness is the ‘hap­pi­er’ state because it pro­vides believ­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be ‘anx­ious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘world­ly things’ because the ‘appoint­ed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all sin­gles should live devot­ed to the Lord… one either lever­ages sin­gle­ness for the Lord, like Paul; or one lever­ages it for world­ly or sin­ful pur­pos­es, like idle wid­ows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich essay about sin­gle­ness.
  5. Evo­lu­tion May Be Pur­pose­ful And It’s Freak­ing Sci­en­tists Out (Andrea Mor­ris, Forbes): “Noble is neu­tral on reli­gious mat­ters. Yet he sees com­pelling evi­dence that pur­pose may be fun­da­men­tal to life. He’s deter­mined to debunk the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digm and replace the ele­vat­ed impor­tance of genes with some­thing much more con­tro­ver­sial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained sup­port from the next gen­er­a­tion of ori­gins-of-life researchers work­ing to top­ple the reign of gene-cen­trism.”
  6. Some arti­cles about the war in Gaza:
    • Israelis Are Not Watch­ing the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of secu­ri­ty and casu­al­ties. And all of a sud­den, peo­ple under­stand that this was not fea­si­ble for the long run. That is to say that we will prob­a­bly have to see more sol­diers fight­ing in the north and in the south for the com­ing years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a per­ma­nent war but maybe a per­ma­nent state of ongo­ing oper­a­tions.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing (albeit a tad long) inter­view with an Israeli intel­lec­tu­al.
    • Get­ting Aid Into Gaza (Ger­man Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, cit­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid ship­ments for its own use.”
      • A rea­son­ably fair-mind­ed arti­cle. Exam­ines mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jes­si­ca Con­tr­era, Jenn Abel­son, John D. Hard­en, Hay­den God­frey & Nate Jones, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion has found that over the past two decades, hun­dreds of law enforce­ment offi­cers in the Unit­ed States have sex­u­al­ly abused chil­dren while offi­cials at every lev­el of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem have failed to pro­tect kids, pun­ish abusers and pre­vent addi­tion­al crimes… The Post iden­ti­fied at least 1,800 state and local law enforce­ment offi­cers who were charged with crimes involv­ing child sex­u­al abuse from 2005 through 2022.”
    • I have long said that the peo­ple throw­ing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sex­u­al abuse cri­sis would be stunned with the far worse num­bers on child sex­u­al abuse in the pub­lic school sys­tem (and I stand by that). But I did not fore­see this one and I should have. There is author­i­ty, there­fore there is abuse of author­i­ty.
    • Unlocked.

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 456



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 456, a very sat­is­fy­ing num­ber: each dig­it increas­es and I like it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Holy Hag­gling: Learn to Pray like Abra­ham (Justin Dille­hay, The Gospel Coali­tion): “We’re often ready to write off an oth­er­wise good church or orga­ni­za­tion because of a few bad apples with­in it. But Abra­ham is the exact opposite—he asks God to spare an entire city of bad apples for the sake of a few good apples with­in it.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Non­prof­it Indus­tri­al Com­plex and the Cor­rup­tion of the Amer­i­can City (Jonathan Ire­land, Amer­i­can Affairs): “Who­ev­er came up with the idea of call­ing these orga­ni­za­tions ‘non­prof­its’ was a mar­ket­ing genius on the lev­el of Steve Jobs. When some­one hears the word non­prof­it, they assume that such an orga­ni­za­tion is work­ing for the pub­lic good; that it serves the home­less, pro­tects the weak, exists for the ben­e­fit and the bet­ter­ment of soci­ety at large.… Con­se­quent­ly, non­prof­its receive a ben­e­fit of the doubt that would not be grant­ed to any oth­er form of pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion. Yet non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions are fre­quent­ly the exact oppo­site of what they appear to be.”
    • Stun­ning sto­ries in here. 100% worth your time.
  3. Why the Pan­dem­ic Prob­a­bly Start­ed in a Lab, in 5 Key Points (Ali­na Chan, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, a nev­er-before-seen SARS-like virus with a new­ly intro­duced furin cleav­age site, match­ing the descrip­tion in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse pro­pos­al, caused an out­break in Wuhan less than two years after the pro­pos­al was draft­ed.…”
    • Unlocked. Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty. The author is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist at a joint MIT/Harvard insti­tute.
  4. Men Only Want One Thing (Nathan Bea­com, Com­ment): “Over a hun­dred years ago, William James, the father of Amer­i­can psy­chol­o­gy, argued that men need a ‘moral equiv­a­lent of war.’ To retain virtue, James thought, men need­ed the soul-shap­ing force of mil­i­tary life with­out war’s destruc­tive con­se­quences.”
