A recent Cyborgology post got us thinking about NASCAR, one of the biggest sports in America. Commenter and RAND scholar David Ronfeldt points us to his own 2000 piece in the online peer-reviewed journal First Monday (“Social Science at 190MPH“) for a look at complexity theory, social network analysis, and game theory on the track, while Chris Uggen suggests this ASQ article about competitive crowding and risk taking at work in the straightaway.

In conjunction with the larger, more theoretical recommendation of Laub and Sampson’s 2001 article from our previous reading list suggestion, those interested in employment and criminal records might be particularly interested in Devah Pager’s 2003 piece in which the researcher found a prison record reduced the likelihood of a “callback” from an employer by 50% for whites and over 60% for African American job-seekers. The problem clearly goes well beyond Target and began well before last week.

Last week, the U.S.’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a revised guidance encouraging the hiring of individuals with criminal records, going so far as to urge employers to consider research on crime desistance since, as The Crime Report puts it, many often “rely on ill-informed and misguided notions about risk and recidivism.” The EEOC guidelines specifically cite this classic Laub and Sampson article.

Georg Simmel once said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. While cultural sociologist Eva Illouz’s new book might help us understand what Simmel meant, the publisher’s blurb suggests more materialist insights: “This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.”

Colleges and universities all tout the value of diversity on campus, but what’s the real payoff? This brand new study finds that in classroom discussions African American students are more likely to invoke media depictions of race/religion and describe unique personal experiences with them, thus enriching and expanding the quality of teaching and learning on these topics.

The big new blockbuster (and its paper predecessor) is chock full of sociological insight and intrigue, but among the most important and least understood themes are the relationships among authority, injustice, and consent. This classic study of Appalachia—a place with obvious parallels to Katniss Everdeen’s District 12—provides an insightful and compelling overview.

If you were at all interested in this weekend’s atheist march on Washington, you might want to take a look at this paper.

Written and researched by a Minnesota team that included Joe Gerteis, author of the recent TSP White Paper on religion and American political culture, this widely cited study was among the first to document and analyze negative public perceptions of atheists in American public life.  (For a decidedly non-academic take on the paper, see p. 61-62 of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (and So Can You!).)

As the Sanford, FL city commission voted “no confidence” in their police chief following the shooting of teen Trayvon Martin, this article is instructive in what legal scholars like Donald Black call violent “self-help”—a tactic vigilante citizens may use when they feel their government is not providing control and protection. In a classic piece, Smith and Uchida test this ideas, finding higher weapon ownership in areas in which police are perceived as ineffective and citizens report feeling vulnerable.

Today, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments in two cases regarding the possibility of life without parole as a sentence for juvenile offenders. This article reports data from polling in four states that challenges the idea that the public supports such incarceration over rehabilitation approaches for youth offenders. It remains to be seen what the Court will decide.