Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 451

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 451, which feels like it is maybe a prime num­ber but it turns out that 451 = 11 · 41.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Was Paul a Slave? (Mark R. Fairchild and Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Rec­on­cil­ing the Phar­isee, Hebrew of Hebrews, Ara­ma­ic-speak­ing zealot Paul with the Roman cit­i­zen, glo­be­trot­ting, Greek-speak­ing Paul seems impos­si­ble. Unless, that is, we con­sid­er the ear­ly church’s rec­ol­lec­tion of Paul’s upbring­ing as a child in an enslaved fam­i­ly. ‘The man­u­mis­sion of Paul’s father solves these prob­lems,’ Ries­ner told me.”
    • The title is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing — the ques­tion is real­ly whether Paul was born a slave and lat­er freed (they do explain Acts 22:28, “When Paul told the com­man­der in Acts 22:28 that he was ‘born’ a Roman cit­i­zen, that word, gen­nao, can refer to birth or adop­tion. Freed Roman slaves were often adopt­ed into their master’s fam­i­ly and giv­en a Roman name and cit­i­zen­ship.”
    • The authors are schol­ars with rel­e­vant exper­tise. The mid­dle sec­tion of the arti­cle is where all the meat is and makes some good points. The open­ing and clos­ing felt like fluff to me.
    • Unlocked.
  2. Stuff about the col­lege protests
    • For most peo­ple, pol­i­tics is about fit­ting in (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple are try­ing to fig­ure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both direc­tions: peo­ple can be attract­ed to a group or neg­a­tive­ly polar­ized by it.… Notice what’s miss­ing from my list? The notion of pol­i­tics as a bat­tle of ideas.”
    • Col­lege pro­test­ers seek amnesty to keep arrests and sus­pen­sions from trail­ing them (Joce­lyn Geck­er, AP News): “Petocz said protest­ing in high school was what helped get him into Van­der­bilt and secure a mer­it schol­ar­ship for activists and orga­niz­ers. His col­lege essay was about orga­niz­ing walk­outs in rur­al Flori­da to oppose Gov. Ron DeSan­tis’ anti-LGBTQ poli­cies. ‘Van­der­bilt seemed to love that,’ Petocz said.’ ”
    • What Stu­dents Read Before They Protest (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Read­ing the syl­labus explains] the two things that seem so dis­pro­por­tion­ate in these protests and the cul­ture that sur­rounds them. First, it explains why this con­flict attracts such a scale of on-cam­pus atten­tion and action and dis­rup­tion, while so many oth­er wars and crises (Sudan, Con­go, Arme­nia, Bur­ma, Yemen …) are bare­ly noticed or ignored. Sec­ond, it explains why the atten­tion seems to leap so quick­ly past cri­tique into car­i­ca­ture, past sym­pa­thy for the Pales­tini­ans into jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Hamas, past con­dem­na­tion of Israeli pol­i­cy into anti-Semi­tism.”
    • In an Online World, a New Gen­er­a­tion of Pro­test­ers Choos­es Anonymi­ty (Nicholas Fan­dos, New York Times): “On cam­pus­es from New Eng­land to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, stu­dents lead­ing one of the largest protest move­ments in decades have increas­ing­ly strapped on face masks and check­ered Pales­tin­ian kaf­fiyehs in a polar­iz­ing bid to pro­tect their anonymi­ty even as they demand uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ments be held to account. The choice rep­re­sents a sharp break by many, though not all, of these stu­dents from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of uni­ver­si­ty activists, who gained their moral force in part by putting their words on record and their futures in jeop­ardy for a larg­er cause.”
    • How Pro­test­ers Can Actu­al­ly Help Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “…this may sound zany, but how about rais­ing mon­ey to send as many of your stu­dent lead­ers as pos­si­ble this sum­mer to live in the West Bank and learn from Pales­tini­ans there (while engag­ing with Israelis on the way in or out)? West Bank mon­i­tors say that a recent Israeli crack­down on for­eign­ers help­ing Pales­tini­ans, by deny­ing entry or deport­ing peo­ple, has made this more dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble. Stu­dent vis­i­tors must be pru­dent and cau­tious but could study Ara­bic, teach Eng­lish and vol­un­teer with human rights orga­ni­za­tions on the ground. Pales­tini­ans in parts of the West Bank are under siege, peri­od­i­cal­ly attacked by set­tlers and in need of observers and advo­cates.”
  3. Some stuff about gen­der:
    • The Bat­tle of the Sex­es Needs a Truce (Thomas Adamo and Isabel­la Griepp, Stan­ford Review): “We must acknowl­edge how soci­ety has lied to both men and women since they were boys and girls—lies that have done noth­ing but bring about dishar­mo­ny between the sex­es. In seek­ing to empow­er young girls, par­ents and teach­ers have de-empha­sized the innate dif­fer­ences between the sex­es. And, any dif­fer­ences between the sex­es were explained in terms of how men had his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed women, rather than the unique and valu­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that men and women inher­ent­ly pos­sess.”
      • The authors are stu­dents in Chi Alpha.
    • The Mas­culin­i­ty Pyra­mid (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A man who is over­ly con­cerned with how he is dif­fer­ent from women is miss­ing the holy instinct of Adam, who first notices the same­ness of Eve and sec­ond notices their dif­fer­ences (Gen 2:23).”
    • Scripts for Healthy Mas­culin­i­ty (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…men ought to be dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from God, ani­mals, boys, and women. When prop­er­ly con­sid­ered, those four dis­tinc­tions yield the four core mas­cu­line virtues of humil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from God), dis­ci­pline (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from ani­mals), respon­si­bil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from boys), and chival­ry (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from women).”
  4. There’s Real­ly No Good Rea­son to Use Tik­Tok (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Tik­Tok is, in my view, a social media plat­form devoid of pos­i­tive ben­e­fit. I do not mean by that that it is whol­ly evil or can­not be used except sin­ful­ly. Rather, I think Tik­Tok sim­ply lacks any mer­it as a plat­form and is only use­ful in the sense that it is pas­sive­ly enter­tain­ing. This is also how I would describe things like soap operas, pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, and the nation­al hot dog eat­ing con­test. The dif­fer­ence, though, between Tik­Tok and those things, is that Tik­Tok is 1) addic­tive, 2) active­ly cor­ro­sive to think­ing, and 3) mar­ket­ed to and con­sumed by an enor­mous num­ber of chil­dren.”

