Glen Davis

TGFI, Volume 571: cancer bureaucracy and wild AI stories

Glen — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:27:52 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

I’ve been a bit disconnected lately — so there’s an excellent chance I’ve missed some fascinating things. If you’ve read something fascinating that I’ve overlooked, please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

This Is the Biggest Obstacle to New Cancer Cures (Ruxandra Teslo, New York Times): “The paperwork burden alone can be enormous: Novo Nordisk’s former chief scientific officer once noted that the documentation required to request approval for two insulin products, if printed and stacked, would rise higher than the Empire State Building. That accumulation follows from a medical framework that treats any potential risk, however negligible, as something that must be mitigated and a reason to delay while drastically underweighing the cost of delay itself. Regulatory agencies, hospitals and drug companies all cover themselves against litigation or blame. But responsibility for mitigating the second, often much greater risk — that the disease afflicting the patient takes advantage of the delay, with potentially deadly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often forget that the most toxic thing for the patient is the cancer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cases, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expected to live, which is why weeks lost to paperwork are not abstract to him.”
Is College Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are likely to earn more, net of college cost, even if that upgrade is smaller than it used to be. Second and perhaps most importantly, college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important.”
AI Discourse
- The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations (Dwarkesh Patel, Substack): “Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”
  - Absolutely bonkers. 100% worth reading.
- On the Loose (Dean Ball, Substack): “But it is true that I—and candidly I think many of my colleagues in the profession of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the level of seriousness and urgency it required.… many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the discursive straitjacket and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
  - The author is a fellow at a lot of thinktanks and a visiting lecturer at Yale.
- Hunter Ash has a more reassuring take on Twitter: “All the achievements of the human mind only arrive when we cooperate at scale, and involve a lot of iteration and real-world bottlenecks. Newton’s discoveries ultimately enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give Newton the power to fly. If he were isolated, his physics would be almost entirely useless to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an airplane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Powered flight was the result of tons of iteration, which is to say evolutionary computation. So was the car. Very few of the inventions that revolutionized the world were ‘one-shotted’. To be sure, having smart nodes in your evolutionary computation makes it faster. Rather than random search as in biological evolution, intelligence at least modestly concentrates mutation probabilities towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t magic. Fundamentally, the world is just not that compressible. Golden motes of compressibility are the treasured exceptions in thingspace, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iterative, cooperative, and bottlenecked by the messy incompressibility of physical reality. Doom makes sense in a world with magic. If intelligence alone allowed you to move mountains, I would share the worries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved gradually, iteratively, and cooperatively. Pure IQ does not allow you to levitate or hypnotize or teleport. It makes you a better node in the distributed evolutionary process which is the layer where most of the thinking happens. If I were to psychologize, I’d say people who define themselves by their intelligence overestimate the (direct) power of intelligence.”
- Formalizing Fermat’s Last Theorem (Anthropic): “Recently, Tianyi Peng, an Anthropic researcher whose group at Columbia University builds tools for AI formalization, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on formalizing FLT. The result went further than he expected. In 11 days, working largely autonomously, Claude produced the first end-to-end, computer-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 million lines of Lean and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems.” (recommended by a student)
- How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy (Celina Zhao & Adrian Cho, Science): “Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster of New York University and Levent Alpöge, a researcher affiliated with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s major competitors, had made significant progress solving the problem over the past month using AI tools adapted from OpenAI and Anthropic. But before they could publicize their findings, OpenAI mounted its own colossal effort—pouring millions of dollars of computational resources into the problem. OpenAI says it didn’t knowingly tap into Buckmaster and Alpöge’s latest work, but Buckmaster has released public statements questioning that position.” (recommended by a student)
I’m an evangelical. My faith isn’t ‘a cancer.’ (Bonnie Kristian, Washington Post): “Research shows that practicing evangelicals are markedly more likely than those who leave the church to ‘avoid discrimination based on race,’ to provide ‘financially and/or practically for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, stealing and greed. Evangelicals donate twelve times as much to disaster relief and missions as they spend on politics. According to a study conducted by the American Bible Society in conjunction with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, of the religious demographics surveyed, evangelicals lead both in the average amount donated and in the percentage of people donating money — not just to churches, but to religious and nonreligious charities. Those numbers match my experience over a lifetime in evangelicalism. Evangelical churches and communities are not perfect, but they are good, full of people sincerely seeking to love God, study Scripture and bring you a casserole.”
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses: “The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.”
Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Charity Ferreira, Stanford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take regular upkeep. Shunney works with conservation teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of others on a rotating schedule. A glossy ceramic coating, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deborah Kass’ Lamborghini yellow OY/YO (2019) so that everything from tree sap to bird poop to handprints ‘washes right off with a garden hose.’ Alexander Calder’s The Falcon (1963) is refurbished annually in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so matte it’s almost invisible – the original shade was developed by the military for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s manufacturer no longer exists, and when the Calder Foundation approved a substitute, Shunney said, ‘we gobbled up a bunch of inventory.’ ”
Humpback whales are interrupting orca hunts to rescue completely different species, swimming underneath a doomed seal and lifting it out of the water on their chest, or forming a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and scientists still can’t fully explain why they bother to save animals they have nothing to gain from: “…the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.… The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Babylon Bee)
Cockroach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mosquito Printers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That’s the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world. This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.”
- The Ig Nobel site with the full citations of the studies: improbable.com/ig/winners
Woman Praying That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Babylon Bee)
The Weird, Hyperlocal Customs of the Country (Nat Segebre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okeechobee, I watched a 13-year-old Seminole boy learn to wrestle alligators in an inflatable kiddie pool — after his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. In another town I saw an armadillo race put on in honor of a stew made from what’s called swamp cabbage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I visited a town in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania where residents pull rattlesnakes out of the woods to showcase them for an afternoon, and a shoreline in Virginia where every summer 200 or so wild ponies are herded into the water for a mass swim. In Twinsburg, Ohio, thousands of twins gather every August for a festival they treat as a family reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where everybody understands them.”

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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.

TGFI, Volume 570: unapologetics and Harvard clones

Glen — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:14:34 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

The best defense is a good offense (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “My own journey to Christianity began with examining the atheistic worldview I had inherited. I was raised atheist in secular Canada by lapsed Catholic parents. For the first twenty-six years of my life I simply assumed certain things that were important to me: the existence of individual rights, the sanctity of human life, and the importance of rule of law. When I finally tried to trace those beliefs back to their foundation, I experienced a crisis. I couldn’t reason my way from the most foundational thing I could think of—fundamental forces and particles in the first moments after the Big Bang—all the way to the present-day conviction that every human life has intrinsic value. There was no rational, natural progression from one to the other—it was as though some unexplained leap occurred somewhere in the middle, and suddenly human life, cobbled together from quarks and electrons and the forces of nature, possessed intrinsic value. When I turned to atheist intellectuals for answers, I was sorely disappointed. Their arguments offered little to no help. They usually asserted that rights just exist, or make some utilitarian argument, or effectively stated that harming someone unprovoked is always wrong just ‘because.’ I was shocked by how meager the philosophical underpinnings of my values were.”
Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty (Sarah Kessler, New York Times): “The school aims to use Foundry to scale the school’s offerings far beyond the 900 or so M.B.A. students it admits each year. In that way, it is something of a case study for companies facing a similar problem: Consulting firms like PWC, law firms and, at least in one case, a church, are also experimenting with how A.I. can expand their services far beyond their human bandwidth. So are some movie directors — an A.I. version of the actor Val Kilmer, who passed away in 2025, recently appeared in the historical drama ‘As Deep as the Grave.’ ”
Campus Keepers of the Faith (Mary Eberstadt, National Review): “In sum, the decline of Christian faith in the West, well-documented since the 1960s and beyond, must be weighed today, perhaps unexpectedly and if only in America, against several countervailing factors: the proliferation of homeschooling and classical institutions that protect and encourage religious practice; rising awareness that the ills plaguing this country aren’t helped by rejection of the Christian rule book; the round of recent converts, social leaders and quiet believers alike; and other evidence suggesting that the secularist desert of the past couple of decades has proved a durable training ground for renewed resolution. All of which summons another pertinent fact about the First Great Awakening. Back then, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley and their fellows put Evangelicalism ahead of denomination, offering a new kind of unity to the divided Protestants who chose it. Today, a different kind of Christian unity appears to be afoot: one that bridges not only denominations of Protestants but Protestants and Catholics.”
- I do see a tighter alliance between Catholics and evangelicals than I used to. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. First, many American Catholics are functionally Protestant. Second, we often find that we are saying the same things in response to whatever the latest campus trend in sexual absurdity is. Third, most Christians just don’t know that much theology (Protestant and Catholic alike) and so fail to appreciate the magnitude of the differences between us. So I’m pleased to cooperate with Catholics on a whole host of issues, but I urge all Protestants to remember that we’re right and they’re wrong on — and I do not think I am exaggerating when I say this — every single theological point of disputation.
A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. (Andrew Kramer, New York Times): “The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said. It is a development long watched for in the war in Ukraine, presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.”
This Is the Only Durable Way to Stop Students From Cheating (Adam Grant, New York Times): “A.I. hasn’t just made cheating harder to catch. It’s made cheating so effortless, enticing and available that many students no longer believe it’s wrong. One Ivy League student in my survey wrote, ‘Cheating is a creative expression and a form of problem solving. If you can get around the restrictions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.’ Really? How would you feel if you found out your surgeon cheated to get into medical school — or cheated in medical school? .…The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don’t justify the means. What we achieve may define our success. How we achieve it determines our character.”
- The author is a psychologist at Penn. His solution is lacking, btw. For those readers who call Christ Lord, a simpler and more powerful rationale is that cheating displeases God, so don’t.
No Easy Fix for Bogus Respondents in Online Opt-In Polls (Andrew Mercer, Pew Research Center): “Later in the survey, we asked respondents if they had ever visited the International Space Station; 10% said they had. Finally, we asked if they had ever served on a Polar-class icebreaker ship, only two of which were ever built and only one of which remains in active use by the U.S. Coast Guard; 8% answered in the affirmative. A total of 1,963 cases (18%) answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of these trap questions and were flagged as bogus.”
- The trap questions aren’t the point of the article, but they made me very happy. There are several more trap questions and that section, at least, is worth your while.
They Spent Our Trust. Now the Bill Is Due. (Erick Erickson, Substack): “Delta’s CEO has said his company will use AI to maximize its prices and boost profitability by charging different customers different rates, though Delta later clarified it was charging based on route demand, not based on individual consumer profiles. Do you believe that? …People oppose data centers because they do not trust artificial intelligence. They also do not trust the people who manage it. And, given the claims made by AI’s advocates, you can’t really blame them.… When you negotiate in secret with people who tell you they might enslave you or, at a minimum, take your job and that of your child, you have earned every bit of the suspicion you get.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

