Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey will be open until June 19. Please go take the survey- it's useful for me to know what kind of topics readers want to read about.

2. Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pastor Who Modeled Winsome Witness (May 19)

3. IKEA's New Ad Claims they Are 'Proudly Second Best' and It's a Stroke of Genius (May 14) I love this. Yes, I'm a mom and I can confirm, the baby doesn't want to sleep in the expensive state-of-the-art baby bed that you bought for them. The baby wants to sleep on Mommy.

4. Women Are Never Going to Cover Themselves Enough to Get Men to Shut Up About Us (May 12) "As The Rules become longer and more consuming, being on the wrong side of them becomes more and more eroticized. Today it's nursing moms, but tomorrow it'll be women holding babies, because babies make men think about nursing and nursing makes them think about breasts (if you think I'm exaggerating, remind me to tell you the story of the time I was reprimanded for hanging a swimsuit to dry where boys could see it at church camp). The rules create the fetish, not the other way around."

5. "Hey, stop!" Taylor Swift defends Baltimore woman during Philadelphia concert (May 15) "Taylor Swift might have bad blood with one particular security guard in Philadelphia. In a viral moment, the star defended a concertgoer during the middle of her set while performing her 2014 hit 'Bad Blood.'"

6. Israelite Divination and the Mysterious Teraphim (May 4, via [along with links 7 and 8]) "The story of Michal helping David evade Saul’s guards by putting a teraphim in his bed, dressing it up to look like him, and then telling the guards David is sick (found in 1 Samuel 19:11-16) while David escapes out the window does little to inform us of the teraphim’s purpose. It simply suggests that teraphim could be nearly life-sized, and that it was not unusual for a household to have one around."

7. Why the Carroll verdict might matter (May 15) "And yet, there was never a come-to-Jesus moment when conservatives repented their previous views and pledged to go a different way. Instead, a conservative sea change happens like this: People who used to be zealots for a particular view go silent for a while. And when they start talking again, they have the opposite view, which they put forward as if they had always believed it."

8. Florida bill would require patients to share their immigration status (April 28) Wow not cool. Aren't these lawmakers worried about going to hell? 

9. The Sudoku With Only 4 Known Solvers (December 20, 2022) "Oh you're jocking my straps, that is absolutely- I've got digits, I've got 2 digits. ... That... That... I've actually got tears in my eyes. That is un... That is unbelievable setting." (1-hour-25-minute sudoku solve video)

10. Beijing LGBT Center shuttered as crackdown grows in China (May 16) Sad news. I've seen people talking about this in WeChat groups- where it's a bad idea to say things about the Chinese government- and based on what they *weren't* saying, I assumed it had something to do with the Chinese government's dislike of queer organizations. This article from AP News comes right out and says it directly.

A similar thing happened to ShanghaiPRIDE a few years ago. The people involved with ShanghaiPRIDE are still around, organizing queer events, but are no longer doing it as part of one big organization, because that attracts the wrong kind of attention.

11. 5 Questions to Ask Before You Talk to a Woman About What She's Wearing (May 15) "She cannot do anything about being well-endowed. The issue can never, ever be about how her body is affecting the men around her; that’s on them." Wow, really amazed at this post about dress codes- the idea presented here is that it has to be about clothes, not about a woman's body. It has to be a standard about what clothes are okay to wear, and it has to be universally applied. 

This is completely different from modesty ideology, which says that if a skinny girl wears a modest outfit, that's fine, but if a girl with big breasts and curves wears the exact same outfit, that's not okay, that's not "modest"- and yes, it is ALL ABOUT her body type, modesty culture doesn't even try to hide that. The result of this modesty ideology is that for some girls/women, there's really no possible outfit they can wear that will satisfy the modesty police. And this intersects with race- women of color are seen as more "sexual", so even if they wear the same "modest" thing that a skinny white woman is wearing, they might still get labelled as "immodest" and sinning against the boys. NOT COOL.