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 450

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.

450 is a cool num­ber because it ends in 50. Which is just cool.

It’s also some­thing called an Ara­bi­an Nights fac­to­r­i­al, mean­ing that 450! has 1001 dig­its. What a fun con­cept!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pro-Pales­tin­ian Encamp­ments Spread, Lead­ing to Hun­dreds of Arrests (Anna Betts, New York Times): “In the week since Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty start­ed crack­ing down on pro-Pales­tin­ian pro­test­ers occu­py­ing a lawn on its cam­pus, protests and encamp­ments have sprung up at oth­er col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Police inter­ven­tions on sev­er­al cam­pus­es have led to more than 400 arrests so far.”
    • Scenes of Protests Spread at Elite Cam­pus­es (Troy Clos­son, New York Times): “Near­ly 50 peo­ple were arrest­ed at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty in New Haven, Conn., on Mon­day morn­ing, fol­low­ing the arrests last week of more than 100 pro­test­ers at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across oth­er cam­pus­es.… The flur­ry of protests has pre­sent­ed a steep chal­lenge for uni­ver­si­ty lead­ers, as some Jew­ish stu­dents say they have faced harass­ment and anti­se­mit­ic com­ments. Ear­ly Mon­day morn­ing, Colum­bia announced a same-day shift to online class­es because of the protests. Barnard Col­lege, across the street, fol­lowed suit hours lat­er.”
    • The Car­nage Is the Point (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Uni­ver­si­ties like Colum­bia have han­dled this poor­ly, although their response pales in com­par­i­son to how some elect­ed offi­cials want them to respond. An awful lot of politi­cians have been call­ing on the use of force against pro­tes­tors. Sen­a­tors Tom Cot­ton and Josh Haw­ley have called for the Nation­al Guard to be deployed in Colum­bia, as has Speak­er of the House Mike John­son. Ear­li­er this week Texas gov­er­nor Greg Abbott enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sent Texas state troop­ers to con­duct mass arrests, break­ing up an unsanc­tioned but non­vi­o­lent demon­stra­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin. Cot­ton, Haw­ley, John­son, and Abbott are a lot of things, but stu­pid they are not. Why would they call for coer­cion when they must be ful­ly aware that such an approach would fur­ther fan the flames of protest?”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Worth your time.
  2. No, There Are No “Trans” Ani­mals (Emma Hilton and Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “Do some crea­tures change sex? Absolute­ly. But this isn’t new infor­ma­tion. It’s a fact that biol­o­gists have known about for a long time. What is also well-known is that none of these sex-chang­ing crea­tures are mam­mals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine inver­te­brates whose biol­o­gy is dif­fer­ent from our own in count­less (fas­ci­nat­ing) ways. What’s more, in every sin­gle case described above, there are always (at most) just two dis­tinct sex­es at play—no mat­ter how those two sex­es may switch or com­bine. One of those sex­es is male, a sex asso­ci­at­ed with gonads that pro­duce sperm (testes); and the oth­er is female, with gonads that pro­duce eggs (ovaries). There’s noth­ing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Ex-ath­let­ic direc­tor accused of fram­ing prin­ci­pal with AI arrest­ed at air­port with gun (Kris­ten Grif­fith & Justin Fen­ton, The Bal­ti­more Ban­ner): “Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was sim­u­lat­ed, made dis­parag­ing com­ments toward Black stu­dents and the sur­round­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, was wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed on social media.”
    • AI crimes are fix­ing to get wild. In case you haven’t been keep­ing up, AI-gen­er­at­ed video and audio is shock­ing­ly good. https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/1783145009153450374 <– check this wild exam­ple. Reid Hoff­man (one of the so-called ‘Pay­pal Mafia’, founder of LinkedIn) inter­views an AI avatar of him­self for about 14 min­utes.
  4. What Is a Woman? What Is a Man? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The key is to under­stand who men and women are, bio­log­i­cal­ly, soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly. What we will see is that evan­gel­i­cals have very lit­tle to say about this.”
  5. How do you get sib­lings to be nice to each oth­er? Lati­no fam­i­lies have an answer (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “I ask Cindy the same ques­tion I posed to sci­en­tists: How do you teach chil­dren to find joy in help­ing their sib­lings? And she answers exact­ly the same as the sci­en­tists answered: ‘We mod­el it.’ Cindy says. Cindy mod­els not just help­ing her sib­lings, but also the joy she receives from the rela­tion­ships she has with her broth­ers and sis­ters.”
  6. Changes in Col­lege Admis­sions (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Start­ing in August 2024, LSAT to elim­i­nate the Log­ic Games (Ana­lyt­ic Rea­son­ing) sec­tion, the hard­est, most fun and most objec­tive and intel­li­gence-test­ing part of the whole test. Nor­mal­ly I would be against dumb­ing down our test­ing, but keep­ing smart peo­ple from becom­ing lawyers is not the worst idea.”
    • The whole thing is inter­est­ing. The excerpt is amus­ing.
  7. Astronomers Find Evi­dence Of A Mas­sive Object Beyond The Orbit Of Nep­tune (James Fel­ton, IFL Sci­ence): “Car­ry­ing out sim­u­la­tions to try and dis­cov­er what best explains the orbits of these objects, the team found that a mod­el that includes a mas­sive plan­et beyond the region of Nep­tune explained the steady state of these objects much bet­ter than in sim­u­la­tions where plan­et 9 was not includ­ed. In the mod­el, the team includ­ed oth­er vari­ables, such as the galac­tic tide and the grav­i­ta­tion­al influ­ence of pass­ing stars.”

