In Icelandic folklore Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat, comes to eat those who do not wear their new clothes for Christmas. In this image, you can see somebody did not put on their new Christmas sweater. Or perhaps even more unfortunately, no one got them one! More ... 👇

Call for Papers: the ISA RC28 Summer Meeting at New York University, New York, USA on August 5-7, 2026 Abstracts must be submitted by February 15, 2026 (11:59 pm EST). Authors will be informed of the committee’s decision by April 2026. as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

Always wanted to have gini coefficients and other inequality statistics of different sources in one dataset? Here you are. The Integrated Inequality Data, from WIID, Worldbank, LIS, and SWIID. osf.io/5cguq/overview

A bit of a theme emerging for my holiday reading list.

Very much agree. If science behaves anyway close to what Kuhn understood it to be (paradigms, normal science, etc), then LLMs would be particularly bad at discerning the quality of contributions that don’t fit standards of practice, both very good and very bad.

why it’s good for scientists, engineers, administrators, diplomats and jurists to be artistically literate

My hot take is that in the era of easily-generated AI nonsense papers journals that want to ensure high quality will need to start hiring full-time professional editors and reviewers instead of relying on volunteer labor from overworked academics.

My new book, The Division of Rationalized Labor, is now shipping! A brief summary of the argument to follow…

New paper in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: PhD candidate Swan Htut shows how the ways that immigrants relate to ethnic and national labels in the US are influenced by nation-building and ethnic conflict in their home country. Congrats, Swan! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DZRMD...

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment...The three factors...are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes..."

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” by Chetty (@Oppinsights), Deming, and Friedman: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Honored to introduce Samuel Bowles Public Lecture The Origin and Future of Inequality, part of 3 days organized by @ucstonecenter.bsky.social. Sam has been an inspiration, both intellectually and morally to me, as well as to so many in the profession. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV-9...

ISA RC28 Spring Meeting in Seville May 20-22! Call for papers closes soon. eventos.upo.es/go/RC28-Spri...

RC28 spring meeting deadline is December 1, 2025. Looking forward to seeing you in Seville. eventos.upo.es/137585/detai...

1/ Egalitarianism should begin at home. I link to this article by @bencasselman.bsky.social in light of the communications between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein that have just been released. The released emails and the fact of friendship are vile. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/b...

Happy 🎂 to the normal curve! #OTD 1733 Abraham de Moivre published a description in Latin. It had the catchy title Approximatio ad Summam Terminorum Binomii (a + b)n in Seriem expansi [Approximation of the Sum of the Terms of the Binomial (a + b)n expanded into a Series] 1/2

Job! A vacancy at the @eui-eu.bsky.social for a postdoc joining the @learnineq.bsky.social project, for 13 months, starting mid January. We study inequalities in school careers, and we engage with policy makers. The vacancy is here, please forward. DEADLINE 24 NOVEMBER. www.eui.eu/Documents/Se...

Join INVEST as a Visiting Fellow! Our fellowship call is open 3.11.-28.11. Fellowships are designed for postdoctoral researchers and beyond who wish to spend time at the flagship, exchange ideas, and build new research collaborations. Read more and apply invest.utu.fi/fellowships/

Sometimes I like to dream about being from a nation where you always know where you'll find your country name in an alphabetical list.

This is a great interview with my coauthor @cbrandtner.bsky.social about our recent @sfjournal.bsky.social paper: poetsandquants.com/2025/10/28/a... (the paper can be found here: doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...)

The wonderful 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics brought to mind this Soviet poster which embodies a different set of ideas: "Let Us Speed Up the Pace of Technological Progress!"

#Nokings protest in Big Sur, CA

Today I was thinking about small kindnesses, simple inexpensive things that brighten a day, and I thought about how the receptionist at my school saved me from humiliation in front of the Headmaster on account of having left my belt in a vase. /1

"To be invited to this interdisciplinary fellowship environment is really cool... I’m pretty stoked about it." - @coreydfields.bsky.social (quoting Confucius...) college.georgetown.edu/news-story/s...

Law is central to today’s social crises—from democratic backsliding to immigrant exclusion. This paper shows how cultural sociology offers rigorous explanations of, and insights into how to tackle, law-related crises. Hope it’s useful to law and society scholars and others osf.io/preprints/so...

We're hiring for a senior appointment at the rank of Associate Professor or Professor! Apply here: facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

The next ECSR conference is brought to you by @tcdsociology.bsky.social and @esri.ie! Trinity College Dublin, 15-16 June 2026 www.ecsr2026.net #ECSR2026 Abstract submission deadline: 11 January 2026

UKRI announces first UK-wide birth cohort study in 25 years #ESRC #AcademicSky

PhD studentship with quantitative focus: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

PhD studentship with qualitative focus: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Call for Papers! "Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts"-a special issue of Poetics, coedited with @jticona.bsky.social + Angèle Christin www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pla...

Master’s alum Ryan Cieslikowski shared research and commentary in a recent KQED news article on Stanford’s legacy admissions practices. bsky.app/profile/kqed...

The @isa-rc28.bsky.social #rc28 network organizes an online conference on 20/21 January 2026, without conference fee. It allows scholars from all over the world to submit their work. www.sciencespo.fr/cris/fr/actu...

This is a great essay on the digital economy: aeon.co/essays/the-s.... If you enjoy this, you should put Fourcade&Healy's The Ordinal Society on your reading list.

There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

Sociology at Nuffield College invites applications for academic visitors during the 2026-27 academic year www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/our-research...

Job alert! Join us at @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social as a postdoctoral fellow to work on your own research for three years. #sociology

Measuring intergenerational educational and occupational mobility in China and Russia during the transition to market economies, using new Markov chain methods, from Kristina Butaeva, Lian Chen, Steven N. Durlauf, and Albert Park https://www.nber.org/papers/w34124

NEW:Fabian Kratz, "Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

New paper reveals widespread decline in intergenerational economic mobility in 🇩🇪 for those born in the 70s and 80s. Similarly, educational inequality by parent income has also been increasing. 1/2 econpapers.repec.org/paper/cesces...

What we have learned from RC28’s contributions over the last two decades? @jenniebrand Hyunjoon Park and Michelle Jackson showed that scholars affiliated with RC28 have made so many important contributions over the last two decades and collectively shaped the field. Stay tuned for their paper. #CCPR

If you want to read the review paper by @jenniebrand.bsky.social , Hyunjoon Park, and Michelle Jackson about recent trends in social stratification and mobility. Please check out the paper 👇 #ASA #ISA #RSSM drive.google.com/file/d/1bgkT...

📣 Hot off the press 📣 We document tremendous growth in U.S. federal place-based funding, show it has disproportionately gone to areas with more nonprofits & stronger housing markets, and find a pattern of cumulative advantage in funding among high-poverty neighborhoods. doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...

RC28’s first online thematic meeting🎉This online meeting will be free of charge. The meeting will take place on 20-21 January 2026 and will be hosted virtually by the Centre for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS), a Sciences Po/CNRS unit, in Paris. More info 👇 www.sciencespo.fr/cris/fr/actu...

Once again, to inject some research into this conversation...although millionaires often threaten to move if taxed, that tends not to actually happen. The millionaire tax flight thing is a myth. See book below ⤵️ www.sup.org/books/sociol...

NEW! Call for papers for @russellsagefdn.bsky.social journal issue on "Gender Inequality Beyond Categories: Femininity, Masculinity and Gender Expression" edited by @stanfordsoc.bsky.social's Aliya Saperstein, @laurel-westbrook.bsky.social, & Bianca Wilson. www.russellsage.org/request-arti...

We are pleased to announce that the ISA RC28 Spring Meeting 2026 will be held at the campus of Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) in Seville. Conference dates: May 20–22, 2026. Theme: Addressing Social Inequalities in the Global North and South Stay tuned! Submissions will begin soon.

Want to work where the electron was discovered (and where other funky physics things happened before sociologists took over the Old Cavendish Lab)? We’re hiring for a Professorship of Sociology at Cambridge @camsociology.bsky.social, applications open until 16 Sept: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNI980/t...