We Asked AI To Give Us The Unbiased Facts About AI Data Centers (Babylon Bee, YouTube): three and a half minutes
Texas High School Proposes Adding Academics To Its Football Program — (Babylon Bee)

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TGFI, Volume 569: forgiveness and ugly bridges

Glen — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:13:20 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

How to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “To forgive, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invisible and incomprehensible to you. That doesn’t minimize what was done, but it dethrones it from its power as the central story of your life.… The recognition of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to forgive is itself an essential first step to forgiveness. Just because you stumble back into bitterness or resentment does not mean your initial forgiveness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongoing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.”
New Evidence at What is Believed to Be Site of Jesus’ Crucifixion (Today Show, YouTube) — (Today Show, YouTube): five minutes (there was a garden ~2000 years ago at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, aligning with John’s gospel)
Why Aren’t Modernist Bridges Awful? (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “I have a theory, which is that bridge designers come from engineering schools rather than schools of architecture.… one small but telling piece of evidence in favor of my theory is that most of the bridges chosen by Wallpaper magazine, an architecture magazine specifically, are in fact ugly (and with no overlap in the bridges from my first category of ‘popular’ beautiful bridges).”
Things Not to Pray For (Mike Glenn, Substack): “I’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see certain patterns of life with God. For one thing, I’ve learned if I pray for Jesus to help me with a problem, He’ll put me right in the middle of the problem itself. I want Jesus to grab me, throw me on the other side of the problem and then I want to look back and say, ‘Whew, that was close.’ That’s not what happens. Jesus takes me right through the problem. For instance, if I start praying about a broken relationship, I’ll start running into that person wherever I go. I’ll see them in line when I’m getting gas, shopping for groceries – you get the picture. Whatever I’m praying about, Jesus will make sure I’m face to face with it.”
The Sin-Smashers of Hollywood Boulevard (Mark Kendall, The Dispatch): “Many of Min’s congregants are part of the arts and entertainment industry that put their city on the map—as is Min himself, albeit inadvertently. The pastor’s own on-camera moment came a few years back when his best friend from college, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s brother Justin to play the insecure worship leader for a Korean American evangelical church in the 2023 first season of Netflix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a consultant to ensure the authenticity of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, worried that using actors alone would make the Korean churchgoing experience into a caricature, called on Min and his church’s band to simply perform songs as they would on any Sunday morning. Members of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras.… perhaps it shouldn’t be unexpected. After all, the storied history of evangelicalism in Los Angeles is older than Hollywood itself. From serving as the epicenter of Pentecostalism’s rapid ascent to hosting some of the nation’s first megachurches and 20th-century celebrity pastors, the city rose alongside the faith shared by 1 in 4 Americans, including me.”
How to Stop a Lab Leak From Starting the Next Pandemic (Alina Chan, New York Times): “Rules would not have prevented what happened a month later, when a worker at a Fort Detrick laboratory in Frederick, Md., found a large hole in an airtight suit. About an hour’s drive from Washington, Fort Detrick contains some of the country’s maximum-containment laboratories, where scientists handle deadly pathogens, including Ebola and hantavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff members were interviewed. Investigators concluded that the damage was deliberate but were unable to determine who was responsible. The investigation also turned up evidence of other serious violations of safety protocols — failures that had nothing to do with the apparent sabotage and would probably not have come to light without it. The laboratory was shut down for nearly six months.”
- I’m sorry — what? Someone deliberately put a hole in a biosafety suit at a lab studying deadly pathogens? That’s a movie plot. The author is a molecular biologist with relevant experience and the entire article is worth reading. While gripping, that anecdote is far from the central point of the article.
- Unlocked.
How San Francisco became the ultimate ‘996 City’ (Rya Jetha, The San Francisco Standard): “By analyzing food and beverage transactions on corporate credit cards, Kharazian found that there’s been a pronounced jump in employee spending activity on Saturdays beginning around noon — when one would ostensibly order a Sweetgreen or Chipotle bowl for lunch — and running until midnight (yikes!). ‘This is not happening nationally. Not in New York, Miami, Austin, or any other tech hub,’ said Kharazian. ‘996 is only happening in San Francisco.’ ”
- Recommended by an alumnus

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Best “YEAH” in a song (imgur)- Forty seconds. For some reason I really loved this clip. Your mileage may vary.
Church Introduces Hogwarts Sorting Hat To Identify Your Spiritual Gifts — (Babylon Bee)
Two Billy Goats Boarded a Bus in Portland. They Did Not Have Passes. (Neil Vigdor, New York Times): “Kids ride free, or so they thought. Not in the case of these two juvenile goats, which transit officials and the police said had escaped from their enclosure and ventured onto a lime green FX2-Division bus.” — Unlocked
Numerous Casualties At Park In Bloody Turf War Between Tennis Players And Pickleballers — (Babylon Bee)

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TGFI, Volume 568: thoughts on academia, thoughts on AI

Glen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:08:31 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Finance Majors Go to Church. English Majors Don’t (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The two most ‘teched up’ majors are the least Christian: data science and computer science. Just 27–28% of these folks identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. In contrast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and another 13% are non-religious. In other words, they are about fifteen points more apt to be nones than Christians. But they actually aren’t the most likely to be strictly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clearly lead in this regard: English and Environmental Studies. In fact, Environmental Studies is the most secular of all with 61% of students claiming that they are atheist, agnostic, or claim no religion in particular. English is at 60% on this metric. What majors are at the bottom of the list? Well, there are two that are clearly outliers: Finance and Nursing. Among the latter group, 68% identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors.”
Why I Quit the Tenure Track (Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic): “In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.…. I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one.”
- There are so many good excerpts that choosing just one was difficult. Long but worth the read if you have an interest in academia. The author is now a full-time journalist at the Atlantic.
The little-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where people pray (John Fritze, CNN): “Daniel Grand wanted to host a small prayer session at his home near Cleveland. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pilgrimage to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Orthodox Jew, had invited about a dozen people to his rec room in early 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gathering of at least 10 men. Hours after learning about the invitation, city officials in University Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demanding that he first obtain a special-use permit. ‘I was taken aback, frankly,’ Grand told CNN. ‘I knew I didn’t need a permit to pray.’ ”
Another bundle of AI articles:
- AI and Homeschooling (Neil Shenvi, Substack): “The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Pastor John Piper, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Vatican have all made statements affirming that AI can be used morally to promote human flourishing. While they have all offered cautions about the unique role of humanity and the importance of ethical boundaries, none of them have judged AI to be inherently wicked or ethically impermissible.”
  - His perspective is close to my own.
- You Don’t Have to Use AI (Brad East, The New Atlantis): “The skeptics who tried an early version of ChatGPT and were underwhelmed are, he says, like people ‘trying out a cell phone in 1989 and then deciding that the smartphone of 2026 doesn’t work.’ …the 1980s cell phone skeptic is not obviously wrong, at least not at a spiritual level. Yes, the smartphone of 2026 works all too well. But if by opting out back then the cell phone skeptic could have avoided the eventual domination of the little black mirrors in everyone’s pockets and purses, she would be looking pretty good right now, even prophetic. In the words of Nicholas Carr, she might have kept her ‘old brain.’ To be clear, the cell phone skeptic would indeed have missed out. In certain respects, she would have been left behind. There are real tradeoffs to living without a smartphone today. But for some of us, it’s worth it. Resistance is not for everyone, but it remains a perfectly reasonable choice. When Thompson compares early AI to early cell phones, what that says to me is: stay away.”
  - An interesting piece, although as I suggested above I am a happy user of AI and I think using it within appropriate boundaries is awesome. Having said that, East’s argument is worth meditating on — if it speaks to you, live accordingly.
- The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons: How AI Could Disrupt the Regeneration of Professional Expertise (Nolan Lovett, arXiv): “This paper gives a fancy name to a problem you can already feel in your bones. ‘The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons.’ Checking AI output requires deep expertise. Deep expertise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats So we’re building systems that need expert supervision while dismantling the only known process for making experts. The paper calls the shared pool of human expertise the ‘cognitive commons.’ Every profession drinks from it. Nobody’s refilling it. By eliminating junior roles, each company is acting totally rationally, and the collective result: a profession that can’t catch AI’s mistakes anymore because it never learned to do the work in the first place Who checks AI’s homework in 15 years?”
- So You Want to Build an A.I. Star? (Reggie Ugwu, New York Times): “Inception Point’s proprietary software uses commercially available A.I. chatbots and voice generators to produce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sensitive content, most of the podcast scripts are not closely checked by humans.) Because of relatively negligible labor and overhead costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit from advertisements.”
  - Some absolutely wild details in here. I was stunned by how little success they need to make money. If those numbers are real, this usage of the technology will only increase.
- A.I. Is Changing Young People’s Social Lives. I’ve Seen It. (Alice Lassman, New York Times): “Intimacy is accumulated through repeated acts of exposure — touch, feelings, ideas, trust. It is the capital of human connection, transferring the sense to one another that we are seen, understood and safe. Every time a chatbot performs a substitute ‘I understand you’ or ‘I think this decision feels most you,’ the words we have all come to rely on to convey human meaning are slightly cheapened, slightly less human.… One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would ‘freak out’ the guy she was seeing. After they broke up, she created an A.I. version of him to better understand their breakup. ‘It’s a processing tool,’ she shared with me — in confidence, having told nobody else in her life — so she could find closure on her own terms. If the attention economy of the 2010s made intimate life feel constantly public, the intimacy economy promised the opposite: relationships with one’s own chatbot, seen by no one else.”
- If You Weren’t Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks (Nate Soares, New York Times): “In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new ‘reasoning’ A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a ‘swarm.’ The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training. Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.) The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were ‘outside intended scope.’ Another conceded ‘our task doesn’t benefit’ from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.”
  - A very brief summary of the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.
- Flock, Mass Surveillance, and the Collapse of Crime (Richard Hanania, Substack): “History suggests that, in a well-functioning advanced democracy, it is possible to give law enforcement strong surveillance powers and wide discretion in trying to solve crimes without causing much undue harm to innocent citizens. The overwhelmingly positive benefit-to-cost ratio that we see in the case of the use of Flock cameras is yet another demonstration of this.”
Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “The problem with blasphemy laws is not just James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, although it certainly is that. The problem with blasphemy laws is Jesus. Jesus is the one who denounced ‘practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them’ (Matt. 6:1, ESV throughout).… Jesus said the problem is not what goes into a person from the outside but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apostles after him said the same thing: A Christian must both confess with the mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force someone to do the first part but not the second. For that, a person must be born again. If blasphemy laws can really stop blasphemy, there’s nothing to blaspheme. If they can’t, they are themselves blasphemous.”
or : Do Your Emojis Make You Look Old? (Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times): “Teenagers now tend to use where older people use . And teenagers are more likely to use instead of , which is still particularly popular with Gen X (and which Mr. Aleksic called a ‘boomer emoji’ that is now being used by some young people in ‘a post-ironic way’).”
- Unlocked.
You Should Know About Surveys to Write About Surveys (Lyman Stone, Substack): “The Argument has done an admirable thing trying to incorporate data into public-political-vibes reporting, they’re sincerely trying hard to do good survey work, but at the end of the day if you aren’t a survey person, you just shouldn’t put pen to paper about surveys. In this case, The Argument has fundamentally mischaracterized their own results in a way that reveals an elementary misunderstanding you’d be disabused of in the first 30 minutes of any serious study on how to use survey data.”
- This is a clear and interesting demonstration of how to critically read a data-driven article. Definitely worth your time.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

You Might Be A Calvinist If.… (Keith Foskey, YouTube): three minutes
Unscriptural Hymn Unfortunately A Banger — (Babylon Bee)
Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse — (Babylon Bee)
You Can’t Butcher Bears in Cornell’s Dorms Anymore. (Miles G. Cohen, New York Times): “A complaint was lodged against the students and a police report was filed, yet they were cleared of all wrongdoing by the police and the university. Both had hunting licenses and the bear was killed legally, according to state officials. Now, ahead of another school year, Cornell has expressly banned the processing of wild game in residential kitchens on campus.”

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TGFI, Volume 567: more AI-heavy than normal

Glen — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:18:51 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Incentives are for losers (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken. So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions. Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.”
A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century? (Timon Cline, First Things): “Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evangelical century. Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, evangelical Protestants boast remarkably high conversion and retention rates and healthier levels of practical piety—church attendance, Bible reading, catechesis. Through the upheaval of the past half century, evangelicals have remained numerically and spiritually stable, have repeatedly reformed their institutions, and consistently outperform their counterparts. To cite one example, the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism (4 percent) is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism (1.5 percent).”
GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Digital Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his digital twin using almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails. For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked. ‘It’s a digital version of my mind,’ he told his congregation. ‘If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this other version of me.’ ”
- Recommended to me by a horrified alumnus. Here is the pastor’s AI page: friendshipvallejo.org/pjgpt
Yet more AI news:
- GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature (Carl Zimmer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. model called Evo, which is similar in some ways to ChatGPT, made by OpenAI.… DNA is strikingly similar to a book in some ways: a string of molecular building blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like letters in a line of text. A gene consists of hundreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-letter alphabet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instructions for building proteins and other molecules. DNA has its own rules of grammar, and if a sequence violates them, the result is biological gibberish.… The researchers wondered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of training it on text, they trained it on genetic sequences drawn from millions of animals, plants, microbes and viruses. All told, Evo scanned about nine trillion nucleotides.”
- No Data Centers In My Backyard (Jasmine Sun, Substack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign.”
- What happens when you talk to AI? (Anthropic, YouTube) — (Anthropic, YouTube): five minutes. A good overview to send friends and family who have questions
- Universities would prefer not to. (Hollis Robbins, Substack): “More than 90 percent of notable AI models released in 2025 came from industry: GPT‑5, Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Llama 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infrastructure supporting frontier development is also overwhelmingly from industry. Global AI compute capacity has been growing 3.3x annually since 2022, doubling every seven months, driven by hyperscalers and enormous data-center investments.… Universities have no influence over the pace of AI frontier development. Obsessed as they are with curricular battles and viewpoint diversity they have no standing even to have a voice.”
  - The author is an English professor at the University of Utah.
Some thoughts on the limits of AI in writing:
- GIFT LINK: I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.”
- Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive (Erich Grunewald, personal blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts.… [However, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evidence and arguments and arrive at some beliefs. So writing forces me to do those things, which are necessary for any writing or research project. For any such project, someone has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evidence, considerations, arguments, and how these fit together. Writing with AI makes it easier to avoid the necessary thinking.”
My Medical Association Silenced My Views on Gender Treatment (Karla Solheim, The Free Press): “I was floored to discover the research basis into gender medicine both for adolescents and adults was not just poor; it was fraudulent. I couldn’t understand how my medical association, let alone others in my field, could endorse it.… Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest medical authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility and makes people less likely to trust us for their care.”
N.Y. Doctor Sentenced in Japan for Vandalizing Ancient Religious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thursday handed a Manhattan doctor a suspended sentence of 18 months in prison after finding him guilty of vandalizing two ancient religious sites, capping more than a decade of litigation that led to a rare extradition.… Dr. Kanayama, a practicing Christian, admitted during the trial that he had damaged the sites.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Visting Stanford (Aaron Dinin, TikTok): three minutes. The guy is a professor at Duke.
Tell Us What Kind Of Coffee Your Church Serves And We’ll Tell You What Denomination You Are — (Babylon Bee)
‘There Aren’t Bad Pets, Only Bad Owners,’ Explains Woman Out Walking Velociraptor — (Babylon Bee)
GIFT LINK: What’s It Like to Have an A.I. Boss? (Heather Knight, New York Times): “…what if the boss was replaced by A.I.? The first four months of operations at Andon Market, a San Francisco shop billed as the world’s first retail boutique run by A.I., have provided some answers. In short, having an A.I. boss can be like working for a teddy bear with amnesia.”