    • This is a sol­id arti­cle, espe­cial­ly rec­om­mend­ed for guys. Ladies, you can eaves­drop if you like.
  5. Why No One Will Save Sudan (Cameron Hud­son, Per­sua­sion): “For those track­ing events in the coun­try, a seem­ing­ly end­less thread of head­lines and edi­to­ri­als lament this ‘for­got­ten con­flict.’ But this is the wrong fram­ing. The cri­sis in Sudan is nei­ther for­got­ten nor ignored. It is de-pri­or­i­tized. And that is worse.… Over the past sev­er­al weeks, a new Beng­hazi-like slaugh­ter has been tak­ing shape in the North Dar­fur city of El Fash­er. With near­ly one mil­lion inter­nal­ly dis­placed already tak­ing refuge there and more than one mil­lion more await­ing a com­ing onslaught by the Rapid Sup­port Forces mili­tia, which has promised to take the city and com­plete their takeover of all of Dar­fur, the specter of geno­cide once again hangs over the region. Egress out of the city has been cut off, as have aid flows into the city, lead­ing ana­lysts to refer to the city as a ‘kill box.’ ”
  6. Does Divorce Make You Hot­ter? (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “…[cel­e­bra­to­ry sto­ries about divorce are] a prod­uct of a pop­u­lar ‘woman empow­ered by every­thing woman does’ par­a­digm, where all choic­es made by women are a prod­uct of lib­er­a­tion, hence fem­i­nist, hence good. There is no error or dis­ap­point­ment that can’t be yass-kweened away.… It’s only women who are seen as requir­ing this par­tic­u­lar brand of cheer­lead­ing, who are relent­less­ly encour­aged to reframe all their neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences as the best thing they ever did.”
    • Straight fire through­out. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  7. Speech Under the Shad­ow of Pun­ish­ment (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “…admin­is­tra­tors have become accus­tomed to using pun­ish­ment as a go-to solu­tion rather than as a last resort. The empha­sis on dis­ci­pli­nary action became par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­nounced in the twen­ty-tens, when uni­ver­si­ties were under urgent pres­sure to address cam­pus sex dis­crim­i­na­tion and harass­ment.… [fur­ther­more] some stu­dents may have been dis­ci­plined not mere­ly for par­tic­i­pat­ing in an encamp­ment but for vio­lat­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion, harass­ment, or bul­ly­ing poli­cies. The pres­sure to enforce those poli­cies can­not be over­stat­ed. In the twen­ty-tens, the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion inves­ti­gat­ed many schools, includ­ing Har­vard, for fail­ing to ade­quate­ly address alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct; uni­ver­si­ties today are once again under fed­er­al scruti­ny, which threat­ens their fed­er­al fund­ing and tax-exempt sta­tus, for fail­ing to address alle­ga­tions of anti­semitism.”
    • The author is a law prof at Har­vard.

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 455



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 455, which is the result of 15 choose 3 — how many ways you can select three objects from a col­lec­tion of fif­teen.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What I’ve Learned From a Decade on the Dat­ing Apps (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “Dat­ing apps are not a neu­tral tool for find­ing love. Like all tech­nolo­gies, they act on us, even as we think we are in con­trol, act­ing on them. They shape how we see oth­er peo­ple, and our­selves, and roman­tic love itself. Accord­ing to the apps, love is the opti­miza­tion of traits that yield the high­est rates of mutu­al sat­is­fac­tion and per­son­al growth for two atom­ized indi­vid­u­als. This self-expres­sive mod­el of romance may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s a major depar­ture from the basis of love in pre­vi­ous eras.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • I also liked this bit: “It’s as if these apps don’t want users to find romance, because they are incen­tivized, to the tune of $5.3 bil­lion in 2022, to keep us swip­ing and search­ing.”
  2. Are Gaza Protests Hap­pen­ing Most­ly at Elite Col­leges? (Marc Novi­coff & Robert Kelchen, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Count­ing Con­sor­tium and news reports of encamp­ments, we matched infor­ma­tion on every insti­tu­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion that has had pro-Pales­tin­ian protest activ­i­ty (start­ing when the war broke out in Octo­ber until ear­ly May) to the col­leges in our 2023 col­lege rank­ings. Of the 1,421 pub­lic and pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encamp­ments. By match­ing that data to per­cent­ages of stu­dents at each cam­pus who receive Pell Grants (which are award­ed to stu­dents from mod­er­ate- and low-income fam­i­lies), we came to an unsur­pris­ing con­clu­sion: Pro-Pales­tin­ian protests have been rare at col­leges with high per­cent­ages of Pell stu­dents. Encamp­ments at such col­leges have been rar­er still.”
    • Con­tains inter­est­ing charts.
  3. Spy­ing Arrests Send Chill Through Britain’s Thriv­ing Hong Kong Com­mu­ni­ty (Megan Spe­cia, New York Times): “This month, three men were charged in Lon­don with gath­er­ing intel­li­gence for Hong Kong and forc­ing entry into a British res­i­dence. While the men have not yet been found inno­cent or guilty — the tri­al will not begin until Feb­ru­ary — the news of the arrests threw a spot­light on many activist­s’ exist­ing con­cerns about China’s abil­i­ty to sur­veil and harass its cit­i­zens abroad, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who have been crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Two arti­cles about sur­viv­ing can­cer:
    • Mar­i­tal Sta­tus and Sur­vival in Patients With Can­cer (Aiz­er et al, Jour­nal of Clin­i­cal Oncol­o­gy): “For five can­cers stud­ied (prostate, breast, col­orec­tal, esophageal, and head/neck can­cers), the sur­vival ben­e­fit asso­ci­at­ed with mar­riage was larg­er than the pub­lished sur­vival ben­e­fit of chemother­a­py. The impor­tance of this study is that it high­lights the con­sis­tent and sub­stan­tial impact that fea­tures of mar­riage, par­tic­u­lar­ly social sup­port, can have on can­cer detec­tion, treat­ment, and sur­vival.”
      • From 2013. Mar­riage is bet­ter than chemother­a­py. To be clear: if you have can­cer also receive med­ical treat­ment even if you’re mar­ried.
    • Tri­al results for new lung can­cer drug are ‘off the chart­s’, say doc­tors (Andrew Gre­go­ry, The Guardian): “Lung can­cer is the world’s lead­ing cause of can­cer death, account­ing for about 1.8m deaths every year. Sur­vival rates in those with advanced forms of the dis­ease, where tumours have spread, are par­tic­u­lar­ly poor. More than half of patients (60%) diag­nosed with advanced forms of lung can­cer who took lor­la­tinib were still alive five years lat­er with no pro­gres­sion in their dis­ease, data pre­sent­ed at the world’s largest can­cer con­fer­ence showed. The rate was 8% in patients treat­ed with a stan­dard drug, the tri­al found.”
      • Amaz­ing!
  5. Two arti­cles about the job mar­ket:
    • Why Can’t Col­lege Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some The­o­ries — and Fix­es. (Peter Coy, New York Times): “Even though the unem­ploy­ment rate is low, few­er peo­ple are quit­ting, so few­er jobs are becom­ing avail­able, accord­ing to Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics data. LinkedIn’s esti­mate of the nation­al hir­ing rate was down 9.5 per­cent in April from a year ear­li­er.”
      • The arti­cle con­tains oth­er sub­stan­tive insights, but that one stood out to me.
    • The case of the angry his­to­ry post­doc (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Why is no one hir­ing his­to­ri­ans? There are four basic rea­sons. The first and most impor­tant — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s sup­posed to be so obvi­ous — is that the U.S. uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is large­ly done expand­ing. The 20th cen­tu­ry saw a mas­sive build-out of uni­ver­si­ties, which required hir­ing a mas­sive num­ber of tenure-track pro­fes­sors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the depart­ments at the exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties are clogged with a ton of old profs who will nev­er leave until they age out. New hires must there­fore slow to a trick­le, since as long as the num­ber of profs is rough­ly con­stant, they can only be hired to replace peo­ple who retire or die.”
  6. Live by the Law or Die on the Cross (Jere­my Eng­land, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What would Jesus do if a Hamas fight­er held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while fir­ing? Hard to say for sure, but any­one who argues that a prop­er­ly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Chris­tian­i­ty. The image of the Cru­ci­fix­ion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accept­ing cor­po­re­al defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spir­i­tu­al vic­to­ry in the world of tomor­row. You will not hear Jesus men­tioned when West­ern lead­ers speak on how impor­tant it is that Israel adhere to inter­na­tion­al laws of war, but the con­cept of the inno­cent civil­ian enshrined in these laws grew prac­ti­cal­ly out of wars fought with­in Chris­ten­dom dur­ing the last sev­er­al hun­dred years.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who does not endorse all of the argu­ment but found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  7. A Redemp­tive The­sis for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Andy Crouch with oth­ers, Prax­is Labs): “Like the Inter­net, elec­tric­i­ty, and agri­cul­ture, AI is a gen­er­al-pur­pose tech­nol­o­gy that can be har­nessed to many ends. Redemp­tive entre­pre­neurs can lead the way in demon­strat­ing that AI can be deployed — in fact, is best deployed — in ways that dethrone pride, mag­ic, and Mam­mon and that ele­vate the dig­ni­ty of human beings and their capac­i­ty to flour­ish as image bear­ers in the world.”

