I have been a fan of Delisle’s for quite some time, but I’m still blown away by how good this is. The book isn’t political or polemical, but a slice-of-life comic done by a cartoonist living in East Jerusalem for a year brings walls, checkpoints, rockets, and attacks on Gaza to life in a subtle, compelling way. I used to follow this news a lot more, and Delisle made me feel like there was a lot I missed even then. I’d love to pick up a copy in the original French.

A friend recommended this book to me, and I’m very glad I tried it. It’s a broad consideration of how the Binding of Isaac has been interpreted, imagined, and portrayed over the centuries—combined with the author’s personal struggles with the story. It was difficult sometimes as an audiobook (while I appreciated its breadth, it sometimes felt repetitious), but I got a lot out of it.

Everyone excited about generative AI needs to account for this kind of thing. We don’t pay enough attention to digital labor and the dehumanizing aspects of content moderation.

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.

On a friend’s recommendation, I’m currently reading (well, listening to) James Goodman’s But Where is the Lamb?, an interesting volume taking a look at the story of Abraham and the Binding of Isaac. This passage stood out to me yesterday:

To say that you prefer your church and its stories to another church and its stories is one thing. But to say that your church annuls another church (completes it, voids it, supersedes it) is quite another. And when that other church and its people are still with you—in other words, when the superseded past is still with you—well, that reading of history is a recipe for disaster.

I’m a fan of Dan McClellan’s YouTube channel—he posts a lot there (nearly everything is a repost from TikTok), and I watch most of what he posts. Yesterday, he posted an interesting video on the “Lucifer” name and character in the Bible, describing how traditional Christian ideas about the figure are all post-biblical innovations that don’t neceessarily line up with the text. In particular, the name “Lucifer” is an artifact of the Vulgate, and even in the Vulgate, the name itself is a reference to a Babylonian king, not to a fallen angel who became the devil. Here’s the video in its entirety:

Yet another wild story in the wild history of Twitter.

Lots to appreciate here.

It took me six months to finally read this book, but it’s exactly what I hoped for, so it was worth the wait. Some of Merton’s essays are more compelling than others, but his fierce condemnation of war and advocacy for peace is moving. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this.

Growing up Latter-day Saint, I knew that polygamy was part of our past, but I was so defensive about it not being part of our present that I often failed to understand just how important it was to my ancestors (both literal and figurative). About a month ago, I stumbled on a passage in RLDS missionary Charles Derry’s autobiography (which I recently finished) that reminded me that polygamy was a huge prority for 19th century Latter-day Saints:

One of the biggest perks of working in academia is access to an academic library. Don’t get me wrong: I deeply appreciate and regularly visit my local public libraries, and kiddo and I have made a couple of visits to her school’s summer library hours (which is an amazing idea). There’s something about the breadth of an academic library, though, that can really come in handy sometimes. For example, I was recently reading an article by Dan McClellan on Bible translation in Latter-day Saint contexts and noticed with interest his reference to David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I have access to that translation through JSTOR, and there’s now a PDF copy sitting on my phone that I’ve started making my way through.

This is horrifying.

I really want to like this book. I am sympathetic to pirate politics, and I’m impressed with its sudden surge to power in Sweden and elsewhere. I even think many of the ideas in here are compelling and will probably come back to it despite my relatively negative review. The thing, though, is that I struggled through it, so it took me so long to read it that I probably don’t even remember enough to give it a fair review—except that that is itself kind of damning. It feels overly confident in its ideas: I don’t necessarily mind it as a conceptual framework for an organization (hence my willingness to come back to it), but its conclusions feel unmerited and unsupported by anything except some back of the napkin figures and choice anecdotes. Besides, the Pirate Party is doing worse now than it was a decade ago, and that feels damning by association. I don’t think I’m done with the book, but I am disappointed by it.

USA! USA! Seriously, though, bookmarking for future teaching.

I’ve seen some reviews describe the new Mission Impossible movie (apparently featuring a malicious AI) as perfectly suited for our time of ChatGPT. I’m more worried about things like this: content farming, model collapse, etc.

It appears that Musk’s “free speech absolutism” continues to be selective and self-serving.

As I wrote earlier in the week, I gave today’s sermon for the Toronto Congregation’s inclusive online worship service. The service was recorded and can be found at the YouTube link below:

I really enjoyed participating with Beyond the Walls. I had some idea of how much work they put into making this look like a professional production, but getting to peek behind the scenes and see how much work they put into juggling different cameras, testing and managing audio, and everything else made me really appreciate what they do all the more. I especially appreciated the images that John picked out to accompany my words, and it was also a delight to see the French translation of what I’d written. I really like my local congregation, but I’m more and more convinced this kind of thing is the future of Community of Christ. I also deeply appreciated all the other contributions to the service: John Hamer’s introduction to the parable made so many important points about interpreting the parable, the experience that Tom Webber shared was moving, the music was wonderful, and the whole thing was an uplifting way to spend my Sunday.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

I read that “chronological order of Star Wars” media piece mentioned here in io9 and I was baffled by how poorly done it was (not realizing it was done by AI and wondering how an io9 writer could get things so wrong). Using AI to content farm is a terrible idea.

As I’ve written before, one of my favorite things about the Day One journaling app is the “On this Day” feature that lets me remember moments from my past—often moments I might have forgotten if I hadn’t journaled about them.

This morning, Day One reminded me of a hymn service my local Community of Christ congregation held a couple of years ago. I had been invited to share a memory of a favorite hymn. It’s been a lot of fun to learn new hymns (and new versions of familiar hymns) during my adventure with Community of Christ, but the hymn I chose to speak about was Peace Salaam Shalom, which you can listen to in the video below:

I get that it’s straightforward language that everyone will get, but I think “uncensored” is the wrong word here. Content moderation is not (necessarily) censorship, and content moderation is good and helpful for tools like generative AI.

I finally read this book weeks after picking it up from a local library and knowing I’d enjoy it. Viloria’s life story (like so many others’ stories) casually destroys sex and gender binaries. Reading about the experiences of intersex people was an important part of my beginning to reject those binaries several years ago, and I think anyone clinging to those binaries ought to hear from voices like Viloria’s. That’s not to say that other queerings of that binary are any less valid than being intersex, of course!

I appreciate Masnick’s thinking, and I’m a big Doctorow fan, so it’s always neat to see them come together.

This is very exciting! I’m far too locked into Apple’s ecosystem to seriously consider this right now (even this post is being composed thanks to Siri Shortcuts), but I hope this does well, because I’d love to own a Fairphone one day.

Next Sunday, I’ll be giving the sermon for the Community of Christ Toronto Congregation’s Beyond the Walls inclusive online congregation, speaking on the Parable of the Samaritan (more often called the Parable of the Good Samaritan, but my sermon will explain why I’m going for that name instead). I had been planning to post about the sermon after the fact, but the links for the YouTube live events went up today, so I thought I might share them ahead of time.