Friday Roundup

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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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...

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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...

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From Sport to Voting Rights

This week The Society Pages checked out gender stereotyping and toys, how we communicate our tone online (but really don’t want to talk on the phone), a whole collection of photoshop in the media, fatherhood and race, and we learned a thing or two from our Nordic friends. Enjoy! more...

This week saw outrage over personal loans offered to Nevada teachers just to buy classroom supplies (for their public school rooms!), a flurry of suggested “great books in sociology” reading lists, 40 years of the War on Poverty, another fight in the toy aisle, and, of course, Canada’s gift to the U.S., the Polar Vortex (we’re particularly sorry for the South… at least we Minnesota types have some snowpants we can dig out of the basement). Enjoy! more...

Before we get to the heart of the matter, let’s just put it out there: SocImages’ annual Christmas Roundup is ready and ripe for the readin’! Get it!

Now, rather than our usual Roundup, it’s time to announce this year’s fully unscientific, but fully entertaining TSP Awards! Hopefully these excellent pieces from our original content, our blogs, and beyond will keep you in reading material in the days of travel and food comas ahead. We wish you a wonderful New Year full of health, productivity, and ridiculousness, because every good year is a little ridiculous. more...

The Care and Feeding of Co-Authors:

As Chris Uggen pointed out on the Twitters, it’s easy to disappoint your coworkers. Whether it’s producing actual Swedish Fish when a candy-mergency arises in a late-night writing session or dropping the ball when it’s your turn to write the lit review, there are just so many opportunities to co-write badly. Here’s my very quick editorial advice should you decide to undertake a co-authored project: more...

Missing the Point

I was so struck last night to hear a little piece about the sociologist Clifford Nass on NPR (in a fun side note, I’d like to point out that Nass was also a computer scientist and professional magician… which is pertinent to the next sentence). Yes, he was known for his warning that multitasking was dangerous to real thought and real learning, but what caught my ear was how his colleagues spoke of his relationship with expanding technologies. Nass didn’t seem to have any antipathy for the tech—he saw its utility, of course—but he realized that all those blinky things were going to be attention sucks. Multiple distractions tend to be bad when you aren’t a good multitasker (to be fair, he didn’t think anyone was a good multitasker), but worse, he seemed to believe, the divided attention meant that his students paid attention to too much noise. Over time, he felt his students were getting worse and worse at understanding an argument and repeating it clearly. They weren’t good at finding the point or pulling out a specific nugget of information from a whole article. They had trained themselves (or been trained by their technologies) to see the forest, not the trees. I’m not wholly convinced, but I am intrigued—and I’m sad that the world has lost another great sociologist in the meantime. more...