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Recent reads (03.31.25)

Recent reads (03.31.25)

Last updated on: March 31, 2025 at 4:40 pm by Fred Clark

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Recent reads (03.31.25) 2025-03-31T16:40:17-04:00 Fred Clark

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• At The Assembly, Kyle Perrotti’s “Out of the Lion’s Den: A Christian author with a long list of abandoned business deals and unpaid creditors finds a new home for his work in Macon County. He says it’s a chance for redemption. Others aren’t so sure.”

Cliff Graham is, apparently, a best-selling author of Christian fiction — with nearly a million copies sold, first through his self-publishing, then through assorted deals with established publishers. I’m not the target audience for his books, though, so I’d never heard of them:

Around the time Graham became more serious about his writing, the movie 300 came out and through its telling of the Battle of Thermopylae revolutionized the action genre by stylizing the film like a graphic novel. He believed there was a market for such a sensational rendering of Old Testament stories, in both film and books. He was particularly interested in the exploits of King David and his small but elite band of “mighty warriors” referenced in 2 Samuel 23. The stories became the inspiration for the Lion of War Series, which Graham envisioned as five novels that would portray biblical battles of David’s army in gory detail.

These are “Bible-based” stories in a very loose sense. For example, Graham wrote an entire novel based on the one-verse biblical “story” of Benaiah (“Benaiah son of Jehoiada, a valiant fighter from Kabzeel, performed great exploits. He struck down Moab’s two mightiest warriors. He also went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion,” 2 Samuel 23:20). And he wrote another one based on the “story” of Shamgar, from Judges 3:31 (“After Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad. He too saved Israel.”)

Judges doesn’t tell us whether Shamgar led an army that defeated 600 Philistines in battle or if he was a guerrilla insurgent picking off occupying soldiers with his ox-goad, night after night. In Graham’s “gritty” novel, Hold the Pass, the story of Shamgar is reimagined as Thermopylae.

And since Graham’s version of this Bible story is just like a movie, he was sure it should be a movie — a big, blockbuster movie that would make him millions of dollars. And he was so sure those millions of dollars were coming that he spent most of them, leaving him in a very deep hole of debt.

Anyway, I read the whole thing and I still haven’t yet decided whether he’s a cynical grifter or the innocent incompetent he claims to be. Perhaps neither — maybe he’s just an incompetent grifter. In any case, Perrotti’s profile would make a far better movie than any of Graham’s bloody Bible stories.

• Also from The Assembly, “The Moral of the Story,” from Carli Brosseau and Sarah Nagem*.* Starts out like a piece of public-service muckraking, telling the story of a state highway patrol officer who got fired for frequently clocking in, then going home — collecting a paycheck without working. But that’s just the set-up for the larger story, in which that trooper lands a new job as a school resource officer, which requires him to be of “good moral character.”

Does a guy who defrauded taxpayers and shirked his duties for years qualify as a person of “good moral character”? A lot of people say No. Or “No way!” But this vague standard — which applies to many occupations — is also legally vague and largely undefined. The discussion and debate on this is interesting.

• Podcasts are a thing you listen to, not a thing you read, so podcasts probably don’t belong in a post featuring “recent reads.” But we defy augury. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. And also this is a very good podcast: “Tested: A Surprising History of Women’s Sports,” by Rose Eveleth.

Since the very beginning of women’s sports, there has been a struggle to define who, exactly, gets to compete in the women’s category. A century later, this struggle is still very much alive. … This story will trace the surprising, 100-year history of sex testing in elite sports that led to this moment.

This history is stranger, and more infuriating, than you may have guessed.

I found this older article on that subject via Eveleth’s podcast, by Grace Huckins for Scientific American, “Hormone Levels Are Being Used to Discriminate against Female Athletes.”

• Kiera Butler for Mother Jones: “My strange weekend with the pronatalists.”

To really understand the pronatalist movement, you first need to be aware of its two main factions. The “trads,” most of whom are religiously motivated, believe that large families are God’s will. Some of the more militant among them also believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits the existence of a global conspiracy to replace white Americans with immigrants of color. Then there are the techies, many of whom see pronatalism as an imperative for maximizing the potential of the human race—they are interested in things like gene-editing people, figuring out how to increase the human lifespan, and replacing elementary school teachers with AI tutors.

OK, I went into this fully expecting that both of these factions — the “trads” and the “techies” — were weird eugenicists, but I wasn’t prepared for how enthusiastically weird and enthusiastically eugenicist both are.

The breeders are not OK.

• And speaking of weirdos who are not OK: “Pirate’s Booty founder stages Long Island mutiny, declares he’s mayor and tries to fire village staff.”

• “How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic.”

The scientist, Dr. Daniel Drucker, says “I did basic science. I really had no idea where this would lead.” That’s how that works. The basic science, in this case, involved Gila monsters — the large, venomous, and freakin’ cool lizard species native to the southwestern United States.

This is the kind of very cool, hugely beneficial science that’s going away and not coming back if we don’t overthrow the King Who Exalts Himself in time to end his destruction of our democracy.

• “Today you come back dressed in pants and openly defying the court and its duties to conduct judicial proceedings in an orderly manner.”

Undine recalls, “Helen Hulick, Famous Slacker.” Hulick was a 29-year-old schoolteacher in 1938, who appeared as a witness in court to testify against two men accused of burglary. But the case ground to a halt when the judge refused to allow her to participate until she changed her clothing:

Hulick was wearing slacks. Blue flannel slacks. Judge Guerin was not about to allow any woman to wear “pants” in his courtroom. A bailbondswoman offered to loan Hulick a skirt.

Our educator of young minds was having none of it. “I like slacks,” she retorted. “They’re comfortable. It’s my constitutional right to wear them.”

If that sounds like ancient history, let me tell you about back in the ’90s when the president’s wife was regularly attacked for wearing pantsuits instead of First Ladylike dresses. Not the 1890s, the 1990s.

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