Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 371

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 371, which like its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor is one of four three-dig­it nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers, mean­ing that it has three dig­its and when you raise each dig­it to the num­ber of dig­its (in this case, to the third pow­er) they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber:  33 + 73 + 13 = 371.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Har­vard Is Real­ly Like (Olivia Glunz, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Pres­tige and influ­ence require class dis­tinc­tions; in a tru­ly equi­table world, Har­vard does not exist. Thus, Har­vard will con­tin­ue to cham­pi­on progressivism—but nev­er enough to endan­ger its own future. Har­vard stu­dents of all polit­i­cal stripes per­ceive this hypocrisy; if any­thing, they grad­u­ate not more lib­er­al but more cyn­i­cal. So much for the for­mi­da­ble brain­wash­ing machine.… Despite the preva­lence of sec­u­lar­ism and cre­den­tial­ism at Har­vard, faith and friend­ship were cen­tral to my joy­ful first year. In fact, Chris­tian­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholi­cism, is alive at Har­vard.”
    • Short but inter­est­ing, and rel­e­vant to life at Stan­ford.
  2. Why the music of Rich Mullins endures, 25 years after his death (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Mullins had all his roy­al­ties and wages go direct­ly to his accoun­tant, whom he asked to issue him an allowance equal to the aver­age work­ing-class salary at the time. The rest of his earn­ings were giv­en away, most­ly to char­i­ty. Smith tells me that Mullins ‘was scared for his own soul.’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t tempt­ed by mon­ey and fame. It’s that he knew he was tempt­ed, so he ran from it.”
  3. Rev­o­lu­tions Occur When a Sig­nif­i­cant Por­tion of Elites Defect From the Exist­ing Regime (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Social move­ments are typ­i­cal­ly led not by some­one from the under­class or the poor, but by sec­ond-tier elites. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Che Gue­vara, America’s founders, etc. were rel­a­tive­ly edu­cat­ed and at least mid­dle-class. They were not near­ly the poor­est of their soci­eties. Far from it.  Which is why their crit­i­cisms of the elite with­in their soci­eties were so astute. They were, fig­u­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, close cousins—they saw their flaws up close.”
    • This one is real­ly good. Relat­ed but long: Diverse and Divid­ed: A Polit­i­cal Demog­ra­phy of Amer­i­can Elite Stu­dents (Eric Kauf­mann, Sub­stack): “A quar­ter of stu­dents are LGBT, and there are rough­ly equal shares of Chris­t­ian and non­re­li­gious stu­dents. LGBT, Non­re­li­gious, and Chris­tians are set to become more impor­tant polit­i­cal groups among America’s future lead­ers.”
    • The data in this lat­ter one is inter­est­ing, but it is so long you should def­i­nite­ly skim and not read.
  4. Relat­ed to jus­tice:
    • A Jury Acquit­ted Them of Var­i­ous Charges. They Served Prison Time for Them Any­way. (Bil­ly Bin­ion, Rea­son): “Can you do prison time for a crim­i­nal charge of which you were nev­er con­vict­ed? I’d ven­ture that most would assume the answer is ‘no.’ They would be wrong. Known as acquit­ted con­duct sen­tenc­ing, the prac­tice allows judges to bloat a prison term when sen­tenc­ing a defen­dant by pun­ish­ing them for a sep­a­rate charge or charges on which a jury deemed them not guilty.” Out­ra­geous. I hope the Supreme Court squash­es this 9–0.
    • Thou­sands were released from prison dur­ing covid. The results are shock­ing. (Mol­ly Gill, The Wash­ing­ton Post): “To pro­tect those most vul­ner­a­ble to covid-19 dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the Cares Act allowed the Jus­tice Depart­ment to order the release of peo­ple in fed­er­al pris­ons and place them on home con­fine­ment. More than 11,000 peo­ple were even­tu­al­ly released. Of those, the Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP) report­ed that only 17 of them com­mit­ted new crimes. That’s not a typo. Sev­en­teen. That’s a 0.15 per­cent recidi­vism rate in a coun­try where it’s nor­mal for 30 to 65 per­cent of peo­ple com­ing home from prison to reof­fend with­in three years of release.… These 11,000 releas­es were not ran­dom. Peo­ple in low- and min­i­mum-secu­ri­ty pris­ons or at high risk of com­pli­ca­tions from covid were pri­or­i­tized for con­sid­er­a­tion for release.”
    • Stock Trades Report­ed by Near­ly a Fifth of Con­gress Show Pos­si­ble Con­flicts (Kate Kelly, Adam Play­ford and Ali­cia Par­lapi­ano, New York Times): “The poten­tial for con­flicts in stock trad­ing by mem­bers of Con­gress — and their choice so far not to impose stricter lim­its on them­selves — has long drawn crit­i­cism, espe­cial­ly when par­tic­u­lar­ly bla­tant cas­es emerge. But the Times analy­sis demon­strates the scale of the issue: Over the three-year peri­od, more than 3,700 trades report­ed by law­mak­ers from both par­ties posed poten­tial con­flicts between their pub­lic respon­si­bil­i­ties and pri­vate finances.… The 97 mem­bers who were flagged by the Times analy­sis amount­ed to more than half of the peo­ple who report­ed trades, and near­ly a fifth of Con­gress. The group was split almost equal­ly between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans.”
  5. The amaz­ing pow­er of “machine eyes“ (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “While there are far sim­pler ways to deter­mine gen­der [than study­ing reti­nas], it’s a 50–50 toss up for oph­thal­mol­o­gists, which means there are no vis­i­ble cues to human eyes. But now two mod­els have shown 97% accu­ra­cy of gen­der deter­mi­na­tion from neur­al net­work train­ing. That was just the begin­ning.… That work has now extend­ed to detec­tion of kid­ney dis­ease, con­trol of blood glu­cose and blood pres­sure, hepa­to­bil­iary dis­ease, a pre­vi­ous study on pre­dict­ing heart attack, close cor­re­la­tion of the reti­nal ves­sels with the heart (coro­nary) artery cal­ci­um score, and, pri­or to the new report above, the ongo­ing prospec­tive assess­ment and track­ing of Alzheimer’s dis­ease.” Wild stuff.
  6. A Nuclear Zugzwang? (Anusar Farooqui, Sub­stack): “Pre­cise­ly because Rus­sia is so weak rel­a­tive to Nato, any Rus­sia-Nato war will even­tu­al­ly esca­late into strate­gic nuclear war, the only lev­el on which the Rus­sia enjoys par­i­ty with the Unit­ed States. So, any counter-esca­la­tion by the Unit­ed States would be fraught with esca­la­tion risk and nuclear dan­ger.”
    • The author has a PhD in math­e­mat­ics but writes exten­sive­ly about for­eign pol­i­cy. I have had mul­ti­ple smart peo­ple rec­om­mend this arti­cle and final­ly gave it a read.

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 Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.” From vol­ume 242.