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 454



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 454, a num­ber whose sym­me­try pleas­es me.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Nones Have Hit a Ceil­ing (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The rise of the nones may be large­ly over now. At least it won’t be increas­ing in the same way that it did in the pri­or thir­ty years. Of course, the ques­tion is why? I don’t know if I have a bul­let­proof answer. I think the eas­i­est expla­na­tion is that a lot of mar­gin­al­ly attached peo­ple switched to ‘no reli­gion’ on sur­veys over the last decade or two. Even­tu­al­ly, there weren’t that many mar­gin­al­ly attached folks any­more. All you had left were the very com­mit­ted reli­gious peo­ple who like­ly won’t become nones for any rea­son. The loose top soil has been scooped off and hauled away, leav­ing noth­ing but hard bedrock under­neath.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  2. ‘Loud-mouthed bul­ly’: CS Lewis satirised Oxford peer in secret poems (Dalya Alberge, The Guardian): “Jok­ing that an infu­ri­at­ed Lewis had per­haps com­posed them dur­ing one of Wyld’s lec­tures, Horobin not­ed that one of them iden­ti­fies Wyld through an acros­tic with the ini­tial let­ters spelling out the name ‘Hen­ry Cecil Wyld’. He added: ‘On the remain­ing blank pages he penned a series of addi­tion­al satir­i­cal vers­es lam­poon­ing Wyld – one in Eng­lish, along­side oth­ers in Latin, Greek, French and even Old Eng­lish.’ ”
    • Even Lewis’s shade was epic and eru­dite. I love this sto­ry. Also, a reminder that every word will be brought into judge­ment — even words uttered (or penned) in secret. I should men­tion he would not yet have been a Chris­t­ian when these poems appear to have been com­posed.
  3. What Do Stu­dents at Elite Col­leges Real­ly Want? (Francesca Mari, New York Times): “…every­one arrived on cam­pus hop­ing to change the world. But what they learn at Har­vard, he said, is that actu­al­ly doing any­thing mean­ing­ful is too hard. Peo­ple give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make mon­ey. Some­one else told me it was com­mon at par­ties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.”
    • Unlocked
  4. Redefin­ing the sci­en­tif­ic method: as the use of sophis­ti­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods that extend our mind (Alexan­der Krauss, PNAS Nexus): “This study reveals that 25% of all dis­cov­er­ies since 1900 did not apply the com­mon sci­en­tif­ic method (all three features)—with 6% of dis­cov­er­ies using no obser­va­tion, 23% using no exper­i­men­ta­tion, and 17% not test­ing a hypoth­e­sis. Empir­i­cal evi­dence thus chal­lenges the com­mon view of the sci­en­tif­ic method.”
    • From the abstract because it is so suc­cinct­ly put, but the arti­cle itself is easy to read. Rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a philoso­pher of sci­ence at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics.
  5. Amer­i­can Mis­sion­ar­ies Killed in Port-au-Prince (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Crim­i­nal gangs killed near­ly 5,000 peo­ple in Haiti last year. Then, in 2024, the gangs band­ed togeth­er, turned against the politi­cians who had once col­lab­o­rat­ed with them for pow­er, and launched coor­di­nat­ed attacks on the gov­ern­ment. The gangs set police sta­tions on fire, shut down the main air­port and sea­port, and broke open two pris­ons, releas­ing an esti­mat­ed 4,000 inmates. They van­dal­ized gov­ern­ment offices, stormed the Nation­al Palace, and took con­trol of about 80 per­cent of the cap­i­tal.”
  6. Group chats rule the world. (Sri­ram Krish­nan, per­son­al blog): “Most of the inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in tech now hap­pen in pri­vate group chats: What­sapp, Telegram, Sig­nal, small invite-only Dis­cord groups.… The great cul­ture wars of 2020 meant peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in tech, weren’t com­fort­able shar­ing their views in pub­lic lest they get var­i­ous online mobs after them.”
