You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy.
You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy.
I’ve reflected elsewhere about the intersection of organizational behavior and culture warring. IMHO injecting more culture warring into the civic and social welfare organizational ecosystem makes it likely that religious NGOs face future public subsidy pressures when the partisan winds shift.
After USAID was gutted primarily under the pretense that it was a hornet’s nest of “wokeism” I have a hard time interpreting the news that the Feds are now bestowing mountains of cash on evangelical NGOs as anything other than partisan patronage. The accusations feel more like confessions of intent.
After USAID was gutted primarily under the pretense that it was a hornet’s nest of “wokeism” I have a hard time interpreting the news that the Feds are now bestowing mountains of cash on evangelical NGOs as anything other than partisan patronage. The original accusations feel more like confessions of intent.
Saying White evangelical support for Trump is unsurprising given previous support for Bush and Romney misses something essential. It is like saying “a great many people enjoy eating bleu cheese, so it shouldn’t surprise us that even slightly more people enjoy eating mold.” Or “Since campfires are very popular with many people, it is understandable that these same people eagerly endorse arson.”
I have several theories on how white Evangelicals got to where they are, but they essentially boil down to an anecdote shared in a couple different forums by Skye Jethani who, when asking an evangelical parishioner if they would prefer their child to marry a Republican or a Christian was given the response “what’s the difference?”
🎩tip to John Fea for link to original quote.
A cherished college memory was blowing off exam prep and going to see Death Cab for Cutie live at The Rave in Milwaukee. They still got it.
📷 Summer Marigolds
Please, please don’t take vaccination guidance from this administration.
Instead of ensuring every family can access life-saving vaccines for measles, influenza, RSV and more, federal leaders are once again spreading misleading claims.
I can’t think of another piece of media or a tech related product that I’ve one-time purchased that has received as much substantive continued support and ongoing improvement as No Man’s Sky.
Sometimes I wonder whether our discomfort with penal substitution is part of a larger discomfort with materiality itself. We would prefer salvation to happen in the realm of ideas. We like it when Jesus teaches, inspires, and models love, and all of those things are wonderful and true. But Christianity insists on something stranger.
A body hangs on a cross.
Blood pours down.
Death takes our Lord.
Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.
This could apply to any number topics of discourse but here @eastbrad is applying it to AI adoption.
🇱🇹 🇺🇦They’re featuring a Ukrainian dish here, but the Lithuanian half of me is excited to see that cabbage and root-based soups are having a moment. Now they just need some deep fried dark and dense rye bread smothered in cheese.
Robin Sloan on LLM company ‘Labs’:
“Lab” evokes Bell Labs, of course; it evokes deep science, Nobel Prize-level horsepower, a certain purity. I don’t deny that there are labs inside these companies … although I don’t believe any of them are operating with anywhere near the distance from practicality that Bell Labs maintained. And, either way, when you are hiring “Growth Account Executives”, you are a company.
Any other Higher Education Studies folks aware of Semble?. Could be a useful way of linking higher ed researchers on BSKY and peer-reviewed research given its connection to the ATmosphere.
Here’s an intro video about Semble:
Sick and tired of feeling like you’re locked into shoveling your thoughts or creative work into a venture capitalists funded attention extraction machine?
Micro.Blog keeps adding user functionality that allows it to serve as a POSSE hub particularly for those (like me) with minimal HTML or CSS coding experience. You can now use MB to published to micro-blogs (e.g. bsky or mastadon), longform blog, set up a newsletter, podcast, or post videos.
Expanded video and podcasting in Micro.blog: manton.org
The monastic and mystical contemplative tradition is the ek-static alternative to Stoicism’s egocentrism. If the Stoic injunction is to master oneself, the mystical invitation is to lose oneself and thereby be found. If the Stoic telos is self-sufficient magnanimity, the mystical telos is union, communion, nothing less than Love—a form of self-transcendence in which we let go of control in order to find ourselves indwelling a Love at the heart of the cosmos and in communion with the beautiful, mysterious neighbors with whom we call it home. Instead of apatheia, the mystic pursues contemplation for the sake of compassion.
For the moment, my favorite “I want to hop into a browser window and find a quick distraction” location is the ‘For You’ page of grain.social
John Fea, evangelical historian, on the WH’s Smithsonian report:
Regarding what historians call “change over time,” the authors of “Saving America’s History” want to have it both ways. Their appeal to the museum’s Cold War founding relies on a 1950s-style patriotism and narrative that, due to new scholarship, is now much more complex and includes many more voices. They don’t seem to want America to change on that front. By invoking the 1950s, they overlook the changes in American history I described above. Yet, on the subject of racism, they quickly criticize the museum for failing to acknowledge historical change over time.
It was riveting to follow Ian Anderson’s bicycle journey in real time on Instagram, but I absolutely agree with this article that inevitably someone in this genre of travelogue is going to get seriously hurt or worse with a global audience watching.
The United States has now recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000, a grim sign that the country may be headed toward a new era in which the disease regularly sickens thousands every year.
a constitutional republic cannot survive if political leaders teach citizens that losing is proof of betrayal…
Democracy depends on evidence governing our doubts and on defeated candidates surrendering power when the evidence says they lost. I gave up my place in Congress because I believed that bargain was the foundation beneath every other political disagreement. Without it, the Constitution is just paper protected by people who no longer agree that votes are binding.
As the “flagship magazine of American evangelicalism,” Christianity Today has always been a contested space, and a space worth watching. Reflecting evangelicalism itself, it needs to be understood not in static terms, but rather in terms of shifting alliances, and shifting centers of power.
It’s early days, but if federated photosharing sites like Grain can gain enough critical mass I think all our timelines and feed content consumption would be better off. I look forward to the day that Meta products and most of the other social media platforms of its era are analogous to the supermarket checkout tabloid in terms of its presence in my media ecosystem: an amusing and occasional distraction I notice in passing and for which I have no necessity to perpetuate by purchasing.
Inspired by this blog post from Nick Heer, I took a closer look at Grain and also Flashes. I’ve prototyped support for Grain in Micro.blog and will ship it today. Flashes mostly piggybacks on existing Bluesky lexicon, so doesn’t really need special support from what I can tell.
Had too dig out the old shoe polishing kit for the shoe brush because both my children are currently obsessed with sand pits.
Building on some previous posts about election integrity, if you’re in the Mid-Michigan region you can come hear the League of Women Voters speak on the topic at the East Lansing Public Library on July 22.
