News with Nuance: May 23, 2025

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hi Readers,

It’s the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and so I hope you have a relatively light work day and are getting ready to spend some time outdoors with loved ones. For those of us with school-aged kids, May always kind of feels like a crazy sprint, filled with lots of school events and repeated reminders to finish homework and wake up on time for the school bus … we almost made it (our kids have a couple of weeks of school left).

Whatever your life looks like this week, thanks for making time to journey through the last couple of weeks of headlines with me here. As usual, there’s much to worry about and pray about and organize and speak against. And there’s also reminders of hope, of pushback, and of opportunities for renewal. So let’s get to the news … with nuance …

But hey - if you have read Disciples of White Jesus, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads? You don’t have to have purchased on Amazon to review there, but I’d very much appreciate it! Thanks so much. I know a few of you have already left reviews, and please know I cherish them from the very bottom of my heart. Your words and thoughts and time mean the world!

The Headline: The Malayan Tiger Is at a Tipping Point, With Increasing Deaths of Both Native Populations and Big Cats

As you know, from reading this newsletter, I consume a great deal of news stories every day. And with all the major political and world news that has come out in the past two weeks, maybe you’re wondering why this story from Malaysia is one that I’m choosing to share at the very top of this newsletter.

The truth is that of all the stories I read in the past few weeks, this is one that stuck with me. Not just the images: of jungle, of encroaching exploitative industry, of native communities - but also the ways that this story brings so many challenges into collision with one another. The challenge of climate change, the loss of forest and natural habitats for even creatures, like tigers, who we’d long considered “at the top of the food chain” and therefore less vulnerable. And then the challenge of maintaining space and health for indigenous populations. The threat of warfare. The threat of economic survival that pits poor people against each other.

The ways in which humanity thinks we have advanced so far: artificial intelligence, airplane travel, visits to outer space. And yet still we have human beings who are being hunted by tigers. That all these things can coexist together seems impossible, and also an important reminder of human frailty and the interdependence of all created things.

The Quote:

But at their heart, the fatal tiger attacks reflect another conflict, he points out. Pos Pasik, in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, is on the frontline, peacefully resisting the seemingly relentless advance of loggers clearing the forests for the expansion of massive oil palm plantations.

Deforestation for palm oil production has driven steep increases in greenhouse gas emissions from razed forests and peatlands, and also destroyed vast areas of critical habitat for endangered species. From 2002 to 2023, according to Global Forest Watch, loggers cut down a fifth of Malaysia’s primary forest—2.93 million hectares (7.24 million acres)—an area larger than the U.S. state of Vermont. Habitat loss led to the extinction of the Sumatran rhinoceros in Peninsular Malaysia around 2007 and the species was declared extinct in all of Malaysia in 2015. If the forests continue to fall, environmentalists worry a similar fate may await the Malayan tiger.

“Deforestation has led to forest fragmentation,” said Nasarudin. “Non-compliant loggers are cutting down big trees outside the bounds of their logging concessions. They remove large ‘mother trees’ that produce lots of seeds and fruit—food for prey species like deer, serow etc. That means less food for the apex predator, tigers.”

“But a bigger problem is an outbreak of swine flu,” he added.

In 2022, wild boar, prime tiger prey, began dying en masse from a strain of swine flu that is nearly 100 percent fatal to them.

In the 1950s, there were an estimated 3,000 Malayan tigers (Panthera tigris jacksoni) in Peninsular Malaysia. By 2020, the number of the big cats had decreased to an estimated 130 to 140, which landed the tiger sub-species on the International Union of Conservation of Nature Red List, which lists them as critically endangered.

So, hungry tigers have been emerging from their shrinking and fragmented rainforests in search of livestock. Sometimes they encounter people instead.

…

On top of the new hazards the plantations and mine pose to the Batek are the threats they have always faced in the forest.

On May 8, 2023, a party of eight people from the Batek settlement of Aring 5 set up camp at the edge of the Aring River inside Taman Negara National Park. The next morning Halim Asin, 27, set out with his 8-year-old nephew, Alang Kuang, to catch some fish.

“He was always cautious with animals,” Halim’s father, Asin Parang, 69, said, “especially since there have been increased sightings of tigers recently.”

Despite his wariness, at 11:30 a.m., a tiger pounced on Halim from behind.

Alang escaped by jumping in the river and swimming away. When he reunited with the rest of the group, they raced back to Aring 5 so that they could contact police.

“Suddenly, my grandson ran up to me shouting, ‘My uncle has been eaten by a tiger!’” Parang said.

Story and photos by James Whitlow Delano, Inside Climate News

The Headline: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

Talk about a depressing story that highlights so many challenges facing our world at once! I think this piece makes important companion reading to the one above, because facing the problems of climate change, violence, economic competition, violence, poverty — all of that requires cooperation and information sharing. This requires an educated populace, people with the time and dedication to look outside themselves, evaluate the credibility of the information they’re receiving, and working together and connecting to meet the challenges head-on.

