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Books, Big Aspirations, and Basic Social Facts
The Star Trib keeps it general. We’re hoping to get specific. Welcome back! Wait, many of you never went anywhere. You’ve been reading TSP all summer. You guys have been great. It was me who’s been on...
View ArticleNotes on Race, Football, and Spanking
The news out of the NFL has been brutal these past few days, but certainly good evidence of my long-held conviction that sport is a powerful and important “contested terrain” for all manner of social...
View ArticleMore on Spanking: Race, Men, and the South
If you were at all interested in the ideas about race, football, and spanking I passed on yesterday, then you have to read this, from the next editor of Contexts magazine, Phil Cohen’s Family...
View ArticleCohen on Distracted Driving, Distracting Data, and the Dangers of Driving
Another quintessential Philip Cohen take-down appeared this weekend. Cohen’s target this time was Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s new book, A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of...
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Welcoming Contexts’ New Editors
The ASA kindly asked me to write up a little welcome for the incoming Contexts editorial team for the most recent issue of Footnotes. Since TSP is the online home of contexts.org, I’m a former...
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Face Work from Zellweger to Goffman
The Daily Mail compared photos of Zellweger last week, aged 45, with photos from 2001, when she was 31. Renee Zellweger received a ton of attention last week, not all of it wanted. The core of the...
View ArticleFacebook, Feelings, and Flight Attendants
Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart was the focus of my “Great Books” graduate seminar last Friday. It is a beautifully written, painstakingly conceived, and imaginatively argued volume–one of the...
View ArticleRace and the Regulation of Voting
If this headline caught your eye, you need to read: “The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement,” a recent New York Times editorial by Brent Staples. It is a pointed and powerful piece by a great...
View ArticleFerguson, the Morning After
What a night. What a disturbing, terrifying, disconcerting night. A questionable grand jury process. Explanations and pushback. Protests. Police, lots of police. Media everywhere. Some looting and...
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Ferguson and Football
Three of the five Rams players taking the field. It happened Sunday afternoon. I tried to avoid writing about it, not wanting to be distracted from the bigger picture or detract from what I thought—and...
View ArticlePaying Tribute
You know he was a sociology major, right? I’m referring, of course, to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights leader whose legacy we Americans celebrate with a national holiday every year this...
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The New Yorker: Champion of Serious Sociology
Images excerpted from New Yorker artists Simon Prades, Leo Espinosa, and Tony Rodriguez. We sociologists tend to have a chip on our shoulder. We tend to think—not without substantial evidence, of...
View ArticleContexts: New Issue, New Site
Attention, friends-of-TSP, attention: Philip Cohen and Syed Ali have taken the reins at the ASA’s Contexts magazine, and their first issue—plus site redesign by Todd Van Arsdale and Jon Smajda—has hit...
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Midwest Sociological Society Meetings: Register Now!
Only two days left to get the early-bird registration fee for the upcoming Midwest Sociological Society meetings in Kansas City, March 26-29th. The meetings, for which I serve as Program Chair are...
View ArticleOur Hero
Adam Gopnik is at it again. This time our favorite writer from The New Yorker uses recent public debates about poverty and foreign policy to talk about that oh-so-sociological concept of norms. Gopnick...
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Holy Week, Hoops, and Hoosier State Law
What to feature on the home page this week? How about some research on religion and society, since Passover and Easter are coming up? Or perhaps we should do something on LGBTQ discrimination, given...
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Tie Day: R.I.P. Professor Gusfield
For Gusfield: ending the semester right. When I first started as a college professor, my father, a play-by-the-rules parochial school teacher and administrator his entire working life, always wanted...
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Grandmothers on the World Stage
Edmon de Haro’s Atlantic.com depiction of Clinton’s age advantage. “Why Age May Be Hillary’s Secret Weapon” is the cover tease for a provocative little piece in the new issue of The Atlantic (June...
View ArticleSSN on SCOTUS Health Care Decision
With all of the attention (rightfully) focused on the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision, we’re a bit worried that the ruling about health care policy–one of the signature programs of Obama’s...
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Getting Culture: TSP’s Newest Book
Now available! With Getting Culture, the fifth in our series of paperback readers with W.W. Norton & Co., it feels like we’ve really hit our stride. The new volume features work on the “stuff” of...
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