Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 319

a brief roundup

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 319, which feels like it ought to be a prime num­ber but real­ly 319 = 11 · 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A giant space rock demol­ished an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city and every­one in it – pos­si­bly inspir­ing the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Sodom (Christo­pher R. Moore, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “As the inhab­i­tants of an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city now called Tall el-Ham­mam went about their dai­ly busi­ness one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speed­ing toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph). Flash­ing through the atmos­phere, the rock explod­ed in a mas­sive fire­ball about 2.5 miles (4 kilo­me­ters) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more pow­er­ful than the Hiroshi­ma atom­ic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blind­ed instant­ly. Air tem­per­a­tures rapid­ly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahren­heit (2,000 degrees Cel­sius). Cloth­ing and wood imme­di­ate­ly burst into flames.”
    • No, it did­n’t “inspire” the Bible sto­ry. The Bible sto­ry is inspired, though. Astound­ing regard­less.
    • A bit of cold water: Sodom Destroyed by Mete­or, Sci­en­tists Say. Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­o­gists Not Con­vinced. (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Archae­ol­o­gists Steve Ortiz, direc­tor of Lip­scomb University’s Lanier Cen­ter of Archae­ol­o­gy, agreed that while Tall el-Ham­mam is an impor­tant site, its destruc­tion date is too late to fit the Sodom sce­nario. He dis­missed the fire­ball hoopla to CT. ‘[Their] destruc­tion does not look any dif­fer­ent than any oth­er destruc­tion,’ he said. ‘We have Assyr­i­an and Egypt­ian destruc­tions at Gez­er that looks just as dra­mat­ic.’ ”
  2. Why Covid reg­u­la­tions may be around longer than you think (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “The US and most Euro­pean coun­tries had aban­doned pass­ports by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In many South Amer­i­can nations, free­dom to trav­el with­out a pass­port was a con­sti­tu­tion­al right. So how did the pass­port come roar­ing back? The answer was the first world war.… Lloyd writes: ‘At the end of the war in 1918, the move­ment to abol­ish pass­ports re-ener­gised itself but it was now fight­ing against gov­ern­ments who had dis­cov­ered how close­ly a pop­u­la­tion could be con­trolled and how eas­i­ly this could be jus­ti­fied.’ ”
    1. The Extreme­ly Weird Pol­i­tics of Covid (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In less than two years, we’ve gone from a world where it was nor­mal for a left-lean­ing pub­li­ca­tion to run an essay gen­tly cel­e­brat­ing the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a bru­tal out­break of the plague, to a world where the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a less lethal pan­dem­ic is cod­ed as incred­i­bly right wing. I don’t know exact­ly why or exact­ly what it means. I just want peo­ple to acknowl­edge that it has hap­pened and it’s real­ly, real­ly weird.” Accu­rate.
  3. My Con­fes­sions (Joshua Katz, First Things): “Though my faith in acad­e­mia, which had been wan­ing for years, is now large­ly gone, my faith in the pow­er of God’s mys­te­ri­ous ways is ascen­dant. Because reli­gion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now instructs those apt­ly dubbed by John McWhort­er ‘The Elect’ to despise reli­gion, I find it remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the peo­ple who have worked so hard to keep me going are reli­gious.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of clas­sics at Prince­ton.
  4. The 1619 Project and Liv­ing in Truth (Sean Wilentz, Opera His­tor­i­ca): “If it were a high school his­to­ry paper, that dis­cus­sion alone would have been grounds for fail­ure. It’s rare, after all, to read a stu­dent get every sin­gle stat­ed fact per­fect­ly wrong, in sup­port of a propo­si­tion for which there is no oth­er evi­dence cit­ed, on two of the most impor­tant top­ics in all of U.S. his­to­ry, indeed, all of mod­ern his­to­ry, the caus­es of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and the ori­gins of anti­slav­ery. But this wasn’t a high school paper, it was the New York Times Mag­a­zine, and the author was, accord­ing to her contributor’s biog­ra­phy, a high­ly acclaimed jour­nal­ist.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Prince­ton. The arti­cle itself is a PDF, direct link here.
  5. The Sci­en­tist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Con­trol Killing Machine (Ronen Bergman and Far­naz Fas­si­hi, New York Times): “The straight-out-of-sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry of what real­ly hap­pened that after­noon and the events lead­ing up to it, pub­lished here for the first time, is based on inter­views with Amer­i­can, Israeli and Iran­ian offi­cials, includ­ing two intel­li­gence offi­cials famil­iar with the details of the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of the oper­a­tion, and state­ments Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s fam­i­ly made to the Iran­ian news media.”
  6. Every­body Hates the Jews (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archae­ol­o­gists for the most minor of microag­gres­sions, the very real macroag­gres­sions tak­ing place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brook­lyn, which have become a reg­u­lar fea­ture of life there, are over­looked or, some­times, jus­ti­fied by the very activists who go to the mat over the ‘cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion’ of a taco.” A bit long, but sober­ing.
  7. Whith­er Tar­taria? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “So I think there’s a gen­uine mys­tery to be explained here: if peo­ple pre­fer tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture by a large mar­gin, how come we’ve stopped pro­duc­ing it?” Much bet­ter than the excerpt indi­cates.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jenny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight badly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 318

First, a word to new stu­dents: wel­come! This might be your first email from Chi Alpha and if so you might be a lit­tle con­fused.

For the last sev­er­al years, I have been shar­ing articles/resources every Fri­day about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues.

I was inspired by the tribe of Issachar from the time of King David. They 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.

Be sure to see the dis­claimers at the bot­tom. Also, I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

All that hav­ing been said, here is 318th roundup of things I have found inter­est­ing (318, I am told, is the num­ber of unla­beled par­tial­ly ordered sets of 6 ele­ments).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amer­i­can Cri­sis of Selec­tive Empa­thy (David French, The Dis­patch): “…Amer­i­ca is expe­ri­enc­ing an empa­thy cri­sis. But it’s not quite the cri­sis you might think. Our empa­thy can over­flow for the peo­ple we love, for the peo­ple with­in our tribe—even when they make grave errors. But what about our empa­thy for ‘them,’ the peo­ple we dis­trust? Then empa­thy is in short sup­ply. Indeed, in some cas­es, the very con­cept of empa­thy is under fire.”
    • Relat­ed: The Lim­its of My Empa­thy for Covid Deniers (Tressie McMil­lan Cot­tom, New York Times): “Because I val­ue being a think­ing per­son, I hon­or emo­tions like empa­thy, fear, joy and trust to guide me around the pit­falls of my ego. Ego makes for real­ly slop­py analy­sis and writ­ing. I am at a point where head­lines about ill and dying Covid deniers do not pull at my empa­thy strings the way I want them to.”
  2. Norm Macdonald’s Spir­i­tu­al Jour­ney (Nic Rowan, First Things): “Mac­don­ald may have only been dab­bling in Chris­tian­i­ty, but his crit­i­cisms of the post-Chris­t­ian world were often inci­sive. He had no tol­er­ance for sci­en­tism and laughed at athe­ists. He fre­quent­ly lam­pooned the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher. And he wasn’t afraid to make dark pre­dic­tions about a future dom­i­nat­ed by their suc­ces­sors.”
  3. Fired After Get­ting Vaccinated—And Encour­ag­ing Oth­ers to Do So (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “I was try­ing to use my plat­form to share the truth. You’re right that Chris­tians should be peo­ple of the truth—not just that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but also the truth about what is real. The ques­tion is: How do you get the truth to peo­ple? We live in a time where infor­ma­tion is com­ing at us from all over. It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly that peo­ple don’t want to believe the truth.” This is a sol­id inter­view. Dar­ling comes off very well.
  4. Effect size is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more impor­tant than sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance. (Ben Recht, per­son­al blog): “In either case we are talk­ing about a dif­fer­ence of 15 cas­es between the treat­ment and con­trol vil­lages in a pop­u­la­tion of 32,000 indi­vid­u­als.… If the effect size is so small that we need sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­tics, maybe that means the effect isn’t real. Using sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal scaf­fold­ing clouds our judge­ment. We end up using sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods as a crutch, not to dig sig­nals out of noise, but to con­vince our­selves of sig­nals when there are none.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of machine learn­ing and data analy­sis at Berke­ley.
  5. Why Amer­i­ca needs the Black church for its own sur­vival (Char­lie Date, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The dif­fer­ence between the Black church and any oth­er Chris­t­ian insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca is that rather than aban­don­ing Scrip­ture as a tool of our oppres­sion, we apply Scrip­ture as God’s rule for our lib­er­ty and liv­ing. The dif­fer­ence is in how our social eth­ic is root­ed in both right­eous­ness and jus­tice, not either right­eous­ness or jus­tice. The dif­fer­ence is that we’ve come to see Jesus and his pow­er to sus­tain and flour­ish us from the mar­gins with­out the ben­e­fit of large donors, polit­i­cal cap­i­tal or own­er­ship of media out­lets.” The author is pas­tor of a promi­nent Black church in Chica­go as well as a sem­i­nary pro­fes­sor.
  6. Roe Will Go (Robert P. George, First Things): “Let me offer a pre­dic­tion, free of any face-sav­ing hedge: Next year, the Supreme Court will hold that there is no con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abortions. In Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion, a case pend­ing before the court, it will return the issue to the states for the first time in forty-nine years. It will do so explic­it­ly, call­ing out by name, and revers­ing in full, the two major cas­es that con­fect­ed and then entrenched a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abortion: Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Par­ent­hood v. Casey (1992). And the vote will be six to three.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Overfitting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more parameters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well‐written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 317

