PicoBlog

UPDATE: MacArthur has doubled down on his comments. You can read my response here: John MacArthur doubles down on his mental health comments. And he's still wrong.Today is a sad day for evangelicals and the Christian Church. I just watched John MacAurthur spend several minutes telling the world that one of the biggest lies in society right now is “that there is such a thing as mental illness.” As someone with diagnosed anxiety, OCD, and depression (and who wrote a book on faith and mental health), I’m telling you MacArthur is wrong.

Hi everyone, and greetings from London! We’re still on our family vacation, so today’s newsletter is a re-post, based on a reader question that I think we can all identify with. (I’ll tell you all about our trip when we return — it’s been amazing.) Q: No matter how hard I try, my kid doesn’t do what I ask. I’ll say, “Hey, when you feed the cat, please put her in the kitchen, and then you can finish vacuuming the den,” and my kid will say "

Do you think you are self-aware? Until about five years ago, I was utterly convinced that this label applied to me. But really, I was clueless. I mistook being self-critical for self-awareness. This mistake led me to believe that the way I saw myself and the world was completely accurate. This happens when we haven’t brought what’s stored in our unconscious mind into awareness. Until then, we see life through a distorted lens and believe it’s objective reality.

There is a trend that is currently taking the internet by storm. I was first exposed to it on Twitter when a beautiful young Montreal woman going by the name Pinkydoll began making the rounds on Twitter. Her notoriety comes from mimicking a “non-playable character” (NPC) from a video game. Internet slang has expanded the definition of NPC since the Trump era, labelling any person deemed incapable of thinking for themselves, whether a Trumpian or a liberal, an “NPC” similarly to how NPCs’ coding makes all their actions and dialogue pre-determined and scripted.

Plagiarism has been in the news this week in a way I’ve never quite seen before. Jumi Bello was preparing to have her debut novel, The Leaving, released this summer when she confessed to her publisher, Riverhead Books, that portions of the book had relied on descriptions of pregnancy by other writers. Having not been pregnant herself, she told herself that she would “rewrite the these parts later during the editorial phase.

I have long lamented our collective meterophobia. Meterophobia is defined as the ‘irrational’ fear of poetry, and I’ve seen some of the brightest people fear poems. Guess what I found when I started investigating this cultural condition? That I haven’t been spared of it! That even after reading, writing, and teaching it, I am still a little terrified of poetry myself. Meterophobia affects a majority - from those who vehemently hate poetry to those who like it but keep it at a distance.

In the 2023 reader survey, you all wanted a podcast, so here I am delivering! I wanted to kick off my podcast with Carol Coletta because she embodies the kind of urban leader I want to talk to: She has an interesting life story, a tremendous and varied career, and the work she is doing now is worthy of international attention. Coletta is president and CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, a nonprofit organization that stewards the riverfront on behalf of the people of Memphis.

Lately, I hear robins singing at night outside our windows. Not at dusk and dawn, as you would expect. But in the wee small hours – 2am, 3am. Robins are not nocturnal birds. I googled and it seems this is a widespread phenomenon in cities and towns. One set of researchers in Sheffield determined that the cause is noise pollution during the day, which prevents robins from carrying on crucial communication until nightfall.

Have you ever heard about Occam’s Razor principle? It’s a principle stating that “the simplest solution is usually the best one.” It means that when presented with several solutions to solve the problem with the same result, we should prefer the one with the simplest one. The Occam Razor principle itself fully applies to the world of data science. Let’s see from the data science realm. I would say that many people who enter the data field, or even professionals, love to use the latest technology.