The Tesla Rocket Car, Friction in Teens’ Faith, and Why Gendered Messaging Often Backfires

Cars are (briefly) flying, teens who engage with their faith wrestle more with hard topics, and why championing a female winner’s gender might not inspire more girls to compete. But first: 

Slang of the Week – “Diff”

“Diff” is short for “different” or “difference.” You might hear your teen say someone is “built diff” or a song “hits diff.” This means that person or that song is just better—on a higher level. The term “skill diff” is a way to highlight the skill difference between two players in a video game or a sport. So if a soccer match ends and the winning team is talking about a “goalie diff,” they’re highlighting how much better their goalie played compared to their opponents’. 

And now for our three conversations..

1. Flying Blind

What it is: In a live demonstration, Tesla debuted its newest Roadster vehicle—a car that can accelerate from 0-60 mph in less than a second and, for brief periods, fly through the air. 

Why it’s not coming to a dealer near you: The Roadster certainly made an eye-popping entrance, careening vertically through its own smoke, barrel-rolling horizontally, and landing gently on its thrusters. Footage of the cars’ debut made the viral rounds on social media. But it’s not a “flying car,” at least not yet—it can only stay airborne for about five seconds before its thrusters are depleted, and there is no clear answer on when this “Rocket” version of the vehicle will even begin production. The practical implications of owning such a vehicle are just as foggy; as one YouTube commenter put it, “Great, now my mechanic needs to learn rocket science.” 

Continue the conversation: What’s one invention you hope will be easily available in the future? 

2. Friction and Faith 

What it is: A report from Barna and Christ In Youth found that the more engaged teens are in their faith, the more challenging they find it to integrate their faith into their daily lives.

Why it’s counterintuitive: In a survey of 1,500 U.S. teenagers, Barna found that about a fourth (27%) of all teens struggle to connect what they believe about God to real-life situations. But for what they call “Faith-Activated” teens—those who scored high across areas of lived-out Christian faith—that disconnect actually jumps to 43%. As teens begin to take their faith more seriously, they become more aware of the areas of their lives where their faith is in conflict with their other beliefs, or with cultural expectations. Although it’s easy to want to resolve this tension, Barna suggests that what teens really need is someone to “keep taking those questions as seriously as they’re starting to take their faith.”

Continue the conversation: Where do you feel tension in your faith?

3. The Future May, Or May Not, Be Female

What it is: A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that gendered messaging (i.e., “Space4Women,” “Coding for Girls,” etc.) often has the opposite of its intended effect. 

How they came to this conclusion: Researchers made up a fictional activity called “Gazzer” to bypass preconceived ideas about whether men or women would naturally be better at a particular task. Participants were then either given descriptions that highlighted the winner’s gender (“A girl is the Gazzer champion”), or that highlighted the winner’s name (“Joan is the Gazzer champion”). On average, the study found that gendered messaging caused participants “…to infer lower participation by the referenced gender and, among adults, lower ability. Gendered messaging also undermined participants’ interest in the activities.” In other words, focusing on a woman’s gender tended to create mistrust about the underlying rationale and truth of the message (for both women and men)—whereas simply mentioning a woman’s name did not. What should we make of this? 

Let’s translate this one further…

Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University and the paper’s senior author,  says, “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate women’s achievements—visibility still matters. What’s counterproductive is highlighting women’s gender as the reason for celebration.” 

In other words, Cimpian thought that phrasing things less like “Isn’t it great that a woman did this?” and more like “Isn’t it great what this woman did?” might be a more effective way to encourage other women to participate—whether in “Gazzer,” or in the various jobs and disciplines it could conceivably represent. 

When Jesus was born 2000 years ago, He was born into a world that didn’t think very highly of women. In fact, in the collection of Jewish oral teachings known as the Mishnah, it was said that the testimony of those who were rabbinically accounted as robbers was as trustworthy as a woman’s testimony. (“In the majority of cases her testimony is not valid.”) 

So in Matthew 28:1-11, when He appeared to women first after His resurrection and then told them to go testify that He was back from the dead, He was purposefully setting up a head-on collision with His culture’s ideas about women. He was insisting that a woman’s testimony could be just as trustworthy as a man’s, and challenging cultural norms around women. 

Now, is this approach more or less similar to what Cimpian advocates? We’ll let you decide. But as Christians, we should care about the issues involved here—because the One we follow cares. 

For more context and nuance, check out our Roundtable podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In the meantime, here are three questions to help you continue the conversation with your teens: 

Parenting together,

Evan Barber and the Axis Team

In Other News…

1. The Nathan Fielder documentary feature film You Can See Everything, focusing on disgraced (and convicted) Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is the darling of critics and fans alike, boasting nearly perfect scores on Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and the user-review app Letterboxd (possible language in user reviews).
2. Electronic Arts is shutting down Bioware, the once-revered game studio that arguably defined the modern role-playing genre with iconic and influential games like Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect.
3. Youth baseball is becoming even more expensive, as MLB styles, complete with things like gold chains and custom gloves, are becoming the standard. Paying five figures for a travel league is just the beginning now (exasperated tone).
4. Popular YouTube crew Dude Perfect is entering into an official partnership with Disney, with some of their existing content coming to Disney+ and exclusive content being planned around Avengers: Doomsday, Star Wars, and even the Super Bowl.
5. The reign of the gummy could be at an end, with the rather dystopian-sounding “supplement strips” rising in popularity. Fans argue the strips are easier to take than pills and have less sugar than gummies. 

A note on how we use AI: At Axis, we are working hard to stay human. Every week, a small team of writers based in California, Colorado, and New York writes this newsletter. We continue to do all the writing, fact-checking, and hands-on developmental editing. We sometimes use Claude or Perplexity for preliminary research, grammar checks, and titling suggestions. All em-dashes are our own—because we love them.