doh forgot to tag @jcallahanbryant.bsky.social! Complete conversation (pod ep + transcript) are here: drilled.media/podcasts/dri...

More relevant than ever.

anyone else at #ASA2025?

The war tore apart the intellectual community of sociologists that had been developing around the North Atlantic. Some, like Hobhouse, were horrified by the fighting; others became belligerent. Durkheim and Giddings became vehement anti-German propagandists

Our Vice President misinterpreted a social scientist and, as a result, converted to Catholicism. jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/peter-thie...

For a while now I’ve been tracing this thread of general conservative skepticism toward the written word. A weird obsession, I know… jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/text-skept...

This week's digest shares the work of @jcallahanbryant.bsky.social and @j-farrell.bsky.social, urging a closer look at conservative thought in relation to the natural environment and the theoretical underpinnings of its connection to nature.

What is up with RFK and everyone talking about a "healthy" society? jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/what-is-a-...

im just on here because twitter is down

I was promised there would be dissertations about wtf "Old Town Road" was

All sociologists face the choice "to situate [social phenomena] resolutely outside nature; that is, admit that they are not subject to the law of causality and thus constitute a world apart within the world, or to proceed with them as with other natural phenomena."

Similarly, 404 Media found Doge dot gov was also not hosted on government servers, but rather was on Cloudflare. Pranksters were able to push live updates to the site. www.404media.co/anyone-can-p...

🔎 Think you know #populism? Think again—In rural America, #populist attitudes connect to economic grievances & conservatism but weaken the link to #PoliticalViolence. New #OA study by Drs. @jcallahanbryant.bsky.social, @jtommueller.bsky.social & Paul Berne Burow: doi.org/10.1177/2378...

My new paper on Populism and Political Violence with @jtommueller.bsky.social and Paul Burow is out now in @sociusjournal.bsky.social! We find evidence that in rural areas populist attitudes are associated with *reduced* support for political violence. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A quick little hit on MAHA, RFK, and today's purity politics. jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/maha-is-ju...

Great new piece from @benjij.bsky.social in @vox.com on the evolving landscape of the RFK right, MAHA movement, and purity politics of right-wing environmentalism! www.vox.com/climate/3935...

bookchin

everyone is like: this thing you think isn’t bad is actually bad

Mythically, Nick Saban is Robert E. Lee.

Me: "Computational power is an enormous barrier for many...under-resourced researchers in attempting to keep up with the cutting-edge methods demanded by top journals." Reviewer 1: "I found this statement frustrating." Reviewer 2: "This is a critical point, and you can support it with Baden (2022)!"

A little reflection on Stengers, Latour, Cronon, Kimmerer, et al. jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/seven-quot...

college football

on the eve of the Civil War, the "owning humans" industry accounted for 75% of the US economy. for context, today this is about equivalent to Finance, Insurance, all real estate; Business Services; Government; Manufacturing; Educational Services, Health Care, and Social Assistance; Oil and Gas

Researchgate always like, “People are reading your work!Weekly stats: +1 Read. A scholar in Kiribati.”

the fact that "abductive" is not a recognized word by most grammar software is a insult to American philosophy

so, in American sociology being a theorist is just being a “smart” empiricist?

if i just create enough “weak links” on BlueSky i will one day get a job in a sociology department

A theory paper revealing that the major cleavages in sociological theory are just Aristotle's "four causes": essentialist theory (material cause), formal theory (formal cause), relational theory (efficient cause), critical theory (final cause).

why do leftists suddenly care about joe rogan so much?

crazy that the only way to get a raise in academia is to threaten to leave by wasting another school's time and resources. should probably change that?

If one treats "Nature" and "History" as synonyms (as Collingwood argues) then "Essentialism" and "Ethnicity" also become synonyms.

the shift from "biology" to "narrative" as the central metaphor in sociology for rendering society intelligible

A new short piece reflecting on my first read-through our Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death! To quote Zadie Smith, “Neil Postman is a prophet and a genius.” jessecallahanbryant.substack.com/p/zadie-smit...

the naturalization of evolutionary metaphysics into progressive senses of reality throughout the 20th century and then the subsequent denial of “Darwinian ideas” by 21st century progressives is so epic

This year i’m primarily Giving Thanks for Kendrick dropping an unexpected album 🙏

the rapid exodus of sociologists to this site is so fucking funny

This paper feels incredibly important in understanding the darker and more intense edges of the contemporary (corporate) power brokers. #TESCREAL #eugenics

are people on here generally aware of the MAHA dimension of the new right? thoughts? confusion?

Looking for good examples of policy for #GenAI for your fall courses, check out this collection with over 130 examples. Spreadsheet: bit.ly/Syllabi-AI-P... GDoc: bit.ly/AI-Syllabi #HigherEd #EdTech #AIEd #ChatGPT #AIEdu #AIEducation

Our review on the sociology of right-wing politics and the environment drops in its final form in the Annual Review of Sociology this month!

Alex Jones has preemptively declared any terrorist attacks that follow in the wake of Trump's conviction "false flags," saying that this is the "classic deep state playbook." I think the term he's looking for is "permission structure."

This is a visual topic model (K=3) of about 8,000 user avatars on the white nationalist website Stormfront. The purple cluster is primarily portraits; the red topic is solely symbols; and the messy yellow topic is users with confused performances of self.

How can new LLM-based technologies be integrated into society to support rather than undermine democratic values and institutions? I edited and produced an audiobook version of a project trying to offer an answer: "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy," out now!

This "dataset of datasets" might be a useful resource for anyone working in political sociology or related fields! github.com/erikgahner/P...