Glen & Paula Davis

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. Your Decision Making Is All Wrong (David Epstein, New York Times): “If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it. In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing. But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.… Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is ‘good enough for me’ rather than ‘the best out there,’ and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.”
2. China Is Much Weaker Than It Seems. That’s the Problem. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “ ‘Business debt has doubled since 2019, while revenues are only 30 percent higher,’ reports Fortune. This economic house of cards rests, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, on a foundation of sand: an aging and declining work force, net emigration, widespread youth unemployment, plummeting foreign direct investment, an arbitrary rule of law that terrifies business leaders, repeated purges of the military that project far more paranoia than confidence and a truculent foreign policy that does little more than alarm and alienate China’s neighbors.… Rising nations, which is what China was under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, have the luxury of being able to bide their time. Declining nations don’t. It tends to make them more inclined to gamble with their future. It’s why Putin invaded Ukraine after he realized the country was moving inexorably into the West’s orbit. It’s also why Xi will be powerfully tempted to seize Taiwan by invasion or blockade despite the enormous risks it poses not only to the world’s economy but also to his own.”
   • Somewhat related: Why China Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. (Jacob Dryer, New York Times): “The reality is that China and the United States are racing in different directions, because the two countries conceptualize A.I. very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known. In the quest for superintelligence, the U.S. government is encouraging private firms to move full speed ahead, regulation be damned. Under the very tightest regulation, by contrast, the Chinese want to make A.I. more practical and embedded in society, more carefully selecting how it is deployed and used by the population.… In that way, as China exports those A.I. models, it will be exporting Chinese governance as well, with all of the safety, abundance, surveillance and embedded hierarchies that entails. That’s why the difference between these two countries in the A.I. race matters so much.”
3. The Atheist and the Machine God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There is no obvious escape from mystery here. If you bite the bullet and just say that Claudia has already attained consciousness, then that implies we somehow built a conscious mind without having any idea of how consciousness works or where it comes from. That’s science with extremely spooky characteristics: Like Kevin Costner summoning baseball ghosts to the Iowa cornfield, we put up a material architecture and the mysterious ‘I’ magically appeared. Alternatively, if you say that A.I. isn’t conscious but merely capable, then the question of why we experience reality through consciousness — the internal ‘I,’ the sense of personal identity and will — becomes much more difficult to answer. If consciousness isn’t necessary for capability, then presumably evolution should default to zombies.… As certain philosophers have argued, this harmony between the psychological and the physical seems more much likely to appear in a universe where consciousness is fundamental, where matter isn’t everything and Mind is where things start. In which case maybe the achievement of Claude, or Claudia if you prefer, is to show us what intelligence might look like in the materialist’s universe — even as our own consciousness indicates that this universe is a much, much stranger place.”
   • I really appreciated this essay.
4. China vs God (Frannie Block, The Free Press): “I’ve obtained hours of interviews with Jin that the Drexels recorded in September 2025, a month before he was arrested. I’ve viewed never-before-seen footage of Chinese police arresting Christians. I’ve listened to audio of police interrogations, and read nearly a dozen testimonies of those who witnessed firsthand the arrests and raids on churches. More than half a dozen people who have been imprisoned or had family members imprisoned by the Chinese regime have shared their stories with me. ‘A government moves from authoritarianism into totalitarianism when it wants to infiltrate and direct the most intimate parts of yourself, of your community, of your family,’ Bill told me. ‘What we’re seeing now,’ he continued, ‘is a renewed desire from the state under Chairman Xi, basically, to engineer souls.’ ”
5. We’re Thinking About Mental Health Diagnoses All Wrong (Awais Aftab, New York Times): “In my practice, I routinely see patients who have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety by one clinician, bipolar disorder by another and post-traumatic stress disorder by a third, at different points in their lives. They arrive confused and frustrated, asking: What disorder do I _really_ have? The honest answer is: all of them and none of them. Each of these labels can capture something useful and inform treatment options, but none of them do justice to the dimensional and dynamic nature of mental illness. Your mental health problems are not caused by a simple thing that you either have or don’t have. They are patterns shaped by who we are as people and that, in turn, shape the people we become. This is a more complicated story than ‘chemical imbalance’ or ‘brain disease.’ But it is closer to the truth.”
