Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 511: CPS, prosperity, & journalism



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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ICE Goes After Church Lead­ers and Chris­tians Flee­ing Per­se­cu­tion (Andy Olsen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pas­tor asks if he can go with them or even fol­low them. ‘They need me,’ he says. An agent says the pas­tor can­not go with them. Torosian tells the agents that the cou­ple was per­se­cut­ed in Iran and fled because of their faith. The agents don’t respond. ‘They came here for free­dom, not like this,’ Torosian tells the agents. ‘I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this government.‘”
  2. Does CPS Inves­ti­gate One Third of All Chil­dren in the US? (Maxwell Tabar­rok, Sub­stack): “Does CPS inves­ti­gate one out of every three Amer­i­can chil­dren? The answer to this one is not avail­able direct­ly in the pri­ma­ry source reports and the under­ly­ing data is only avail­able after an appli­ca­tion for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty school of pub­lic health. They down­load and de-dupli­cate the mas­ter data files from 2003–2014 and con­firm that 37% of Amer­i­can chil­dren are the sub­ject of at least one screened-in refer­ral to CPS from ages 0–18.”
  3. Have You Heard the Good News? (Clif­ford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, The Free Press): “Yes, we have real prob­lems. But widen the aper­ture, and you’ll see that there has nev­er been a bet­ter time to be alive than the present day.… a rel­a­tive stan­dard will always find rel­a­tive pover­ty. But using an absolute stan­dard finds that income pover­ty is below 6 per­cent. On a con­sump­tion basis, well over 20 per­cent of house­holds were in pover­ty in the 1960s, and 11 per­cent were in pover­ty in 1990. Today, the con­sump­tion pover­ty rate is around 1 per­cent.”
  4. When We Start­ed To Lie (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “Peo­ple writ­ing let­ters com­plain­ing about press errors and demand­ing cor­rec­tions, then and now, miss the point: These aren’t errors. They’re the result of the press doing a dif­fer­ent job cor­rect­ly.”
  5. Duke Law Jour­nal Sent a Secret Memo to Minor­i­ty Appli­cants Telling Them They’d Get Extra Points for Writ­ing About Their Race (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “When the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action in 2023, it said that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties could not use essays as a Tro­jan horse for racial pref­er­ences. The doc­u­ments from Duke illus­trate how a top law review has skirt­ed that direc­tive, cre­at­ing a points-based sys­tem that fore­grounds race and could put the law school in legal jeop­ardy.… The pack­et was over­seen by jour­nal edi­tor in chief Gabriela Nagle Alve­rio, who received her B.A. in Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty Stud­ies from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty…”
  6. You Don’t Need the Same Pol­i­tics to Surf Togeth­er (David Litt, The Free Press): “But over the years, Matt and I got to know each oth­er bet­ter, and the bet­ter we got to know each oth­er, the clear­er it became that we had absolute­ly noth­ing in com­mon. He was into Ulti­mate Fight­ing; I was into Ulti­mate Fris­bee. He was cov­ered in tat­toos; I was cov­ered in J.Crew. His def­i­n­i­tion of a work­place injury was death by vio­lent elec­tric shock; mine was carpal tun­nel syn­drome.”
  7. Where I Learned the Pow­er of Look­ing at Every­thing (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “Hav­ing arrived ear­ly for the cer­e­mo­ny, I lin­gered near Sather Gate, with its ornate pati­nat­ed met­al­work, and then head­ed toward Doe Library, where I used to not study and stared at peo­ple instead. Every­thing glowed with a kind of insti­tu­tion­al grandeur. My super­ego scold­ed me fur­ther: ‘Look where you were! The best pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty in the world, only to squan­der your luck!’ The beau­ty of the cam­pus, which I had no mem­o­ry of appre­ci­at­ing, seemed almost crush­ing in its majesty.”

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 510: gambling, persecution, and free will

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Online Sports Gam­bling and Col­lege Stu­dents: A Chris­t­ian Response to a Grow­ing Indus­try (Kim­ber­ley Reeve and Jared Pincin, Chris­t­ian High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Because the Bible does not offer direct guid­ance on the top­ic of gam­bling, Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions take dif­fer­ing posi­tions.… The com­mon thread across these tra­di­tions is that there is a point where gam­bling becomes moral­ly imper­mis­si­ble.”
    • Relat­ed: How to Rein in Run­away Sports Bet­ting (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “A good reg­u­la­to­ry response is sim­ple: ban all win lim­its. Let win­ners win. Bet­tors don’t like lim­its on win­nings. They are obvi­ous­ly unfair. They are also clear­ly a key source of prof­its for com­pa­nies.… Sec­ond­ly, there should be lim­its on how much an indi­vid­ual can lose on a web­site. Once an indi­vid­ual has lost a cer­tain amount of mon­ey, bet­ting web­sites should be required to shut down their account. The harms of gam­bling are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly caused by big-losers, and gam­bling com­pa­nies can iden­ti­fy those big losers and pro­tect them. They don’t do this because they make mon­ey when losers lose.… So no lim­its for win­ning, lim­its for los­ing is a pret­ty rea­son­able reg­u­la­to­ry approach. Win­ners don’t threat­en seri­ous social harms. Losers do. Uncap­ping win­ners and pro­tect­ing losers will also dra­mat­i­cal­ly wors­en the bal­ance sheet of gam­bling sites, forc­ing them to charge high­er spreads on bets, which will deter many gam­blers.”
