Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press...

The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect government. Dr. Mark Fenster discusses the motivations of trans...

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when in...

We end the year by remembering our favorite authors, books, and some of the titles. There were so many great books written this year that we had the fun of reading and talking to a few of the authors. Weve both been doing a lot of grading, so left out...

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ per...

Melanee Thomas and Amanda Bittner have assembled a fascinating and important exploration of the role, understanding, and perceptions of mothers and motherhood within the realm of politics. Mothers and Others: The Role of Parenthood in Politics (Univers...

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Volatility. Instability. Insecurity. Precarity. There’s a burgeoning lexicon seeking to capture the grim economic state of more and more Americans. Join us as Jonathan Morduch describes what he and Rachel Schneider discovered when they got 253 househol...

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs designed to encourage poor and low-income Americans to get ...

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention to the pernicious problem of discrimination in the wor...

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state are hot topics in law and criminology,

On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the victims were women, and about half of them were black.

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious o...

Why do we have sex-segregated restrooms? Are they necessary? What about your drivers license? Have you thought of why your designated sex category is listed, despite your picture and all other relevant information present? Heath Fogg Davis,

What is right about democracy? In Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want (Beacon Press, 2017), Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen seek out an answer. Lappe, author of the multimillion-selling Diet for a Small...

Jamin Creed Rowan is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University. His book The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) offers a history of how American intellectu...

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about trying to influence television’s portrayal of those values...

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge, 2017) explores how and why we are so invested in this...

Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaPira is associate professor of political science at Jame...

Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers are increasingly being taught that they need to sell the...

The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2017) by Heather Silber Mohamed weaves together a number of different strands within the discipline of Political Science in context of the diverse...

In our era of economic instability, rising inequality, and widespread immigration, complaints about fairness and life chances are coming from an interesting source: white people, specifically members of the working class.

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective wa...

We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number of people faced long-term unemployment,

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in northern Ethiopia.