I liked the Odyssey and all, but if pee breaks were good enough for David Lean, they should be good enough for Christopher Nolan
Andrew Chalfoun
@achalfoun.bsky.social
Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ripon College. I study social interaction, organizations and religion. PhD from UCLA. Find me at www.andrewchalfoun.com
Big talk from someone who hasn't made a watchable movie in my lifetime
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w agoGeorge Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts
With all due respect to our northern neighbors, Boston Pizza is a terrible name for a fast food chain
The Met put its entire collection online for free so I made a game out of it! 10 artifacts a day, and you guess where and when each one's from. Anthropeum.com if anyone wants to give it a shot and leave feedback :) #history #archeology #arthistory #museums
I know you've always wondered: how were confessionals managed in modern Italy? My latest article, just published in Church History, reconstructs the use, maintenance, and negotiation of confessionals in late eighteenth-century Verona. (SPOILER: Their administration was surprisingly bureaucratic!)
New(ish) in Philosophy & Social Criticism: an intervention on realist “unveiling narratives” and their associated prescriptive claims within critical philosophy of race. doi.org/10.1177/0191...
Eyes and Darkness: Race and Idealism Through Cinga Samson’s Okwe Nkunzana 6 - Bradford Gladstone, 2026
This article critiques a strain of critical philosophy of race that presumes an ability to remove the evaluative “distortions” of race-based judgements from per...
doi.org
New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.
📢 We're hiring for my project RESPOL on residential mobility & electoral realignment 📍 University of Hamburg 📅 4y, 75% FTE 🔍 pol behavior, comp politics, regional inequalities 📊 quant, administrative & survey data Please share with talented MA students! 🔗 www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenan...
Job advertisement
uni-hamburg.de
Copyediting my dissertation and it appears that past me was fundamentally incapable of using apostrophes correctly.
New from me in Church History! I trace an early split between Southern Baptist conservatives over charismatic practices. The split shows how important Baptist identity (rather than generic evangelicalism) was to SBC conservatives in the 1980s. @aschurchhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
New from me in Church History! I trace an early split between Southern Baptist conservatives over charismatic practices. The split shows how important Baptist identity (rather than generic evangelicalism) was to SBC conservatives in the 1980s. @aschurchhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
BREAKING: we're suing CBP for hiding plans to wall off Big Bend. CBP refuses to release basic details, leaving local communities, outfitters & landowners in the dark. This wall would permanently destroy their livelihoods—and CBP won’t say a word to them. biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press...
The server says she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. A man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff. But she’s never seen anyone teleport into the Waffle House, like the FEMA official says he was. 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u...
No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In
nytimes.com
Really interesting piece - check it out! Deals with some old but enduring sociological questions.
Andrew Chalfoun@achalfoun.bsky.social · 5mo agoNew from me in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour! Social theorists have trouble explaining how intersubjectivity is possible if norms are open-ended. I contrast two proposed solutions (offered by Talcott Parsons and Harold Garfinkel), both ultimately unsatisfying. #EMCA 1/4
New from me in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour! Social theorists have trouble explaining how intersubjectivity is possible if norms are open-ended. I contrast two proposed solutions (offered by Talcott Parsons and Harold Garfinkel), both ultimately unsatisfying. #EMCA 1/4
Differentiating Regulative and Constitutive Normativity: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel and the Sticky Problem of Meaning
In everyday life, individuals regularly confront novel situations which demand their attention and response. In such situations, they routinely deploy portable norms to select between appropriate and....
doi.org
Working on a playlist for my students. What are people's favorite songs about violence? Bonus points if they're cheerful!
I have never felt more American than I do working on the proofs for a journal that enforces British spelling.
I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth. Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word! More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...
chicagobooth.edu
New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social: Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
When cooking with garlic, always remember the fundamental rules: 1) If the recipe calls for 3-4 cloves, use double 2) If the recipe calls for 1-2 cloves, use triple 3) The little cloves are freebies; don't count them
New from me in @readingreligion.bsky.social! I reviewed G. Kanato Chophy's book "Christianity and Politics in Tribal India," which documents an interesting case of the relationship between religious identity and ethno-national mobilization.
Christianity and Politics in Tribal India - Reading Religion
Through an ethnohistorical study of the Nagas—a congeries of tribes inhabiting the Indo-Myanmar frontier—this book explores an unusually interest...
readingreligion.org
Volume 67, issue 1, of TSQ is now LIVE, featuring articles by @achalfoun.bsky.social, @gio-rossi.bsky.social, @daeunjung.bsky.social, @djhardingsoc.bsky.social, @criminovelist.bsky.social, @mmaroto.bsky.social, @dnpetti.bsky.social, @andiewinnipeg.bsky.social, and more! Read it at bit.ly/45ezfzx
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
404media.co
my paper with my colleague and friend Victoria Tran is finally out!
Urban Affairs Association (UAA)@uaanews.bsky.social · 10mo agoNEW JUA #ARTICLE: Between the city and the people: The pitfalls and potential of hyper-local governance of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... @bhanlonurban.bsky.social
There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there plenty of agnostics in badger setts. And don't get me started all the freethinking that goes on in rabbit warrens
FREE TO READ Andrew Chalfoun, Giovanni Rossi, & Tanya Stivers show that everyday requests are made with an optimistic stance. Across seven language communities, people ask as if the answer will be “yes,” revealing a pervasive optimism bias in routine interaction. Read more at bit.ly/4oKjWWs
When we ask for something big—time, effort, money—do we hedge against rejection or assume success? With @gio-rossi.bsky.social & Tanya Stivers, we find that people are incurably optimistic, even though big requests often meet resistance. Published open access in @socquarterly.bsky.social. #EMCA
Incurable Optimism about Getting What We Want: Anticipating Success in Everyday Requests
When asking for something significant from another person, speakers not only set the tilt of the question toward the affirmative or negative but also display an optimistic or pessimistic stance tow...
doi.org