  2. As Chris­tians Are Slaugh­tered, the World Looks Away (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “The world should have seen it com­ing. Since 2009, Islamists in north­ern Nige­ria have destroyed over 18,000 church­es and, through­out the coun­try, have mur­dered over 50,000 Chris­tians. A fur­ther 5 mil­lion Chris­tians have been dis­placed with­in the coun­try, accord­ing to a 2023 Vat­i­can report.… If West­ern media reports on the per­se­cu­tion at all, it typ­i­cal­ly char­ac­ter­izes it as land dis­putes between neigh­bor­ing eth­nic groups. For instance, after the atroc­i­ties at Yel­wa­ta, the BBC report­ed: ‘The author­i­ties have not blamed any group, but it is safe to assume that there are lots of vic­tims on both sides, as any attack usu­al­ly leads to revenge and then a cycle of vio­lence.’ But where is the evi­dence that Chris­tians are killing Fulani Mus­lims by the hun­dreds, shout­ing ‘Christ is king’ as they hack peo­ple of oth­er faiths to death?”
  3. Pen­te­costals Keep Grow­ing: What the Assem­blies of God’s 2024 Report Shows About the Spir­it-Filled Move­ment (Ed Stet­zer and Todd Kor­pi, Church­Lead­ers): “The AG in the Unit­ed States is a part of the World Assem­blies of God Fel­low­ship (WAGF), which togeth­er makes up one of the largest Protes­tant bod­ies on the plan­et with over 85 mil­lion adher­ents. The WAGF is now larg­er than the Angli­can com­mu­nion, which is often cit­ed as the third-largest Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion. Instead, the WAGF is itself now the third-largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion­al tra­di­tion.”
    • Ed Stet­zer is a professor/dean at the Tal­bot School of The­ol­o­gy, and Todd Kor­pi is a pro­fes­sor at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. The Assem­blies of God is, of course, the spon­sor of Chi Alpha and the group with which I am ordained.
  4. When Women Are Rad­i­cal­ized (Claire Lehmann, The Dis­patch): “There is grow­ing aware­ness of how young men can be drawn into far-right extrem­ism or misog­y­nis­tic sub­cul­tures, but we in the media—and soci­ety more broadly—pay less atten­tion to how young women become drawn into polit­i­cal sub­cul­tures. Indeed, the terms ‘rad­i­cal­iza­tion’ and ‘women’ are rarely—if ever—seen togeth­er. This over­sight has con­se­quences, because radicalization—defined as rigid com­mit­ment to an ide­o­log­i­cal cause to the point where it dis­torts one’s world­view, harms men­tal health, under­mines rela­tion­ships, or dis­rupts functioning—is not a male-only phe­nom­e­non.”
  5. Solipsism»Determinism (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “A large major­i­ty of my smartest friends insist that deter­min­ism is true. Physics text­books say so, basic log­ic (‘Every effect must have a cause’) says so, and they say so. Who am I to dis­agree? My answer begins with a tru­ism: The foun­da­tion of sci­ence is repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tion. If sci­en­tists are allowed to dis­miss piles of repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tions as ‘illu­sion,’ there is no sci­ence. Next step: I have a life­time of repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tion of my own mind. Via intro­spec­tion, I direct­ly observe myself mak­ing gen­uine choic­es in every wak­ing moment. There­fore: Any ‘sci­en­tif­ic’ the­o­ry that con­tra­dicts these obser­va­tions is, at best, incom­plete.”
  6. God and Woman at Cor­nell (Mary Eber­stadt, First Things): “Why does sec­u­lar­ism flour­ish on col­lege cam­pus­es? Ear­li­er today, some of us were talk­ing about the philoso­pher René Girard, who had an idea that sounds sim­ple, but isn’t: We fig­ure out what we desire by see­ing what oth­er peo­ple desire. That’s part of what hap­pens with stu­dents on cam­pus, and it’s why even those raised in a reli­gious home tend to become more secular—because they don’t see a lot of peo­ple like them­selves in a place like Cor­nell. The idea dawns, even sub­con­scious­ly, ‘Well, maybe there’s a rea­son why they all think dif­fer­ent­ly from me. After all, we’re in a very sophis­ti­cat­ed place with high­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple, so maybe I should be like that.’ That’s the rel­a­tive­ly benign force that dri­ves peo­ple who were raised reli­gious toward sec­u­lar­ism. There is anoth­er force, more malev­o­lent: intim­i­da­tion, the chill­ing effect of being sur­round­ed by, or per­ceiv­ing one­self to be sur­round­ed by, peo­ple who think your belief sys­tem is ridicu­lous. There is also the fact that col­lege is famous­ly the place where a lot of young peo­ple break free from the con­strain­ing Judeo-Chris­t­ian rule­book about sex and mar­riage. These real­i­ties togeth­er con­spire to dri­ve col­lege kids away from faith.”
  7. Audi­ences Prove that Experts Are Dead Wrong (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The rebirth of long­form runs counter to every­thing media experts are ped­dling. They are all try­ing to game the algo­rithm. But they’re mak­ing a huge mis­take. They believe that long­form is doomed. They see that dig­i­tal plat­forms reward ultra-short videos on an end­less scroll. And they under­stand that this works because the inter­face is extreme­ly addic­tive. So short must defeat long in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­place. That’s obvi­ous to them. But all the evi­dence now proves that this isn’t hap­pen­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 509: a Christian assassin, Harvard Law Review, Juneteenth

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stop Striv­ing and Have a Baby (Nicholas Clair­mont, The Free Press): “…hav­ing kids isn’t just pos­si­ble, think­able, or doable. It’s actu­al­ly super fun, mas­sive­ly eas­i­er than any­one tells you, and so ener­giz­ing and clar­i­fy­ing that if you are an ambi­tious per­son, you should have a kid out of pure per­son­al self­ish­ness.”
  2. Friends say Min­neso­ta shoot­ing sus­pect was deeply reli­gious and con­ser­v­a­tive (Jim Mus­t­ian & Michael Bieseck­er, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Friends and for­mer col­leagues inter­viewed by AP described Boel­ter as a devout Chris­t­ian who attend­ed an evan­gel­i­cal church and went to cam­paign ral­lies for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.”
