Current status: monitoring the video game room at the post-prom party. Watching the level of play, pretty sure I could beat most of these kids at Mario Kart. 😂

2024 Reads: NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman 📚

A moving and empathetic history of modern grappling with neurodiversity.

Headed into a busy weekend… high school tennis tonight for K15, prom tomorrow night for A18. I volunteered to be a post-prom party door monitor from 11:15pm to 2:00am… I suspect I will not be making it to church on Sunday.

Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:

A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.

Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them:

Sam Thielman goes hard in his most recent piece at Forever Wars titled “What Could Be More Radicalizing Than An NYPD-Columbia Education?”

Eric Adams, the ex-NYPD mayor of New York City —who, in keeping with the grand traditions of his old job, probably doesn’t even live in New York—cares deeply about our children. We know this because he told us so. “These are our children,” he told Katty Kay on MSNBC, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe.”

It is important to Eric Adams that children learn the right lesson at the right time. And so, on the campus of Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded today, he deployed platoons of his former colleagues to administer the kind of education New York City’s ruling class prefers.

Worth reading the whole thing. (As is true any time Sam is writing.)

It is amazing to me the level of over-reaction from School Administration and the NYPD, who clearly wanted an excuse to display their power. Fascim, folks. It’s real. It’s not coming; it’s here already.

May your garden always thrive: A beautiful little essay from Wil Wheaton.

After a tense last 19 minutes:

#DallasStars #NHL #StanleyCup

On a beautiful Sunday morning, I slept in (until 8).

Kicked off the coffeemaker to brew my locally-roasted beans.

Played Wordle. (Got it in 4.)

Read through my email newsletters for the morning. Realized I was long overdue to support A.R. Moxon. Clicked the link and started a monthly donation. By my count, the 5th recovering homeschooled or super-conservative Christian-schooled evangelical-kid-turned-writer I’m supporting. It’s a whole genre.

Made breakfast. Drank coffee. Started reading a book on social science.

I’m now a member of a church where you don’t have to show up at the crack of dawn and stay all morning to prove your devotion to the cause. My wife and kids aren’t going this morning. (My kids don’t usually. My wife has other plans today.) I’ll show up this morning for the 10:15 service and do my part by getting up to read the OT and Psalm. I’ll be home by 11:30. (The Episcopal Church: Where You Can Love Jesus and Your Trans Kid. ™)

After church I’ll probably hit the neighborhood farmer’s market. (First market of the year today!)

Still evangelical enough that there’s a verse in my head to summarize my morning thoughts:

“When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

2024 Reads: The Light Within Darkness by David Jeffrey 📚

Blew through this one in a day to finish up the trilogy. Really enjoyed this one.

2024 Reads: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar 📚

A stunning little novella. Spare, keen, and gripping.

This Cubs/Brewers game this afternoon has all the hallmarks of a postseason clash. Two terrific starting pitching performances, good defense, aggressive baserunning. Both teams have had scoring chances but neither have cashed in with a clutch hit. Still 0-0 in the 6th!

#MLB #Cubs #Brewers #baseball

Just took a close look at my calendar and realized that between work travel, personal travel, and holidays, I will only be in the office for 25 of the next 40 weekdays… only two weeks in May/June that I’ll be in the office all week. Yikes.

Got travel booked last night for a family trip in June… National History Day nationals for K15 in DC, followed by a weekend in NYC. First real family vacation in probably 5 years!

With all the crap going on in the world it seems trivial to still be cheered by sports, but dang it, the Cubs won 1-0 last night, and the Stars have come back from a 0-2 deficit to Vegas to win 3 in a row. That cheers me up this morning, at least for a bit.

#MLB #NHL #Cubs #Stars

I was an instant supporter of this album on Kickstarter and now I’m finally getting a chance to listen to it: Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas 25. Back when Kansas came out in 1998, college me was totally drawn in. Smart lyrics, catchy tunes, and a raw honesty that I didn’t hear in a lot of the other Christian music that was on the radio and for sale in the bookstore. I memorized the songs, sang them on my guitar, sang one of them in church, and spun that CD all the time in the car. I have often mentioned it as one of the three “perfect” Christian music albums ever. It’s that good.

