Section
Sociology
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Cool Enchantment
The ad is seductive but transparent. We don’t believe the copy but appreciate its innocence.
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Breaking the Cycle: Laurence Ralph on “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him”
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“The Unique Magic That Happens When Two People Come Together”: Allison Pugh on Building a Society of Connection
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D.A.R.E. Is More Than Just Antidrug Education—It Is Police Propaganda
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“2020 Isn’t Over”: Eric Klinenberg on Pandemics, Politics, and Solidarity
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Why Do Police Drive Cars?
Why did American police end up in cars? And how did policing the nation’s roads become so racially unjust? In Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, legal historian Sarah Seo uses motor vehicle search and …
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Terminal Whiteness
While doing fieldwork in Tennessee for his eye-opening and often harrowing new book, Dying of Whiteness, Vanderbilt University Professor Jonathan M. Metzl met Trevor. A 40-something-year-old former …
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Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Dark Matter and White Empiricism
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of fewer than a hundred Black American women … [none-for-homepage]
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How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects …
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How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the …
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The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers …
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Jewish Fragility
When I receive appeals from Jewish organizations exhorting me to fight antisemitism—which, they claim, is on the rise here and abroad—I tend to toss them away. During many periods of time, and in many places, it has been dangerous to be Jewish; but that hardly seems true today. In Europe, the catastrophe of the Shoah…
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Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or early adolescence. When kids embrace models of social identity newly available to their generation, the parents who love and care for them…
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Casa Mueller’s Ghost: Displaced Afro-Caribbean History in Panama City
I’m standing on a foot-wide cement island in the middle of the bustling Avenida …
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Ending the Anthropocene
One might think that the patent anthropocentrism of the concept of “Anthropocene” would suffice to invite a clear opposition, and, yet …
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Corporate Responsibility in the Climate Crisis
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century …
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What Was Public Housing?
Any debate about American public housing will eventually have to reckon with Chicago. More specifically, it will have to reckon with that city’s wrecked projects. Those closest to the issue have reasons to balk at such a reckoning. After all, as political scientist Edward Goetz points out, the history of American public housing can easily be…
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Our Drugs, Ourselves
Is the term “drugs” still meaningful? Many of us would confess to being at least mildly dependent on some substance, be it single-origin coffee or Sancerre, antidepressants or anti-inflammatories, Red Bull or Ritalin. Because such a wide range of substances characterizes everyday middle- and working-class life, their indiscriminate lumping under the heading “drugs” is proving…
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Can We Stop Both Crime and Incarceration?
Everything you have been told about the American criminal justice system is wrong. Or at least not completely accurate. In our current moment of political polarization …
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More Nurture, Less Nature?
What if genes weren’t the perfect blueprint we’ve been led to believe they are? What if your body was constantly being shaped by its environment? What if your children’s …
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The Inequality of “Human Rights”
What if the global struggle for human rights has accidentally helped make the world more unequal? What if, in seeking human rights, Samuel Moyn asks, we’ve …
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American Perceptions of Class
When, in 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart quipped that in America, “all socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie,” he offered a …
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Idleness as Flourishing
It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to it, that wasting time is not a waste of time. Paradox infuses the experience of…
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Stadium Arts
On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was unmistakable, but the effect was strangely appropriate. Here, embodied, was the paradox of Russia in the eyes of its foreign visitors:…
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Let Us Now See Climate Change
How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate …
