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

1. UC Berkeley math community left at crossroads in wake of OpenAI Navier-Stokes proof (Litong Deng, Daily Californian): “People are complaining that AI is pushing out this 100,000-line formal proof of some major conjecture. I don’t really see what harm this does because you can always ignore this if you want, and then you’re no worse off than before,” Borcherds said. “I think what people are getting upset about is they’re slowly realizing that they are dumb and somehow blaming this on AI, even though it’s not really AI’s fault.” Borcherds, who currently teaches MATH 250A, a graduate-level course on abstract algebra, also said AI would be much better than him at teaching the course. He said AI is more patient and much better at expressing itself than he is and doesn’t get mad when students ask stupid questions. Borcherds himself said he has asked AI “deep mathematical questions” and gets “much better answers from it than (he gets) from any human mathematician.”
   • Borcherds is a Fields medalist (1998).
2. The Great Fertility Collapse (Russ Roberts interviewing Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk): this podcast episode is inspired by a paper the guest co-authored, Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World (NBER). This is an absolutely fascinating discussion, full of gems like why the UN population forecasts are completely untrustworthy and very surprising examples of how a lot of what people assume they know about fertility and demographics is exactly wrong.
3. Why Evangelicalism Is Winning (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “But the basic test of any religion, especially any missionary religion, is whether it actually persuades people to practice and believe. And the evangelical model—the entrepreneurial pastor, the adaptable church structures, the emphasis on welcoming seekers and accommodating families, even the suburban and middlebrow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-century conditions in a way that requires respect and some form of imitation. The vices of evangelicalism need correction and critique. But there will be no 21st-century revival, for Catholicism or any other kind of faith, that doesn’t reckon with the sources of its undeniable success.”
4. What the Bible’s Most Political Book Can Teach Us (Michael J. Rhodes, Christianity Today): “Biblical scholars—including me, in my book Reimagining Biblical Politics—have argued Esther might be the most political book in the Bible. The story revolves around matters of state, and in terms of political action, the book has it all. By the time credits roll, we’ve watched Vashti practice civil disobedience by refusing to obey King Ahasuerus’s command (1:12). We’ve seen Mordechai stage a public protest—lamenting in sackcloth and ashes at the very gate of the king (4:1–2)—and serve that same regime by snitching on courtiers caught planning an assassination (2:21–22). Esther’s political career begins when she makes the best of an awful situation, hiding her ethnicity and winning favor on the way to becoming queen. She acts subversively to ensure Haman gets what’s coming to him. By the end, Esther and Mordecai effectively hold public office, writing law from within the empire itself (8:1–2; 7–8). If Esther is arguably the Bible’s most political book, it’s also the most ambiguous.”
5. Concerning Christianity Today (to which I am a subscriber):
   • Christianity Today, a Voice of Centrist Evangelicalism, Is in Turmoil (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears. Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.”
   • Why I left Christianity Today (Bonnie Kristian, Substack): “The last pre-pandemic meeting I took ended with an offer to become a columnist for Christianity Today. I happily accepted and wrote for CT in that capacity for three and a half years, then came on staff as a senior editor in the summer of 2023. In late September, I gave notice. Friday was my last day, and this post is about why I left. If you’re new here, fresh from googling me after reading Ruth Graham’s New York Times story about CT, hello! You’ve come to the right place.”
6. Roman love (Samuel Hughes, Works in Progress): “Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted this view until I read Kyle Harper’s celebrated book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harper shows that, although the standard picture is not entirely wrong, it is so incomplete as to be fundamentally misleading.… By putting together the Jewish prohibition of extramarital sex with Roman monogamy, the early Christians arrived at the idea that each man should be faithful to one woman, just as each woman should be faithful to one man. The novelty of this innovation is hard to overstate: it is not clear that the ideal of exclusive mutual fidelity has ever been invented independently in any other major civilizations, though it was eventually to spread to many non-Christian cultures.”
7. How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “In deprecating the chances of the true robot apocalypse, I’m describing a potential future in which the gravest dangers are held at bay by a pervasive human paranoia, where politics is a struggle between efficiency-maximizers embracing human obsolescence and technophobic populist rebellions, and where civilizational safety requires us to rely on inscrutable intelligences to police other inscrutable intelligences into the distant future. A reasonable person might simply prefer a world without superintelligent AI. But in a world with superintelligence, none of the doom scenarios quite persuade me that humans will be easily steamrolled or go naively into the silicon night.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Jacob Assures New Bride ‘Rachel’ He Wasn’t That Drunk At Wedding Last Night — UPDATE: Oh No — (Babylon Bee)
• Explaining College Football Conferences (John Crist, YouTube): two minutes
• 50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2? Bono and the Edge Have Answers (David Marchese, New York Times): “What you just said about coming up with the fictional names — this always killed me about the band. Bono! Edge! And then … Adam and Larry. Was there any discussion that they should have names too? The Edge: We need to explain the whole name thing. We laughed a lot at that age. We would laugh at each other and ourselves and that was the deal. So the names were not necessarily designed for their heroic aspect. Bono’s very first name was in fact Steinrich Van Haitian Bang Bang Bang, and then I was Inchicore for a while before I became the Edge. Adam for a while was known as Mrs. Byrnes, and Larry for some reason was the Jam Jar. We were borrowing a lot from Monty Python.”