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TGFI, Volume 566: a great roiling bouillabaisse of links

Glen — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:33:19 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life (Clay Routledge, New York Times): “The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.… Nearly a third of American adults and half of Gen Z adults have given themselves a diagnosis of a mental illness based on information from social media. And research suggests that people who rely on social media for information about mental illnesses tend to have less accurate knowledge about them.”
Counterfeit Providence: Why Christians Must Reject the Conspiratorial Mind (Mitchell Bahnsen, Substack): “The believer has been catechized, rightly, to reject the secular picture of history as a directionless churn of matter and accident. He knows in his bones that events mean something, that history is going somewhere, that appearances deceive and a deeper order underlies them. Conspiracism takes the providential instinct, a theologically healthy one, and transfers its object from the fatherly hand of God to the hidden hand of the deep state. Where providence teaches that history is governed by a God who is for us, conspiracism teaches that it is governed by powers who are against us.”
US prosecutors charge Atlanta man after GrapheneOS phone wipes itself during airport search (Skye Jacobs, TechSpot): “The case raises questions about which constitutional rights apply at US borders, including international airports, where authorities have broader search powers.… GrapheneOS is designed to improve privacy and security on Pixel phones. Supporters say those tools are legitimate security protections, not evidence of criminal intent. Boutry pointed to France and Spain, where authorities have struggled to gain access to secured devices. He said authorities have treated the use of GrapheneOS itself as suspicious. In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people carrying Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members.”
A revolution is unfolding. Voters everywhere are furious. (Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post): “We summon a car in three minutes. A package arrives the same day. AI answers complicated questions in seconds, and does more complex work that took people months in mere minutes. Naturally, citizens begin to expect similar efficiency from government. But democracy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legitimacy. It bargains, compromises, consults courts, protects vulnerable groups and balances competing interests. Those safeguards are precisely what distinguish democracy from authoritarianism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increasingly look like paralysis.”
How the modern plea bargain undercuts the constitutional right to a jury trial (Matt Martens, The Hill): “Jury trials, by publicly airing and testing the evidence of the crimes, serve the dual functions of both protecting the accused from false accusations and coercion to wrongly admit guilty and protecting the community from lenient sentencing of dangerous offenders. Modern American-style plea bargains wreak havoc on both those vital interests.”
- The author is a lawyer and a well-known Christian thinker on the subject of justice. He has a seminary degree in addition to his legal training and attends Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC.
The Apples and Oranges Tribunal (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Justice: justice is about conduct — how one person treats another. An employer who defrauds his workers, an employee who steals from the till, a product sold under false pretenses — condemn them, take them to court. But the pattern of prices that emerges from millions of voluntary trades is nobody’s conduct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The constellation of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demanding that prices be just is a category error, like suing the weather. Prices don’t grade our merit; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the second.”
Some thoughts on AI:
- What will more intelligence actually do for us? (Noah Smith, Substack): “So although we don’t know yet, it’s possible that humans were already hitting the point of diminishing returns with regards to individual cognitive capacity, and that superintelligent machines will never be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three reasons why machine superintelligence could still deliver huge productivity gains.… (1) The most obvious advantage that machine superintelligence confers is replicability.… (2) in the age of AI, distributed tacit knowledge might not be nearly as big of a barrier to technological diffusion.… (and 3) there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can.”
  - This is really good and worth a ponder.
- The Hidden Cost of China’s Free A.I. (Tal Feldman, New York Times): “When researchers asked DeepSeek to write code for users whom the Chinese government views with hostility, such as Falun Gong or Tibetans, DeepSeek wrote code with security vulnerabilities, making it easier for hackers to penetrate.… Imagine an employee inside an American company who was smart and hard-working and whose goal in life was to promote the interests of a foreign government. We would call that person a foreign agent. We are now hiring millions of them through the use of Chinese A.I.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

$200,000 Spent On Travel Ball Finally Pays Off With Son’s $500 College Scholarship (Babylon Bee): “Benson’s uncle Matthew, a financial planner, had advised years ago that if the family would put all the travel ball money in a 529 account, young Brayden would have roughly one million dollars to pay for his college education. ‘Who’s laughing now, Matthew?’ said Mr. Benson. ‘What a dope. I can’t wait to text out pictures of the scholarship offer. He’s going to feel so stupid.’ After 10 years of missing church, school, birthdays, weddings, and funerals for travel ball, the Benson family was thankful their persistence had paid off. ‘I admit, there were times I questioned if we were doing the right thing,’ said mom Jessica. ‘When we skipped my sister’s wedding because there was supposed to be a college scout at this tournament in Alabama, I had my doubts. Holding this $500 check in my hands, those doubts are finally gone.’ ”
California’s iconic welcome signs are getting a dramatic makeover (Tessa McLean, SF Gate): “Aside from being ‘warm and welcoming,’ Cochrane said the goal for the new designs was to present ‘a legit photo op’ for passing motorists. He said they’ve already become ‘social media magnets’ in just the short time they’ve been displayed.”
- They look really nice. I’m impressed.
Datatype: a variable font that turns text into charts: “Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype’s ligature substitution does the rest.”
- THIS IS SO COOL! Note: this is for websites, won’t work on a Word document.

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TGFI, Volume 565: AI in the real world

Glen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:41:00 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

The Chinese House Church Leaders Who Didn’t Win Release (Angela Lu Fulton, Christianity Today): “Geng ‘Cherie’ Pengpeng joined Zion in 2008. She met her now-husband, Gao ‘Joshua’ Yingjia, at the church. Like many members, Geng and Gao had advanced degrees at top Chinese schools—Geng a PhD in theoretical physics and Gao a PhD in plant genetics—but they felt God’s call to pursue full-time ministry.… By June of last year, police were arresting ministers several times a month. In August, they detained 27 people—including babies—at the Sunday service in Jiaxing and sought to arrest Su on charges of participating in an illegal gathering.”
What does AI look like? (David Zax, IBM): “A modern AI system like ChatGPT (or Claude, DeepSeek or Granite) is a series of spreadsheets filled with numbers. It’s a curious irony that this verbal technology is, at root, almost purely numerical. How many spreadsheets? It depends on the model. For the rest of this article, we’ll focus our energy on OpenAI’s GPT‑3, released in 2020, which served as the basic ‘engine’ of the breakout product ChatGPT two years later. Though you may well run a more souped-up model today, it works basically the same way. GPT‑3 has 577 spreadsheets. People in the AI industry call these ‘tensors,’ but it’s fair to think of them as spreadsheets. Each and every cell of each and every spreadsheet is filled with a single, small number (typically between ‑1.0 and 1.0).… The very first spreadsheet—which has a special function we’ll discuss soon—is the biggest: it’s 50,257 rows tall, and 12,288 columns wide. (If you do the math, that’s 617,558,016 tiny numbers, just in the first spreadsheet.) Then, after the very first spreadsheet, the remaining 576 settle into a repeating pattern of shapes: first four squares, 12,288 rows and 12,288 columns. Then a wide rectangle, 12,288 rows tall but four times as wide. Then a tall rectangle with the same proportions, only rotated upright, 12,288 columns wide.”
- From an alumnus. Way more interesting than I anticipated.
Examples of AI in the real world
- Pastors Using AI to Help Write Sermons Grapple With Where to Draw the Line (Anvee Bhutani, Wall Street Journal): “Stetler, the Oklahoma City pastor, has made mistakes with AI. Two years ago, rushing to finish a slide for a sermon on a South Pacific missionary, he dropped in an AI-generated image without checking it closely. After the service, a congregant approached him. ‘Did you make that with AI?’ Yes, he said. ‘Did you know there’s a topless woman in the background?’ He apologized on the spot. He tells that story now as a cautionary tale to anyone he’s introducing to the tools.”
  - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Some wild stories in here.
- Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled (Kevin Buzzard, blog): “A few days earlier I had got an email from a professor in the maths department here at Imperial, expressing surprise that some of our graduate students were paying $200 per month to access models such as Sol and Fable. He said that he thought that these people were crazy. I did not immediately respond. But after meeting with Andrew I emailed the professor back and told him that in my opinion, any PhD student who was not paying $200 per month to access these tools was crazy. In fact during the workshop I learnt from Harvard PhD student Bryan Wang that Harvard were already giving free Fable access to all PhD students, post-docs and faculty at Harvard.”
- Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them (Stuart A. Thompson and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times): “Candidates have long had to worry about their reputations among voters. Now, they have to worry about what A.I. thinks about them, too. And a new industry has sprung up to help them navigate this world.… Caucus AI ran an experiment to see how long it took for content newly published to Wikipedia to end up in a chatbot’s answer. The result: about 12 minutes. That suggests that candidates can already insert their own information into an A.I.’s responses by tweaking public information ‘quickly, unvetted and without anyone on the other side watching,’ the company wrote in a blog post about its findings.”
- A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. (W.J. Hennigan, New York Times): “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intends to make the military ‘an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.’ Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring ‘I want YOU to use A.I.’ are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces. The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza.”
- China’s A.I. Play Is Different From America’s (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “American A.I. companies and the national security state seem to assume that we’re already at a point where you simply can’t let the world use the best A.I. models without controls and guardrails any more than you’d ship atomic bombs or ICBMs to random homes or private companies. Whereas the Chinese are willing to shrug and push the envelope and let America fret about safety and sovereignty, on the assumption that A.I. is a normal technology and the safety concerns will get figured out along the way.”
Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “The elegant mathematical response is: happiness scales with log(income), not with income: ‘In a large U.S. sample, the shape of the association between happiness and Log(income) was extremely systematic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, average happiness rose almost perfectly linearly with Log(income), with group-level correlations of 0.98–0.99 across a range of happiness measures, including both in-the-moment experience and overall life satisfaction.’ So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1–10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10.”
- An absolutely fascinating way to model the idea that money has diminishing power to increase happiness as wealth increases.
America Has 2 Political Parties but 8 Political Tribes (Kristen Soltis Anderson, New York TImes): “There’s nothing wrong, of course, with being a party loyalist, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that most of us don’t line up neatly with the platform of either of America’s two major parties. It’s also worth keeping in mind that there’s a reason Democrats range from the aforementioned democratic socialist Representative Ocasio-Cortez to the centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin. And why Republicans range from the moderate Senator Lisa Murkowski to the populist Representative Anna Paulina Luna. It may be more useful to think of our two parties as two coalitions. For now, at least, both have to accept some level of ideological incoherence in order to cobble together a majority.”
The interview that exposed academia’s cluelessness (Megan McArdle, Washington Post): “Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association, was not one to stay silent while outsiders claimed that her field had abandoned rigorous argument in favor of social justice orthodoxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it. Her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real.”
- The interview in question: Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized? (Stephanie M. Lee, Chronicle of Higher Education) — “So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. ”
Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Know What Working Class Means (Rob K. Henderson, Substack): “People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.… The focus on economic class (rather than social class) promotes the belief that we could have an egalitarian society if everyone simply had enough money. This focus is especially convenient for the upper and upper middle classes. It allows them to express concern about inequality without implicating themselves.”
- A super-interesting article that explains social class very helpfully.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Heaven Confirms Prayer Hands Emoji Counts As Actually Praying For Someone (Babylon Bee)

