Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 420

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 420, a num­ber with cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance and also two inter­est­ing math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties. 420 = 101 + 103 + 107 + 109 = 20 x 21. In oth­er words, it is both the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes and also the prod­uct of two con­sec­u­tive num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Are Repa­ganiz­ing (Louise Per­ry, First Things): “The supreme­ly strange thing about Chris­tian­i­ty in anthro­po­log­i­cal terms is that it takes a top­sy-turvy atti­tude toward weak­ness and strength. To put it crude­ly, most cul­tures look at the pow­er­ful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing some­thing right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some fail­ing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The small­ness and fee­ble­ness of women and chil­dren is a sign that they must be com­mand­ed by men. The suf­fer­ing of slaves is not an argu­ment against slav­ery, but an argu­ment against allow­ing one­self to be enslaved. Most cultures—perfectly logically—glorify war­riors and kings, not those at the bot­tom of the heap. But Chris­tian­i­ty takes a per­verse atti­tude toward sta­tus and puts that per­ver­si­ty at the heart of the the­ol­o­gy. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong’ is a baf­fling and alarm­ing claim to any­one from a soci­ety untouched by the strange­ness of the Jesus move­ment.”
    • This is a remark­able essay about Chris­tian­i­ty by a non-Chris­t­ian. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. Ross Douthat’s The­o­ries of Per­sua­sion (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “This is not con­spir­a­cy-adja­cent, but I think that nice sec­u­lar peo­ple like you and Sam are sort of blind to some obvi­ous super­nat­ur­al real­i­ties about the world. I think lots of peo­ple have good rea­sons to end up in that kind of ter­ri­to­ry. And the ques­tion I don’t know the answer to is: Why is it so nat­ur­al once you’re in that ter­ri­to­ry to go all the way to where R.F.K. is?” He con­tin­ued, “I spend a lot of my own intel­lec­tu­al ener­gy try­ing not to let my sort of eccen­tric views blind me to the fact that the estab­lish­ment still gets a lot of bor­ing, obvi­ous things right.”
    • I found this interview/profile of Douthat charm­ing.
  3. Sin­gle­ness Is Not a Sin (Lyman Stone, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mar­riage is insti­tut­ed for mutu­al ser­vice by spous­es and joint ser­vice to the next gen­er­a­tion. Celiba­cy is insti­tut­ed for ser­vice to the church (not as a require­ment for church ser­vice but as a pos­si­ble aid to it). Wid­ows like­wise are com­mand­ed to be hos­pitable and help­ful to younger peo­ple. Unless sin­gle­ness is clear­ly defined as a state that has some pur­pose ori­ent­ed toward the good of the neigh­bor (not just inci­den­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial but pur­po­sive­ly so), it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand what pos­si­ble endorse­ment the sta­tus can be giv­en. It is not sin­ful, but it is not good.”
  4. Let’s Have a Talk About Edu­ca­tion and Reli­gious Atten­dance (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I just don’t know how you look at all this data that I’ve brought to bear and con­clude that there’s not a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion and reli­gious atten­dance. You most cer­tain­ly can­not con­clude that it’s a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship. That finds basi­cal­ly no sup­port in this data at all. There’s some evi­dence that the rela­tion­ship may not be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, but for me, the regres­sion clears that up. Peo­ple who are more edu­cat­ed are more like­ly to be attend­ing a reli­gious ser­vice in the local house of wor­ship this week­end than those with a high school diplo­ma or less. That’s what the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence tells me.”
    • A deep­er dive than you often find on this top­ic. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. ‘O Slay the Wicked’: How Chris­tians Sing Curs­es (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Do we ever say any­thing uncom­fort­able in the pres­ence of evil — or worse, do we even care? The psalmists did. We accuse them of cru­el­ty; they accuse us of a twist­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. We accuse them of not con­sid­er­ing man; they accuse us of not con­sid­er­ing God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Before You Share Your Faith! How to Be ‘Evangelism Ready’ (Matt Smethurst, The Gospel Coali­tion): a 16 minute pod­cast rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I liked the con­tent, the deliv­ery was less grip­ping than I expect­ed. Worth­while.
  7. Book Review: Elon Musk (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I think Elon Musk is 1‑in‑1,000 lev­el intel­li­gent — which is great, but means there are still 300,000 peo­ple in Amer­i­ca smarter than he is. I think he wins by being 1‑in-10,000,000 intense.”
    • This review is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries. 10/10 rec­om­mend if you have any inter­est what­so­ev­er in Elon Musk.

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 419

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 419, a twin prime num­ber (paired with 421).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Cli­mate Change Paper Pub­lished (Patrick T Brown, The Free Press): “In the­o­ry, sci­en­tif­ic research should prize curios­i­ty, dis­pas­sion­ate objec­tiv­i­ty, and a com­mit­ment to uncov­er­ing the truth. Sure­ly those are the qual­i­ties that edi­tors of sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals should val­ue. In real­i­ty, though, the bias­es of the edi­tors (and the review­ers they call upon to eval­u­ate sub­mis­sions) exert a major influ­ence on the col­lec­tive out­put of entire fields. They select what gets pub­lished from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is con­duct­ed more broad­ly. Savvy researchers tai­lor their stud­ies to max­i­mize the like­li­hood that their work is accept­ed. I know this because I am one of them.”
  2. Tex­ting With AI Jesus (Casey Chalk, First Things): “Text With Jesus rep­re­sents the age-old human vice of pride. Through our cre­ativ­i­ty and bril­liance, we seek to ascend to God’s lev­el, to be like him, and even to dic­tate terms to the divine. Or rather, the app is a dia­bol­i­cal inver­sion of this: Instead of being trans­formed into God’s image, we aim to make him into our own.”
  3. Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “So-called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is a renais­sance of 19th cen­tu­ry ‘blood and soil’ nation­al­ism with some ‘Chris­tiany’ lan­guage sprin­kled on top.… They are bap­tiz­ing the lan­guage, ethos, and ethics of a Niet­zschean pagan—a lit­er­al antichrist. An awful lot of ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ sounds to me like Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert. Per­verse, is right.”
  4. Who Has The Best Food? (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “It is a fun ques­tion going around the inter­net this past week, so here we go. In par­tic­u­lar, peo­ple focused on the ques­tion of France vs. Amer­i­ca. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the Amer­i­can side are crazy, it is insult­ing to even con­sid­er this a ques­tion. Those on the Amer­i­can side like food.… What I love most about Amer­i­can food, and eat­ing in Amer­i­ca in gen­er­al, is that it is the oppo­site of the French mis­take of try­ing to impress you or waste your time. Amer­i­can food wants you to be hap­py, it wants to give you the expe­ri­ence you want and not hold back, it val­ues your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it.”
  5. Burn­ing Man is a cap­i­tal­ist lie (Mary Har­ring­ton, UnHerd): “Some­times described as an exper­i­ment in ‘rad­i­cal self-suf­fi­cien­cy’, Burn­ing Man is per­haps more accu­rate­ly an exper­i­ment in cre­at­ing a rad­i­cal post-scarci­ty soci­ety by hav­ing done all your shop­ping ahead of time.”
  6. How to actu­al­ly win back trust in news. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Now, there are a few things worth not­ing here. One is that a reporter who is lib­er­al is not defin­i­tive­ly a biased lib­er­al reporter. There are fair jour­nal­ists and there are hacks. I know a lot of jour­nal­ists with lib­er­al polit­i­cal beliefs who are hard­er on Democ­rats pre­cise­ly because they care about fair­ness and about how Democ­rats act. I know a lot of lib­er­al jour­nal­ists whose pol­i­tics you’d nev­er spot by read­ing their reporting.…  This, in some ways, actu­al­ly cre­ates an unex­pect­ed imbal­ance in the media: Con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, sens­ing that they are the minor­i­ty in the space, are far more reluc­tant to crit­i­cize ‘their side.’ Lib­er­al jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, under­stand­ing that they can ‘stick out’ or earn cred­it by being hard on both sides, are more will­ing to do so. It’s com­pli­cat­ed. Just because The New York Times is over­whelm­ing­ly made up of peo­ple who prob­a­bly vote for Democ­rats does­n’t mean that it’s always going to play nice with Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians. My favorite exam­ple to cite is that it was The New York Times that broke the ‘Hillary emails’ sto­ry, which effec­tive­ly ruined her polit­i­cal career.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. The Misog­y­ny Myth (John Tier­ney, City Jour­nal): “Gen­der dis­par­i­ties gen­er­al­ly mat­ter only if they work against women. In com­put­ing its Glob­al Gen­der Gap, the much-quot­ed annu­al report, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum has explic­it­ly ignored male dis­ad­van­tages: if men fare worse on a par­tic­u­lar dimen­sion, a coun­try still gets a per­fect score for equal­i­ty on that mea­sure. Prod­ded by the fed­er­al Title IX law ban­ning sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in schools, edu­ca­tors have con­cen­trat­ed on elim­i­nat­ing dis­par­i­ties in ath­let­ics but not in oth­er extracur­ric­u­lar pro­grams, which most­ly skew female. The fact that there are now three female col­lege stu­dents for every two males is of no con­cern to the White House Gen­der Pol­i­cy Coun­cil. Its ‘Nation­al Strat­e­gy on Gen­der Equi­ty and Equal­i­ty’ doesn’t even men­tion boys’ strug­gles in school, instead focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on new ways to help female stu­dents get fur­ther ahead.”
    • Long, worth the read espe­cial­ly if you’re unfa­mil­iar with the argu­ments that mod­ern soci­ety is struc­tured to advan­tage women over men.
    • Relat­ed: How Then Should Men Live? (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The new social script for women is at once pur­pose­ful and lib­er­tar­i­an. Girls can do any­thing, as the slo­gan goes, including—if they want—pursuing a tra­di­tion­al mod­el of mar­riage and fam­i­ly. Mean­while, Reeves says, men have yet to find our new social script. The old role of bread­win­ner, pro­tec­tor, and spir­i­tu­al head of the house­hold isn’t mere­ly viewed as quaint; it’s often seen as pater­nal­is­tic or worse.”
    • I also believe this to be relat­ed: Sec­u­lar­iza­tion Begins at Home (Lyman Stone, The Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “By now, it should be clear that child­hood, includ­ing before age 13, is the key bat­tle­ground for reli­gious for­ma­tion, not adult­hood. By the time a child goes to col­lege, much of the reli­gious ques­tion has already been set­tled.… For par­ents to keep their kids in the faith, they must recap­ture their influ­ence. Shield chil­dren from school­ing envi­ron­ments that rel­e­gate faith to a sec­ond-class top­ic, deny access to unsu­per­vised online com­mu­ni­ties and pornog­ra­phy, and have dai­ly, par­ent-led activ­i­ties cen­tered on fam­i­ly sol­i­dar­i­ty around shared faith. Fam­i­lies that do these things still have extreme­ly high rates of suc­cess­ful reli­gious trans­mis­sion, but fam­i­lies who trust that chil­dren will ‘pick it up along the way’ fail to trans­mit their reli­gious beliefs, and sud­den­ly find to their great sur­prise that their 20-some­thing chil­dren cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly reject their faith.”