  7. What ‘Tradwives’—and Some of Their Critics—Miss (Han­nah Ander­son, The Dis­patch): “But women haven’t been unique­ly lied to. Fam­i­lies have been lied to about what their homes can and should be. Men and women alike have been told that their great­est achieve­ments lie out­side of it. And yet, a mar­riage reduced from two ‘careerists’ to one is still serv­ing cor­po­rate inter­ests. At best, a woman sac­ri­fic­ing her career to enable her husband’s career (as Butk­er asserts his wife does and as he coun­seled new female grad­u­ates) miss­es the point. At worst, it enables the very mar­ket­place that desires noth­ing more than to creep into our homes and com­mod­i­fy every expres­sion of good­ness and beau­ty that hap­pens there—even if what we’re sell­ing is tra­di­tion­al­ism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Tour by Drone (YouTube): six min­utes (it’s a lit­tle long, but the first bit is nice to watch)
  • Will 18 year old Emma Olson FOOL Penn & Teller with a Rubik’s cube? (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine min­utes
  • When an Eel Takes a Bite Then an Octo­pus Might Claim an Eye­ball (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “In each video, the com­mon octo­pus may sac­ri­fice arms, much as lizards drop their tails to dis­tract preda­tors, Dr. Hernández-Urcera said. In the first video, the octo­pus los­es three arms while the one in the sec­ond video los­es two — but they can ful­ly regrow limbs in about 45 days, some lab tests show.”
    • Rarely do I find that news arti­cles are improved by embed­ded videos. This is one of the excep­tions. Very cool.
  • Are Plants Intel­li­gent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Sal­ad? (Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “Obvi­ous­ly we’re ani­mals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imag­in­ing a future with agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices and har­vest­ing prac­tices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capa­ble of and its pro­cliv­i­ties. This opens up the world of plant ethics.”
    • The arti­cle itself is inter­est­ing. The title made me laugh.

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 453

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rec­on­cil­ing Chris­tian­i­ty with intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty (Nadia Jo, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “One of the val­ues Jesus empha­sized most is humil­i­ty, and I strive to imple­ment that val­ue in my intel­lec­tu­al life in addi­tion to my per­son­al life. My ethos of intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty involves curios­i­ty, chal­leng­ing and wrestling with claims and lines of rea­son­ing, flex­i­ble think­ing and respect for peo­ple who put in the same effort. I hope that my non­re­li­gious peers can come to under­stand and appre­ci­ate Christianity’s deep intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion, even if they don’t agree with its con­clu­sions. And, I encour­age more Chris­tians to live up to that tra­di­tion and exam­ine their own belief. You’ll prob­a­bly find it more reward­ing than you expect.”
    • Nadia is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. Home­less man is brought to church and starts CURSING right in the mid­dle of the ser­mon while the pas­tor is preach­ing on the para­ble of the lost sheep. (Twit­ter): the link title is click­baity, but the video is real­ly good. 17 min­utes but 100% worth your time.
  3. The Sin­gle Chris­t­ian (Alexan­dra DeSanc­tis Marr, Reli­gion & Lib­er­ty Online): “Rather than offer­ing sym­pa­thy to those who are sin­gle for rea­sons out­side their con­trol, Broad­way argues, Chris­tians often send the mes­sage that sin­gle­ness is an afflic­tion endured by those who sim­ply aren’t try­ing hard enough to find a spouse. But, as she explains, there isn’t an easy answer to what is ulti­mate­ly a prob­lem of num­bers: ‘When women out­num­ber men in the church, that leaves three options: polygamy, mar­ry­ing a non-Chris­t­ian or stay­ing sin­gle. Which would you like us to choose?‘”
    • That’s a great line by Broad­way.
  4. The Schol­ar of Com­e­dy (David Rem­nick inter­view­ing Jer­ry Sein­feld, The New York­er): “Every artist is only show­ing you his best. When you watch a movie, every scene—they only show you the one take that worked. Sev­en­teen times, they missed it. You’re only see­ing the peak of it. But in standup you got­ta make it hap­pen every night. That’s the dif­fer­ence. That’s why actors, I think, like to do the the­atre. They want to be hon­est. They want to be held to account. And only a live audi­ence holds you to account.”
  5. Chiefs kick­er Har­ri­son Butk­er says Pride Month is exam­ple of ‘deadly sin’ dur­ing com­mence­ment speech (Lukas Weese, New York Times): “Kansas City Chiefs kick­er Har­ri­son Butk­er, speak­ing dur­ing a com­mence­ment speech at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege, referred to Pride Month, the events in June demon­strat­ing inclu­siv­i­ty and sup­port for the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty, as an exam­ple of the ‘dead­ly sins’ as he advo­cat­ed for a more con­ser­v­a­tive brand of Catholi­cism.”
    • I am always sur­prised when peo­ple seem sur­prised when reli­gious peo­ple say reli­gious things.