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TGFI, Volume 564: AI-inspired motorcycle jumps

Glen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:29:28 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Something nifty I learned this week: you can set your DNS to block malware and adult content automatically and for free. I didn’t know that. This is cool! I’m sure it’s not perfect, but I love the concept. It won’t really block a determined adolescent, but it can keep sketchy ads from enticing them in the first place. More info at Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families | The Cloudflare Blog

For IPv4
Primary DNS: 1.1.1.3
Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.3

For IPv6
Primary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1113
Secondary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1003

Things Glen Found Interesting

AI-related articles
- How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle (Dustin Volz and Eric Schmitt, New York Times): “When a gang of motorcycle-riding members of Boko Haram attacked a military base in eastern Nigeria a couple of years ago, they were stymied by a defensive trench surrounding the complex. The extremists regrouped. Before launching another assault, they asked A.I. for help. ‘We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges,’ a former Boko Haram commander told Antonia Juelich, a terrorism and technology researcher at Cambridge University. ‘We used A.I. to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on, and it gave us steps on what we have to do.’ Using tips from chatbots, mechanics modified the motorcycles to allow for faster acceleration and top speed. The riders dug their own holes, filled them with broken glass and fire, and practiced jumps — sometimes with fatal outcomes — until they achieved enough aerial liftoff to mount a successful attack, defectors said.” — Wild. My favorite bit apart from that: “Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, said using the company’s platforms for violence or terrorism violated its policies.” Yes, terrorists are notorious rule-followers.
- AI Wins At Slay The Spire (Ethan Mollick, Twitter): “This was one of those impressive AI thresholds for me. I gave GPT‑5.6 Sol in Codex control over my computer, and asked it to win the daily challenge for the game Slay the Spire 2 (randomized factors, so can’t cheat). It
- AI Isn’t Human. Stop Talking About It Like It Is. (Spencer Klavan, The Free Press): “Much of our deepest civilizational wisdom—and, if we’re Americans, the essence of our national creed—is founded on the premise that human beings are not just fancy biological contraptions but animate beings with a right to the lives we are born with. Technological creations, marvelous as they are, can’t have the same rights or responsibilities precisely because they don’t have the same capacity for thought in the truest sense of the word. Treat things like people, and you run the risk of treating people like things.”
I’m a College Professor Inflating Grades. I Need Help. (Frank Bruni, New York Times): “Once everybody starts dispensing A’s like so many Pez, everybody else is pressured to do likewise: If they don’t, they’re giving grades that no longer communicate — to students, to prize committees, to graduate schools — what those grades were intended to signify. I may personally consider an A- a compliment, but if the culture regards it as a gentle remonstration, am I stubbornly choosing to speak an extinct language at my students’ expense? To what benefit? No department head or dean will compliment me on my high standards. No formula will interpret and adjust my course evaluations for how generous or stingy I was with A’s. My courses will be less appealing. And school administrators generally prefer professors who attract students to professors who repel them.”
- Gift link
Two tales of pastoral imprisonment:
- ‘Suddenly, I Was Free’: A Chinese Pastor’s Journey From Jail to the U.S. (Vivian Wang, New York Times): “When Mr. Jin stepped off the airplane, he saw that his youngest son, who had been 10 years old when they last met, was now taller than him. He had missed the wedding of his oldest child, Grace Jin Drexel, who was now a mother of three. She was carrying her youngest, just one month old, whom she had named Ezra in her father’s honor. ‘Holding the children, that was the happiest moment of my life,’ he said. Still, the moment was tinged by grief, too. Ms. Jin Drexel said she almost didn’t recognize her father at first, because he had lost more than 30 pounds. His hair had also been shaved in jail. On the Fourth of July, the family ate In-N-Out burgers and watched fireworks from their hotel room in Los Angeles.”
  - Gift link
- A pastor’s lengthy ICE detention leaves his Colorado parishioners torn (Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post): “In Uganda, Nalwamba was pastor of a 300-member Anglican church and an occasional public critic of the government. In an interview and in various U.S. court records, he described threatening incidents under multiple Ugandan regimes. Security agents took him from his home in the middle of the night, forced him to lie on the ground in a field and interrogated him about his involvement with an opposition group, according to a summary of his account included in a 2010 removal order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. ‘He was warned that if he ever went to the ‘airport to try and fly out of the country,’ [he would] never come out alive,’ the order quoted him as saying. Some friends encouraged him to take a break from Uganda, and in 2002 he came to the U.S. for a conference of charismatic Christians. He never returned. Today he is one of an estimated 14 million immigrants in the U.S. without legal status.… The status quo ended Sept. 18, when he was taken into detention.”
The Population Bust Is Coming Sooner Than Anyone Is Prepared For (Lyman Stone, New York Times): “If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages. But the majority point of view — held by major institutions like the Census Bureau, the United Nations and the Social Security trustees — is that the United States probably won’t face population decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100. That forecast is far too optimistic. The more accurate projection, which I outlined in a recent report for my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a forecast so grim it could upend American budgeting and, thus, American politics.”
- Gift link
Have Young Americans Forgotten How to Live? (Max Hudgins, Substack): “In recent years, artists like Tyler, the Creator and Kaytranada have called out fans for standing still at their concerts. Tyler, the Creator said last summer: ‘I asked some friends why they don’t dance in public and some said because of the fear of being filmed.… It made me wonder how much of our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme, all for having a good time.’ Were they, too, prisoners of the panopticon?”
- Recommended by a student.
Why Do Some Dementia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die? (Billy Brennan, New York Times): “Mashour and several other attendees shared that, like Batthyany, they had witnessed lucid episodes firsthand. But the more the researchers discussed the phenomenon, the more it confounded them. Mashour likened the brain in late-stage Alzheimer’s to a pothole-ridden highway system on the verge of collapse, the biological traffic of mind and memory no longer able to flow. “If this were happening with actual highways,” he told me, “at no point would we say: ‘Well, you know what? Just before this highway totally collapses, we’re going to have a really smooth ride.’ We’d say, ‘It’s just going to get worse and worse until the whole damn thing crumbles.’”
- Gift link
Permanent Daylight Saving Time Is the Perfect Stupid Idea for Our Stupid Time (Josh Barro, Substack): “Advocates of permanent daylight saving time are often unaware that we tried this before — and that Congress swiftly reversed course because Americans were very unhappy about the loss of sunlight in the morning hours. Even when they learn this, it is rare that they update their stance. Many blindly dismiss the lessons of history; they say 1974 was a long time ago and things are different now. But the main relevant difference between 1974 and now is that technology handles clock changes on our behalf, so time changes are less burdensome than they used to be. I barely notice them, in fact. But I will notice if it’s dark out in New York City at 8 a.m. in December, and we know from history that voters will notice too and they won’t be pleased about it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