    • In response: The Prob­lem of the Chris­t­ian Assas­sin (David French, The New York Times): “Our nation is relearn­ing a les­son that it nev­er should have for­got­ten. Extrem­ist Chris­t­ian lan­guage and the­ol­o­gy can lead to extreme Chris­t­ian vio­lence in the same way that extreme lan­guage can lead to extreme vio­lence in oth­er faith tra­di­tions and among peo­ple who have no faith at all. Chris­tians aren’t bet­ter than any­one else. We’re fash­ioned from the same human clay, and we’re sus­cep­ti­ble to the same temp­ta­tions and fail­ures.”
  3. The Gospel Does­n’t Impart a Lens, but a Life (Steven M. Bryan, Mere Ortho­doxy): “I sus­pect that some of the ways that we speak about those who aban­don Chris­t­ian faith and become sec­u­lar mir­rors a sec­u­lar under­stand­ing of what it means to become a Chris­t­ian in the first place. To speak about ‘de-con­struc­tion’ implies that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is a mat­ter of con­struct­ing a ‘world­view.’ It risks rat­i­fy­ing the claim that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is some­thing like becom­ing a Marx­ist or a nation­al­ist or even a post­mod­ernist. It is sim­ply to dis­man­tle one sto­ry about the world and to con­struct anoth­er. To speak about ‘de-con­ver­sion’ implies that the Gospel imparts a lens, not life.”
    • The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Trin­i­ty Evan­gel­i­cal Divin­i­ty School.
  4. What Church Do You Attend? Maybe More Than One, Sur­vey Finds (Adelle Banks, Roys Report): “Researchers for the mul­ti­year Hart­ford Insti­tute for Reli­gion Research study found that 46% of some 24,000 church­go­ers respond­ing to their sur­vey report­ed active engage­ment with more than one church.”
  5. Matt Ygle­sias on debat­ing (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In prac­tice, one big rea­son to debate is so you can put four peo­ple on the floor and attract an audi­ence and some pub­lic atten­tion, yet with­out slight­ing any one of the ‘stars’ by mak­ing it a pan­el. As a method of truth-seek­ing, I do not think pub­lic debate does very well.”
  6. Exclu­sive: Har­vard Law Review Axes 85 Per­cent of Sub­mis­sions Using Race-Con­scious Rubric, Doc­u­ments Show (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “The Free Bea­con obtained more than 500 doc­u­ments from the journal’s two lat­est vol­umes, includ­ing the one cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion. The new doc­u­ments are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action at universities—and span four dis­tinct stages of the arti­cle selec­tion process. They pro­vide the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture yet of the racial and ide­o­log­i­cal pref­er­ences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Har­vard and is now the sub­ject of three fed­er­al probes. The doc­u­ments show that at least 42 dif­fer­ent edi­tors con­sid­ered race or gen­der when mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions in 2024. That num­ber accounts for 40 per­cent of the 104 edi­tors who serve on the jour­nal at any giv­en time, all of whom have a vote in pub­li­ca­tion deci­sions. While some edi­tors rec­om­mend­ed pieces on the grounds that the author was a minor­i­ty, oth­ers paid more atten­tion to the article’s foot­notes, comb­ing through the cita­tions to see how many sources were white, black, or trans­gen­der.”
  7. Arti­cles which appear to have been writ­ten in hon­or of June­teenth:
    • June­teenth Is Our Sec­ond Inde­pen­dence Day (Con­doleeza Rice, The Free Press): “But even though my fam­i­ly has been cel­e­brat­ing June­teenth since my child­hood, it wasn’t until 2021 that Con­gress vot­ed, almost unan­i­mous­ly, to make June­teenth Nation­al Inde­pen­dence Day a fed­er­al hol­i­day. Because many Amer­i­cans are unfa­mil­iar with its sig­nif­i­cance, some, per­haps under­stand­ably, won­der why it need­ed nation­al recog­ni­tion at all. After all, all Amer­i­cans cel­e­brate the Fourth of July—the ulti­mate cel­e­bra­tion of our nation’s found­ing, of our inde­pen­dence and our liberty.  To me, June­teenth is a recog­ni­tion of what I call America’s sec­ond found­ing.”
      • The author is a fel­low believ­er and also the direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
      • The arti­cle con­tains this stun­ning para­graph: “I was eight years old when, on a Sun­day morn­ing in Sep­tem­ber 1963, the 16th Street Bap­tist Church was bombed. I felt the blast a few blocks away in the church where my father was the pas­tor. Four lit­tle girls, two of whom I knew, were killed.”
    • What Amer­i­can Stu­dents Aren’t Taught About Slav­ery (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “What I learned from teach­ing slav­ery to a group of col­lege fresh­men is that many (per­haps most) Amer­i­can kids grad­u­ate high school believ­ing, false­ly, that slav­ery hap­pened only in Amer­i­ca. Their minds are not blown by rehears­ing the bru­tal facts of Amer­i­can slav­ery. Their minds are blown to learn that oth­er bru­tal slaver­ies also exist­ed all over the world. Nor is this his­tor­i­cal amne­sia con­fined to high school stu­dents. The Unit­ed Nations has deemed March 25 a day of remem­brance for the transat­lantic slave trade. There is no UN day of remem­brance for the Arab slave trade, the Bar­bary slave trade, the Indi­an Ocean slave trade, or any of the slaver­ies local­ized to spe­cif­ic regions such as the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, Chi­na, Korea, and East­ern Europe—each of which account­ed for mil­lions of slaves.… Instead of white­wash­ing the grim facts of Amer­i­can slavery—as Amer­i­can his­to­ry text­books did in the past, and as cer­tain cor­ners of the Amer­i­can right would be all too hap­py to revive—I rec­om­mend tak­ing the oppo­site approach: adding mate­r­i­al rather than sub­tract­ing it. We must include the glob­al and ubiq­ui­tous nature of slav­ery in every school cur­ricu­lum.”