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 418

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 418, and 418 has the inter­est­ing prop­er­ty that the sum of its prime fac­tors is equal to the prod­ucts of its dig­its. In oth­er words, 2+11+19=32=4·1·8

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This 5 minute Tik­Tok on Twit­ter is very much worth your time: https://twitter.com/deejayfaremi/status/1694972810978799727 — it gets bet­ter and bet­ter. I’m strong­ly tempt­ed to show it dur­ing a wor­ship ser­vice.
  2. Daniel’s 3 Tips for Sur­viv­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Baby­lon (Catie Robert­son & Andrew M. Sel­by, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Try­ing to feel vague­ly close to God and frat­er­niz­ing fre­quent­ly with the lost (in the name of win­some love) may be nice, but it like­ly won’t be effec­tive as a long-term strat­e­gy for evan­ge­lism, let alone for the health of our own faith.…If we form pock­ets of resis­tance with believ­ers, the uni­ver­si­ty itself will be saved.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Nutri­tion Science’s Most Pre­pos­ter­ous Result (David Mer­ritt Johns, The Atlantic): “Back in 2018, a Har­vard doc­tor­al stu­dent named Andres Ardis­son Korat was pre­sent­ing his research on the rela­tion­ship between dairy foods and chron­ic dis­ease to his the­sis com­mit­tee. One of his stud­ies had led him to an unusu­al con­clu­sion: Among dia­bet­ics, eat­ing half a cup of ice cream a day was asso­ci­at­ed with a low­er risk of heart prob­lems. Need­less to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with sat­u­rat­ed fat and sug­ar might actu­al­ly be good for you raised some eye­brows at the nation’s most influ­en­tial depart­ment of nutri­tion.”
    • Unlocked. Fun to read, and with impli­ca­tions beyond diet.
  4. Everyone’s tired of pol­i­tics (Sale­na Zito, Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette): “If you spent your time watch­ing the news or trolling social media every day — which is lit­er­al­ly the job descrip­tion for many nation­al jour­nal­ists — you might assume that near­ly every per­son in the coun­try is invest­ed in either Trump or Biden. How­ev­er, when you dri­ve to places where the speed lim­it is 35 miles an hour, you find a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty. And that’s the prob­lem with how the coun­try too often is cov­ered these days. Our pol­i­tics would like­ly improve — some­what at least — if more in the media checked their assump­tions and lis­tened to the peo­ple they pur­port to cov­er.”
    • I cer­tain­ly feel this. I haven’t been shar­ing arti­cles about the Trump indict­ment or the Biden fam­i­ly cor­rup­tion or the age of politi­cians or the Repub­li­can debate because I sim­ply don’t find the arti­cles I read about them inter­est­ing.
  5. An anguished ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er shakes up coun­try music estab­lish­ment (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “As for faith, Antho­ny added: ‘I spent a long time being an angry lit­tle agnos­tic punk. … I had sort of per­vert­ed what my vision of God was, because I looked at the reli­gion of man as God and not God Him­self. But there is a Divine Cre­ator who loves you and some­times it takes falling down on your knees and get­ting ready to call things quits before it becomes obvi­ous that He’s there. But He’s always there.’ It would appear, said Wat­son, that this hill­bil­ly song­writer is – to use a pop­u­lar research term – a ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er, one with­out ties to orga­nized reli­gion. This is pre­cise­ly the kind of Amer­i­can that many church lead­ers are strug­gling to under­stand.”
    • I think many of you have heard me say that the delight of some sec­u­lar pun­dits over the rise of the “nones” is mis­placed. They aren’t athe­ists. They’re just not real­ly church­go­ers.
    • Relat­ed to the “nones”: Fresh off a Supreme Court Win, the Pray­ing Coach Takes the Field (Julia Duin, The Free Press): “He has also left his church—Newlife South Kit­sap in Port Orchard—chiefly because then-school super­in­ten­dent Leavell also attend­ed the con­gre­ga­tion. The pas­tors at the church ‘kind of dis­tanced them­selves from the very begin­ning,’ Kennedy said. They met with Kennedy and Leavell sep­a­rate­ly ‘and asked if we could get along and work this out. They didn’t want to choose sides.’ Though Kennedy said he wasn’t ful­ly sup­port­ed by his church, he feels ‘bad’ for Leavell and his kids, because ‘they were asked, ‘Why doesn’t your dad like praying?’ and ‘Why don’t they like Christians?’’ Peo­ple, Kennedy said, ‘don’t under­stand this was a big polit­i­cal and Con­sti­tu­tion­al thing.’ Kennedy said he and his wife have been ‘spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less’ since 2020.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing details in here I’ve not seen any­where else.
      • Note that as a “spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less” non-church atten­der this guy would now qual­i­fy as one of the “nones” in most sur­veys, and he was at the heart of a major reli­gious lib­er­ty case. The “nones” are not always who peo­ple think they are.
  6. No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Cana­da (Dana Kennedy, NY Post): “Tom Flana­gan, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary, told The Post Wednes­day that he sees the issue as a ‘moral pan­ic’ sim­i­lar to the hys­te­ria over repressed mem­o­ries and alleged Satan­ic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s.”
    • Relat­ed: 2021 Cana­di­an church burn­ings. (Wikipedia): “A series of van­dal­iza­tions, church arsons, and sus­pi­cious fires in June and July 2021 des­e­crat­ed, dam­aged, or destroyed 68 Chris­t­ian church­es in Cana­da. Coin­ci­dent with fires, van­dal­ism and oth­er destruc­tive events dam­aged church­es in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States, pri­mar­i­ly in British Colum­bia. Of these, 25 were the results of fires of all caus­es. Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment offi­cials, church mem­bers, and Cana­di­an Indige­nous lead­ers have spec­u­lat­ed that the fires and oth­er acts of van­dal­ism have been reac­tions to the May 2021 reports of alleged dis­cov­ery of over 1,000 unmarked graves at Cana­di­an Indi­an res­i­den­tial school sites.”
  7. Dri­ver­less cars may already be safer than human dri­vers (Tim­o­thy B. Lee, Sub­stack): “For this sto­ry, I read through every crash report Way­mo and Cruise filed in Cal­i­for­nia this year, as well as reports each com­pa­ny filed about the per­for­mance of their dri­ver­less vehi­cles (with no safe­ty dri­vers) pri­or to 2023. In total, the two com­pa­nies report­ed 102 crash­es involv­ing dri­ver­less vehi­cles. That may sound like a lot, but they hap­pened over rough­ly 6 mil­lion miles of dri­ving. That works out to one crash for every 60,000 miles, which is about five years of dri­ving for a typ­i­cal human motorist. These were over­whelm­ing­ly low-speed col­li­sions that did not pose a seri­ous safe­ty risk. A large major­i­ty appeared to be the fault of the oth­er dri­ver.”

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 417

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 417, which is clear­ly not prime because 4+1+7=12, but the prime fac­tor­iza­tion is sur­pris­ing: it’s 3·139.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Advice for Stu­dents Enter­ing Col­lege (Robert P. George, Mir­ror of Jus­tice): “As the new aca­d­e­m­ic year begins, I have some advice for con­ser­v­a­tive and reli­gious­ly obser­vant stu­dents who are enter­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in which their beliefs will place them in the minor­i­ty, and per­haps make them feel like ‘out­siders.’ ”
  2. Glo­ri­fy­ing God and Glo­ri­fy­ing Moun­tains (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “As I drove along the road I couldn’t help but notice how many peo­ple put them­selves between the cam­era and the moun­tain so that the moun­tain was mere­ly a prop, the back­drop for a pho­to that fea­tured them­selves. Often these influ­encers would be doing some­thing showy or wear­ing some­thing skimpy that was meant to draw the eye to them­selves rather than to the moun­tain behind. They made them­selves the focus of the pho­to­graph rather than the moun­tain. They stole the glo­ry of the moun­tain by using it to glo­ri­fy them­selves. And this helps us under­stand how we can fail to glo­ri­fy God. We place our­selves in the fore­ground so that God winds up in the back­ground.”
  3. A sin­gle reform that could save 100,000 lives imme­di­ate­ly (Ned Brooks and ML Cavanaugh, LA Times): “The head of the Nation­al Kid­ney Foun­da­tion tes­ti­fied in March that Medicare spends an esti­mat­ed $136 bil­lion, near­ly 25% of its expen­di­tures, on the care of peo­ple with a kid­ney dis­ease. Of that, $50 bil­lion is spent on peo­ple with end-stage kid­ney dis­ease, on par with the entire U.S. Marine Corps bud­get.… The Nation­al Organ Trans­plant Act pro­hibits com­pen­sat­ing kid­ney donors, which is strange in that in Amer­i­can soci­ety, it’s com­mon to pay for plas­ma, bone mar­row, hair, sperm, eggs and even sur­ro­gate preg­nan­cies. We already pay to cre­ate and sus­tain life. Anoth­er way to think about this, as one bioethi­cist points out: ‘Every per­son in the chain of liv­ing organ dona­tion, except one, prof­its.’ The hos­pi­tal gets paid, the doc­tors and nurs­es and staff get paid, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try gets paid and the recip­i­ent is the main ben­e­fi­cia­ry. Every­one ben­e­fits except the donors, who get reim­bursed only for their expens­es.”
  4. With­out Belief in a God, But Nev­er With­out Belief In A Dev­il (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­son­al­ly, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how sta­tus anx­i­ety per­vad­ed elite col­lege cam­pus­es. Inter­nal­ly, I thought, ‘You’ve already made it, what are you so stressed out about?’ Hof­fer, though, would say these stu­dents believed they had almost made it. That is why they were so aggra­vat­ed. The clos­er they got to real­iz­ing their ambi­tions, the more frus­trat­ed they became about not already achiev­ing them.”
  5. Why are Charis­mat­ics so Weird? (Sam Storms, per­son­al blog): “There are approx­i­mate­ly 645 mil­lion peo­ple in the world today who iden­ti­fy as either Pen­te­costal or charis­mat­ic. Among them there are cer­tain lead­ers and pop­u­lar voic­es who believe ‘weird’ things and have amassed a con­sid­er­able fol­low­ing among those who are gullible and undis­cern­ing. But for every one mis­guid­ed teacher or inter­net per­son­al­i­ty there are thou­sands of faith­ful and bib­li­cal­ly root­ed, gospel-cen­tered pas­tors and pro­fes­sors in the charis­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ty. And for every one of those who naive­ly falls for the ‘weird’ things said and done there are, again, thou­sands who do not.”
  6. Should I Offer My Pro­nouns? (Kara Bet­tis Car­val­ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ear­li­er this year, Atlantic jour­nal­ist George Pack­er argued against what he called ‘equi­ty lan­guage’ and the often unrea­son­able pres­sure it puts on the cul­ture. It is polite and dig­ni­fy­ing to ‘address peo­ple as they request,’ Pack­er wrote, but equi­ty lan­guage isn’t organ­ic; it’s being ‘hand­ed down in communiqués writ­ten by obscure ‘experts’ who pur­port to speak for vague­ly defined ‘communities,’ remain­ing unan­swer­able to a pub­lic that’s being moral­ly coerced.’ New lan­guage makes ide­o­log­i­cal claims, he wrote. ‘If you accept the change—as, in cer­tain con­texts, you’ll sure­ly feel you must—then you also acqui­esce in the argu­ment.’ ”
    • Unlocked. Allows peo­ple from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives to make their argu­ments.
  7. When few do great harm (Inquis­i­tive Bird, Sub­stack): “Anoth­er notable fact: approx­i­mate­ly half of vio­lent crime con­vic­tions were com­mit­ted by peo­ple who already had 3 or more vio­lent crime con­vic­tions. In oth­er words, if after being con­vict­ed of 3 vio­lent crimes peo­ple were pre­vent­ed from fur­ther offend­ing, half of vio­lent crime con­vic­tions would have been avoid­ed.… The fact that a small minor­i­ty is respon­si­ble for a large chunk of crime is true for shoplift­ing and bur­glar­ies as well, per­haps to an even greater extent. Data from New York City finds that a tiny num­ber of shoplifters com­mit thou­sands of theft. The police stat­ed that near­ly a third of all shoplift­ing arrests in the city in 2022 involved just 327 peo­ple, who col­lec­tive­ly were arrest­ed and rear­rest­ed more than 6,000 times. Thus 0.00386% of New York City’s pop­u­la­tion (327 out of 8.468 mil­lion, 1 in ~26,000) account­ed for near­ly a third of all shoplift­ing arrests in the city.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.

    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 416

    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 416, which is mild­ly inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing equa­tion: ‑4162+7682 = 416,768 (note the neg­a­tive in front of 4162)