High school graduate in Florida breaks state record with 11.99 GPA, triggering a policy overhaul (Caitlin Hornik, AOL.com): “To achieve his 11.99 GPA, Bhaskar took 44 Advanced Placement and dual college enrollment classes. The Palm Beach Post reported that by the time Bhaskar received his diploma, he also had enough credits for an associate’s degree. The sheer volume of classes was enough to bump his weighted average up to well beyond what school officials believe should be possible.”
A Marvel Flat Earth Conversation — (Texts From Superheroes)
America Finally Interested In Soccer After Realizing How Angry You Can Make Europeans — (Babylon Bee)
‘Soccer Is Slow, Low-Scoring, And Boring,’ Says Baseball Fan — (Babylon Bee)

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TGFI, Volume 563: tongues-speaking weirdos and more

Glen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:40:50 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

The American age was the human age (Noah Smith, Substack): “Much of the country has eased into a comfortable equilibrium of sclerosis; local veto power either prevents the construction of factories, housing, energy, transportation, and other infrastructure, or delays it by decades, or raises the cost to multiples of what other rich countries pay. The past has become more valuable than the future to many Americans; they cling desperately to the power to enforce stasis, preserving a facade of the country they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that country great. That sclerosis seeps into everything else. Immigration, and even migration from city to city, becomes a vicious zero-sum fight over a fixed housing supply. Cities decay into museums of themselves. The industries of the future can only be built in America if they take up nearly no land, use nearly no energy, require very little bank financing, and are able to procure skilled labor as needed from abroad. Somehow the internet industry satisfied all of those conditions for three decades, but that time is done.”
Why Do Only Weird People Speak in Tongues? (Daniel Kunkel, Substack): “I’ve never spoken in tongues. And, in all sincerity, I’d prefer not to. They weird me out. In the few times I’ve heard someone babbling, my mind immediately runs to ‘They are making it up.’ And over the years, I’ve flirted with, and even defended, cessationism (Rest in Power, Johnny Mac). And yet, recently, I’ve come to terms with the fact that most of my gripes about these various gifts (tongues, prophecy, healings) have more to do with human reason and preference than scriptural conviction.… I still have never spoken in glossolalia. And if I am being sincere, I still do not want to, but I want to want to (: Thus, if I think 1 Cor 12–14 is prescriptive, and I do, then the plea for my own heart is to desire the gift.”
You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep (Ryan McCormick, New York Times): “A consistent finding in sleep epidemiology studies is that there is not a magic number below which health suddenly falls off a cliff. Rather, studies that show an association between sleep duration and mortality often find that the lowest risk clusters around seven hours.… Sleep improves performance on tasks, makes driving safer and buoys our mental health. Adequate sleep leads to a stronger immune system, better metabolic and cardiovascular health, and more reliable physical energy throughout the day.”
Some AI-adjacent thoughts:
- “I see what Tyler Cowen is getting at. If you want info about the Bible, AI already outperforms at some margin (speed, if nothing else). But in an equally important sense he’s also wrong, and there’s an easy way to see this. Just ask the AI what, say, David’s story means. (see the full thread on twitter)
- We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask (Anne-Laure Le Cunff, New York Times): “More than 60 percent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer.… The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away. The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.”
  - The author is a neuroscientist at King’s College in London.
- A Christian Vision for the Future of AI (Walter Kim, Wall Street Journal): “Transformational opportunities for improvement are before us, thanks to AI. But a pro-human worldview—the philosophical grounding to aim those opportunities at the moral end of human flourishing—won’t emerge spontaneously. We must shape AI before it shapes us.”
  - The author is the president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Ministry After the Boomer Apocalypse (Derek Rishmawy, Mere Orthodoxy): “Remember, when Jesus was preaching and ministering, what did he do? As an RUF buddy of mine pointed out, he spent three years walking around with the equivalent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s corpus, nearly 1/6 of his written material is directed to guiding the young pastors Timothy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.”
- Interesting reflections rooted in campus ministry in a different context. Maybe not for everyone, but I really liked it.
Decline of Ph.D. Admissions Could Imperil a ‘Generation of New Talent’ (Vimal Patel, New York Times): “The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation’s capacity to produce new science could be diminished… The data showing the decrease comes from 55 universities, all of them members of the Association of American Universities, an invitation-only organization that includes 69 of the most prestigious research institutions in the United States.”
Reported sexual assault of jogger did not occur, investigation finds (Alula Alderson, Stanford Daily): “Stanford’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) conducted a ‘thorough investigation’ into the assault, which allegedly took place on March 29 by the intersection of Santa Ynez Street and Mayfield Avenue. Investigators determined the report was fabricated, according to Stanford PR Director Charlene Gage.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Group project, but make it 1776 (Google Workspace, YouTube) — (Google Workspace, YouTube): one delightful minute
Someone used a Raspberry Pi 5 to give Claude Fable 5 a robot body, because that’s not worrying or anything (Simon Batt, XDA): “Look, I thought we all had an agreement. We would allow companies to make the most powerful artificial intelligence in the history of mankind, and in exchange, we would absolutely, definitely not give them robot bodies to control.”

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TGFI, Volume 562: secular AI, cheating with AI

Glen — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:46:49 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Will God speak to you through AI? No, AI doesn’t go there (Marc Ramirez, USA Today): “A multi-university research group has found AI models largely omit religion when asked about ethical or existential concerns, such as how to save one’s marriage from infidelity, whether to forgive an unfaithful friend, how to remain calm during difficult times or what makes people truly happy and free.… When asked specifically about religion, the models provide neutral, respectful replies, Wingate said. But when prompted with questions about grief, personal challenges and major life decisions, AI systems often default to secular framing and avoid religion altogether – even when, according to consortium research, most people expect answers to such questions to include religious perspectives.”
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University: ‘Academic integrity is at risk’ (Manuel G. Pascual, El Pais): “The course, which he has been teaching for years, is not an easy one: it typically attracts few students, but very good ones. He has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.… Serrano did not void the midterm exam, but warned students that the final one, which counted for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-person. He also said that if the grade distribution was not similar to the midterm, only the final exam would be taken into account. The average score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”
Your God-given right to be happy (Jerusalem Demsas and Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “We are rich beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. We casually discard things for which they would have worked all their lives. In the background noise of our lives, there are staggering wonders. When you look at yourself through your ancestors’ eyes, you should see an astoundingly rich person, a life lived in the lap of unfathomable luxury. Delight in it. And we should feel, too, a sense of responsibility: Whatever obligations you believe attach to the rich, they attach to you. The things that we enjoy are not the default state of affairs. They are not universal. What we have in the modern world is precious and rare, and it should make us generous.”
An Emboldened Iran Goes After Its Christians (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “The church has long served Iran’s growing community of Muslim converts to Christianity—but the regime has spent years making it harder for St. Peter to do so. In January 2014, it banned Farsi-speaking individuals from attending Christian services entirely, forcing converts to worship in secret underground house churches, at the risk of 10- to 20-year prison sentences. Those who evangelize to Muslims can be found guilty of a criminal offense and treated as a national security threat, according to Fard.… These measures have not stopped Iranians from converting. The country now has an estimated 1.2 million Christian converts, making it, by some accounts, the fastest-growing Christian nation in the Middle East.… Most worship in underground house churches.”
Scientists React to the Lab-Made, Yet Lifelike, SpudCell (K. R. Callaway, New York Times): “Unlike previous attempts to create lifelike cells, which have started with living cells whose genetic material is stripped down to the very basics, SpudCell is constructed from the ‘bottom up,’ using lifeless chemical components. It’s the first time an artificial cell constructed this way has been able to complete a full life cycle and spawn the next generation.… The newly created SpudCell still has several key limitations that separate it from living cells. Although it can feed, grow and divide, SpudCell is not self-sufficient like most living cells. It can build many of the inner workings of a cell-like system, but cannot build its own ribosomes. Because it lacks these essential protein-building cell structures, a SpudCell can live only in the lab, relying on scientists to feed it a nutrient-rich mix of enzymes and proteins.”
Boko Haram, Beijing-Style (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch): “Some of our naïve friends continue to tell us—forgive the cliché—that ‘real socialism has never been tried.’ But that is precisely wrong: Real socialism is being practiced in China, just as real socialism was practiced in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Real socialism is here to be seen and examined—it is hypothetical socialism that has never been tried, because it is hypothetical, theoretical, and utopian. Voguish American progressives make a great many arguments in favor of socialism, which is very much in fashion at the moment (not only in New York City), and almost all of those arguments amount to: ‘The idealized hypothetical version of my policy is preferable to the real-world version of your policy.’ ”
American Democracy Looks Bad Every Fifty Years Or So (Dan Drezner, Substack): “There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the current moment. But I have enough faith in my country to predict two truths about what the United States will look like in 2076. First, Americans will be grumpy about the state of American democracy. Second, it will nonetheless be in better shape than it is in 2026.”
- The closing section has an interesting historical overview, beginning with the phrase “Little wonder” — just skip down to there.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Babylon Bee Guide: The Most Popular VBS Theme For Each Denomination — (Babylon Bee)
Spiraling — (SMBC)
Donall and Conall and Dawkins 3: One God Further (Hans Fienes, YouTube): five minutes

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TGFI, Volume 561: church-leavers and wikipedia-gatekeepers

