Thrilled to share our new paper, "What Would Jesus Fund? Christian Nationalism and Americans' Views on Government Spending," just out in Socius! 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

What Would Jesus Fund? Christian Nationalism and Americans’ Views on Government Spending - Ibrahim Enes Atac, Lena Kunjan, Forrest Lovette, Samuel L. Perry, 2026

Research on government spending focuses primarily on the roles of partisanship, ideology, and in-group self-interest. Beyond these, the authors propose that rel...

journals.sagepub.com

new WP (w/ @ntd.bsky.social): we use the case of Christian nationalism to make a broader point about "niche ideologies" in mass opinion research, and why you shouldn't scale them the same way you'd scale more general attitudes Link: osf.io/wbdut/files/...

PSA to authors who assume that their reviewers are demanding citations to themselves: I just got the reviews of something where I was a reviewer, I was NOT the reviewer who told them to cite me, and this is not all that rare an occurrence

This semester I taught a new course, "Culture and Social Policy." The idea was to identify the symbolic assumptions that drive policy discussions in the US, trace their historical roots, then see how they work in multiple policy domains.

Human cooperation undergoes constant breakdown and repair Incentives to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed (don't assume cooperation will sustain itself). www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"...to remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it...minor conflicts over shared resources are key to the health of democracy." placesjournal.org/article/the-...

The Disappearance of the Public Bench

Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban public spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose more than just a place to rest.

placesjournal.org

NEW at POST: In a naturally-occurring experiment, we document an electoral "vibe shift" surrounding Biden's decision to drop out of the '24 election, which translated into increased donations up/down ballot and increased faith in democratic institutions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

"[J]ob-level variation in skill content constitutes an independent source of wage inequality—one that is obscured by analyses at the occupational level." Just out in our journal, @sociologicalsci.bsky.social

Sociological Science@sociologicalsci.bsky.social · 4mo ago

NEW: Marie Labussière, Thijs Bol, "Are Occupations “Bundles of Skills”? Identifying Latent Skill Profiles in the Labor Market Using Topic Modeling" sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

I've always been curious about how seeds *actually* work when generating random numbers, so I decided to figure it out for class yesterday and it's actually REALLY NEAT AND MAGICAL. Check out this little Excel file I made to show how a seed can creates a set of pseudo random numbers

I’m happy to report that a new article written by Daniela V. Negraia, Sophie Lohmann, @ezagheni.bsky.social, and me is now available in Social Indicators Research: link.springer.com/article/10.1... We use historical time use data to examine growth in solitary leisure in the U.S. since 1965.

Unmarried and Increasingly Alone: Solitary Leisure Among Unmarried, Solo Dwelling Americans, 1965 to 2018 - Social Indicators Research

Social Indicators Research - Remaining unmarried and living alone are becoming more common in Western countries, including the U.S. Prior research has focused on the social lives of these...

link.springer.com

RELIGION UNBUNDLED Excited that this paper proposing a new paradigm for the sociology of US religion @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social, @jlkucinskas.bsky.social, @bsteens.bsky.social and I have been working on has been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review. osf.io/preprints/so...

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

Jürgen Habermas, influential German philosopher, dies at 96

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died.

bit.ly

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Meet the window heat pump: A compact unit that's relatively cheap and takes half an hour to install. While they're not widely available yet, they could prove to be an important climate solution in the future. @wbur.org #energysky #decarbonization www.wbur.org/news/2026/02...

Boston is piloting a new type of heat pump that's as easy to install as a window AC

The Boston Housing Authority is piloting a new type of window-mounted heat pump that's relatively inexpensive and easy to install.

wbur.org

Soc Theory Nerds should check out @dsilver432.bsky.social's always illuminating Substack. The most recent missive, on "The Iron Cage of Authenticity" is fun into Tay Tay's philosophy (Charles Taylor, of course. Did you think Taylor Swift?). thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/the-iron-c...

The iron cage of authenticity

Why there can be no more traditionalists, only Trads

thesilverlining3.substack.com

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/...