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 449

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 448

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 448, an untouch­able num­ber. Which is an absolute­ly cool des­ig­na­tion for a num­ber to have.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gos­sip is good, Stan­ford sci­en­tist sug­gests (Sarayu Pai, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Although gos­sip­ing is typ­i­cal­ly cast in a neg­a­tive light, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land found that gos­sip­ing may be a ben­e­fi­cial prac­tice, as long as infor­ma­tion remains ‘reli­able.’ Study co-author Michele Gelfand, who is a pro­fes­sor at the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, esti­mates that peo­ple gos­sip an hour a day on aver­age — defined as the ‘exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, who said “these peo­ple need a dose of the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week : gos­sip is cor­ro­sive!” [Glen’s note — the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week is a thing we do in our Chi Alpha, and “gos­sip is cor­ro­sive” is one of them]
    • Indeed they do, and this is use­ful launch­ing point for a brief dis­course on gos­sip. In this study, gos­sip is defined as “exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.” But that’s not what we’re con­demn­ing when we con­demn gos­sip! If some­one tells you, “wow — that Caleb guy is super charm­ing and hand­some” and you reply, “You know he’s mar­ried, right?” then you’ve done noth­ing wrong — that’s not the sin of gos­sip. But if you spread a false neg­a­tive rumor about Caleb “you know he does drugs, right?”, that is the sin of gos­sip. This study con­flates those two very dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions.
    • The sin of gos­sip can be described as bear­ing bad news behind some­one’s back with a bad heart. The bad news can be bad in the sense of being untrue or it can be bad in the sense of unnec­es­sary and unhelp­ful. For more on this help­ful fram­ing, check out What Is Gos­sip? Expos­ing a Com­mon and Dan­ger­ous Sin (Matt Mitchell, Desir­ing God).
    • This is a recur­ring pat­tern, by the way: some researcher wants to study some­thing inter­est­ing but needs to oper­a­tional­ize a vari­able in some unortho­dox way to make the research fea­si­ble. Then they do their research and find some­thing that would be coun­ter­in­tu­itive rel­a­tive to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the word they’re using (although maybe not that sur­pris­ing giv­en their oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the vari­able), and then the media repeats it as a com­men­tary on the actu­al thing — a thing which the sci­en­tists nev­er stud­ied. In this case, the study did­n’t actu­al­ly ana­lyze the sin of gos­sip, but nonethe­less near the end of the arti­cle we learn that “some stu­dents with pre­vi­ous­ly neg­a­tive views of gos­sip report see­ing it dif­fer­ent­ly in light of this study.”
  2. Why We Fast (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Fast­ing is no mag­ic fix. In fact, it’s almost the exact oppo­site of a mag­ic fix. It takes time, patience, and discipline—dare I say, suffering—to see its fruit. But the fruit is no less than the abil­i­ty to see more of God. Here are three ways to under­stand Chris­t­ian fast­ing: 1. Fast­ing makes space for God. 2. Fast­ing inter­rupts and reori­ents our uncon­scious pat­terns. 3. Fast­ing gives us eyes to see the unseen.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Lots of good insights in this one.
  3. ‘Little Wom­en’ and the Art of Break­ing Gram­mat­i­cal Rules (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “Curzan notes, for exam­ple, that the use of ‘literally’ to exag­ger­ate is no recent anom­aly but rather goes back to, for exam­ple, our ‘Little Women,’ in which Louisa May Alcott has it that at a gath­er­ing ‘the land lit­er­al­ly flowed with milk and honey.’ The March girls, also, would have said ‘sneaked’ where, since just the 1970s, as Curzan charts, we have been increas­ing­ly like­ly to say ‘snuck.’ Are you a lit­tle irked by the youngs say­ing ‘based off of’ rather than ‘based on’? That one threw me when I start­ed hear­ing my stu­dents say­ing it about 15 years ago; Curzan calms us down and demon­strates how ordi­nary and even log­i­cal it is. Curzan is also good on the use of ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘it is hoped.’ This became a punch­ing bag only in the 1960s — until then, not even gram­mar scolds cared, too busy com­plain­ing that, for exam­ple, the ‘proper’ mean­ing of obnox­ious is ‘subject to harm.’” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some more Israel/Hamas com­men­tary
    • Frac­tured Are the Peace­mak­ers (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I spent a week in Israel and the West Bank meet­ing Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians and Mes­sian­ic Jews who are pas­tors, youth lead­ers, YMCA lead­ers, tour guides, lawyers, and stu­dents. Many of them aren’t pro­fes­sion­al peace activists, but all of them, from what I could tell, take seri­ous­ly Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount and strive to embody his procla­ma­tion that ‘blessed are the peace­mak­ers, for they will be called chil­dren of God’ (Matt. 5:9). The prob­lem is, I spoke to about two dozen indi­vid­u­als about what peace­mak­ing means and got almost two dozen dif­fer­ent answers.” Unlocked.
    • Israel Has Cre­at­ed a New Stan­dard for Urban War­fare. Why Will No One Admit It? (John Spencer, Newsweek): “In my long career study­ing and advis­ing on urban war­fare for the U.S. mil­i­tary, I’ve nev­er known an army to take such mea­sures to attend to the ene­my’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, espe­cial­ly while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly com­bat­ing the ene­my in the very same build­ings. In fact, by my analy­sis, Israel has imple­ment­ed more pre­cau­tions to pre­vent civil­ian harm than any mil­i­tary in history—above and beyond what inter­na­tion­al law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
      • The author is the chair of urban war stud­ies at the Mod­ern War Insti­tute at West Point. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid: Amer­i­can Lib­er­ty and the Jews (Mike Cosper, Acton Insti­tute): “His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the emer­gence of anti-Semi­tism is always a sign of some­thing poi­so­nous tak­ing root in a soci­ety. It doesn’t just spell dan­ger for Jews; it spells dan­ger for every­one. As Bari Weiss has put it, ‘What starts with the Jews nev­er ends with the Jews.’ The rise of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many, Sovi­et Rus­sia, and half a dozen Mid­dle East­ern states was quick­ly fol­lowed by oth­er forms of vio­lence, tyran­ny, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” This is a long and sol­id arti­cle that cov­ers much more than anti-Semi­tism (although that is at its heart).
  5. Schools are using research to try to improve children’s learn­ing – but it’s not work­ing (Sal­ly Rior­dan, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “A series of ran­domised con­trolled tri­als, includ­ing one look­ing at how to improve lit­er­a­cy through evi­dence, have sug­gest­ed that schools that use meth­ods based on research are not per­form­ing bet­ter than schools that do not.”
    • British con­text, hence the spelling.
  6. The Anti-Frag­ile Bren­dan Eich (Andrew Beck, First Things): “I am not here to com­plain about can­cel cul­ture. Bren­dan Eich does not. He is too busy. He refus­es to be defined by the evil done to him, or by the pur­port­ed het­ero­doxy of his beliefs, but by the work he does and by his char­ac­ter, as known by those clos­est to him. Rather than tak­ing to the air­waves and lean­ing into the role of mar­tyr, as have so many oth­ers who have endured sim­i­lar abuse, Eich nev­er speaks pub­licly about the wrong done to him—not once even in pri­vate to me. Instead, he dili­gent­ly pur­sues his voca­tion.”
  7. The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Move­ment (David French, New York Times): “The old­er I get, the more I’m con­vinced that we sim­ply don’t know who we are — or what we tru­ly believe — until our val­ues car­ry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has made the case that life begins at con­cep­tion. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Repub­li­can Par­ty can’t live with its own phi­los­o­phy. There is no tru­ly pro-life par­ty in the Unit­ed States.”