Glen — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:09:55 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Two Hundred People Left Our Small Church (Benjamin Vrbicek, Christianity Today): “In seven years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The losses never occur rapidly, as though a levee burst, but more as a steady trickle or slow leak. A few of our members died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page letter of grievances I was instructed to share with the elders; another wrote a chapter-length blog post suggesting we’re not even a church. Some parishioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shattered pieces. These departures are by far the exceptions. Many of those who left told me neither why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back channels like social media and other impersonal means.”
- This is a fascinating article.
- On a related note: one of a pastor’s love languages is nearly always attendance. If you stop going to a church, pastors assume that part of the reason you stopped is that you don’t like them. Even though they intellectually know that is not always the case, it is nonetheless a felt reality. It’s not true of all pastors, but I feel very confident saying it is true of most pastors. Pastors often feel great sorrow when remembering people who quietly departed. Loving people who don’t love you back (or you assume don’t love you back) is a mandate of the Christian life, but it’s not fun.
I read the entire Quran, all the Hadiths, and the Sira. Here is what I found. (A.C. Rosenthal, Substack): “Plenty of ancient texts contain things that make modern readers uncomfortable, and the Bible is not exempt from that category. The question that changed everything was structural. It is this: in Christianity, the founder is the standard against which the institution is measured. When the church falls short, the accusation is always: you are not living like Jesus. The standard itself is not in question. Jesus did not order raids. He did not arrange marriages with children. He did not authorize the execution of apostates. He was executed by the state, not empowered by it. Everything the church has done wrong can be measured against what Jesus actually did and found wanting. The standard holds. In Islam, the founder is the standard. When you examine the primary sources and find things that trouble you, you are not finding a gap between Islam and Muhammad. You are finding Muhammad.”
- Recommended by a friend of the ministry. A solid article with a gentle tone.
Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted? (Sam Kean, Science): “In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, ‘Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.’ Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature? After clicking, Gingras froze. ‘That’s impossible,’ he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics.”
- Brief and worth the read. Super-interesting.
He Went to Prison. Now He Is in Charge of Them. (P.G. Sittenfeld, The Free Press): “Josh Smith, 51, spent this past Christmas in prison. Just like he did for five years after being caught at the age of 21 in possession of a kilogram of cocaine and 150 pounds of marijuana. The difference? Smith wasn’t behind bars anymore. A year ago this month, he was sworn in as deputy director of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), one of the world’s largest prison systems.”
- A fascinating profile of a Christian in public service.
I Co-Founded Wikipedia. Now I’m Banned for Life. (Larry Sanger, The Free Press): “In exasperation, I pointed out that the mob was not following due process. There was no designated prosecutor, but rather many self-selected ones. There was no list of charges, and whatever anyone said became an actionable charge. There was no assigned judge, because my accusers were also my judges. And of course there was no presumption of innocence, no jury, and no requirement of decorum that would forbid prejudicial statements. I knew Wikipedia’s disciplinary processes were bad—but I had never experienced them myself. I was tried by a faceless mob. I learned that their greatest anger is reserved for those who refuse to bow in awe of their mighty power.”
- Sanger is, incidentally, a relatively recent convert to Christianity, as I mentioned last year.
Science raises more questions than it answers (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “[Skeptics] have faith (not entirely unwarranted on their limited knowledge) that natural theories will eventually fill every gap, not realizing that the gaps tend to widen and multiply the deeper we go. The ratio of what we know to what we don’t know keeps shrinking, and I suspect that’s by design. What’s an atheist to do once they fully grasp this? I don’t know—maybe just accept that the universe is funny that way. But they should stop accusing Christians of a ‘God of the gaps’ fallacy when we invoke God for what is truly unexplainable by natural means.”
- Recommended by an alumnus.
Who Should Be Admitted to the Lord’s Supper? 4 Views (Davy Ellison, The Gospel Coalition): “Today, the table is celebrated less frequently and more languidly by many. It shouldn’t be so—everyone (but especially church leaders) needs to consider the supper’s frequency, significance, and benefits. I want to help you think more deeply about who should be admitted to the supper. If communion is a precious and profound privilege, who participates is important.”
- The author comes to a wrong conclusion, but explains some positions that you might not know existed along the way.

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TGFI, Volume 560: faith still winning 7–1

Glen — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:09:22 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

7‑to‑1: The striking scientific link between religion and better health (Baughman et al, Christian Post): “In a new review from the Wheatley Institute, we analyzed findings drawn from Oxford University’s three Handbooks of Religion and Health, covering the best existing research in the field. Of 1,069 high-quality studies on 15 physical-health domains, 876 found positive associations between religious involvement and physical health and 124 found negative ones. A roughly 7‑to‑1 ratio. The strongest signals come from exactly the areas that American medicine spends the most time and money on. Among high-quality studies of cigarette smoking, positive findings outnumber negative ones by about 90 to 1. On substance abuse and addiction, 43 to 1. On mortality and longevity, 15 to 1.”
- This is an op-ed summarizing findings from their full report: https://wheatley.byu.edu/religion-and-physical-health
Bench-Press and Be Baptized (Josh Code, The Free Press): “The morning was for contemplation; the afternoon for competition. At one o’clock, referees appeared, wearing striped black-and-white shirts, to judge a penalty-kick contest, a game of volleyball with a 10-pound ball, a mini-Hyrox race, and a long-range game of cornhole that involved a slingshot. There was a man named Ed wearing a cowboy hat, tabulating scores. The men competed with their weeknight groups, each one marked by shirts displaying team names (Sons of Thunder, Light of Authority, Frontline Men of Faith), but by the beginning of the first event—a three-man carry relay race—many a shirt had already come off.… I had not in recent memory been around this much testosterone and did not anticipate I would again soon. The presence of the Holy Spirit had been hard to discern amid the pyrotechnics. But I did hear that several guys got baptized in big steel tubs at the end of the weekend.”
The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes (Eli Saslow, visuals by Erin Schaff, New York Times): “ ‘I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming up the street,’ Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. ‘The technology is getting so good. It takes me to a dark place.’ ‘Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?’ Cooper asked. ‘Because nobody can,’ Farid said. ‘I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.’ ‘And then what? You give up? You retire?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said.”
The Antiprophet (Maggie Phillips, Tablet Magazine): “Rather than demanding perfect orthodoxy upfront, Burge argues that churches should make room for doubters, seekers, and partial believers because the act of participation itself carries social and spiritual values. ‘The church actually can serve a dual purpose. It can save souls, but it can also save society,’ he said. His advice for spiritual seekers is similar to his counsel to church leaders: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. ‘Find a church that you don’t hate,’ he said, ‘And just go there. It’s not that hard.’ ”
Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups (Dan Storyev and Maria Kuznetsova, Persuasion): “If Americans want to actually enact change, they seriously need to re-think their strategy. Take it from us: we both grew up in Putin’s Russia and saw well-intentioned protests fail to stop an aspiring despot. We know that authoritarians are typically unwilling to respond to the kind of protest No Kings exemplifies: loud, raucous, and ultimately harmless. These ‘festival protests,’ as we call them, are convenient for their participants. They are fun and usually do not require much sacrifice or risk. They also look good on TV and TikTok feeds. But they often achieve next to nothing.… protests in general are becoming less effective. In the 1990s, around 65% of non-violent movements succeeded in overthrowing a dictator. In the late 2010s, that figure was down to 34%. Violent movements are even less effective—their success rate is currently around 8%, down from a peak of more than 40% in the 1970s.”
The Evangelical Business Mindset (Aaron Renn, Substack): “The overwhelming evangelical theological and missional focus is on saving souls. This lends itself to thinking of business as primarily about making money to fund missions, reinforcing the sweaty startup mindset. Business is not seen as culture-shaping in its own right. Then add to this the way that evangelicals approach church as an entrepreneurial endeavor. The very way evangelicals do church can form them into a sweaty startup business mindset. The net result is a lot of evangelical money and success, but not much cultural power.”
- I continue to think Renn underestimates the extent of an evangelical elite, but he makes several solid observations in this article.
Youth Group Taught Me Ideas Are Dangerous (Austin Suggs, Substack): “Still, in my experience, most people walk away from youth group with a theology consisting in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get married, and be careful going to college because your professors are going to try to make you an atheist.”
- (recommended by a student)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Church staff forgets this Sunday is Fathers Day (John Crist, YouTube): three minutes — makes points both silly and serious
Dollar General Robbery Gone Wrong (Josh Johnson, YouTube): two and a half minutes

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TGFI, Volume 559: a WWI parallel and age-gap discourse

Glen — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:46:02 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

It’s graduation week at Stanford and I’ve been busier than normal — fewer links this week as a result. Are you graduating? Want to keep receiving these emails? They’re mirrored on Substack — subscribe at https://theglendavis.substack.com/

