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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What Can Millennials Teach Us about the University?
Perhaps more fragile and contested than ever before, the university today feels …
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Privacy Cultures
In “USS Callister,” a much-discussed episode of Black Mirror, a reticent computer programmer collects DNA around his office from discarded objects like lollipops and coffee cups. He uses that DNA to …
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Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment
On the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment we are called upon …
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The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple …
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Beautiful Games?
In the early ’90s, cable TV reached the Vermont woods. The wire running up our dirt road brought MTV, C-SPAN, and a regional station called the New England Sports Network (NESN), which aired …
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See How The City Divides Us
In New York the preference is for discrete rails or sharply sloped surfaces, in London polished studs do the trick; San Francisco opts for boulders, and Lima has no …
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Focus Groups and Voting Booths
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however …
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“It’s the iPhones Isn’t It?”
If you’ve picked up a Sunday newspaper or a biweekly magazine sometime in the past decade, there’s a good chance you’ve come across more than one article about …
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Toxic Masculine Cosmology
Cosmologists are obsessed with origin stories. We are the physicists and astronomers who take on the task of explaining why spacetime and its …
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The Right to Have Rights
Since the election of Donald Trump, sales of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism have soared. Driving the new attention to this three-volume work of political theory published in 1951 is …
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Our Drones, Ourselves
Drones have changed modern warfare almost beyond recognition. In the 19th century, the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz likened war to “a duel on a larger scale,” but drones do away with chivalry, removing one of the duelists from danger and subjecting the other to a barrage of missiles.1 Thus, according to the philosopher Grégoire…
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Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control activists. In response, Public Books reached out to scholars Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston to develop a Gun Studies Syllabus. There are an estimated 310 million…
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“To Examine Society and Try to Change It”
I take a seat near the middle of the table at 6:06 p.m. The room soon fills, students clutching coffee, shedding coats; someone brings gummy worms and sends them …
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Ask the Kids
Professors, K–12 teachers, and parents are worried. College students listen to lectures online and feel no need to open a textbook. High school students seem emotionally fragile, worrying about their image on social media. Children spend hours playing computer games or watching online porn, seemingly beyond the reach of their mothers and fathers. Jean Twenge’s…
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When Police Are the Problem
Think, if you’ll indulge me, of your last significant encounter with a police officer. For some, this may be difficult, and perhaps all that will come to mind is …
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13 Key Works for Understanding Guns in the USA
If you are interested in understanding the past, present, and future of guns in …
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Virtual Roundtable on Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons
Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?
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“The College That Enters the Prison Is Transformed”
The Bard Prison Initiative is a full-time, degree-granting college program …
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The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these …