   • The author is a psychiatrist at Case Western.
6. The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.… How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict has taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar, and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.”
   • A disturbing read which I, for the record, find largely plausible even if certain lurid details wind up not withstanding scrutiny. This isn’t rooted in thinking that Israel is any way worse than other nations. I think Israel is far more praiseworthy than her rivals — and I also think that praiseworthy nations can have very dark corners. This op-ed set off a firestorm on the internet, and some noteworthy responses follow:
   • How ‘The New York Times’ Laundered a Conspiracy (Matti Friedman and Dan Senor, The Free Press): “When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees. But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being credulous about charges that are much, much harder to believe. After all, the facilities are equipped with cameras. There are commanders, there are lawyers.… It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t investigate credible allegations of sexual assault. I remain concerned about the people in charge of detention facilities and law enforcement in Israel. I do not have complete faith that the right people are running this, to be honest, or that we’re pursuing every allegation of misdeeds by our own soldiers.”
     • This is a debunking of the Kristof piece, but it honestly seems to agree with the substance of what Kristof said. I don’t know why people find it so hard to say, “People who are ‘on my side’ sometimes do really vile things.”
   • The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear (Haviv Rettig Gur, The Free Press): “The Israeli Prison Service has a reputation for incompetence. There have been cases of abuse, even famous cases of prisoners abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face huge numbers of abuse claims. Prisons are not nice places, wherever they are in the world. So mistreatment of prisoners by Israeli guards isn’t merely possible, it’s almost certain, as in any prison system anywhere in the world. And conditions were especially problematic in recent years. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of Palestinian detainees into the prisons, together with undertrained reservist guards in the early months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos gleefully documenting massacres that the new prisoners had committed.… And it must be said, as I’ve said before: Neither National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems interested in fixing it. Our leaders do not seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.”
     • Again, a debunking that contests details but concedes the basic point.
   • “Everything Is Legitimate To Do! Everything!” (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “…the context for claims of Israeli excesses is obvious: a traumatized Israeli psyche that has radicalized even more during this war, in which inhibitions around hating the enemy have obviously loosened. And the man in charge of the prison system is Itamar Ben-Gvir — a far-right Kahanist, Jewish supremacist. He’s as close to a neofascist as you can get. His view of Arabs, let alone suspected terrorists, is, shall we say, not great. So a recent Abu Ghraib-like case in the system he presides over is worth looking at. A prisoner in Sde Teiman, Israel’s torture and prison camp, was handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten, tased, and sodomized with a broom handle, ending up in the hospital with broken ribs and a ruptured bowel. The incident was even caught on videotape, but the grisly details were concealed behind IDF shields.”
7. The Congresswoman Who Wants to Shoot Sea Lions (Will Rahn, The Free Press): “…By the 1950s, there were only about 10,000 sea lions left. And so, in the 1970s, they implemented something called the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). And the great news was that they recovered, going up to about 300,000 of them. In fact, they are now invasive in the Columbia River tributaries, where they were never historically dominant. The problem is that they are now really eviscerating native vulnerable and endangered salmon and steelhead populations. So we basically have an invasive species consuming an endangered species.… I think we clearly need to amend the MMPA to allow for more tribal control, and allow them or their designees to engage in lethal removal of sea lions in the Columbia River and its tributaries.”
   • 100% recommend this interview. A fascinating read.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• The original source of “lorem ipsum” — recommended by a friend.
• Orthodox Star Wars Fans Prepare To Celebrate ‘May The 11th Be With You’ — (Babylon Bee)

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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.