From Spikosauropod: “I have read the Bible from cover to cover, but it never really spoke to me…. I was also considering collecting some writings of my own and binding them together to be my bible…. Suddenly, I realized that this was all a mistake. There was no book of rules for me.”

“If the hill is civil rights, if the hill is justice, if the hill is moral goodness or righteousness or whatever you personally call that, then the child that is the United States started pulling the sled up the hill in the late eighteenth century. And we didn’t start near the top.”

“For much of my life, I’ve thought that it hasn’t mattered that I’m Jewish, that it in no way changes how I live in the world… Now I think it matters a lot that I’m Jewish. Though it has nothing to do with what I believe — and everything to do with what other people believe. They think I’m different.”

“Cheaters have lined their pockets with our gelt”: math educator Ben Orlin takes a deep, fun, illustrated dive into the probability models of dreidel-spinning, a beloved Hanukkah tradition.

“So for those who knew, it must have been very strange that we have dead bones in our closet.” The Caspers are an American expat family in Cairo, Egypt. Jayson Casper tells the story of Max, the skeleton they’ve lived with, and explores a different view of death in Middle East culture.

“Cheesecake is a divine reason to indulge in one’s Jewishness.” Self-proclaimed foodnik Nino takes us on a journey through religion, film, and history en route to his perfect cheesecake recipe.

From Fiona Greenland: “You don’t have to be a Near Eastern specialist to be concerned about the broader outcomes of a private group, with a pronounced political and religious agenda, having the power to control the empirical underpinnings of a discipline.”

“I don’t have any sympathy for men who can’t handle a woman with cleavage.” At Ezer, Bailey Steger writes a critique of purity culture from an egalitarian Christian perspective.