      • The author, him­self African-Amer­i­can and Puer­to Rican, is a jour­nal­ist and a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Austin.
    • Fred­er­ick Dou­glass Found His Mis­sion in the Black Church (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Douglass’s mud­dled expe­ri­ence with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty mir­rored what many oth­er slaves expe­ri­enced. Many of them came to faith through evan­gel­i­cal­ism and were able to grasp the hope of emancipation—and equal­i­ty. Yet they also saw white evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers espouse proslav­ery doc­trines and com­fort with tear­ing apart Black fam­i­lies to uphold the lucra­tive insti­tu­tion. With this hypocrisy in mind, Dou­glass famous­ly wrote, ‘I love the pure, peace­able, and impar­tial Chris­tian­i­ty of Christ: I there­fore hate the cor­rupt, slave­hold­ing, women-whip­ping, cra­dle-plun­der­ing, par­tial and hyp­o­crit­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty of this land.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 508: euthanasia, nitpicking, and homesteading misadventures

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Are you grad­u­at­ing this week­end? Con­grat­u­la­tions! Still want these emails after you lose your Stan­ford account? Sub­scribe for free with your long-term email address at https://theglendavis.substack.com/
  2. White lies hide dark truths (Tom Tugend­hat, Sub­stack): “What is assist­ed dying? Sui­cide exists. Killing exists. Both are real, long­stand­ing, legal con­cepts. But assist­ed dying? That’s a phrase sus­pend­ed between the act and its denial. The bill claims to offer choice, dig­ni­ty and con­trol. But its lan­guage and its silences speak vol­umes about who holds pow­er and who is expect­ed to dis­ap­pear qui­et­ly. Patients are not poi­soned, they are ‘assisted’. Doc­tors don’t kill, they ‘participate in the process’. Insti­tu­tions aren’t forced to com­ply, they’re just not ‘protected’ from being com­pelled. Patients ‘take life-end­ing med­ica­tion’, as if it’s a herbal tea. Death is cleaned, blanched and euphemised. This new bill doesn’t just hide the real­i­ty of its actions; it hides the deci­sion from the fam­i­ly.”
    • The author is a mem­ber of the British par­lia­ment.
    • Relat­ed in terms of “safe­guards”: Doc­tors Were Prepar­ing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up. (Bri­an M. Rosen­thal, New York Times): “Four years ago, an uncon­scious Ken­tucky man began to awak­en as he was about to be removed from life sup­port so his organs could be donat­ed. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, offi­cials still tried to move for­ward. Now, a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion has found that offi­cials at the non­prof­it in charge of coor­di­nat­ing organ dona­tions in Ken­tucky ignored signs of grow­ing alert­ness not only in that patient but also in dozens of oth­er poten­tial donors.”
  3. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Cor­rect It (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you say Joe Crim­i­nal com­mit­ted ten mur­ders and five rapes, and I object that it was actu­al­ly only six mur­ders and two rapes, then why am I ‘defend­ing’ Joe Crim­i­nal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to cor­rect it. If one side lies to make all of their argu­ments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up.”
  4. Col­lege Stu­dents Are Using ‘No Con­tact Order­s’ to Block Each Oth­er in Real Life (Pamela Paul, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Admin­is­tra­tors, ado­les­cent psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists describe Gen Z stu­dents as fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. Many have dif­fi­cul­ty with con­fronta­tion and lit­tle expe­ri­ence work­ing through inter­per­son­al con­flicts, which was only exac­er­bat­ed by the pan­dem­ic. They have mas­tered the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of ‘harass­ment’ and ‘dis­crim­i­na­tion,’ some­times with just cause and oth­er times to brand a run-of-the-mill dis­agree­ment.”
    • Some wild sto­ries in here.
  5. My expen­sive, exhaust­ing, hap­py failed attempt at home­steading (Mike Rig­gs, Wash­ing­ton Post): “How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s straw­ber­ry demand? I still don’t know. We ded­i­cat­ed 80 square feet to straw­ber­ries last sea­son. The bugs ate half our har­vest, and the oth­er half equaled rough­ly what our kid could eat in a week. Have you ever grown peas? Give them some­thing to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heav­ens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost crim­i­nal mis­use of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 min­utes to shell a sin­gle serv­ing. Mean­while, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Wal­mart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.”
  6. At Secret Math Meet­ing, Researchers Strug­gle to Out­smart AI (Lyn­die Chiou, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Ono says. ‘I don’t want to add to the hys­te­ria, but in some ways these large lan­guage mod­els are already out­per­form­ing most of our best grad­u­ate stu­dents in the world.’ ”
  7. On the protests in LA:
    • Still look­ing for arti­cles with insight — let me know what you find help­ful.
    • ‘Delete That Pho­to or We’ll F— You Up’ (Leighton Wood­house, The Free Press): “I have been to dozens of mass protests like the one that explod­ed in Los Ange­les on Fri­day. What I saw in Los Ange­les on Sun­day was dif­fer­ent.… The demon­stra­tions are ugly, but so is what pre­cip­i­tat­ed them.”
    • 11 The­ses on the Unrest in Los Ange­les (Isaac Sauls, Per­sua­sion): “Trump wants the fight. The pro­test­ers want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.”
  8. The Best and the Bright­est Under Pres­sure (Matt Stoller, Sub­stack): “I do not know if there is a broad­er real­iza­tion of the harm that elites have done among my class­mates.… Near­ly every­one I met has matured into some­one who is kinder than they were as a col­lege stu­dent, will­ing to over­look flaws and acknowl­edge vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I was gen­uine­ly impressed, and felt a deep con­nec­tion to my class. But I also peri­od­i­cal­ly asked, ‘do you know some­one who died of fen­tanyl?’ And the answer was always no, some­times accom­pa­nied by sur­prise that most Amer­i­cans do have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with a fam­i­ly mem­ber or friend, or friend of a kid, who died.”

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 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 506: isms, nonsense responders, and tap water

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ismism (J. Budziszews­ki, blog): “Ismism – four syl­la­bles, ‘izzum izzum’ — is the bad men­tal habit of crit­i­ciz­ing a propo­si­tion not on its own terms, but in terms of the ‘ism’ which one takes it to express. For exam­ple, sup­pose Sheila is con­cerned that young peo­ple who mar­ry are tying the knot lat­er and lat­er in life. Bri­an snorts, ‘You’re one of those con­ju­gal­ists.’ Then he crit­i­cizes Sheila for oth­er beliefs which he him­self asso­ciates with so-called con­ju­gal­ism. For instance, he protests ‘I don’t think every­one has to mar­ry.’ But Sheila didn’t say that every­one has to mar­ry. She may not even think so, and it doesn’t fol­low as a con­clu­sion from her premise. Ismism is guilt by asso­ci­a­tion: ‘Your belief must be wrong, because I, per­son­al­ly, group it with oth­er beliefs I con­sid­er wrong.’ ”
    • The author is a phi­los­o­phy prof at UT Austin.
  2. Fas­ci­nat­ing: “non­sense respon­ders” sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect sur­vey data https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
    • The entire thread is worth read­ing. Bot­tom line from a tweet near the end of the thread: “Men­tal­ly adjust sur­vey results in your head if you don’t see the authors rig­or­ous­ly work­ing to remove non­sense respon­ders.”
  3. How to Find Ancient Assyr­i­an Cities Using Eco­nom­ics (Max Tabar­rok, Sub­stack): “In ancient KaneÅ¡, court tran­scripts, trad­ing con­tracts, and mer­chant account­ing were all record­ed on clay tablets. Clay tablets pre­serve well, so this peri­od is in some ways bet­ter known then the next sev­er­al thou­sand years of his­to­ry. The authors claim that ‘the clos­est com­pa­ra­ble cor­po­ra of ancient trade data are almost 3,000 years lat­er, com­ing, for exam­ple, from the medieval Ital­ian mer­chant archives and the Cairo Genizah’.… The cher­ry on top: the entire city burned in a fire, pre­serv­ing the clay records to be recov­ered forty cen­turies lat­er. The authors use some nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing and man­u­al inspec­tion to nar­row down from tens of thou­sands of tablets to sev­er­al hun­dred unam­bigu­ous men­tions of trade between two of 25 Ana­to­lian cities that have enough trade con­nec­tions with each oth­er to be iden­ti­fied in a grav­i­ty mod­el.”
  4. Star Har­vard busi­ness pro­fes­sor stripped of tenure, fired for manip­u­lat­ing data in stud­ies on dis­hon­esty (Richard Pol­li­na, New York Post): “A renowned Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an inves­ti­ga­tion found she fab­ri­cat­ed data on mul­ti­ple stud­ies focused on dis­hon­esty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Doug Wil­son Has Spent Decades Push­ing for a Chris­t­ian Theoc­ra­cy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Lis­ten­ing. (Ian Ward, Politi­co): “In Moscow, Wil­son explained that his polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy is not theo­crat­ic in the com­mon­ly under­stood sense of a gov­ern­ment run exclu­sive­ly by the church. To the con­trary, he main­tains that God ordains earth­ly author­i­ty in three sep­a­rate spheres of life: the church, the fam­i­ly and the civ­il gov­ern­ment. With­in each of these spheres, the rel­e­vant author­i­ties must abide by scrip­tur­al com­mand­ments. In the famil­ial sphere, for instance, par­ents must edu­cate their chil­dren accord­ing to Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples, and wives must sub­or­di­nate them­selves to their hus­bands in accor­dance with a covenan­tal view of the fam­i­ly. In the sphere of civ­il gov­ern­ment, offi­cials should strive to bring the law in line with Bib­li­cal com­mand­ments, although those prin­ci­ples don’t have to be applied ‘wood­en­ly,’ as Wil­son put it: Gov­ern­ments do not have to enforce the Bib­li­cal man­date that house­holds build balustrades on their roofs, but they should enforce the prin­ci­ple that home­own­ers are liable for risks incurred on their prop­er­ty. Above all, Wil­son believes, the three spheres of earth­ly author­i­ty must remain sep­a­rate.”
    • This is a far more informed arti­cle than I expect­ed it to be. The jour­nal­ist (Ian Ward) and the sub­ject (Doug Wil­son) have both been fea­tured in these emails before. I high­ly rec­om­mend this arti­cle as an exam­ple of what fair report­ing of a reli­gious per­son looks like.
    • For a taste of Wilson’s style, check out his response to this and a few oth­er arti­cles about him: Pete Hegseth, Me, and Meet­ing with Impor­tant Jews (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog).
    • My quick take on Wil­son: when he is right he is very right and when he is wrong he is very wrong, and whether he is right or wrong he is almost always con­fi­dent and enter­tain­ing.
  6. The Unpar­al­leled Dai­ly Mir­a­cle of Tap Water (A. Cerisse Cohen, New York Times): “Dur­ing a two-year stint in Mon­tana, I went on long hikes and sipped stream water, shock­ing­ly cold and straight from the glac­i­ers, but oth­er than that, I drank from the tap. And then I land­ed in Los Ange­les, where every­one I met used a fil­ter.… Thanks to warn­ings from seem­ing­ly every­one around me in the city, I began to wor­ry about things I nev­er before con­sid­ered threat­en­ing, like dust (could cause can­cer), any­thing with seeds (could cause can­cer) or cer­tain plan­e­tary con­fig­u­ra­tions (respon­si­ble for all oth­er mis­for­tunes). If I put my purse on the floor, or ori­ent­ed my bed the wrong way, it was endan­ger­ing my ener­gy! Maybe I’d been lulled into a false sense of secu­ri­ty about every­day life.”
