Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Bo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation and realizing he was a real insider until roughly 2016 and then the whole tribe went somewhere he does not recognize; Ryan Burge's new Gen Z data showing that half of an entire generation is refusing church because of Donald Trump specifically; a five-books-for-the-rest-of-your-life draft (we are on the same desert island, which lets us share a Lord of the Rings and free up a slot each); a running argument with the recent Atlantic article about how a third of the country has not finished a book in a year; and, at the end, Bo pitching me five different themes for his Beer Camp session (my favorite: emergency politics in a society of spectacle: a survivor's guide, which is what the chat voted for too), and me pitching a real book to Cynthia Shafer-Elliott based on the archeology of 8th-century Israelite hotboxing. This is a long one. It also contains actual grief. Come sit with us.
Bo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation and realizing he was a real insider until roughly 2016 and then the whole tribe went somewhere he does not recognize; Ryan Burge's new Gen Z data showing that half of an entire generation is refusing church because of Donald Trump specifically; a five-books-for-the-rest-of-your-life draft (we are on the same desert island, which lets us share a Lord of the Rings and free up a slot each); a running argument with the recent Atlantic article about how a third of the country has not finished a book in a year; and, at the end, Bo pitching me five different themes for his Beer Camp session (my favorite: emergency politics in a society of spectacle: a survivor's guide, which is what the chat voted for too), and me pitching a real book to Cynthia Shafer-Elliott based on the archeology of 8th-century Israelite hotboxing. This is a long one. It also contains actual grief. Come sit with us.
