Weekend A La Carte (May 16)

Welcome to a new edition of A La Carte. These weekend editions focus on long-form content and think pieces. There’s a lot of good material here, so I’m sure you’ll find something that’s of interest.

For some of the articles, I have provided gift links, which should get you around any paywalls. Note, however, that these gift links may expire in a few days or weeks.

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals include the usual weekend collection of newer and older books. There should be something there for just about any reader!

Recommended Reading

Here are some links to articles I found especially interesting this week. As you’ll see, that is the only thing they have in common, as they range across a wide variety of subjects.

The Slippery Protein Problem. Most of us have seen recent interviews with Ben Sasse and heard a little bit about the “miracle drug” that is extending his lifespan months longer than he was told to expect. This article explains some of the incredible science behind it. “In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76 percent reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.”

Enduring All Things for the Gospel. Thomas Kidd has a long profile of Adoniram Judson in the recent issue of Christianity Today. Judson and his wife wives are well worth getting to know. “Familiarity with missions history is one of the best antidotes to the prosperity gospel—the idea that God will surely bless the faithful with health, wealth, and safety. Missionaries have routinely endured terrible hardships as they obeyed God’s call in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20). The call to missions—and the call to ministry generally—is also a call to resilience. To be sure, many missionaries have chosen to terminate their missions for good reasons, sometimes before the scheduled end of their service. This can happen when God permits circumstances that make it impossible for them to operate without grave threats to themselves or their families’ lives.”

The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss. I had never read anything about Mrs. Dr. Seuss and the sad tale of her life until I came across this. “Unless you are very deep into children’s books, you’ve probably never thought much about Helen Palmer. I hadn’t either, until I bought inscribed copies of two of her books. Then I fell into the quicksand of research that so many antiquarian booksellers get sucked into.”

Love (And Work Well With) Your Gen Z Employees. One thing is certain: Gen Z is growing up fast. And, whether we like it or not, Gen Z is the future. Hence, those of us who are Boomers, Xers, or Millennials need to get to know, understand, and appreciate them. You can do that through this article/interview at TGC.

No Meeting Should Be 30 Minutes. This article in The Washington Post poses a question we should probably all ask: Why do we think meetings need to be scheduled in increments of 30 minutes? It is an interesting case of decisions made long ago continuing in perpetuity. “At this moment, in your calendar program, in a setting you’ve likely never clicked on, is the solution to one of the most miserable features of modern professional life: back-to-back meetings.”

Won’t Somebody Please Think of (Having The) Children! Stephen McAlpine considers the nearly universal decline in birthrates and observes something important: “Children have become commodified, as we would expect when we either demonise them (and get rid of them before birth), or worship them, and then pour all our energies and monies into crafting the one or two children that we do have into the gods and goddesses we are told that they undoubtedly will become.”

Clips

I continue to be fascinated and dismayed by the rise of the video clip—the short-form video content that has taken over all the video apps and sites.

Mia Sato of The Verge wrote The Clippening to describe what is happening. “If you are someone who wants attention, social media is just another form of gambling in the age of algorithmic recommendation feeds. Creators and influencers can optimize their content or tweak titles and thumbnails, but ultimately they are all just pulling a virtual slot machine arm, hoping it will dispense views, engagement, and resultant revenue. For well over a decade, content creators have worked to reverse engineer ‘the algorithm.’ Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble on content at scale, without paying a network of contractors upfront: Why bet once, when you could bet 50 times?”

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you could now turn off shorts within YouTube. To do so, simply open the YouTube app and go to the settings. Then tap “time management” and set Shorts to 0 minutes. This should remove Shorts from the app altogether. Unfortunately, that worked only for the app and not for the desktop version of YouTube. You may be interested to know, though, that there is a shortcut that can do that for you, at least if you use a browser like Chrome (or, in my case, Vivaldi): The aptly named Remove YouTube Shorts.

Quick Links

• Greta Gerwig’s Latest Narnia Casting Officially Kills a Fan-Favorite Aslan Rumor. I’m still not holding out much hope for it, though.
• Bright Horizons for AI. A thoughtfully positive take on AI because the AI you have today is the worst you’ll ever use.
• One Awkward Moment. It’s worth the price of one awkward moment to share the gospel.
• AI Dating and Chatfishing: Are You Dating a Robot? Because the world has become that strange.
• Photographic Memory Is a Myth. So maybe Spurgeon didn’t have a photographic memory after all.

Flashback

The Ministry of Sorrow. We should not desire loss, but we should consent to bow the head, to bow the heart, to bow the knee, and to be a blessing to God’s people in whatever sorrows God ordains for us.