September 19, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston
“Now we are beginning a new school year.” That was the line I had to write every September in elementary school, back when penmanship was still part of the curriculum. If I recall correctly, the follow-up line was, “Writing helps me in my lessons.” I should pay more attention to those words of wisdom. Writing this blog can have its rewards both for learning and for teaching.
The start of a new year (academic year, blog year, Hebrew year) is also the end of the old year. Time to look back and pick out the posts that I liked — an exercise in what Chris Uggen,* in the banner of his blog, called “self-indulgery.”
1. Two posts about Debbie, the sociology grad student in the TV show “Mindhunter.” Her misreadings of Durkheim and Goffman are noteworthy.
Debbie Does Durkheim if only for the title. (Among people in France who read this post, there was some discussion on Twitter about how to translate the title so as to capture the cinematic allusion.)
“Mindhunter” Needs a Sociology Checker
2. Two posts on current hand-wringing over kids and technology.
America’s Not-So-Lost Youth
Smartphones and Teen Existential Angst
3. Two posts about Tom Wolfe. Nobody had a sharper eye than Wolfe when it came to status and style — what we now call “signalling.” The trouble is that even when the issue was injustice or inequality, Wolfe saw only status and style.
Tom Wolfe (1931 - 2018) — Class, Status, and Parties
Tom Wolfe and the Novelistic Techniques of the New Journalism – Reading Minds and Making Stuff Up
4. Rutgers v. Irony. I lapsed into very non-academic prose in this one.
Gentrification and Its Discontents
The guy it’s about e-mailed me that it was “brilliant,” but that’s only because I understood what he was trying to do while everyone else (Breitbart, Rutgers) was deliberately misunderstanding it. Eventually FIRE got involved.
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* If anyone can get Chris to put on his spikes again and come out of blogger retirement, the Internet will be a better place.
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