lots of pan­dem­ic and vac­ci­na­tion stuff

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 317 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Did you believe that? I mean, that’s also a pret­ty cool sto­ry, isn’t it? Right-wing news out­lets accuse the so-called ‘lib­er­al media’ of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admit­ted I’m prob­a­bly biased here?”
  2. On vac­ci­na­tions
    • It’s Time to Stop Ratio­nal­iz­ing and Enabling Evan­gel­i­cal Vac­cine Rejec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “For the Chris­t­ian believ­er, the pur­suit of free­dom is insep­a­ra­ble from the pur­suit of virtue. We do not seek lib­er­ty sim­ply to sat­is­fy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pur­sue the free­dom to make our neigh­bors sick, we vio­late the social com­pact and under­mine our moral stand­ing in pol­i­tics, law, and cul­ture. Chris­t­ian lib­er­tin­ism becomes a long-term threat to reli­gious lib­er­ty itself.”
      • Although I am vac­ci­nat­ed myself, I am more sym­pa­thet­ic to vac­cine reluc­tants than French is. I def­i­nite­ly do not think it is a reli­gious lib­er­ty issue, though. It seems to me that this is more a mat­ter of per­son­al auton­o­my and the reluc­tance is large­ly dri­ven by self-inflict­ed dam­age from the author­i­ties. The CDC (for exam­ple) has repeat­ed­ly said and done extra­or­di­nar­i­ly stu­pid things in this pan­dem­ic. Very often you would have been bet­ter off doing the oppo­site of what they advo­cat­ed for. Peo­ple noticed. And so now that the offi­cial advice is to receive the vac­cine, peo­ple who are resis­tant are apply­ing an under­stand­able heuris­tic.
    • I’m a For­mer Pas­tor, and I Don’t Believe in ‘Religious Exemp­tion­s’ to Vac­cine Man­dates (Cur­tis Chang, New York Times): “Chris­tians who request reli­gious exemp­tions rarely even try to offer sub­stan­tive bib­li­cal and the­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing. Rather, the dri­vers for evan­gel­i­cal resis­tance are non­re­li­gious and are root­ed in deep-seat­ed sus­pi­cion of gov­ern­ment and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to mis­in­for­ma­tion.… The biggest threat to any legit­i­mate right is the ille­git­i­mate abuse of that right.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Cur­tis Chang used to pas­tor near here and although we’ve nev­er met I emailed with him once about a book he had writ­ten.
    • NRB spokesman Dan Dar­ling fired after pro-vac­cine state­ments on ‘Morning Joe’ (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Daniel Dar­ling, senior vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the Nation­al Reli­gious Broad­cast­ers, was fired Fri­day (Aug. 27) after refus­ing to recant his pro-vac­cine state­ments, accord­ing to a source autho­rized to speak for Dar­ling.”
    • The ACLU, Pri­or to COVID, Denounced Man­dates and Coer­cive Mea­sures to Fight Pan­demics (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “What makes the ACLU’s posi­tion so remark­able — besides the inher­ent shock of a civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion cham­pi­oning state man­dates over­rid­ing indi­vid­ual choice — is that, very recent­ly, the same group warned of the grave dan­gers of the very mind­set it is now push­ing. In 2008, the ACLU pub­lished a com­pre­hen­sive report on pan­demics which had one pri­ma­ry pur­pose: to denounce as dan­ger­ous and unnec­es­sary attempts by the state to man­date, coerce, and con­trol in the name of pro­tect­ing the pub­lic from pan­demics.”
  3. The pan­dem­ic more gen­er­al­ly
    1. One in 5,000 (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Here’s one way to think about a one-in-10,000 dai­ly chance: It would take more than three months for the com­bined risk to reach just 1 per­cent… I will con­fess to one bit of hes­i­ta­tion about walk­ing you through the data on break­through infec­tions: It’s not clear how much we should be wor­ry­ing about them. For the vac­ci­nat­ed, Covid resem­bles the flu and usu­al­ly a mild one. Soci­ety does not grind to a halt over the flu.”
    2. New Details Emerge About Coro­n­avirus Research at Chi­nese Lab (Sharon Lern­er & Mara Hvis­ten­dahl, The Inter­cept): “The doc­u­ments con­tain sev­er­al crit­i­cal details about the research in Wuhan, includ­ing the fact that key exper­i­men­tal work with human­ized mice was con­duct­ed at a biosafe­ty lev­el 3 lab at Wuhan Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter for Ani­mal Exper­i­ment — and not at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, as was pre­vi­ous­ly assumed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
    3. New Stud­ies Find Evi­dence Of ‘Super­hu­man’ Immu­ni­ty To COVID-19 In Some Indi­vid­u­als (Michaleen Doucleff, NPR): “In fact, these anti­bod­ies were even able to deac­ti­vate a virus engi­neered, on pur­pose, to be high­ly resis­tant to neu­tral­iza­tion. This virus con­tained 20 muta­tions that are known to pre­vent SARS-CoV­‑2 anti­bod­ies from bind­ing to it. Anti­bod­ies from peo­ple who were only vac­ci­nat­ed or who only had pri­or coro­n­avirus infec­tions were essen­tial­ly use­less against this mutant virus. But anti­bod­ies in peo­ple with the ‘hybrid immu­ni­ty’ could neu­tral­ize it.”
  4. Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Immi­nent Doom Is Wrong (David March­ese, New York Times): “Giv­en that vir­tu­al­ly every cli­mate sci­en­tist believes that human activ­i­ty is warm­ing the plan­et, how could any­one deny it? The answer is, peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly believe what sci­en­tists say because they cor­rect­ly sense that with­in acad­e­mia a per­son can get pun­ished for unortho­dox beliefs.”
    • Includ­ing entire­ly for that excerpt. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is that the jour­nal­ist is dis­mis­sive of this idea, which is not only clear­ly true but at the root of much soci­etal dys­func­tion. We have a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in our cul­ture because our experts seem deter­mined to demon­strate their untrust­wor­thi­ness again and again. Jour­nal­ists are even more to blame than aca­d­e­mics, which is why I think it is so hard for this jour­nal­ist to accept Pinker’s claim.
  5. Per­spec­tive: The moral util­i­ty of his­to­ry (Jon Meacham, Deseret News): “As a mat­ter of observ­able fact, the Unit­ed States, through its spo­radic adher­ence to its finest aspi­ra­tions, is the most durable exper­i­ment in plu­ral­is­tic repub­li­can­ism the world has known. Oth­er nation­al rev­o­lu­tions have descend­ed into dic­ta­tor­ship and per­se­cu­tion; ours has pro­duced envi­able, if frag­ile, demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. In the main, the Amer­i­ca of the 21st cen­tu­ry is, for all its short­com­ings, freer and more accept­ing than it has ever been.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. On the Texas abor­tion law
    1. Tex­as’ Abor­tion Law Should Force Amer­i­ca to Change Its Ways (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, New York Times): “In Amer­i­ca, of all the preg­nan­cies that don’t end in mis­car­riage, near­ly one in five is abort­ed; this is a soci­ety in which things are wild­ly off track. A world like this, spun by forces that lead to that many lives being undone, doesn’t hap­pen by chance. It takes all of us. It takes a vil­lage to make abor­tion seem like the best choice. We can change our ways, though.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at South­east­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary.
    2. The Pro-Life Move­ment Must Tran­scend Pol­i­tics (David French, The Dis­patch): “To be pro-life does not mean sup­port­ing every pos­si­ble strat­e­gy, even if only tem­porar­i­ly suc­cess­ful (a Texas state court has already issued a broad injunc­tion against the law), designed to ban or lim­it abor­tion. Strate­gies designed to ban abor­tion do not nec­es­sar­i­ly help end abor­tion, and end­ing abor­tion is the ulti­mate aim of the pro-life move­ment.”
    3. How a for­mer SLS pro­fes­sor and Hoover fel­low helped shape the Texas abor­tion ban (Sari­na Deb and Geor­gia Rosen­berg, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Jonathan Mitchell was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford Law School and for­mer fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion when he the­o­rized the legal mech­a­nism which laid the ground­work for the con­tro­ver­sial Texas abor­tion ban that went into effect last week. If states want­ed to cir­cum­vent judi­cial review, Mitchell wrote in a 2018 law review arti­cle, they could del­e­gate the pow­er of enforce­ment to pri­vate cit­i­zens. That is exact­ly what S.B. 8 does.”
  7. Strate­gic Cit­ing (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “[Schol­ars are more like­ly to cite oth­er schol­ars who can help them out]… The find­ing is robust to con­trol­ling for self-cita­tions, own-jour­nal cita­tions, and a vari­ety of oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties. The authors also show that deceased authors get few­er cita­tions than matched liv­ing authors. For exam­ple, liv­ing Nobel prize win­ners get more cita­tions than dead ones even when they were award­ed the prize joint­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Individuals have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” At the time of writ­ing, the author had just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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 316

