1. First up, some low-hanging fruit from The Atlantic, Olga Khazan’s “The Problem with Being Perfect,” an expert deconstruction of America’s favorite #humblebrag. Khazan fills in the shading a bit more than journalists usually do when tackling this subject, especially toward the end, where she catalogs not just the appeasement response to the law perfectionism, […]
Another Week Ends: A Dark Consensus, Social Credit, Untrainable People, New Detective, Complicit Christianity, and the Unimportance of Jerry Seinfeld
1. A fascinating parable appeared on NPR this week, a 5-minute radio story about China’s “social credit system.” Apparently, this system of credit scoring functions like the US’s in that your financial history affects your financial future: it differs, though, in that “China’s system also considers information like what you buy and how you treat […]
Another Week Ends: Consumer Churches, 30 Year Takeaways, the Other Side, Bull Head Coaches, iPad Tipping and Japanese KitKats
1. Fresh on the heels of hosting a truly, er, glorious theology-of-the-cross-themed conference last weekend in San Diego, our friends at 1517 Legacy posted a brilliantly contrarian reflection from Joel Hess, responding to a critique that’s fairly common among confessional Christians in this country. I’m referring to the criticism that the church, especially in its […]
Another Week Ends: Honest Obituaries, Wounded Healers, Humblebrag Injuries, Employee Surveillance, and the Google Pixel 3
1. Maybe you have already read this obituary from a Vermont newspaper; it went viral this week and for good reasons. It recounts the life of Madelyn Linsenmeir, and all the love that surrounded her as she struggled through addiction to opiates. Linsenmeir was 30 and the obituary, written by her sister Kate O’Neill, captures […]
Another Week Ends: Comparisonitis, Funk Apostles, Boring Adults, Coffee Wars, Religious Radicalization, and the Ageless Persistence of Vision
“It’s not quite reality. It’s like a totally filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is.” – Joshua Leonard 1. Envy: according to Moya Sarner at The Guardian this deadly sin is more present in our everyday lives than ever before, thanks to social media. More than a mere […]
Another Week Ends: Divine Dad Jokes, Social Media Dark Ages, Millennial Marriages, Cher’s SOS, and a Swimming Pool Full of Sprinkles
1. It’s the experience economy, in case you haven’t heard. In a previous vocation, that was the mantra by which we were expected to “pivot” our future plans. The new experience entrepreneurs have likely set up shop in your neighborhood too: we just got our first axe-throwing range to compliment our smashing-pottery-therapy studio and our […]
Another Week Ends: Embellishers, Marital Branding, Christian Rock, Anxiety Economy, Reagan’s Letter, and InstaBlues
1. First up, a searing column from Eve Fairbanks on BuzzfeedNews, claiming that “Well-Off Millennials Are All Julia Salazar.” Not being much of a political junkie, I had to look Salazar up. She just won the Democratic primary for State Senate in Brooklyn, and was roundly criticized for misrepresenting her upbringing, making it sound inaccurately arduous […]
Another Week Ends: Data Thugs and Emotional Scientists, René Girard and Johnny Cash, Hurricane Pop-Tarts, Personality Tests, and Mean Houseplants
1. A mishmash of articles coming our way this week regarding the search for objectivity in the public sphere. First, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the “replicability crisis” in the field of psychology. If you’re uninitiated, this is the recent (and ongoing) debunking of numerous landmark studies in psychology, debunked […]
Another Week Ends: Cognitive Bias, Christian Impurity, Authoritarian Safetyism, Evil Nuns, Self-Care, and the Gentle Whisper of the Divine
1. The theme that binds today’s links seems to be cognitive bias: the way our brains maneuver away from rational thinking, particularly under duress or in highly pressurized situations. Much of the pop-coverage of this topic, post-2016 (and there has been quite a bit), has been political: seeking to answer how anyone could be so […]
Another Week Ends: Taking Life for Granted, Eating Sin, Middle School Materialism, Death by Jaywalking, Moth Jokes, and the Joy of Things You’ll Never Master
1. Let’s start off at Digg, another web venture focused on curating the best of the web for a specialized audience. For the unfamiliar, Digg is to Reddit as Myspace is to Facebook, it was one of the web’s earliest “vote on the stories you like” style websites. Steve Rousseau, the senior editor at this rebooted […]
Another Week Ends: Tuesday Treatment, Sad Musk, #SelfCare, Catholic Mothers, Presbyterian Pool Parties, and Steve Perry
1. First up, the incredibly moving TED talk above, in which Aaron Stark describes what led him to consider perpetrating a school shooting–and what prevented him from going through with it. It’s well worth the seven minutes. And the phrase “treat you like a Tuesday” may be my favorite new euphemism for grace. Just beautiful. […]
Another Week Ends: Aretha Franklin, Robot Lovers, Instagram Repetitions, Submarine Parents, Forever 37, and Forgiving Spouses
1. This weekender would have been done so much sooner had I not gotten completely entranced by Aretha Franklin YouTube videos, which I’ll smatter throughout this post. While the Queen of Soul has a litany of songs you have heard for decades, there are so many live performances (and so many stories) (and so many […]
