I ride an e-bike into work, and because an e-bike is expensive, I bring it into my office rather than lock it up at one of the bike racks on University of Kentucky campus. Because an e-bike is heavy, I also take it up the elevator to get up to the third floor, where my office is. My e-bike takes up a lot of space, but I’ve figured out how to share the elevator with others as I make my way up to my office. I lead my bike in, getting the front wheel as far toward the back of the elevator as I can, and then swing it around to the left as I pick up my rear wheel and try to tuck it in to the opposite (front) corner of the elevator. It takes a little bit of effort, but I know I can get it in there; because I also know it’s going to take some effort to get my bike out, I usually face the rear of the elevator during the ride, which is short enough that there’s no point in turning around to face “the front” of the elevator only to turn back around again to take control of my handlebars and wheel the bike back out.

Trump’s leaning into Q is not a good sign for the future.

I unsuccessfully started this book a couple of years ago and recently decided that it was time to come back to it. I had a PDF copy and wanted something to read on my phone instead of mindlessly browsing the internet or refreshing my feed reader.

I’m glad that I read this now, a year after my confirmation in Community of Christ, rather than when my faith transition was in a more difficult phase. It let me read about Young’s darker side without feeling overly conflicted about it.

Look, Parler isn’t as bad as Gab, but this kind of softball, uncritical approach to the platform is not helpful. WSJ should know better.

I am a big fan of the Book of Mormon. It’s one of the reasons that I stuck with Community of Christ when transitioning out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I know the book is problematic, and I doubt its historicity, but I’m still an advocate for making some religious meaning out of it.

There are diverse opinions about the Book of Mormon in Community of Christ, and while there’s plenty of room to believe lots of different things, the default institutional view tends to be either indifferent or suspicious of the text. There are some good reasons for that—not least the increasingly international focus of Community of Christ—but I still sometimes feel like I’m not sure why people don’t embrace the Book of Mormon more.

What a cheap, cynical about-face. The fact that candidates think this is something they can do to drum up voters and then change strategy is worrying.

Dallin Oaks, the second highest-ranking apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave a speech at Brigham Young University yesterday where he touched on the “two great commandments” identified by Jesus in the Book of Mark. Unsurprisingly for anyone who’s been following recent signals of retrenchment at BYU (or anyone familiar with the apostle for that matter), Oaks put the two commandments in a particular order. Here’s how the Salt Lake Tribune quotes him:

Currently reading John Turner’s excellent biography of Brigham Young, and I keep wanting to highlight passages and then send them to Brad Wilcox.

Caring about privacy ought to be common sense. It’s difficult to push back, but that doesn’t mean those of us who do are crazy.

I’ve never had qualms about listening to Christmas music outside of December, but it still surprises me that I’ve been listening to parts of Handel’s Messiah during my morning routines over the past couple of weeks. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the music of Messiah, and in recent years, I’ve let go of my attachment to King James language and learned that a lot of the passages quoted in Messiah represent Christian prooftexting of the Hebrew Bible (here’s a great post on the subject by Pete Enns—and here’s another). In theory, this ought to sour me on Messiah even more, but I’ve spent a big chunk of this morning listening to this performance of excerpts—and really enjoying it!

I hope the Fairphone will be sold in the U.S. one day. It’s an awesome project.

Americans should be more worried about the NSA than they are.

This is a tragic detail in an even more tragic story. Government can absolutely be good, and our allergic reaction to spending, laws, and policy only makes these situations worse.

It isn’t that TikTok doesn’t pose a real threat, it’s that it’s not alone in doing so. In particular, I appreciate that this article points out that U.S. border agents REGULARLY SEARCH COMPUTERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS. So, yes, raise concerns, but be consistent instead of creating a moral panic around thus one app (which, by the way, would be a privacy threat even if it were totally owned by a U.S. company).

A good case for why the edit button probably isn’t as good as everyone thinks.

Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

What a story. I knew how awful the TSA could be to passengers, but I never knew how bad it also was for its own employees.

This is very interesting—it gives me some hope that I haven’t had over the past couple of months.

Speaking personally, I’d be happy to pay extra taxes to better support our local schools.

I don’t know that any of this is surprising, but it remains worrying.

The inconsistency here is infuriating. When I was in grad school, I had the philosophy that I (a Mormon working toward a PhD) couldn’t rule out the possibility of working at BYU. There’s still a lot that I like and respect about BYU, but seeing the way they’re putting the squeeze on their employees makes it clear that I could never have survived there.

BYU is really on a roll this week.

I’ve read this comic through Boing Boing for a while now, so when I saw a collection of strips at the library, I thought I ought to pick it up and enjoy some of the strips from before I began reading it.

I was surprised, then, to not enjoy the collection. I like the contemporary strips (mostly), but there was something about the collection that didn’t work for me. Maybe they would have been better if I were reading them one at a time when they came out. Maybe my relative conservatism during the 2012-2015 era collected in this volume stopped me from enjoying the obvious left-wing slant. Maybe I still have enough resistance to left-wing views that a concentration of them didn’t go well.

Learned about the Trib article from this blog post, which I think also makes some solid points. It’s one thing to prefer that outside organizations not provide materials, but if BYU isn’t doing anything itself…

What a disappointment.