Stanford Review: EXCLUSIVE: The Review Interviews President Levin 

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

The Morning Dispatch

Reading Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity. 📚

The long introduction is very promising. The acknowledgements produced the pleasant surprise that the author is (or was while writing) a capital-O Orthodox Christian. In that smallish world, I’m surprised she’s new to me.

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was embedded in a longer blog post, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

1. First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
2. Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
3. Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
4. Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
5. Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
6. Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
7. Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
8. Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
9. Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
10. Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

A few years ago, I systematically identified all my charitable donees, put them in a spreadsheet and planned how much and when to give each, month by month. I revisit the sheet on the 1st of each month and execute the plan for that month.

Then I disregard all routine emails requesting money. (I sometimes murmur “You’re on the list. Wait for your turn.”)

I also revisit the sheet yearly to update donees, amounts, and funding sources (e.g., Qualified Charitable Distributions from IRAs or anonymous gifting from a Charitable Gift Fund).

(I do pay attention and give specially for relief of specific disasters.)

Maybe you’d feel less “blown to and fro” with a similar approach.

Yes, this. Or maybe I should say, “NO! I’m not going to respond to these any more!” If your employer thinks that’s bad, you should look for a new, saner employer.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Aristocrats: handle only with asbestos gloves!

Oh, man! Giving Tuesday! The mailbox is filling up with email from everyone I’ve given so much as a sideways glance!

I hadn’t seen/heard anybody else say it, so I will. I suspect that Joe Biden was thinking about 1/21/25, with Trump having just pardoned hundreds of insurrectionists while breathing vengeance on his enemies.

I’m glad I still have a gift article because this is really good: Opinion | The Inverted Morality of MAGA - The New York Times.

After nine years, I’m finally starting to understand MAGA “morality.’ I hate it and its short-sightedness.

It. Is. Not. Conservative. In any way.

Acid test passed: our son’s mother-in-law Larissa is extremely allergic to cats. We’ve been feeding our cat a special food to reduce dander (or the allergens). Larissa has been here for three hours with no problems — and just noticed.

All the other trees have dropped their leaves, so this burning bush really stands out .

I laughed out loud, paused the podcast, and wrote down Rituals of Spontaneity, which I’ve now ordered to complement America’s God and The Democratization of American Christianity.

I just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when up pops Androids Dreaming of Electric Sheep, or It’s Hallucinated Turtles All the Way Down.

Ross Douthat, Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet (unlocked). Douthat seldom disappoints me, and this wasn’t one of those occasions.

New useful vocabulary word: Broligarchy. (H/T Brooke Harrington, in the Atlantic)

New phrase encountered: charismatic megafauna. I figured it out from context, but confirmed with Wikipedia

Just when you think surveillance capital has us all pegged, here comes an email offering a spanish version of Cormac McCarthy …

Matt Gaetz Withdraws as Attorney General Pick: Trump Transition Live Updates - The New York Times

Too many articles recently saved to Instapaper. I think I’ll start by deleting the reviews of Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God, since I long ago tuned him out. Life’s too short to wade through so many words for something personally useful. Same (more recently) for Aaron Renn.

David Brooks, How Ivy League Admissions Broke America is excellent (and long), but I kept thinking “why not mention that we’ve been limiting intelligence to left-hemisphere manipulation, without regard to right-hemisphere integration?”

(Maybe that’s just a left-brain explanation I’m offering.)

One of my heroines has died: Diane Coleman, Fierce Foe of the Right-to-Die Movement, Dies at 71 - The New York Times (unlocked).

Feeling attuned to the world is possible only when we relax our compulsion to control it.

Matthew Crawford, reviewing Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder.

This rings true, doesn’t it?

Another substack post made public by its author, but by no means on the same theme as Ted Gioia’s post: Paul Kingsnorth, The Moses Option.

This one, I suggest, is only for practicing Christians.

I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen De Young’s book St. Paul the Pharisee, which I hoped would focus on this bold claim:

Mostly it doesn’t, or it doesn’t do so explicitly except for that quote.

But Fr. Stephen’s “interpretive translation” of Paul’s epistles subtly undermines the tendency to view them as theological treatises rather than pastoral guidance.

I found Ted Gioia’s latest very thought-provoking: 15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict.

The author made it public.