Interesting social psychological insight from an experiment at Yale:   http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-21/displaying-outrage-on-social-media-earns-a-kind-of-currency   How you too can profit from being indignant!   This may go a considerable distance toward explaining some otherwise puzzling phenomena on the internet, in newspaper and magazine comments sections, and elsewhere.     Read more

    The photograph accompanying the piece (not the photograph above) is, well, just a slight tad crass.  I apologize for that.  (You can choose not to look.)  But this article says something really important, I think.   Thanks to Cassandra Hedelius for alerting me to it.     Read more

    Joe Cannon, the principal opponent whom he defeated in order to gain the Utah Republican nomination for the United States Senate in the first place, has been a friend of mine for many, many years.   With a friend, I had lunch with Mike Lee, who eventually defeated him and took his place in the Senate, while Mike Lee was still considering whether or not to run.   And yet, that said, I think extremely highly of Bob... Read more

    There were two new articles published in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture today.  This is the second one:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/from-the-sea-east-even-to-the-sea-west-thoughts-on-a-proposed-book-of-mormon-chiasm-describing-geography-in-alma-2227/   Rumors have our impending death have, it seems, been greatly exaggerated.     Read more

    I post this link not just because some of these incidents are perfectly astonishing — thanks to John Walters for bringing them to my notice! — but for the sake of encouraging and inspiring others:   https://www.facebook.com/172547052803759/videos/1090142394377549/?pnref=story.unseen-section   If such people as these could avoid death, at least a slight chance still exists that conservatives can escape the looming Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party.   There.  I had to give this post some serious meaning, and now I’ve... Read more

    It’s Friday, so — of course! — Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture is in publishing mode:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/alma-young-man-hidden-prophet/   This is the Interpreter Foundation’s 196th consecutive Friday of publication — out of the 197.5 total weeks of its existence.  A pattern may be emerging.     Read more

    It is crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job. Richard Swinburne, University of Oxford     Read more

    Wow.  Seth Rogers just alerted me to a really interesting (but — be warned! — rather long) essay:   http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism   It’s mostly about politics, of course, as its title suggests.  But it’s about politics in the sense that political things are intertwined with religion and culture more broadly:   http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism   And I think it’s spot on.   As I’ve indicated many times, I frequently check in on two or three virulently anti-Mormon message boards.  I want... Read more

    You may not have seen this.  It’s funny:   http://www.today.com/pets/little-higher-watch-lemur-demand-back-scratch-two-kids-t87396     Read more

    This is, umm, really difficult stuff to wrap one’s head around.  I’m going to have to think about it quite a bit:   https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/   Two initial reactions, though:   1.   Charles Darwin used to worry, from what I’ve read, about whether it was plausible to assume that the brain of essentially a glorified ape, which had evolved to cope with the challenges of surviving and reproducing on the African savannah, was even remotely qualified to think... Read more