A Merry Christmas Meanderings!

Merry Christmas — Eve, Day, and week — to you from Kris and me from the northern suburbs of Chicagoland.

Photo by Flaviu Costin on Unsplash

What are your top two Christmas songs? Chris Gehrz gives his top ten. Mine is Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Yours?

On Sunday I shared a reflection inspired by “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which I too rashly called “my favorite Christmas song.” I like that hymn enough to have written about it twice before at my original WordPress blog (2015, 2020). But we’re in the thick of my favorite musical season of the year, so Christina Rossetti has plenty of competition.

So what better way for a Christian college professor to procrastinate from grading than to write about the ten other Advent and Christmas songs that he thinks are the best of a terrific bunch?

Three guiding principles I tried to follow in making today’s list:

1. I’m trying to focus on songs that anyone can sing. So while I’ve previously written about coming to appreciate “O Holy Night,” it’s too challenging a vocal to be on this list. And while I’ve also named the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas as my favorite Christmas album of all time, my favorite tunes on it are instrumentals.

2. For that matter, I’m also setting aside more secular songs of the season. Not that I don’t appreciate them; for example, I’ve had various versions of “Fairytale in New York” on heavy rotation ever since Shane McGowan died.¹ But today I want to focus on hymns and carols that connect more directly to the sacred themes and stories of Advent and Christmas. If you want a more varied list, try Esquire’s.

3. While I’m picking ten, there are few songs from this time of year that I dislike. I mean, I find problematic the theology underpinning the claim that “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” but I’m still glad that “Away in the Manger” connects so well with children — and people who remember being children at Christmas. If you want to nominate alternatives, the comments section is always available to paid subscribers.

With all that out of the way, here’s my list, in chronological order of when the texts were written.

Yours?

Good news: crime rates are going down, no matter what many of us actually think or believe:

Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.

A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.

The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded, Asher found, and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.

Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.

“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”

The FBI’s quarterly numbers cover about 78% of the U.S. population and don’t give as full a picture as the more comprehensive annual report the FBI puts out once a year. But Asher said the quarterly reports in the past have hewed fairly close to the annual ones.

The most recent annual report, released in October, covered 94% of the country and found that violent crime in 2022 fell back to pre-pandemic levels, with murder dropping 6.1%.

Asher maintains a separate database of murder in big cities which found that murder is down 12.7 percent this year, after rising during the pandemic. 

Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966, Asher found, while Baltimore and St Louis are on track to post the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. A few cities, including Memphis and Washington DC, are still seeing increases in their murder rates, but they are outliers.

PPE problems:

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in an unprepared U.S., states scrambled for masks and other protective gear.

Three years later, as the grips of the pandemic have loosened, many states are now trying to deal with an excess of protective gear, ditching their supplies in droves.

With expiration dates passing and few requests to tap into its stockpile, Ohio auctioned off 393,000 gowns for just $2,451 and ended up throwing away another 7.2 million, along with expired masks, gloves and other materials. The now-expiring supplies had cost about $29 million in federal money.

A similar reckoning is happening around the country. Items are aging, and as a deadline to allocate federal COVID-19 cash approaches next year, states must decide how much to invest in maintaining warehouses and supply stockpiles.

An Associated Press investigation found that at least 15 states, from Alaska to Vermont, have tossed some of their trove of PPE because of expiration, surpluses and a lack of willing takers.

Into the trash went more than 18 million masks, 22 million gowns, 500,000 gloves, and more. That's not counting states that didn't give the AP exact figures or responded in cases or other measures. Rhode Island said it got rid of 829 tons of PPE; Maryland disposed of over $93 million in supplies.

"What a real waste. That's what happens when you don't prepare, when you have a bust-and-boom public health system," where a lack of planning leads to panicked over-purchasing in emergencies, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "It shows that we really have to do a better job of managing our stockpiles."

Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian bunker:

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is building a massive Hawaiian compound complete with tree houses, dozens of bedrooms and even an underground bunker, according to an investigation by Wired.

The in-depth investigation by Wired said the compound is being built in Kauai, Hawaii, and reportedly cost $100 million to build.

The Wired investigation cited sources and planning documents obtained through public records requests.

Koolau Ranch, as it is reportedly called, sits on land purchased by Zuckerberg for $170 million.

The ranch will have at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms and a network of tree houses that connect some of the rooms, according to Wired.

Wired reports that the main residences will be joined by a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter that includes living spaces and an escape hatch. Sources told Wired the compound will be completely self-sufficient, with an 18-foot tall water tank and pump system and food production systems.