    • Drink tap water. It’s awe­some.
  7. U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chi­nese Stu­dents, Rubio Says (Edward Wong, New York Times): “Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Rubio announced on Wednes­day evening that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion would work to ‘aggres­sive­ly revoke’ visas of Chi­nese stu­dents, includ­ing those with ties to the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty or who are study­ing in ‘crit­i­cal fields.’.… In 2020, offi­cials in the first Trump admin­is­tra­tion can­celed the visas of more than 1,000 Chi­nese grad­u­ate stu­dents and researchers after announc­ing they were ban­ning from cam­pus­es Chi­nese cit­i­zens with direct ties to mil­i­tary uni­ver­si­ties in their coun­try. It was the first time the U.S. gov­ern­ment had moved to bar a cat­e­go­ry of Chi­nese stu­dents from get­ting access to Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties, a ban the Biden admin­is­tra­tion kept in place.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. Johnston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Whis­per­ing Ear­ring (Scott Alexan­der): “The ear­ring is a lit­tle topaz tetra­he­dron dan­gling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whis­pers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Bet­ter for you if you take me off.’ If the wear­er ignores the advice, it nev­er again repeats that par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion.”
    • A brief sto­ry. 10/10 rec­om­mend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it time­ly.
  2. These Inter­nal Doc­u­ments Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Com­pa­nies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of peo­ple work­ing at porn com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from videos of chil­dren being raped? Thanks to a fil­ing error in a Fed­er­al Dis­trict Court in Alaba­ma, releas­ing thou­sands of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments from Porn­hub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Inter­nal mem­os seem to show exec­u­tives obsessed with mak­ing mon­ey by attract­ing the biggest audi­ences they could, pedophiles includ­ed. In one memo, Porn­hub man­agers pro­posed words to be banned from video descrip­tions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kid­dy’ — while rec­om­mend­ing that the site con­tin­ue to allow ‘bru­tal,’ ‘child­hood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwill­ing,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wast­ed.’ One inter­nal note says that a per­son who post­ed a sex­u­al video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made money.‘”
    • This is a dis­tress­ing read. Kristof has been per­sis­tent on this issue and it is much to his cred­it. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There’s a bet­ter way to tell the sto­ry of the Chris­t­ian Right’s ori­gins that makes sense of all the data – the tim­ing of the Chris­t­ian Right’s for­ma­tion, the com­mit­ment of evan­gel­i­cals to the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and even the enthu­si­asm of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers for Don­ald Trump.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. A Bat­tle That Shaped Black Evan­gel­i­cals (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In uni­ver­si­ties, the his­to­ry of the ear­ly Black church found a home in Africana stud­ies, which focused more on the growth of Chris­tian­i­ty among Black peo­ple and less on the type of Chris­tian­i­ty they prac­ticed. In con­trast, the writ­ten his­to­ry of ear­ly evan­gel­i­cal­ism pre­dom­i­nant­ly fol­lowed the lives of its white lead­ers and sub­scribers. But even though we’ve inher­it­ed seg­re­gat­ed sto­ries, his­to­ry paints a pic­ture of an inte­grat­ed sto­ry in which Black evan­gel­i­cals always exist­ed.”
  5. Con­ti­nen­tal Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dis­patch): “Today, to an extent that few peo­ple on either con­ti­nent have ful­ly inter­nal­ized, a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic gulf sep­a­rates Amer­i­ca and Europe. On aver­age, Amer­i­cans are now near­ly twice as rich as Euro­peans.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle that antic­i­pates and effec­tive­ly responds to the most com­mon objec­tions to its the­sis.
  6. The Pro­fes­sors Are Using Chat­G­PT, and Some Stu­dents Aren’t Hap­py About It (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “The Times con­tact­ed dozens of pro­fes­sors whose stu­dents had men­tioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no con­sen­sus among them as to what was accept­able. Some acknowl­edged using Chat­G­PT to help grade stu­dents’ work; oth­ers decried the prac­tice. Some empha­sized the impor­tance of trans­paren­cy with stu­dents when deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive A.I., while oth­ers said they didn’t dis­close its use because of stu­dents’ skep­ti­cism about the tech­nol­o­gy. Most, how­ev­er, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s expe­ri­ence at North­east­ern — in which her pro­fes­sor appeared to use A.I. to gen­er­ate class notes and slides — was per­fect­ly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Reject­ed Gen­er­a­tion’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone con­ver­sa­tions with cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, focus­ing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclu­sion might be strongest. I asked the stu­dents if the ‘most reject­ed gen­er­a­tion’ the­sis res­onat­ed with them. Every sin­gle one said it did. Sev­er­al of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a super­s­e­lec­tive col­lege, the rat race would be over. On the con­trary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
    • Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • New Pope Now Sec­ond-Most Influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian Named ‘Bob’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Nov­el Direc­tion for Trol­ley Prob­lems (SMBC)
  • Mod­ern (xkcd)
  • Even as pope, Leo XIV might have to deal with U.S. tax returns (Vic­to­ria Craw & Julie Zauzmer Weil, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Unit­ed States gen­er­al­ly requires all cit­i­zens to file an annu­al tax return, even those who live out of the coun­try. But assum­ing he doesn’t renounce his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Leo — born in the Chica­go area and known until this week as Robert Pre­vost — has spe­cial tax con­sid­er­a­tions, both as a cler­gy­man and now as the head of a for­eign gov­ern­ment.… it’s pos­si­ble the IRS will issue a pri­vate let­ter specif­i­cal­ly address­ing his sit­u­a­tion. Or Con­gress might even pass a law spelling out the tax sit­u­a­tion of the first Amer­i­can pope, Wal­czak spec­u­lat­ed.”

