Reporting live from a snowbank, I’m here to share this week’s picks from The Society Pages! Send provisions—or at least snowblowers—if you can. Or, take a cue from us and hunker down to devour the latest spotlight on the Scholars Strategy Network website: “Lone Star Debacle: The High Price of Obstructing Health Reform.” As their introduction puts it:

Almost a quarter of Texans do not have health insurance—and 13% of all uninsured Americans live in the state. Millions could gain coverage through the Affordable Care Act. But ultra-conservative Texas authorities are doing all they can to block and sabotage reform – hurting health and wellbeing and imposing unnecessary costs on hospitals, community clinics, and state finances.

SSN scholars have looked closely at the extra and unnecessary costs Texas people and health care institutions are paying because of the state’s decisions to obstruct exchange enrollments and refuse new federal funds to expand Medicaid. The picture is not pretty—and the juxtaposition of America’s two largest states, California and Texas, dramatizes the impact of state-level cooperation versus obstruction on the progress of health reform.

The Editors’ Desk:

“A Free Subscription for Nicholas Kristof,” by Chris Uggen. Agreeing that social scientists need to get their data into the public policy arena more forcefully and explicably, Chris Uggen offers NYTimes’ Nick Kristof—and the  rest of the world—a free lifetime subscription to The Society Pages and other open-access arenas.

“Vol. 1, No. 1—Sociological Science,” by Chris Uggen. “No one likes an apple polisher,” but everyone likes a shout-out. A welcome to new kids Sociological Science and Social Currents.

Contexts Magazine:

The latest issue, Winter 2014, is now online, and for one month only, you can download every single article for free! We suggest starting with the cover, by Scholars Strategy Network member and Yale professor Marcus Anthony Hunter, “Black Philly after The Philadelphia Negro.”

Citings & Sightings:

“McSenior Center,” by Andrew Wiebe. With other venues closing, Mickey D’s becomes a hot spot for the aged hob-nobber.

“Almost Human,” by John Ziegler. Kinship and community with our four-legged friends.

Reading List:

“Whiteness: From Worst to First,” by Stephen Suh. New research shows assimilation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least in high-tech hubs where whiteness has come to be associated with “laziness” and “academic mediocrity.”

Scholars Strategy Network:

“How Polarization Reduces the Ranks of Republican Women in Congress,” by Danielle Thomsen.

There’s Research on That!

“Race and Self-Defense in the Courtroom,” by Evan Stewart. Who gets to claim what defense? Scholars give us the scoop.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Sociological Images helps show how corporations can change cultural preferences with a look at Gillette’s response to the resurgence of beards—they’re pushing “manscaping” by using sex and insecurity to problematize the au naturel body.
• Girl w/ Pen! takes a look at paid family leave and finds it wanting in the wake of the firing of a Whole Foods employee who needed to attend to a family emergency.
• Sociology Lens finds a pernicious ethnocentrism and amped up nationalism in the spectacle of world sport (USA! USA! What? Whoops.)