Parking was the ostensible focus of a fascinating, revealing exchange on our Community Page Cyborgology last week. In it, Tim McCormick—a research consultant (at Stanford Media X) who works in scholarly communication, new media, and publishing—took one of our most regular and prolific TSP bloggers, Nate Jurgenson, to task for his critique of “smart parking.”

In his original post, Jurgenson suggests that, in stark contrast to its laudable intentions, smarter parking could actually create more parking problems by encouraging people to drive around even more, since the annoyance of parking won’t be quite the disincentive it is currently. Jurgenson bases his critique on what he calls the “Robert Moses Mistake”—the unintended consequences of creating more and better freeways. McCormick, in turn, argues that Jurgenson doesn’t really know much about the impetus and ideas behind smart parking, its realities as a social policy innovation, or the actual research on parking and driving among urban planners and policy makers.

We love Jurgenson’s sociologically-inspired, counter-intuitive critique of smart parking, as well as McCormick’s careful point-by-point, empirical rejoinder. Without taking sides or giving away the details, let’s just say it was a great exchange, typical of the best of sociological research and thought. more...

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon…

As this week, stretching out from Christmas to the New Year, generally is. But that isn’t to say that The Society Pages has gone dark; perhaps just a bit dusky, enjoying this still moment before the New Year comes on with its full force. Here’s a bit of what we were up to this week. more...

Happy New Year!

2012 is over, and as we looked back at what The Society Pages accomplished in that span, we realized there’s no way to choose a “Best Of.” Other sites might be up to the task, but here we’d be weighing so many factors that the results would be somewhere between utterly irrelevant to most readers and totally gut-wrenching for us. And since we do our best to avoid gut-wrenching anything, instead we’re offering up a list based on one very simple metric: the most popular post published in each area of our site this year. That is, what got the eyeballs. These might be controversial, weird, the beneficiaries of 12 months of results rather than 1 (if they happened to be published in December)… who knows? Let’s find out together. Thanks for your support, comments, readership, and curiosity! more...

‘Twas the night before break and Suzy was cranking away on a TSP piece at 7:30 pm.  When the custodian chided me for “keeping Bob Cratchit working pretty late,” I was feeling my inner Scrooge. But everybody at The Society Pages seems to work hard with good cheer. Doug and I owe many thanks: to Letta Page and Jon Smajda, for making it all both possible and beautiful; to our wonderful grad board and undergrad interns (above), for wicked-good work all over the site and behind the scenes; to our friends at WW Norton and SSN, for their inspiring vision and support; to the brilliant and prolific bloggers on our community pages; to the generous scholars who review our white papers and support us in myriad ways; and to you for giving us your precious time and attention. Happy holidays to you and yours!

(R-L) Doug Hartmann, Suzy Maves McElrath, Rahsaan Mahadeo, Kia Heise, Andrew Wiebe (Fall intern), Grad Board Editor Hollie Nyseth Brehm (semi-hiding), Sarah Shannon, Erin Hoekstra, Chris Uggen, Sarah Lageson, and Kyle Green.
(not pictured) Letta Page (behind the lens), Shannon Golden, Jon Smajda, Stephen Suh, Lisa Gulya, and Evan Stewart

It’s the Fi-nal Roundup! Of the year…

And it’s going to be a short one, given travel and a luckily contained but still exciting house fire early this morning. All’s well, but such things do tend to cut into the time available for waxing poetic (or waxing anything, for that matter). A programming note: on January 1st, we will share our most-trafficked post from each section of the site as its own sort of Annual Roundup. Stay tuned! more...

Last week, the news broke that the U.S. Census Bureau is projecting that whites will no longer be the majority by the year 2043. This is at least a year earlier than previous estimates and seven years earlier than the 2050 majority/minority prediction that first got everyone’s attention a few years back.

The Associated Press release that broke the story described the news as a “historic shift” that is “reshaping the nation’s schools, workforce, and electorate.”  It attributes the trend to “higher birth rates” among American minorities, especially Hispanics who entered at the height of the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. (The story also correctly notes that immigration rates from Mexico and elsewhere have slowed dramatically with the housing bust of the previous decade and the economic recession of recent years.) The story claims these demographic shifts are “redefining long-held notions of race” in the U.S.—“easing” residential segregation, increasing intermarriage for some, “blurring” racial and ethnic lines, and “lifting the numbers of people who identify as multiracial.” more...

Avoiding the Holiday Slide

I’ve now ostensibly spent over half my wee life in college. First, as an undergrad, then a grad student, then some more undergrad, staff time, and now as a sort of academia groupie (let’s just say I loiter around a sociology department more often than some find “normal”). And yet, this is the first time in all those years that I’ve really felt the “holiday slide.” My brain essentially tried to go on vacation, starting the day before Thanksgiving (for our international readers, this year’s Thanksgiving was on Nov. 22). I’ve fought back valiantly, but not nearly so valiantly as our authors and grad students, who continue creating great work week after week—undeterred, like the post office, by rain, sleet, or the allure of two weeks without writing an exam, a recommendation letter, a grant application, a survey, or a holiday card. more...

When people ask why I pursued or persist in sociology, I sometimes say that the world just makes no sense without it. With a few basic concepts, some systematic observation, and a little analysis, however, we can at least begin to fathom the unfathomable. Our new TSP feature on genocide by Hollie Nyseth Brehm offers a grim example, but my favorite physical therapist offered another illustration this weekend. She had just attended a conference on understanding pain and injury—a big part of any PT’s job—and came across some cool studies on the social construction of these phenomena.

My favorite new example is “Neck Pain in Demolition Derby Drivers” by Alexander Simotas and Timothy Shen in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. In the general population, about 10 percent of people who have a car collision will develop chronic severe neck pain. Doctors Simotas and Shen surveyed 40 demolition derby drivers, who had undergone a median of 1,632 lifetime collisions at an average estimated speed of 26 miles per hour, 55 percent of which were rear-end, with no special safety equipment. Yet only 3 of the derby participants (7.5 percent of the sample) reported even mild chronic neck pain and none reported moderate or severe chronic pain. more...

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. more...

Good Advice

So, this week, I heard an interesting piece of advice for writers, and it’s been knocking around in my head. Here’s the thing: it’s great, pithy advice. And it’s obviously sexist. So here’s the adaptation at which I’ve grudgingly arrived: “When writing an essay, think of it like shorts. You want ’em long enough to cover the business, and short enough to keep things interesting.” more...