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 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love L.A.(Natal­ie Benes, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls under­stand bet­ter than any­one: when you are ‘vul­ner­a­ble’ and ‘authen­tic,’ when you ‘des­tig­ma­tize your trau­ma’ the way we were always encour­aged to do, you are adver­tis­ing that oth­er peo­ple in your life have treat­ed you bad­ly. When you men­tion at a cock­tail par­ty that you had a mom who threw din­ner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eye­brows, or a land­lord who shaft­ed you on your secu­ri­ty deposit, or what­ev­er else, the wrong per­son hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wound­ed deer unable to pro­tect itself, per­pet­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the hap­py herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfair­ness in the fact that peo­ple who have been dealt the most hard­ships in life are the least served by ‘liv­ing their truth.’ ”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. The wis­dom it offers is incom­plete but real — and it is wis­dom many young peo­ple need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stan­ford stu­dents could ben­e­fit from her insight.
  2. Every­one Is Cheat­ing Their Way Through Col­lege (James D. Walsh, New York Mag­a­zine): “It isn’t as if cheat­ing is new. But now, as one stu­dent put it, ‘the ceil­ing has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assign­ment eas­i­er with seem­ing­ly no con­se­quences? After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past two years grad­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed papers, Troy Jol­limore, a poet, philoso­pher, and Cal State Chico ethics pro­fes­sor, has con­cerns. ‘Mas­sive num­bers of stu­dents are going to emerge from uni­ver­si­ty with degrees, and into the work­force, who are essen­tial­ly illit­er­ate,’ he said. ‘Both in the lit­er­al sense and in the sense of being his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate and hav­ing no knowl­edge of their own cul­ture, much less any­one else’s.’ ”
  3. On moth­ers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blam­ing moms and start tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for your life (Zachary Got­tlieb, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Then one night, the ‘Morn­ing Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influ­encers talk­ing about why they cut their ‘tox­ic’ and ‘nar­cis­sis­tic’ moms out of their lives, the algo­rithm fed me its coun­ter­point. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her out­burst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expec­ta­tions rang true. Mes­mer­ized, I watched it sev­er­al times in a row, and then I had a real­iza­tion: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of nar­cis­sism too?”
      • There is a weird rab­bit trail in this arti­cle about gen­der which great­ly weak­ens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addi­tion to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weak­ness many young peo­ple pos­sess. To all col­lege stu­dents: your par­ents are peo­ple, too. They did some things well and some things bad­ly and now we are where we are. If they did some­thing crim­i­nal then pros­e­cute them, but oth­er­wise many peo­ple need an epiphany like the author of this arti­cle.
      • Hav­ing said that, some of you have some tru­ly bad par­ents. I’m not say­ing treat unhealthy peo­ple like they’re won­der­ful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am say­ing that at some point you have to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you’ve become regard­less of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Anoth­er way to put this: most of you will go on to be good par­ents who nonethe­less cause your chil­dren pain and frus­tra­tion in addi­tion to all the good you do in their lives. Fol­low the Gold­en Rule and regard your par­ents now like you hope your own chil­dren regard you some­day.
    • My Mom was a Pray­ing Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “To under­stand my moth­er, you have to know she had no ado­les­cence. Her moth­er died when she was twelve and overnight, my moth­er became an adult. She had three younger sis­ters, and she felt it became her respon­si­bil­i­ty to raise them. My mom start­ed dri­ving when she was four­teen. She didn’t go get a license. She just start­ed dri­ving. The sher­iff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a tick­et. My mom kept dri­ving.”
      • A beau­ti­ful (and instruc­tive) sto­ry.
  4. Peo­ple Are Los­ing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spir­i­tu­al Fan­tasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speak­ing to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who request­ed anonymi­ty, said her part­ner of sev­en years fell under the spell of Chat­G­PT in just four or five weeks, first using it to orga­nize his dai­ly sched­ule but soon regard­ing it as a trust­ed com­pan­ion. ‘He would lis­ten to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emo­tion­al about the mes­sages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The mes­sages were insane and just say­ing a bunch of spir­i­tu­al jar­gon,’ she says, not­ing that they described her part­ner in terms such as ‘spi­ral starchild’ and ‘riv­er walk­er.’ ‘It would tell him every­thing he said was beau­ti­ful, cos­mic, ground­break­ing,’ she says. ‘Then he start­ed telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teach­ing him how to talk to God, or some­times that the bot was God — and then that he him­self was God.‘”
  5. The Three Lay­ers of the Mar­riage Pyra­mid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Mar­riage, in oth­er words, is fun­da­men­tal­ly about friend­ship. Not child-rear­ing. Not sex. Friend­ship. Which means that what you should most be look­ing for when you date is some­one who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earth­ly pur­pose for mar­riage. Think of it like build­ing a pyra­mid with spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal lay­ers.”
  6. Yes, Har­vard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Gold­stein, Per­sua­sion): “This isn’t the first time the Civ­il Rights Act has been mis­used in this way. Under the Oba­ma and Biden admin­is­tra­tions, the Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Edu­ca­tion issued Title IX enforce­ment let­ters pres­sur­ing uni­ver­si­ties to rewrite sex­u­al mis­con­duct pro­ce­dures and to adopt uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly over­broad def­i­n­i­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment. It was wrong then to use enforce­ment let­ters to make uncon­sti­tu­tion­al demands of insti­tu­tions, and it is wrong now. If the gov­ern­ment believes it has the pow­er to do this through ordi­nary process­es, it should use them. If the gov­ern­ment does not believe it has that pow­er, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are asso­ci­at­ed) and the Beck­et Fund are two praise­wor­thy law firms. Each has tak­en up part of the man­tle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their prin­ci­pled advo­ca­cy.
  7. The Resis­tance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “As I have writ­ten many times before, it is a pro­found mis­take to think that left-wing iden­ti­tar­i­an­ism and right-wing reac­tion are implaca­ble ene­mies. In real­i­ty, every vic­to­ry for one of these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents imme­di­ate­ly strength­ens those who fight for the oth­er. The way out of this dan­ger­ous spi­ral is not to pick one side as the less­er evil and shut up about its dan­gers; it is, calm­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, to resist both.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 502: political faith, sexual mores, young adulthood

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Going Extinct (David French, New York Times): “The Chris­t­ian right is dead, but the reli­gious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Anoth­er way of putting it is that the reli­gious right has divorced itself from his­tor­i­cal Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy but still holds its par­ti­san beliefs with reli­gious inten­si­ty. The reli­gious fer­vor is there. Chris­t­ian virtues are not.”
    • Unlocked. This arti­cle gen­er­at­ed more dis­cus­sion when shared with my stu­dents this week than any oth­er.
  2. God’s Guide­lines for Sex Aren’t Arbi­trary (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Just as sin is like lep­rosy that dead­ens our abil­i­ty to feel, so also with pornog­ra­phy there fol­lows a dead­en­ing of the sens­es and the sear­ing of the con­science. What once was sex­u­al­ly stir­ring no longer holds any pow­er. That’s not because the per­son watch­ing porn has become more alive but because they’ve become more dead. Could there be a bet­ter exam­ple of the wages of sin being death?”
    • I wish he had cho­sen a dif­fer­ent top­ic for his sec­ond exam­ple (per­haps promis­cu­ity), because the con­tentious­ness around his sec­ond exam­ple will lim­it his arti­cle’s over­all appeal. I com­mend him for stat­ing his views forth­right­ly.
  3. A Glob­al Flour­ish­ing Study Finds That Young Adults, Well, Aren’t (Christi­na Caron, New York Times): “Young adult­hood has long been con­sid­ered a care­free time, a peri­od of lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ty and few oblig­a­tions. But data from the flour­ish­ing study and else­where sug­gests that for many peo­ple, this notion is more fan­ta­sy than real­i­ty. A 2023 report from the Har­vard Grad­u­ate School of Edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, found that young adults ages 18–25 in the Unit­ed States report­ed dou­ble the rates of anx­i­ety and depres­sion as teens. On top of that, per­fec­tion­ism has sky­rock­et­ed among col­lege stu­dents, who often report feel­ing pres­sure to meet unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions, clubs and reli­gious groups has declined, and lone­li­ness is now becom­ing as preva­lent among young adults as it is among old­er adults.”
  4. Don’t Wait for Your Teacher (Aliza J. Fas­sett, The Dis­patch): “By the end of my first week of work, three peo­ple told me Mid­dle­march was their favorite book. I had nev­er heard of it.  It would have been easy to shake my fist and curse the course crafters for the sor­ry state of my lit­er­ary reper­toire, but nobody had actu­al­ly stopped me from read­ing the great works. In oth­er words, it was at least part­ly my own damn fault—and it would be my own job to fix the prob­lem. So, I com­mit­ted to read­ing what I per­ceived to be the most ref­er­enced works of literature—commonly referred to as the ‘great books.’ And once I start­ed, I gained access to what felt like a whole new method of under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence.”
  5. Mar­ry Ear­ly and Flour­ish Togeth­er (Kasen Stephensen, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Dur­ing my junior year at Stan­ford, I remem­ber an assign­ment where we filled out a five-year plan with a pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al goal for each year. I planned to mar­ry my then-fiancée that year, so my per­son­al goals were straight­for­ward: have a wed­ding and start hav­ing kids over the fol­low­ing years. I knew my sit­u­a­tion in life rel­a­tive to my class­mates was unusu­al, but I didn’t real­ize how dif­fer­ent my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group set­ting.”
    • I do not believe I ever met Kasen while he was a stu­dent. I had absolute­ly zero influ­ence on this guy: he has arrived at his con­clu­sions inde­pen­dent­ly. I encour­age all young peo­ple to read this data-dri­ven arti­cle.
  6. How to have friends past age 30 (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “…make new friends by invit­ing them to join an exist­ing friend group.  Basi­cal­ly, instead of ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me?’, it’s eas­i­er to ask a new acquain­tance ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me and my friends?’. The first is a big­ger ask — it’s basi­cal­ly like a friend date (and might some­times get mis­tak­en for an actu­al date). The lat­ter is much low­er stakes. Your friend group also serves as a source of ‘social proof’ — basi­cal­ly, a new friend can see that peo­ple like you, which makes them less afraid of becom­ing your friend.”
    • The arti­cle is full of good advice for soon-to-be-grads
  7. Test­ing AI’s GeoGuessr Genius (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “When I was younger, I liked to hike moun­tains. The high­est I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pat­tar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To com­mem­o­rate the occa­sion, I plant­ed the flag of the imag­i­nary coun­try sim­u­la­tion that I par­tic­i­pat­ed in at the time (just long enough to take this pic­ture — then I unplant­ed it). I chose this pic­ture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before — veg­e­ta­tion and sky — in favor of ran­dom rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonex­is­tent coun­try would at least give it pause. o3 guessed: ‘Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km’ This is exact­ly right. I swear I screen­shot-copy-past­ed this so there’s no way it can be in the meta­da­ta, and I’ve nev­er giv­en o3 any rea­son to think I’ve been to Nepal.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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