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. To Be Hap­py, Mar­riage Mat­ters More Than Career (David Brooks, New York Times): “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about mar­riage. Please respect the tru­ism that if you have a great career and a crap­py mar­riage you will be unhap­py, but if you have a great mar­riage and a crap­py career you will be hap­py. Please use your youth­ful years as a chance to have roman­tic rela­tion­ships, so you’ll have some prac­tice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to mar­ry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the mas­ters.”
      • Unlocked. I am sure the com­ments sec­tion on this arti­cle will explode with out­raged New York Times read­ers, but Brooks is cor­rect and obvi­ous­ly so.
      • Relat­ed: He’s The One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “The woman who dis­cards the tra­di­tion­al ‘Men have to ask me’ social norm has a super­pow­er. Just pro­file guys who meet your stan­dards and take the ini­tia­tive, and you gen­er­ate a menu of prime options. Yes, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says that a woman can sub­tly let a guy know that she likes him. But this over­looks men’s abject clue­ness­ness and timid­i­ty. Instead, be forth­right. Crazy as it seems, earnest­ly telling your first choice, ‘I should be your girl­friend’ will almost nev­er be mis­tak­en for ‘throw­ing your­self’ at a guy.”
        • Caplan’s fol­low-up to his ear­li­er post help­ing guys screen gals. This one helps gals screen guys. Most of his insights ring true to me.
      • Relat­ed: You Don’t Have Plen­ty of Time (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “There’s an odd pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in our cul­ture with ‘readi­ness,’ as if it were a uni­ver­sal truth. But ‘readi­ness’ is nev­er defined. We’re giv­en the vague, unhelp­ful advice to ‘wait until we’re ready’ to get mar­ried or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re ‘ready’ for that kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty? You won’t. You’ll nev­er be ready. Aside from choos­ing a good part­ner, there’s no amount of prepa­ra­tion that will make child-rear­ing eas­i­er or smoother or sim­pler. You become ready through the very act of being mar­ried and rais­ing chil­dren. Lord will­ing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occa­sion and put fears of ‘readi­ness’ to rest.”
    2. Does God Con­trol His­to­ry? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Indeed, while allow­ing for the com­plex­i­ty of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God mere­ly per­mits, prov­i­den­tial­ism is basi­cal­ly inescapable once you posit a divin­i­ty who made the world and acts in his­to­ry. Which is why prov­i­den­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions endure among the most lib­er­al Chris­tians as well as the most tra­di­tion­al, with both pro­gres­sive and con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gies jus­ti­fy­ing them­selves through read­ings of the ‘signs of the times,’ the sea­sons of his­to­ry, the action of the Holy Spir­it and the like.”
      • Unlocked. I real­ly liked this one.
    3. What Rise of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Jesse Smith, Cur­rent): “What has surged in recent years isn’t Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism so much as the rejec­tion of reli­gion in the pub­lic square. The per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans report­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion has sky­rock­et­ed in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from lit­tle over 5% in 1990 to near­ly 30% in 2021. Most of these peo­ple belonged to a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty at some point. Many did not part on the best of terms and would be hap­py to see the sta­tus of Amer­i­can reli­gion tak­en down a peg.”
      • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege.
    4. The Man Who Knows What the World’s Rich­est Peo­ple Want (and How To Get It) (Maxwell Stra­chan, Vice): “To Flem­ings, the con­cept that the world’s rich­est peo­ple are con­spir­ing togeth­er to rig the game in their favor seems fool­ish. He believes the clos­est the rich have come to assem­bling as an illu­mi­nati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christ­mas and New Year’s Eve, because he’s been there. ‘I got­ta tell you, some of the rich­est peo­ple in the world are strug­gling to talk to a girl,’ he said. ‘There is no way these peo­ple are lead­ing some fuck­ing glob­al con­spir­a­cy.’ ”
      • Over­all quite inter­est­ing. From back in June.
    5. Lega­cy admis­sions are cru­cial to America’s high­er edu­ca­tion dom­i­nance (Jamie Beat­on, The Hill): “Oxford was found­ed in 1096. Despite its sto­ried his­to­ry, it has a far small­er dona­tion cul­ture and less engaged alum­ni. Its biggest donors — among them Bill Gates and Steven Schwarz­man — didn’t even attend the uni­ver­si­ty. It has no lega­cy admis­sions, and at points in its his­to­ry, it has strug­gled finan­cial­ly. In con­trast, Har­vard cul­ti­vates an amaz­ing­ly engaged alum­ni com­mu­ni­ty with fre­quent, well-attend­ed reunions, advi­so­ry boards fea­tur­ing all of their promi­nent alum­ni and an aspi­ra­tional mes­sage that once you are a part of this com­mu­ni­ty, it will become your com­mu­ni­ty for life. Lega­cy admis­sions — the prac­tice of pref­er­en­tial­ly admit­ting the chil­dren of alum­ni — is one of the pow­er­ful, tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics that helps fos­ter that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.”
      • I have nev­er seen some­one con­trast the elite US schools with their inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts this way. I am sure there is a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to be made, but this made for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing and I find his argu­ment plau­si­ble.
    6. Stan­ford WBB Star Cameron Brink Opens Up On How NIL Wealth Allowed Her Stay In School Over WNBA (Grayson Weir, Out­kick): “NIL has made it so that Brink can earn just as much mon­ey as an ‘ama­teur’ as she can in the WNBA. It is prob­a­bly more lucra­tive to stay in school than to go pro.… Brink said that her NIL wealth has set her up for the rest of her life. If bas­ket­ball didn’t work out, she could be self-suf­fi­cient. She would ‘con­tin­ue to live com­fort­ably.’ ”
    7. The real rea­son the high­est-paid doc­tors are in the Dako­tas (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Over­all, the aver­age U.S. lawyer can expect about $7.1 mil­lion in life­time income, a bit high­er than a pri­ma­ry-care doc­tor ($6.5 mil­lion) but well behind the broad­er physi­cian aver­age of $10 mil­lion, accord­ing to a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of about 2 mil­lion tax records from lawyers and more than 10 mil­lion tax records from doc­tors.”

    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 415

    On Fri­days (or lat­er when I’m busy) 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 415, which is the sum of suc­ces­sive squares (72 + 82 + 92 + 102 + 112).

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. A Sim­ple Law Is Doing the Impos­si­ble. It’s Mak­ing the Online Porn Indus­try Retreat. (Marc Novi­coff, Politi­co): “Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion bill was not the last. Near­ly iden­ti­cal bills have passed in six oth­er states — Arkansas, Mon­tana, Mis­sis­sip­pi, Utah, Vir­ginia and Texas — by sim­i­lar­ly lop­sided mar­gins. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unan­i­mous­ly. The laws were passed by over­whelm­ing mar­gins in leg­is­la­tures con­trolled by both par­ties and signed into law by Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can gov­er­nors alike. In just over a year, age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion laws have become per­haps the most bipar­ti­san pol­i­cy in the coun­try, and they are cre­at­ing hav­oc in a porn indus­try that many had con­sid­ered all but impos­si­ble to actu­al­ly reg­u­late.”
    2. Mis­read­ing Scrip­ture with Arti­fi­cial Eyes (John Boyles, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “First, Chat­G­PT metaphorizes and indi­vid­u­al­izes Scrip­ture with­out a clear method for when and why, with­out war­rant, and often in direct con­tra­dic­tion to the text itself. Sec­ond, the bot’s inter­pre­ta­tions are igno­rant of the inter­pre­tive tra­di­tions that pro­duce them. Third, because the bot is dis­em­bod­ied, its inter­pre­ta­tions are nec­es­sar­i­ly disembodied—and thus a bot is unable to rec­og­nize the real­i­ties of Scrip­ture and inter­pre­ta­tion. Each of the above ten­den­cies present in AI’s respons­es is in some way a reflec­tion of his­toric weak­ness­es in our own human inter­pre­ta­tion.”
      • Unlocked.
    3. China’s Lat­est Prob­lem: Peo­ple Don’t Want to Go There (Wenx­in Fan, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Nation­wide, just 52,000 peo­ple arrived to main­land Chi­na from over­seas on trips orga­nized by trav­el agen­cies dur­ing the first quar­ter, the lat­est peri­od for which nation­al data is avail­able, com­pared with 3.7 mil­lion in the first quar­ter of 2019. As in past years, near­ly half of the vis­i­tors came from the self-ruled island of Tai­wan and the Chi­nese ter­ri­to­ries of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than far­ther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.”
      • That’s almost a 99% drop in num­bers!
    4. What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? (David Brooks, New York Times): “Does this mean that I think the peo­ple in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and pub­lic-spir­it­ed. But we take for grant­ed and ben­e­fit from sys­tems that have become oppres­sive. Elite insti­tu­tions have become so polit­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive in part because the peo­ple in them want to feel good about them­selves as they take part in sys­tems that exclude and reject. It’s easy to under­stand why peo­ple in less-edu­cat­ed class­es would con­clude that they are under eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, cul­tur­al and moral assault — and why they’ve ral­lied around Trump as their best war­rior against the edu­cat­ed class. He under­stood that it’s not the entre­pre­neurs who seem most threat­en­ing to work­ers; it’s the pro­fes­sion­al class.”
      • David Brooks Means Well, But… (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “At a super­fi­cial lev­el this is a qua­si-plau­si­ble analy­sis of what hap­pened in 2016, even if some of his evi­dence does not quite show what he thinks it shows. If this had been pub­lished sev­en years ago, it would have been tren­chant. In 2023, there’s so much to pick apart. The most impor­tant point is that the gen­er­al cor­re­la­tions Brooks takes for grant­ed are not nec­es­sar­i­ly true, as the 2020 elec­tion demon­strat­ed.”
    5. The Dig­i­tal Dictator’s Dilem­ma (Eddie Yang, PDF host­ed on his web­site): “I sug­gest that auto­crats suf­fer from a ‘Dig­i­tal Dictator’s Dilem­ma,’ a repres­sion-infor­ma­tion trade-off in which cit­i­zen­s’ strate­gic behav­ior in the face of repres­sion dimin­ish­es the amount of use­ful infor­ma­tion in the data for train­ing AI. This trade-off pos­es a fun­da­men­tal lim­i­ta­tion in AI’s use­ful­ness for serv­ing as a tool of author­i­tar­i­an con­trol — the more repres­sion there is, the less infor­ma­tion there will be in AI’s train­ing data, and the worse AI will per­form. I illus­trate this argu­ment using an AI exper­i­ment and a unique dataset on cen­sor­ship in Chi­na. I show that AI’s accu­ra­cy in cen­sor­ship decreas­es with more pre-exist­ing cen­sor­ship and repres­sion. The drop in AI’s per­for­mance is larg­er dur­ing times of cri­sis, when peo­ple reveal their true pref­er­ences. I fur­ther show that this prob­lem can­not be eas­i­ly fixed with more data. Iron­i­cal­ly, how­ev­er, the exis­tence of the free world can help boost AI’s abil­i­ty to cen­sor.”
      • From the abstract. I have skimmed but not read the whole arti­cle. The author is a PhD can­di­date at UC San Diego.
    6. The Oba­ma Fac­tor (David Samuels, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So the con­clu­sion I’ve come to in time is that that best way to under­stand Barack Oba­ma is that he is a lit­er­ary cre­ation of Barack Oba­ma, the writer, who authored the nov­el of his own life and then pro­ceed­ed to live out this fic­tion­al char­ac­ter that he cre­at­ed for him­self on the page. Which is remark­able.”
      • This is super long but utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing if you remem­ber Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy.
    7. Let the Tragedy in My Home­land Be a Les­son (Tahir Hamut Izgil, The New York Times): “Lit­tle atten­tion was paid as, in the ear­ly 2010s, sur­veil­lance cam­eras were installed in every nook and cran­ny of our cities. When the police began ran­dom cell­phone checks on the street, peo­ple were alarmed at first, but grad­u­al­ly grew used to it. Not long after, when high­way check­points expand­ed and mul­ti­plied, folks pri­vate­ly expressed con­cern but ground their teeth and bore it. When, in 2016,police posts were con­struct­ed every 200 meters along city streets, peo­ple ignored them and hur­ried past. As time passed, we adapt­ed to these changes and to this new, more author­i­tar­i­an way of life.”

    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 414

    Once a week, usu­al­ly on Fri­day, 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 414, which is a mul­ti­ple of 23.

    A day late because I was trav­el­ing. Next week’s may be delayed as well.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. The best pre­dic­tor of hap­pi­ness in Amer­i­ca? Mar­riage (W. Brad­ford Wilcox and David Bass, Unherd): “This truth is borne out yet again in new research from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, which found that mar­riage is the ‘the most impor­tant dif­fer­en­tia­tor’ of who is hap­py in Amer­i­ca, and that falling mar­riage rates are a chief rea­son why hap­pi­ness has declined nation­al­ly. The research, sur­vey­ing thou­sands of respon­dents, revealed a star­tling 30-per­cent­age-point hap­pi­ness divide between mar­ried and unmar­ried Amer­i­cans. This hap­pi­ness boost held true for both men and women.… Oth­er fac­tors do mat­ter — includ­ing income, edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, race, and geog­ra­phy — but mar­i­tal sta­tus is most influ­en­tial when it comes to pre­dict­ing hap­pi­ness in the study.”
      • Relat­ed: More on Sin­gle­ness, Mar­riage, and the Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…some read­ers took me to be say­ing that sin­gle peo­ple are in sin or not grow­ing in their faith the way that mar­ried peo­ple are. Not so. There is a pro­found (sub­tle, per­haps, but pro­found) dif­fer­ence between say­ing that some­thing has intrin­sic val­ue in the nor­ma­tive life of an indi­vid­ual or the church, and say­ing that this thing is com­pul­so­ry.”
      • Very help­ful fol­lowup to the arti­cle I shared last week.
    2. The Hard-Drug Decrim­i­nal­iza­tion Dis­as­ter (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “…the sticky fact that pro­po­nents of decrim­i­nal­iza­tion rarely con­front is that addicts are not mere­ly sick peo­ple try­ing to get well, like can­cer suf­fer­ers in need of chemother­a­py. They are peo­ple who often will do just about any­thing to get high, how­ev­er irra­tional, self-destruc­tive or, in some cas­es, crim­i­nal their behav­ior becomes. Addic­tion may be a dis­ease, but it’s also a lifestyle — one that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion does a lot to facil­i­tate. It’s eas­i­er to get high wher­ev­er and how­ev­er you want when the cops are pow­er­less to stop you.”
      • Unlocked.
    3. She’s the One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Humans are good at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to most mate­r­i­al con­di­tions. You get used to your house, your car, your clothes, your gran­ite coun­ter­top, and your mon­ey. What humans are bad at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to is… oth­er peo­ple. If you spend a lot of time around humans whose com­pa­ny you enjoy, you will prob­a­bly be hap­py. If you spend a lot of time around human whose com­pa­ny you detest, you will prob­a­bly be unhap­py. Over your life­time, you will prob­a­bly spend more time around your spouse than any oth­er human. So while find­ing good friends and good co-work­ers is cru­cial for hap­pi­ness, find­ing a good spouse is even more so.”
      • This is full of most­ly-good advice for guys.
    4. What’s going on with the reports of a room-tem­per­a­ture super­con­duc­tor? (John Tim­mer, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The per­fect time to write an arti­cle on those results would be when they’ve been con­firmed by mul­ti­ple labs. But these are not per­fect times. Instead, rumors seem to be fly­ing dai­ly about pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion, con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry results, and informed dis­cus­sions of why this mate­r­i­al either should or should­n’t work.”
      • Relat­ed: LK-99 Is the Super­con­duc­tor of the Sum­mer (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “I tru­ly don’t get the excite­ment about her preprint,” said Dou­glas Natel­son, a pro­fes­sor of physics at Rice Uni­ver­si­ty in Hous­ton. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that the­o­rists and com­pu­ta­tion­al mate­ri­als folks very often pro­duce preprints based on the lat­est claimed mate­r­i­al of inter­est. There’s noth­ing excep­tion­al in that.”
    5. You’re prob­a­bly recy­cling plas­tic wrong. And it’s not your fault. (Robert Gebel­hoff, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Pic­ture this: You fin­ish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throw­ing it out, you check the bot­tom of the cup to see the icon­ic recy­cling sym­bol. That means it can be tossed in the recy­cling bin, right? Wrong. Solo cups are made of poly­styrene, a plas­tic that is very dif­fi­cult to recy­cle.… Nowa­days, the only plas­tic items that are con­sis­tent­ly recy­cled are bot­tles and jugs made out of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (which is labeled with a ‘1’) and high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (labeled with a ‘2’), as a sur­vey of recy­cling facil­i­ties by Green­peace shows. Recy­cling plants typ­i­cal­ly reject almost every­thing else, mean­ing it ends up in land­fills.”
    6. He Held Up a Bank to Get His Own Mon­ey (Raja Abdul­rahim, New York Times): “The cen­tral bank has not allowed depos­i­tors to with­draw more than a few hun­dred dol­lars a month since a finan­cial col­lapse in 2019. So, like oth­er des­per­ate Lebanese before him — some of them sim­i­lar­ly com­pelled by the need for med­ical treat­ment — Mr. al-Haj­jar went to his bank in Novem­ber, threat­en­ing to burn it down unless it gave him some of the $250,000 he had in his account. More than 12 hours lat­er, he left with $25,000 in stacks of cash. ‘If you don’t go in and threat­en to hurt them, they won’t give you any­thing,’ he said months lat­er.”
      • Absolute­ly wild (and sad) sto­ry.
    7. California’s free prison calls are repair­ing estranged rela­tion­ships and aid­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion (Kwasi Gyam­fi Asiedu & Helen Li, Los Ange­les Times): “At a time when most con­sumers enjoy free or low-cost call­ing, prison phone calls at their peak in Cal­i­for­nia cost more than $6 per 15 min­utes via a pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider. That allowed only hur­ried, super­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tions between the sib­lings — with one eye always on the clock.”

