Leah Libresco's Blog, page 27
June 12, 2015
7QT: How Composing, Covers, and Costumes Work
— 1 — Hi folks! Did you want to read a novella-length article on how software development works? I thought you might! I enjoyed the heck out of Paul Ford’s “What is Code?” for Bloomberg Businessweek (and it’s one of only a couple articles I can think of that makes excellent use of being on the [Read More...]
June 11, 2015
Breaking Strains for Robots and Women
The ever-excellent cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written a great essay today titled “Want to understand what it means to be a woman? Look to robots.” The gist: I haven’t seen anyone acknowledge the obvious point that so much of pop culture is making, and has been making for more than half a decade: Robots [Read More...]
June 10, 2015
A Dominican Invitation to Witness [Saints Bookclub]
In 2015, I’m reading and blogging through Ronald Knox’s collection of sermons on Christian exemplars, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. Every Monday (kinda), I’ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. Maybe I wouldn’t have been slow to get back into blogging through [Read More...]
June 5, 2015
What I Read On My Book Tour
Sorry for the low posting volume, folks — I’ve spent the last two weeks in New York City and Boston, doing book talks, radio, science museum trips (ok, that last is not technically related to *publicizing* Arriving at Amen, but it is totally in the spirit of the book), and I’ve been a little tuckered out. [Read More...]
June 3, 2015
Good Fights, Like Good Friendships, Are A Long-Term Promise
Monique Ocampo runs a series of interviews with Catholic women on Wednesdays and I’m her guest this week. I’ve posted a snippet of our discussion below, but you can read the full Q&A at her place. How do you balance working in news with apologetics? Most of the time, there’s no balancing act at all [Read More...]
May 31, 2015
Concussion Tests and a Voting Mess [538]
Here’s the roundup of what I’ve been working on at FiveThirtyEight over the last week: The ‘One Person, One Vote’ Case Relies On Statistics That Nobody Has The plaintiffs are challenging the usual method (counting total number of people living in a district) and are asking that states use the total number of eligible [Read More...]
May 26, 2015
Letting Prayer Lead from Self to Other
Tonight I’m speaking in NYC at First Things at 6p. I hope to see some of you there or next week when I do a Theology on Tap in Boston on June 2nd. As part of the Patheos Book Club, I got to do a Q&A with Will Duquette about Arriving at Amen. Will’s a great guy, [Read More...]
May 21, 2015
The Publishing Milestone that No One Mentions
This might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the midst of launching my first book. Last week, I reposted one of those perennial facebook memes: Since I was reading The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr, I typed up the appropriate page 45 sentence: To use an image that is [Read More...]
May 20, 2015
Accidental Stylites and the Benedict Option
This weekend, I’m hosting an in-person discussion of “the Benedict Option” — ways for modern Christians to root their faith so that they can wind up living it more fully and more joyfully. Rod Dreher is the biggest promoter of the idea, which takes its name from the Benedictine monasteries that acted as centers of [Read More...]
May 19, 2015
Running the (Terrible for Catholics) Numbers on Conversion
The Pew Religious Landscape Survey gave the chance to write some code and run the numbers on religious churn, retention, and conversions for my day job at FiveThirtyEight. Here are a few highlights: Evangelical Protestants Are The Biggest Winners When People Change Faiths The numbers presented by Pew help describe current patterns, but they don’t [Read More...]
