Chad Ragsdale wrote a piece about the “He Gets Us” ad featuring Jesus that aired during the Super Bowl. He takes issue with those who are complaining about the ad being too “woke.”

Affirming that the incarnate son of God identifies with the conflicts and complexities of modern life is not “woke.” Spreading a message of Jesus that seeks to heal divisions and tribalism with love is not progressive. It’s Christian. Seeing wokeness everywhere you look is not advancing or safeguarding the gospel the way you think it is.

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On the cusp of a revolution in information, in 1990, at a meeting of the German Informatics Society, Neil Postman spoke of “Informing Ourselves To Death." His premise was that we were inundated by information — to our detriment. After making the point that all of our efforts have gone towards creating more information and making it increasingly accessible, he opined that we simply could not handle the load.

As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know to use it.

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A study found that commuting may actually be good for mental health. However, it seems the benefit really varies depending on the circumstances of the commute.

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Paul Kingsnorth writes a defense of his frequent invocation of nostalgia.

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As a comedian, Ginny Hogan is predisposed to some humorous hyperbole, but her thoughts on sleep capture exactly why I’m not into self-quantification.

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The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece demanded a desire to dig deep and attention span to match that ambition. I spent some time this week going through the bands. It was not time wasted. Though I didn’t come out of the exercise with a lot of new favorite music, I did benefit from hearing how the upcoming crop of bands was bending old sounds.

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Simon Kennedy writes for Mere Orthodoxy about how Christians need to be circumspect about how they engage publicly. He sees very few individuals as cut out to properly express faith publicly.

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A comment on a Stereogum piece about the new wave of American shoegaze: I know I keep riding this schtick, but we really are out of band names, folks. “Ganx Crap take inspiration from the post-slo-blorpgaze of Body Wash and LilMissPiggy.geccs, without completely cresting the wave set in motion by fellow Milwaukee veterans Total Garf Nuggets and T(w)asty Past(e).” Although hilarious, it almost sounds too exaggerated to be a decent parody.

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Matt Birchler on the absurdity of media not being available for ownership. I think it’s extremely frustrating that streaming services generally don’t let people buy permanent copies of the shows they offer. Coda won Best Picture at the Oscars last year and there is no way for someone to buy that movie and know they’ll be able to see it whenever they want in the future. That’s nuts. Considering the rate of bit rot, it can be an unfortunate prospect to imagine your favorite book, movie or album disappearing.

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In a world that’s full of surprises, it turns out that accepting “full responsibility” for massive layoffs might not have the weight it appears to. Art Shaikh, serial entrepreneur and CEO of the tech firm Digital Will more cynically echoes that in the first instance, “claiming responsibility for layoffs might seem like a noble move”, but in reality, “it is advice given by PR professionals”. The language used in these circumstances is so homogeneous and transparent, Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s was able to do a pitch perfect parody.

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I’ve been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a “last known good” configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running. It was like being able to go back in a time machine to before a failure (a power most of us would like to have IRL). It was a chance to correct something and make it right, and then avoid the negative consequences.

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I generally don’t do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year’s, I get a chance to reflect back on what I’ve enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.

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