Subscriber Links Roundup #4 (May 23, 2023)

Fourth (and final) batch

Here is the fourth and final batch of subscriber writing links. Links for the first, second, and third batches. Again, if you haven’t seen your piece in any of these roundup posts, it may have gotten lost in my inbox. I’ll do another call for subscriber writing in the future; please send it then. 

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Alessandro Bellini, Luxury beliefs around parenting

The article is about the luxury beliefs around parenting that wealthy society holds that lower class parents take on and which leads to poorer kids having too much freedom and which disturbs the family unit. 

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Yonason Goldson, 6 questions to ask to find out if you’re an ethical leader

The most effective way to create a vibrant culture built on loyalty, commitment, and trust is by cultivating these essential qualities that define an ethical leader.

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Sandra Beasley, The Art of Sales: Taking Your Time

This tribute to patience, silence, and active listening draws on examples from the modern art world.

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Eugene Miller, How We Subdue Our [Own] Beast Across Time

Reverse engineering the pulses of aggression by means of Darwinian logic.

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Laith Al-Shawaf, Should You Trust the Myers-Briggs Personality Test?

This essay asks whether you should trust the most popular personality test in the world -- and offers 8 reasons why you shouldn't.

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Kathleen Sykes, Art is not supposed to be pleasant

If we always expect a happy ending, we deprive the humanities of humanity.

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Cristóbal de Losada, Believers vs. Atheists

Are believers and atheists congenitally different?

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Karam Zarkitou, Ignore The Voice

How to deal with the voice inside your head. 

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Ramez Nathan, This is 'The Nietzschean Friend You Need'

This is a piece on three of Nietzsche's main ideas (the Priest, the Individual and the Truth).

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Ben Reesor, Nemo Found

How a father's reaction to Finding Nemo differs from his son's.

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Alan Flanagan, Policing Language is About Controlling Thought

This essay discusses postmodern/'Theory' language-based modes of social critique, and why this is unscientific, classist, and damaging to the political aims of the Left.

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Martti Ylikoski, Public Organizations: Automation Budgets

How to automate what the government does by letting citizens decide where the focus is?

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Triangulation, The price of tears

It is basically about the evolution of emotional tears inspired by a forthcoming paper by Daniel Szyncer et al. 

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Andrew Izzo Clarke, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow 

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Dalton Mabery, 7 Life Lessons from "The Splendid and the Vile" by Erik Larson

An analysis of the broad lessons learned from studying Churchill, London, and life during The Blitz.

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Mosby Woods, Oh Native Land! Bu-Bu-Bu, Miaow, Miaow

A literary essay that describes methods of Soviet literary dissent, tools for those who write stories today without permission.

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Jordan Harris, Couples counseling is the hardest counseling. (A counselors point of view)

Some counselors are refusing to provide marriage therapy. Why? It’s just too difficult to help some couples. 

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Nothing Doing, Transgender Identity & Perception

Why transgender ideology is best understood not as concerned with claims of identity, but demands for perception.

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Mary Purpura, Epstein's Victims: It Could Be Any Of Us

Any young woman, given an unfortunate intersection of wrong place and wrong time, could be exploited by an Epstein or one of his ilk.

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Stephanie Losi, Types of Risk: Asymmetry, Boundedness, and Uncertainty  

A guide for figuring out which risks to take, based on asymmetry of outcome distribution and magnitude of downside or upside potential.

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Zachary Yost, Why the State Seeks to Abolish Both Tradition and History

I argue that tradition, properly understood, serves a vital social function for people to navigate life without having to reinvent the wheel.

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William Higgins, "The Inquiry and its Enemy."

In this the inaugural post of my Substack I explain how I plan to push back against "the monster of postmodernism" by reading widely in the Western Intellectual Tradition and writing about what I learn. 

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Pieter Marx, Intellectuals in a Free Society: Bernard Williams’s nightmare come true.

Looking back on the last 20 years, I ask whether the state of distrust, disconnect and worse between Intellectuals (or “truth-workers”) and their public can be attributed to their relinquishing “truth and truthfulness” as goal and principle of their work, as was Bernard Williams’s 2002 end of life premonition; and if I should be one. 

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Marissa Paape, A Thriving Mom’s Newsletter

A newsletter dedicated to parents struggling with parenthood.

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David Racioppa, Free Will Beliefs and Feelings of Free Will- What's Worth Holding On To?

In this piece I distinguish between beliefs in free will from "feelings of free will" or agency, argue that they can be decoupled, and how it may be reasonable and advantageous for free will skeptics to embrace so-called feelings of free will. 

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Stefan Webb, Negative Entropy

Resisting entropy as a virtuous pursuit. 

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Elizabeth Kyrzyk, You’re Nobody Until Somebody Calls You An Enby 

The piece explores possible philosophical and social consequences of the popularity of the term non-binary. 

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Promise Tewogbola, The Psychological Significance of the Bible Stories: David and Goliath

A meditation on the psychological principles that can be gleaned from the Biblical story of David and Goliath, a la Jordan Peterson. 

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Anya Shakh, The Dad Lesson in The Adam Project

A deep dive beneath the plot of Netflix's action adventure film, The Adam Project, to uncover an important lesson for healing our issues with dad. 

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James A Dawson, The Difference Between Organic Gardening and Conventional Methods

This piece explains some of the fundamental differences between organic gardening, conventional methods, and also provides organic gardening based solutions.

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Connie Morgan, The Quiet Rise of Black Home Educators

Examining the home school boom among black Americans.

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Rav Arora and Jay Bhattacharya, The Illusion of Consensus