In the past few days there is one story I’ve been asked about more than any other in the news or current events—it involves the (unexpected) hot hand of undrafted NBA rookie Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks. “What do you think?,” everyone wants to know. “You must have an interesting angle or two given your interest in race and sport, right?”

Well, I am fascinated. Indeed, my son Ben and I were intrigued enough to buy tickets to our first Timberwolves game in at least five years to see Lin and his New York team take on our local favorites Saturday night (led by another heralded rookie point guard Spaniard Ricky Rubio). It was quite a spectacle: over 20,000 fans (the most in Minneapolis since 2004, they said), more Asian Americans than I can ever remember seeing at a pro sports event, and some interesting commentary up in the nosebleed seats where we were perched. There was also a puzzling (if racially revealing) reference in the local paper the next day about a budding “international” rivalry between the two rookie playmakers. (I mean, Lin is from Palo Alto, after all.)

Still, most of my interest so far has been at Lin’s amazing play. The number of points and assists he posted in his first five games in the league was better than any other first five-game stretch of any player in NBA history. He led the Knicks to a comeback win here in Minnesota even when he was clearly exhausted from having played the night before in New York. On Valentine’s Day, he nailed a last second three-pointer for the win. I just love seeing great basketball. Check out any of his highlight clips on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

Thankfully, one of our TSP bloggers, C.N. Le, writing on The Color Line, has been able to maintain professional decorum and provide some sociological meaning and context for the Lin-sanity.

Le reviews some of the ground he covered in 2010 when he wrote when Lin was still playing for Harvard—how the ballplayer provides a counter to certain model minority stereotypes and expectations and in doing so is expanding the definition of success for Asian Americans. (Le’s even earlier post mentioned some of the racial stereotypes and slurs Lin has dealt with along the way as well.) But what I like most about the post is at the end, where Le is talking not about Lin but about colorblindness:

But as Asian Americans becoming increasingly common in these areas of U.S. popular culture, are we headed for a day when it is no longer a “big deal” when we see Asian American faces in the media, just like it’s taken for granted when we see White faces or Black faces? Ultimately, yes, that is the goal—for us as a society to no longer consider it “strange” or “unusual” to see Asian Americans in the media or in other prominent positions in U.S. social institutions.

Le goes on to point out—and this is the part I really like—that what we are talking about here is the concept of colorblindness, a concept that many of us race scholars actually tend to be quite critical about. It is a provocative reminder of what is good, right, and valuable about colorblindness as an ideal. But appropriately, Le also insists on reminding us—as he does over and over in his writings—of two points: (1) that we are still not there yet, and (2) to get there we actually have to be aware of race and racial inequalities and racism and vigilant in trying to resist them.

I’m not sure how aware Jeremy Lin is about any of this (though I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s not only doing amazing things on the court, he is clearly a very smart guy. In fact, as a friend of mine speculated today, one of the stereotypes Lin is laying bare is the old dumb-jock trope. Even in his “nerdy handshake” with other smarty-pants baller Landry Fields—seen below—Lin is showing that Ivy Leaguers can definitely hoop.) But I very much appreciate C.N. Le’s ability to draw out this broader social significance and use the power of the popular in service of making these vitally important sociological points about race and the struggle to move past race in contemporary American society.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo is garnering well-deserved attention in venues ranging from Fortune to Slate to This American Life, but his Rolling Stone article today is my favorite thus far.

Eric has assembled a terrific playlist for his new book — everything from Billy Idol’s Dancing with Myself to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. And you know that a researcher like Professor Klinenberg wouldn’t limit himself to the obvious hits. He unearthed nuggets like Tom Waits‘ “Better Off without a Wife” and Loudon (via Rufus) Wainwright’s One Man Guy, Morrissey’s “I’m OK by Myself” and Uggen’s “One-Way Love Dirge.”

