Best* of Substack this week** - link roundup and commentary

*Not necessarily / **not actually from this last week

A random photo I took in Mallorca

Hi howdy hey y’all. I’m trying something completely different with this post: I’m summarizing a few articles that I enjoyed recently on this, the Greatest App. My commentary and the links themselves will be behind the paywall, but I’ll include a table of contents with the titles and authors if you want to find and read them. Might do this again, might not, so enjoy it while it lasts!

If you’re new to The Fare Well Files, I write a couple of posts a week, one paid and one free, about things like what personality characteristics are most like what dogs and, of course, almost getting thrown up on by your two-year-old son in the middle of his nightly prayer.

---

Table of Contents:

• “My most shameful opinion,” Jordan Call (example)

• “Off the Cuff: with Respect to Creed,” Not-Toby

• “Evolution of the American Village,” Stephanie H. Murray

• “Pathless Path: From Antimeme to Meme | #301,” Paul Millerd

• “Dating Apps: Giving Men What They Want But Not What They Need,” Eurydice

• “The Colors of Her Coat,” Scott Alexander

---

“My most shameful opinion,” Jordan Call

I’ll start with my own piece, which will pull double duty as a template for what’s behind the paywall and as a personal advertisement.

The first and most important thing about this piece is that my wife likes it. And she’s not one to hand out gold stars willy-nilly. Doubly so because this piece is my ruthless takedown of her favorite thing in the solar system: the Sun. Basically, other than the fact that it makes life possible for every single thing on Earth, I hate the Sun. The article lays out an ironclad syllogism which proves beyond all doubt that the Sun is bad. The argument is too complex to meaningfully summarize here, but if I had to try, I’d say it goes something like (1) the Sun gives me sunburns and (2) I don’t like wearing sunscreen. I also use science to explain how everything is prettier on cloudy days than on sunny days (diffused light > direct light). I back this up with actual comparison photographs to demonstrate. For example:

A cloudy day:

Still from The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965)

A sunny day:

Whoa, I completely forgot about this scene

QED.

Best Quote:

The combination of my complexion and the absolute ray gun in the Utah sky meant that to be outside even for a short time was to risk a bad burn. Imagine if you were Superman, and you lived somewhere where there was a giant ball of kryptonite floating in the sky, everywhere you went. How might you feel about the floating ball of kryptonite?

---

“Off the Cuff: with Respect to Creed,” Not-Toby

This piece asserts that the right framework for thinking about the culture war in America is as a creedal dispute: it’s not quite disagreement over “religion,” the way that most people think about that word, but it’s a lot closer to that than perhaps most Americans might think. I tend to agree. It seems clear to me that our culture war is ultimately as much a clash of tribal dogma as it is any other factor—probably even more so than geography or class or race. After all, how we organize society is downstream of what we value and believe.

What drew me to this article is that the main character is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its adherents. He points out that members of the Church have risen in prominence and social capital in the last couple of decades—a fact that might make people uncomfortable. After all, how could you hold such wacky beliefs and still consistently flourish? Or in his words, it seems like proof for the uncomfortable proposition that “civilizational success does not seem contingent on believing true things.” I completely agree that this would be strange. Which is why I’m persuaded that everything they believe is completely true. I mean, that’s just Occam’s Razor. We should all do something about it.

Best Quote:

In Missouri and Illinois, they talk of Mormons wars. If America could be said to have manifestly failed to tolerate any creed, it is this one.

But the moral arc of the universe is long, and we have grown, first apart and then together, and they have come to represent to many the very best of what we have to offer, when the rest of us seem to have completely lost sight of it.

Off the Cuff: with Respect to Creed