Can. You. Dig it?

No, there aren’t a lot of reasons to reference “The Warriors” on the Editors’ Desk. I could spin some, sure: it’s a cool cultural relic; the various gangs all try on personality and self through costume and affiliation; it involves crime, deviance, and social movements, etc. But really, I just wanted to ask Cyrus’s great rhetorical question, “Can you dig it?” Just as the Moon Runners and the Van Courtland Rangers can come together, so, too, do educators, researchers, policy makers, students, and wonderfully interested and curious people from the public here on TSP. And we definitely dig it. After the clip, check out some of this week’s latest and greatest from around the site. Hope you have as much fun reading it as we do making it.

Citings & Sightings:

“Halving it All,” by Lisa Gulya. In which sociologist Michael Kimmel takes to CNN.com to rebut the latest in “war on men” rhetoric.

“Supersize and Unionize,” by Andrew Wiebe. In which the New York Times takes notice of Fast Food Forward, a movement to unionize low-wage workers.

Reading List:

“Big Contradictions,” by Kia Heise. In which Laura Backstrom looks at two reality TV shows to get at the differences in presentations of body size—and blame—in popular media.

Teaching TSP:

“Guest-Speaker-Tweeter,” by Hollie Nyseth Brehm. In which educator Mary Chayko invites Cyborgology’s Nathan Jurgenson to join her class as a guest-tweeter and shares her classroom social media use policy in the comments.

A Few from the Community Pages:

• Public Criminology. In “Crime, Community, and Clostridium Difficile,” Chris Uggen is inspired by a lecture on bacterial balance (and a—pulls necktie—difficile problem in society), while Michelle Inderbitzen presents a word cloud created out of the reactions her students—both those who are prisoners at the Oregon State Penitentiary and those who are enrolled at Oregon State University—had to a semester studying together.
• Cyborgology. This week the cyborgs have cooked up some suggestions for that end-of-year op-ed you still need to crank out (oh, and you will need to get cranky before you start writing…), consider why our online past feels so haunting, and both clarify and complicate notions of hypervisibility and invisibility in the realm of social media.
• Sociological Images. Soc Images picks up a chilling graph created by Neal Caren (soc grads, avert your gaze!) from Scatterplot, celebrates Noam Chomsky’s birthday, sees actual life stories behind birth rate declines, and asks the always pertinent question, “What Happened to the Oldsmobile?” No really, why’s it so old and decrepit and what? That’s not what they were saying? Ohhhh.
• Backstage Sociology. The return of Monte Bute! Bute links to a radio interview extolling the achievements of his radical institution, Metro State University.

Scholars Strategy Network:

“The Prospects for Reducing Poverty Are Dismal—Unless America’s Leaders Change Course,” by Sheldon Danziger. Why doesn’t a rising tide lift all boats in today’s economy?

“Beyond Class War: Americans Want Government to Promote Equal Opportunity,” by Lawrence R. Jacobs. Americans hold tight to the conflicting values of individualism and interdependence; they hope, idealistically, for a country in which everyone earn and achieve, but they also clearly understand that the playing field is far from level.