Just saw Keytar Bear playing a Red Line stop in single digit windchill. They are one of the best parts about living in Boston. Kudos to people who make public joy in tough times.

When we moved to Indiana in 2012, my husband was working remotely, and the isolation was rough, so he started looking for local social activities and ended up starting a rec hockey league. Sadly, the league fell apart when we left Indiana in 2022, because no one stepped up to run it in his place.

Vicki Larson@omgchronicles.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Women show up. The men? Not so much. #maleloneliness medium.com/an-injustice...

We're mourning yet again in Minnesota — and struggling to square the gut-churning video of Alex Pretti's final moments with official accounts. I'm teaching techniques of neutralization this term, so I made this quick slide on the DHS statement. Share if it's useful. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...

The University of Minnesota has confirmed that Mr. Pretti was a 2011 graduate of our CLA Geography Department's Biology, Society, and the Environment program -- a few floors down from my sociology office. He will *not* be forgotten. apnews.com/article/immi...

The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says

Family members say the man who was killed by a federal officer in Minneapolis was an intensive care nurse at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital who cared deeply about people and was upset ...

apnews.com

With apologies for the self-promotion, if you're interested in learning about how faith leaders built the network that this clergy and religious resistance grew out of, I have just the book for you! uncpress.org/978146967316...

Making Moral Citizens

This fascinating book takes readers inside the world of faith-based progressive community organizing, one of the largest and most effective social justice mo...

uncpress.org

Jack Jenkins@jackjenkins.me · 6mo ago

The clergy just keep coming to this anti-ICE protest. Genuinely unclear where they all will go — it’s packed outside on the sidewalk already.

Attention undergrads! @pewresearch.org has more than a dozen paid internships for rising juniors and seniors this summer in Washington, DC. Find more info here: www.pewresearch.org/about/intern... Apply here: pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...

Internships

Our 2026 summer internship program will be open to applications January 16-February 11, 2026. Our paid summer internship program is a learning and

pewresearch.org

Wondering why those new university "civics centers" are silent on the deadly constitutional crisis happening in Minnesota. hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/civics-cen...

Civics Centers as Ivory Towers

Federalism in the classroom, silence on the street

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

a useful parsing of the age-period-cohort problem for Australian loneliness in this thread

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 7mo ago

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

Absolutely fascinating new study in ASR: Lab experiment with 5th graders finds "even individual effort does not appear immune to the influence of socioeconomic origins." doi.org/10.1177/0003...

What an honor for our documentary podcast When the Wolves Came to be named one of The Atlantic’s Top 20 Podcasts of 2025. Wild way to end a wild year!

Read all about it here!

A new print magazine celebrates creativity of adult fans of Legos

Massachusetts resident Sam Aquillano’s passion for Lego building as an art form drove him to create a new, independent magazine, Bricka. The first issue printed this month.

wbur.org

Sharon Brody@thebrodybeat.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Coming right up on 90.9 @wbur.org -- adult fans of Lego building, unite! And peruse a new print magazine made just for you! We'll introduce you to the Massachusetts man launching the publication that celebrates the art of the little interlocking bricks.

Fun new work on political behavior/donations: doi.org/10.1111/socf... "several important trends, all of which challenge simplistic stereotypes of American professors as some sort of Marxist intellectual vanguard or as professional mouthpieces for the US capitalist class."

Which Side Are the Faculty on?: Professors, the 2019–2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and the Politics of Redistribution in the United States

Existing scholarship on US professors' political views focuses overwhelmingly on their attitudes toward social and cultural issues rather than economic ones. This study explores American academics' p...

doi.org

Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. Key measures of religiousness are holding steady in the United States, continuing a period of relative stability that began about five years ago. www.pewresearch.org/...

Ooooo cool new study: "...the relationship between religiosity and conformism is stronger in more religious countries and birth cohorts, and conformists are more likely to disaffiliate in contexts where larger proportions of the population are nonreligious." academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...

Faith in Numbers: Religion and Social Conformism in Europe

Abstract. Religious people are considered to be more conformist, both in popular imagination and in scholarly literature. However, most studies on religion

academic.oup.com