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Social media feeds are like carnival money booths: we snatch away greedily as the links swirl past, but we’re rarely enriched by the experience. In the rush to process so much so quickly, we’ve become lousy filters for one another – recommending “great articles” that ain’t so great by social science standards.

Many rapidly-circulating stories offer grand assertions but paltry evidence about the social world. It seems silly to direct much intellectual horsepower at every li’l item whooshing past (why, that Upworthy post needs an interrupted time-series design!). So people just hit the “thumbs up” button if they like the sentiment and send it down the line. Passing along such blurbs can seem like a modern equivalent to the kindly/nosy relative who sent us Dear Abby clippings in the newsprint era. Yet there’s a danger to indiscriminate recommendations that can subvert our authority as experts. In my case, I’ve developed a set of policy preferences on crime and economic issues, which I adjust in response to new evidence. If I start endorsing weak studies just because they affirm my preferences or prejudices, then I’d rightly be considered a hack. more...

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.

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Very cool to see the first issue of Sociological Science, a new open-access journal for primary research articles. While I should disclose that I’m a consulting editor for the publication, I should also disclose that I can’t claim any credit for the good stuff therein:

Nicholas Kristof called out professors today, saying we’ve “fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” While the snarkmeister in me is tempted to return serve — couldn’t one say the same thing about the Times? — I actually concur with Mr. Kristof on several key points.

To paraphrase, he cites dreadful writing, a lack of political and ideological diversity, a dearth of public intellectuals, obstructionist professional associations, little social media presence, “hidden-away” journals, and a reward structure that privileges technique and abstraction over relevance, clear thinking, and broad dissemination.  In truth, we at TSP make largely the same claims in pitching our li’l project to authors, readers, and potential partners. We use different words, of course, but the whole point of TSP is to help bring social science to broader visibility and influence. This mission drives all the choices we’ve made: to stay open-access, to put our resources into a best-in-the-business professional editor and site designer, and to partner with other groups who “get” our mission and vision — like WW Norton, the Scholars Strategy Network, and Contexts magazine.

While many academics feel marginalized by mainstream media and society, Mr. Kristof points out that we’re also self-marginalizing. As a scholar, an editor, and an academic administrator, I’d agree that at least some of our injuries are self-inflicted.  For example, I was gratified when Attorney General Holder used some of my felon voting research last Monday. We’d undertaken the project with both science and policy in mind, in hopes of doing good sociology that would also encourage the sort of  national conversation now taking place. When the Times wrote a characteristically smart op-ed on Tuesday, friends asked why they linked to an old working paper rather than the polished journal article. This is likely because the article remains “hidden away” behind a paywall. I suppose they could have secured permissions from the authors, the journals, and the professional association that owns the journals, but we all tend to work on timelines that are a wee bit more protracted than the speech-on-Monday/op-ed-on-Tuesday news cycle.

While we can’t solve all of the problems of academic self-marginalization, we can at least offer Nicholas Kristof a free subscription to TheSocietyPages.org. And we’ll continue to extend the same offer to every one of the million-plus readers stopping by every month.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails. more...

This week we unveiled our new TSP on Topic pages, where you can find a curated selection of our content in six major areas. The left hand side of each page is content directly from TSP’s departments, including features, interviews, and other goodies, and the right highlights pieces from our “Community Pages”—our suite of lively, engaging blogs that reveal the sociological imagination at work. Links are on the homepage—have at ’em! more...

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This week on The Society Pages, we tackled drug addiction and harm reduction, body image and stigma, Twitter as a public forum for shaming, marriage equality and health, and the thin line between The Bachelor‘s Juan Pablo and Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson. Plus much more (as always)!

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This week, on The Editors’ Desk*, Doug Hartmann enumerated and tried to define** six elements of the sociological worldview. Elsewhere on The Society Pages, our many contributors worked to demonstrate that worldview—enjoy!

*That’s right: we all share one desk. It’s adorable. Possibly even adorkable.

**See what I did there? The man never met a conjunction he didn’t like. more...

At the beginning of this academic year, Chris and I set a goal: we wanted The Society Pages to do a better job of representing the field of sociology  as a whole. This aim is driven by our sense that the site does a great job in certain areas and specialties (race, gender, and sexuality, for example), but not so much in others. In addition, much of our content tends to be more oriented toward commentary, advocacy, and critique than the facts, empirical data, explanations, and discoveries which are so crucial to the research orientation and contributions of the field. We’ve made some great progress on these fronts, especially with building the topical beat pages (which we will unveil soon), revitalizing the Reading List, and launching the new There’s Research on That! feature. But there is still work to be done. In addition to these innovations—actually, as a supplement to them—we want to push for a renewed emphasis on developing content and material that does a better job of identifying, illustrating, and advocating for distinctly sociological approaches and perspectives to the study of human life. more...

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From racial codes to technology design, “bland erotic pudding,” and why college is still worth the cost (but maybe shouldn’t be)—all that and a bag of weed (well, an article on the uneven policing of possession) on this week’s Friday Roundup! more...