Whew! We had a wonderful event yesterday. Sponsored by Northern seminary’s Center for Women in Leadership, the event included talks by Lisa Bowens and Vivian Mabuni and Marshall Hatch, along with yours truly. We are grateful to Lynn Cohick for her vision for the CWL, and to Kelly Dippolito and Tracey Bianchi for their pulling all the details into harmonious order.
OK, time to get on with our meanderings for this week.
If you have not used TikTok, you are rapidly becoming the global exception. In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet — a phenomenon that has secured an unrivaled grasp on culture and everyday life and intensified the conflict between the world’s biggest superpowers.
Its dominance, as estimated by the internet firms Cloudflare, Data.ai and Sensor Tower, is hard to overstate. TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the United States, roughly a third of the country. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined.
Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey in August found; usage of Facebook among the same group has been cut in half since 2015. A report this summer by the parental-control tool Qustodio found that TikTok was both the most-used social media app for children and the one parents were most likely to block. And while half of TikTok’s U.S. audience is younger than 25, the app is winning grown-ups’ attention, too; the industry analyst eMarketer expects its over-65 audience will increase this year by nearly 15 percent. (AARP last year even unveiled a how-to guide.)
What is the best tactic when engaging a book one deems potentially harmful?
Should would-be critics stay quiet?
As an author who has benefitted from precisely this sort of outrage amplification, I have a few thoughts on this.
Truth be told, when Jesus and John Wayne first released, I was hoping for a little pushback, especially from people with platforms. I was relatively unknown outside of academic history circles and I had a very small platform of my own. I knew that I’d benefit from outrage reviews as much as from positive ones, if not more. And so I waited. Whether by instinct or agreed upon strategy, the “theobros” said almost nothing for the first several months. With the exception of an odd and not exactly glowing review published at Christianity Today, which provided an undeniable sales boost, there was relatively little negative chatter about the book. A few months after publication, things changed. The negative reviews started coming fast and furious, sometimes several a day, most on blogs and Twitter threads and very, very few of them containing any sort of substantive critique. This was what I’d been waiting for. And it worked. It kept my book in the spotlight, outrage sparked backlash outrage, and all of this led to more sales and several additional printings.
Which isn’t to say this would be my preferred path. I honestly would have preferred a more serious engagement at Christianity Today. I don’t love that there are several malicious and dishonest reviews circulating about the book, available to anyone looking for an excuse to dismiss it. I also don’t love the multiple and creative attempts of character assassination that will endure in some form or another for decades. Fortunately I happen to have a very thick skin and a very clear understanding of what I’m up against. In the end, there is little about the release of a book that one can control, and so it made sense to approach it as a lemons-to-lemonade opportunity. I can attest that, in many if not most circumstances, attacks do amplify sales.
Does that mean those of us who may oppose the substance of a book ought to ignore it entirely? In some cases, this may be a wise strategy. Certainly mere outrage posts tend to play into the hands of one’s opponent. On the other hand, as an academic, I’m torn. My ultimate goal isn’t to drive sales up or down. It’s to research, evaluate, and share findings with fellow academics and with a broader public. Sometimes that ends up amplifying things that I don’t like, but in the end, affecting the sales of someone else’s book isn’t my primary concern. Besides, this sort of amplification is often fleeting.
In spite of that opening green grocers’ apostrophe:
Neurosurgeon‘s in Italy operated on a 35-year-old musician on Thursday, successfully removing a tumor from the patient’s brain.
Unlike most surgeries, the patient — identified as GZ — played the saxophone throughout the entire operation in order to stay awake, according to a press release from Paideia International Hospital in Rome.
The surgery was led by Dr. Christian Brogna, a neurosurgeon and expert in complex tumor surgery and “awake surgery,” the release said.
Brogna was able to remove the tumor from the patient’s brain without compromising any of his neurological functions.
“The architectural complexity of the brain and its remarkable plasticity make the brain of each of us very different from each other,” Brogna explained. “Each brain is unique, as is each person.”
He said that awake surgery makes it possible to map with extreme precision during surgery, explaining that brain functions such as playing, speaking, moving, remembering and counting make it possible to map out that specific brain’s neuronal networks.
“The goal of awake surgery is to remove the brain tumor, or a vascular malformation, while preserving the patient’s quality of life,” Brogna said.
The procedure lasted over nine hours, and GZ played the saxophone the entire time. He can be seen playing the instrument in the video provided by the hospital above.
Just in case you’re interested:
The Queen’s beloved corgis appear to be in good hands with the Duchess of York.
Sarah Ferguson has shared the first photos of Queen Elizabeth II’s famous dogs since her former mother-in-law’s funeral in September.
The Queen was passionate about the corgi breed throughout her life, owning dozens of the dogs. She was often photographed with one or more of her corgis sitting at her feet or trailing behind her. At the time of her death, she owned four dogs, a source previously told CNN: two Pembroke Welshi corgis named Sandy and Muick, one “dorgi” (a dachshund-corgi hybrid) named Candy, and one cocker spaniel named Lissy.
On Saturday, Ferguson posted photos to her verified Instagram account that appear to show the two corgis Sandy and Muick.
“The presents that keep giving,” she wrote.
Corgis, a working breed originally meant to herd cattle, are known for their distinctive short legs and fluffy coat.
I find this weird, but he can do what he wants: Rod Dreher moves to Budapest, exiling himself.
I just woke up here in Baton Rouge on the day that I am going to fly into exile. It sounds like such a pretentious word -- "exile" -- but that is exactly how I'm experiencing this move to Budapest. Don't get me wrong: I'm very, very pleased to have a place to go where I will be surrounded by friends, and can do good work. But this move today lands in me with the power of myth. The last time I had this feeling of dread in the face of the necessary was the day I left Catholicism to become Orthodox. I knew that the exile could not be avoided, but that did not remove the pain. I'll explain below.
That passage of Dante, by the way, is a prophecy his ancestor Cacciaguida, in heaven, makes about the poet's coming exile (in real life, Dante had already been living in exile). It's quite poignant the way Cacciaguida makes his point: in Florence, uniquely in Italy, the bread contains no salt; with every bite of his daily bread, Dante would be reminded of his exile. At the beginning and end of each day, coming down to start it and going up to bed to end it, he would be reminded that he is dependent on the charity of another man. That's what this feels like to me, what is happening to me today. Again, I'll explain below.
Here’s one for the ages — better yet, for the century:
MINNEAPOLIS — Before attending the packed Sunday morning service, Queen Sonja of Norway praised Mindekirken congregation for having maintained worship in Norwegian for all 100 years that the church has existed in Minneapolis.
"It's extraordinary to realize that, one hundred years after, Mindekirken is still fulfilling that purpose" of building community and preserving culture and language, she said to the nearly 500 people in attendance. They had lined up for more than an hour in this modest neighborhood in brisk fall weather in the 40s — single digits in Celsius, just as in Oslo — to participate in the service.
Queen Sonja received a special greeting from Eline Gro Knatterud, 4, who presented the queen with a bouquet of red roses nearly as big as herself. Queen Sonja got down to eye level with the awestruck girl and told her, in English, that she had an identical red traditional bunad dress at home, before walking into the large stone church.
Sad news about the Alaska snow crab:
The Alaska snow crab harvest has been canceled for the first time ever after billions of the crustaceans have disappeared from the cold, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery.
But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
“Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all the Bering Sea crab species that is caught commercially,” Daly told CNN. “So the shock and awe of many billions missing from the population is worth noting – and that includes all the females and babies.”
The Bristol Bay red king crab harvest will also be closed for the second year in a row, the agencies announced.
Officials cited overfishing as their rationale for canceling the seasons. Mark Stichert, the groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator with the state’s fish and game department, said that more crab were being fished out of the oceans than could be naturally replaced.
“So there were more removals from the population than there were inputs,” Stichert explained at Thursday’s meeting.
Between the surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022, he said, mature male snow crabs declined about 40%, with an estimated 45 million pounds left in the entire Bering Sea.
“It’s a scary number, just to be clear,” Stichert said.
I found this quote interesting and wonderful from the Norwegian church story: "The group said, 'We'll talk American English every day, but we need our hearts' language when we praise God,"
I cannot help but think of Pentecost in Acts, Ignatian spirituality, etc....