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 447

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 447, which I kin­da hoped would be prime. Alas, 447 = 3 · 149.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One of the Most Over­looked Argu­ments for the Res­ur­rec­tion (Michael J. Kruger, blog): “…the ear­li­est Chris­tians came to believe, against all odds and against all expec­ta­tions, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead. Notice the dis­tinc­tive nature of this claim. The claim is not that Jesus rose from the dead (though, I think he did). The claim is that the ear­li­est fol­low­ers of Jesus came to believe—and very strong­ly believe— that he did. And that is a whol­ly oth­er mat­ter. Why? Because it is a his­tor­i­cal fact that is not dis­put­ed.”
  2. The Prob­lem With Say­ing ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’ (Alex Byrne and Car­ole K. Hooven, New York Times): “Sexed organ­isms were present on Earth at least a bil­lion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had nev­er evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of lin­guis­tic cer­e­monies in the deliv­ery room or oth­er cul­tur­al prac­tices. Lone­some George, the long-lived Galápagos giant tor­toise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatch­ing. A baby aban­doned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by any­one, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the con­fu­sion sown by some schol­ars, we can be con­fi­dent that the sex bina­ry is not a human inven­tion.”
    • One author is a philoso­pher at MIT, the oth­er an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard. Unlocked.
  3. Rival per­spec­tives on the war between Israel and Hamas
    • https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1775980849944539391 (Cole­man Hugh­es, Twit­ter): a two and a half minute video sym­pa­thet­ic to Israel
    • Bomb First, Ask Ques­tions Lat­er (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “To hit one car is a mis­for­tune; to destroy three cars con­sec­u­tive­ly on a pre-approved route, not so much. The cars were clear­ly marked and in a decon­flic­tion zone — but the IDF pol­i­cy is to tar­get any­where Hamas could be present, even if some civil­ians were killed. As we’ll see, one dead Hamas mem­ber and sev­en dead civil­ians was well with­in the mar­gin of error Israel had set for itself. So it appears they method­i­cal­ly took out each car to make sure they fin­ished the job. No, I don’t believe that Israel delib­er­ate­ly mur­dered the aid work­ers; but I do think that, in con­text, the IDF’s effec­tive rules of engage­ment — strike places like hos­pi­tals and schools because Hamas is there, even though there will be many civil­ian casu­al­ties — made this kind of indif­fer­ence to human life pos­si­ble.”
  4. The Church of Trump: How He’s Infus­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Into His Move­ment (Michael C. Ben­der, New York Times): “The appar­ent effec­tive­ness of such tac­tics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politi­cian to suc­cess­ful­ly sep­a­rate char­ac­ter from pol­i­cy for reli­gious vot­ers, said John Fea, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school in Penn­syl­va­nia. ‘Trump has split the atom between char­ac­ter and pol­i­cy,’ Mr. Fea said. ‘He did it because he’s real­ly the first one to lis­ten to their griev­ances and take them seri­ous­ly. Does he real­ly care about evan­gel­i­cals? I don’t know. But he’s built a mes­sage to appeal direct­ly to them.‘”
    • Unlocked
  5. The Case for Mar­ry­ing an Old­er Man (Gra­zie Sophia Christie, The Cut): “Very soon, we will decide to have chil­dren, and I don’t pan­ic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it ear­ly: on the hol­i­days of some­one who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beau­ti­ful places when I was young and beau­ti­ful, a sym­me­try I rec­om­mend. If such a thing as mater­nal ener­gy exists, mine was nev­er deplet­ed. I spent the last near­ly sev­en years sup­port­ed more than I sup­port and I am still not as old as my hus­band was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does pro­fes­sion­al tenure earn you if not the right to set more lim­its on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least?”
    • A well-writ­ten and unusu­al posi­tion. Not the only path to con­sid­er, but cer­tain­ly a path to con­sid­er.
  6. Break­through in prime num­ber the­o­ry demon­strates primes can be pre­dict­ed (Michael Gibb, Phys.org): “Con­trary to what just about every math­e­mati­cian on Earth will tell you, prime num­bers can be pre­dict­ed, accord­ing to researchers at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, U.S.”
  7. Are Mem­bers of the Cler­gy Mis­er­able? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I real­ly want­ed to key in on a few ques­tions about job/life sat­is­fac­tion. The sur­vey repli­cates a ques­tion from ‘The Sat­is­fac­tion with Life Scale.’ The state­ment is sim­ply: In most ways my life is close to my ide­al.… The mean score for this was 5.6 in the cler­gy sam­ple. Among mem­bers of Israel’s Defense Force it was 4.7, among some uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents it was found to 5.23. Among nurs­es it was 3.81. In a sam­ple of peo­ple liv­ing in Colom­bia it was only 3.67. The long and short of it was this — I can’t find anoth­er pop­u­la­tion group that scores high­er on this met­ric than cler­gy.… I’m pret­ty con­fi­dent in say­ing that cler­gy seemed pret­ty con­tent with their sta­tion in life (or at least this was the case before the pan­dem­ic).”
    • Maybe laypeo­ple don’t hear this very often, but I am often in cir­cles where they talk about an epi­dem­ic of min­is­te­r­i­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But I’ve nev­er seen it. I love my job and pret­ty much all my peers do, too. What we do is amaz­ing. I’m glad to see a schol­ar vin­di­cat­ing my intu­ition.

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 446

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 446, which is equal to 92 + 102 + 112 + 122

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The War at Stan­ford (Theo Bak­er, The Atlantic): “At one point, some mem­bers of the group turned on a few Stan­ford employ­ees, includ­ing anoth­er rab­bi, an imam, and a chap­lain, telling them, ‘We know your names and we know where you work.’ The ring­leader added: ‘And we’ll soon find out where you live.’ The reli­gious lead­ers formed a pro­tec­tive bar­ri­er in front of the Jew­ish stu­dents. The rab­bi and the imam appeared to be cry­ing.”
    • Full of grip­ping anec­dotes, most new to me. 100% worth read­ing.
    • A response that caught my atten­tion: Are the Kids Alright? (Robert Far­ley, blog): “Israel-Pales­tine is to inter­na­tion­al rela­tions what St. Patrick’s Day is to an alco­holic; ama­teur night, when every idiot is not only enti­tled to an opin­ion but absolute­ly must tell you about it in the most abra­sive terms pos­si­ble. But the divide between elite and non-elite cam­pus engage­ment with Israel-Pales­tine is deeply inter­est­ing to me, and I think that it’s a divide that has large­ly been missed by media insti­tu­tions that a) are head­quar­tered in places like Wash­ing­ton, New York, and San Fran­cis­co, and b) are pop­u­lat­ed by grad­u­ates of elite col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence (I think that’s his depart­ment — the uni­ver­si­ty web­site is a bit con­fus­ing) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky.
  2. A Chris­t­ian revival is under way in Britain (Justin Brier­ley, The Spec­ta­tor): “All that our post-Chris­t­ian soci­ety has deliv­ered so far is con­fu­sion, a men­tal health cri­sis in the young and the cul­ture wars. It’s not sur­pris­ing then that a move­ment of New The­ists has sprung up.… As a Chris­t­ian I believe things that are dead can come back to life. That’s the point of the sto­ry after all. As G.K. Chester­ton wrote: ‘Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.’”
    • The author did not choose the title of this col­umn and stat­ed on Twit­ter he does not con­sid­er what is hap­pen­ing a revival… yet.
  3. 101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago (Leila Clark, blog): “10 years ago, I start­ed my fresh­man year of col­lege. This is the advice I need­ed to hear… I would trade half my cur­rent net worth for a world in which I had a stronger com­mu­ni­ty of friends and had worked more on my own projects instead of some­one else’s.”
    • A high per­cent­age of this advice is good.
  4. The Online Degra­da­tion of Women and Girls That We Meet With a Shrug (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “The great­est obsta­cles to reg­u­lat­ing deep­fakes, I’ve come to believe, aren’t tech­ni­cal or legal — although those are real — but sim­ply our col­lec­tive com­pla­cen­cy. Soci­ety was also once com­pla­cent about domes­tic vio­lence and sex­u­al harass­ment. In recent decades, we’ve gained empa­thy for vic­tims and built sys­tems of account­abil­i­ty that, while imper­fect, have fos­tered a more civ­i­lized soci­ety.”
    • Unlocked
  5. The Quest for a New Vision of Sex­u­al Moral­i­ty (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “You can have a cul­ture of hard moral con­straint, a con­ser­v­a­tive order that impos­es norms that inten­tion­al­ly lim­it human free­dom — remain faith­ful to your cho­sen spouse, live with your giv­en body. Or you can have the kind of free­dom-max­i­miz­ing cul­ture that removes lim­its and stric­tures but cre­ates new regrets, new kinds of suf­fer­ing, new dan­gers for the vul­ner­a­ble and weak.”
    • Unlocked
  6. Some thoughts about rela­tion­ships:
    • Resent­ment Between Men and Women in the Church: 4 Obser­va­tions (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…mar­riage cre­ates empa­thy between the sex­es in a way that pla­ton­ic friend­ship or mere col­le­gial­i­ty can­not. If this is true, in a soci­ety where few­er peo­ple are opt­ing to get mar­ried, we should see evi­dence that men and women are becom­ing ide­o­log­i­cal­ly polar­ized and sus­pi­cious of one anoth­er. That’s what we see… there needs to be some kind of thought giv­en to help­ing fos­ter sol­i­dar­i­ty between Chris­t­ian men and women that goes beyond mar­riage.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
    • How To Choose A Roman­tic Part­ner (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “You can com­mit a lot of blun­ders in your life, but if you man­age to get two things right, you will max­i­mize your chance of long-term well­be­ing. Our choice of job and our choice of spouse are cen­tral to our hap­pi­ness because they are where we spend most of our lives—at work and with our fam­i­lies. There­fore, we should devote a good deal of time con­cen­trat­ing on how to make the best pos­si­ble deci­sion for these two sources of poten­tial hap­pi­ness.”
      • Advice aimed at men, but use­ful to ladies as well.
    • 11 Rea­sons Why Two Par­ents Are Bet­ter Than One (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “There’s a mas­sive out­come gap between chil­dren grow­ing up in two par­ent vs. sin­gle par­ent homes. The dif­fer­ences are so large, and the attempts to help kids in sin­gle par­ent homes so lim­it­ed in their impact, that if we don’t reduce the share of chil­dren in sin­gle fam­i­ly homes, we are not going to make a dent in many of our social prob­lems.”
  7. Water isn’t nor­mal (Derek Lowe, Chem­istry World): “The next time you see the reflec­tion of a white cloud in a pud­dle of water, one of the most famil­iar sights in all of human his­to­ry, take a moment to realise just what a mys­tery you are real­ly look­ing at, and how much about it we still have to under­stand.”
    • The author has his PhD in Organ­ic Chem­istry from Duke.