OK, OK, I’m kidding about that last one. The spotify list makes for good fun and a great argument-starter (e.g., I’ve got a different take on “No Woman No Cry”), but the article and the book make a much bigger sociological argument. Eric is really telling a story of massive social change — the extraordinary rise of living along  alone:

Until the middle of the 20th century, no society in human history had sustained large numbers of singletons. In 1950, for instance, only 4 million Americans lived alone, and they accounted for less than 10 percent of all households. Today, more than 32 million Americans are going solo. They represent 28 percent of all households at the national level; more than 40 percent in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Denver, and Minneapolis; and nearly 50 percent in Washington D.C. and Manhattan, the twin capitals of the solo nation.

Check out the playlist and stay tuned (so to speak) for an upcoming office hours podcast with our own Arturo Baiocchi.

*photo by Tor Kristensen

David Denby’s polemic against smart-alecky new media types attracted a lot of, well, snarky reviews when it arrived in bookstores a few years ago. Of course, the First Amendment has protected all manner of speech about public figures since at least the Times v. Sullivan decision in 1964. Denby points to exceptions, but most of the serious journalists that I know seem almost constitutionally incapable of abusing such freedoms. In my view, the uglier snark story concerns not professional journalists, but the cultural transmission of snark in which all of us post breathlessly and nastily on social media.

It certainly seems easy to take shots at celebrities, politicians, and even our own friends and family with mean little missives on twitter or facebook. Watching indie darling Bon Iver on Saturday Night Live last weekend, for example, I wanted to post something clever about his descent through Coldplay territory and into Hornsby range (Christopher Cross won Grammys too, you know). After seeing Midnight in Paris, I felt a similar urge to tweet a line about Woody Allen’s real genius being reflected in somehow rehashing Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with actors lacking Keanu Reeves’ emotional range. The trouble with such snark is that it isn’t based on any real thought or analysis — it is snark for snark’s sake. I hadn’t critically engaged Woody Allen or Bon Iver (much less Keanu or Coldplay) or even thought more than two seconds about it. I can’t fathom the motives here — are we in it for the “likes” and retweets? Do we feel better about ourselves when we rip the famous or successful?

Iggy Pop once said that “nihilism is best done by professionals” and so, I suspect, are such off-handedly cruel attacks. As an aspiring rock writer in the 1980s, I appreciated both the romantic humanism of Lester Bangs and the hyperliterate sneak atttacks of Robert Christgau. Mr. Christgau’s wicked/smart capsule reviews, were peppered with mean and clever phrases like “idolization is for rock stars, even rock stars manqué like these impotent bohos” (on Sonic Youth) or “the words achieve precisely the same pitch of aesthetic necessity as the music, which is none at all” (on Radiohead) or “As bubble-headed as the teen-telos lyrics at best. As dumb as Uriah Heep at worst” (on U2). The quintessential Christgau review? The fictitious two-word appraisal of Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich — the very definition of snark.

But Christgau also did real analysis, as in this rumination on the Eagles: “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them. “Hate” is the kind of up-tight word that automatically excludes one from polite posthippie circles, a good reason to use it, but it is also meant to convey an anguish that is very intense, yet difficult to pinpoint. Do I hate music that has been giving me pleasure all weekend, made by four human beings I’ve never met? Yeah, I think so. Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from things I used to love. As the culmination of rock’s country strain, the group is also the culmination of the counterculture reaction that strain epitomizes.”

Most of the tweets I see on, say, the death of Whitney Houston or a politician’s fall from grace aren’t nearly so reflective, even when smart people are tossing them off. As a criminologist, I’m often trying to cultivate a little reflection and empathy in my students, so that they see criminal behavior as human behavior — and the person convicted of crimes as more than the personification of a single, awful act. David Carr describes this duality with staggering clarity in telling his own story: “If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true…”

Carr isn’t being snarky, he’s just an unflinching professional reporter trying to tell a complex story. One-sided snark, in contrast, simply “piles on” people at their weakest moments. I’ll confess that after seven years of blogging, I’ve probably written my share of thoughtlessly cruel comments. Even when the object of your derision could not possibly be hurt by it, haven’t you felt a little pang of regret after posting or repeating something petty, malicious, or unfounded? It feels, to me, as though I’d just binged on really unhealthy food or drink. Back when I was known to enjoy a beer or two during a flight delay, I recall getting some cheap laughs with an over-the-top Greta Van Susteren impersonation (don’t ask) at the Detroit airport. Though nobody registered any dissatisfaction (and Ms. Van Susteren seems to be doing just fine, thankyouverymuch), I still feel rotten about it three years later.