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 370

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 370, a nar­cis­sis­tic num­ber (some­times also called an Arm­strong num­ber). It has three dig­its, and when you raise each dig­it to the third pow­er they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber: 370 = 33 + 73 + 03. There are only 88 nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers in base 10, and only 4 of those have three dig­its (153, 370, 371, and 407).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (or More) Unskip­pable Ads in a Row (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “This, my friends, is the web we asked for. We want­ed every­thing for free—but what we real­ly got was a swamp where all the costs are still there, just hid­den. And the expe­ri­ence we have gained from oth­er indus­tries where prices are most­ly hid­den from view—healthcare is the most obvi­ous exam­ple, but of course there are others—is that this usu­al­ly turns out to be the most expen­sive trans­ac­tion of them all.”
    • This is real­ly good!
  2. For Sub­ur­ban Texas Men, a Work­out Craze With a Side of Faith (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “This is F3 — that’s fit­ness, fel­low­ship and faith — a fast-grow­ing net­work of men’s work­outs that com­bine exer­cise with spir­i­tu­al­ly inflect­ed cama­raderie.… I first heard about F3 through a few acquain­tances in Texas, men who spoke about their local groups with the zeal of evan­ge­lists. It remind­ed me of how urban women used to talk with me about Soul­Cy­cle, only these guys were sub­ur­ban fathers.”
    • A Short Sto­ry of Men (David French, The Dis­patch): “What is the short sto­ry of mod­ern men? Life has changed for­ev­er. Ide­o­logues pull men and boys into destruc­tive and unsus­tain­able extremes. Yet vir­tu­ous pur­pose can still be found in the fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks of the good life. Only a man can be a hus­band, only a man can be a father, and men need male friends. If a man can fill those roles with integri­ty and courage, then doubts about his mas­culin­i­ty should not ever dark­en his heart.”
    • This is a response piece inspired by the above sto­ry about F3.
  3. The Chero­kee Nation is again call­ing on Con­gress to deliv­er on a 200-year-old promise (Harmeet Kaur, CNN): “The Chero­kee Nation is renew­ing its cam­paign for rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress, call­ing on fed­er­al leg­is­la­tors to hon­or a treaty that the US gov­ern­ment made near­ly 200 years ago. In a video released last week, the trib­al nation reassert­ed its demand that Con­gress seat its del­e­gate in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives – a right stip­u­lat­ed by the 1835 Treaty of New Echo­ta.”
    • From what I can tell this is a legit claim: the treaty was approved by the US Sen­ate even though shady things hap­pened on the the Chero­kee side (the treaty was entered into by Chero­kees not autho­rized to nego­ti­ate on behalf of their tribe). I don’t know why this is con­tro­ver­sial: Amer­i­ca took the land, we need to hon­or all the terms of the deal.
  4. ‘Out of con­trol’ STD sit­u­a­tion prompts call for changes (Mike Sto­bbe, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “New syphilis infec­tions plum­met­ed in the U.S. start­ing in the 1940s when antibi­otics became wide­ly avail­able. They fell to their low­est ever by 1998, when few­er than 7,000 new cas­es were report­ed nation­wide. The CDC was so encour­aged by the progress it launched a plan to elim­i­nate syphilis in the U.S. But by 2002 cas­es began ris­ing again, large­ly among gay and bisex­u­al men, and they kept going. In late 2013, CDC end­ed its elim­i­na­tion cam­paign in the face of lim­it­ed fund­ing and esca­lat­ing cas­es, which that year sur­passed 17,000. By 2020 cas­es had reached near­ly 41,700 and they spiked even fur­ther last year, to more than 52,000.”
    • That’s a 26% jump just last year!
    • As STD rates explode, are we still sure God’s way isn’t bet­ter? (Peter Heck, Not The Bee): “There’s more to the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic than a despot­ic list of don’ts. There’s a holis­tic and healthy ide­al that includes rec­og­niz­ing the per­son you are dat­ing is some­one’s future spouse and should be treat­ed with the same dig­ni­ty that we would want anoth­er treat­ing our future spouse. There’s an endur­ing com­men­da­tion of the for­ma­tion of life­long, lov­ing rela­tion­ships built not upon tawdry lusts but self-sac­ri­fi­cial com­mit­ment; the recog­ni­tion that love is not some­thing we feel, but some­thing we do. There’s a self-con­trol that pro­tects human­i­ty and lib­er­ates it from sick­ness and suf­fer­ing. It’s God’s way…”
    • I often think upon this fact: if the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic were uni­ver­sal­ly observed for one gen­er­a­tion STDs would be essen­tial­ly elim­i­nat­ed.
  5. Illib­er­al­ism Is For (Cul­tur­al) Losers (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “Illib­er­al­ism, the deep desire to deny to oth­ers their rights of con­science and belief and prop­er­ty that we our­selves enjoy and to force them into con­for­mi­ty to our vision of the com­mon good by way of coer­cive State pow­er is the last resort of losers. Cul­tur­al losers. Abi­gail Adams would judge that such peo­ple are unfit for lib­er­ty; or at least they are peo­ple who can’t accom­plish any­thing fruit­ful with it. I have a bet­ter idea. Reform our weak insti­tu­tions, and where we can­not, we build bet­ter ones and be cul­tur­al win­ners.”
  6. An ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ men­tal­i­ty on cam­pus­es turns poten­tial friends into allies — or ene­mies (Pamela Paresky and Samuel J. Abrams, Boston Globe): “Accord­ing to an NBC poll released in August, only 20 per­cent of col­lege sopho­mores sur­veyed said they can def­i­nite­ly see them­selves room­ing with some­one who vot­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than they did in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. And more than half said they prob­a­bly or def­i­nite­ly couldn’t see them­selves dat­ing such a stu­dent. Cam­pus cul­ture seems to fur­ther social dis­con­nec­tion rather than fos­ter friend­ship across the polit­i­cal divide.”
    • The authors are schol­ars of psy­chol­o­gy and pol­i­tics, respec­tive­ly. I read this one most­ly because the thumb­nail pre­view is of Stan­ford.
  7. The ‘Lizzo Play­ing James Madis­on’s Flute’ Con­tro­ver­sy: A Blogger’s Analy­sis (Nick Catog­gio, The Dis­patch): “H ad you heard of Madison’s flute before Liz­zo played it? I hadn’t. I’d heard of her but not it. It was she who lent celebri­ty to the instru­ment, not vice ver­sa. You may find that dispir­it­ing, although I’m not sure why any of us should have base­line knowl­edge about a ran­dom gift giv­en to James Madi­son that played no mean­ing­ful role in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Me, I’m thrilled to have learned about it via this episode. A crys­tal flute! Made for the father of the Con­sti­tu­tion! Played for the first time in 200 years by a celebrity—totally ran­dom­ly! It wouldn’t sur­prise me if it turns out to have mag­i­cal pow­ers and Liz­zo has now been pos­sessed by Madison’s ghost. Which, if so, would make her next con­cert a must-see. But I digress. The last rea­son this sto­ry is instant blog fod­der is because, per the fore­go­ing, it’s quirky as all hell.”

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 Nuclear Fam­i­ly Was a Mis­take (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you want to sum­ma­rize the changes in fam­i­ly struc­ture over the past cen­tu­ry, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for indi­vid­u­als and more unsta­ble for fam­i­lies. We’ve made life bet­ter for adults but worse for chil­dren. We’ve moved from big, inter­con­nect­ed, and extend­ed fam­i­lies, which helped pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in soci­ety from the shocks of life, to small­er, detached nuclear fam­i­lies (a mar­ried cou­ple and their chil­dren), which give the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in soci­ety room to max­i­mize their tal­ents and expand their options. The shift from big­ger and inter­con­nect­ed extend­ed fam­i­lies to small­er and detached nuclear fam­i­lies ulti­mate­ly led to a famil­ial sys­tem that lib­er­ates the rich and rav­ages the work­ing-class and the poor.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. From vol­ume 238.

