The World and Everything in It: September 9, 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Some investment funds are pitching themselves as faith-friendly, promising to reflect religious values. But the fine print tells a different story.

SCHWARTZENBERGER: They just basically are using the same thing they just throw in a couple of Catholic words here or there.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also the debate among some conservatives over what conservatism even means.

Later: night lights. We’re not only throwing off our natural rhythms; we’re also playing tricks on wildlife.

KNUTSON: Songbirds, they’ll sing to the sky glow because they can’t differentiate artificial light and natural light.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, September 9th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Mark Mellinger with today’s news.

MARK MELLINGER, NEWS ANCHOR:  Trump considers new Russian sanctions » President Trump says he’s ready to punish Russia with what he calls “a second phase” of sanctions. That’s in response to Russia launching its largest drone attack on Ukraine over the weekend since the start of the invasion.

The president also confirms he expects several E.U. leaders to be in the U.S. this week to discuss the war in Ukraine, and he says he’ll be speaking to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

With peace talks stalled, Georgia Congressman Richard McCormick says it’s time to put more pressure on countries indirectly funding the war by doing business with Russia, like China and India.

MCCORMICK: This is not just one country’s problem. This is all of our problem, and if we want to end this war, we’ve got to put enormous pressure on these countries not to buy their energy.

McCormick speaking to Fox Business.

The White House’s latest deadline for Russia to get serious about peace talks has come and gone. But so far, Moscow isn’t facing any new consequences.

Israeli bus stop shooting » In the Middle East:

SOUND: [Jerusalem]

A bus stop in northern Jerusalem became a crime scene Monday as officials say Palestinian gunmen opened fire on the busy intersection.

At least six people were killed and another dozen injured before police say a security officer and a civilian killed the two attackers. A third suspect is under arrest in connection with the shootings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the scene.

NETANYAHU: We are now in pursuit, seizing the villages from which the murderers came. And we will get everyone who helped them -- everyone who sent them -- and we will carry out tougher measures.

Monday’s shootings were the deadliest attack in Israel since October of last year.

Trump comments on North Carolina public transit murder » President Trump is speaking out about last month’s horrifying, apparently random murder of a Ukrainian refugee on a Charlotte, North Carolina public transit bus.

Surveillance video released this week shows 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska getting slashed in the neck and killed. Police say her attacker was 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., a man with diagnosed mental health issues and a criminal history more than a decade long.

Local leaders in Charlotte are facing sharp criticism for allowing Brown to walk the streets. On Monday, President Trump weighed in, calling the suspect a madman while also offering condolences to Zarutska’s family.

TRUMP: I just give my love and hope to the family of the young woman who was stabbed.

The president made those comments as he addressed the Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible. Later, in a social media post, Trump said of Brown, “Criminals like this need to be locked up!”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly blamed local leaders, including Charlotte’s Democratic mayor, as did top Republican state lawmakers, including North Carolina’s House speaker, who called Zarutska’s death “the cost of soft-on-crime leadership.”

Jeffries appoints three Democrats to serve on GOP J6 investigation panel » On Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has appointed three Democrats to sit on the new Republican panel investigating the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Representatives Eric Swalwell of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, and Jared Moskowitz of Florida will be joining the new investigation.

Jeffries says Democrats won’t let the GOP rewrite history and whitewash the violence of that day.

JEFFRIES: Donald Trump promised that he would lower costs on day one. That hasn’t happened. Why didn’t it happen? Because on day one, Donald Trump was too busy pardoning hundreds of violent felons who brutally beat police officers.

GOP leaders say the new probe will look into the security breach of the Capitol on January 6th and say Trump himself urged House Republicans to launch the investigation.

Thune will change rules so Trump nominees can clear Senate » Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he’s moving forward with a rules change aimed at stopping Democrats from blocking several of President Trump’s nominees.

The rules change can pass with a simple majority. It could clear the way for up to 100 nominees. Thune says the Democrats’ log jam has gone on long enough.

THUNE: This is simply the world’s longest, most drawn-out temper tantrum over losing an election.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says the president is trying to appoint puppets to exert greater control over government.

SCHUMER: Sometimes it’s almost as if the more corrupt, the better because then Donald Trump will totally control what they do. It’s as if he wants the Senate to confirm people willing to lie for him.