    • Relat­ed: Har­ri­son Butk­er jer­sey sales increase in after­math of Bene­dic­tine Col­lege address (Greg Dai­ley and Ryan Hen­nessy, KCTV 5): “Amid reac­tion to Har­ri­son Butker’s now-viral com­mence­ment speech at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege on Sat­ur­day, the place­kick­er seems to have gained sev­er­al new fans in the process. Accord­ing to NFL.com, Butker’s jer­sey sales are among the most pop­u­lar online. Only Travis Kelce rat­ed high­er than Butk­er, with Mahomes com­ing in right behind the star from Geor­gia Tech.”
    • This is com­mon enough that there is prob­a­bly a term for it: high-sta­tus peo­ple denounce some­thing and or pre­tend it does­n’t exist, where­as many low­er-sta­tus peo­ple real­ly like it. This is a good exam­ple of this, as is the New York Times best­seller list com­pared to actu­al sales num­bers.
  6. Cam­pus protest-relat­ed:
    • See­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty More Clear­ly (David Pozen, blog): “To sim­pli­fy some­what, we might say that pro­fes­sors are grant­ed a num­ber of basic rights with­in the uni­ver­si­ty, includ­ing rights to free speech and due process and qua­si-prop­er­ty rights in the job itself. Stu­dents and staff are grant­ed a par­tial­ly over­lap­ping, though weak­er, bun­dle of rights. What none of us have are gov­er­nance rights against the trustees who real­ly run the place. We enjoy var­i­ous indi­vid­ual priv­i­leges and pro­tec­tions, but not the fran­chise. Legal schol­ars and polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have a term for this sort of arrange­ment, too: lib­er­al autoc­ra­cy.”
      • The author is a law prof at Colum­bia and has some insight­ful thoughts about how shifts in uni­ver­si­ty gov­er­nance in recent years have pro­vid­ed the con­text for how cam­pus­es are respond­ing to protests.
    • Mod­ern Protest Cul­ture is Crip­pled by Inter­net-Brain (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “A trans­for­ma­tion­al protest is one that bears the brunt of real­i­ty and, in so doing, con­vinces oth­ers to join in chang­ing it. The inabil­i­ty to bear this real­i­ty is not just fragili­ty, it is pre­cise­ly the way com­put­er sys­tems work; when the autonomous sys­tem fails to yield a pleas­ant or smooth solu­tion, it must be fixed, not endured. Con­tem­po­rary stu­dent activism reflects the assump­tions and habits of the dig­i­tal era.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. Bel­gian Gov­ern­ment Will Inter­vene In Cas­es Where Pros­ti­tutes Refuse Sex­u­al Acts Too Often (Amy Hamm, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Pros­ti­tutes are to be grant­ed ‘rights’ to refuse sex­u­al acts, stop sex­u­al acts, per­form sex­u­al acts in the man­ner they pre­fer, and refuse to sit behind Ams­ter­dam-style win­dows (pub­lic fac­ing win­dows where pros­ti­tutes are on dis­play). How­ev­er, should a pros­ti­tute use these ‘rights’ 10 times with­in six months, their pimp can then call on a gov­ern­ment medi­a­tor to inter­vene.”
    • Pimps used to have to beat their pros­ti­tutes. Now they can have the gov­ern­ment use force on their behalf. #progress
    • This is the log­ic of “bake the cake, big­ot” tak­en to its ulti­mate con­clu­sion — con­science is noth­ing and the mar­ket is every­thing and per­son­al con­vic­tions are incon­ve­niences to be tram­pled upon.
    • If, as some fem­i­nists tell us, sex work is real work then you can’t be shocked at stuff like this. If, on the oth­er hand, pros­ti­tu­tion is both a tragedy and a vice you can get out­raged.

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 452

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.

452 is a prod­uct of 113. Specif­i­cal­ly, 452 = 4 · 113. A web­site informed that it is also the clos­est inte­ger to 7Ï€, but that’s a weird fact.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘I Knew I Would Pay a Price for My Faith’: Chi­na Releas­es Mis­sion­ary After Sev­en Years (CJ Wu inter­view­ing John Cao, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I did not have a Bible while in prison. Although both my moth­er and my lawyer brought Bibles to my prison, the cor­rec­tion­al staff refused to hand them over to me. My moth­er would write down Bible vers­es in her let­ters to me. Yet the police checked our cor­re­spon­dence: If faith was men­tioned in my let­ters, they would not be deliv­ered. Both pris­ons had small libraries with hun­dreds of books. I would search for Leo Tolstoy’s books, since there are some Bible vers­es in his books. When I found them, I’d be very, very hap­py and copy the vers­es in my note­book. In the four years I was there, I copied dozens of vers­es.”
