For the next couple of Roundups, I’d like to welcome TSP’s graduate editor Hollie Nyseth Brehm. She’ll be covering for me as I head off on a 3-hour cruise. Actually, there’s no cruise. But I do expect to find myself washed up on a beach for a stretch, so I won’t be rounding up the site until… October 11th? Craziness. For now, one last hurrah before heading for the airport (yet again).

Features:

“Environmental Inequalities,” by Hollie Nyseth Brehm and David Pellow. We think of environmental damage as infesting specific sites (Erin Brokovich, anyone?) or being a fully global problem (ozone layer: we need one). Brehm and Pellow urge us to consider the ways in which environmental hazards work to more directly impact the most vulnerable global citizens.

Editors’ Desk:

“Sketch #2: Ears to the Ground,” by Doug Hartmann. Talking to the media is daunting; it’s hard to speak in soundbites when scholars are used to 40 pages of nuanced analysis to make a point. What do social scientists get out of the exchange? Turns out: more data.

Citings & Sightings:

“Strong and Stable: Personal and Civic Lives,” by John Ziegler. New work reported in the Atlantic measures voting patterns and finds that personal tragedies along with other life disruptions can keep people away from the polls. Is a stable life the first step to civic participation?

“A Fitting Tribute,” by Erin Hoekstra. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, extends her work on inequality into wider realms in a reflection on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.

Teaching TSP:

“Guest Post: Environmental Inequality, Class, and Life Chances,” by Marie Berry. Extending Brehm and Pellow’s new work (above) to discussions of “life chances,” or “the odds that an individual will obtain the resources and opportunities necessary for a long and successful life.”

A Few from the Community Pages:

• New Books in Sociology. “Superdads,” with author Gayle Kaufmann. 
• Sociological Images. The beat stays catchy, the words stay sketchy. SocImages keeps unblurring those lines with the help of Project Unbreakable. And while we’re pissed off, guess what you can’t have in movies? No, it’s not explicit violence or abuse, it’s wrinkles. Dirty damn lady wrinkles.
• Cyborgology. Robin James on the real meaning of time: it’s not money, it’s value.