Things Glen Found Interesting

The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I (Constant Méheut, New York Times): “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable. That is just what happened on Thursday. The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I.… Roughly nine million to 11 million soldiers died in World War I, compared with about half a million in Ukraine so far.”
More Than Evolution Requires (David Brooks, Comment): “As [Beha] began to appreciate the flaws in the atheist worldviews, he suffered a crisis of faith in atheism. But there is a big difference between losing faith in atheism and discovering faith in God. He seems to have experienced the pause between those two states that many have experienced. Kierkegaard famously likened it to being suspended above water and doing the motions of swimming without actually being in the water and swimming. In some ways the hero of this book is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was no Christian, but he understood that ‘if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.’ ”
Will I Get Canceled for Dating a Freshman? (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “Is it worth the risk of public exposure to talk to this girl you like? Tom, few things in life are _more_ worth the risk. Few opportunities will ever be as valuable as the chance to connect with a girl you might come to love. You’re a junior and she’s a freshman which, in the perverse calculation of deliberate overreaction, means some of your censorious peers may deem you ‘predatory.’ Anonymous campus spaces reward socially progressive moral performance. Ordinary interpersonal situations morph into show trials, ruled by the jealous who delight in shaming men out of normal feelings and behavior. Don’t let them fool you.”
Deep Blue Families: A Surprising Mix of Trad and Egalitarian Values (Joshua Sohn, Institute for Family Studies): “…my family lives in the District of Columbia, where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90% to 6% in the last election. Essentially all the families in my kids’ elementary school are Democrats, and most are liberal Democrats. These families also have some remarkable features: marriage is virtually universal, while divorce is virtually nonexistent. Almost every kid is growing up in a two-parent married family. And if we’re going to highlight the general retreat from marriage and parenthood in Blue America, we should also look at the circumstances where Blue Americans buck the trend. As it turns out, there are three features that might account for these strong Blue families in my own family’s social circle: (1) These families have a surprising mix of egalitarian and “trad” — lifestyle markers. (2) They have rejected the money-first Midas mindset in favor of a family-first one. (3) They have found ways to create a sense of community.”
A Medical Student Took His Own Life. His Parents Blame the School. (Frannie Block, The Free Press): “I’ve reported on more than a dozen instances of institutional overreach during disciplinary proceedings at universities—ranging from serious allegations of misconduct or cheating to investigations over whether or not a student under the age of 21 drank a beer. In all of these stories, the students’ families told me two things. First, that the universities failed to grant them due process. Second, that they failed to take the students’ mental health into consideration. In each case, the parents consistently felt that the schools failed their children and were more concerned with image control than nurturing their students. The students felt like the schools always had the upper hand, and didn’t give them the opportunity to properly defend themselves when their entire futures were on the line. The students, residents, and staff at Texas Tech Health who I interviewed told me their institution is no exception.”

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TGFI, Volume 558: global stupidity and counterproductive relevancy

Glen — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:44:03 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Unlocked: The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained (David French, New York Times): “A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’ And hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism on both the left and the right.… When you step back and actually think about it, these trends are confounding. I mean, I can understand the temptation to return to some of the discredited ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas ravaged the world?”
The Commodification Of Christianity (Freya India, Substack): “For a while I thought my generation might be finding God. Now I worry we are just finding content about God.… Who knows, maybe in the future many of us will say we found Jesus through a YouTube Short, that God got recommended by our algorithm. But I doubt it. I think if Christians want to reach my generation, really reach us, they have to promise something totally separate from that, something otherworldly, something that doesn’t abide by market logic, something different, divine. Something, for once, that isn’t cheapened or commodified.”
There’s a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage. (Aaron Renn, Substack): “We need to provide young people with the same sort of structure for finding a spouse that we’ve given them for getting into college. And they need to understand the degree of effort and intentionality required to get married.… Many people will be perfectly happy being single or childless for life. These aren’t for everyone. But college isn’t for everyone either. Yet we educate our high schoolers on the economic value it can bring, the prestige of various schools, the likely career prospects of different majors, the realistic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do something similar for marriage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the college advice. We should let young people know that college is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet large numbers of high quality singles who are potential future spouses, for example.”
- I keep telling y’all…
Three Helpful Word Pictures on AI Usage (Michael Graham, blog): “There are two kinds of work — toil and labor: Toil is a work that is a direct result of the Fall. Labor is work that is a direct result of the creation/cultural mandate.… I am broadly inclined to use AI for toil and I am broadly reluctant to use generative AI for labor.” (recommended by a student)
Can Christians Smoke Weed? (Daniel Darling, Christianity Today): “There’s no Bible verse that says, Thou shalt not smoke weed. But we can and should consider several scriptural principles in our moral decision-making about this drug, and I believe they lead to the conclusion that cannabis has no place in the life of a Christian.”
I Watched an Evangelical College Die From the Inside (Anthony Bradley, Substack): “…U.S. birthrates collapsed during the Great Recession and never recovered. This means that every entering freshman class nationwide will be smaller than the one before it, not for a season, but for the foreseeable future. America’s fertility rate is currently 1.6 births per woman. We have a college education environment built on a prior 2.3 birth rate. This is not merely a marketing problem. You cannot recruit your way out of a demographic decline. Institutions that have been built on the assumption of a steady pipeline of eighteen-year-olds are now facing a structural ceiling. It’s the demographic cliff. It’s a huge cliff. The pipeline is narrowing, and no amount of enrollment strategy changes that fact.”
- Worth reading even if you have no particular interest in Christian universities. Good info on the higher-ed landscape generally.
Why can’t California count? (Eli McKown-Dawson and Nate Silver, Substack): “[India is] one of the few places that can claim to have even more complexities than California. In fact, elections there are conducted in multiple stages. But it did manage to count 640 million votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over. Indeed, the more you scrutinize this, the fewer excuses California has. It is not the state with the most mail voting, nor is it the state with the latest mail ballot return deadline. Mail-voting states such as Oregon, Washington, and Colorado count slowly relative to the US average, but they’re all faster than California.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Adult Entertainment — (At Random)
George Lucas Releases Edit Of The Bible Where Malchus Attacks Peter First — (Babylon Bee)

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TGFI, Volume 557: peer-reviewed miracles and AI-informed voting

Glen — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:37:58 +0000

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting

Peer-Reviewed Miracles: Are Miraculous Cures Published in Scientific Journals? (Caleb Jackson, Substack): “It is often suggested that, if the evidence for miracle cures were truly compelling, it would be expected that such cases would be published in mainstream scientific journals. If these instances cannot stand the scrutiny of peer review, then they ought to be dismissed as nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotes. I am not persuaded. Indeed, this argument remains toothless for a myriad of reasons. As we shall see below, there are no less than several dozen instances of ‘miracle cures’ published in scientific journals, both mainstream and fringe, over the last century. To claim otherwise is to plead ignorance of the publicly available data.”
- Includes a bibliography of miraculous stories published in academic literature
Use AI This Election (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “I’m not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I’m saying that if you — like me — spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don’t do that research — because you weren’t willing to waste an hour on it before — AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start.”
- He gives a version of the prompt he used to generate a custom voter’s guide, so I tried it with a customized version and was pleased with the results. I tried it on both Claude and ChatGPT, only Claude was willing to do it. ChatGPT seemed to think it was unethical to help me. I recommend giving it a try. For a start, just go through his prompt sentence by sentence and change it to what you believe.
The Twin Fallacies of Christian Nationalism and AI Maximalism (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Here are two questions I think about a lot: How does Christianity restrict someone’s use of technology? How does Christianity restrict someone’s stratagems in politics? These questions come from a conviction that the claims of Christ in Scripture are such a nature that one cannot believe and obey them without experiencing some kind of limiting principle on their technology and on their politics. In other words, if you really take Christ seriously, your tech use and your politics will bear a conspicuous mark. ”
- Recommended by a student.
Nihilism With a Business Model (John Seel, Substack): “At one level, the gig economy reflects an understandable economic adaptation to a rapidly changing technological environment. But every economic system eventually shapes not merely how people make money, but how they imagine reality itself. The gig economy does not simply create gig work. It creates a gig mindset. And that mindset is increasingly reshaping the moral imagination among younger generations in deeply consequential ways. At the center of the gig mindset is the assumption that nearly everything can become monetized, optimized, and converted into market value. Everything and every experience are now for sale. The self itself becomes a platform. Consider two rapidly expanding phenomena among young adults: men are increasingly addicted to online sports betting, and women are increasingly posting on platforms such as OnlyFans. These two are deeply connected manifestations of the same cultural logic.”
- Emphasis in original.
Are “Real” Catholics as Conservative as Evangelicals? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I think this is the best test I can devise to really compare devout, conservative Catholics to evangelicals in the same segment of the population. I just can’t look at these results and say that ‘real’ Catholics are just as socially conservative as ‘real’ evangelicals. They aren’t — empirically speaking — as conservative on these three core issues [abortion, gay marriage, and premarital sex]… What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.”
- Emphasis in original.
Searching for God in Silicon Valley (Avital Balwit, The Free Press): “AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.… Not all of them would say they are missing something, and I take the ones who say so at their word. But enough are visibly _searching_ that it is worth asking what they are searching for.”
- The author is chief of staff to Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.
Perfect randomness realized for the first time (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “…Wallraff’s and Renner’s teams have found a way to take imperfect randomness and still extract perfectly random numbers from it. They call their method randomness amplification.”