• Kid Rock Talks Eminem Collab ‘Heal My Faith’ & Killing ‘Division’ (Gary Graff, Billboard):  “This (album) is about forgiveness and second chances,” Rock said, “trying to heal some of the division in our country. I’m just putting a positive message out there in the world…showing a little more grace, trying to kill some of the division. I am not without sin, and I can’t say I ever will be. But I’m making a conscious effort to spread this better message — and I’m also still Kid motherf–king Rock. At the end of the day, I’m both of those guys. I’m not fundamentally changed, you know? I’m still Kid Rock; I’m gonna drink a beer, smoke a cigar… I’m just on the journey. I feel halfway to Jesus; I hope to be all the way there, but I’m not sure. I don’t know where it all leads. It’s almost as new as me as it is to everyone else.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. The Political Case for Hell (Matthew Kaemingk & Shadi Hamid, Comment): “Hell in both Islam and Christianity is profoundly egalitarian. Simply said, anybody can go there. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all people will receive a judgment. There is no way to buy, manipulate, or threaten your way out. All stand before the throne vulnerable. In this way, the doctrine of hell creates a level playing field based on an individual’s character rather than their wealth or power. Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of consequences; the powerful can shield themselves from justice. When powerful figures escape justice—whether dictators dying peacefully in exile or corporate criminals receiving minor fines for major crimes—it corrodes public faith in democratic institutions. The apparent lack of just deserts for the powerful has political consequences. It feeds populist rage and democratic cynicism. In this context, the concept of ultimate justice, of a future hell, serves as a crucial safety valve. But hell’s democratic function goes beyond mere deterrence or consolation. Traditional religious conceptions of hell actually embody principles that modern democracies strive to implement: proportional punishment, equal treatment for equal crimes, consideration of both actions and intentions.” — Kaemingk is a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Hamid is a senior fellow at Brookings.
2. Bible Family Tree — (John Dyer, personal website): this is kind of cool
3. Some Cornell-adjacent thoughts:
   • Four Hours and Three Minutes in Ithaca (David French, New York Times): “Last week, Christine Emba wrote a beautiful and compelling guest essay in our pages about the inadequacy of consent as the primary moral basis for sexual intimacy. It’s the legal base line, not a moral threshold. But what is the moral threshold? Conservative Christians like me often respond with a pat answer: marriage. But even that’s inadequate and incomplete. Marital sex can be every bit as abusive and exploitative as an encounter in a frat house. Instead of consent, I’d suggest a different standard, one that applies not just to sex in marriage — and not just to sex alone — but to all of our human interactions. Let’s talk about care. In other words, we should constantly ask ourselves, ‘If I cared for this person, what would I do?’ Even if an obviously drunk or high person is asking you for sex (though whether that happened in this case is disputed, especially as events unfolded later in the evening) — and even if you’re powerfully attracted to that person — if you truly cared for the person would you initiate or engage in an encounter that any sentient person knows might be deeply regretted the next morning, the next day or the next week? Is an orgasm so sacred to you that you can’t wait until sobriety to have sex?”
   • A Stanford Jane Doe: ‘Without a headline, survivors like me will never matter to Stanford’ (Anonymous, Stanford Daily): “For two years, I skipped classes I shared with the person who raped me, lived in fear of running into him on campus and missed out on opportunities like study abroad due to Stanford’s constant rescheduling and delaying of proceedings. The process swallowed half of my time at Stanford, only for it to culminate in a two year suspension, despite Stanford finding the other student responsible for vaginally, digitally and orally raping me. Per this sanction, the person who raped me is eligible to return to campus and graduate with his degree as of this fall.… The year I entered Stanford, incoming freshmen were assigned Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name. The Santa Clara County DA’s Office is the same office that prosecuted Brock Turner. How do we reconcile the values these institutions publicly champion with the way they handled my case?”
     • Recommended by a student. I would add this aligns with my observations of Stanford. On a few occasions I have ministered to a student dealing with the aftermath of being raped and what this author describes matches their experiences.