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 369

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 post 369, which I like sim­ply because 3+6=9.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sug­ar Babies of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty (Nico­la Buskirk, Sub­stack): “But decades after the unwind­ing of America’s tra­di­tion­al sex­u­al mores, no new moral­i­ty has clear­ly emerged, and young peo­ple increas­ing­ly find them­selves nav­i­gat­ing a cul­ture of sex­u­al anar­chy, in which — pro­vid­ed an act is con­sen­su­al — there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Such think­ing has brought us inevitably to the rise of Only­Fans, the nor­mal­iza­tion of sex work, and the curi­ous sto­ry of Stan­ford University’s sug­ar babies.”
    • A curi­ous sto­ry indeed!
  2. Wikipedia Is Mak­ing Us More Polit­i­cal (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “There is sim­ply no par­al­lel to this with any oth­er peri­od of media his­to­ry; the dig­i­tal age is the very first to say that we should have access to a repos­i­to­ry of a person’s most con­tro­ver­sial sen­tences, per­ma­nent­ly acces­si­ble through their bio­graph­i­cal data.… All of these exam­ples ampli­fy the role of pol­i­tics in cul­ture, by mak­ing par­ti­san opin­ions a vital part of a person’s bio­graph­i­cal data. There is no dis­tinc­tion any more between the per­son who, through their voca­tion­al or per­son­al choices, decides to become a polit­i­cal fig­ure, and the per­son who is per­ceived as polit­i­cal. What we know about the one is pret­ty much what we know about the oth­er. Thus, hyper-politi­ciza­tion of every­thing feels much more nor­mal.”
  3. So you haven’t caught COVID yet. Does that mean you’re a super­dodger? (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Your immune response and these T cells fire up much more quick­ly [than in a per­son with­out the HLA muta­tion],” Hol­len­bach says. “So for lack of a bet­ter term, you basi­cal­ly nuke the infec­tion before you even start to have symp­toms.… It’s def­i­nite­ly luck,” she says. “But, you know, this muta­tion is quite com­mon. We esti­mate that maybe 1 in 10 peo­ple have it. And in peo­ple who are asymp­to­matic, that ris­es to 1 in 5.”
    • Relat­ed: The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic feels over but is not actu­al­ly over. (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “For the time being I will still mask at air­ports and on air­planes and occa­sion­al­ly in very large indoor gath­er­ings. Oth­er than that, I’m done. I am vac­ci­nat­ed, boost­ed and had COVID-19 ear­li­er this year, so the prospect of con­tract­ing it again seems both less like­ly and less scary. The thing is, I con­fess to being unsure whether I have made the right prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­la­tions.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics at Tufts.
  4. Why Is The Cen­tral Val­ley So Bad? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A short dri­ve through [the Cen­tral Val­ley] is enough to notice pover­ty, decay, and home­less camps worse even than the rest of Cal­i­for­nia. But I didn’t real­ize how bad it was until read­ing this piece on the San Joaquin Riv­er. It claims that if the Cen­tral Val­ley were its own state, it would be the poor­est in Amer­i­ca, even worse than Mis­sis­sip­pi. This was kind of shock­ing. I always think of Mis­sis­sip­pi as bad because of a his­to­ry of racial vio­lence, racial seg­re­ga­tion, and get­ting burned down dur­ing the Civ­il War. But the Cen­tral Val­ley has none of those things, plus it has extreme­ly fer­tile farm­land, plus it’s in one of the rich­est states of the coun­try and should at least get good sub­si­dies and infra­struc­ture. How did it get so bad?”
  5. Cov­er­age of church­es:
    • Doug Wil­son in Ida­ho:
      1. Pas­tor Seeks To Make Moscow, Ida­ho A ‘Christian Town’  (NBC News, YouTube): twelve min­utes.
      2. What NBC Did­n’t Show You (Dou­glas Wil­son, YouTube): Wilson’s response video, four and a half min­utes.
      3. NBC News Lends a Hand (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As I have said else­where, I am grate­ful that it was not a hit piece—they let both sides talk, in oth­er words. It was even-hand­ed in that way. At the same time, it was clear that what we were say­ing must have sound­ed some­thing like Mid­dle Klin­gon to them, and this of course affects the edit­ing process.”
    • Gra­ce­point at Berke­ley:
      1. The Ungod­ly Sur­veil­lance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps (Dhruv Mehro­tra, Wired): “At its most basic lev­el, the idea is pret­ty straight­for­ward: Why would any­one watch porn if they are going to have to talk to their par­ents or pas­tor about it?… The trou­ble is, accord­ing to Hao-Wei Lin, pro­vid­ing his church leader with a ledger of every­thing he did online meant his pas­tor could always find some­thing to ask him about, and the way Covenant Eyes flagged con­tent didn’t help. For exam­ple, in Covenant Eyes reports that Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED, his online psy­chi­a­try text­book was rat­ed ‘High­ly Mature,’ the most severe cat­e­go­ry of con­tent reserved for ‘anonymiz­ers, nudi­ty, erot­i­ca, and pornog­ra­phy.’ ”
      2. At Gra­ce­point Min­istries, ‘Whole-Life Dis­ci­ple­ship’ Took Its Toll (Cur­tis Yee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Thir­ty-two for­mer Gra­ce­point mem­bers who spoke with Chris­tian­i­ty Today for this sto­ry described a cul­ture that was ‘con­trol­ling’ and ‘coer­cive’ for the sake of min­istry effi­cien­cy. Mem­bers said they were manip­u­lat­ed into con­fess­ing sins, screamed at by lead­ers, and over­loaded with oblig­a­tions to the point of ill­ness. To keep mem­bers focused on mis­sion work, Gra­ce­point effec­tive­ly restrict­ed dat­ing, media con­sump­tion, and pet own­er­ship. Lead­ers direct­ed staff on how to arrange their homes, where to shop for clothes, and what cars to dri­ve.”
  6. Rich Mullins: Raga­muf­fin, Celebri­ty, Dis­ci­ple (Bethel McGrew, Plough): “You might have called him a frus­trat­ed strug­gling artist: a suc­cess­ful artist who nev­er want­ed to suc­ceed. When Myrrh records first called to say Amy Grant want­ed to record his song ‘Sing Your Praise to the Lord,’ he near­ly hung up. But it would be a hit, the first of many. He wrote nat­u­ral­ly to the peo­ple, com­ple­ment­ing his poet­ic lyri­cism with a good pop writer’s ear for how to con­vey pro­found ideas sim­ply. His arrange­ments were an eclec­tic fusion of pop and folk, most famous­ly intro­duc­ing radio to his sig­na­ture instru­ment, the ham­mered dul­cimer. This was the secret sauce that made hit sin­gles out of songs like the atmos­pher­ic West­ern nature poem ‘Call­ing Out Your Name’ – a tune which, by all the rules of hit sin­gles, should nev­er even have been on the air. As one fan put it, Mullins was weird, but he was also so good that radio had to play him.”
    • Mullins was unique and bril­liant and I am still sad he is dead. He was before your time, so I doubt you will believe me when I say that he by him­self out­weighed the entire Chris­t­ian music indus­try that you have been exposed to. But he was that good. It was more than his music. It was his life.

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 Killing Human Mon­sters (Mark LiVec­chi, Prov­i­dence): “‘The inter­nal con­di­tion of God’s exter­nal expres­sion of wrath,’ writes the the­olo­gian and rab­bi Abra­ham Joshua Hes­chel, ‘is grief.’ To the best I can deduce, there­in is com­mu­ni­cat­ed the com­plex dis­po­si­tion of the just warrior.… I do not rejoice that I wor­ship a God who kills. I only rejoice that I wor­ship a God who is will­ing to.” From vol­ume 236.

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 368

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 368, which is appar­ent­ly how many ways there are to tile a 4×15 rec­tan­gle with the pen­tomi­noes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grad­u­al­ly, then Sud­den­ly (Lawrence Freed­man, Sub­stack): “It would of course be pre­ma­ture to pro­nounce a com­plete Ukrain­ian vic­to­ry in the war because of one suc­cess­ful and unex­pect­ed break­through. But what has hap­pened over the past few days is of his­toric impor­tance. This offen­sive has over­turned much of what was con­fi­dent­ly assumed about the course of the war.… Rus­sia is los­ing but it has not yet lost. It still occu­pies a large chunk of Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry and still has sub­stan­tial mil­i­tary assets in the coun­try.”
    • Good news from Ukraine. The author is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of war stud­ies at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don. He’s not some ran­do pop­ping off.
  2. An Icon, Not An Idol (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The Crown rep­re­sents some­thing from the ancient past, a log­i­cal­ly inde­fen­si­ble but emo­tion­al­ly salient sym­bol of some­thing called a nation, some­thing that gives its mem­bers mean­ing and hap­pi­ness. How­ev­er shit­ty the econ­o­my, or awful the prime min­is­ter, or ugly the dis­course, the monarch is able to rep­re­sent the nation all the time. In a liv­ing, breath­ing, mor­tal per­son. The impor­tance of this in a deeply polar­ized and ide­o­log­i­cal world, where fel­low cit­i­zens have come to despise their oppo­nents as ene­mies, is hard to mea­sure. But it mat­ters that divi­sive fig­ures such as Boris John­son or Mar­garet Thatch­er were nev­er required or expect­ed to rep­re­sent the entire nation. It mat­ters that in times of pro­found acri­mo­ny, some­thing unites.”
  3. No Longer Strug­gling To Believe (John W. Kennedy, AG News): “The first week on cam­pus in Con­way, Schiefer went to a Chi Alpha gath­er­ing — on acci­dent. She saw a fly­er adver­tis­ing an event with a band. She appre­ci­at­ed the music, but no so much the lyrics. Jesus kept pop­ping up in the words of the cho­rus­es. ‘It’s not that I hat­ed Chris­tians,’ says the straight­for­ward Schiefer. ‘I just thought they were stu­pid.’ Still, Schiefer left the ini­tial meet­ing with a nag­ging sen­sa­tion that she had a void in her life. That first semes­ter, sev­er­al of her dor­m­mates who treat­ed her with respect reg­u­lar­ly went to Chi Alpha gath­er­ings and they invit­ed her along. Soon she began attend­ing every Mon­day night. ‘I found friend­ship before faith,’ Schiefer says. ‘My class­mates weren’t intim­i­dat­ed by my lack of faith or my ask­ing ques­tions.’ ”
  4. Ex-Alien Judge Speaks Out in Favor of Using the Statu­to­ry Term “Alien” Rather Than “Nonci­t­i­zen“ (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “Defend­ers of ‘nonci­t­i­zen’ some­times claim that this word is inter­change­able with alien because every­one is a cit­i­zen of some­where, sans the unusu­al case of the indi­vid­ual who has some­how been ren­dered state­less. This con­tention is not an accu­rate excuse. For one, monar­chies exist. A Span­ish born per­son is a ‘sub­ject’ of the King­dom of Spain, albeit he may have demo­c­ra­t­ic rights. One born in Sau­di Ara­bia is sim­i­lar­ly a ‘sub­ject’ of the House of Saud. Even more, a per­son born in Amer­i­can Samoa or Swains Island is a U.S. nation­al, but not a cit­i­zen; he or she can­not vote in fed­er­al elec­tions nor hold fed­er­al office. These dis­tinc­tions mat­ter. Words mat­ter. Our fed­er­al immi­gra­tion statutes con­cern them­selves with aliens. This word is not a pejo­ra­tive nor an insult. I cer­tain­ly did not con­sid­er it an insult to be referred to as an alien in my depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  5. The Debate Over Mus­lim Col­lege Stu­dents Get­ting Secret Mar­riages (Emma Green, The New York­er): “Moha­jir tries to be direct in her book. She writes that ‘there appears to be a pro­found rise in the preva­lence of secret mar­riages among Mus­lim Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly polyg­y­nous secret mar­riages,’ in which men take more than one wife. ‘I per­son­al­ly have a major, vis­cer­al reac­tion to polygamy,’ Quraishi-Lan­des, the Wis­con­sin schol­ar, who also edit­ed the book, said. ‘I was, like, ‘I don’t want to nor­mal­ize secret polygamy. I don’t like that.’ Moha­jir replied, ‘Look, the whole book is about real-life rela­tion­ships. And if peo­ple are real­ly in a real-life polyg­a­mous rela­tion­ship, here’s how we can help them make it healthy and not abu­sive.’ ”
    • I had heard of secret mar­riages, but I had­n’t con­sid­ered that secret mar­riages among young Mus­lim men would almost cer­tain­ly be polyg­a­mous.
  6. How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham (Jesse Sin­gal, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “For mil­lions of peo­ple watch­ing this sto­ry unfold, this was yet anoth­er exam­ple of the inerad­i­ca­ble stain of Amer­i­can racism, of just how lit­tle progress we’ve real­ly made. Except it didn’t hap­pen.… All the jour­nal­ists who cred­u­lous­ly report­ed on this event were wrong—and it was an embar­rass­ing kind of wrong, because the red flags were large, numer­ous, and flap­ping loud­ly. Richard­son and her fam­i­ly mem­bers report­ed that racial slurs had been hurled with aban­don, loud­ly and repeat­ed­ly, in a crowd­ed gym filled with more than 5,000 peo­ple. But the jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing this inci­dent nev­er stopped to notice how odd it was that none of these vile slurs were cap­tured by any of the thou­sands of lit­tle hand­held cam­eras in the gym at the time, nor on the big­ger cam­eras record­ing the match. Nor did they find it strange that in the days fol­low­ing the inci­dent, not a sin­gle oth­er eye­wit­ness came forward—none of Richardson’s black team­mates, and none of the play­ers for either team.”
    • I’ve been fol­low­ing this sto­ry, wait­ing for a thor­ough well-put togeth­er piece. This is it. It illu­mi­nates some­thing very sad about con­tem­po­rary media.
  7. Blunt Viet­nam Marine Tells You Exact­ly What Hap­pened To Him (Bill Ehrhart, YouTube): six­teen min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent — extreme­ly inter­est­ing. In the com­ments the film­mak­er rec­om­mends watch­ing Mag­nif­i­cent Viet­nam Green Beret Tells What Hap­pened To Him (David Chris­t­ian, YouTube, one hour long!) to hear an equal­ly artic­u­late but dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive. I have watched excerpts from it and can con­firm he’s a good sto­ry­teller and dis­agrees with the first gent quite strong­ly. Both rec­om­mend­ed if you have the time and are inter­est­ed in war/foreign pol­i­cy.

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 Weath­er­ing the Storm: How Faith Affects Well-Being (Byron John­son & Chris­tos Makridis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “First, and con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies, active Chris­tians exhib­it 6 per­cent greater cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and are 6 per­cent­age points more like­ly to report that they are thriving—a mea­sure from Gallup that com­bines respon­dent infor­ma­tion on both cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and expect­ed future life sat­is­fac­tion over the next five years. Sec­ond, and at least as impor­tant, we found that SWB is either acycli­cal or slight­ly coun­ter­cycli­cal for active Chris­tians, where­as it is strong­ly pro­cycli­cal for (inac­tive) Chris­tians and theists.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. The study which this arti­cle sum­ma­rizes is on SSRN: Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect People’s Well-being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion After Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects.  From vol­ume 235.

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 367

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

This is the 367th install­ment, notable because 367 is a prime num­ber and also the largest num­ber whose square is com­posed of strict­ly increas­ing dig­its: 3672 = 134689.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Social­ism, Nation­al­ism, and Tolkien (Alec Dent, The Dis­patch): “In our time of unprece­dent­ed wealth and safe­ty, the once-defeat­ed foe of illib­er­al­ism has made a reap­pearence.… due large­ly to a lack of appre­ci­a­tion for how good we have things right now, a lack of under­stand­ing of how we got here, and a lack of under­stand­ing of how a rad­i­cal over­haul of soci­ety would alter the world as we know it.”
  2. The Despo­tism of Isa­ias Afew­er­ki (Alex de Waal, The Baf­fler): “…fight­ers protest­ed the deci­sion that they should con­tin­ue to serve with­out pay for two more years. A group of dis­abled vet­er­ans marched—there’s no verb that con­veys the deter­mined col­lec­tive motion of their wheel­chairs, arti­fi­cial limbs, and sticks—towards the cap­i­tal to demand their pen­sions. They were shot at with live ammu­ni­tion. Some were killed, oth­ers were arrest­ed and dis­ap­peared.”
    • I’d heard before that Eritrea was worse than North Korea in some ways, but this arti­cle real­ly drove it home. Wow.
  3. Why Peo­ple Are Los­ing Faith In Pub­lic Insti­tu­tions (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…if you relied on the Post to tell you about the world you actu­al­ly live in, it would not have occurred to you that there is any oth­er side to the library sto­ry than the vir­tu­ous pink-haired queer librar­i­an and her allies ver­sus the mob of big­ots. If you are on the Left, isn’t it in your inter­est to under­stand why peo­ple are so upset, even if you don’t agree with them? Isn’t it in your inter­est to at least think about why the peo­ple of a town would rather defund their library rather than see it used in this way?”
    • This one is wild and Dreher, as they say, has the receipts.
  4. Can an Athe­ist Be a Moral Real­ist? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “…I can’t see how you can be an athe­ist and a moral real­ist at the same time. It is like eat­ing a cake and still hav­ing it. If nat­u­ral­ism is true, then aren’t we just meat bags full of water with no dig­ni­ty? My friend says I am car­i­ca­tur­ing his posi­tion. Am I miss­ing some­thing, or is he?”
    • This is well argued. The author is a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment and phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas.
  5. Trump should fill Chris­tians with rage. How come he doesn’t? (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I know that peo­ple inspired by [Jesus] have done great things in the past — build­ing hos­pi­tals for the poor, improv­ing the rights of women and chil­dren, mil­i­tat­ing against slav­ery, car­ing for the men­tal­ly dis­abled, work­ing for a mer­ci­ful wel­fare state, fight­ing prej­u­dice, improv­ing glob­al health. But pre­cise­ly because these things have hap­pened, it is dif­fi­cult for me to com­pre­hend why so many Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals have reject­ed the splen­dor and romance of their call­ing and set­tled for the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal resent­ments of the hard right.”
    • Long and a bit ram­bly, nonethe­less inter­est­ing.
  6. Pub­lish­ing needs JK Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster (Vic­to­ria Smith, The Crit­ic Mag­a­zine): “The trou­ble with JK Rowl­ing is that she has done noth­ing wrong. Back in 2020, she wrote a care­ful­ly word­ed, com­pas­sion­ate piece about sex and gen­der.… This is a sit­u­a­tion in which the pun­ish­ment has cre­at­ed the crime and it’s one that is need­ed by mem­bers of the pub­lish­ing indus­try who have spent years embrac­ing the argu­ments of the most extreme trans activists while ignor­ing those of fem­i­nists. They need Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster. Oth­er­wise they might have to respond, not just to what Rowl­ing has writ­ten, but to the real­i­ties of the move­ment to which they have pledged alle­giance.”
  7. Died: Queen Eliz­a­beth II, British Monarch Who Put Her Trust in God (Dud­ley Delffs, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Queen’s love of the Bible and its gospel mes­sage led to her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pub­li­ca­tion of a spe­cial book to com­mem­o­rate her 90th birth­day. Titled The Ser­vant Queen and the King She Serves.… Her Majesty per­son­al­ly wrote the fore­word, thank­ing read­ers for their prayers and good wish­es. ‘I have been—and remain—very grate­ful to … God for His stead­fast love. I have indeed seen His faith­ful­ness,’ she wrote. The book was dis­trib­uted to thou­sands of church­es across the UK and through­out many Com­mon­wealth coun­tries pri­or to the Queen’s birth­day in 2016. The book proved so pop­u­lar that the Bible Soci­ety had to print anoth­er 150,000 copies to meet demand.”