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 445

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 445, which feels like it ought to have many fac­tors. But it’s just 89 * 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Har­vard, M.I.T. and Sys­temic Anti­semitism (David French, New York Times): “…what’s hap­pen­ing to Jew­ish stu­dents and fac­ul­ty at sev­er­al elite cam­pus­es is so com­pre­hen­sive and all-con­sum­ing that it can only be described as sys­temic anti­semitism.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Worth read­ing. Unlocked.
  2. How To Save a Democ­ra­cy (Quico Toro, Sub­stack): “Watch­ing videos of the protest now, what strikes you is that Bernar­do Arévalo is sel­dom men­tioned. K’iche’ lead­ers were at pains to empha­size they were not there to favor one politi­cian or anoth­er. They were there to defend their votes. If Arévalo’s name was sel­dom uttered, the name of Jesus Christ was con­stant­ly invoked.”
    • A remark­able story. 
  3. Piety and Pro­fan­i­ty: The Raunchy Chris­tians Are Here (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The par­tial embrace of vul­gar­i­ty, Dr. Kobes Du Mez point­ed out, is hap­pen­ing in a moment of deep con­ser­v­a­tive out­rage, an often vis­cer­al dis­gust, at ris­ing rates of non­tra­di­tion­al gen­der and sex­u­al iden­ti­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly among young peo­ple. In that con­text, an indul­gence in het­ero­sex­u­al lust, even if in poor taste, is becom­ing seen as not just benign, but maybe even healthy and noble. Part of the rea­son trans­gen­der iden­ti­ties are con­sid­ered a threat is that they blur gen­der dif­fer­ence, Dr. Kobes Du Mez said. ‘Against that back­drop, it’s a whole­some thing for a boy to be lust­ing after a very sexy woman.‘”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Steven D. Levitt (Freako­nom­ics co-author and Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor) on His Career And Deci­sion To Retire From Aca­d­e­m­ic Eco­nom­ics (Jon Hart­ley, Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom): “I had always been the smartest kid or close to the smartest kid, but then I got to MIT and I real­ized my God these peo­ple are incred­i­ble. Not just what they know but how they think. So, I knew from day one I was the odd man out. I mean I’m not even exag­ger­at­ing when I say that there was a group of peo­ple in the in-crowd. Aus­tan Gools­bee, my good friend Aus­tan Gools­bee was one of the in-crowds. And Aus­tan told me that maybe a month into our first year at MIT, the in-crowd sat down and they made a list of the five peo­ple most like­ly to fail out. And I was on that list of five.”
    • An absolute­ly delight­ful inter­view. The above link is to the tran­script, but I rec­om­mend the audio ver­sion.
  5. The Pol­i­cy Stakes in this Elec­tion Are High (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “This pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is not very inter­est­ing, but it is impor­tant. And some of the rea­sons it’s impor­tant are the banal rea­sons that every pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is impor­tant: You get dif­fer­ent pol­i­cy out­comes depend­ing on who gets elect­ed.”
    • Writ­ten from a cen­ter-left per­spec­tive. Even if you dis­agree with Bar­ro on your pre­ferred pol­i­cy out­comes, I think he does a nice job of sum­ma­riz­ing some of the most impor­tant dif­fer­ences (although he leaves off a few big ones about which the two admin­is­tra­tions have dif­fer­ent track records such as reli­gious free­dom, DEI issues, etc).
  6. Are Drunk Peo­ple in New Orleans More Sen­si­ble Than Con­gress? (Ben Meets Amer­i­ca, YouTube): four min­utes. If the qual­i­ty con­tin­ues, I will prob­a­bly be shar­ing most install­ments of this series.
  7. Which Cities are the Least Reli­gious? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The least reli­gious cities are at the top and there are two clear win­ners here: San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle. In both cas­es, about sev­en in ten adults are attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices less than once a year. But I think that San Fran­cis­co make take the crown for most sec­u­lar — just 12% of folks in that city are attend­ing church at least once a month.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty

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 444

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 444, which is just the same dig­it repeat­ed. I like that. Clean. Classy. Ele­gant.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rant About Wor­ship Songs (Jere­my Pierce, First Things): “Here are some of the things I real­ly hate in a wor­ship song.”
    • This is bril­liant, from back in 2010.
  2. Top Only­Fans cre­ator mak­ing $300,000 a month turns to Christ, walks away from porn indus­try (John Knox, Not The Bee): “From what I can tell, Nala here isn’t going through a Lil’ Nas X ‘Chris­t­ian era’ where she’s aging out of porn and wants to rebrand her­self as a good girl again before piv­ot­ing to anoth­er grift. All I see is gen­uine joy, like the pros­ti­tute who wept and was for­giv­en at Jesus’ feet.”
    • Includes a video of her shar­ing her tes­ti­mo­ny. I love this part: “The dev­il can tru­ly give you things in this life. He has a bud­get, though. He can only go so far.… The dev­il has a bud­get, but God does not.”
  3. Lati­nos Are Flock­ing to Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty (Marie Arana, The Free Press): “In fact, some researchers project that by 2030, half of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Amer­i­can Lati­nos will iden­ti­fy as Protes­tant evan­gel­i­cals. Com­pare that growth with white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants, whose num­bers have declined from 23 per­cent of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion in 2006 to 14 per­cent in 2020. With the His­pan­ic population’s pro­ject­ed growth, in less than a decade, we may see forty mil­lion Latinos—a con­gre­ga­tion the size of California—heading to Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church­es every Sun­day.”
  4. Is Rome a True Church? (Chris Castal­do, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Protes­tants tend to answer the ques­tion of Roman Catholicism’s sta­tus in one of two ways. Look­ing through the lens of the ear­ly creeds (i.e., Nicene and Apos­tles’), some under­stand it to be fun­da­men­tal­ly ortho­dox. The ratio­nale is sim­ple: because the creeds uphold the basic tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty, and Rome upholds those creeds, her apos­tolic­i­ty is affirmed. Roman Catholi­cism is thus regard­ed as ‘inside the pale.’ An alter­na­tive read­ing, one that prob­a­bly informed the Face­book com­ment, is to view the Roman Catholic Church through the lens of the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Ref­or­ma­tion in which the Coun­cil of Trent anath­e­ma­tized (pro­nounced to be cursed) the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion by faith alone. Because such faith is rec­og­nized as the dri­ving cen­ter of the bib­li­cal gospel, and Rome force­ful­ly repu­di­ates the doc­trine, the Roman Church is there­fore con­sid­ered incom­pat­i­ble with bib­li­cal faith.  I rec­og­nize the log­ic in these posi­tions, but in my opin­ion, both are incom­plete.”
  5. Jour­nal­ism Has a Reli­gion Prob­lem (Andrew T. Walk­er, Nation­al Review): “Jour­nal­ism has a reli­gion prob­lem. More specif­i­cal­ly, jour­nal­ists are either unaware or unwill­ing to admit that their own views, pre­sum­ably untouched by ‘reli­gion,’ are nonethe­less pas­sion­ate­ly held con­vic­tions ground­ed, well, some­where. What do I mean by that? Well, jour­nal­ism that touch­es on reli­gion and pol­i­tics tends to see reli­gious view­points as car­ry­ing a spe­cial bur­den. It goes some­thing like this: ‘Tell me, Mr. Pious, why a diverse pop­u­la­tion should accept your views on moral­i­ty, con­sid­er­ing they come from reli­gion.’ ”
  6. Har­vard Tram­ples the Truth (Mar­tin Kulldorff,City Jour­nal): “…as I dis­cov­ered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a sto­ry of a Har­vard bio­sta­tis­ti­cian and infec­tious-dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gist, cling­ing to the truth as the world lost its way dur­ing the Covid pan­dem­ic.… Two Har­vard col­leagues tried to arrange a debate between me and oppos­ing Har­vard fac­ul­ty, but just as with Stan­ford, there were no tak­ers. The invi­ta­tion to debate remains open. The pub­lic should not trust sci­en­tists, even Har­vard sci­en­tists, unwill­ing to debate their posi­tions with fel­low sci­en­tists.”
  7. How the Gaza Min­istry of Health Fakes Casu­al­ty Num­bers (Abra­ham Wyn­er, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “If Hamas’ num­bers are faked or fraud­u­lent in some way, there may be evi­dence in the num­bers them­selves that can demon­strate it. While there is not much data avail­able, there is a lit­tle, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Min­istry released dai­ly casu­al­ty fig­ures that include both a total num­ber and a spe­cif­ic num­ber of women and chil­dren.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of sta­tis­tics at the Whar­ton School, and I find his analy­sis com­pelling.

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 443

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

This, vol­ume 443, is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Four Ways of Look­ing at Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…to chart the sup­posed reach of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, a sur­vey from the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute asks respon­dents whether they agree with the for­mu­la­tion ‘U.S. laws should be based on Chris­t­ian val­ues.’ But some­one who says yes might just be agree­ing with King’s ‘Let­ter From Birm­ing­ham Jail’ or the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, not endors­ing a legal code based on Deuteron­o­my.”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Relat­ed: If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Help­ing the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A demo­c­ra­t­ic life is not the high­est thing or the best thing. But as a way of liv­ing amongst our neigh­bors and seek­ing to live a life of con­science under the law, it is a very good thing. The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists, with their strong man pol­i­tics, sup­port for rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence, and obses­sion with racial sol­i­dar­i­ty would destroy all of that. What wor­ries me now, though, is not the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists them­selves. Frankly, many of them are too reck­less, undis­ci­plined, and reac­tive to be able to accom­plish the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change they seek. What wor­ries me is that there are a great many social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers who love the demo­c­ra­t­ic life who are con­stant­ly being called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists’ by the likes of Hei­di Przy­by­la for believ­ing things that are utter­ly unre­mark­able in Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. If our sec­u­lar media out­lets con­tin­ue to tell them that ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is the belief in things vir­tu­al­ly all Chris­tians across his­to­ry have believed, I fear they will lis­ten. And they will find these eth­no-nation­al­ist total­i­tar­i­an aspi­rants and, not real­iz­ing what they are doing, they will make com­mon cause with them.”
    • This is one of the most help­ful pieces I’ve seen on Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism. It’s a bit long, but eas­i­ly skim­ma­ble to zero in on the parts you find most inter­est­ing.
  3. What hap­pened after a man got 217 coro­n­avirus shots (Rachel Pan­nett, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Going into the study, the researchers had spec­u­lat­ed that hav­ing so many shots could cause his immune sys­tem to become fatigued. Vac­cines cre­ate immune mem­o­ry cells that are on stand­by, ready to rapid­ly acti­vate the body’s defens­es in the event of an infec­tion. But in fact, the researchers found that the man had more of these immune cells — known as T‑cells — than a con­trol group that had received the stan­dard three-dose vac­cine reg­i­men. They also did not detect any fatigue in these cells, which they said were just as effec­tive as those of peo­ple who had received a typ­i­cal num­ber of coro­n­avirus shots.”
  4. Alba­nia to speed up EU acces­sion using Chat­G­PT (Alice Tay­lor, Eurac­tiv): “The Alban­ian gov­ern­ment will use Chat­G­PT to trans­late thou­sands of pages of EU legal mea­sures and pro­vi­sions into shqip (Alban­ian lan­guage) and then inte­grate them into exist­ing legal struc­tures, fol­low­ing an agree­ment with the CEO of the par­ent com­pa­ny, Ope­nAI, Mira Murati, who was born in Alba­nia.… on 13 Decem­ber, at the EU sum­mit in Brus­sels, he will present the project and a suc­cess­ful test of ‘the Alban­ian mod­el of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for the inter­po­si­tion of the leg­is­la­tion totalling 280,000 pages of legal mea­sures of the EU.‘”
  5. I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train (Steve Charnok, Metro): “While the 17-year-old does indeed live on trains, he does so entire­ly legal­ly. And with a sur­pris­ing amount of com­fort. Lasse trav­els 600 miles a day through­out Ger­many aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He trav­els first class, sleeps on night trains, has break­fast in DB lounges and takes show­ers in pub­lic swim­ming pools and leisure cen­tres, all using his unlim­it­ed annu­al rail­card.”