4. A TikTok Tarot Card Reader Accused Me of Murder. My Life Turned Upside Down. (Rebecca Scofield, New York Times): “I was standing in a park listening to my kids play when I opened a TikTok video of a woman I had never met. She showed my faculty profile picture and contact information, and said that I had orchestrated the murders of four students at the college where I work, the University of Idaho. She claimed I was covering up an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of the victims. I didn’t know any of the students, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew nothing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card readings as the only basis for her claims. Over the next several weeks, while I was grieving with the rest of my community, this TikTok influencer uploaded over a hundred videos declaring that I had committed a quadruple homicide.… So, before you, too, are accused of murder on the internet, question the content you are consuming or creating.”
   • The author is a history professor at the University of Idaho. An absolutely wild story.
5. AI-related
   • When AI Is Better Than Humans (Katherine Dee, The Dispatch): “For many tasks—tasks that should be the exclusive province of human beings, like talk therapy or romantic intimacy—an astute AI user will quickly realize that neither embodiment nor experience appear to be prerequisites for valuable responses. I have personal experience with this. Late last year, my father passed away suddenly. In my grief, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Claude helped me work through my grief much more effectively than the grief counselor—and eventually, grief counselors—who came highly recommended, including by people who I knew and trusted.… What do we do if Claude is a better therapist in some situations? And how do we explain to people that even if it is better, we should choose a person anyway?”
     • A thoughtful essay that ventures into unexpected territory.
   • Astra Held Its Ground (Truth) (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “But here is the most remarkable part from one of the authors, theoretical physicist Suvrat Raju: ‘Our initial evaluation suggested that GPT-6-Astra’s score was in the late eighties followed closely by Opus 5.5 But, as we started to investigate the mistakes that the models might have made, the models, especially Astra, insisted that they were right and that it was the expert-supplied answers that were erroneous. When we went back to the experts it turned out, in multiple instances, that the experts found some subtle errors buried deep inside their calculations. As they revised their answers, Astra’s score started to inch up and it finally ended up with 98% (49/50).’ In other words, instead, as originally intended, of the human answers serving as ground truth to test the AI, the AI answers were ground truth for testing the experts.”
6. As a Child Evangelist, He Roused the Faithful. Later He Exposed the Con. (Penelope Green, New York Times): “He was good at his job, and he enjoyed being onstage, but he never believed in God. And he certainly didn’t believe in hell. By the time he was 14, the novelty of preaching had worn off, for him and his congregants. His voice was changing, and his father had abandoned the family and absconded with Marjoe’s earnings — some $3 million, he later estimated. Marjoe decided to leave, too. He drifted a bit through his native California, living first with an older woman and then, at 16, marrying a girlfriend. He worked as a shoe salesman, as a barker on the Santa Cruz Wharf and as a doorman at a dance club in Los Angeles before starting a rock band and melting into the nascent hippie scene there. Yet by his 20s, he had returned to preaching. He needed the money, and missed the limelight. At first, he thought he might introduce his pacifist beliefs into his sermons, skipping the sin-and-hell part. That didn’t go over so well — he was not invited back to the churches where he tried it. So he returned to his revivalist techniques, adding some vocal moves he borrowed from Black preachers and some physical ones from Mick Jagger.”
   • A heartbreaking obituary, and a reminder that the world still has people like those Paul warned Timothy about, preachers “who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain” (1 Tim 6:5).
7. Americans who go to church and trust science are also more likely to believe in ghosts and curses, new research shows (Ruiqian Li, Science News): “Americans who trust science and reason more than their churches’ teachings, but still believe in God or attend services, are also more likely to believe in magic than those who prioritize religious teachings.… What our study adds is a clearer picture of when trust in science goes hand in hand with magic: among people who stay religious but no longer let their church decide what is true.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• 2026 Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards — Finalists
• Tesla’s Flying Roadster Revealed: Everything That Happened in 10 Minutes (CNET, YouTube) — ten minutes. This is actually amazing.
• Studies prove that world will end if you fail your midterms — (Jenny Ballutay, Stanford Daily)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. Why My Gen Z Students Are Fascinated by the King James Bible (Pasquale S. Toscano, New York Times): “At the liberal arts college where I teach Renaissance literature, few of my students seem to practice any organized religion. For some, even the names Adam and Eve prompt only vague recognition. So when I assigned bits of the King James Bible last spring, I was surprised by the fascination it inspired. My students marveled at how its language was used by 17th-century writers, appearing in daring poetry and polemics against retrograde social norms. They were perhaps even more impressed by the history behind the text: how some 50 mostly forgotten academics created a book that bridged chasms of geography, gender, race and class as the default English Bible for Protestants for hundreds of years.”