The rules change would only apply to lower-tier executive branch nominations, including posts with federal agencies and ambassadorships, not Cabinet-level or judicial nominees.

French prime minister ousted » Lawmakers in France have voted that country’s prime minister out of office.

Francois Bayrou lost the confidence vote 364 to 194. He had only been on the job nine months. He called the vote in the hopes lawmakers would support his view that France needs to cut $51 billion dollars in public spending to rein in its debt. Obviously, that backfired.

France is Europe’s second-largest economy. Now, President Emanuel Macron will have to search for a fourth prime minister in 12 months to help manage it.

Bayrou warned that despite the vote, the country’s debt is not going away.

I'm Mark Mellinger. 

Straight ahead: Christian investors lobby fund managers to support their values. Plus, making sure more people can actually see the night skies that so loudly declare the glory of God.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 9th of September.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: When your money votes against you.

Billions of dollars in Christian-owned investments may be working in opposition to Biblical values.

That’s because a handful of powerful firms control how most shareholder votes are cast. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has the story of Christians calling for change.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Ruth and Rudy Poglitsch have an exchange-traded fund that owns shares in various companies. Earlier this year, Ruth Poglitsch got an email from the investment firm that manages their fund.

POGLITSCH: So when I got this, my first thought was, ‘Oh, wow, what a brilliant idea.’

The email claimed that with the click of a few buttons, she could ensure the shares she owned would be supporting her beliefs at upcoming shareholder meetings—without her needing to do anything else.

Poglitsch is Roman Catholic. The email offered her the option to sign up for a Catholic faith-based policy option crafted by Institutional Shareholder Services. The document’s title indicated that it would make sure her shares were voting for policies supporting her Catholic values.

Poglitsch decided to dig into the details before she digitally signed the dotted line. She’d had a bad experience before with stuff hidden in the fine print, even when the word “Christian” was involved.

She says it’s a good thing she took a closer look:

POGLITSCH: What you see is that again and again and again here the the values that they are expressing that they will be voting on have very very little to do with Catholic values.

The fine print revealed that her shares would support pro-LGBT workplace policies, climate-conscious initiatives she personally didn’t agree with, and they would support granting employees’ homosexual partners the same benefits as spouses.

SCHWARZENBERGER: I know at least for the last 20 years that these guidelines have been voting in a way that is very much pro-ESG…

Tim Schwarzenberger is an investment portfolio manager at a Christian investment firm. He says that proxy voting advisory firms have a track record for playing fast and loose with what it means to actually vote in favor of Christian values in company boardrooms.

SCHWARZENBERGER: It's just gotten progressively worse.

Schwarzenberger says that proxy voting advisory firms’ faith-based options aren’t actually all that different from their default policies.

SCHWARZENBERGER: So basically what they do for their Catholic policies, they just basically are using the same thing they just throw in a couple of Catholic words here there.

One of the two giants dominating the proxy voting industry is a company known as Glass Lewis. It told me earlier this year that their Catholic faith-based policies were crafted to reflect the values of select clients, not necessarily every Catholic.

But many Christians in the finance industry are calling for greater transparency from fund managers and proxy voting advisory firm, and are calling for Christians to take back control of their votes.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

REICHARD: Joining us now to discuss this story further is Jerry Bowyer. He’s CEO of the investment consulting organization Bowyer Research and a WORLD Opinions contributor.

Jerry, good morning.

JERRY BOWYER: Good morning to you, Mary.

REICHARD: Jerry, can you explain how proxy voting works, and why these two companies control so much of the process?

BOWYER: Proxy voting is one of those obscure things in the area of finance that almost nobody understands and almost nobody knows what's going on inside of it, but is incredibly culturally and financially important. So it's one of those zones of low transparency but tremendous influence. So the way it works is if you own investments through a mutual fund or an ETF—which is something very similar to a mutual fund—and these are the things that you would typically have in a 401k plan or an IRA, you have given away your vote to that asset manager: a BlackRock, a Vanguard, a State Street. Or a “biblically responsible investment company.” And we need to loop back to that, because just because someone says they're biblically responsible doesn't mean they're biblically responsible.

