👋 ASB Partners Nuggets 2.28.25
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution
From early on, Indursky was a committed and ambitious, if daydreamy, student of the Torah and Talmud, and at 15, he applied to Ponevezh
Indursky and I visited his parents one afternoon in their apartment, on a steep Givat Shaul street a few blocks from where he grew up. His mother, with soft eyes and a quick smile below her maroon tichel, served us a snack of fruit cocktail and kugel. “I prayed and prayed and prayed,” she said, about all the years when Indursky — the youngest of her five children, the rest of them rigorously religious — strayed from faith. She prayed that one day “he would marry a good religious woman and build a home with religious children — that he would be as us.” She visited the graves of venerated rabbis and spoke her prayers there. To give her prayers greater strength, she fasted once a week.
Inside him, “something was exploding.” The reception of “Shtisel,” which had so totally exceeded his fantasies, now left him with “a powerful empty feeling.” It was as if the writing was “not connected to me. I was losing my compass.” When he came home after late nights out and stepped into his building’s elevator, he stared, bewildered, disoriented, scared, into the mirror on the elevator’s back wall. “I was not even seeing myself.”
2. Anti-Defamation League Debuts What It Says Is First Jewish ETF
Podcast/Videos
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am here live and in person with Ross Douthat. Ross is arguably the best columnist in the world. He has many excellent books, and he has a new book, which I’m a big fan of, called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Perhaps today, my soul is on the line.
For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don’t challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment.
In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he’s less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he’s publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam