California’s controversial Prop 8 (the ban on same-sex marriage) has now been struck down as unconstitutional, but ballot initiatives themselves can have lasting effects even if they’re unsuccessful. This article illustrates how and why the campaigns impact the targeted groups. Using community interviews from 2008, the authors show that the fight for the measure made gay people feel excluded and unequal, but also gave friends and family a moment to rally around their loved ones in opposition to the ballot initiative.

Okay, it’s obvious but our recommendation for Valentine’s Day is Ann Swidler’s Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (2001). This SocImages post from a couple of years back provides a nice intro and an array of illustrative illustrations.

Two days later, everyone’s still talking about the Super Bowl ads. This classic book is great resource for putting these pitches in perspective: Schudson argues that advertising is both a much more complicated and a much less successful enterprise than is often realized. In fact, he writes, the “success” of a marketing campaign is often driven by contingent, contextual factors as much as the ads themselves. For further reading, the second edition of Schudson’s The Sociology of News is also out now.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation recently withdrew its grant funding for a Planned Parenthood program that provided over 170,000 clinical breast exams annually—and the move spiked a severe backlash, including threats of resignation from a number of Komen’s own board members. But it’s not the first time the politics of pink have come into question (nor will it be the last). Today’s reading list item will help provide nuance and context as you watch the Komen kerfuffle unfold in the coming days.

In a way, we can simply let The Nation’s review do the work on why you should read this book. David Scheffer writes:

I have long awaited the day when empirical research would help make the case for why the pursuit of international justice over the last two decades has been a worthy instrument not only of punishment, but also of deterrence. Now that day has arrived with Kathryn Sikkink’s important book. It fills a yawning gap in the literature of atrocity crimes.

But should reinforcement be necessary, let us add that The Justice Cascade is great scholarship gaining the wide—and glowing—reviews it deserves.

Prof. Penny Edgell at the U of M uses this insightful book in her sociology of culture class because the author takes on the talk show’s success as part of a culture of pain and suffering (and the power to transcend that suffering and victimization). Along the way, Illouz draws on many social scientific theories to explore why Oprah and her eponymous show were so popular for so long. Appropriate reading for Ms. Winfrey’s birthday!

This article, published online in advance, makes a convincing case that climate change could become a driving force of crime rates over the next century. Agnew argues that changes in climate—heat, extreme weather events, food/water shortages—are likely to increase crime by increasing strain and conflict, weakening social supports and social controls, and increasing criminal opportunities.

As the national conversation takes shape around racial coding in politics (this time around, it’s Newt Gingrich and the “food stamp president”), The Race Card is a particularly useful text. Mendelberg uses the famous Willie Horton ads from the 1988 election as her jumping-off point into the murky pool of rhetoric, race, and politics.

A public speaking engagement Friday night found me invoking this text as I discussed a 1980s photo of an infamous Minneapolis streetcorner. In the grand tradition of urban sociology, Sidewalk introduces the workings of life and commerce of New York streets (as well as to dozens of images from Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Ovie Carter). The book remains as relevant for students and scholars today as it does for, well, a south Minneapolis art gallery crowd on a snowy weekend night.

One of the main points of this 2009 book is that, in spite of frequent political allusions to “class warfare,” Americans—even rank-and-file Republicans—have both a reasonable awareness of inequality and a desire to minimize it through policy. As Occupy Wall Street and other movements continue alongside election season, it will be interesting to see how inequality takes shape as a voters’ issue.