So you have a vote as a shareholder, just like you have a vote as a citizen in America. We have a vote as a shareholder in a company, but when you use an asset manager, one of these funds, you are giving your vote to them, and they're voting on your behalf. Well, most of them don't want to bother to learn everything that's on the ballots of companies to vote on, because there's thousands and thousands. A typical portfolio might have 15 or 20,000 proposals to be voted on. So they depend on outside “objective experts,” proxy advisory services. And those proxy advisory services make recommendations on how to vote, but in reality, they don't really function like recommendations. They pretty much automatically get voted quite often according to those recommendations.

Those proxy advisory services have long been the subject of activism from people in the ESG—Environmental Social Governance—and DEI movements, and so they’ve been pulled to the left of where the country is and where most of the shareholders are. So when your money’s in a fund, you think you're just investing, but you’re also voting. And what are you voting on? Yeah, you're voting on things like board members and the auditor, but you're also voting on things like abortion or divesting from Israel or puberty blockers, and on Second Amendment issues or fossil fuel issues, and there's a pretty good chance, unless you're somebody who's pretty left wing, you don't like how your money is being voted.

REICHARD: You know, I recall the retired Justice Stephen Breyer saying that he throws those proxy materials right in the trash as soon as he gets them. After talking to you over the years, I don’t do that anymore. What advice do you have for people who don’t know what to do with proxy statements?

BOWYER: Well, I would make a distinction between people who just own directly and don't have any help from a financial advisor, and people who do have help from a financial advisor. If you have help from a financial advisor, then make them help. It is endemic in the industry to just ignore this function. Often the advisors say, just throw it away. Why do the advisors put this responsibility on their investors, because they don't know how to handle it. Well, they need to learn how to handle it. This is a vote. This is a right. This is important. This is an exercise of social responsibility or the abdication. We help financial advisors help their clients with this. So there's no excuse. So if you're just an ordinary investor and you've got a financial planner or advisor or a CPA or someone who's doing this for you, bring it up. And if they cannot tell you how you should vote or how you're already voting, including with your money that’s in ETFs and mutual funds, well, insist.

REICHARD: We heard about Catholic voting guidelines. Are there other religious value guidelines, and do they have the same problems?

BOWYER: There are none offered by the major proxy advisory services other than Catholic guidelines. And let me tell you, the Catholic guidelines are Catholic in name only. They are not even voting pro life. And I've looked at these closely, I've read the guidelines in detail, and I've looked at the funds that are being voted according to these guidelines. And this is something that proxy advisory services are aware of. And a lot of asset managers who say, “Well, we're faith based, we're Catholic based” … I look at their voting record. You would not be able to tell from their voting. They're voting for proposals that are telling companies to divest from pro life states. They're voting against proposals to say to a company, “you endorsed Roe v. Wade, you should really count the risk of taking sides on this issue.” They're voting against proposals that are trying to stop companies from paying for puberty blockers. When I look at the actual votes, none of the Catholic advisors or asset managers that I can find the results are actually Catholic. And since evangelical Protestants are also pro life, then they're not evangelical Protestant either.

REICHARD: Assuming the average person has an investment advisor, how would that person check on his or her say retirement investments? And if it’s voting according to his or her values?

BOWYER: You would ask your advisor, and there's a high probability your advisor would not know what you're asking about. And what they're going to do is they're going to come back with some reassuring answers, and let's say they're a Christian financial advisor. In reality, if you have an asset manager who is just filled up with faith language, and you look at their actual voting, you can tell they're not paying any attention to it. This has been going on for decades, and Christians have not been paying any attention to it, and the other side has been paying attention to it, so no one was paying attention to the past. Fine. Now you have to. I understand most people listening aren't advisors. Most of you are clients. Well, be demanding clients. Make sure that your money is not being used to fight against everything you believe in.

REICHARD: Jerry Bowyer is CEO of Bowyer Research and writes for WORLD Opinions. Jerry, thank you so much!

BOWYER: Thank you Mary.

REICHARD: To read more about this story, look for Josh Schumacher’s article in the August issue of WORLD Magazine.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Conservatives debating conservatism.

At this year’s Natcon—the National Conservatism Conference in Washington—speakers showed the movement is still defining itself.

Washington Bureau reporter Carolina Lumetta has the story.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Last week, more than a thousand attendees with pockets full of business cards flocked to a Washington hotel for NatCon. They went to sessions aimed at determining what the conservative position is on issues like artificial intelligence, foreign policy, and more.

CARLSON: NatCon is sort of this United Nations of the right wing and I think that that's very encouraging.

David Carlson manages conservative brands as a strategist with Beck & Stone. He has attended NatCon for three years.

In the exhibit halls, conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute handed out their latest magazines and books. In hallway conversations, attendees discussed philosophers Nietzsche and Kant, debated whether the U.S. is or should remain a dominant global force, and created new think tanks on the spot. NatCon has become the primary stomping ground for the conservative elite.

CARLSON: The vibe has changed. The energy has shifted. NatCon is ascendant in the ranks and halls of Congress and in the White House, obviously. And I think everybody's super optimistic.

This year, a record number of speakers came directly from the Trump administration, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and Budget Director Russ Vought.

VOUGHT: There are so many overlapping aspects of the rise of Trump, President Trump's agenda, the America First movement, and the rise of the national conservative movement.

While President Donald Trump says that he is the author of the America First ideology, NatCon claims the mantle of determining what counts as conservative. The first conference was held in 2019, helmed by Israeli philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony. He invited then up-and-coming author J.D. Vance to discuss how the conservative movement should move away from libertarianism.

VANCE: So I want to thank Yoram and David for putting together a conference like this, I think it's important for folks like us to get together and talk about and think about some of the big issues…

Vance spoke at every NatCon until this year. In his opening day address, Hazony urged the movement to adjust course. For the first time in four years, former speakers and attendees now hold influential positions in the government.

HAZONY: Our job is to pull together journalists, academics, think tank people, writers, people who work in the field of ideas to bring them in together into a coalition and to hold it there to be the intellectual substrate, underpinning, of this nationalist movement. That’s what we do.

In the first 8 months of the 2nd Trump administration, conservatives have differed over several key policies. After the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear capabilities, some conservatives praised it as a smart decision to aid Israel and cripple a foreign adversary. Others said it was hypocritical to promise no new wars and then bomb another country. So Hazony and the NatCon organizers decided to include balanced perspectives on the panels this year to showcase the range of conservative thought. The fault lines appeared on the first day during a breakout session titled America and the Israel-Iran war. Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms argued for what he calls a realist position: U.S. intervention.

ABRAHMS: I'm not going to say that we we can just wash our hands of any concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. That would be absurd. But it's weaker. It's much weaker than it was had there not been an intervention.

His fellow panelist argued defending Israel is not in America’s best interests. Curt Mills is the executive director of the magazine, The American Conservative.

MILLS: Why are these our wars? Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it's advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First, asterisk Israel?

While the debate grew heated at times, most NatCon attendees said it’s more important to wrestle with these questions than avoid them. Brad Littlejohn hosted a table in the hallway for the conservative economics think tank American Compass. He is also a WORLD Opinions contributor.

LITTLEJOHN: NatCon is not really serving as a place for developing a substantive policy agenda, but it is a kind of convening where every year we sort of find out what is the Overton window within which the conservative movement can operate… until the next NatCon.

While conservatives cheer Trump’s election win, they’re also thinking about 2028 and what a unified conservative movement should look like then. In his speech, Hazony urged conservatives to debate issues without personal attacks.

HAZONY: This is not this is not just a sideshow. I want to know: how is J.D. Vance going to win the next election if what we're doing outside for four years is tearing each other apart, accusing one another of the most horrible things, smashing one another in public?

Brand strategist David Carlson says answering that question will take more than simply articulating the right ideas.

CARLSON: I think the real threat is electoral probability post-Trump…whether he runs for a third term or whether he doesn't, he will one day no longer be running for president. And confronting that is paramount, figuring out how we can continue to win without the sort of human charisma that Trump has is a difficult one, because the ideas are good, but sometimes elections aren't just about ideas.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta in Washington.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Imagine a sea of fiery hair—thousands of redheads filling the square in the Dutch city of Tilburg. Every year, they gather for the Redhead Days Festival.

OLD WOMAN: I had two children and four grandchildren with red hair…

The teasing, well it’s a little funny now, but not back in the day:

MIDDLE WOMAN: When I was in school, I remember, kids would say, ‘I’d rather be dead than red in the head.’ (laughs)

Now they’re leaning into it and celebrating!

MAN: It can be a dream to be once in a lifetime in a group of thousands redheads (sic) just like you.

The weekend brings music, food, even makeup tips. And the highlight: A giant group photo—so many redheads in the picture, I think we can fairly call it one big ginger snap.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 9th.  Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: When the stars disappear.

Have you looked up at night and realized you can’t really see anything? For most Americans, the Milky Way is invisible. Not because it’s gone—but because we’ve washed it out.

REICHARD: 

DIANE KNUTSON: They have to have night. They have to have darkness to find each other.

JENNY ROUGH: Diane Knutson is talking about fireflies or lightning bugs. They mate by flash signal.

KNUTSON: You might have a long flash, a break, and then a long flash. And those are the males out above, flashing at the females. The females are in the grass flashing back if they see a signal that they like.

Knutson is the former board president of DarkSky International. That’s an organization that works to restore the nighttime environment to communities. She says light pollution can cause real problems for fireflies.

KNUTSON: If it’s too bright they can’t find one another. And they don’t leave their place, so they just die out.

Of the 18 threatened firefly species in North America, researchers linked 17 to ALAN, artificial light at night.

It’s not just fireflies that are at risk. Sea turtle hatchlings become disoriented by coastal lights and struggle to navigate their way to the ocean. A research project on coastal ecosystems found coral reefs in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf are spawning outside their reproduction times, drastically reducing their chances of survival.

KNUTSON: Songbirds, they’ll sing to the sky glow, thinking it’s the sun rising at 2:00 a.m., when it’s nighttime, because they can’t differentiate the difference of artificial light and natural light sources.

Even vegetation becomes confused.

KNUTSON: You’ll see flowers and trees that are impacted if they’re under a streetlight. So with trees they might not lose their leaves in the right season. Maybe one side of the tree is de-leafing, getting ready, and the other side is not. There’s flowers that only bloom at night. And we have night pollinators. So if the flowers aren’t blooming and opening at night, the pollinators can’t get to them.

Our excessive use of lights and screens affects our own circadian rhythms. It’s a major contributor to sleep deprivation.

So, Knutson is on a mission to help communities reclaim the night sky.

She loved stargazing as a child.

KNUTSON: Looking up at the stars at night, wondering where we belong and what our role is or place in the universe. And it offered a real broader perspective of wonder and joy.

It brought to mind Psalm 19.

KNUTSON: God declares his knowledge in the heavens. It’s such a powerful way that he can communicate to us and connect with us. So just enjoying that gift he gives us of beauty.

But the night sky is disappearing from our view. Knutson noticed the seriousness of the problem when she worked at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. During night sky presentations—

KNUTSON: We could see the light pollution from Rapid City over 60 miles away.

Knutson defines “light pollution” as light that does not originate from the sun, moon, stars, or other natural sources. On a clear night—we should be able to see about 45-hundred stars. In a city, it’s more like 30.

That motivated her to make personal changes in her family—

KNUTSON: We use the off switch a lot.

—and raise awareness in her community. When she ran a business in Rapid City, she purposely used timers and dimmers. And didn’t feel the need to advertise at 3:00 a.m.

KNUTSON: Our signage would not be lit up at night.

Business and commercial lighting aren’t the only culprits. The trend of landscape decorating contributes to the problem, too.

KNUTSON: People are decorating the sides of their houses with light, their trees, their flower beds, their gardens, their yards, just to dress it up with light.

Knutson recommends turning off those lights. Or using motion sensors. Well-placed lighting helps, too. Beams aimed where needed to serve a clear purpose. Warm-colored bulbs that are not too bright.

WELSH: A lot of lightning is just really unnecessary. It causes problems.

Ed Welsh is a ranger at Badlands National Park in South Dakota. During a night sky program at the amphitheater, Welsh explained how to find the Milky Way.

WELSH: Sagittarius is another fun one to point out.We always point out the teapot because teapots are easier to see and recognize because they’re real! If you see the smoke coming up from the teapot, that’s the Milky Way.

Eighty percent of people who live in North America can no longer see it. At Badlands, you can. The park has committed to certain education, policies, and protections. For example, the outdoor path to the amphitheater at Badlands was illuminated with red lighting. It doesn’t mess with night vision.

WELSH: White light, it resets. Sometimes it takes people 20 minutes to reacclimate to a dark sky.

Many national parks are certified dark sky places.

KNUTSON: It’s really difficult to find a pristine, unaltered night environment.

There are also certified dark sky cities. In 2001, Flagstaff, Arizona, was named the first. The dark sky program also certifies towns and municipalities. Knutson says that’s the ideal—instead of the need to drive to a far off place for a spectacular sky.

KNUTSON: It’s the backyard access that’s so enjoyable when you can actually go out to a place near you.

In addition to enjoyment, dark skies will help the environment and wildlife, even human health—not only the health of our bodies, the health of our souls.

KNUTSON: It zooms us out of our daily problems in a beautiful way that draws us out of ourselves into a connectedness. Over ages, the heritage and culture of what are the stories of the constellations and how people navigated the seas by constellations and we used it as our map and we’re just less connected to nature, to one another that when we step back a bit, it gives us a lot bigger perspective.

The stars haven’t gone anywhere. They’re not endangered or extinct. They’re simply waiting for us to flip off our switches and shift our gaze.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Badlands National Park.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 9th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, WORLD Opinions contributor Ted Kluck reflects on dorm rooms, interior design, and unrealistic expectations.

TED KLUCK: When I moved into my college dorm room in the mid-1990s I arrived with a couple of bags of clothes, a few posters, an old black-and-white television…oh, and a few pieces of wood to build a bunk bed.

We all lived in the same rectangular cell and used the same utilitarian community bathroom down the hall. It was absolutely disgusting most of the time. Our rooms each bore some semblance of our personalities but were nothing special—and I went to college with rich kids. We all had the same university-issued desks, the same university-issued analog phone, and a closet. If you were really clever, you’d put the TV in the closet to save space and situate your gross futon underneath the bunk to create a so-called “study area” where we really just played Bill Walsh Football on a Sega Genesis.

Needless to say, nobody went to our university for the nice rooms. The utilitarian aesthetic was part of the charm. It had a bit of a social-strata-leveling effect—whether your dad was a renowned vascular surgeon, a pastor, or a mechanic, your room was basically trash.

In this regard, my college experience was a lot more like my dad’s in the 1960s than my son’s—who just graduated. Many of his classmates operated under the spell of “DormFluencers.” They give out advice, selling dorm-related products of all kinds, and even doing personalized design appointments to help teens and their parents stave off institutional blasé—creating the dorm room of their very special dreams.

What happened after my generation went to college in gross dorm rooms in the 1990s, was that we got married, had kids, and then set about spoiling them rotten. We wrapped them in existential bubble wrap, making sure they never failed, they were never hurt or disappointed, they always got “A’s,” and apparently, surrounded by awesome dorm rooms. In return we now throw up our collective hands in exasperation when they call us, sobbing, after some big meanie of a professor has the absolute audacity to give them a “B.”

You see, what my generation has done—with its obsession of perfecting the imperfect dorm room—is create an expectation in our children that their college experiences will be perfect. Even though the very thing that was charming and noteworthy about our own college experiences was the fact that they were fabulously imperfect! We had bad dates. Our outfits were tacky and dumb. We didn’t love every professor, and the professors, in turn, didn’t always love us. We got “B’s” sometimes and lived to tell about it. Our comforters didn’t match the upholstery on our garage-sale Futons and it didn’t matter. Also, our parents basically didn’t care. Because what they sought to build in us was a sense of independence, which they rightly thought might serve us a little in the years to follow.

And because the rooms themselves weren’t perfect havens of rest we were forced to actually interact. And for most of us, those interactions were—in the end—the most valuable thing we got out of the four-year experience. Because of the communal bathrooms, I would always pause to flex my triceps in the skinny mirror belonging to a theology major in a room so neat you could eat off the floor. I figured I should actually say hello to him one day, and we’ve been talking pretty much non-stop for the last 30 years.

Because college in the 1990s wasn’t an exercise in customer service, it actually served us with best friends, character, and a little grit.

I’m Ted Kluck.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Washington Wednesday. Hunter Baker will join us and we’ll get his perspective on the Senate confirmation logjam, and other capital controversies. And the Savannah Bananas minor-league baseball, fun to watch, fun to say, we’ll meet one of the ballplayers mixing viral stunts with a deeper message. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “And now, O sons, listen to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it.” —Proverbs 8:32, 33

Go now in grace and peace.

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