an unusu­al den­si­ty of thought­ful arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex

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 316, which is cool because leg­endary Stan­ford CS pro­fes­sor Don Knuth wrote a book called 3:16 Bible Texts Illu­mi­nat­ed in which he ana­lyzes every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible as a means of bring­ing his aca­d­e­m­ic exper­tise to bear upon his faith.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Curse of Ham: Get­ting It Hor­ri­bly Wrong (Stephen Le Feu­vre, The Gospel Coali­tion Africa): “In bib­li­cal Hebrew, the name ‘Cush’ seems to mean ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘blackness’. Black African nations seem­ing­ly devel­oped from the off­spring of Cush. But that is exact­ly where the so-called curse of Ham is mis­ap­plied. The curse nev­er fell on Ham or on Cush. For what­ev­er rea­son, not tru­ly giv­en in the text, it fell on Canaan. In Gen­e­sis 9:25 Noah pours out his anger, ‘Cursed be Canaan!’ There is no record of a bib­li­cal curse put on the descen­dants of Cush or the nations of Africa.”
    1. A slight­ly old­er arti­cle that I’m shar­ing this week for obvi­ous rea­sons. If you’ve recent­ly heard the phrase “Curse of Canaan” or “Curse of Ham” this arti­cle will help you sort out what it means.
  2. Why the UN’s Dire Cli­mate Change Report Is Ded­i­cat­ed to an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Houghton, who died of com­pli­ca­tions relat­ed to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief edi­tor of the first three IPCC reports and an ear­ly, influ­en­tial leader call­ing for action on cli­mate change. His con­cerns about green­house gas­es, ris­ing tem­per­a­ture aver­ages, dying coral reefs, blis­ter­ing heat waves, and increas­ing­ly extreme weath­er were informed by his train­ing at as atmos­pher­ic physi­cist and his com­mit­ment to sci­ence. They also come out of his evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of God, the bib­li­cal accounts of humanity’s rela­tion­ship to cre­ation, and what it means for a Chris­t­ian to fol­low Christ.”
  3. A clus­ter of arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex:
    • Can Chris­t­ian Sin­gles Thrive? (Anna Broad­way, Plough): “The glob­al church has at least eighty-five mil­lion more women than men among adults thir­ty or old­er; the US church has twen­ty-five mil­lion more women. Even if some of those women have or find spous­es out­side the faith, that leaves mil­lions who can’t ever mar­ry – a real­i­ty the church has yet to face. Instead, most Chris­tians I met around the world treat­ed het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage as the pri­ma­ry nar­ra­tive axis in life.”
    • Is Noth­ing Sacred? Reli­gion and Sex (Dou­glas T. Ken­rick, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “High­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple often wait many years past puber­ty to set­tle down, as they delay start­ing a fam­i­ly for up to a decade while attend­ing col­lege and grad­u­ate school. Those indi­vid­u­als do not want strong pro­hi­bi­tions against pre­mar­i­tal sex­u­al­i­ty and birth con­trol because it would mean they’d need to remain celi­bate for many years, and com­plete­ly sup­press their post-puber­tal sex­u­al urges until they get their Ph.D., M.D., or law degree, and then wait a lit­tle longer until they find a part­ner with whom to set­tle down. Wee­den has sug­gest­ed that the links between reli­gion and repro­duc­tive strat­e­gy account for many of the heat­ed moral con­flicts between the reli­gious right and the irre­li­gious aca­d­e­m­ic elit­ists on the left.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of social psy­chol­o­gy at Ari­zona State and I think this is very insight­ful.
    • The Prob­lem With Being Cool About Sex (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “Yet here is the conun­drum fac­ing fem­i­nist writ­ers: Our enlight­ened values—less stig­ma regard­ing unwed moth­ers, the accep­tance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, greater eco­nom­ic free­dom for women, the avail­abil­i­ty of con­tra­cep­tion, and the embrace of con­sent culture—haven’t trans­lat­ed into any­thing like a par­adise of guilt-free fun.” A very non-Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive that unex­pect­ed­ly aligns with impor­tant Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions at a few points.
  4. Why Poet­ry Is So Cru­cial Right Now (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Both poet­ry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about real­i­ty than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deep­est long­ings, lamen­ta­tions, and loves.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a NYT colum­nist. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. When Migrants Come Knock­ing (Edmund Wald­stein, Plough): “The nation-state com­bines the worst fea­tures of polit­i­cal and impe­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the advan­tages of a small com­mu­ni­ty found­ed in friend­ship and mutu­al trust among cit­i­zens actu­al­ly liv­ing a com­mon life, but pre­serves the com­mu­nal ego­ism and hatred of out­siders typ­i­cal of such small com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the capa­cious­ness and abil­i­ty to unite many nations typ­i­cal of ancient empires, but has all of their mil­i­tarism and libido dom­i­nan­di.” A wide-rang­ing Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on refugees; rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Why I Vot­ed For the Athe­ist Pres­i­dent of Harvard’s Chap­lain Group (Pete Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Har­vard has no ‘chief chap­lain,’ and the pres­i­dent of the Har­vard Chap­lains does not direct spir­i­tu­al life on cam­pus. We are a decen­tral­ized, non­hier­ar­chi­cal com­mu­ni­ty of inde­pen­dent chap­lain­cies, with about 40 chap­lains span­ning rough­ly 25 denom­i­na­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, tra­di­tions, and reli­gions.… Chap­lain pres­i­dents are cho­sen not to reflect whose tra­di­tion is ascen­dant, nor as a reward to the most influ­en­tial chap­lain. They are not an indi­ca­tor of a bold new vision for the Har­vard Chap­lains.”
  7. A Third Par­ty Won’t Save Us (Alexan­der H. Cohen, Per­sua­sion): “It’s true that some third par­ties have his­tor­i­cal­ly bro­ken the mold, notably in the pre-Civ­il War era. The Repub­li­can Par­ty itself began as an insur­gent, anti-slav­ery third par­ty. But the rules have changed. The Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties have been in pow­er so long that they have con­scious­ly designed a sys­tem that pro­tects their dom­i­nance and dis­cour­ages the orga­ni­za­tion of new third par­ties.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Clark­son Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sister, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 315

some extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ing arti­cles this week — high­ly rec­om­mend­ed

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.

Today’s num­ber is 315, which is north­west when mea­sured on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only­Fans and the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion (Samuel D. James, First Things): “If you look care­ful­ly, you can see how sobri­quets such as ‘sex work­er’ give away the game. The con­tem­po­rary lib­er­at­ed social order is an order of work­ers: naked bod­ies labor­ing round the clock, sac­ri­fic­ing dig­ni­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to nib­ble the crumbs that fall from Big Tech’s table. Our civilization’s efforts to com­mod­i­fy sex­u­al­i­ty can­not deliv­er what they promise. It is impos­si­ble to make sex a prod­uct or sub­scrip­tion; the clos­est thing is human traf­fick­ing, which, as it turns out, is a fea­ture and not a bug of the adult con­tent indus­try.” Straight fire.
  2. The World Is Cat­e­chiz­ing Us Whether We Real­ize It or Not (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “It is worth remem­ber­ing David Well’s famous def­i­n­i­tion: world­li­ness is what­ev­er makes right­eous­ness look strange and sin look nor­mal. Here’s the real­i­ty fac­ing every Chris­t­ian in the West: the mon­ey, pow­er, and pres­tige of the main­stream media, big time sports, big busi­ness, big tech, and almost all the insti­tu­tions of edu­ca­tion and enter­tain­ment are invest­ed in mak­ing sin look nor­mal.”
  3. Nike’s End of Men (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “For all the talk of a racial reck­on­ing with­in major indus­tries, Nike’s main prob­lem is this: It’s a com­pa­ny built on mas­culin­i­ty, most specif­i­cal­ly Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambi­tions, scan­dals, and intel­lec­tu­al trends, Nike finds mas­culin­i­ty prob­lem­at­ic enough to loud­ly reject.” This is WAY more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  4. Tet­lock and the Tal­iban (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “I have a PhD in polit­i­cal sci­ence with a focus on inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. Most peo­ple in my posi­tion would tell you that you should give my opin­ions on my top­ic of exper­tise more weight because of my cre­den­tials. I believe if any­thing, you should hold my degree against me, as get­ting a PhD is prob­a­bly the most inef­fi­cient way to under­stand a top­ic, and a per­son seek­ing that cre­den­tial has shown that they don’t under­stand that. I think I’ve been right on Afghanistan and oth­er Amer­i­can inter­ven­tions because of good intel­lec­tu­al habits, includ­ing a gen­uine con­cern with what is true. But that has lit­tle to do with any train­ing I got from polit­i­cal sci­ence.” This piece is quite good. I feel like I should add a dis­claimer like, “Warn­ing: aca­d­e­m­ic heresy ahead.”
  5. ‘When My Satire Becomes Pop­u­lar, I Must Ask, What Is the Problem?’ (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[Pop­u­lar satirists] can’t say, ‘I’m call­ing out pow­er.’ No, you are pow­er. Satirists must inter­ro­gate their own posi­tion­al­i­ty. I try to say, ‘How am I impli­cat­ed in this thing per­son­al­ly?’ Because satire nev­er used to be pop­u­lar.… So when my satire becomes pop­u­lar, I must ask, What is the prob­lem? Why are there so many peo­ple that are com­fort­able with my work?” A very per­cep­tive inter­view with Elnathan John. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  6. Hos­pi­tals and Insur­ers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why. (Sarah Kliff & Josh Katz, New York Times): “This year, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment ordered hos­pi­tals to begin pub­lish­ing a prized secret: a com­plete list of the prices they nego­ti­ate with pri­vate insur­ers.… data from the hos­pi­tals that have com­plied hints at why the pow­er­ful indus­tries want­ed this infor­ma­tion to remain hid­den.” This is reveal­ing and irri­tat­ing.
  7. About Afghanistan:
    • We Must Learn From Our Defeat (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “We must learn the lessons of our fail­ure with great urgency. Amer­i­can pri­ma­cy has insu­lat­ed Amer­i­ca from the pains of our defeat. This will not be true for much longer. As I type these words my nation hur­tles towards a dark and uncer­tain future. The chal­lenge posed by an ambi­tious and revi­sion­ist Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Chi­na dwarfs any prob­lem a move­ment of illit­er­ate pop­py farm­ers could cre­ate. We have wast­ed the prof­its of our imperi­um away; in this more fee­ble state we now con­front the chal­lenge of a cen­tu­ry. We must not face it armed with the dys­func­tion of our past two decades. We must relearn how to be seri­ous.”
    • US spe­cial oper­a­tions vets car­ry out dar­ing mis­sion to save Afghan allies (James Gor­don Meek, ABC News): “The Afghan oper­a­tors, assets, inter­preters and their fam­i­lies were known as ‘pas­sen­gers’ and they were being guid­ed remote­ly by ‘shep­herds,’ who are, in most cas­es their loy­al for­mer U.S. spe­cial oper­a­tions forces and CIA com­rades and com­man­ders, accord­ing to chat room com­mu­ni­ca­tions viewed by ABC News.… Look­ing back at an effort that saved at least, by their count, 630 Afghan lives, Red­man expressed deep frus­tra­tion ‘that our own gov­ern­ment did­n’t do this. We did what we should do, as Amer­i­cans.’ ” Amaz­ing.
    • Three major net­works devot­ed a full five min­utes to Afghanistan in 2020 (Jim Lobe, Respon­si­ble State­craft): “If the U.S. gov­ern­ment was caught up short by the dra­mat­ic denoue­ment of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, view­ers of the three major net­works must have been tak­en entire­ly by sur­prise. Out of a com­bined 14,000-plus min­utes of the nation­al evening news broad­cast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five min­utes were devot­ed to Afghanistan…”
    • Let’s Not Pre­tend That the Way We With­drew From Afghanistan Was the Prob­lem (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “I will not pre­tend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But nei­ther do a lot of peo­ple dom­i­nat­ing the air­waves right now. And the con­fi­dent pro­nounce­ments to the con­trary over the past two weeks leave me wor­ried that Amer­i­ca has learned lit­tle. We are still hold­ing not just to the illu­sion of our con­trol, but to the illu­sion of our knowl­edge.”
    • The eco­nom­ics of Tal­iban finance (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “An exam­ple of Islamist gov­er­nance can be found on the stretch of road from Kab­ul to the Mile 78 bor­der cross­ing in south-west Farah province that bor­ders Iran. The road has more than 25 gov­ern­ment check­points and a fee is charged at mul­ti­ple points on the jour­ney. By con­trast, the Tal­iban who police the same road have far few­er check­points and give a receipt, so only a sin­gle pay­ment is nec­es­sary.” Very inter­est­ing, sum­ma­riz­ing a pay­walled piece.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Ian McE­wan ‘dubious’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 314

Afghanistan links at the bot­tom.

