Another commercial which I’ve always wondered about is this one for Traveler’s insurance: The trouble with the commercial is that the dog, after seeking out ways to protect his most prized possession, finds a solution in purchasing insurance. Keep it on your person? Too hard. Put it in a bank? Too risky. But with insurance, …
I don’t always love 30 Rock, but this week’s episode hit exactly the perfect New York spot (apologies in advance for the advertisement): [sorry, hulu just does not play nice embedded] For people who don’t live in NYC, the joke is about Alec Baldwin having bedbugs and finding himself an outcast, finally reduced to asking …
Awesome tribute to our first Secretary of the Treasury. Compares favorably to 99 Problems but a Bitch ain’t One: Geek rap is so sexy. h/t James Fallows.
Gabriel had a thoughtful post about Jay Leno, comparing his programming to NPR and classical music over the past couple decades. I’m much more sympathetic to Grant McCracken’s view of Leno as a failure because he misses the contemporary moment’s desire for specificity and instead provides the blandest of something-for-everyone variety. Though McCracken and Rossman …
It’s that time of year again, when I first got freaked out about emergency preparedness by watching 28 Days Later. And it’s the time when I review and renew my emergency go kit. For peace of mind, this is the fanny pack that you can walk out of your house in 10 seconds with. It …
One of the founders of string theory in physics made the case this week that the Large Hadron Collider will fail to produce/discover the Higgs boson because its very existence is so abhorrent to nature that the attempt to create it sabotages itself. The upshot is that we can expect seemingly strange delays and chronic …
Shouldn’t there be some kind of Mario Kart sociology meetup again sometime soon? It feels like it’s been a really long time…Let’s get a move on, Scatterplot!
Here is another one from the series of Volkswagon’s ‘fun theory’ design projects, this one a bottomless garbage can to induce people to throw away trash: The whole shebang is worth noting, for its effects on behavior and its bigger-issue demonstration of the contextualization of rationality. Plus, honestly, it’s a fun video. I don’t know …
Economic sociologists have long wrestled with the microfoundations of market rationality, and attempted to understand the embeddedness of behavior in the cultural context in which it rests…oh, hell, I just want to post this video of the subway stairs in Stockholm: Have a nice Friday, peoples!
The most unusual part of this unusual story is not that a bee truck overturned and overwhelmed victims and emergency workers with bees. It’s that a similar accident occurred in 2006. WTF, Turkey?
Fabio, over at orgtheory.net, suggets yet again that Sociology should be more like something else. I am genuinely mystified by these periodic forays into the dissing of the discipline, and my take is generally that: There is a small but persistent category of sociologists who always seem to want sociology to be more like some …
What does it mean when you start reading articles, posts, threads, and comments that look like the same exact articles, posts, threads, and comments that you already read 5 years ago? Same cited people, same trajectory of argument, same conclusions. It’s not plagiarism, it’s the re-invention of the wheel. Like undergraduates reading Marx for the …
Well, IMHO they have to publicly levy the maximum fines, penalties, suspensions, scorn, shame, and derision on Serena (tirade! outburst!). Because it allows the officials to not have to admit that they substituted procedural rationality for substantive rationality in a) allowing a linesperson to call an at-best 1/16 inch footfault at 15-30 at 5-6 in …
I am preparing for classes to begin, cleaning out files and cleaning up office. And I decided last-minute, with a cheap fare, to jump to Chicago for the weekend to attend a close friend’s annual party (which I’d never been to before and seemed like the kind of thing to do at least once). As …
One of Erving Goffman’s brilliant insights is the extent to which people engage in presentations of self. Front-stage behavior is the display meant for ‘public’ consumption: witty, urbane, dangerous, smart, smooth, down-to-earth, intellectual, anti-intellectual. This depends on the audience, of course, and it is meant to make oneself look good. Backstage behavior is closer to …
There’s a longer post I intend on the ways political/social discourse gets hijacked by experts, well-covered territory to be sure but important nevertheless. In the meantime, I’m still on something of a news hiatus. So I am coming to this a little belatedly. Apparently, Niall Ferguson, a professor dude who writes about money, wrote an …
Back from ASA, and it somehow feels incomplete without some kind of wrap-up. So: I am coming to appreciate my cohort and close-related cohorts at Northwestern more and more. Within a couple years or three, wow. This year, I ran into or got to catch up with Mike Sauder, Ryon Lancaster, Tim Hallett, Mike Lounsbury, …
I was scheduled to leave for SF today, and after I arrived at the airport and waited around a half hour or so, I was somewhat horrified to learn that my flight had been irreparably delayed. My choices? Fly to Cincinnati and take an early flight out from there, or fly out tomorrow morning. So …