Sociologists are uniquely positioned to pull together research and provide perspective on almost any of the major problems that confront the human species today—from climate change to terrorism and war, inequality, food scarcity, human rights, criminal justice policies. Anything. You name it, there are sociologists working on it and writing about it and helping large public audiences to understand what we are up against. I’ve believed that at least since I was editor of Contexts, and probably long before that.

One example I’ve given numerous times over the past couple of years is an article Eric Klinenberg wrote for The New Yorker in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It called attention to how unprepared most American cities are for the effects of climate change. Klinenberg’s piece was big picture and beautifully written. It also synthesized research findings from other fields (including the natural sciences) and packaged them in a way that not only made the work coherent, but really highlighted its implications for citizens and social life (for an overview from our Clippings team, click here.)

This week brings a few more wonderful examples. One comes from the most recent class of MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, Matt Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard. Writing in The New Yorker (again!—it was only about a year ago that I christened the magazine “champion of serious sociology“), Desmond helps draw our attention to the crisis in housing and evictions that is so deeply implicated in the problems of urban policy, crime, and poverty all across the country:

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focused on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.

“For many poor Americans,” he writes with authority and conviction, “eviction never ends.”

And then there’s Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis’s reborn sociology department. Drawing on the pioneering work of Arlie Hochschild (along with Minnesota’s own Jennifer Pierce and Millsaps College’s Louwanda Evans), Wingfield writes in The Atlantic about the consequences of the emotional labor done by women in the service industry, “How Service with a Smile Takes a Toll on Women.”

Writing—and writers—like this show off many things, not least of which is the synthesizing and contextualizing ability that characterizes the discipline of sociology, that enterprise I told my intro students last night is can be called the “big tent” of the social sciences.