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.

314 is rough­ly Ï€ times 100, and that makes me hap­py.

Afghanistan links are at the bot­tom and are well worth read­ing, but oth­er stuff is up top in case you’re over­whelmed already.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Guide to Find­ing Faith (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents con­sid­er­able evi­dence of an orig­i­nat­ing intel­li­gence pre­sid­ing over a law-bound world well made for our minds to under­stand, and at the same time a panoply of spir­i­tu­al forces that seem to inter­vene unpre­dictably in our exis­tence.” This is a won­der­ful thing to have print­ed in the New York Times.
  2. The Real Col­lege Scan­dal (Agnes Callard, The Point Mag­a­zine): “If I had to mea­sure the worth of my class­es in my stu­dents’ sub­se­quent civic virtue or life sat­is­fac­tion, I couldn’t afford to lose touch with most of them after grad­u­a­tion. I am some­times sad­dened when I lose touch with them, but it nev­er caus­es me to won­der whether their edu­ca­tion was worth­while.” Enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Ope­nAI Codex Live Demo (Ope­nAI, YouTube): thir­ty astound­ing min­utes. This tech­nol­o­gy is going to change SO MUCH. I’m hon­est­ly blown away. Sign up for beta access at https://openai.com/join
  4. Unmar­ried Sex Is Worse Than You Think (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra & Collin Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion): “Amer­i­cans talk a lot about sex. Any­one would think they’re hav­ing a lot of it.… Instead, the oppo­site has hap­pened. Young peo­ple are hav­ing less sex—and are less happy—than the mar­ried, church­go­ing gen­er­a­tion before them.”
  5. Does Cana­da have a reli­gion prob­lem? (Ray Pen­nings, Sub­stack): “In part­ner­ship with the Angus-Reid Institute, Car­dus has been mea­sur­ing Cana­di­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. We asked about sev­en prac­tices — belief in God’s exis­tence, prayer, read­ing a scrip­ture, par­tic­i­pat­ing in wor­ship, believ­ing in an after­life, hav­ing reli­gious expe­ri­ences, teach­ing your kids about faith. We termed the 16 per­cent who do at least six of these ‘reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted’ and the 19 per­cent who do zero or one ‘non-believ­ers.’ That leaves the 64 per cent of Cana­di­ans in the mid­dle — nei­ther devout­ly reli­gious, nor reli­gious­ly indif­fer­ent. They’re a big chunk of the 86 per cent of Cana­di­an­s who pray at least monthly.  But many reli­gious Cana­di­ans, of var­i­ous faiths, don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly feel it’s safe to be pub­lic about their beliefs.” The author is the co-founder of Car­dus, a Cana­di­an think tank. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. Who Tells Them Things They Don’t Want to Hear? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…I don’t think and have nev­er sug­gest­ed that crowd­fund­ed media can replace the basic news­gath­er­ing func­tion of news­pa­pers and that the NYT in par­tic­u­lar still serves a vital func­tion in its fun­da­men­tal repor­to­r­i­al duties. This is, in fact, pre­cise­ly why I am so dis­turbed by the paper’s takeover by a fringe ide­ol­o­gy embraced by a tiny sliv­er of the Amer­i­can pub­lic and by behind-the-scenes high school bull­shit.”
    • These two lines at the end grabbed me, “It’s only integri­ty when it hurts, guys. Some­thing you write is only brave when it piss­es off all your friends and col­leagues.
  7. Con­cern­ing Afghanistan, the work­ing out of which has made me more ashamed of my coun­try than I can put into words.
    • What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan (Mike Jason, The Atlantic): “We didn’t send the right peo­ple, pre­pare them well, or reward them after­ward. We rotat­ed strangers on tours of up to a year and expect­ed them to build rela­tion­ships, then replaced them. We were over­ly opti­mistic and large­ly made things up as we went along. We didn’t like over­sight or tough ques­tions from Wash­ing­ton, and no one real­ly both­ered to hold us account­able any­way.… We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 inco­her­ent wars, one year at a time, with­out a sense of direc­tion.” The author is an Army vet who served in Afghanistan. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Bru­tal.
    • I Was Deeply Involved in War in Afghanistan for More Than a Decade. Here’s What We Must Learn (James Stavridis, Time): “The on-the-ground lead­ers in Afghanistan, most­ly Army and Marine Corps, were over­whelm­ing­ly brave, thought­ful, and com­pe­tent. But as we learned over the long years, we sim­ply rotat­ed them too fre­quent­ly. If we had fought World War II by lim­it­ing Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er or Admi­ral Nimitz to one year tours of duty, the out­come would have been dif­fer­ent, to say the least. We made the same mis­take in Viet­nam, where every­one was on a one year tour, and the out­come was a dis­as­ter. This was reflect­ed up-and-down the chain of com­mand, and the lack of con­ti­nu­ity and sense of ‘I’ve just got to make it to my depar­ture date’ hin­dered strate­gic coheren­cy bad­ly.” The author is a for­mer com­man­der of NATO. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Nation­al Humil­i­a­tions (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence): “And Amer­i­ca like all great nations will endure and hope­ful­ly learn from its humil­i­a­tions, whether 1941 or 1950 or 1975 or 2001 or today. All nations ulti­mate­ly decide their own des­tinies medi­at­ed by divine judg­ment and mercy. Maybe Afghanistan’s col­lapse is a divine judg­ment on it and us. But there is mer­cy always avail­able, accom­pa­nied by wis­dom.”
      • The sur­vey of his­to­ry at the begin­ning is what caught my atten­tion. Some of those dis­as­ters are bare­ly on my his­tor­i­cal radar.
    • Afghan Trav­es­ty (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “God knows how to hum­ble great mil­i­tary pow­ers. He has done it numer­ous times, and that is what you are see­ing right now. What are we to make of that great patri­ot­ic vaunt, ‘these col­ors don’t run’? The reply is that they will run any and every time God deter­mines that they will.” The­o­log­i­cal­ly brac­ing.
    • Dis­as­ter in Afghanistan Will Fol­low Us Home (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan some­time? So goes a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far high­er cost, and the world is bet­ter off for it.”
    • Did Amer­i­ca just lose Afghanistan because of What­sApp? (Pre­ston Byrne, per­son­al blog): “The Unit­ed States thought it was fight­ing an army. I sus­pect the rea­son we lost is because we were fight­ing a meme.”
    • The above dove­tails nice­ly with a Tan­ner Greer essay: Fight­ing Like Tal­iban (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pick­up bas­ket­ball, a con­test among friends, a tour­na­ment where you nev­er knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomor­row. On Tues­day, you might be part of a fear­some Tal­iban reg­i­ment, run­ning into a mine­field. And on Wednes­day you might be man­ning a check­point for some gang of the North­ern Alliance.”
    • Dis­hon­or in Afghanistan (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You can believe that get­ting out of Afghanistan is the right policy––again, I have friends whom I respect who believe that––while also under­stand­ing that this was a ter­ri­ble way to get out of Afghanistan. We can all agree that it’s time to leave a par­ty; that doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly mean you should jump out the near­est win­dow to make your exit.”
    • The Fall of Impe­r­i­al Amer­i­ca (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As a friend of mine put it this morn­ing, how many meet­ings to plan an order­ly evac­u­a­tion of Afghanistan did our mil­i­tary brass miss so they could attend diver­si­ty train­ing? Again, we are an unse­ri­ous coun­try, and the world knows it. A friend of mine whose son is head­ed to West Point told me that in the boy’s pack­et of infor­ma­tion that just came in there is a rain­bow-flag diver­si­ty stick­er. Amer­i­ca might not know how to win actu­al wars, but it sure is going to equip its troops to win the cul­ture war against tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty and old-fash­ioned Amer­i­can val­ues.” Feisty.
    • What We Can Learn From Europe’s Refugee Crises (John Gus­tavs­son, The Dis­patch): “As a Euro­pean with expe­ri­ence of work­ing with eco­nom­ic and migra­tion pol­i­cy, and who wit­nessed what hap­pened in my home coun­try of Swe­den, I have seen what works—and espe­cial­ly what doesn’t.”
      • Full of real talk. I am in favor of reset­tling vir­tu­al­ly any­one who can get out (or who we can get out) of Afghanistan and putting them onto a path to cit­i­zen­ship (like­wise for Hong Kong). I am also in favor of being thought­ful in the ways described in this arti­cle.
    • Today’s Tal­iban uses sophis­ti­cat­ed social media prac­tices that rarely vio­late the rules (Craig Tim­berg and Cris­tiano Lima, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…U.S. con­ser­v­a­tives have been demand­ing to know why for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has been banned from Twit­ter while var­i­ous Tal­iban fig­ures have not. The answer, ana­lysts said, may sim­ply be that Trump’s posts for years chal­lenged plat­form rules against hate speech and incit­ing vio­lence. Today’s Tal­iban, by and large, does not.”
      • This illus­trates a weak­ness in the West. We pun­ish pro­ce­dur­al vio­la­tions more than we pun­ish actu­al vice, in part because so many of our elites don’t have a moral com­pass that they view as true and bind­ing. It’s OK if the Tal­iban uses social media to achieve actu­al evil as long as they don’t make us think about what they’re doing. Kind of like it’s okay for Chi­na to bru­tal­ize their own pop­u­la­tion as long as they don’t tweet about it and lie about doing it. Tech com­pa­nies will boy­cott Geor­gia but not Chi­na; they will dis­man­tle Par­ler but not Tik­Tok.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 313

a dis­turbing­ly high num­ber of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles

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

313 is the 65th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • How the Pan­dem­ic Now Ends (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “Here, then, is the cur­rent pan­dem­ic dilem­ma: Vac­cines remain the best way for indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect them­selves, but soci­eties can­not treat vac­cines as their only defense.”
      • First, this is a free arti­cle that won’t use up a pay­wall click. Sec­ond, this is dis­cour­ag­ing to read and makes me think Stan­ford is going to be way more restric­tive than I was hop­ing come fall.
    • What We Lose When We Livestream Church (Collin Hansen, New York Times): “The very word we trans­late from Greek as ‘church’ in the New Tes­ta­ment sug­gests we must assem­ble in per­son. The church wasn’t just a bridge of 2,000 years until human­i­ty reached Peak Zoom. It’s essen­tial for the reli­gion where God took on flesh and dwelt among us. It’s essen­tial in a faith that believes Jesus phys­i­cal­ly rose from the dead and then sat down to enjoy a meal with his stunned friends.”
    • Covid incom­pe­tence (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amaz­ing­ly the US pol­i­cy response is even more irres­olute than the first time around. Our gov­ern­ment is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sug­ar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wan­ders off fol­low­ing a pup­py.”
      • The author is a senior fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • “What Do Full Hos­pi­tals Real­ly Tell Us About COVID?” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “The pub­lic argu­ment for spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals is more exper­tise and low­er costs because of effi­cien­cy. The real mod­el was no emer­gency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured peo­ple to get into the hos­pi­tal. All of the finan­cial ben­e­fits of being a hos­pi­tal with­out any of the respon­si­bil­i­ties. So we get wom­en’s hos­pi­tals, ortho­pe­dic hos­pi­tals, etc., suck­ing the prof­itable work from com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tals, with­out tak­ing any of the bur­den of com­mu­ni­ty care for the indi­gent.… The hos­pi­tals in Louisiana which take indi­gent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all.”
      • I did not know any of that. Real­ly inter­est­ing. Writ­ten a law prof at Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Porn­dem­ic? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study of Pornog­ra­phy Use Before and Dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in a Nation­al­ly Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sam­ple of Amer­i­cans (Grubbs et al, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “In gen­er­al, pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward over the pan­dem­ic, for both men and women. Prob­lem­at­ic pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward for men and remained low and unchanged in women.”
      • The excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing but also I think peo­ple are less like­ly to watch porn with their fam­i­lies around, which hap­pened a lot dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. I do won­der how their find­ings cross-check with traf­fic stats from porn web­sites. It seems like an obvi­ous way to do a sim­ple check on their find­ings.
  2. The Gap Between Law and Moral­i­ty (Helen Dale, Law & Lib­er­ty): “The planet’s two great legal sys­tems devel­oped in two Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tions, Rome and Eng­land. Their wide prove­nance is not only due to both peo­ples con­quer­ing great empires. It’s also because they worked: they did things no oth­er legal regime did before them, and those oth­ers are still inca­pable of doing now.… Incred­i­bly, these devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er. The Eng­lish com­mon law did not bor­row from Rome: when it first emerged, Roman law was lost.”
    • This is sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. In the words of an alum­nus, “This one was a sleep­er hit. Start­ed slow, blew me away by the end.”
  3. Why a Mas­cu­line Min­istry Rose and Fell (David French, The Dis­patch): “When coun­ter­ing a cul­ture that often attacks tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent virtue.… Driscoll, in all his tough­ness and swag­ger, tried to make men out of Chris­tians. The church, how­ev­er, should make Chris­tians out of men.”
  4. Cor­nel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When I was in Char­lottesville, look­ing at these sick white broth­ers in neo-Nazi par­ties and the Klan spit­ting and cussing and car­ry­ing on, I could see the hounds of hell rag­ing on the bat­tle­field of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. Peo­ple say, ‘Oh, you’re so qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than those gang­sters.’ I say, ‘No, I’ve got gang­ster in me. I was a gang­ster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sin­ner with gang­ster pro­cliv­i­ties.’ It is a very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things than many of my sec­u­lar com­rades.”
  5. Crim­i­nal-Jus­tice Reform­ers Chose the Wrong Slo­gan (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Before the pub­lic sours on crim­i­nal-jus­tice reform more broadly—as it may amid ris­ing fears about crime and dis­or­der in cities—a new focus and ral­ly­ing cry are need­ed. And giv­en the spike in homi­cides that has afflict­ed the Unit­ed States dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly killing Black peo­ple, there’s an espe­cial­ly strong case for this over­due slo­gan: Solve All Mur­ders. Pre­cise­ly because Black lives mat­ter, peo­ple who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.”
  6. Assem­blies of God Grow­ing with Pen­te­costal Per­sis­tence (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point exact­ly why the Assem­blies of God has con­tin­ued to increase over the past 15 years. Research shows that mem­ber­ship of the Assem­blies of God has become more polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and more reli­gious­ly active today than just a decade ago, but its own num­bers indi­cate that it has achieved incred­i­ble racial diversity—44 per­cent of mem­bers in the Unit­ed States are eth­nic minori­ties.”
    • Since the Assem­blies of God is the group with which I am ordained and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Chi Alpha, file under “arti­cles that make me hap­py.”
  7. We Need to Build Our Way Out of This Mess (Eli Doura­do, New York Times): “How did the most dynam­ic coun­try on the plan­et become so scle­rot­ic? We did it to our­selves. We enact­ed laws that priv­i­lege the sta­tus quo at the expense of change and progress. We lib­er­al­ly passed out veto rights to any­one with the mon­ey and where­with­al to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the dam­age and cre­ate a more pros­per­ous future, we must make it easy to build.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Utah State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a provoca­tive read, In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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 312

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.