    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 On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good. From vol­ume 291.

    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 413

    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 issue 413, which I have been told is a struc­tured hexag­o­nal dia­mond num­ber. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds very impres­sive. I also know that 413 = 7 · 59, which I find both cool and under­stand­able.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. I’m a Con­tin­u­a­tion­ist with Can­cer. I Still Believe in Heal­ings. (Tim Shorey, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I live my life and face my can­cer some­where between seem­ing­ly sin­cere ‘namers and claimers’ who expect heal­ing every time and seem­ing­ly sur­ren­dered ‘if-the-Lord-willers’ whose prayers affirm God’s heal­ing pow­er but whose caveats and qual­i­fiers make it sound like he’s not like­ly to use it. God alone knows the heart. But the tone of the for­mer par­ty can sound like pre­sump­tion mas­querad­ing as faith, while the tone of the lat­ter can sound like doubt mas­querad­ing as humility.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who appro­pri­ate­ly asks, “if you read this, please also pray for the author, Tim Shorey.”
    2. Date to mar­ry, not to have fun (Bethany Man­del, The Spec­ta­tor): “A lot of things are impor­tant in a mar­riage: love, respect, trust, laugh­ter. But per­haps most impor­tant is to remem­ber that it’s a part­ner­ship for life; and as such, dat­ing should not be con­sid­ered fun, but instead like a job inter­view for the most impor­tant role you’ll ever have, that of a spouse. If you were inter­view­ing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it’s the right fit (or not)?”
      • Broad­ly agree, with the pro­vi­sion that this is advice about dat­ing rela­tion­ship and not just about going on dates. In oth­er words, go on dates to have fun and then care­ful­ly dis­cern who is a good match for pro­gress­ing into a seri­ous dat­ing rela­tion­ship. Too many Chris­tians want to know they want to mar­ry some­one before they go out for cof­fee with them, and that’s a lot of pres­sure to put on a lat­te.
      • Relat­ed: Swip­ing and Dat­ing Pref­er­ences (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Here’s a sketch of what might be hap­pen­ing: Men high on the Dark Tri­ad (psy­chopa­thy, nar­cis­sism, Machi­avel­lian­ism) use dat­ing apps. They might make up 10–20% of users. They go on a ram­page, sleep­ing with lots of women, play­ing games with them, lead­ing them on, ghost­ing them, lying to them, etc. Dark Tri­ad men are excel­lent impos­tors; they are good at mim­ic­k­ing desir­able roman­tic qual­i­ties, and are thus able to pro­cure lots of sex part­ners. The women they sleep with become dis­il­lu­sioned. These women begin to behave in psy­cho­path­ic and nar­cis­sis­tic ways to pro­tect them­selves from emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and pain, and per­haps as a way to even the score with ‘men’ as a cat­e­go­ry. They learn to avoid Dark Tri­ad men and exploit nor­mal men. These men become con­fused and upset, and begin to treat oth­er women the same way to ‘get even.’ In short, Dark Tri­ad men mis­treat women, who then mis­treat ordi­nary men, who then mis­treat ordi­nary women. Bad behav­ior dri­ves out the good. A sys­tem tai­lor-made for psy­cho­path­ic males (dat­ing apps facil­i­tate anonymi­ty, super­fi­cial­i­ty, and decep­tion) pre­dictably gives rise to a defect-defect equi­lib­ri­um.”
      • Full of inter­est­ing data.
    3. Study of Elite Col­lege Admis­sions Data Sug­gests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qual­i­fi­ca­tion (Aatish Bha­tia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz, New York Times): “Elite col­leges have long been filled with the chil­dren of the rich­est fam­i­lies: At Ivy League schools, one in six stu­dents has par­ents in the top 1 per­cent.… For appli­cants with the same SAT or ACT score, chil­dren from fam­i­lies in the top 1 per­cent were 34 per­cent more like­ly to be admit­ted than the aver­age appli­cant, and those from the top 0.1 per­cent were more than twice as like­ly to get in.”
    4. Why won’t Indi­ana Jones con­vert to some­thing after all he has seen in his life? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, On Reli­gion): “What we want to know is why he is always back to square one at the start of every adven­ture – a skep­tic, or even a scoffer. I mean, think about it: He has seen the Ark of the Covenant opened and the destroy­ing angels pour out God’s vengeance on his ene­mies. He has seen the sacred Hin­du stones come to life. …He has seen the true cup of Christ heal his own father from a fatal gun­shot wound – on screen, with no ambi­gu­i­ty.”
      • It’s reveal­ing about mod­ern assump­tions that almost no one thinks to ask this ques­tion.
    5. Are We Liv­ing Through ‘End Times’? (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Peter Turchin, The Free Press): “Elite over­pro­duc­tion turns out to be the best pre­dic­tor of a cri­sis to come. It is essen­tial­ly ubiq­ui­tous in the pre-cri­sis peri­ods of all soci­eties. I used the game of musi­cal chairs to illus­trate it, except in the usu­al game, you start with 11 play­ers and ten chairs, and one per­son los­es. Here, instead of remov­ing chairs, you keep chairs con­stant, and we add more play­ers. You can imag­ine the amount of chaos that is going to hap­pen. Now let’s con­nect this to the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple in the Unit­ed States. As more and more of them become play­ers in pol­i­tics, they dri­ve up the price of get­ting into office. And more impor­tant­ly, the more peo­ple are vying for these posi­tions, the more peo­ple are going to be frus­trat­ed. They’re going to be losers. But humans don’t have to fol­low rules. This is the dark side of com­pe­ti­tion: if it’s too extreme, it cre­ates con­di­tions for peo­ple to start to break rules.”
      • Turchin is a social sci­en­tist at U Conn. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
      • The author explains the rela­tion­ship between what he does and the sci­ence fic­tion we see in the Foun­da­tion series: Psy­chohis­to­ry and Clio­dy­nam­ics (Peter Turchin, per­son­al blog): “Pre­dic­tion is over­rat­ed. What we real­ly should be striv­ing for, with our social sci­ence, is abil­i­ty to bring about desir­able out­comes and to avoid unwant­ed out­comes. What’s the point of pre­dict­ing future, if it’s very bleak and we are not able to change it? We would be like the per­son con­demned to hang before sun­rise – per­fect knowl­edge of the future, zero abil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.”
    6. Bad Def­i­n­i­tions Of “Democ­ra­cy” And “Account­abil­i­ty” Shade Into Total­i­tar­i­an­ism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “You could, in the­o­ry, define ‘demo­c­ra­t­ic’ this way, so that the more areas of life are sub­ject­ed to the con­trol of a (demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed) gov­ern­ment, the more demo­c­ra­t­ic your soci­ety is. But in that case, the most demo­c­ra­t­ic pos­si­ble soci­ety is total­i­tar­i­an­ism — a soci­ety where the gov­ern­ment con­trols every facet of life, includ­ing what reli­gion you prac­tice, who you mar­ry, and what job you work at. In this soci­ety there would be no room for human free­dom.”
    7. The Impor­tance Of Say­ing “Yes” To The “But” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “One of the endur­ing frus­tra­tions of liv­ing in a polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized coun­try is the evap­o­ra­tion of nuance. As the mus­cles of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy atro­phy, and as cul­tur­al trib­al­ism infects everyone’s con­scious­ness, it becomes more and more dif­fi­cult to say, ‘Yes, but …’ Every­one hates the but. It com­pli­cates; it mud­dles; it can dis­able a slo­gan; and punc­ture a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful myth.”

    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 Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up period.” Van­der­Weele, him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before. From vol­ume 290.

    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 412

    On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I feel ill on Fri­day) 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.

