People sometimes think I don’t work much (an opinion only reinforced when they see me having my morning coffee at 2pm and still in my bathrobe at dinner time). But I’m a night owl and I work from home. So along with teaching four classes (a very heavy load for a college professor), I have to write. And writing is…
I’ve written: It’s to our shame as [academic] writers that the average Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece is more thought provoking than 95 percent of journal articles. If we can’t explain ourselves to others in a style both illuminating and interesting, we won’t and don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Here’s that kind of article. Gladwell talks about strong a…
Cool maps! And interesting data presentation that shows the detailed racial and ethnic make-up of various cities broken down by very small units.
“In America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable.” Most of you would probably agree with that statement. I do, too. But I would be quick to add that culture and background matter. A lot. Background isn’t destiny, but it’s a damn good predictor of your future. You can tell an amazing amount of information…
I have an article in the current Political and Legal Anthropology Review, “Policing: A Sociologist’s Response to an Anthropological Account”: In order to be read (and who among us writes for sheer compositional joy alone?) writing needs to be good; people won’t read the other kind. The more jargon and sociobabble we anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers spew out, the more…
There’s a good article by Tom Siegfried in Science News about what’s wrong with statistics. Take the idea of statistical significance. Much of social science is based on the (very arbitrary) idea that for any given correlation, there should be a less than 5% chance of that result being due to random chance. [And as any sociology grad student knows,…
W.E.B. DuBois (pronounced doo-boyz, by the way, cause he wasn’t French) wrote about “The Talented Tenth.” DuBois was, among other things, a great American, a suffragist, a sociologist, and a Harvard grad. Had his groundbreaking The Philadelphia Negrobeen written today, I can only wonder if it would have been called, DuBois in the Hood. In contrast to the Talented Tenth,…
I’m proud to announce that “professor” has joined the list of overrated careers that already includes “police officer.” Boy, I sure know how to pick them! So says U.S. News and World Report.
I always like academics who can explain things simply. I rarely find any greater knowledge or meaning hidden behind esoteric words and jargon-filled academic prose. Here’s Professor Jay Livingston on the difference between ethnography and survey research. While it’s not a distinction that most non-academics give two-beans about, it’s a great description. From A Shot of Ethnography: Survey research shows…
My wife and I were in Kalibukbuk, Bali, visiting a few friends from Amsterdam, one of whom kind of lives in Bali now. He asked if we wanted to go see a cockfight. Well, in the name of Clifford Geertz and “thick description,” yes! (Hell, and this slightly worries me, I’ve enjoyed every bit of blood sport I’ve ever seen…