The New York Times ran a story on the removal or design changes of public benches as a part of a “decades-long shift of reinventing the public bench into something that doesn’t welcome the public at all.” Michael Benediktsson (Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College) commented that this trend connects to pre-1970s anit-vagrancy laws that allowed police officers to arrest people of color and people experiencing homelessness who were utilizing public spaces. Benediktsson commented that once these laws were deemed unconstitutional, “that’s when you see more of a turn to hostile urban design and planning as a means of achieving the same objective.”
Ash Watson (Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney) described the consequences of the digital divide in Australia in an NewsCop article. Nearly “6 million Australians have difficulty accessing the internet; this spans physical access, affording the internet and being confident and capable with their own abilities,” Watson described. As more services–including banking, news, housing applications, and government services–move online, many Australians are getting left behind. “The big consequence is that people can struggle to fully participate and feel that they don’t belong in Australian society as a result,” Watson said.
The Atlantic ran a story addressing a “surprisingly contentious” question: does money make parenting easier? In 2023 a Pew Research Center survey found that lower-income parents were more likely to state that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding most of the time. Many media commentators focused on this singular data point, claiming that parenting was most difficult for wealthier parents (despite another finding in the Pew data that lower-income parents are more likely to say that parenting is stressful). Jennifer Glass (Sociology Professor at the University of Texas at Austin) commented that “there’s simply no data on mental health, subjective well-being, or happiness that I have ever seen showing [that wealthy parents struggle with parenthood more].” Rather, Glass’s research shows that higher income and education improve happiness for parents.
Equal Times interviewed Alex Wood (Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Cambridge) on the rise in self-employment and freelance work since 2000. Wood explains that freelancing is often more common where there are weaker labor protections, service-based economies, and digital labor platforms available. Wood also describes a shift in the corporate mindset toward prioritizing short-term profit: “If you leave it to employers, to firms, they will choose the low road, the easy option, because they are focused on short-term profitability and short-term share price, even though that’s detrimental to them in the long term.”
The Washington Post ran an article about shifting trends in cosmetic surgery–particularly a rise in breast implant removals and breast implants of smaller sizes, mirroring a broader cultural trend toward thinness. Alka Menon (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University) explained that “cosmetic surgery moves on a trend model. Minimalism is the name of the game now.” Menon also commented on how social media accelerates cycles of beauty trends: “What took decades to shift from Marilyn Monroe to Kate Moss now happens in a few years. The algorithm determines what version of beauty you’re exposed to.”
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