So for now I’ll stand with Denby — in our bermuda shorts, watering our respective lawns — and his old-fashioned assertion that mindless hair-trigger snark might somehow deplete us. If every cruel line in the snarkstorm represents an ugly little human transaction, is it so far-fetched to suggest that their collective weight might be dragging us down?

I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it yet or not, but last week, Kyle Green and I posted one of the first TSP white papers on the interrelationships between sport and politics in contemporary American culture. (https://thesocietypages.org/papers/politics-and-sport/).

Intended to coincide with the super bowl and in the middle of the republican primaries, the main point was to examine all of the ways in which sport and politics are intertwined, even if we don’t like it. We concluded that piece by saying that our goal was not necessarily to argue that the two should be separate but concluded that some might take it that way.

Well, what do you know but this week’s back page column in Sports Illustrated is a mock political campaign by columnist Phil Taylor to push for passage of a bill that would “ensure” the permanent “separation of sports and politics.”

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1194467/index.htm

Taylor is clearly having fun with the piece, mostly at the expense of politicians who have pretended to be sports fans and men of the people. (Joe Biden, John Kerry, Newt Gingritch, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney all take shots).  There are no great sociological insights here–just a number of great and revealing examples of the awkward, potentially combustable collusion of sport and politics in contemporary life.

My favorite part is Taylor’s speculation that this campaign might be one of the few arenas in which a bipartisan coalition in American politics might be possible. I love that line–both because it speaks to how deeply and broadly-held are our beliefs about the separation of sports and politics (“God bless any elected official who doesn’t pretend to care about the Super Bowl,” he writes) and as a commentary on how difficult it is to imagine Democrats and Republicans coming to consensus on anything these days.

My late mother-in-law was born and raised in Okinawa and came to the United States as an adult. She didn’t read a lot of English publications, but she swore by Dear Abby. She said read the column because Abby’s advice taught her what it meant to be a good American. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and I’ve often wished there were more such commonsense voices of decorum, belief, and behavior in our public discourse—never more so than right now.

Which brings me to the website “Yo, is this racist?” (yoisthisracist.com) by blogger Andrew Ti.

Okay, well, that’s not exactly accurate. I mean, I wouldn’t have put Ti in the “Dear Abby” category on my own. He and his website are often irreverent , sometimes offensive or downright vulgar, and just seem to be having too much fun most of the time. But that’s how Rachel Brahinsky, writing in Antipode described him: “Ti …mocks overt and subtle racism with comedy and brilliance, using a renovation of the old ‘Dear Abby’ format.”

Brahinsky explains:

Readers send in questions, and Ti tears them apart, mocks them, and applauds them for their insights. The exchanges range from goofy to deadly serious, and Ti has a tendency to curse a lot and use text-isms like LOL to reach his audience—and the consistency of his critique is highly uneven (sometimes he’s just name-calling, but that usually seems to come after receiving a raft of nasty racist emails from readers; the blog is his outlet).

But there is a lot of brilliance in the blog, and it generally comes at moments when Ti uses the space to redirect a reader’s question from the micro-moments of interpersonal racism to the socio-structural factors that bracket those moments.

I think that Brahinsky’s is a pretty accurate description and assessment, and in fact I had been meaning to write something on the site myself (my son had introduced me to it) ’til she beat me to the punch. I am especially convinced that Ti is at his best when he situates various comments, questions, and episodes in the context of larger racial hierarchies in the U.S. In doing so, he shows that not all comments and quotes are equal—and that things like context, who is speaking, and who is listening are crucial to the racial implications and effects of any given utterance or interaction. I also believe that Brahinsky is precisely on point about the challenges—and necessity—of using humor to get at racism, not only in the classroom but in the culture. Plus, I appreciated the quote from my former advisor George Lipsitz. Thanks, Rachel, for writing this up!

Slowly but steadily, we’ve been introducing a number of changes around The Society Pages, particularly in the last couple of weeks. Today, as you head into the weekend, I’d like to bring your attention to the first installments of several new features that we’ll be building on, and, of course, warn you that our web editor, Jon Smajda, will be carefully carving out a new place for each of these items on our front page. Which is to say: spoiler alert! TSP 2.0 (or, more likely, 5.1.4) is on its way.

Roundtables: This afternoon, our associate editor, Letta Page, put up the inaugural Roundtable, in which our intellectually curious and always gregarious graduate team members reach out to social scientists on the topics of the day. Our first features some movers and shakers talking about research on social movements, from how you do it (and do it well) to how you carve out your own role within the movement as an embedded social scientist. As Letta puts it, “This is the first of many Roundtable installments to come—a wide-ranging attempt to look at a topic through many different lenses. Soon, we’ll be taking on politics and humor and how sociologists and political scientists each have a different idea of just what polling is and does. Enjoy!”

Special Features: I’m excited to report that, as of this afternoon, we have two Special Features up for you to devour. The first is Letta’s talk with Jessie Daniels about using documentaries in the classroom effectively—and about which ones you might want to adopt. We’ve gotten some great feedback, including a number of comments from educators and students sharing their own favorite films for class, and we hope to create a permanent repository for the latest and greatest in clips, shorts, and features for your use. In our second Special Feature, grad student Sarah Shannon talks with public sociologist Joe Soss about his new book, Disciplining the Poor, and discusses how race, welfare, and poverty policy intersect. Soss gives some clear results from his research and some straightforward ways that policies might be better created and implemented.

Our Special Features will expand to include all sorts of wonderful things—from the photographic/sociological conversation we see shaping up between our own Doug Hartmann and Minneapolis photographer Wing Young Huie to edited interviews from our Office Hours podcasts and beyond.

Reading List: Just a couple of weeks old, you’ll be seeing the Reading List grow over time. Every few days or so, we’ll be putting up a new or classic work in social science that we find particularly relevant for the public discourse, and if you click on the title “Reading List” from any single article, you’ll find the whole running list. We’ve also tagged each recommendation so that, in time, we’ll make it easy for you to pull your own topical reading list on demand.

White Papers: If we keep pushing hard, we should be launching our first new TSP White Papers late next week. More in the vein of a Contexts, New Yorker, or Economist article than anything out of an academic journal, these papers are to be written by well-informed social scientists stripped of their jargon and lit reviews. In 3,000 or so words, the White Papers will give you a smart, grounded social scientific take on a given issue, and a list of suggested readings, should you hope to follow up and dig deeper yourself.

I do want to stress that, while you will notice design changes, the core mission of The Society Pages remains the same: to bring social scientific knowledge to the broadest public audience in the most accessible, open way possible. Heck, you can even follow us on Twitter (@TheSocietyPages) for thoughts from the HQ throughout the day. You won’t have to pay to read what we write, you won’t have to worry that we’re muzzling our amazing bloggers (we couldn’t possibly have the time with the prolific likes of Sociological Images, Graphic Sociology, Cyborgology…), you won’t have to look up word after word in a desperate attempt to understand what we’re saying. We’re talking about society with society.

So, I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the controversy that has emerged over Newt Gingrich’s repeated use of the line that Barack Obama is the “greatest food stamp President.” If not, the main question is whether the phrase is racially motivated—that is, if it is a racial code designed to play upon white fears and resentments about African Americans in general and the President in particular. (Clearly, some of the invective hurled against the President has to do with his social difference—not just his race, but the fact that he is believed (incorrectly of course) to be an immigrant, a Muslim, and an egghead, as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their new book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservativism.) You can read more about the current kerfuffle is a Sociological Images post by guest blogger Jason Eastman called “Newt Racism.”

Still, as this is something you’re likely to hear more about in the wake of Gringrich’s victory in the South Carolina primaries this weekend and it’s something that I do research on, it seems like a good time for me to bring a little social scientific research and perspective to bear.