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 Big Data+Small Bias « Small Data+Zero Bias (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Suppose you want to esti­mate who will win the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. You ask 2.3 mil­lion poten­tial vot­ers whether they are like­ly to vote for Trump or not. The sam­ple is in all ways demo­graph­i­cal­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US vot­ing pop­u­la­tion but poten­tial Trump vot­ers are a tiny bit less like­ly to answer the ques­tion, just .001 less like­ly to answer (note they don’t lie, they just don’t answer).” I was stunned. From vol­ume 234.

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 366

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

This is the 366th of these mis­sives, which is not only the num­ber of days in a leap year but also  82 + 92 + 102+ 112.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No Promis­es (Eve Tush­net, Plough): “In con­fes­sion you do not seek pri­mar­i­ly moral improve­ment but rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with God. The con­fes­sion­al is less a class­room and more a tryst­ing place. In my own life, my best cur­rent under­stand­ing of what I’m doing is not that I’ve turned away from drunk­en­ness and to absti­nence; absti­nence is an absence. It’s slight­ly more true to say that I am turn­ing from drunk­en­ness to sobri­ety: a path of peace. But it is most true to say that I hope to turn from drunk­en­ness to Christ. And this in all things: not from vice to virtue but from vice to God.”
  2. Humans Are All More Close­ly Relat­ed Than We Com­mon­ly Think (Scott Her­sh­berg­er, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “…our most recent com­mon ances­tor prob­a­bly lived no ear­li­er than 1400 B.C.and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefer­ti­ti, some­one from whom we are all descend­ed was like­ly alive some­where in the world. Go back a bit fur­ther, and you reach a date when our fam­i­ly trees share not just one ances­tor in com­mon but every ances­tor in com­mon.… some­where between 5300 and 2200 B.C.,according to Rohde’s cal­cu­la­tions.”
    • If only there was an ancient and holy book which attest­ed some­thing sim­i­lar…
  3. Why Are We in Ukraine? (Christo­pher Cald­well, Clare­mont Review of Books): “The attempt to iso­late Rus­sia from the Amer­i­can world sys­tem has had a strik­ing unin­tend­ed consequence—the pos­si­ble found­ing of an alter­na­tive world sys­tem that would draw pow­er away from the exist­ing one. Twen­ty years ago, under George W. Bush, the Unit­ed States removed the Iraqi deter­rent from Iran’s neigh­bor­hood, trans­form­ing Iran overnight into a region­al pow­er. This year, under Joe Biden, the Unit­ed States has made Chi­na a gift of Russia’s exportable food and min­er­al resources. We are dis­play­ing an out­right genius for iden­ti­fy­ing our most dan­ger­ous mil­i­tary adver­sary and solv­ing its most press­ing strate­gic chal­lenge.”
    • In relat­ed news, these two arti­cles by Rod Dreher are the clear­est things I’ve seen high­light­ing the prob­lems Europe is fac­ing as a result of the Ukrain­ian war. Scary times.
    • Neron­ian Rul­ing Class Fid­dles While West Burns (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As rich as the West is, it can’t keep its peo­ple warm in the win­ter by burn­ing cash. And so, Euro­pean house­holds are now being forced to ask if freez­ing in the dark for Ukraine is some­thing they real­ly want to do. This is not going to hap­pen to Amer­i­cans — but you should think about how you would react if this were you, and your elder­ly par­ents, and your kids. Yes, Putin is an SOB, but this is the real world.”
    • Can You Heat Europe With Von Der Leyen’s Hot Air? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To be clear: Putin was wicked to invade Ukraine, and I wish Rus­sia would lose that war. But Rus­sia is not los­ing that war; the West is. It is unspeak­ably arro­gant for Ursu­la von der Leyen to say Putin is not being crick­et to use eco­nom­ics as a weapon of war, when she and the group of nations she leads have spent the last six months doing exact­ly the same thing to Rus­sia, only with­out much effect. Rus­sia, obvi­ous­ly, has the bet­ter hand — and it’s play­ing it. Again: we are ruled by fools who pre­fer sun­ny ide­o­log­i­cal dreams to cold real­i­ty … of the sort that’s going to hit Euro­pean homes and busi­ness­es very hard by Jan­u­ary.”
  4. Sub­ma­rine Cables and Con­tain­er Ship­ments: Two Imme­di­ate Risks to the US Econ­o­my if Chi­na Invades Tai­wan (Chris­tine McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong, Mer­ca­tus): “The poten­tial effects of a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan on the US econ­o­my are far greater than those of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine. Con­tain­er ship­ments to and from major ports in the region, as well as dig­i­tal flows, would be at direct risk. Chi­na and Tai­wan are also major sup­pli­ers and con­sumers for US major trad­ing part­ners around the globe from Japan and Ger­many to Sau­di Ara­bia. The effects of a cri­sis or block­ade would be felt by every major econ­o­my, which, in turn, would pro­duce addi­tion­al neg­a­tive effects for the US econ­o­my.”
  5. Octo­pus­es Don’t Have Back­bones — or Rights (New York Times): “…male blue-ringed octo­pus­es could use touch to rec­og­nize females they’d already mat­ed with. After bump­ing into a for­mer mate, the males fled, per­haps to avoid being eat­en. Such research sug­gests that octo­pus­es and oth­er cephalopods are smart and sen­si­tive.”
    • That’s a fun­ny excerpt. More seri­ous­ly, I thought this point was quite inter­est­ing: “Dr. Nie­mi said crit­ics have point­ed out that ani­mal care com­mit­tees have rarely denied approval to researchers. But in his expe­ri­ence, this is because com­mit­tees go back and forth with a sci­en­tist to revise the plan until it is accept­able.”
  6. Death in Navy SEAL Train­ing Expos­es a Cul­ture of Bru­tal­i­ty, Cheat­ing and Drugs (Dave Philipps, New York Times): “Sailors who enter the pro­gram bol­stered by steroids and hor­mones can push hard­er, recov­er faster and prob­a­bly beat out the sailors who are try­ing to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with mul­ti­ple com­bat deploy­ments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up select­ing only the very best cheaters, and steadi­ly fill the SEAL teams with war fight­ers who view rules as option­al. ‘What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?’ said the leader. ‘A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an eth­i­cal deci­sion?’ ” 
    • This sto­ry has INSANE details.
  7. New sto­ries on New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, Sean Feucht keep assum­ing a right-wing takeover (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…he doesn’t claim to be a pas­tor who’s expect­ed to take a qua­si-vow of prop­er­ty; he’s a rock musi­cian who does what oth­er enter­tain­ers do: Haul in the cash. He just hap­pens to have put a Chris­t­ian veneer on it all, and he’s doing for con­ser­v­a­tives what lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood elites have done for the Left for years.  If you look at Feucht in that light — as an astute enter­tain­er who wise­ly grasped peo­ples’ anger at church shut-downs in 2020 and exploit­ed it in a series of con­certs — his wealth doesn’t seem as unusu­al.”
    • I found this piece very inter­est­ing. At its best, GetRe­li­gion high­lights how news sto­ries in major pub­li­ca­tions get basic facts wrong about reli­gion (espe­cial­ly tra­di­tion­al reli­gions) and miss impor­tant insights as a result. This is one of their bet­ter pieces in a while.

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  Film Experts: Why Chris­t­ian Movies Are a Joke (Dou­glas Wil­son): “Stefan Malar­ney (Hot Tub Time Machine) made the obser­va­tion that Chris­t­ian film mak­ers sim­ply refuse to pick mate­r­i­al that is true to life. Andre Caproni (Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies) agreed, adding that unless we address the human con­di­tion with integri­ty, we are deny­ing some­thing essen­tial­ly spir­i­tu­al about ourselves.” For the record, this is satire. From vol­ume 233.