Doomsday preppers are stocking up for the end of the world or at the very least, major calamity. Preppers may learn survivalist skills as well as stockpiling supplies such as food and ammunition.

Some preppers go as far as constructing bunkers that could survive a catastrophic event like a nuclear bomb. One of the world’s largest bunker communities is at an old Army base in South Dakota.

Renamed Vivos, NewsNation visited the community where former military, doctors, lawyers, school teachers and others are buying up bunkers from all over the country.

The effort to avoid the end-of-the-world event isn’t cheap. The bunkers in South Dakota run around $55,000 unfinished, which is still a lot less than Zuckerberg is spending in Hawaii.

Book sales are not what many think — or what they used to be:

Kristen McLean, an analyst at NPD BookScan, the industry-standard platform that tracks book sales in the United States, provided a more accurate data set in response to a newsletter by novelist Lincoln Michel, who was also rightly suspicious of the stat. McLean’s figures suggested that, of the new books published in the preceding calendar year, about 15 percent sold under twelve copies; 51.4 percent of books, meanwhile, sold between a dozen and 999 units. Neither of those figures is as alarming as the original claim. But nor are they especially encouraging. Sales are indeed down. According to an early-October report in Publishers Weekly, the first nine months of 2023 saw print book sales drop 4.1 percent compared to the same period in 2022. Reports from the preceding weeks had the Eeyore-ish titles “Print Book Sales Fell Again Last Week” and “Print Book Sales Improved Last Week, but Still Fell 4%.” In Canada, the drop is more pronounced: BookNet reported in August that print sales for the English-language trade market were down 12 percent in the first half of 2023 as compared to the same six months the previous year.

These figures are as high as they are in the first place only because of big tent-pole titles like Prince Harry’s Spare, which sold 1.1 million copies in the US in the year’s first quarter, or Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series (boosted by the franchise’s recent film adaptation), which helped push American Thanksgiving week sales higher than they’d been the year prior. Few titles can be relied upon to reach those heights—according to McLean’s data set, in 2022, less than half a percent of books even cleared 100,000. But this is the financial model on which the publishing industry operates: a small number of titles generate sufficient profit to keep the lights on, offsetting the vast majority of the rest. The marquee projects get the flashier promotional campaigns, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: the authors expected to attract the most attention and resources from consumers are given the most attention and resources by their publishers (which in turn helps them attract the most attention and resources from consumers). As a 2019 Publisher’s Weekly piece on the “top-heaviness” of the industry put it, “as [the bestselling] books get the lion’s share of the houses’ focus, other titles are left to find audiences on their own.”

So where does that leave the rest of the writers? When it comes to things that actually move the dial—what writers can do to make their books rise above that bottom 50 percent of sales—the answers are often frustratingly random and disproportionately dependent on luck or resources. In a snapshot of the past year’s bestseller list in the New York Times, Elisabeth Egan noted that merely “eight noncelebrity debut novelists made it onto the hardcover fiction list,” and five of those got a leg up from major national book clubs. Some people—including a number of right-wing authors—have even bought their way onto the bestseller lists, causing the New York Times to mark conspicuously bulk-ordered titles with a small dagger. …

The enigma of how to sell a book touches all corners of literary culture. It affects what kinds of titles publishers acquire and, at the other end of the pipeline, which titles readers see the most. If you’ve ever felt the uncanny sense that some shadowy agent wants you to know about a certain book, you’re probably right. The fate of a book depends on so many small but consequential decisions that accumulate to ensure it reaches your awareness: the time of year it comes out, the runway it has to get pre-publication endorsements, the way it gets positioned by the publisher. And then, once a book is released, it has to contend with all sorts of other obstacles: The Amazon algorithm. The decline of outlets offering arts coverage. The drop in book sales themselves. In response, our best defence is to read beyond the bestseller lists and the most-hyped titles and support our local independent bookstores. Every book that finds you is a minor miracle.

Fewer young men going to college:

Over the past decade, college enrollment has seen a gradual decline, but a recent survey found that most of the downturn can be attributed to fewer young men pursuing a degree.

In 2022, 39% of young men who have a high school diploma are enrolled in college, Pew Research Center said. This is down from 47% in 2011.

The rate of young female high school graduates enrolled in college also fell, but not as much with 52% in 2011 and 48% in 2022.

According to the Pew Research Center, both men and women were about equally likely to say affordability was a big reason they had not completed a four-year degree.

Last year, researchers said the total number of 18-to-24-year-olds enrolled in college was down overall by approximately 1.2 million from its peak in 2011.