First, some basic facts about food stamps and welfare from this weekend’s Chicago Tribune. One: more whites than blacks receive food stamps (34 percent white, 22 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic, according to the Agriculture Department). Two: the racial breakdown for public assistance more generally is about 1/3 African American, 1/3 white, and 1/3 Hispanic. Three: funding for foodstamps actually started to rise under George W. Bush’s presidency, though it has increased under the current administration. And four: the percent of Americans receiving public assistance has declined dramatically since the welfare reform act of 1996 which imposed strict work requirements and a 5 year lifetime cap on benefits.

What the Tribune story didn’t say that is crucial is all of this is that welfare has long been and continues to be associated with race and with African Americans in particular. See Martin Gilens’s book Why Americans Hate Welfare. This perception is actually a key piece of information in itself—perhaps the key fact about welfare. It is, in short, racially coded.  So even if Gingrich doesn’t intend it, this is how such references are likely to be understood by the majority of Americans. It may not be the only reason Gingrich continues to reference and discuss food stamps, but it is obviously part of the conversation.

The real question, of course, is not intent but effect. Do such racially coded messages matter? Do they impact politics, policies, and campaigns? According to Tali Mendelberg’s The Race Card, one of the most meticulously researched studies of the phenomenon, they do. Racially coded words and phrases play upon white fears about and resentment against African Americans in order to implicitly or explicity shift public opinion on and support for various candidates, campaigns, regimes, and policy initiatives.

Mendelberg, whose initial research was occasioned by the Willie Horton ad that appeared during the 1988 Presidential campaign, based her work on a wide variety of techniques and data including simulated television news experiments, national surveys, content analyses of campaign coverage, and archival cases. Key to Mendelberg’s explanation for the phenomenon is that, in a post-civil rights era there are strong norms (of equality, fairness, individualism) that prevent overt radicalized and racist images to be referenced and mobilized; however, anti-black stereotypes and perceptions remain in place—and can be mobilized in subtle, coded ways to powerful political effect.  It reminds me of the old line by Malcolm X. “Racism,” he used to say, “is like a Cadillac: they make a new one every year.” In a country that is supposedly colorblind and race neutral, driven by individual opportunity and meritocracy, it can be almost no other way.

Mendelberg’s message has one ray of hope for those interested in combating radicalized political messages coded or otherwise, though:  implicitly racial messages tend to lose their appeal when their content is exposed. We shall see if this is the case in the days to come as the charges and defenses are waged.

Finally, there is another point I want to highlight: race cards don’t always work and it is not just Republicans who play them. Democrats do too, though often to different effect and for different purposes. Indeed, my own work on midnight basketball and the 1994 crime bill debates with Darren Wheelock revealed that “the race card” as it pertained to  midnight basketball was not played first or even most self-consciously by Republicans. Rather, that would be left to the Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton during the 1994 crime bill debates. And that wasn’t exactly a winner—indeed, Republicans kind of turned that against the Democrats, and it wasn’t long before Gingrich himself unveiled the “Contract” that made him famous.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, we are in the midst of a slow and steady renovation of The Society Pages. Over the next few weeks, we will tweak our design, add some new features (including The Reading List, as described earlier this week–look over to the left), become more interdisciplinary, and develop and publish more of our own original content. We believe  these changes will help us do an even better job of meeting our  mission of bringing sociology and its aligned social scientific disciplines to broader public visibility and influence, and doing so in an even more timely and regular manner. Even better: it’s our free gift to you. As we said in our post on why we’re doing a SOPA black screen earlier in the week, we want academic research and knowledge to be directly relevant, and that means it needs to be accessibly written and accessibly posted. You can read it, you can understand it, you can apply it. And hopefully you can share it with others (or, like The Reading List says, use it to impress others at parties).

In one interesting new direction, I am personally beginning to work on a new project with the Twin Cities-based documentary photographer Wing Young Huie. We’re calling it “Changing Lenses.” The collaboration grows out of a profile of Huie’s landmark images I produced for the final Minnesota issue of Contexts: “Up Close and Communal,” and the basic idea is for the two of us to explore the connections between sociology and photography by exchanging comments and ideas on each other’s work. Specifically, I will provide sociological context and commentary on some of Huie’s various projects and famous images, and Wing will  supply images and observations on some of my recent papers and studies. We are particularly interested in delving into themes related to race, identity, different, culture, and otherness in contemporary American life, and there will probably be some sports stuff thrown in there as well (Wing and I actually met playing pickup basketball).