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 365

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 365, which is the num­ber of days in most years. In oth­er words, I’ve done the equiv­a­lent of work­ing on this email dai­ly for a year. In real­i­ty I just add a lit­tle bit every day as I’m read­ing things, but it’s still a big sta­tis­tic.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good. And, above all, lis­ten to your moth­er.”
    • Warn­ing: the head­er pic­ture is risque but the arti­cle is worth it. The author is not a Chris­t­ian and unsur­pris­ing­ly comes to some non-Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions — still fas­ci­nat­ing to see a force­ful sec­u­lar rejec­tion of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion.
  2. Racism-relat­ed:
    • Black cou­ple sues after they say home val­u­a­tion ris­es near­ly $300,000 when shown by White col­league (Justin Gam­ble and Vir­ginia Lang­maid, CNN): “Con­nol­ly and Mott lat­er re-applied with anoth­er lender, and ‘white­washed’ their home, accord­ing to the law­suit. This includ­ed remov­ing pho­tos of their Black fam­i­ly from the home, and hav­ing a White col­league present the prop­er­ty to the apprais­er. The suit claims this val­u­a­tion came back at $750,000, more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars high­er than 20/20 Val­u­a­tions’ appraisal of $472,000.”
    • In California’s largest race bias cas­es, Lati­no work­ers are accused of abus­ing Black col­leagues (Mar­got Roo­sevelt, Los Ange­les Times): “Though the agency tracks the race and eth­nic­i­ty of vic­tims, it does not com­pile offi­cial sta­tis­tics on offend­ers. Nor are there data­bas­es of pri­vate cas­es cat­e­go­rized by per­pe­tra­tors’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hos­til­i­ty from Lati­no work­ers. But court fil­ings, vic­tim­s’ alle­ga­tions and employ­er records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co offices involved dis­crim­i­na­tion by Lati­nos, about a third involved white offend­ers and a third were unspe­cif­ic.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Polit­i­cal Ethics Are Upside Down (David French, The Dis­patch): “…both the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties are utter­ly depen­dent upon their most devout mem­bers for their elec­toral success. As I’ve not­ed before, non­white Democ­rats (and espe­cial­ly black Democ­rats) are among the most God-fear­ing, church­go­ing mem­bers of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At the same time, the Repub­li­can Par­ty would be irrel­e­vant with­out its own white Evan­gel­i­cal base. The bot­tom line is that Chris­tians in both par­ties have absolute veto pow­er over (at the very least) the party’s nation­al can­di­dates.”
  4. Silent cri­sis of soar­ing excess deaths grip­ping Britain is only tip of the ice­berg (Sarah Knap­ton, The Tele­graph via Yahoo News): “For 14 of the past 15 weeks, Eng­land and Wales have aver­aged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, the num­ber of non-Covid excess deaths will soon out­strip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more dead­ly than the omi­cron wave. So what is going on? Experts believe deci­sions tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in the ear­li­est stages of the pan­dem­ic may now be com­ing back to bite. Poli­cies that kept peo­ple indoors, scared them away from hos­pi­tal­s and deprived them of treat­ment and pri­ma­ry care are final­ly tak­ing their toll.”
  5. The Rise of the Work­er Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Score (Jodi Kan­tor and Arya Sun­daram, New York Times): “…two years ago, her employ­er start­ed requir­ing chap­lains to accrue more of what it called ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty points.’ A vis­it to the dying: as lit­tle as one point. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a funer­al: one and three-quar­ters points. A phone call to griev­ing rel­a­tives: one-quar­ter point.”
  6. Good con­ver­sa­tions have lots of door­knobs (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Con­ver­sa­tion­al affor­dances are things like digres­sions and con­fes­sions and bold claims that beg for a rejoin­der. Talk­ing to anoth­er per­son is like rock climb­ing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist our­selves sky­ward. Maybe that’s why a real­ly good con­ver­sa­tion feels a lit­tle bit like float­ing. What mat­ters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affor­dances.” The author has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from Har­vard and is doing a post­doc at Colum­bia study­ing con­ver­sa­tions.
    • Relat­ed: Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “…most of us are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­tak­en about how much we will enjoy a social encounter. Com­muters expect­ed to have less pleas­ant rides if they tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. But their actu­al expe­ri­ence was pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. Peo­ple ran­dom­ly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips con­sis­tent­ly more than those instruct­ed to keep to them­selves. Intro­verts some­times go into these sit­u­a­tions with par­tic­u­lar­ly low expec­ta­tions, but both intro­verts and extro­verts tend­ed to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions more than rid­ing solo.”
  7. Put Down the Woke Man’s Bur­den (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “The Har­vard being whipped along by the admin­is­tra­tive caste, by con­trast, resem­bles the Children’s Cru­sade of the Mid­dle Ages: wrong cause, wrong army. And it ends up attack­ing the wrong ene­mies.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Relat­ed: Harvard’s Sta­tus as Wealth­i­est School Faces Oil-Rich Con­tender in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas (Janet Lor­in & Ser­gio Cha­pa, Bloomberg): “Oil reached a high of $120 a bar­rel ear­li­er this year as a result of a war-induced ener­gy crunch. The rev­enue is expect­ed to help nar­row the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 bil­lion endow­ment and Harvard’s $53.2 bil­lion as of June 2021. ‘The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas has a cash wind­fall when every­one is look­ing at a poten­tial cash crunch,’ said William Goet­z­mann, a pro­fes­sor of finance and man­age­ment stud­ies at Yale University’s School of Man­age­ment. ‘Adjust­ing your port­fo­lio for social con­cerns is not cost­less.’ ”

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 Too much trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in public.”First shared in vol­ume 233.