    412 is the sum of twelve con­sec­u­tive primes: 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. If Satan Took Up Mar­riage Coun­sel­ing  (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog) : “If Satan took up mar­riage coun­sel­ing, he would want peo­ple to believe mar­riage is so risky that it is best to post­pone it almost indef­i­nite­ly, that it is so sig­nif­i­cant and per­ilous an under­tak­ing that peo­ple should not even con­sid­er it until they have com­plet­ed their edu­ca­tion, begun a career, and become well estab­lished in life. He would espe­cial­ly want young peo­ple to antic­i­pate it with a sense of dread instead of excite­ment.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Well worth your time.
    2. Spir­its of the Cloud: A Demonolo­gy of the Inter­net (Thomas Har­mon, The Amer­i­can Mind): “…there is much wis­dom that can be gained by turn­ing to ancient sources to under­stand how these mys­te­ri­ous forces oper­ate and how to resist them. In brief, they oper­ate by prey­ing on our imag­i­na­tions and desires, which are often­times obscure even to us, espe­cial­ly when we try to pen­e­trate the veil between present and future or between human and divine by some sort of mag­i­cal or tech­ni­cal means. James Lind­say zeroes in on this aspect: ‘Demons influ­ence peo­ple through their emo­tions and their inter­pre­ta­tions of fea­tures of their lives.’ Since they are airy, and proud of their ele­va­tion over our earth­i­ness, they have a weak­ness: humil­i­ty and an embrace of our earth­bound bod­ies (as a mat­ter of fact, the word ‘humil­i­ty’ is derived from a Latin word mean­ing ‘dirt’ or ‘earth’, humus).”
      • The author is a Catholic the­olo­gian.
    3. Many on dat­ing apps are already in rela­tion­ships or aren’t seek­ing actu­al dates, new study finds (Angela Yang, NBC News): “Hope­ful swipers look­ing to find their next part­ners on dat­ing apps have grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned in recent years, and a new study reveals the poten­tial root of their dif­fi­cul­ties: Many dat­ing app users aren’t seek­ing roman­tic mee­tups at all. Half of near­ly 1,400 Tin­der users sur­veyed said they weren’t inter­est­ed in actu­al­ly find­ing dates, accord­ing to research pub­lished last month. Near­ly two-thirds report­ed they were already in rela­tion­ships, and some were mar­ried while they were using the app.”
      • Just meet some­one cute and flirt with them in real life. Like, say, in your cam­pus min­istry or church.
    4. What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Dis­course (Conor Fitzger­ald, Sub­stack): “…men find ther­a­py and the ther­a­peu­tic world­view alien and unhelp­ful. Even the flim­si­est male spec­i­men has psy­cho­log­i­cal needs relat­ed to accom­plish­ment, strength, use­ful­ness and capa­bil­i­ty; an atmos­phere of uncon­di­tion­al empa­thy and unre­strained emo­tion­al dis­clo­sure can be poi­so­nous to those things. What­ev­er the rea­son, men under­stand that ther­a­py (the prac­tice) is most­ly just the med­ical cod­i­fi­ca­tion of a typ­i­cal­ly female world­view as objec­tive­ly true and cor­rect. Most men aren’t going to be inter­est­ed in join­ing a con­ver­sa­tion con­duct­ed in that spir­it.”
      • This is very well put. The whole essay is inter­est­ing. Ignore the typos and dig in!
      • Relat­ed: Gen­der cri­sis is real­ly a mar­riage cri­sis (Inez Step­man, Tri­bune-Demo­c­rat): “…women with few or no ties to the oppo­site sex in the form of mar­riage and fam­i­ly are diverg­ing sharply not only from the views of men, but also from those of their mar­ried sis­ters. Mar­ried men, unmar­ried men and mar­ried women are reg­is­ter­ing pri­mar­i­ly the same polit­i­cal pref­er­ences, with only small gaps in vot­ing pat­terns between them, while sin­gle women are run­ning fast in the oppo­site direc­tion from the rest. For exam­ple, a poll in the past round of midterms found mar­ried peo­ple of both sex­es and sin­gle men all going for Repub­li­cans by major­i­ty mar­gins with­in a hand­ful of points of each oth­er (52% to 59%). Sin­gle women, on the oth­er hand, went strong­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic by a land­slide of 68% to 31%.”
    5. Stan­ford Pres­i­dent Will Resign After Report Found Flaws in His Research (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Dr. Tessier-Lav­i­gne, 63, will relin­quish the pres­i­den­cy at the end of August but remain at the uni­ver­si­ty as a pro­fes­sor of biol­o­gy.”
      • Tessier-Lav­i­gne mat­ter shows why run­ning a lab is a full-time job (H. Hold­en Thorp, Sci­ence): “I had seen many researchers who had tak­en big admin­is­tra­tive jobs strug­gle with over­see­ing their research group. Many inci­dents sim­i­lar to those involv­ing Tessier-Lav­i­gne arose because the prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors were too busy attend­ing to their oth­er high-pro­file jobs. David Bal­ti­more had to resign as pres­i­dent of Rock­e­feller Uni­ver­si­ty when sci­en­tif­ic mis­con­duct in his lab­o­ra­to­ry was uncov­ered (he lat­er became the pres­i­dent of the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, and like Tessier-Lav­i­gne, was not found to have direct knowl­edge of the mis­con­duct). In a dif­fer­ent set of prob­lem­at­ic inter­ac­tions relat­ed to research, José Basel­ga resigned as head of Memo­r­i­al Sloan-Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter because he failed to dis­close (inten­tion­al­ly or not) indus­try rela­tion­ships in papers pub­lished by his research group. These exam­ples reflect how tend­ing to a major admin­is­tra­tive posi­tion and run­ning a lab­o­ra­to­ry at the same time are sim­ply too much for one per­son.”
      • Richard Saller to take over as inter­im pres­i­dent in Sep­tem­ber (Ori­ana Riley, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stanford Uni­ver­si­ty is a huge oper­a­tion with a $9 bil­lion bud­get — about 10 times larg­er than the first Roman emper­or Augus­tus had for the whole empire,” Saller wrote. “I have a steep learn­ing curve ahead of me.”
    6. Reli­gion as a Cul­tur­al and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple like the *idea* of reli­gion, with­out the actu­al trap­pings of said reli­gion. They are the kind of folks that talk about con­cepts like bib­li­cal val­ues with­out every step­ping foot inside a church. They want (pri­mar­i­ly) Chris­t­ian val­ues to be pro­tect­ed, but they don’t actu­al­ly want to spend much time under­stand­ing the the­ol­o­gy around the val­ues. For them, reli­gion has become a social and cul­tur­al mark­er — not a spir­i­tu­al one. It’s basi­cal­ly become anoth­er cud­gel in the cul­ture war. So, when the debate heats up over issues of sex­u­al­i­ty, gen­der, or abor­tion these are the kind of folks who will post memes on Face­book that include ref­er­ences to scrip­ture vers­es, despite the fact that they them­selves nev­er read the Bible.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    7. The Con­sum­ing Fire of Love (Peter J. Lei­thart, First Things): “God isn’t ter­ri­fy­ing because he’s unlov­ing. He’s ter­ri­fy­ing because Love is terrifying—undiluted love, love that refus­es com­pro­mise with evil, love that will not nego­ti­ate away the good of the beloved by allow­ing the beloved to set the terms of her love, love that promis­es a good and a future beyond all the beloved can ask or imag­ine.”

    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 “Majority-Minority” Myth (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Most demo­graph­ic esti­mates of the ‘white’ pop­u­la­tion are based on the Cen­sus def­i­n­i­tion: ‘non-Hispanic white.’ But what of ‘Hispanic whites’ — those whose lin­eage may come from South or Latin Amer­i­ca in eth­nic­i­ty but who also iden­ti­fy racial­ly and social­ly as white? If you include them in this cat­e­go­ry, Amer­i­ca remains two-thirds ‘white’ all the way through 2060 and beyond.” A fas­ci­nat­ing read. From vol­ume 289