Anyway, we are going to workshop this collaboration this coming Friday night at Wing’s studio in south Minneapolis (see press release below). In the event, I will provide an overview of my vision and goals for TheSocietyPages, then Wing and I will test pilot our concept a bit through a conversation on difference, diversity, and otherness in which I discuss a few of Wing’s landmark images, and he engages some of my academic research in images. Then we’ll then invite input and feedback from the audience—and, as is always the case for events at Wing’s studio, the event will conclude with ping pong and karaoke. Anyway, if you are local, I hope you can join us in workshopping our project and beginning to chart the future of the new Society Pages content.

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(k)now launch party featuring Doug Hartmann
Friday, January 20th at The Third Place

Jesse Wozniak jets off to a job interview this week, where he’ll talk about his research on state reconstruction and the new Iraqi police force. Jesse is an advisee, Contexts student board member, and frequent contributor to the Office Hours podcasts. All dissertations demand sacrifice, but this one posed particular challenges.

In fact, Jesse’s project calls to mind what Pierre Bourdieu called “the craft par exellence of the researcher:  investing a theoretical problem of far-reaching implications in an empirical object that is well constructed and controllable with the means at hand, that is, possibly, by an isolated researcher, with no funding, limited to his[her] own labor power.” Doug Hartmann loves this passage, as it simultaneously conveys both the enormity of our task and our power and capacity to get it done.

The “theoretical problem” of civilian policing and state reconstruction certainly has far-reaching implications. I couldn’t be 100% sure, though, that the “empirical object” of contemporary Iraq training academies was quite so “controllable with the means at hand.” And, despite a fine academic record, Jesse had a tough time securing funding for his ambitious dissertation plan — observations at training academies, interviews with officials, surveys and interviews with recruits in training, extensive archival research, and some very costly plane tickets and living expenses.

While he put in several grant and fellowship proposals, most reviewers and funders simply viewed the project as impossible. How could a single graduate student possibly secure human subjects approval, gain clearance from the Department of State, learn a new language, live and travel extensively in a war zone, and gain repeated access to the officials and recruits he planned to interview and survey?

Well, now he has done the impossible and returned with data in hand. When he didn’t get funding, this “isolated researcher” was undaunted – he simply took on extra teaching and all manner of additional work so that he could self-fund the project. The proof, of course, will be in the pudding that Jesse is still preparing. Having seen the materials he brought back from Iraq, however, I’m confident that the hard work and fearlessness will pay off in a terrific dissertation and book.

In some ways, we’re fortunate to work in a field where isolated researchers can still learn so much by the sweat of their brows. And while a couple years of cushy dissertation funding would have made Jesse’s life a whole lot easier, I’m guessing that something real and true has been gained in the struggle.

* The quote is from page 156 of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1988 “Program for a Sociology of Sport” in the Sociology of Sport Journal 5:153-161.
** The photo is from Ben Brears’ photostream, licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) under creative commons.

One of the core values of The Society Pages is that knowledge should be transparent, accessible, and uncensored. Proposed legislation, known as SOPA in the Senate and PIPA in the House, undermines these core values and threatens the very foundation of the Internet. Many prominent websites, such as Wikipedia, have chosen tomorrow as a day of action regarding these legislative moves.

We have decided to join in with these groups and we will present site visitors to The Society Pages with a “splash screen” or “blackout screen” for the entirety of 1/18/12. The screen will inform visitors of the implications of SOPA/PIPA and link to further reading on the subject.

Please note, our readers will still be able to click through to all of our content; they will simply be met by the black informational screen first.

We’ll be  getting the word out on Twitter and Facebook, but we’d appreciate it if you’d do the same. This will both raise awareness of the issue and prevent (we hope) any panic on the
part of our loyal readers when they see a drastically different screen when they first visit a TSP page tomorrow.

Thanks—in advance—for your support. You all mean the world to us, and we think this is the right course of action for our site as a whole.

All the best from our whole team,

The Society Pages