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 442

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 442nd edi­tion of these emails. 442 is the sum of eight con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of the Cul­ture, 2024 (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The tech plat­forms aren’t like the Medici in Flo­rence, or those oth­er rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelan­ge­lo or Mozart. They want to cre­ate a world of junkies—because they will be the deal­ers. Addic­tion is the goal.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Includes an anec­dote about a Stan­ford under­grad near the end.
  2. Men Are From Mer­cury, Women Are From Nep­tune (David French, New York Times): “…if there are pre-exist­ing polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences between men and women — and it’s true that in aggre­gate men are more con­ser­v­a­tive than women — then those dif­fer­ences will be exac­er­bat­ed as men spend more time with men, and women spend more time with women. The more that men and women live sep­a­rate lives, the more we would expect to see sep­a­rate beliefs.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, and I high­ly rec­om­mend it to you.
  3. My Mom’s Rules For Cults (Ben Lan­dau-Tay­lor, Sub­stack): “…when I was 25 years old I told my par­ents I was mov­ing to San Fran­cis­co to join a new-wave rad­i­cal move­ment and a self-devel­op­ment psy­chol­o­gy I‑swear-we’re-not-a-cult group. And she sat me down and gave me three things to check before I went: 1. Are the mem­bers of the group in con­tact with their fam­i­lies? 2. How does the group react when mem­bers are close with friends who don’t share the group’s beliefs and ide­ol­o­gy? Is this dis­cour­aged? Is it seen as nor­mal and healthy? 3. How does the group relate to for­mer mem­bers who have left? Are they old friends who are wel­come at par­ties, or are they vile trai­tors, or what? In my expe­ri­ence this is the best and fastest way to tell the dif­fer­ence…”
  4. ‘I Said, ‘What’s Your Plan About Mar­riage and Dating?’ And There Was Silence.’ (Jane Coas­ton, New York Times): “I was talk­ing to a grad­u­ate stu­dent recent­ly. He had a very clear sense of his plan for school­ing and work, and then I said, ‘What’s your plan about mar­riage and dat­ing?’ And there was silence. He didn’t real­ly have a plan. I think that’s part of the chal­lenge — that peo­ple are not being inten­tion­al enough about seek­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet, date and mar­ry young adults in their world.”
    • An inter­view with Brad Wilcox, who is often cit­ed in these updates. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. The Rise of the Non-Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cal (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Nine per­cent of Repub­li­can Jews self-iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal, com­pared to 3% of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Jews. For Mus­lims, the gap is huge: 32% vs 11%. It’s also fair­ly large for Bud­dhists (16% vs 6%) and Hin­dus (18% vs 10%). You can even see it among noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars. 19% of the Repub­li­cans are evan­gel­i­cals; it’s just 9% of the Democ­rats.”
    • Wild and inter­est­ing.
  6. The Takeover (Nee­tu Arnold, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…even in the van­ish­ing­ly rare event that uni­ver­si­ties attempt to cul­ti­vate an envi­ron­ment of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and free speech on cam­pus, it will nev­er ful­ly apply to spon­sored inter­na­tion­al stu­dents from coun­tries with author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. In many ways, this defeats the main pur­pose of hav­ing inter­na­tion­al stu­dents on Amer­i­can cam­pus­es in the first place: the free and open cul­tur­al exchange that occurs between them and Amer­i­can stu­dents. What kind of skewed cul­tur­al edu­ca­tion will Amer­i­can stu­dents receive about Sau­di Ara­bia and Chi­na if their friends from those coun­tries aren’t even allowed to crit­i­cize their own gov­ern­ments, and if the main source of teach­ing and schol­ar­ship on such coun­tries comes out of ‘cen­ters’ fund­ed by those gov­ern­ments?”
    • This is an odd arti­cle. Lots of inter­est­ing stats framed strange­ly, but def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Acad­e­mi­a’s “Pre­tendi­an” Prob­lem Stems From a Few Very Obvi­ous and Basic Real­i­ties (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “You’ve cre­at­ed a fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive process in which a seg­ment of peo­ple are giv­en a very large advan­tage, there are few if any objec­tive mark­ers that can dis­prove that some­one is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, and you’ve declared it offen­sive to ques­tion whether some­one real­ly is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, out­side of very spe­cif­ic sce­nar­ios. (When I was in acad­e­mia peo­ple spoke very dark­ly about the con­cept of ever ques­tion­ing someone’s indige­nous iden­ti­ty, called it the act of a col­o­niz­er, etc etc.) The obvi­ous ques­tion is… what did you think was going to hap­pen? Human­i­ties and social sci­ences depart­ments have, through the con­di­tions described above, rung the din­ner bell for peo­ple pre­tend­ing to have indige­nous her­itage. They now act shocked when such peo­ple show up. I find it disin­gen­u­ous and unto­ward. This behav­ior is the prod­uct of the incen­tives that you your­self built.”

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.