312 is an idoneal num­ber (which appar­ent­ly there are only 65, 66 or 67 of — it’s wild how in math you can prove things that seem total­ly impos­si­ble to prove).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bere­ans Had No Bibles: Re-envi­sion­ing Acts 17 (Grif­fin Gulledge, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The Bere­ans had no Bibles. It was rare for aver­age folks in the ear­ly church to have an indi­vid­ual copy of the Scrip­tures. Indeed, it wasn’t until the Ref­or­ma­tion era that mass pro­duc­tion of God’s Word was even pos­si­ble. What they had instead was a community—in this case the synagogue—which had a col­lec­tion of writ­ings we know as the Old Tes­ta­ment.”
  2. How Big Tech Tar­gets Faith Groups for Cen­sor­ship (Joshua D. Hold­en­ried, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Most tech com­pa­nies’ user agree­ments ban con­tent that dis­crim­i­nates on the basis of reli­gion, yet their poli­cies enable them to engage in such dis­crim­i­na­tion them­selves.”
    • That is a very suc­cinct way to express the hypocrisy. Put that sen­tence in your pock­et — you will have occa­sion to use it more than you’d like in the future.
  3. Becer­ra and Biden Betray Med­ical Pro­fes­sion­als Being Forced to Assist in Abor­tions (Roger Sev­eri­no, Nation­al Review):  “The facts were stun­ning in their clar­i­ty, the vic­tim was extreme­ly cred­i­ble and sym­pa­thet­ic, and the vio­la­tor remained entire­ly cal­lous and unre­pen­tant. The UVMMC mat­ter was the most open and shut con­science case in over a decade. I say was, because on Fri­day, the DOJ qui­et­ly, and vol­un­tar­i­ly, dis­missed the case. No admis­sion of guilt, no injunc­tion, no cor­rec­tive action, no set­tle­ment, no noth­ing.”
  4. Relat­ed to health care:
    • Mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty lands man in Hawaii men­tal hos­pi­tal (Jen­nifer Sin­co Kelle­her, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Instead, against Spriestersbach’s protests that he wasn’t Castle­ber­ry, he was even­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted to the Hawaii State Hos­pi­tal. ‘Yet, the more Mr. Spriesters­bach vocal­ized his inno­cence by assert­ing that he is not Mr. Castle­ber­ry, the more he was declared delu­sion­al and psy­chot­ic by the H.S.H. staff and doc­tors and heav­i­ly med­icat­ed… despite his con­tin­u­al denial of being Mr. Castle­ber­ry and pro­vid­ing all of his rel­e­vant iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and places where he was locat­ed dur­ing Mr. Castleberry’s court appear­ances, no one would believe him or take any mean­ing­ful steps to ver­i­fy his iden­ti­ty and deter­mine that what Mr. Spriesters­bach was telling the truth – he was not Mr. Castle­ber­ry.’ No one believed him — not even his var­i­ous pub­lic defend­ers — until a hos­pi­tal psy­chi­a­trist final­ly lis­tened.”
    • Dance Till We Die (Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “Covid secu­ri­ty the­ater is when we claim our actions are aimed at fight­ing Covid, but actu­al­ly part of our moti­va­tion is just to give the impres­sion that we’re fight­ing Covid. Gen­uine­ly fight­ing Covid may or may not be one of our goals too, but what makes the­ater the­ater is that per­for­mance is one of our goals.”
      • Pro­vides an inter­est­ing defense of wise secu­ri­ty the­ater while also absolute­ly slam­ming what we got in its place.
    • Adum­bra­tions Of Adu­canum­ab (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I wor­ry that peo­ple are going to come away from this with some con­clu­sion like ‘wow, the FDA seemed real­ly unpre­pared to han­dle COVID.’ No. It’s not that spe­cif­ic. Every sin­gle thing the FDA does is like this. Every sin­gle hour of every sin­gle day the FDA does things exact­ly this stu­pid and destruc­tive, and the only rea­son you nev­er hear about the oth­ers is because they’re about some dis­ease with a name like Schmoe’s Syn­drome and a few hun­dred cas­es nation­wide instead of some­thing big and media-wor­thy like coro­n­avirus. I am a doc­tor and some­times I have to deal with the Schmoe’s Syn­dromes of the world and every f@$king time there is some sto­ry about the FDA doing some­thing exact­ly this awful and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.”
    • We Walk Among You (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I do not want my men­tal ill­ness to be accept­ed by strangers. I hate it and I hate myself for hav­ing it. Men­tal ill­ness is not an expres­sion of the beau­ty of every indi­vid­ual who has it but the most ugly ele­ment of their most ugly selves.… The worst part of this car­i­ca­ture of kind­ness towards the men­tal­ly ill may seem con­tra­dic­to­ry: it extin­guish­es the capac­i­ty for mer­cy. For only the guilty can be shown mer­cy; that is the most essen­tial qual­i­ty of mer­cy, its only mean­ing. And I am guilty. Many of us who suf­fer from men­tal ill­ness are. Per­haps some­day our cul­ture will mature enough to under­stand that what we need is not to be absolved, nor to be exon­er­at­ed, nor to be excused, but to be for­giv­en.”
  5. Anato­my of a Bad Idea: Affir­ma­tive Con­sent (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So you get this huge pol­i­cy change at hun­dreds of uni­ver­si­ties that does effec­tive­ly noth­ing to stop sex­u­al assault, infringes on the rights of the accused, and func­tions as a make-work pro­gram for over­paid ‘con­sul­tants’ and lib­er­al writ­ers, all while most peo­ple qui­et­ly rec­og­nize that nobody fol­lows it, and sup­port for that emp­ty pol­i­cy is enforced with mis­sion­ary zeal not by true believ­ers but almost entire­ly by peo­ple who are too scared to ask whether any of it makes any sense.”
    • My hot take? “No means no” and “yes means yes” are both pale imi­ta­tions of “I do means I do” — and until we move back from con­sent to covenant we’re going to have lots of need­less suf­fer­ing.
  6. On Hun­gary
    1. Hun­gary is No Mod­el for the Amer­i­can Right (David French, The Dis­patch): “If you’ve been a con­ser­v­a­tive for any length of time, you’ve like­ly had what I like to call the ‘Swe­den con­ver­sa­tion,’ or per­haps the ‘Den­mark debate.’ A social­ist-lean­ing pro­gres­sive friend will wax elo­quent about the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries that com­bine high stan­dards of liv­ing with gen­er­ous wel­fare states and ask, ‘Why not here?‘ .… Well, Hun­gary is the new right’s Den­mark. Except that Hun­gary is a much worse place to live than Den­mark.”
    2. “My favorite things Hun­gary” — my revi­sion­ist take (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Way back in 2011, when I was vis­it­ing Hun­gary, I did a post in typ­i­cal MR style: My Favorite Things Hungary. I had no par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal point in mind, and indeed the cur­rent dis­putes over Hun­gary did not quite exist back then. Nonethe­less, if you sur­vey the list, just about every one of my favorites list­ed end­ed up leav­ing Hun­gary. The one excep­tion, as far as I can tell, is film direc­tor Béla Tarr, but he is a crit­ic of both nation­al­ism and Orban. All the rest left Hun­gary.”
    3. Unpa­tri­ot­ic Con­ser­v­a­tivesTM 2021 (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I can’t think of any­thing in recent mem­o­ry that has been more reveal­ing of where we Amer­i­cans actu­al­ly stand polit­i­cal­ly than Tuck­er Carlson’s vis­it to Hungary. As I wrote in The Spec­ta­tor a cou­ple of days ago, Hun­gary is a coun­try with lots of trou­bles, includ­ing corruption. I won’t go once again into list­ing all the rea­sons why it’s impor­tant for West­ern right-of-cen­ter peo­ple to come here and learn from the Hun­gar­i­ans — I’ve been blog­ging about that all sum­mer; I invite you to go through the archives here — so I’m going to try to boil it down.”
      • Dreher has a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than most Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tors, and I include him because his argu­ment is inter­est­ing. I tru­ly know almost noth­ing about Orban or Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics — but I am intrigued by how divi­sive Orban is in Amer­i­ca.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 311