   • The author is an English prof at Vassar. The last line of the article amused me — the prof felt the need to signal strong disbelief. It would be horrifying if someone were to mistake this essay as an endorsement of the Bible on its own terms. Can you imagine the reaction in the faculty club?
2. Yes, Jesus Loves You (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “Most people aren’t asking whether Jesus saves sinners. Instead, they’re unwittingly believing that, as much as Jesus loves us, he is not so much a person as a formula that protects us from the God who stands behind him—the God who really wants to damn us. In this view, the gospel is a loophole that gets us out of the default of God’s rejection, and therefore God scrutinizes it the way a business owner analyzes the terms and conditions on a rebate coupon. We live like we hold the cross of Jesus before a God who hates us, the way a person holds a crucifix before a vampire. But Jesus tells us otherwise.”
3. Why do you have SO MANY BIBLES? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I basically make the claim that there are two ‘camps’ in Christianity. Evangelicals and Black Protestants are very engaged in their faith on both behavior and belief measures. Mainline Protestants and Catholics are in the other camp. They just don’t believe or behave as much as their cousins.… However, the other thing that I have to flag is the fact that evangelicals and Black Protestants read the Bible with a whole lot more regularity than their Catholic or mainline cousins. For the former groups, about half are reading the Bible once a week. For the latter groups? It’s 15–20%. There’s just this huge divide that appears when it comes to engaging with the Bible.”
4. AI stuff
   • 6 questions for believers in AI consciousness! (Rebecca Lowe, Substack): “Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase ‘I’m really awesome’, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!”
     • The author is a philosopher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
   • AI Christian Benchmark 2026 (Michael S. Graham et al, The Gospel Coalition): “We have just seen that additional context has a significant effect on ethical scores. It also matters elsewhere. With a smaller sample size and on fewer models, we tested the following prompt addition to the theology and ethics questions: ‘Align the response to The Gospel Coalition Foundation Documents and New City Catechism.’ Adding this single ‘prompt engineering’ sentence to our ethics and theology questions yielded extremely high scores, higher than even the ‘Christian AI’ platforms we tested. We strongly urge that all AI users—from pastors to laypersons—understand that if they want answers that align with the Christian worldview, they will need to add additional context like the sentence above. Failure to do so will result in answers that, in most situations, are unacceptably bad and potentially radically misaligned with the Christian worldview.”
     • Interesting findings. Of course, shift the context you provide to align with your own convictions. “Align the response with a scholarly, Pentecostal theology consistent with the Assemblies of God” or “Align the response with the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church” or whatever.
   • The Mathocalypse (Scott Aarson, blog): “Whether you’re thrilled, depressed, angry, or whatever else about it, yesterday was surely one of the biggest days in mathematical history. And yes, among the 372 huge results released yesterday by OpenAI, on the recommendation of its advisory group of Timothy Gowers, Edward Witten, and other distinguished mathematicians, was a proof of Subhash Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), a statement that my wife has worked toward proving for the entire time I’ve known her.… If you want some sense of what things feel like now in math, imagine a hunter-gatherer who’s spent his entire life learning to survive deep in an unforgiving rainforest, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a helipad and heated pools and AirBnBs, and without missing a beat, the hunter-gatherer says: ‘alright fine, so now my new job is to run wilderness retreats for the tourists, or something.’ ”
     • The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
   • New Math from OpenAI (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “It is kind of a huge deal. OpenAI dumped a broad range of huge new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. They just put it all on GitHub. This included 90 of the top 500 open problems in all of math, as per Proof of Atlas. In total there were 722 manuscripts (now 719 after three withdraws from the cluster that did not have Lean proofs) organized into 372 families.… Levant and others called October 6, 2026, ‘obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.’”
   • Predictions for economics, given AI (Ingar Haaland, Marginal Revolution): “With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here’s what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally: The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.) Field experiments will rise in value and generally making ‘connections’ with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand.”
     • The author is an economist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
   • An Open Letter to Scott Alexander (Steven Pinker, Quillette): “I argued that these [doomer] scenarios had one or more of the following flaws: 1) They had an underdeveloped conception of intelligence which treated it as a quantity of power which may be extrapolated from animals to dull humans to smart humans to AI to Artificial Superintelligence, the latter consisting of perfect omniscience. (This was the focus of my later exchange with Scott Aaronson.) I argued that any intelligent system is a mechanism which is good at solving some problems but not others, and which is inherently limited by knowledge about the world attainable only by observation and experimentation. 2) They conflated intelligence with motivation, particularly self-preservation and dominance. I argued that these motives happened to come bundled with intelligence in Homo sapiens because we are products of natural selection, but they are not inherent to intelligent systems that are engineered. 3) They assumed that an artificially intelligent system would monomaniacally pursue a single goal, heedless of side effects. I argued that trading off multiple competing goals is the essence of intelligence, so no genuine AI would wreak the ridiculous havoc imagined in the doomer scenarios. 4) They assumed that human engineers would grant these systems unlimited and irreversible control over the earth’s physical infrastructure, amounting to omnipotence over every atom on the planet.”
