Top 5: Faith in the face of death
Plus: televangelist influencers
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Growing my Faith in the Face of Death” (The Atlantic)
Because seriously, take the time out to read this, even if you aren’t terribly religious, you’re in a spiritual-limbo, or you feel secure in your faith. Tim Keller’s written something extremely human about death and faith as he faces pancreatic cancer.
“The Empty Religions of Instagram” (New York Times)
Because Leigh Stein writes about the rise of moral influencers, especially those tailored towards women who identify as a “None.” While I (Melissa) don’t identify as a None, I did identify with a lot of similar experiences and observations in this essay.
“Foreign Policy for Pragmatists” (Foreign Affairs)
Because this essay will go down as one of those essays I’ll remember 4 years from now, when the first term of the Biden administration is coming to a close, trying to assess Biden’s approach to foreign policy in his first-term. “The way to do so (test its assumptions) is to make theorists, not principals, the administration’s true team of rivals, forcing them to make real-world predictions, and to offer testable practical advice, and then seeing whose turn out to be better in real time. In this approach, searching intellectual honesty is more important than ideology; what people think matters less than whether they can change their minds. Constantly calculating implied odds won’t always win pots. But it will help the administration fold bad hands early, increasing its winnings over time.”
“Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on” (The Verge)
Because we are always interested in trends in the future of work (or in this case, office work).
“Posting less, posting more, and tired of it all: How the pandemic has changed social media” (Vox)
Because this is a comprehensive, well-researched essay on how social media usage and the attitudes towards social media have changed since 2019 and with the pandemic.
P.S. Michael will be writing tomorrow about the COVID relief bill as part of our weekly news brief tomorrow. You can receive it by becoming a subscriber: