(Book available here.)
1. If you are going to test a survey in an obviously dangerous public housing project, do not have your first question be arguably the worst survey question I have ever seen. (here)
2. If you hear a person planning a drive-by shooting of another person, you are under a legal–as well [...]
To answer foodgirl’s question: absolutely. To pull said plug from a long comment thread:
My dissertation is about the foie gras controversies in the US and France and looks at the nexus of movements, markets, and the state in defining morality and virtue. My other project was about ‘virtuous food’ movements - the connections and disjunctures [...]
Belle Lettre asks me what the word “normative” means in sociology. Norms figured heavily in my lecture on “Morals” just last week, so why not:
I’ve said it’s the great thing about prediction markets: either you can accept their implied probabilities as correct, or you can show that your disagreement is not just prattle by trying to make money off their “errors.” A friend of mine, “J.,” has been sulking around complaining that the rest of the world does [...]
I just went along with a major report that uses the word Caucasian throughout (along with African American). I personally hate the word Caucasian, I associate it with scientific racism*, it seems smarmy to me, it makes my skin crawl. But I know a lot of people use it if they think the [...]
That idea of Jeremy’s where grad students ask questions about things they’ve heard about the discipline, the job market, navigating grad school, etc.? And then folks who’ve been around the block chime in and answer. Wasn’t that going to be a regular feature of this blog? I really liked the idea. It was first suggested [...]
Did anyone else watch the State of the Union address last night?
The contents of my campus mailbox today:
Corridor of Shame: The Neglect of South Carolina’s Rural Schools
Cruel and Unusual: Sentencing 13- and 14-Year-Old Children to Die in Prison
The Pacific Sociologist: January 2008
There, I said it. Beyond my friendship with Colin Jerolmack (”the pigeon dude”) who has guided me to respect the animals and society section, I just read Mark Bittman’s article in the NYTimes, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler” and thought to myself, “sociologists should work more on this relationship”. The Times has been doing a series of [...]
Back when I was an undergrad, one would hear references to the “Holy Trinity” of sociology, meaning “Weber, Marx, Durkheim” (with the order perhaps switched around in ways that might or might not be telling about the speaker). Sometime between then and my first years as a faculty member, this changed so that when [...]
Even as scientists in the United States are calling for the presidential candidates to participate in a debate about science, and to take back the role of Science Adviser from its current status as a travesty, Canada announces that it will eliminate its National Science Adviser position. That is moving in the wrong direction.
What’s with me? Don’t I have any ideas for posts? Actually, I have a great idea! Yesterday I read something by a sociologist that included this passage about her/his research process that I thought was so implausible and conveniently self-serving that the post calling it out practically writes itself. But, for [...]
The New York Review of Books has a piece reviewing ten books on blogs. Not great, but kinda interesting. We need to write more about superheros.
Overheard: “It’s a weird coincidence. If you put all my positions on major political issues together, I’d say that I am farther to the left than x% of the American population, which means that I’m to the right of x% of the population of American sociologists.”
People often say that every talk is a job talk. I think this is a reasonable approach. And to be clear, “job talk” refers to more than the presentation itself. It’s about the time spent at the host institution overall. You want to make a good impression when you go and visit a school. Making [...]
This may be the wrong network for this question, but here’s a try. In general, the terms “Black” and “African American” are considered non-derogatory among people in that group, with some preferring one and others the other and many people using them interchangeably. By contrast, many White young people are [...]
You pick up a journal. You look through it. You know that what’s in there is “sociology”. But then you think to yourself, “I don’t recognize this stuff as what I do. It seems like an entirely different discipline; one I’m not remotely interested in!” It happens to me more often than I should probably [...]
That is what this essay by journalist Michael Valpy on the decline of religious identity and attendance in Canada implies. The article goes through several explanations of why Canadians have become sharply less religious since the 1960s. Rejecting other explanations, such as the postmodern condition and declines in voluntary participation in general, the article focuses [...]
From a video by the Stanford Environmental Health and Safety group (actual video not available without an ID):
“So clean your toaster, or get your mom to come here and live with you.”
And no, it’s not just on some obscure video one can only view with a campus ID , it also got blasted to tens [...]
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