What a mess Musk has made Twitter into.

Rereading this book after a few years, and it continues to be great! The organization could be more clear, and it sometimes feels repetitive, but it provides important historical detail that allows the reader to understand Latter Day Saint priesthood in new ways.

This is an excellent, thorough book on the purity system of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the excommunications of the “September Six” and many others for their violations of that purity system. I bought the book out of personal interest, but I think it will be professionally valuable as well. I knew much of what was in the book, but what I didn’t know was important, and I am grateful for the volume and hope that many will read it to learn about this important period in Mormon history. As Patterson notes, though, it’s not just history; her conclusion reflecting on how these episodes have their echoes in the present is especially good.

Torn on this article. I think you can choose to patronize a platform without being associated with its worst users, so I wonder if the Fuentes connection is overstated. That said, choosing to livestream on Rumble is absolutely pandering to Fuentes-type right-wingers, so it’s a bad, bad move.

Yesssss! Andy Beshear, governeer! So very happy about this.

I always assumed “Dem Bones” was one of those vaguely educational children’s songs (meant to teach anatomy?) and was always confused by the line “hear the word of the Lord.” I was yesterday years old when I finally realized the song is a reference to that story in Ezekiel.

Got to do early voting at the library today, which neatly combines a lot of my favorite things into a single experience.

I did not read this book as one is supposed to. It’s a collection of daily Advent and Christmas reflections, but I listened to the audiobook well before Advent started and with no pauses in between individual reflections. I’m sure that takes away from the experience, but I enjoyed what I heard and plan to read more Bonhoeffer.

I’ve been meaning to reread this since I first listened to the audiobook, which I started as soon as it was released. It’s not my favorite Doctorow, but it’s still him at his best: The book is opinionated, exciting, and full of specific, compelling details. I like it a lot.

I know it’s not Advent yet, but I’m feeling impatient for Advent, and if I start checking out Advent books from Libby/the library now, I won’t have to compete with people for them in a month when Advent really starts.

When I took a job at the University of Kentucky, a former professor (and boss) of mine at BYU told me to look up a specific French professor on campus, whom she’d also taught (and supervised) some time earlier. I ran into him several months later at a stake conference (this was, obviously, when I was still attending Latter-day Saint meetings), and we bonded over what it was like to work under our boss. Because Mormons tend to assume that there’s no way to learn a language without speaking that language on your mission (this is partly true for me, but I also got my French to a damn respectable level through coursework before I ever put on the tag, so I still resent the assumption), we wound up talking about missions, and so we ended up bonding even more about our shared experience serving in the now-defunct Switzerland Geneva Mission.

Thinking a lot today about Leo Tolstoy’s argument that because we cannot agree on when violence is justified, we must agree that violence is never justified. It still seems to me like a bold claim to make, but I’m feeling more and more convinced by it.

Even more than AI’s potential to replace humans in the name of saving money, I think we need to talk about the way companies are exploiting humans to save money—so that it can train AI.

Hear me out: What if the moral of Dr. Strangelove for the 2020s is that automation and efficiency aren’t always good things?

I generally like my local paper, but I’m annoyed by all of the feel-good “someone won big at the lottery!” stories they publish. Lotteries are regressive taxes, and celebrating winners helps conceal that fact.

Maybe not clicking with Utah is because so many of my interactions with Utah and Utahns involved being defensive about or emphasizing my being from somewhere else. Even in my Mormonism, I was a Kentucky Mormon, and I filtered a lot through that perspective.

Visiting Utah for work this weekend has me thinking about how I’ve never really felt like I understand this state—and that despite attending college here and all four of my grandparents being born here. I feel like it should be more familiar to me than it is.

Looks like Masnick’s (and others’) predictions about Musk’s changes to Twitter are coming true. This isn’t what verification is for.

Don’t know how I missed this story yesterday, but what the heck? Like the article says, nothing particularly new revealed by these stunts, but it’s still a compelling critique of Amazon.

This was an interesting read, and there are portions of it that I expect to come back to later. However, I was surprised by how often I felt like I already knew what was being covered. Given my familiarity with both faiths, I expect that I’m not the target audience (anymore) for this volume.

Welp, this is scary.

Free speech absolutism at its finest.

Solid article right here.

Last Sunday, I attended a Latter-day Saint Elders Quorum meeting for the first time since March of 2020, when I taught Elders Quorum on the last Sunday before Latter-day Saint services shut down because of COVID. I had enjoyed most of the sacrament meeting (I took issue with some parts of some talks, but I have to admit that I miss the size, songs, and sense of community of Latter-day Saint services), but Elders Quorum turned out to be kind of a disappointment. Truth be told, I had been hoping that it was a Sunday School week, but I couldn’t remember which weeks are Sunday School and which are Elders Quorum/Relief Society after being out of practice for so long.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.