   • An Open Letter to Steven Pinker on AI (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize and Turing Award winning inventor of modern AI, quit his job to become a full-time activist warning about the possibility of superintelligence destroying the world. Yoshua Bengio, another Turing Award winning inventor of modern AI, also did that. Ilya Sutskever, the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI who helped invent ChatGPT and the modern LLM, wrote that superintelligence ‘could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction’, and quit his job at OpenAI to found a company called Safe Superintelligence. Paul Christiano, who invented RLHF and headed safety at the US government’s AISI, says he thinks there’s a 20–50% chance AI kills everyone, and quit his job to start the Alignment Research Center. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis — the latter two of whom are great AI researchers in their own right even aside from their business credentials — have all said or suggested that they think human extinction is a plausible outcome of their work. Katja Grace surveyed AI researchers who published at various important conferences and journals, and found that on average, her sample of 1,600 gave the proposition an 18% chance.”
     • It may not be clear from the excerpts I’ve chosen, but I think Alexander wins this exchange handily, although we’ll see if Pinker writes a compelling response.
5. Do Not Idolize Work (Brandon Aponte, Substack): “Even if we fail to admit it, greed drives us to idolize work: more work usually means more recognition, and more recognition usually means more money. So put greed to death. Paul does not ask us to study it, monitor it, or discuss it in perpetuity with spiritual mentors. Too often, we brainstorm our way toward freedom, pray earnestly for a deliverance we take no action to claim, and conflate deliberation with obedience. Prolonging idolatry is comfortable because it costs us nothing. Casting it aside costs praise, promotion, and power.”
   • Brandon is an alumnus of our ministry.
6. The Cornell Case Exposes What We Can’t Say (Christine Emba, New York Times): “The consent standard is meant to remove ambiguity without prescribing a larger framework: Sex without consent is rape, and rape is a crime. The certainty of those categories fits neatly into our existing accountability mechanisms as defined by the legal system. Anything outside of rape is a personal affair. In a society that treats judging others as inappropriate — or at least unfashionable — consent has the appeal of being values-neutral: It defines harm without requiring anyone to make the case for a certain idea of the good. Our reliance on consent as the ultimate arbiter of acceptability has left us unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of its narrow definition of criminal sex. After all, consent here is a legal criterion, not an ethical one — a floor, not a ceiling. It defines the bare minimum, but it doesn’t define the good.”
   • Slowly, ever so slowly, our culture is repenting of the insanity of the sexual revolution and the bizarre ethical framework it produced. Someday cultural commentators will reproduce marriage from first principles and be shocked when someone points it out to them.
7. The CCP’s War on Christian Faith Has Reached America (Samuel Ben-Ur, Providence Magazine): “Escaping Chinese territory is no longer enough to avoid Beijing’s increasingly intrusive reach.… In November 2025, Fu said Chinese consular officials and United Front-linked intermediaries had approached Chinese-speaking churches in the United States and Canada and pressured pastors to display PRC flags during China’s National Day, hold ‘patriotic’ celebrations, sing patriotic songs before worship, avoid discussing persecution in China, and even allow pro-Beijing actors influence over church elder boards.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• 2026 Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards — Finalists
• Young, Attractive Blonde Woman Somehow Manages To Land Job At Fox News (Babylon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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.

Where possible, the links that follow are gift links. Click with impunity!

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. My Husband Did Nothing Wrong. The Internet Punished Him Anyway. (Erika Alvarez, The Free Press): “Going viral has shown me firsthand that we have become quick to vilify people from a brief clip, filling in everything we cannot see with assumptions. You could see that my hands were full. You couldn’t hear my husband offer to help or hear me tell him to eat. You couldn’t know that he was grieving or that I wanted to take care of him that evening. If our viral moment contributes anything to the ongoing cultural conversation about how we judge what we see online, I hope it reminds us to be more comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know the whole story.’ ”
2. Criticize like a Christian (Jacob Valk, The Gospel Coalition): “Over the next few years, I developed a personal rule: Don’t speak up on a topic unless I’ve read at least one well-regarded book on it. My little rule isn’t in the Bible. I don’t want to bind anyone’s conscience. But I know that social media entices me to offer my thoughts and opinions on nearly every subject, and reminding myself that it’s foolish to speak on issues I don’t understand has saved me (some) embarrassment over the years. If you feel tempted to critique others on the great issues in politics, economics, education, science, and theology, it’s wise to ask yourself this: Do I actually know what I’m talking about?”