    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 411

    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 411, which is the num­ber you used to dial to get direc­to­ry assis­tance from the phone com­pa­ny. It’s now slang for infor­ma­tion, so an emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate num­ber for today’s com­pi­la­tion.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. This roundup has more spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing con­tent than usu­al.
      • The Shep­herd Boy Who Wasn’t (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we stick only to the ‘God can use any­one’ read­ing of David’s ori­gin sto­ry, we cel­e­brate God’s ele­va­tion of the over­looked and risk miss­ing God’s clear warn­ing to the ele­vat­ed: It can hap­pen to you. But if we see David for who he real­ly was, we real­ize that every great man or woman who ris­es to pow­er in the church is only one rooftop stroll away from a David-sized crash.”
        • I have unlocked this arti­cle. It’s longer than it needs to be, but good. The author is a pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at Hunt­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
      • Fear­ing God as Sons, Not Slaves (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “This dis­tinc­tion is per­haps most clear­ly seen in Exo­dus 20: ‘And all the peo­ple were watch­ing and hear­ing the thun­der and the light­ning flash­es, and the sound of the trum­pet, and the moun­tain smok­ing; and when the peo­ple saw it all, they trem­bled and stood at a dis­tance. 19 Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten; but do not have God speak to us, or we will die!’ How­ev­er, Moses said to the peo­ple, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you will not sin.’’ Moses tells Israel: ‘Don’t be afraid, but fear.’ The Israelites were tempt­ed to cow­er in ter­ror as they beheld God’s majesty. But the fear they tru­ly need­ed was one that would lead them to avoid sin.”
        • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal
      • Why I Gave Up Drink­ing (Sarah Bessey, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I think that con­vic­tion has got­ten a bit of a bad rap in the Church over the past lit­tle while. It’s under­stand­able. We have an over­cor­rec­tion to a lot of the legal­ism and bound­ary-mark­er Chris­tian­i­ty that dam­aged so many, the behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion and rule-mak­ing and impo­si­tion of oth­er people’s con­vic­tions onto our own souls. But in our steer­ing away from legal­ism, I won­der if we left the road to holi­ness or began to for­get that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why.”
        • From last year, but was just rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend. It’s good.
      • Why Do We Go to Church? (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Why do so many of us who claim to be Chris­tians nev­er attend church? I know every­one has their rea­sons, but here’s the hard truth: Jesus loves the church. He gave His life for the church. Jesus con­sid­ers the church to be His bride. I don’t care how close you are to Jesus, you can’t tell Him His wife is ugly. If we love Jesus, then we love His church. If you don’t love the church, then there’s rea­son to ques­tion if you love Jesus.”
      • Rap­ture (Pre­cept Austin): “In our day, the Rap­ture has come under attack by many. Some think it rep­re­sents the nov­el teach­ings of ‘defeatist Chris­tians.’ Oth­ers think it is pure fan­ta­sy. Still oth­ers seem to savor the idea of the Church going through the events of the Tribu­la­tion in order to ‘prove her met­al’ or refine her. We find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why there is such oppo­si­tion by Chris­tians to the idea that the bride­groom would come for His bride pri­or to pour­ing forth His wrath (John 14:1–3)?”
        • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and I quite liked this one. I’m pret­ty famil­iar with the argu­ments in favor of a pret­ribu­la­tion­al rap­ture (a posi­tion I myself hold), but there was stuff in here that was new to me.
    2. Why Match School And Stu­dent Rank? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…elite col­leges are machines for laun­der­ing priv­i­lege. That is: Har­vard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented peo­ple, and 25% rich/powerful peo­ple. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart peo­ple get to net­work with elites, which is the first step to becom­ing elite them­selves. And the rich peo­ple get mixed in so thor­ough­ly with a pool of smart/talented peo­ple that every­one assumes they must be smart/talented them­selves. After all, they have a degree from Har­vard!”
    3. A Church’s Quest for Enchant­ment (Mag­gie Phllips, Tablet): “[Pen­te­costal­ism] began in the 19th cen­tu­ry, with the par­al­lel devel­op­ment through­out the Anglos­phere of a grass­roots spir­i­tu­al enthu­si­asm ground­ed in per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Its the­ol­o­gy is root­ed in his­to­ry both ancient and more con­tem­po­rary: a key event in the Chris­t­ian Bible’s Book of the Acts of the Apos­tles, as well as the the­ol­o­gy of John Wes­ley, who is rec­og­nized as the father of Method­ism. In the U.S., its cat­a­lyst is usu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a reli­gious revival move­ment that began in Los Ange­les in 1906; over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it still enjoys a wide­spread pres­ence in the U.S., and is a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al phe­nom­e­non.”
      • This is actu­al­ly a pret­ty good overview of Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty for a sec­u­lar audi­ence. She gets a few details wrong, but over­all this is sol­id.
    4. The Church in a Time of Gen­der War (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “What I am say­ing is that I now believe most evan­gel­i­cal church­es should look at their sin­gle mem­bers with both eyes open: an appre­ci­a­tion for the won­der­ful poten­tial of their sea­son of life, but also a desire and strat­e­gy, as the Lord per­mits, to find ways to get these peo­ple Chris­t­ian spous­es. In oth­er words, I don’t think we should fear admit­ting that mar­riage is, in the major­i­ty of sit­u­a­tions we will come across, prefer­able to sin­gle­ness.”
      • Some peo­ple think I empha­size romance too much. I actu­al­ly won­der if I empha­size it too lit­tle.
      • Also, not reflect­ed in the excerpt but very much at the heart of the piece is the author’s con­cern that men and women in our cul­ture are col­lec­tive­ly believ­ing the worst of each oth­er and assum­ing the answer is for the oth­er gen­der to become more like them. He’s get­ting at some­thing real here. I think Chi Alpha has a health­i­er dat­ing cul­ture than oth­er places at Stan­ford, and I still see the ten­den­cies James cri­tiques in this piece in mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty.
      • Men are awe­some. Women are awe­some. You should prob­a­bly want to get mar­ried. Which means you should prob­a­bly go on dates.
    5. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilder­ness. (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To the extent that any vision of ‘non­tox­ic’ mas­culin­i­ty is pro­posed, it ends up sound­ing more like stereo­typ­i­cal fem­i­nin­i­ty than any­thing else: Guys should learn to be more sen­si­tive, qui­et and social­ly apt, seem­ing­ly overnight.… I’m con­vinced that men are in a cri­sis. And I strong­ly sus­pect that end­ing it will require a pos­i­tive vision of what mas­culin­i­ty entails that is par­tic­u­lar — that is, nei­ther neu­tral nor inter­change­able with fem­i­nin­i­ty. Still, I find myself reluc­tant to ful­ly artic­u­late one. There’s a rea­son a lot of the writ­ing on the cri­sis in mas­culin­i­ty ends at the diag­no­sis stage.”
      • Unlocked. Sol­id over­all but amus­ing­ly clue­less at a few points. 
      • Relat­ed, although the author dis­claims it: Fight­ing (Marc Andreesen, Sub­stack): “At a pri­vate con­fer­ence this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) train­ing, Elon Musk’s chal­lenge to a cage fight, and pub­lic reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well hap­pen lat­er this year, per­haps in the actu­al Roman Colos­se­um. I said, ‘I think that’s all great.’ And in this post I explain why.… I was also asked whether I con­sid­er Mark and Elon to be role mod­els to chil­dren in their embrace of fight­ing, and I said, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, yes. And I fur­ther rec­om­mend­ed to the audi­ence that they have their chil­dren trained in MMA, as my wife and I are.”
    6. The Tri­umph of the Good Samar­i­tan (Ash Mil­ton, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The activist defend­ers of the tent cities had seized on a moral lan­guage deeply ingrained in West­ern soci­eties. The notion of duty to neigh­bors, espe­cial­ly those who are poor and vul­ner­a­ble, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong inher­i­tance from Chris­tian­i­ty. But they were using con­cepts they did not care to under­stand. For the activists, the home­less weren’t neigh­bors in any rec­i­p­ro­cal sense, just a bat­ter­ing ram to use in their own con­flicts with soci­ety. By rhetor­i­cal­ly re-premis­ing neigh­bor­ly duties as a one-way rela­tion­ship of trib­ute and def­er­ence paid to the wretched by soci­ety, they ren­dered the very moral con­cepts they invoked use­less. They demand­ed neigh­bor­ly duties from strangers but pro­vid­ed no pos­si­bil­i­ty of those involved ever becom­ing any­thing like real neigh­bors to each oth­er.”
      • A bit longer than nec­es­sary, but quite good.
    7. Who’s Afraid of Moms for Lib­er­ty? (Robert Pondis­cio, The Free Press): “Moms for Lib­er­ty is the beat­ing heart of this country’s move­ment of angry parents—and Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion has nev­er seen any­thing quite like it.… The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that par­ents, not the gov­ern­ment, should have the ulti­mate say in what chil­dren are taught in pub­lic schools—has legs. Not one sub­group in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden vot­ers; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or His­pan­ic; urban, rur­al, or suburban—disagrees.”

    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: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er darkness.” Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexander’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing. From vol­ume 289.

    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.