wide-rang­ing links with a focus on the pan­dem­ic

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues (although I skipped last week because I was on vaca­tion and it was glo­ri­ous). 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 311th install­ment. 311 is some­thing called a per­mutable prime (aka absolute prime), which means that it is prime no mat­ter how you reorder the dig­its. In oth­er words because 311, 113, and 131 are all primes they are per­mutable primes. Nifty!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The New Moral Code of America’s Elite (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “…it’s decent, if you have a prob­lem with some­one, to take it up with them before run­ning it up the near­est flag­pole. But this is some­thing peo­ple with the right views and the best degrees, it seems, sim­ply do not do; just as the dis­tinc­tion between tat­tling and whistleblowing—resting, as it does, on a sober eval­u­a­tion of one’s own motives and the stakes at hand—is one they often fail to make.” THIS IS WILD and 100% worth using up a pay­wall view on.
  2. The Ger­man Exper­i­ment That Placed Fos­ter Chil­dren with Pedophiles (Rachel Aviv, New York­er): “Per­haps the politi­cians were recep­tive because the project seemed to be the oppo­site of the Nazis’ repro­duc­tive exper­i­ments, with their rigid empha­sis on prop­a­gat­ing cer­tain kinds of fam­i­lies, or per­haps they were uncon­cerned because, in their opin­ion, the boys were already lost.” Actu­al­ly insane.
  3. “These Bas­tards Will Nev­er See Our Tears”: How Yulia Naval­naya Became Russia’s Real First Lady (Julia Ioffe, Van­i­ty Fair): “She said, ‘I think there is no chance that they will let him out. He will be in jail for a long time,’ ” Grozev recalls. “You must under­stand how shock­ing this con­ver­sa­tion was. She’s this wide-eyed, earnest, hon­est per­son. She says these things like they’re the most obvi­ous things on earth, but she’s say­ing very nonob­vi­ous things. You have to process what she says before you real­ize that it’s obvi­ous only in a cer­tain universe.” That uni­verse was the imag­ined future in which Rus­sia is free and hap­py.
    • What an absolute­ly astound­ing lady. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Call it Racism, Not ‘White Suprema­cy’ (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “ ‘White­ness is a sys­tem, not white skin’ is a per­fect­ly plau­si­ble real­i­ty, but it has the laws of ordi­nary lan­guage work­ing against it, and that’s not going to change any­time soon. My sense is that you can have the lan­guage of white­ness or you can have an audi­ence that under­stands what you’re say­ing, but you can’t have both.”
  5. A whole pas­sel of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles, all of which are extreme­ly worth­while.
    • The Noble Lies of COVID-19 (Ker­ring­ton Pow­ell & Vinay Prasad, Slate): “Pub­lic health mes­sag­ing is pred­i­cat­ed on trust, which over­comes the enor­mous com­plex­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate ini­tia­tives effec­tive­ly. Still, vio­la­tion of this trust ren­ders the com­mu­ni­ca­tion unre­li­able. When trust is shat­tered, mes­sag­ing is no longer clear and straight­for­ward, and instead results in the audi­ence try­ing to reverse-engi­neer the state­ment based on their view of the speaker’s intent.”
    • The Myth of Pan­ic (Tan­ner Greer, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “This is the great les­son of the 2020 coro­n­avirus: We should have been allowed to fear. Alas, our lead­ers feared our fear more than they feared our deaths. ” The lat­ter half (about the moti­va­tions of the rul­ing class) is par­tic­u­lar­ly insight­ful. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • ‘I’m sor­ry, but it’s too late’ Alaba­ma doc­tor on treat­ing unvac­ci­nat­ed, dying COVID patients (Den­nis Pil­lion, AL.com): “You kind of go into it think­ing, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this per­son, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said. “But then you actu­al­ly see them, you see them face to face, and it real­ly changes your whole per­spec­tive, because they’re still just a per­son that thinks that they made the best deci­sion that they could with the infor­ma­tion that they have, and all the mis­in­for­ma­tion that’s out there. And now all you real­ly see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room think­ing, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a per­son that’s real­ly suf­fer­ing, and that is so regret­ful for the choice that they made.” Sober­ing.
    • Let’s get more peo­ple vac­ci­nat­ed (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Now if I went around tweet­ing all day ‘don’t take the vac­cines unless you’re high­ly vul­ner­a­ble, they’re exper­i­men­tal treat­ments the FDA hasn’t approved because they say they don’t have enough safe­ty data yet’ peo­ple would (right­ly) get very mad at me. Spread­ing that mes­sage would (right­ly) be con­sid­ered an anti-social and chaot­ic thing to be doing. But the mes­sage is true, and a good way to cut down on its spread would be to make it not be true, rather than try­ing to infor­mal­ly stig­ma­tize say­ing it.”
    • The New COVID Pan­ic (Susan Matthews, Slate): “The most impor­tant thing to real­ize is that break­through cas­es are going to con­tin­ue to sur­face in our lives. ‘The goal was nev­er to erad­i­cate COVID from being annoying—it was to erad­i­cate it from being a killer,’ said Dara Kass, an emer­gency med­i­cine physi­cian in New York. (She empha­sized, again, that the vac­cines are very good at doing the lat­ter.) And so even while you have like­ly heard that break­through cas­es are ‘rare,’ that’s a sub­jec­tive assess­ment that is prob­a­bly worth adjust­ing upward.”
    • Are COVID Restric­tions the New TSA? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s like God was design­ing the eas­i­est moral and util­i­tar­i­an ques­tion pos­si­ble. Here we have a sit­u­a­tion where a dis­ease 1) Spares chil­dren 2) Spares those who behave respon­si­bly; and 3) There­fore has a bur­den that falls almost exclu­sive­ly on those who behave irre­spon­si­bly.” This is an uneven essay but on the whole quite strong.
    • Good morn­ing. Covid is more mys­te­ri­ous than we often admit. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Social dis­tanc­ing and espe­cial­ly vac­ci­na­tion can save lives. But much of the ebb and flow of a pan­dem­ic can­not be explained by changes in human behav­ior. That was true with influen­za a cen­tu­ry ago, and it is true with Covid now. An out­break often fiz­zles mys­te­ri­ous­ly, like a for­est fire that fails to jump from one patch of trees to anoth­er.” Super inter­est­ing!
  6. Inside a KKK mur­der plot: Grab him up, take him to the riv­er (Jason Dearen, AP News): “A con­fi­den­tial infor­mant had infil­trat­ed the group, and his record­ings pro­vide a rare, detailed look at the inner work­ings of a mod­ern klan cell and a domes­tic ter­ror­ism probe. That inves­ti­ga­tion would unearth anoth­er secret: An unknown num­ber of klans­men were work­ing inside the Flori­da Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions, with sig­nif­i­cant pow­er over inmates, Black and white.” Odd cap­i­tal­iza­tion deci­sions aside, a worth­while sto­ry.
  7. The Illu­sion of Porn “Literacy” (Samuel D. James, First Things): “Edu­ca­tion is about dis­cern­ment, yes, but it is also moral for­ma­tion. No teacher or admin­is­tra­tor inter­est­ed in keep­ing her career would advo­cate a cur­ricu­lum that treat­ed racism the way porn lit­er­a­cy treats smut, as a sub­stance with which to become bet­ter acquaint­ed and a more informed con­sumer. Like­wise, any teacher who invit­ed a CEO of Big Tobac­co to give a lec­ture on why his career is sat­is­fy­ing would be sharply rebuked. What we as a soci­ety deem harm­ful and unjust is taught as such.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Aliens and Pro­nouns (Dil­bert): I am gen­uine­ly curi­ous what the pop­u­lar reac­tion to this strip will be. I wish I had access to his ana­lyt­ics! He’s going to learn some inter­est­ing things about our cul­ture. Peo­ple on Twit­ter will lose their minds… but Adams must be gam­bling that most peo­ple will find it fun­ny.
  • Shark Fish­ing (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine min­utes.
  • Strange Ways Air­lines Cut Costs (QI, YouTube): four min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Let­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Congratulations. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 310

short and sweet this week

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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