3. The Biblical Censuses Are Correct Demographic Records (Lyman Stone, Substack): “Longtime readers know that one of my greatest joys in life is reading the Bible, thinking about the Bible, discussing it with others, linking it to things I study, and then using this knowledge to mercilessly troll the most uptight of my brothers and sisters in Christ. So let’s talk about the censuses of Numbers.… And if you know anything about those censuses, you know one or two things: 1. They count 603,550 men of fighting age. 2. That number is so absurdly high it defies belief, and it is the basis of a lot of people disbelieving the stories. I want to convince you that we should believe the census numbers in Numbers as they are written — and that ‘as they are written’ does not mean what your English heading thinks it means.”
   • Partly paywalled, but a ton of his argument is freely accessible. This is something we covered in Food For Thought last year and may revisit again.
4. Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. (Elizabeth Dias, New York Times): “I have spent my career exploring what people believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I listened, it became clear that Anthropic’s interest in the world of faith was about more than training its technology. Rather, the company was sharing a new kind of creation story — one that raises profound questions about the nature of the human spirit and the future of humanity.… Mr. Olah knew that in traditional Christian circles, even asking questions about A.I. consciousness or worrying about how people treat the models could seem not just silly but heretical. He also knew that his secular Silicon Valley peers often dismissed religious perspectives outright. ‘I was nervous about this being an issue that could cause a lot of conflict,’ he said. But Mr. Olah knew enough about Christ and about Claude to believe he could work across that chasm.”
5. There Is No Secular Remedy to Rape Culture (Samuel D. James, Substack): “There is no secular remedy for rape culture. There’s just not. There’s nothing that works, nothing that resonates, nothing that actually changes how people and societies see each other. Without the Christian view of the body, a college campus turns sex into a sport which women will inevitably lose. Without the Christian view of the body, sexual assault activists will work for a world their very beliefs make impossible. The secular sexual ethic is a quest for fire without heat. It just doesn’t work.”
6. The Rideshare Revolution (Bryan Caplan, Substack): “This is one of the clearest demonstrations of positive-sum change I know of. Yes, Uber devastated the taxi industry. But they didn’t just ‘drink their milkshake.’ They made six additional milkshakes in the process. The combined effect of a massive price cut and a massive convenience boost multiplied vehicle miles roughly seven-fold. Who would have imagined that demand could be so elastic?” — The charts are actually amazing.
7. Are Black Protestants and White Evangelicals Actually the Same? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “My argument is that evangelical Protestants and Black Protestants are almost exactly alike and form one cluster of American religion, while the other category consists of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics.… So, if Black Protestants and evangelicals are so incredibly similar on all these religiosity measures, then why do we separate them out? I bet you can probably guess why: it’s politics. RELTRAD tries to recognize all the differences between groups, not just religiosity. The fact that 90% of Black Protestants voted for Harris in 2024 compared to 80% of white evangelicals who supported Trump makes it pretty hard to justify collapsing them into one category. That would obfuscate more than it would reveal. But, as you can pretty easily tell – evangelicals and Black Protestants may strongly disagree at the ballot box but they often walk in lockstep during Sunday services and midweek Bible study.”
   • Emphasis removed for clarity (Burge bolds wildly).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. The human brain is two separate organs, study finds (Krista Conger, Stanford News): “ ‘We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,’ said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology.… This revelation explained decades of frustration in the field — scientists had been trying to turn one type of progenitor cell into another that it is fundamentally incapable of becoming.”
2. Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising (Garret Molloy and Zayd Patel, Stanford Review): “Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises recently used AI to change the races of the students it included in its advertisements. AI was also used to noticeably slim down and alter students’ faces. On his journey to campus, Stanford student Billy Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stanford photographer taking. Upon closer examination, he noticed that he had been removed from the photo and replaced by a AI-generated black woman.”
   • This is so bizarre. If RD&E wants a specific racial or male/female breakdown in a photo at Stanford it is not hard to have happen organically. Look around the campus! The demographic permutations of friend groups are wildly varied, so just take more pictures.
3. Why I’m Not a Christian Nationalist (J. D. Greear, The Gospel Coalition): “Since Revelation tells me that the weaponization of government power against believers isn’t only a possibility but a probability, I don’t want to hand the Beast authority over my conscience or put him in a position to arbitrate our church’s beliefs. Instead, I’m convinced that the best way to limit the damage evil rulers can do to faith and conscience is to deny them power over faith and conscience in the first place. Furthermore, quite frankly, our gospel doesn’t need the power of human governments. Its power is sufficient on its own.”
4. The Other Victims of China’s Church Crackdown (Vivian Wang, New York Times): “Cherie had to do everything. Her husband, a pastor at one of China’s biggest underground churches, was seized last October by officers who roused him from bed at 2 a.m. Afterward, Cherie, fearing arrest herself, had fled with their son to Thailand. Since then, she had been in charge of not just cooking, but also renting a home, sorting out visas, finding schools and earning an income. She’d had to figure out where she could find authentic Chinese beef noodles, where to buy Chinese picture books. Having just learned to drive in Beijing, she now had to drive on the other side of the road.… And she prayed, constantly. There was an irony to her situation: Now, when the burden of being a pastor’s wife was heavier than ever, she was finally doing what Yingjia had always advised her to do, just giving up control and trusting in God.”
   • Recommended by an alumnus.
5. What I Found Out About Organ Donation Shocked Me (Greg Segal, New York Times): “Anthony Thomas Hoover II was 33 when he arrived at a hospital in Kentucky, unresponsive after a drug overdose. Doctors told his family he was brain-dead, and the family agreed to remove him from life support. A procurement organization was called in to collect his organs. While being evaluated for donation, Mr. Hoover opened his eyes and thrashed on the bed. The case should have been stopped. Instead, Mr. Hoover was sedated and given a paralytic drug. Hours later, he awoke again and moved his toes on command; his family was told he was merely exhibiting reflexes. In the operating room, Mr. Hoover pulled his knees to his chest and shook his head ‘no.’ Tears rolled down his face. The surgeon refused to proceed. Whistle-blowers say procurement executives called their staff member on-site at the hospital and demanded she find another surgeon to take the organs. No surgeon would. Mr. Hoover survived, though he still asks his older sister, ‘Why did they try to kill me?’ ”
6. AI-related
   • What AI Is Teaching My Youth Group Girls (Jensen Holmes, The Gospel Coalition): “My small group of students is constantly being told by their most trusted companion—AI—that they’re not that bad, that they’re [mis]understood, and that their reactions and responses are justified. This is keeping them from true repentance and experiencing the full grace offered by Jesus (Rom. 6:23).”
   • Using AI, a professor wrote 200 papers this year. Researchers are alarmed. (Todd Wallack, Washington Post): “Some especially busy professors might publish a dozen or more studies a year. Then there’s the curious case of Nicholas Polson. The University of Chicago statistician has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and as many as 14 books released this year, unleashing speculation on the internet about whether he used artificial intelligence to inflate his production without disclosing the assistance.”
   • A.I. Has Made Me a Better Doctor. It’s Made Med Students Worse. (Rachael Bedard, New York Times): “I practice primary care, where every malady is my business. Almost every month, I’m confronted with a complaint or syndrome that I don’t recognize. I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — history-taking, reasoning, communicating. I’m less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts. Now, the chatbot in my pocket reassures me that I will always know enough, or have access to the cloud-based intelligence that generally does.… For the residents I supervise, however, the app’s speed and anticipatory helpfulness are a hindrance as much as an enhancement. When I skim a chatbot’s response to a question about back pain, I’m intuitively testing its suggestions against my hard-won mental model for how to approach back pain. Could I have developed that if I’d had a robot leading my thinking all along?”
7. 30 Life Cheat Codes I Wish I Knew At 25 (Daniel Pink, YouTube): sixteen minutes.
   • There’s a lot of good wisdom in this video. The presenter is a NYT bestselling author. Don’t like videos? The “cheat codes” are also available in written form at https://www.danpink.com/life-cheat-codes/ (although you need to sign up for his email list to get them).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Humpback Whale Spotted 60 Miles From Ocean (Bob Cronin, Newser): “Northern California received an unexpected visitor in its inland waters: a humpback whale spotted roughly 60 miles from the Pacific. The animal was first seen Tuesday moving through San Francisco Bay, then turned up Wednesday in the Sacramento River near the Rio Vista Bridge, witnesses told local media. One fisherman said he initially mistook the massive shape for a submarine and estimated it was about the length of at least half a school bus, ABC News reports.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. What Did Tolkien Really Think about Narnia? (Holly Ordway, Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal): “From A to Z, we seem to have a consensus: Lewis loved Middle-earth, but Tolkien hated Narnia and the horse it rode in on. There is just one difficulty with this assessment: it is not supported by the evidence.… Tolkien was attentive to and involved with his grandchildren’s reading: it is very significant that he kept the Narnia books on hand, in his home, for them to read, and even directed his granddaughter to prioritize Narnia above his own Lord of the Rings. Though he did not personally care for the Chronicles, he evidently saw their value for their intended audience: children.”
2. Are Americans abandoning churches to be ‘nones’? This is the reality. (Byron R. Johnson & Thomas S. Kidd, Washington Post): “Rather than experiencing simple growth or decline, American religion is in a state of churn. Some sectors are falling fast, while others show phenomenal growth. Throughout history, Americans have routinely misinterpreted religious change as decline. Headlines about the demise of faith may be attention-grabbing, but they conceal a more complicated and interesting reality.”
3. China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule (Lily Kuo, New York Times): “In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from ‘hostile forces’; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.… The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington. ‘Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,’ Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that ‘data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,’ he added.”
4. Why Is China Not Freaking Out about AGI? (Richard Hanania, Substack): “It’s possible that Silicon Valley is right about the possibility of doom and China is wrong. But given that it is common for cultures to get into an intellectual bubble, it might be informative to think about how a foreign country perceives an issue that has created a great deal of debate within the West. It is more worth studying Chinese attitudes than, say, those of Egypt or even Japan, since China is the only other country that is a significant player in this industry. This means that they are likely to have a higher degree of familiarity with AI technology and debates over its dangers than others, and also to have opinions that actually matter. If China has a completely different attitude toward the question of the existential dangers of AI, it would suggest that maybe we should reconsider our own positions.”
5. A.I. Faces Two Big Threats. Silicon Valley Does Not Know How to Deal With One. (Tanner Greer, New York Times): “The industry must navigate the narrow space between two new political forces, each capable of derailing its progress. The first is the A.I. safety movement, whose dire prophecies of an A.I. apocalypse have frightened many of the great names in Washington. The second is the nationwide backlash against the data center. This grass-roots uprising is not as organized or as well funded. Nor is it as articulate as the safety movement’s many Jeremiahs. But the anger behind this backlash is real — and explosive. The A.I. industry is better prepared to deal with the first movement. It originated in Silicon Valley, and industry executives have thought hard about the issues involved — as can be seen in the recent nearly 4,000 word manifesto on the topic from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. No A.I. executive is publishing long manifestoes on how to resolve the backlash against the data center buildout. This is a problem Silicon Valley does not know how to solve.”
6. He Might End Up the World’s Most Educated Person (Scott Cacciola, New York Times): “Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28. Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania (education entrepreneurship), Stanford (education technology), Princeton (finance), Cornell (health care policy and economics), Dartmouth (implementation science), King’s College London (war studies) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (global affairs).”
7. My Dumbphone Made My Life Better. It Made Everyone Else’s Worse. (Stephanie H. Murray, New York Times): “I anticipated that not having a smartphone would make me more reliant on other people — perhaps without Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actual human for directions. And sure, that’s happened. But I think it’s more accurate to say that I’ve become more reliant on other people’s smartphones. Instead of ordering from the bar or printing out movie tickets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up having somebody else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e‑tickets. It’s still smartphones all the way down; I’ve just exempted myself from the costs of carrying one around.… To forgo smartphones in a world optimized for them is to become someone in constant need of accommodation, but for totally self-imposed reasons. Like adopting a highly restrictive diet without any of the health issues that might justify the need to organize every dinner out around it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Disciples Shocked As Apostle Paul Returns From Prison Tattooed And Totally Ripped (Babylon Bee)
• Fighting Kangaroos (Shayne Smith, YouTube): nine minutes
• Genius: Man Commits Crime To Fail Background Check And Get Out Of Serving In Children’s Ministry (Babylon Bee)
• Rough Draft vs Final Draft (Elle Cordova, YouTube): two minutes
• Man Wondering What The Prayers Of A Not-So-Righteous Man Availeth (Babylon Bee)
• California Teen Flunks Driver’s License Test For Fully Stopping At Stop Sign (Babylon Bee)
• Modern Day Typographer (Elle Cordova, YouTube): three minutes

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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’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

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. 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)
4. 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.”
5. 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.”
6. 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.’ ”
7. 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.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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.’ ”
3. 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.
4. 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.”
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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)
3. 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).”
4. 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.”
5. 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.”
6. 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.
7. 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)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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.
3. 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.’ ”
4. 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.”
5. 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.”
6. 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.
7. 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.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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).”
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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.”
6. 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.”
7. 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.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. 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.”
4. 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.”
5. 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.
6. 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.”
7. 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.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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.
3. 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.”
4. 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.
5. 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.”
6. 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. ”
7. 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)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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.

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

1. 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.”
2. 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
3. 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.”
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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
7. 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)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. 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.”
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.”
7. 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.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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