0:11
The Neuroscience of Letting Go | Renewing Your Mind Through Biblical Surrender
Episode 19, Season 1
Why is letting go so difficult?
If you’ve ever found yourself replaying painful memories, holding onto regret, struggling with control, or wondering why you keep returning to the same fears even after you’ve prayed about them, you’re not alone.
In this episode of The Christian Mind Reset, we will examine how the biblical invitation to let go is brought into sharper focus by neuroscience and psychology, uncovering the ways God has intricately fashioned the mind to encounter freedom through the practice of surrender.
We will consider how the brain encodes emotionally signifi
1:01
SUV e-bike conquers all kinds of terrain with a powerful DJI motor
The TL Carbon is Amflow’s newest e‑bike, and it’s built around a DJI‑sourced motor that feels surprisingly strong for its size. It’s a single‑model launch, not a line of prototypes, so the specs you see are the ones you’ll actually get on the road.
What makes it stand out is how the bike balances three very different uses. In town, the pedal‑assist smooths out rush‑hour climbs; on longer tours the battery holds enough charge for a full day with a loaded rack; and on single‑track trails the motor’s torque still feels responsive without overwhelming the rider. The frame stays light, thanks to carbon fiber, so you don’t feel like you’re hauling a mini‑motorcycle.
Overall, it’s a practical, all‑terrain option that doesn’t try to be a “breakthrough” but delivers solid performance where you need it—city streets, packed luggage, or a bit of off‑road fun.
2:07
'Longevity diet' puts an amino acid in the spotlight as key to healthy aging
A meta‑analysis of large human cohort studies was paired with a controlled mouse experiment, so the evidence comes from both population data and a lab model.
The combined work suggests that a Mediterranean‑style diet enriched with plant‑based proteins and lower in animal protein may boost levels of the amino acid glycine, which in turn appears to support healthier aging markers.
In the mice, adding extra glycine improved metabolic health and reduced inflammation, while the human data showed modest associations between higher dietary glycine and better longevity outcomes.
Overall, the findings are preliminary—especially the animal results—but they point toward a diet that emphasizes plant proteins and modest glycine intake as a potentially useful strategy for aging well.
3:09
The human eye may hold the fix for self-driving cars
Penn State researchers built a prototype sensor that mimics how the human retina adapts to sudden light shifts. It’s a single‑lab study, not a field trial, so the findings are early but promising.
The device uses a memristor—a tiny component that changes its resistance like a nerve cell—to adjust exposure in milliseconds, something current camera systems struggle with. In lab tests the sensor kept objects visible when headlights flashed or shadows fell, outperforming standard car cameras by a noticeable margin.
Because it’s still a proof‑of‑concept, we can’t count on it yet, but the underlying biology looks solid. If the approach scales, it could give autonomous vehicles a more human‑like visual robustness.
4:03
Dostoevsky on Passion, Sex, and Fatherhood
Welcome to the Unsolicited Advice Reading Group! For the next few months we will be tackling Dostoevsky’s longest (and, in my view, greatest) work, The Brothers Karamazov. Our schedule for the next few weeks is as follows:
Saturday 13th June: Book 1: The Story of a Certain Little Family
Saturday 20th June: Book 2: An Inappropriate Gathering
Saturday 27th June (today!): Up to Book 3, Part 7 - A Disputation
Saturday 4th July: Up to the end of Book 3.
Sunday 5th July: Live Call (for paid subscribers only)
Today we are going to focus on the character of Dmitri Fyodorovich, and in particular his passion. As is suggested by the name of book 3, this section is all about voluptuaries and voluptuousness (or “sensualists” as it is sometimes translated). However, it is also where we begin to get explicit parallels between Fyodor and Dmitri.
(Before we get started, I just wanted to say there has been a heatwave all this week and it has really affected my ability to think clearly, so sorry if this post is more muddled than usual - it promises to be cooler next week. I’ve also been reading two different translations of TBK simultaneously to compare them, so a few of the quotes this week are taken from the other edition I have).
Often Dmitri is seen as the brother that is most like his father, and while I think that is probably true, we must not overstate the continuity. In my view, Dmitri is as much a reaction to his father as he is a continuation of him, and it is in the differences of their character that we get some of the subtlest psychological work in the novel.
On my reading, Dmitri (at this moment) is caught in a vicious and contradictory relationship to Fyodor. On the one hand he despises Fyodor, and wishes to be nothing like him, but on the other hand he cannot help but imitate him. Even in the ways that he is entirely unlike Fyodor, he is so as a conscious reaction to his father. In other words, Dmitri’s entire character is caught in the web of Fyodor. Where Dmitri is like Fyodor, he imitates what he despises, and where he is unlike Fyodor, he is still merely reacting to Fyodor, and so is still, in some sense “in his orbit”.
What Fyodor and Dmitri both share is that they are both led by their senses. They both are hit with uncontrollable passions, and in that way their wills are chaotic and unpredictable. In Fyodor, this is clear in both his moment-to-moment changeability and his inability to care for anyone for a long time. In Dmitri, it is evident in his emotional and sexual abandonment of Katerina Ivanovna, and his sudden fall for Grushenka. But if we look in more detail, the way they view their own sensuality is quite different.
Fyodor is sometimes ashamed of his sensuality, but on the whole he is a pure instrumentalist. When he feels judged by others he simply digs his heels in and continues down his sensual path. Although there is some self-judgment in the mix, the main emphasis is on how he feels condescended to by other people. For Dmitri things are entirely reversed. Throughout the novel he will display almost a complete absence of social shame, but he is full of self-hatred, such that he will often be willing to endure near-universal censure so long as he can safeguard the key principles by which he judges himself.
For example, compare the ways Fyodor and Dmitri talk about falling further into their sensualism. Whereas Fyodor will often frame this as an act of rebellion against the external judgers, as when he decides to re-enter the monastery at the end of book 2, Dmitri instead views his own sensualism as an unpleasant fate he is doomed to. He hopes (and sincerely hopes) that that Katerina Ivanovna will be happy, and he refers to himself slinking down back alleys (to mean falling into a life of total depravity). Dmitri, as he says explicitly, views himself as a tragic figure, desiring to transcend his voluptuous nature yet doomed to simply follow his senses wherever they lead. What this looks like to a reader is that while Fyodor is far worse than Dmitri by almost every measure, he remains (for the most part) blissfully untormented by his sins, while Dmitri, with his comparative moral illumination, suffers far more for far lesser evils.
Dmitri’s suffering is further increased because he outwardly despises his father, and his father’s sensuality, and by extension must despise himself for those same tendencies. In fact, it is even worse than this. Since his self-hatred is the primary difference between him and his father, he must not only despise himself but also remain attached to that self-hatred as one of the only things he esteems about himself. To put things another way, the only thing that Dmitri seems to respect about himself is the fact that he hates himself - it is hardly an enviable position for someone to be in.
This links with what will be a major theme in the relationship between Dmitri and Fyodor, which is the mimetic notion of each of their desires.
9:46
Solomon Wrote the Whole Chapter About Her. Then He Ended It About You.
You were handed Proverbs 5 as a warning about a woman.
The strange woman. The lips that drop as a honeycomb. The feet that go down to death. Every youth group in America read it to you with the lights low and the warning loud. Stay away from her.
So you stayed away from her. And the thing still had you.
Because Proverbs 5 does not end with the woman. Read past the line they stop on. Solomon turns, almost mid breath, and stops talking about her at all.
“His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.” (Proverbs 5:22)
His own. Not hers. Not the world’s. Not the screen’s.
Look at the verb. Holden. Held. Bound. And look at what binds him. Cords. Not chains someone else locked on him. Cords. The kind a man weaves himself, one quiet night at a time, until the rope he braided in the dark is strong enough to hold a grown man down.
That is the part nobody reads to you. The trap in this chapter was never only the woman in the doorway. It was the man learning to tie knots in private and call it nothing.
I send one of these into the dark every week. No fog, no shame. Just the verse and what it actually says.
You have felt those cords. The clean shirt. The good name. The phone face down on the nightstand while someone who loves you sleeps three feet away, and you lie there held by a rope only you can see.
Every program told you to cut harder. Block it. Install the software. Find a man to text when you fail. And you failed anyway, not in three months, in three weeks, because you cannot white knuckle your way out of a cage you keep rebuilding.
The cords are the symptom. The cage is the problem.
I wrote the whole map out of the cage. The inventory, the thirty days, the conversation with your wife.
And if you are the one asleep three feet away. If you have felt the distance and could not name it. That rope is what you were sensing. It is not your fault that he went far. A caged man goes quiet long before he goes wrong.
Solomon already told you how it ends for the man who never names it. “He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.” (Proverbs 5:23)
Without instruction. Nobody ever handed him the map. He died pacing the same circle, calling the bars his personality.
You are not that man because you have the cords. You are him only if you die without ever naming them.
So name them. Tonight. While someone three feet away still hopes you will.
Name the bars tonight. This is the guide that names them with you.
Someone you know is lying three feet from a person who loves them, held by a rope only they can see. Hand them this.
12:53
Week in Review (June 22-27)
One of the unexpected gifts of writing regularly is discovering patterns I didn’t know were there. While I’m immersed in a particular essay, it often feels as though I’m exploring a single question. But when I step back at the end of the week, I sometimes realize that several seemingly unrelated pieces have been participating in the same conversation all along.
That happened this week.
Again and again, I found myself returning to a question at the heart of existential health: What becomes possible when we stop organizing our lives around certainty and begin organizing them around reality?
Much of human history has been an attempt to make existence feel manageable. We create beliefs, institutions, identities, ideologies, and cultural narratives that reduce uncertainty into something we can carry. These structures have real value. They help us cooperate, preserve knowledge, and make sense of experience. But they also carry a temptation. Over time, we forget they are interpretations of reality and begin treating them as reality itself.
The result is not simply mistaken belief. It is a subtle distancing from life.
That distance surfaced in different ways throughout this week’s writing.
In The Human Yes: Why Existential Health Begins with Learning to Trust Life, I explored the possibility that existential health begins before purpose, meaning, or even hope. It begins with something more fundamental: our willingness to trust life enough to participate in it. Life offers no guarantees of fairness or predictability, yet withdrawing from reality ultimately costs us the very thing we hope to preserve. There comes a point when the deepest act of courage is no longer finding certainty, but remaining in relationship with existence itself.
That naturally led me to revisit nihilism in The Gifts of Nihilism: Only the Idols Died.
For many people, nihilism represents the collapse of everything worth believing, an intellectual dead end or existential emergency. I’ve become increasingly convinced, however, that it often serves an important developmental function. It strips away explanations that have become substitutes for reality. The experience is painful, not because meaning itself has disappeared, but because the containers that once held it have broken open. Reality remains. What has collapsed are our assumptions about it.
Seen this way, nihilism is less an enemy than a difficult teacher. It reveals the difference between borrowed certainty and lived participation.
That distinction continued into Violence Begins Before Violence: What Must Disappear Before Violence Becomes Possible. We often think violence begins with aggression, hatred, or cruelty. Those are usually its final expressions. Something more fundamental has already happened. Another person has ceased to appear as fully real. We stop encountering them as a center of experience and begin relating to them as a category, an obstacle, an ideology, or a problem to be managed. Violence begins in perception before it reaches behavior.
The implications extend far beyond physical harm. Every time another human being disappears beneath our explanations, something essential about relationship is lost. Existential health therefore concerns not only our relationship with ourselves, but our capacity to remain genuinely available to the reality of other people.
That insight also shaped The Cult of Authenticity: The Burden of Being Yourself. Our culture treats authenticity as a sacred ideal, urging us to discover and express our “true selves.” Yet the longer I study human development, the less convinced I am that there is a finished self waiting to be uncovered. We are not static objects buried beneath layers of social conditioning. We are living processes. Identity emerges through participation, relationship, responsibility, loss, love, failure, and countless encounters with a world that continually changes us.
The goal is not to uncover a fixed inner essence, but to become more available to reality.
Looking back, I realize this theme also explains why I began writing Ordinary Mysteries: Stories from an Unfinished Town.
For months I've been developing ideas about existential health through articles, philosophy, psychology, and theology. Those forms matter because they sharpen our thinking. But some forms of understanding cannot be reached through argument alone. Stories slow us down. They invite us to inhabit experience rather than analyze it, allowing us to witness lives unfolding instead of reducing them to concepts.
The first two installments introduced readers to a small circle that gathers each Thursday around an ordinary table. Nothing spectacular happens there, at least not by conventional standards.
18:20
A Radically Inclusive, International Feminist Reading List.
I’ve created a page to bookmark the reading lists I’ve created so you can refer to them easily. As I add more feminist reading lists, I’ll update this page.
My next essay, on a historically matrilineal community and state, and life there today for women, will be paywalled. So sign up for a paid subscription if you’re interested in reading the full article.
The cost of a monthly paid subscription is that of one matcha latte or fancy coffee drink, and less than the cost of fancy cocktail. A yearly subscription is 20% less than that. Paid subscriptions allow you to access my archive of work, give you access to new essays on ending rape, and grant you a comp’ed subscription to the feminism for all bookclub substack.
Paid subscriptions are a large part of my income, so they allow me to continue writing. There are labor and costs associating in producing my essays, which includes research materials, purchasing and reading feminist texts; my time and labor in formulating topics, researching, writing; as well as my (unpaid) advocacy with sexual assault survivors and anti-rape work.
I have a Ko-Fi if you’re uncomfortable with Substack paid subscriptions. You may also use it as a tip jar.