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 364

a mix of links more rar­i­fied and more spicy than nor­mal

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, the 364th install­ment, can also be expressed as the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes: 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One Man­ner of Law (Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Harpers): “Almost fifty years ago, I learned by pure acci­dent that a code of law was drawn up in Mass­a­chu­setts in 1641 that sub­stan­tial­ly antic­i­pat­ed the Bill of Rights. I hap­pened to read a let­ter to the edi­tor in the New York Times that men­tioned the Mass­a­chu­setts Body of Lib­er­ties. I had a PhD by then and was sup­pos­ed­ly an Amer­i­can­ist by train­ing, yet I was learn­ing of this for the first time. When I final­ly read these laws, I won­dered why the nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can his­to­ry did not begin with them.”
  2. The Girls Who Resist­ed Boko Haram (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “While the world demand­ed their return, the cap­tive girls were under relent­less pres­sure to con­vert to Islam and mar­ry mil­i­tants cho­sen for them. They were threat­ened with behead­ing or bru­tal slav­ery if they refused. Many of the girls, par­a­lyzed with fear, suc­cumbed. Oth­ers buck­led under the brain­wash­ing of a mil­i­tant assigned to incul­cate them into the doc­trines of Islam. He forced the ‘daugh­ters of infi­dels’ to take hours-long class­es in which they mem­o­rized the Quran. The girls were told that if they mar­ried, they would receive homes, slaves, and hon­or. In secret, the girls shared Bible pas­sages and prayed fer­vent­ly togeth­er for strength and res­cue. They sang hymns into their hands and cups of water to sti­fle the sound.”
  3. Why I Left Acad­e­mia (Since You’re Won­der­ing) (William Dere­siewicz, Quil­lette): “…it wasn’t so much that I want­ed to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than every­body as that I want­ed every­body to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly. I want­ed the rules to change; I played by the ones that I thought we should have. I insist­ed on behav­ing as if I exist­ed in an envi­ron­ment that val­ued teach­ing as much as schol­ar­ship and intel­lec­tu­al­ism as much as spe­cial­iza­tion. Where open­ing the eyes of a hun­dred under­grad­u­ates was worth as much as super­vis­ing one more dis­ser­ta­tion, and pub­lish­ing an essay in a peri­od­i­cal that’s read by tens of thou­sands was as valu­able as adding one more item to the pile of dis­re­gard­ed stud­ies.” This is quite good, more rel­e­vant to the human­i­ties than to the sciences. 
  4. I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medi­um Real­ly Is the Mes­sage (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Amer­i­cans are cap­i­tal­ists, and we believe noth­ing if not that if a choice is freely made, that grants it a pre­sump­tion against cri­tique. That is one rea­son it’s so hard to talk about how we are changed by the medi­ums we use. That con­ver­sa­tion, on some lev­el, demands val­ue judg­ments. This was on my mind recent­ly, when I heard Jonathan Haidt, a social psy­chol­o­gist who’s been col­lect­ing data on how social media harms teenagers, say, blunt­ly, ‘Peo­ple talk about how to tweak it — oh, let’s hide the like coun­ters. Well, Insta­gram tried — but let me say this very clear­ly: There is no way, no tweak, no archi­tec­tur­al change that will make it OK for teenage girls to post pho­tos of them­selves, while they’re going through puber­ty, for strangers or oth­ers to rate pub­licly.’ ”
    • Relat­ed: When Bots Write Your Love Sto­ry (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “That machines are telling us par­tic­u­lar sto­ries about our world is one of the main rea­sons I keep com­ing back time and again to dig­i­tal cul­ture, epis­te­mol­o­gy, and the­ol­o­gy. Our default pos­ture toward the Inter­net is still, to this day, a pos­ture of intu­itive belief: to gen­uine­ly accept that what we see on the screen is a piece of ‘real life,’ rep­re­sen­ta­tive of some­one who is real­ly some­where. And in many cas­es, of course, this is more or less true. But there are also very real cas­es where the inten­si­ty or the vivid­ness of what we see online is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to its weight or valid­i­ty out­side.”
    • Relat­ed: Speech With­out Account­abil­i­ty: Reck­on­ing with Anony­mous Chris­t­ian Trolls (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…there is at least one clear ana­log to anon speech in the Bible that I have not yet touched on: the speech of the ser­pent in Eden. He was the first char­ac­ter in Gen­e­sis to con­ceal his iden­ti­ty in order to cri­tique a person—God him­self. The first anon words in human his­to­ry set human his­to­ry on fire.”
      • This piece is far too long, ram­bles need­less­ly, and at one point says some­thing I think very sil­ly. Nonethe­less, I read to the end with inter­est. The best parts were the reflec­tions on anonymous/disguised speech in the Bible.
    • Relat­ed: The Seat of Mock­ers (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “The defend­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers of smash-mouth incen­di­ary rhetoric insist that we must do this so as to ade­quate­ly com­bat the world and the infil­tra­tion of world­li­ness into the church. It seems to me that in reality, it is the world and the infil­tra­tion of world­li­ness into the church.” This is quite good, and I found it by fol­low­ing a link in the pre­ced­ing point.
  5. Some links relat­ed to the ongo­ing sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, most­ly crit­i­cal:
    • Chris­tians Vol­un­teer­ing Pro­nouns? (Andrew T. Walk­er, Amer­i­can Reformer): “We should name the pro­noun issue for what it is: A lan­guage game. Lan­guage is about nam­ing real­i­ty. Pro­nouns of any sort are instru­ments that indi­vid­u­als use to wield pow­er. Pro­nouns pos­sess pow­er only because the cul­ture we live in deems one’s cho­sen indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ty to be absolute­ly cen­tral to who one is. Pro­nouns serve the sub­jec­tive self, so if one rejects another’s cho­sen pro­nouns, it is doubtless­ly inter­pret­ed as reject­ing the person’s attempt at self-descrip­tion and self-auton­o­my. That’s what this is all fun­da­men­tal­ly about—creating a pri­vate field of real­i­ty defined by the wish­es and fan­tasies of indi­vid­u­als who know they can pro­voke sub­mis­sion for fear of can­cel­la­tion. We should be clear-eyed about this and refuse to go along with it.”
    • Zoophil­ia: The Last Taboo Will Fall (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Seri­ous­ly, how do you stop legal­iz­ing zoophil­ia, espe­cial­ly in a pop­u­lar cul­ture in which inter­nal bar­ri­ers with­in the mass­es will have been bro­ken down by wide­spread hard­core pornog­ra­phy? ‘What does my neigh­bor’s habit of being corn­holed by his Ger­man shep­herd have to do with my mar­riage?’ say the nitwit lib­er­tar­i­ans. ‘Ani­mals can’t con­sent!’ squeal the nitwit lib­er­als, though I hope they have the sense not to say so with their mouth full of ham.”
      • This is a well-doc­u­ment­ed piece and the updates at the end are very much worth read­ing, espe­cial­ly the Scalia quote.
    • I Regret Being A Slut (Brid­get Pheta­sy, Sub­stack): “I know regret­ting most of my sex­u­al encoun­ters is not some­thing a sex-pos­i­tive fem­i­nist who used to write a col­umn for Play­boy is sup­posed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a ‘slut’ and sleep­ing with a lot of men is not the only behav­ior I regret. Even more dam­ag­ing was what I told myself in order to jus­ti­fy the fact that I was dis­pos­able to these men: I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t care when a man ghost­ed me. I didn’t care when he left in the mid­dle of the night or hint­ed that he want­ed me to leave. The walks of shame. The black­outs. The anx­i­ety. The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empow­ered. Look­ing back, it isn’t a sur­prise that I lied to myself. Because from a young age, sex was some­thing I was lied to about.” This is in no way a Chris­t­ian arti­cle — but it is inter­est­ing.
    • Mon­key­pox And The Face Of Gay Promis­cu­ity (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I remem­ber being told by the media that gay men were vast­ly more promis­cu­ous than straight men because soci­ety com­pelled them to be. Nor­mal­ize homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and grant same-sex mar­riage, and that would change. I nev­er believed it because I knew per­fect­ly well that gay men were insane­ly promis­cu­ous not because they were gay, but because they were men. An ordi­nary male unre­strained by reli­gious or moral scru­ple, and faced with a wide vari­ety of will­ing part­ners who demand no emo­tion­al com­mit­ment, or even to know one’s name, before hav­ing sex — that man will like­ly behave exact­ly as most gay men do.”
      • WARNING — the pic­ture in the link is jar­ring. The com­ments at the end are quite inter­est­ing and not at all what most observers would expect — Dreher real­ly does appre­ci­ate his audi­ence even when they dis­agree with him.
  6. ‘Dis­turb­ing’: Experts trou­bled by Canada’s euthana­sia laws (Maria Cheng, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Cana­da prides itself on being lib­er­al and accept­ing, said David Jones, direc­tor of the Anscombe Bioethics Cen­tre in Britain, ‘but what’s hap­pen­ing with euthana­sia sug­gests there may be a dark­er side.‘”
  7. As India marks its first 75 years, Gand­hi is down­played, even derid­ed (Ger­ry Shih, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, at ral­lies of Hin­du nation­al­ist hard-lin­ers, Gand­hi is rou­tine­ly vil­i­fied as fee­ble in his tac­tics against the British and over­ly con­cil­ia­to­ry to India’s Mus­lims, who broke off and formed their own state, Pak­istan, on Aug. 14, 1947. On social media and online forums, exag­ger­a­tions and false­hood­s abound about Gandhi’s alleged betray­al of Hin­dus. And in pop­u­lar films and the polit­i­cal main­stream, Gand­hi and Jawa­har­lal Nehru — the first prime min­is­ter — are side­lined, while nation­al­ists who advo­cat­ed the force of arms have been ele­vat­ed.”

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  Hav­ing Kids (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “I remem­ber per­fect­ly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the abil­i­ty to take off for some oth­er coun­try at a moment’s notice. That was so great. Why did I nev­er do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the free­dom I had before kids, I nev­er used. I paid for it in lone­li­ness, but I nev­er used it.” First shared in vol­ume 233.

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 363

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 num­ber 363, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as 31 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why aren’t smart peo­ple hap­pi­er? (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “My grand­ma does not know how to use the ‘input’ but­ton on her TV’s remote con­trol, but she does know how to raise a fam­i­ly full of good peo­ple who love each oth­er, how to car­ry on through a tragedy, and how to make the per­fect pump­kin pie.… Exclud­ing this kind of intel­li­gence from our def­i­n­i­tions doesn’t just hurt our grandmas—it hurts us too. If you don’t val­ue the abil­i­ty to solve poor­ly defined prob­lems, you’ll nev­er get more of it. You won’t seek out peo­ple who have that abil­i­ty and try to learn from them, nor will you lis­ten to them when they have some­thing impor­tant to say. You’ll spend your whole life try­ing to solve prob­lems with clev­er­ness when what you real­ly need is wis­dom.”
  2. New York City’s Largest Evan­gel­i­cal Church Plans Bil­lion-Dol­lar Devel­op­ment (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On 10.5 acres of church land, the pro­posed vil­lage would include thou­sands of units of afford­able hous­ing, a trade school, a super­mar­ket, a per­form­ing arts cen­ter, 24/7 child­care for night-shift work­ers, senior liv­ing facil­i­ties, and oth­er ameni­ties designed to revi­tal­ize the East New York neigh­bor­hood.”
    • But I thought church­es were leech­es on soci­ety exploit­ing their tax-exempt sta­tus with­out help­ing their com­mu­ni­ties! I’m sure some­one told me that once. 
  3. When mix­ing faith with fur­ries, things can get hairy (Riley Far­rell, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “…Chris­tians in the fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty are cau­tious about who knows about both their fur­ry and faith­ful selves. Chris­t­ian fur­ries inter­viewed for this sto­ry, includ­ing lead­ers of the group that calls itself the Chris­t­ian Fur­ry Fel­low­ship, asked to be anony­mous, fear­ing ‘doxxing’ from with­in the large­ly sec­u­lar fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty for their Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ty and ostra­ciza­tion from their pro­fes­sion­al lives for their fur­ry hob­by.”
    • This was by far the most unex­pect­ed arti­cle I read this week. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing here. I draw your atten­tion to my dis­claimers.
  4. Fact-Check­ing Ran­dall Balmer’s Urban Leg­end on the Real Ori­gin of the Reli­gious Right (Jonathan White­head, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By the ear­ly 1970s, Evan­gel­i­cals, Catholics, and oth­er reli­gious vot­ers had dis­cov­ered that pol­i­tics would not leave them alone. Then their con­cerns about abor­tion, gov­ern­ment over­reach in schools, sec­u­lar human­ism at the FCC, and an unre­spon­sive ‘born again’ Pres­i­dent all merged into a sin­gle out­let, cre­at­ing a tor­rent of Repub­li­can vot­ers in 1978 and beyond.”
    • I post­ed a debunk­ing of this claim a while ago, but this one is quite good. And the claim gets repeat­ed enough in cer­tain cir­cles that debunk­ings should be repeat­ed as well.
  5. There Is a Sec­u­lar Case for Life (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amidst a squadron of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers, there was a sin­gle athe­ist pro­gres­sive. He was beard­ed, disheveled, and qui­et, but when he spoke every­one fell silent. Every­one leaned for­ward to hear what he had to say. His name was Nat Hentoff. He was a writer for the Vil­lage Voice; he’d pub­lished in Play­boy. He was a pro­gres­sive civ­il lib­er­tar­i­an. He was also one of the most per­sua­sive pro-life voic­es in the land.”
  6. Yearn­ing for a Banana Repub­lic (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “When seri­ous peo­ple talk seri­ous­ly about chang­ing a regime, they’re talk­ing about chang­ing the sys­tem of gov­ern­ment. Regime change in Iraq meant get­ting rid of a total­i­tar­i­an, ter­ror­is­tic dic­ta­tor­ship, not sim­ply replac­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein with a more pli­able and coop­er­a­tive tyrant. America’s regime isn’t on any bal­lot. Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it is the bal­lot. More prop­er­ly, it is the con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem that requires our lead­ers to be elect­ed.”
    • This is straight fire. Not espe­cial­ly par­ti­san but def­i­nite­ly polit­i­cal. Gold­berg is a tremen­dous word­smith.
  7. 1st syn­thet­ic mouse embryos — com­plete with beat­ing hearts and brains — cre­at­ed with no sperm, eggs or womb (Nico­let­ta Lanese, Live Sci­ence): “To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spin­ning device filled with shiny glass vials.”
    • The title is, I think, poor­ly word­ed. These are not embryos assem­bled from raw mate­ri­als; rather, the researchers suc­cess­ful­ly mor­phed a stem cell into an embryo. Which is also amaz­ing!

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  Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.” First shared in vol­ume 232. (sad­ly, this is pay­walled)

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 362

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.

362 feels like a num­ber that should have lots of fac­tors, but it’s only got the prime fac­tors 2 and 181.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Explor­ing AI-Assist­ed Bible Study (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “I prompt­ed GPT‑3 to gen­er­ate text for each chap­ter in the Bible in each cat­e­go­ry. For exam­ple, the prompt to gen­er­ate a prayer was: “Write 5 prayers inspired by John 3 in the Bible. Remem­ber that the events described here are in the past. First include a short obser­va­tion or les­son for each prayer, and then write a per­son­al prayer relat­ed to the lesson.“  I reviewed the gen­er­at­ed text to avoid (or at least min­i­mize) unhelp­ful or hereti­cal con­tent. I accept­ed about 90% of GPT-3’s sug­ges­tions on its first pass and regen­er­at­ed the rest until it gave me some­thing use­ful. It cost about $150 over six weeks to gen­er­ate this con­tent, which con­sists of 71,062 gen­er­a­tions and 1.1 mil­lion words.”
    • This is the same guy who gen­er­at­ed the AI Bible art­work I shared recent­ly (these and oth­er exper­i­ments of his are avail­able at http://www.openbible.info/labs/).
  2. What an Over­ly Pes­simistic View of Amer­i­ca Gets Wrong (Yascha Mounk inter­view­ing Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “If every insti­tu­tion found­ed by a faith com­mu­ni­ty in your city dis­ap­peared overnight, preschools, hos­pi­tals, and uni­ver­si­ties would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social ser­vices would prob­a­bly be gone. It feels to me that reli­gious iden­ti­ty diver­si­ty should be at the cen­ter of our nation­al con­ver­sa­tion, and I’m curi­ous as to why it’s not.” This con­ver­sa­tion is full of wis­dom and I high­ly rec­om­mend it.
  3. Peo­ple Are Dat­ing All Wrong, Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence (Seth Stephens-Davi­d­owitz, Wired): “Good roman­tic part­ners are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict with data. Desired roman­tic part­ners are easy to pre­dict with data. And that sug­gests that many of us are dat­ing all wrong.”
    • From lat­er in the arti­cle: “…how a per­son answered ques­tions about them­selves was rough­ly four times more pre­dic­tive of their rela­tion­ship hap­pi­ness than all the traits of their roman­tic part­ner com­bined.”
  4. A Cru­cial Court Case Expos­es the Dark­ness of America’s Worst Indus­try (David French, The Dis­patch): “If some­one want­ed to cre­ate a sys­tem that was designed to facil­i­tate the dis­tri­b­u­tion of child pornog­ra­phy, videos of rape and oth­er kinds of abuse, or revenge porn, it would be hard to con­struct a more effi­cient sys­tem than MindGeek’s. And the sheer amount of MindGeek’s traf­fic and the vol­ume of the down­loads demon­strates that Porn­hub and oth­er sites are inject­ing poi­son into Amer­i­can life at an indus­tri­al scale.”
    • A stu­dent rec­om­mend­ed this piece from a month ago in addi­tion to the above: The Fight to Hold Porn­hub Account­able (Shee­lah Kol­hatkar, The New York­er): “Pschorr was sur­prised by the lack of reg­u­la­tion in the U.S. ‘It was always inter­est­ing for me as a Ger­man to see that, in the U.S., you’d get I.D.’d if you went to a bar, and if you’re not twen­ty-one you get in big trou­ble,’ he said. ‘But if you want to con­sume porn all you have to do is click ‘Yes, I’m 18,’ and you’re in the realm of dirt.’ ” I found this arti­cle inter­est­ing because it por­trays Chris­tians both favor­ably and unfa­vor­ably in short order.
  5. How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83? (Rebec­ca Davis O’Brien & Ali Watkins, New York Times): “A home­less shel­ter work­er and peo­ple close to Ms. Ley­den ques­tioned whether, despite her gen­der iden­ti­ty, Ms. Har­vey should have been placed in a home­less shel­ter for women, giv­en her his­to­ry of attack­ing and mur­der­ing them.” Read that sen­tence slow­ly. Wow. And the last eight para­graphs are jaw drop­ping.
  6. A large new study offers clues about how low­er-income chil­dren can rise up the eco­nom­ic lad­der. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Church­es and oth­er reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions may have some lessons to teach oth­er parts of soci­ety. Although many church­es are socioe­co­nom­i­cal­ly homo­ge­neous, those with some diver­si­ty tend to fos­ter more cross-class inter­ac­tions than most oth­er social activ­i­ties. Churchs [sic] have low­er lev­els of what the researchers call socioe­co­nom­ic ‘friend­ing bias.’ ”
    • Sad­ly there isn’t more info on the reli­gious dynam­ic, even though this sec­tion of the newslet­ter is called “How Church­es Shine”
    • Although this is a NYT piece, it is not pay­walled because it is from their morn­ing newslet­ter.
  7. Non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Church­es Are Adding Mil­lions of Mem­bers. Where Are They Com­ing From? (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What is dri­ving the growth of non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al church­es? While in the past it result­ed from a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of indi­vid­u­als leav­ing a main­line tra­di­tion, now it looks like non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tions are increas­ing by tak­ing in peo­ple who were raised Catholic—which is about a quar­ter of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Merit,’ It’s the ‘Ocracy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most others.” First shared in vol­ume 232

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.