• A recent opinion piece in The Washington Post argued that the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will ignore calls to ban assault weapons because he is a Christian nationalist. The piece cites multiple studies by Samuel L. Perry (Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma) and colleagues that show that Christian nationalists tend to oppose federal gun control and favor “righteous violence” (specifically the idea that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns”).
  • El País ran a story on sexualized social media content. The article quotes Carolina Are (Research Fellow at Northumbria University Newcastle; PhD in Criminology) on how social media shows or hides women’s bodies: “The most artificial and more mainstream form of involuntary sexualization is represented by celebrities and pushed by the algorithm. But more personal content and content from people who come from more marginal contexts are censored. So, in the end, we see that sexualized content reflects power dynamics.
  • The Washington Post ran a story on the increasing number (an 85% increase over the past decade) of Americans claiming Indigenous heritage in the U.S. Census. Carolyn Liebler (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota) is quoted, as attributing the increase to “very important changes in the race question and especially in the way they coded the responses that they received.” In 2020, the Census included a free-response line for each racial category checkbox. Individuals who noted indigenous heritage in the free-response lines were counted, even if they did not check the “American Indians and Alaska Natives” box.
  • A recent study by Amin Ghaziani (Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia) and Andy Holmes (PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto) examined recent coming-out experiences of LGBTQ adults in Vancouver. They found that “neither a narrative of struggle and success nor emancipation fully captures what it’s like to come out today. Instead, we found that people are deeply ambivalent.” The study was covered by SciTechDaily.