📣 We are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in sociology at Davidson College! Could this be your dream job? I'm open to chatting about teaching at a liberal arts college and this position. Just message or email me : ) careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311603/...

Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Sociology - Davidson, North Carolina job with Davidson College | 1311603

Tenure Track Assistant Professor - Sociology   The Sociology department at Davidson College invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Profe...

careercenter.asanet.org

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...

#Sociology has been in the news a lot lately. A new piece just dropped in @wsj.com, featuring some comments from me. Per usual, they only used a few sentences from the hour+ conversation. Let me to expand a bit below. tldr: my answer to the titular question is an emphatic "no"🧵

If Odysseus had spent less time on forever wars in Troy and more time on issues affecting white working-class citizens of Ithaca, then maybe Penelope's suitors wouldn't have tried to kill him.

With this stuff I’m always just like “Release the Cristobal!”, the Millionaire Exodus Kraken of Cornell, equally devastating and let’s face it almost as large (sociology.cornell.edu/cristobal-yo...)

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 3w ago

Another example. Recent stories about a millionaire exodus from NYC, with pictures of Mamdani. 1) The report covered a period from 2010-2022 - before Mamdani was elected! 2) Its about NY state not NYC! 2) There was no millionaire exodus! NY's millionaire growth just lagged other states!

How you react to this interview might be the best Rorschach test for social science faculty ever devised.

Stephanie M. Lee@stephaniemlee.bsky.social · 3w ago

New Q&A: Is anthropology hopelessly politicized, more than any other humanistic field? That's the charge that's been flying around this summer, so I wanted to hear from Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association. She had a lot to say. www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

Interesting read for sociologists given how sociologists vary in whether anthropology is to be seen as a role model or cautionary tale.

Stephanie M. Lee@stephaniemlee.bsky.social · 3w ago

New Q&A: Is anthropology hopelessly politicized, more than any other humanistic field? That's the charge that's been flying around this summer, so I wanted to hear from Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association. She had a lot to say. www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...

New study reveals children drive cultural change - Durham University

durham.ac.uk

PLEASE SHARE: The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion has immediate opportunity for new Executive Officer. This part-time, remote position pays $55k. Details in attachment. Apply here https://bit.ly/SSSR-2026-EO.

woof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.

If students are simply uninterested in the core bargain of a class like this, it’s hard to know what to do. You teach the material because you think it’s important they know it; they don’t give a shit, but want the credential; and the university wants their money. Your main option is “pretend”.

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 4w ago

woof ≈80% of assignments this summer term have essentially been just raw chatgpt/claude output, including assignments that required designing stuff in illustrator/affinity/canva. The battle is lost for asynchronous online courses.

I'm hiring a postdoc in 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲! This project will focus on psychological change in the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular interest in Islamic history. Topical themes include religiosity, creativity, morality, and institutions. 1/n

a new blog post! given how politically sorted occupations are in the U.S., I wanted to examine whether occupational prestige judgments differ by partisanship. using the restricted GSS data from 2012, I show that there is, in fact, no such partisan penalty. post: tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/prestige

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

I feel like there's a growing gap in perception between people who use LLMs to code or do code-adjacent things and people who only evaluate LLMs on their ability to write prose. This might be a stretched analogy but it reminds me of the different "worlds" of the polarized US media environment.

A fifth of Leave voters have died.

Today is my last day at Scientific American, which has been sold to LabX media group. For three decades I've led the magazine's coverage of human origins, archaeology, paleontology, animal behavior, ecology, BIRDS. End of an era. Anyway this feels weird to say, but I'm now available for assignments!

a new working paper with Chris Johnston & @stephenvaisey.com! we study issue opinions among a novel sample of 10-12-year-olds, showing that children, contrary to received wisdom, express reasonably structured preferences. a working paper here: tkeskinturk.github.io/poldevelopment.pdf

I'm teaching an online workshop on ABM and model-based thinking through ICPSR next month. Details linked below in case you or someone you know is interested.

ICPSR Summer Program@icpsrsummer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Interested in building models? 🤔🖥️ During "Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling and Model-Based Thinking" you will learn to understand, design, and build agent-based models of complex social systems! Register now: https://myumi.ch/3R7q1 #ICPSR #SumProg26 #AgentBasedModeling #ModelBasedThinking

I’ve grown super worried about LLM agents w/ access to all my files and secrets. Existing sandboxes and containers felt hard to use day-to-day, so I built a small convenient utility to keep agents away from important stuff. It’s called “bulle” (for “bubble”). 1/2 vincentarelbundock.github.io/bulle

shoutout to @hannahrecht.bsky.social for a fantastic R package. This is a great way to get US census data: github.com/hrecht/censu... #EconSky

GitHub - hrecht/censusapi: R package to retrieve U.S. Census data and metadata via API

R package to retrieve U.S. Census data and metadata via API - hrecht/censusapi

github.com

This is the clearest and most accessible introduction to DML I've ever read: arxiv.org/abs/2504.08324 Congrats to the authors @aahrens.bsky.social, @markeschaffer.bsky.social, et al on this amazing paper and great accompanying R package! I'm now DML-pilled.

An Introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning

This paper provides an introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML). DML is a general approach to performing inference about a target parameter in the presence of nuisance functions: objects...

arxiv.org

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

we have a new paper in the April issue of Political Psychology. in this (admittedly quite lovely) new paper, @stephenvaisey.com, @pablobellode.bsky.social and I make a simple point: using panel data to understand belief change is very hard. we highlight an empirical intractability in the process:

there are many out there thinking that it's beneficial to use AI tools for coding, but treat writing as a sacrosanct activity. I think this distinction is a mystification. I discuss why scholarly work is essentially a project, and it's about curating as much as it is refining:

It’s not just that there is no requirement, but ASA prohibits any requirement. This is why I am no longer an ASA member and won’t serve on ASA journal editorial boards.

Joe Noonan@joenoonan.se · 5mo ago

Wild that the top sociology journal doesn't require computational replication or open data.

Sociologists may be even more able than other academics to hold these two insecurities in their heads at once: (1) My work is brilliant and everyone wants to steal it; (2) my work is pathetic and it's only a matter of time before I am exposed. Both are excuses to not follow basic science norms.

Interesting use of open ends to show how partisan-leaning independents differ from both "pure" independents and weak and strong partisans onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...