  2. The ado­les­cent men­tal health mess (Lucy Foulkes, Medi­um): “We are in a sit­u­a­tion where some ado­les­cents are very legit­i­mate­ly expe­ri­enc­ing men­tal health crises, with­out decent treat­ment, while oth­ers are inac­cu­rate­ly describ­ing typ­i­cal devel­op­men­tal stress with the lan­guage of dis­or­der.… The whole thing is a mess, and a thou­sand miles away from the orig­i­nal goal of men­tal health aware­ness.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gist at Oxford.
    • Ampli­fied by the New York Times: Are We Talk­ing Too Much About Men­tal Health? (Ellen Bar­ry, New York Times): “[The] train­ing could encour­age ‘co-rumi­na­tion,’ the kind of long, unre­solved group dis­cus­sion that churns up prob­lems with­out find­ing solu­tions.… Co-rumi­na­tion appears to be high­er in girls, who tend to come into the pro­gram more dis­tressed, as well as more attuned to their friends, he said. ‘It might be,’ he said, ‘that they kind of get togeth­er and make things a lit­tle bit worse for each other.‘”
  3. Per­spec­tives and news about the col­lege protests
    • The Peo­ple Set­ting Amer­i­ca on Fire (Park Mac­Dougald, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In fact, it is a mis­take both to view the cam­pus protests as a ‘stu­dent’ move­ment and to regard the out­siders as ‘infil­tra­tors’ or some­how sep­a­rate from the move­ment. Rather, stu­dent activists have been work­ing togeth­er with out­siders, with whom they are linked via over­lap­ping activist net­works and nation­wide orga­ni­za­tions.… wealthy donors have been sub­si­diz­ing months of rolling dis­rup­tive street protests by a grab bag of rev­o­lu­tion­ary and anti-Israel rad­i­cals. That leads nat­u­ral­ly to a ques­tion: To what end?”
    • An Inside Look at the Stu­dent Takeover of Columbia’s Hamil­ton Hall (Sharon Otter­man, New York Times): “[The main­te­nance work­er] said he tried to block them and they tried to rea­son with him to get out of the way, telling him ‘this is big­ger than you.’ One per­son, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Some­one tried to offer him ‘a fist­ful of cash.’ He said he replied: “I don’t want your mon­ey, dude. Just get out of the building.” … Both Mr. Tor­res and Mr. Wil­son said they strong­ly object­ed to the tac­tics of the occu­piers, which they said had tak­en a toll on them. Nei­ther man ever wants to work in Hamil­ton Hall again.”
      • A pret­ty wild sto­ry told from a unique per­spec­tive
    • How Coun­ter­pro­test­ers at U.C.L.A. Pro­voked Vio­lence, Unchecked for Hours (EIGHT JOURNALISTS!, New York Times): “A New York Times exam­i­na­tion of more than 100 videos from clash­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, found that vio­lence ebbed and flowed for near­ly five hours, most­ly with lit­tle or no police inter­ven­tion. The vio­lence had been insti­gat­ed by dozens of peo­ple who are seen in videos coun­ter­protest­ing the encamp­ment.… Fif­teen peo­ple were report­ed­ly injured in the attack, accord­ing to a let­ter sent by the pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia sys­tem to the board of regents.”
    • Behind the Ivy Intifa­da (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Con­trary to ear­li­er claims by uni­ver­si­ty and city offi­cials about a large pro­por­tion of ‘out­side agi­ta­tors,’ more than 70 per­cent of those arrest­ed at Colum­bia had a direct insti­tu­tion­al tie to the uni­ver­si­ty. This was reflect­ed in how they were treat­ed after arrest. Most of those swept up were released with­out charges. Among Colum­bia affil­i­ates who were for­mal­ly charged, none faced more than a sin­gle mis­de­meanor charge. Mean­while, those who faced charges at City Col­lege, the near­by pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty raid­ed by police the same night, were all hit with felonies. While it’s pos­si­ble that the City Col­lege kids just engaged in more extreme and unlaw­ful activ­i­ty, it seems more like­ly that belong­ing to the elite paid crim­i­nal-jus­tice div­i­dends for the Colum­bia arrestees.”
      • Wow. Well worth read­ing. Full of snarky insight. The author is a pro­fes­sor of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Stony Brook and is pro-Pales­tin­ian.
    • Check Your Priv­i­lege (Nick Catog­gio, The Dis­patch): “Acad­e­mia could select for kids who show intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty and curios­i­ty, to bor­row a point from my col­league Sarah Isgur. Instead they’ve select­ed for kids who feel not mere­ly enti­tled to demand that their elders ‘check their priv­i­lege’ but moral­ly jus­ti­fied in act­ing aggres­sive­ly to make sure they do. All told, one might say that pro­gres­sives, the great ene­mies of colo­nial­ism, have … col­o­nized high­er edu­ca­tion over the past half-cen­tu­ry. And you know how set­tler-colo­nial­ists are. They can be very defen­sive when you demand that they vacate ter­ri­to­ry they regard as right­ly theirs. The behav­ior of cam­pus pro­gres­sives this month has radi­at­ed the sense that Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties are ‘theirs’ in a way that isn’t true of oth­er stu­dents. It’s been point­ed out repeat­ed­ly but can’t be empha­sized enough that the sort of dis­rup­tion in which they’ve engaged wouldn’t be tol­er­at­ed from those whose polit­i­cal beliefs offend­ed the administration’s left­ist ortho­doxy.”
  4. Per­spec­tives and news about the war in Gaza
    • One Pho­to That Cap­tures the Loss in Gaza (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “An Amer­i­can sur­geon who vol­un­teered in Gaza sent me a pho­to that sears me with its glimpse of over­whelm­ing grief: A woman mourns her young son.… The nurs­es and oth­er doc­tors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of com­pli­ca­tions from mal­nu­tri­tion.”
    • Israel orders Al Jazeera to close its local oper­a­tion and seizes some of its equip­ment (Tia Gold­en­berg and Jon Gam­brell, AP News): “The extra­or­di­nary order, which includes con­fis­cat­ing broad­cast equip­ment, pre­vent­ing the broad­cast of the channel’s reports and block­ing its web­sites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shut­tered a for­eign news out­let oper­at­ing in the coun­try.… While includ­ing on-the-ground report­ing of the war’s casu­al­ties, its Ara­bic arm often pub­lish­es ver­ba­tim video state­ments from Hamas and oth­er region­al mil­i­tant groups.… Al Jazeera has been closed or blocked by oth­er Mideast gov­ern­ments.”
    • Kol Hakavod (Russ Roberts, Sub­stack): “Israel going to the finals real­ly shouldn’t float my boat and make my heart sing. But it did. Because here’s the thing. The deci­sion about who advanced to the Euro­vi­sion finals tomor­row night was done by a pop­u­lar vote. There’s no pan­el of judges in the semi­fi­nal round.… Golan advanced. Despite the thou­sands who marched in the streets and the dozens who booed Golan in the rehearsal hall, prob­a­bly mil­lions, from the safe­ty of their homes, were able to cast an anony­mous vote for Israel.”
  5. The Heresy of Chris­t­ian Bud­dhism (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “…while many men can eas­i­ly recog­nise the moral evil of debauch­ery and world­li­ness, not many see the dan­ger of an ascetic puri­tanism that push­es too far. Too much empha­sis on sin, too much empha­sis on humil­i­ty, too much empha­sis on heav­en and even too much empha­sis on Christ to the exclu­sion of man soon leads to a Chris­tian­i­ty that hates the indi­vid­ual, indi­vid­u­a­tion and the cre­at­ed world. Chris­tian­i­ty starts to resem­ble Bud­dhism.”
    • Fol­low-up: The Bud­dhist Mood in Evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “…the de fac­to def­i­n­i­tion of idol­a­try is want­i­ng any­thing so much that, if you don’t get it, you are very upset. Hence, the path to avoid­ing sin and idol­a­try, the way to please God, is to purge one­self of desires. This is Bud­dhism. Undoubt­ed­ly it would be pos­si­ble for some­one to be engaged in idol­a­try in some of these cas­es. But there are a lot of things in this world you should be upset about.”
  6. When Intru­sive Thoughts Come (John Bee­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Nur­ture men­tal play­grounds of gospel creativity.Many of us expend so much ener­gy try­ing to knock down destruc­tive intru­sive thoughts that we have no ener­gy to build con­struc­tive imag­i­na­tions. We believe our minds are dan­ger­ous and need to be shut down. But your mind is a gift God intends to be lever­aged for his glo­ry. He desires to reshape your mind to become a fac­to­ry of God-glo­ri­fy­ing curios­i­ty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cruise ship sails into New York City port with 44-foot dead whale across its bow (ABC News): “A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot dead whale across its bow, marine author­i­ties said. The whale, iden­ti­fied as an endan­gered sei whale, was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brook­lyn on Sat­ur­day, Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion fish­eries spokesper­son Andrea Gomez said.”
    • I guess it’s the nau­ti­cal equiv­a­lent of a car hit­ting a deer. Yikes.

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.