Knapp, now 50, has been on a long road since releasing the original Kansas in her early twenties. She moved to Australia in 2002, publicly came out as a lesbian in 2010, recorded some other albums, and became an outspoken advocate for LGBT causes. There’s something incredibly meaningful about hearing her revisit these faith-filled songs in middle age. The miles have taken their toll - the voice is a little more raspy, the tempos a little slower - but the youthful expressions of faith still ring true all these years later.

If you supported the Kickstarter, you probably already have the download. (If not, find it in your inbox!) If you didn’t get in early, head over to Bandcamp where you can preorder it and listen as soon as it officially releases on May 17.

A better late than never update: Katie took 2nd place in her division at National History Day state competition, which qualifies her to go to the national competition in June! Super proud of her.

Iowa National History Day state competition: with only 5 competitors in the senior individual presentation division, they aren’t doing a final round; we just have to wait for the award ceremony at 5pm. Time to go somewhere for a few hours to kill time.

National History Day state competition in Des Moines today. Event center buzzing with teenagers who have spent months researching, writing, and polishing their presentations. My daughter goes on in an hour. 🤞

A. R. Moxon has a brilliant and brutal essay out today entitled “War or Nothing”, in which he describes a theme beginning in 2001 with the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks and continues all the way through 2020’s George Floyd protests and this year’s pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. From it he describes “seven laws of living in a war-oriented society”:

• Killing is not only an appropriate answer to killing, it is the only appropriate answer.
• The worst betrayal possible is any opposition to killing.
• The only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing.
• Any hypothetical future threat of potential attack justifies the same disproportionate violent response as an actual attack.
• Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense.
• Wanting to wage war makes you correct in a way that overcomes evidence or results or even coherence.
• Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

He’s not wrong. A taste:

And millions of us, who have been watching since 2001 or even before, can see how framing the apparatus of killing as indistinguishable from safety helps the apparatus of killing, but not how it helps make us safe. We can see how framing a country as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the country. We can see how framing all a county’s citizens as indistinguishable from its murderous government helps that government, but not how it helps the people. And we can see clearly how framing killing as the only way to bring safety, and any act other than killing as nothing favors those who want to see a world of death, but not how it helps honor the dead or keeps any of the living safe.

Millions of us think the bigger problem might be the killing. It seems to us war as the only option represents the greatest possible failure of human imagination there can be, and our wealth and resources and ingenuity seem to present many other options. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we might think of something else to do, that isn’t nothing but isn’t war, either. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant about what that something might be, we think that seeking that something is better than not seeking it. And even if many of us are foolish and ignorant, many of us are not, and even those of us who are ignorant fools can see the way the suggestions and solutions presented by those who are not ignorant fools are ignored while those of us who are the most ignorant and the most foolish receive the most attention from our institutions of influence and power, to frame this whole act of imagination as ignorant and foolish.

And even those of us who are ignorant fools can see how this helps promote the ideal of war or nothing, but we don’t see how it helps us find something that is not killing but isn’t nothing, either.

God grant us leaders brave enough to consider responses to killing that aren’t more killing, but aren’t nothing, either.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Robinson writing on Genesis, but I enjoy her writing enough it was definitely something I was going to read. Structured as a narrative commentary, Robinson doesn’t employ chapter breaks or other touchpoints within the text itself. It’s fascinating to read a commentary by a Christian writer who takes the text seriously but not necessarily literally. If there is a broad “point” to her book, it is to feature the uniqueness of Genesis among the Ancient Near Eastern texts, and to highlight the theme of unmerited grace that runs through it. From God’s forgiveness of Cain to Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Robinson tells us that Genesis is set apart from the other ANE texts this way.

I appreciated her book, but didn’t enjoy it as much as reading her essays. I need to pick them up for a re-read.

2024 Reads: Sun Wolf by David C. Jeffrey 📚

I like this guy’s ideas, and the sort of grand scope of his universe. His story just needs a better writer to really make it amazing.

Today’s challenge in adulting: paying attention at the tail end of a 3-day class when it’s getting pretty slow. It’s been a good class, but we’ve got diminishing returns at 3:30 on day 3.

Mandatory post.

Gah, Cody Bellinger has a cracked rib. This is not the way I hoped to see Pete Crow-Armstrong in the bigs this season. #Cubs #MLB

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.