This semester, I'm taking a creative-writing workshop on devotional poetry. I've worked with the instructor, Josh Bell, before, and I'm incredibly excited to be working with him again.

Assignment zero for the workshop was "For fun, start thinking about songs (I'm of course talking pop songs, but interpret this how you'd like) which are in the devotional mode. Then send me links to those songs. And I'll start sending those songs around to this list."

I had a lot of fun exploring several of the possible dimensions of "devotional" with this exercise, especially when I asked my friend Leah for suggestions and she introduced me to several incredible songs that I'd never heard (of) before. And when I was done, I figured that I'd share the ten that I ended up submitting here, just in case any of my readers were interested.

To be clear, I compiled this list for a very specific purpose, and plenty of songs I like a lot got cut in late stages because I felt they fit insufficiently well with the assignment specification. But I still think that the ones that made it all explore (distinct) modes of imagining oneself in relation to some divine entity, which I believe is a useful exercise, whether or not you believe that any such exist.

(Hat-tip to Leah Libresco for recommending "How Glory Goes", "Lot's Wife", and "Stronger". I also first found "The Summons" in one of her old blog posts.)

If you've got other suggestions to add to the list, drop them in the comments below, or mention them

And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

Per aspera ad astra; Godspeed Challenger.

I published 72 posts in 2015, with the first on January 1 and the last on November 18, for an average of 1.6 posts/week on that interval, up 70% from 2014's 0.9 posts/week. These 72 posts accounted for about 47% of the 152 posts published through December 2015.

According to Google Analytics (which ignores my pageviews), I saw an average of 57 views per day, with non-homepage views-per-day up 97% from the last half of 2014 (before which I don't have GA records). September 18 (when 2015's overall most-viewed post was published) was the single-day high, with more than a thousand more views than any other day in Faults history. GA thinks that 41% of all sessions originated from Facebook.

tl;dr I am writing posts and people are reading my blog. I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

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The ten My Faults My Own posts published in 2015 with the most total pageviews were: (in ascending order)

• A Liberal Critique -- in which I attempt to explain why calling out harmful discourse is especially important when the people I'm calling out are on the left.
• October 28 Links: Thinkers, Statesmen, Economists, Doctors -- The only linkwrap to make the list; no, I'm not sure why, either.
• Putting money where my mouth is and Okay, you can stop it now., in that order. -- A two-part rant in frustration with the entirely ugh-y renaming of my school.
• Yes, you should hire college-educated computer scientists -- contra David Gelernter, who looks to hire only "people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it."
• Something About Bernie -- In

Now that we're back and I'm finally caught up on my blog-feed reading from 2015, I figured I'd link to selected posts from some of the blogs I really enjoyed getting caught up on. This is not all of the posts from all of the blogs, just some selected ones from selected ones, chosen more or less following my whims.

My reading from December 1 to December 31 totalled almost 600 posts from 23 blogs; December in Review: Part I and December in Review: Part II include about ninety links with commentary from me. If that sounds like too much for you, December in Review: Best Of is twenty links (plus two bonus mathy ones). Finally, My Faults My Own | Reading Feed already has stuff from the first bit of January, albeit in more abbreviated form.

No warranty, especially not merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, should be implied -- my interests in reading range significantly farther than my interests in writing, so don't expect that every blog is 100% recommended to every Faults reader. Nevertheless, if you enjoy reading Faults, there's probably something here for you.

While we were on finals-induced break...
(if you wish, skip over this news review)

Says Jasmine M. Waddell, resident dean for Elm Yard, as reported in the Crimson article:

"This is a way to say, 'You've been exposed to a lot of different ideas, and particularly in this moment when there’s a lot of discussion about various topics, you’re going to go home and you may or may not be able to speak the same language,'" Waddell said. "It's not that you have to believe in what's on the placemat, but it gives you some tools to be able to have productive conversations."

Waddell added that the Freshman Dean's Office decided against emailing the placemats directly to students, instead installing them in Annenberg without comment as a piece of "

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Say you are deeply, morally opposed to capitalism on principle, but nevertheless some inconsiderate person walks up to you, presses a dollar bill into your hand, and walks away. You already have more dollars than you need, and you certainly don't want to take part in the system you despise by spending it.

But then what do you do? Hide it away in order to level down inequity? Burn it in protest of the capitalist system that distributes luxuries to the rich instead of welfare to the starving?

Writes Scott Alexander:

If, as I’ve postulated, the reason we can’t solve world poverty and disease and so on is...the capture of our financial resources by the undirected dance of incentives, then what better way to fight back than by saying "Thanks but no thanks, I'm taking this abstract representation of my resources and using it exactly how I think it should most be used"? (...)

I suggest that you give it to someone who needs medicine. Or food. Or whatever else a dollar can buy. You don't seek to destroy unearned wealth if you can dispatch it to do immediate, tangible good. That's just selfish.

Writes Jeff Kaufman:

If you think of privilege as something you have that makes you a bad person, if you know the word and know it applies to you but you try to hide and dismiss your privilege, to find axes along which you have less of it, that's only marginally more helpful than if you were to deny your privilege entirely and insist

Unless you're using Lynx, you've probably noticed a new theme for the site. Love it? Hate it? Let me know in the brand-spanking-new comments section! (If the comments are broken, let me know by email.)

It's my own design, built from the ground up, and I'm still tweaking it around the edges, so I appreciate any general feedback on the visual design, whether positive or negative, as well as bug notices. I've been hacking at it for long enough that you should assume that any bug you find is not something I'm aware of yet.

Known bugs so far:

• Scrolling on mobile is jerky. If your browser refuses to scroll at all, or if your scrolling is messed up in a desktop browser, do let me know.
• The site icon has reverted to the Ghost default. I'll eventually put a new one up, once I get around to drawing it.
• I'm still working on optimizing load/render time, so consider that a known issue.

...and with that, we're back from hiatus! Expect a proper post first thing tomorrow. (I'd like to do a writeup of the theme-development process, but the first post won't be that.)