Thank you 🧡 for reading feminism for all, my newsletter dedicated to inclusive, intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ history, theory, analysis, and to ending sexual violence.
There’s a concept in Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism that stopped me cold: that when we women talk about white feminism, we lambast white folks as the pinnacle of loving and doing radical work.
The earliest feminist writing about the solipsism of white feminism, of white womanhood that centers itself as the only experience, as the experience from which all others are measured, was from a white women, Adrienne Rich.
Since then, it’s mostly been women of color who write of white feminism. We’ve turned the practice of critiquing the system of white supremacy and the wrongs done to us by white folks as evidence of our dedication to intersectional feminism. We crack open our hearts, laid them bare, and visit the old wounds, over and over. We share them with others, hoping that our pain will open their hearts, will change their minds, that our wounded vulnerability will turn hate and indifference into warmth and care.
For a year and a half of my life, I did this with following my own sexual assault. I had hoped that if I laid my pain bare, made it public, gave the too often anonymous impersonal pain of rape a name and face, that would make the devastation real, not theoretical. Thousands, maybe millions of women believed the same as they shared their stories with the hashtag #metoo. Moira Donegan wrote that we were naive. I did not fail, we did not, but in that process, we hurt ourselves a great deal. I often told myself it was a pyrrhic victory: that minds were changed and educated, at the cost of myself. Taruna Burke, the Black woman who originally created the hashtag, wrote that the work is never over, that temporary set backs in the work mean little in the great scheme of progress. The moral arc towards justice bends so slowly and slightly that the bending is all but invisible to us. My own suffering doubled, tripled, kept growing, and slowly drove me from the place I had lived my entire life.
I left the United States about six weeks ago. Leaving has revealed to me how anxiety-inducing the loneliness and disconnect American experience is, the antagonism, skepticism, mistrust, and contemptuous rudeness with which Americans often treat one another. It harms us but benefits both our tech overlords and the wealthiest class in keeping us dashed and divided, exhausted, and barely subsiding emotionally and mentally. I wonder about the increasing politicization of our country, the focus not on uprooting the whole toxic system but simply replacing one very harmful leader with another slightly less so, all beholden to the same corporate powers that be. How much better it might be for us if we focused more on the social problems and building community, than the political.
Since I’ve left, I have begun to think very differently about race, gender, and feminism. Two favorite quotes from anarchist Emma Goldman have been flowing in and out of my mind for the past two weeks:
“If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
― Emma Goldman
and
“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman
Liberation or destroying the white supremacist-sexist-colonialist-, I put together this reading list of feminist theoretical works, feminist literary fiction and memoir from women around the world. One of the things that does continue to hurt me is the knowledge that I will have more “success” and “growth” as a writer if I center the American experience. I choose instead to write this to all the women of world, Americans also, as a step in the direction of showing that we have more in common than we do difference.
24:06
Magnalia 01: Does The Southern Ocean Have A Pulse?
Hi. This is Mike of Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter that argues where we’re going, we need more of the right kind of idiots.
If you haven’t yet done so, please sign up for maximum idiocy below:
A few days ago I saw this image from the magnificent (posted here):
What a perfect name that would make for a regular round-up of interesting and hopeful things, I thought greedily.
So, as the title of this newsletter confirms, I’m stealing it.
Either I’ll get away with this, or I’ll be meeting wmg’s Olivia Swarthout in court where I won’t have a leg to stand on and will be quickly and completely ruined. Please stay tuned either way.
In the meantime, here are some incredible things I have been thoroughly wondering at.
Well, that was crazy.
On Friday, and for the third day in a row, the record for the hottest recorded June day in Britain was smashed, with Suffolk reaching a truly incredible 37.3C (99.14F).
As for those of you living in France where it was a good 10 degrees hotter - my imagination fails me. Please leave a comment saying you’re okay?
I know all the big news sites adding the obligatory “Is It Climate Change?” explainers are just doing their jobs, but - yes, of course it’s climate change, because just about everything is now (ie. it’s going to have an impact on every part of our lives), and because extreme weather researchers have confirmed this couldn’t have happened without climate change.
It’s also another sign that in years to come, we Northern Europeans can expect our summers to get hotter and winters to get colder, as extreme temperatures become increasingly unexceptional.
That means a lot needs to change - in the way our houses are built or rebuilt, in the way we generate and store energy in preparation for extreme weather, and in the way we use architecture, technology and urban planning to engineer smarter methods of keeping cool or warm, as needed.
Thankfully, there are plenty of good examples to draw upon! In the EU, the Nearly Zero-Energy building standard has been in place since 2020, and in a few years it’ll be enhanced by a Zero Emissions requirement. A key part of both is better “electric and thermal energy storage,” including measures that help get occupants through extreme temperature events like the heat dome over Europe this week. The faster the UK (and elsewhere) fully and successfully implements something like that, the better.
I’m also wondering here about the potential role of ultra-reflective paint and structural colour, as I wrote about previously:
“A team at Purdue University in Indiana has been experimenting with different compounds that absorb less UV light than usual paint materials, and in 2021, they created a paint that reflects 98.1% of all the sunlight landing on it - which means it could cool the surfaces it’s painted upon below the ambient temperature, without aircon. Pretty spectacular!”
Meanwhile, as just noted, Australia is now so awash with cheap solar energy that its citizens will be getting 3 free hours of electricity every afternoon. It’s not quite a giveaway - it’s also designed to encourage more usage in hours when there’s much more power entering the grid - but as a demonstration of how quickly things are changing, it’s a dramatic one:
“Now, in one large part of the earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.”
There are so many ways that the world can get nudged in a better direction. But when ethical choices also become the most cost-affordable ones - as with China’s renewables revolution (memorably dubbed by WIRED as a “huge mess that might save the world”) driving the cost of solar installation and energy generation down to hitherto barely imaginable lows - that feels like a real turning-point. When even the most ruthless capitalists among us can’t help doing the right thing, you can expect a lot to change for the better very, very quickly.
So yes, there’s a lot going on. But the parts that are encouraging? I remain firmly encouraged.
The above screenshot is of the incredible headline the BBC ran last week.
It’s since been changed to “Young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death after HPV jab” - and I suspect they did this because of folk yelling AT LAST, A CURE FOR CANCER!
I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting that excited. It’s absolutely warranted! This is the relevant sentence from the study in The Lancet:
“In women aged 20–24 years between 2020 and 2024, in whom vaccination coverage was around 88–90% at age 12–13 years, no deaths occurred, compared with 23.1 expected deaths based on historical rates, corresponding to a mortality reduction of 100%.”
“No deaths”.
“Mortality reduction of 100%”.
Zero.
Incredible stuff.
29:35
Was The SpaceX IPO A Success?
SpaceX’s IPO was always going to be a wild, erratic and chaotic ride. That is why I have waited so long to comment on it. Due to the obviously BS nature of SpaceX’s business plan and the rigged way the IPO was launched, it was anyone’s guess as to what would happen. . You might think that because Elon Musk is now comfortably the most grotesquely greedy man alive — sorry, I mean, the world’s first trillionaire — that this IPO was a success. After all, the pathetic man got the hollow title he desperately craved so that he could feel something. But now, a few weeks down the line, we can see that this IPO is actually quite a mixed bag.
So, let’s start with a positive point. It was a success because SpaceX managed to sell its shares at a $1.77 trillion valuation, raising just over $85 billion, which is $10 billion more than they targeted. That makes this by far the largest IPO in history. The fact that they were able to pull this off is objectively impressive — particularly when you realise that many analysts claimed SpaceX was worth half of this colossal figure.
But this IPO was heavily engineered. SpaceX only floated 5% of its stock, with 70% of that reserved for retail investors, and many brokers heavily reduced the barrier to entry to buy the IPO. That means the supply was greatly restricted and demand skyrocketed because a lot of non-professional investors were suddenly able to buy it. So, while it is impressive that this IPO went well at all, a sizeable chunk of its success is thanks to this manipulation, not necessarily SpaceX itself.
Okay, but what is an IPO actually for? Well, to raise cheap funds for the company to grow rapidly. Indeed, the general notion is that this mountain of cash will be used to finally get Starship working (which it won’t, read more here) and to put a ton of AI data centre satellites in space (which will never be economically viable or scalable, read more here).
Unfortunately, to meet these goals, $85 billion is nowhere near enough. As Cape Fear Advisors points out, SpaceX faces around $235 billion in spending commitments through to 2030. On top of that, SpaceX was going to use its IPO to pay down an extremely expensive $20 billion loan (which SpaceX inherited from xAI and X), meaning that only $65 billion from this IPO would go to these spending commitments over the next three and a half years. That is just 27.6% of what they need! But, in reality, the financial situation is likely even worse. Because Cape Fear Advisors’ analysis is based on SpaceX’s S-1 filing, it likely drastically underestimates the cost of Starship development and doesn’t fully include the cost of deploying orbital AI data centres. In other words, over the next few years, SpaceX will have to raise hundreds of billions of dollars more in cash, or its main value proposition will fail.
Source:
