Axis Conversations

Gen Z hits the track (and the tracking apps), a new Lord of the Flies adaptation hits home, and pop songstresses say they are manifesting their dream lives.
Resource of the Week: Faith and Life Survey
→ Click here to watch our video about manifesting.
In Other News:
Teen boys and young men are turning to injectable peptide stacks in order to achieve physical transformations and faster muscle recovery, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), in a trend being fueled by looksmaxxing culture. The latest Gen Z trend is the comeback of the hacky sack. Teens are starting clubs at schools, making TikToks about their newest hobby, and the footbags are already selling out in stores. Winning out over MrBeast, LeBron James, and Taylor Swift, the celebrity young people want to emulate most is Zendaya, who came in second to "none of the above". With age verification requirements on the rise, some kids are fooling age-checking technology with a fake mustache. Subnautica 2, the sequel to Subnautica, a quiet hit about crafting, exploring, and avoiding giant leviathans in an underwater world, releases this week in early access.
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Jen Pollock Michel is the award-winning author of six books: A Rule for the Rest of US, Teach Us to Want (Christianity Today's Book of the Year), Keeping Place, Surprised by Paradox (Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award of Merit—Beautiful Orthodoxy), A Habit Called Faith, and In Good Time (Canada's Word Guild Book of the Year Award). 
Jen is a sought-after contributor to publications like Christianity Today, The Christian Century, The Gospel Coalition, Mockingbird, and The Dispatch, among others. She is also a first-year mentor in Whitworth University's MFA in Creative Writing program, and she travels to speak at churches, conferences, and retreats. Over the past several years, she has been teaching rule-of-life workshops to hundreds of people across various life stages. The mother of five children, she is married to Ryan, and they live in Cincinatti, Ohio.
→ Click here to preorder A Rule For the Rest of Us, which will be published in September.
🎧 Listen / Follow / Connect
→ Become a monthly donor today, join the Table.
→ Check out the podcast now on our YouTube Channel!
→ Get your question on Ask Axis! Send in your questions to [email protected].
→ For more Axis resources, go to axis.org.

Three Big Conversations:
The jury is out for The Devil Wears Prada 2- 06:18
The Met Gala made people mad for different reasons - 21:00
Moms are ready to organize—so they can boycott school events- 29:06
Slang of the Week: "Chud"- 1:28
In Other News: - 42:58
The Savannah Bananas, an "exhibition baseball" team that includes comedy and choreographed dances in games of what they call Banana Ball, played in front of 102,000 fans this past Saturday with a cameo from the Dude Perfect team. Angel Studios' new adaptation of Animal Farm (paywall) hit theaters this past weekend, uniting George Orwell's classic critique of totalitarianism with fart jokes and other trappings of modern kids' movies. Scalpers are purchasing the new Pokémon Pop-Tarts from Target and selling them for up to eight times their worth (with their original price being $2.89 per box of 12). After Justin Bieber's performance at Coachella, he became the artist with the most monthly listeners on Spotify, with just over 141 million monthly listeners as of this week. While the Taylor Swifts and Harry Styleses of the world may still get away with charging obscene prices for concert tickets, many other artists (like Post Malone and Kid Cudi) are also trying to increase sale prices—and then often cancelling concerts after low sales.
🎧 Listen / Follow / Connect
→ Become a monthly donor today, join the Table.
→ Check out the podcast now on our YouTube Channel!
→ Get your question on Ask Axis! Send in your questions to [email protected].
→ For more Axis resources, go to axis.org.

The jury is out for The Devil Wears Prada 2, the Met Gala made people mad for different reasons, and moms are ready to organize—so they can boycott school events.
Slang of the Week: "Chud"
In Other News:
The Savannah Bananas, an "exhibition baseball" team that includes comedy and choreographed dances in games of what they call Banana Ball, played in front of 102,000 fans this past Saturday with a cameo from the Dude Perfect team. Angel Studios' new adaptation of Animal Farm (paywall) hit theaters this past weekend, uniting George Orwell's classic critique of totalitarianism with fart jokes and other trappings of modern kids' movies. Scalpers are purchasing the new Pokémon Pop-Tarts from Target and selling them for up to eight times their worth (with their original price being $2.89 per box of 12). After Justin Bieber's performance at Coachella, he became the artist with the most monthly listeners on Spotify, with just over 141 million monthly listeners as of this week. While the Taylor Swifts and Harry Styleses of the world may still get away with charging obscene prices for concert tickets, many other artists (like Post Malone and Kid Cudi) are also trying to increase sale prices—and then often cancelling concerts after low sales.
🎧 Listen / Follow / Connect
→ Become a monthly donor today, join the Table.
→ Check out the podcast now on our YouTube Channel!
→ Get your question on Ask Axis! Send in your questions to [email protected].
→ For more Axis resources, go to axis.org.

Parenting right now just feels… different.
We're doing it in the middle of smartphones, social media, and nonstop input. We're thinking about safety, screen time, mental health, cyberbullying… all of it, all at once aaand probably even before 9am.

So this question keeps coming up: is it actually harder to raise kids now, or was it just a different kind of hard back then?
Did previous generations have more freedom because they weren't monitoring devices or even getting pulled into doomscrolling themselves? Or were they carrying a weight we might underestimate? Less support, less language for mental health, less flexibility at work?
 
🎧 Listen / Follow / Connect
→ Become a monthly donor today, join the Table.
→ Check out the podcast now on our YouTube Channel!
→ Get your question on Ask Axis! Send in your questions to [email protected].
→ For more Axis resources, go to axis.org.