The truth, though, is that those who hold most of the concentrated wealth in our world have a dedicated motive to work against an educated, connected, trusting populace. Suspicious people without access to unbiased, reliable information are easier to control and manipulate in an increasingly authoritarian government. Which is why they’re pushing AI so hard at us through things like social media platforms!

It’s deeply bleak to learn that AI is rampant on college campuses, because ideally college is a time of your life when you’re most open and hungry for learning and new information. Cheating with AI is ultimately just denying yourself of the opportunity that education provides to broaden your horizons and challenge your preconceived notions. As much fun as college parties and tailgates can be, if you go to college and spend your whole time cheating and using AI, you’re missing out on the most important and rewarding part.

The Quote:

Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee told me recently.

Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia. (His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

By the end of his first semester, Lee checked off one of those boxes. He met a co-founder, Neel Shanmugam, a junior in the school of engineering, and together they developed a series of potential start-ups: a dating app just for Columbia students, a sales tool for liquor distributors, and a note-taking app. None of them took off. Then Lee had an idea. As a coder, he had spent some 600 miserable hours on LeetCode, a training platform that prepares coders to answer the algorithmic riddles tech companies ask job and internship candidates during interviews. Lee, like many young developers, found the riddles tedious and mostly irrelevant to the work coders might actually do on the job. What was the point? What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?

In February, Lee and Shanmugam launched a tool that did just that. Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F*CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.) A month later, Lee was called into Columbia’s academic-integrity office. The school put him on disciplinary probation after a committee found him guilty of “advertising a link to a cheating tool” and “providing students with the knowledge to access this tool and use it how they see fit,” according to the committee’s report.

Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI. Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

…

Lee has already moved on from hacking interviews. In April, he and Shanmugam launched Cluely, which scans a user’s computer screen and listens to its audio in order to provide AI feedback and answers to questions in real time without prompting. “We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again,” the company’s manifesto reads. This time, Lee attempted a viral launch with a $140,000 scripted advertisement in which a young software engineer, played by Lee, uses Cluely installed on his glasses to lie his way through a first date with an older woman. When the date starts going south, Cluely suggests Lee “reference her art” and provides a script for him to follow. “I saw your profile and the painting with the tulips. You are the most gorgeous girl ever,” Lee reads off his glasses, which rescues his chances with her.

Before launching Cluely, Lee and Shanmugam raised $5.3 million from investors, which allowed them to hire two coders, friends Lee met in community college (no job interviews or LeetCode riddles were necessary), and move to San Francisco. When we spoke a few days after Cluely’s launch, Lee was at his Realtor’s office and about to get the keys to his new workspace. He was running Cluely on his computer as we spoke. While Cluely can’t yet deliver real-time answers through people’s glasses, the idea is that someday soon it’ll run on a wearable device, seeing, hearing, and reacting to everything in your environment. “Then, eventually, it’s just in your brain,” Lee said matter-of-factly. For now, Lee hopes people will use Cluely to continue AI’s siege on education. “We’re going to target the digital LSATs; digital GREs; all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests,” he said. “It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything.”

Story by James D. Walsh, New York Magazine

A few more must-read stories since our last News with Nuance …

Burned out by workplace violence, nurses demand higher staffing from Minnesota hospitals

Swamp Coolers’ Ability to Beat the Heat is Evaporating in Record Southwestern Temperatures

'Unprecedented': About 140 structures lost as wildfires expand in northeastern Minnesota

Millions of People Depend on the Great Lakes’ Water Supply. Trump Decimated the Lab Protecting It.

Invisible Deaths: As Climate Disasters Kill in Pakistan, the True Scale Is Unknown

Trump Is Harming National Parks for Future Generations, Former NPS Director Warns

Disciples of White Jesus: Tracking down those who are weaponizing radicalization and a masculine identity that’s dangerous for men and boys

Every edition in this section of the newsletter, we’ll look at stories from around the U.S. and the world that lift up the ways in which this trend of hawking radicalization and violence to young white men and boys (often in the guise of Christianity and conservative politics - with dog whistles of white supremacy) is leading to anger, chaos, disenfranchisement, and fear for everyone. You’ll notice that many of the storylines and main characters here overlap with my previous research (and this newsletter’s previous focus) on Christian Nationalism. You’ll also read stories of the impacts of this kind of messaging on ordinary men and boys who can’t measure up to this fabricated ideal: especially financially, in a global economy that’s emphasizing massive inequality and greed.

But don’t worry - because after this section - we’ll focus on stories of hope, ways masculine identity for young men and boys is being found in compassion, care, diversity, and - when it comes to Christianity - a story closer to the gospel of Jesus himself, rooted in truth, kindness, justice, and love.

This Edition: