Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S23XASA through our virtual exhibit ».
The resurgence of American censorship and book bans
Anthony Comstock is back in the news. More than a century after his death, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the law he inspired – the 1873 “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” more commonly known as the “Comstock Act” – have emerged once again as players in America’s cultural wars, cited by right-wing judges in 2023 to support banning books, drag shows, and the medical abortion drug mifepristone.
Comstock was active throughout the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. He opposed women’s suffrage, the dissemination of any information regarding birth control or abortion, and pornography or other “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Thousands were arrested under the Act and Comstock himself boasted that 15 people were driven to suicide by his actions. After his death in 1915, Comstock’s work was carried on by his successor at the NYSSV, John Sumner.
As I discuss in my book, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity », it was Sumner who had Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap arrested in 1920 in New York for publishing an excerpt of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review. In January of that same year, Prohibition became law in the US after the Volstead Act passed. In April, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the murder of a Boston-area paymaster in what many believed was a politically motivated action based on their anarchist political beliefs. And perhaps most importantly, in 1920 the 19th Amendment became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote, sending Sumner into a frenzy over the fear that “radical feminists” would upend American society. In the midst of these social and cultural changes, Anderson and Heap were convicted, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, and were fined fifty dollars each (about $750 today). Joyce’s Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies of The Little Review that contained excerpts of it were taken to the official government incinerator and burned. Fortunately, copies already in the hands of purchasers survived to be digitized for us today.
What do two of the biggest fraud cases in U.S. history have in common?
The precipitous fall of Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF) from his status as a crypto wunderkind and the world’s youngest billionaire, splashed across the covers of Fortune and the Forbes’ “400” edition, to having his in-jail nutrition and pastimes in a sordid Bahamas jail reported by Bloomberg, is a story that rapidly claimed widespread public attention and commentary. Indicted on eight counts of conspiracy and criminal activity related to wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, violation of campaign finance laws, as well as facing civil charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, SBF is alleged to have, from the very beginning of his establishment of the cryptocurrency trading platform, FTX, in 2019, deceived equity investors, and channeled and commingled billions in customers’ funds illegally to his other business, the quantitative crypto-hedge fund Alameda Research, founded in 2017. With those funds, SBF purchased swanky real estate in the Bahamas, made risky speculative investments and large political donations, loaned himself and other executives large amounts of money, repaid Alameda’s debts, and even bailed out other distressed crypto firms. In total, about 8 billion dollars of FTX customers’ funds are thought to have been lost in the swindle by SBF and his accomplices.
Almost immediately, along with the details of SBF’s fraud and titillating accounts of his life in the Bahamas, came comparisons with and allusions to perhaps the most notorious white-collar criminal of the 21st century, Bernard Madoff. CNN juxtaposed footage of Madoff’s arrest alongside that of SBF, asking if SBF was the “new Madoff” in an interview with the federal prosecutor. In his first network interview, George Stephanopolous levelled at him “A lot of people look at you and see Bernie Madoff.” #BernieMadoff trended in tweets about SBF in November 2022, and Google Trends in January 2023 showed that the top two related rising “breakout” queries to the search term “Bernie Madoff” were “FTX” and “Sam Bankman-Fried" respectively. Yet, the comparison to Madoff, in terms of the nature, length of, modus operandi, and motive, is largely inapposite. Important differences (and similarities) abound.
Perhaps most significant among these differences, in spite of the loose throwing around of the term to describe SBF’s fraud: it is not a Ponzi scheme. To call it such—as has been the case in non-broadstreet outlets—stretches the term so that it loses its definitional clarity. Madoff’s 17.5 billion Ponzi, the largest in history, like all such classic schemes regardless of size, involved paying ‘returns’ to investors in a fake investment advisory business using funds from other investors in the same scheme that were merely deposited in a personal Chase bank account. It was a legerdemain that was possible as long as new institutional investors and individual ‘marks’ could be obtained. SBF is accused of misappropriating deposits from FTX customers to plug holes for Alameda among other purposes, commingling funds between the two businesses, but this is more readily described as embezzlement. His selling equity investors on a responsible business that was anything but responsible, was also fraudulent, but not a Ponzi. On none of the legal documents from government agencies like the Department of Justice (DOJ) or Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does the term appear, unlike in Madoff’s case. Among the other important differences is the modus operandi: Madoff's scheme, as with many Ponzis, was an affinity fraud targeting members of communities to whom he had personal connections, a characteristic not seen in SBF’s crime, which was much shorter-lived, surviving only a few years, compared to Madoff’s fraud, which by some accounts stretched back to the 1970s, an almost 40-year scheme. And last, while Madoff in his interviews for my book Bernie Madoff and the Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism », expressed being motivated to begin the Ponzi to not disappoint his wealthiest clients, some have suggested that SBF’s allegiance to the philanthropic philosophy of effective altruism might have been his motivator.
Continue reading "Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, and the lessons of Bernie Madoff and the Crisis." »
The future of physician decision-making and patient welfare
The overturning of Roe v. Wade has shocked millions, with many grappling with the implications of the June 2022 Supreme Court decision to no longer ensure that abortions are a constitutional right to all individuals living in the United States. Amidst the shock caused by this decision with many questioning how we, as a nation, got here, health care providers, patients, activists, policymakers, and the like, began to immediately articulate the consequences of this decision. Including the obvious impact on reproductive health care access and reproductive rights, this decision will have a disproportionately negative toll on individuals of color, and will lead to the criminalization of patients and health providers who offer abortion care.
With each passing day, the consequences of this decision continue to permeate the news. Most recently, reports have revealed the heavy restrictions being placed on medications that are known to impact a fetus and/or can result in an abortion. For instance, Methotrexate, a common and affordable drug used to treat multiple conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer, is currently being denied to individuals with a uterus. With providers choosing not to prescribe these medications and pharmacies refusing to carry such medications, individuals of childbearing age are disproportionately impacted and at high risk of their health care needs being unmet due to anti-abortion legislation.
The decision to refuse to provide medication to an individual of childbearing age is just one example of the difficult decisions providers are now expected to make in the post Roe v. Wade nation. Such decisions resonate with the complex decision-making process of physicians revealed in my book, Conflicted Care: Doctors Navigating Patient Welfare, Finances, and Legal Risk ». In this book, I demonstrate how physicians encounter a hidden curriculum of doctoring on the clinical wards of a prestigious academic medical center that forces them to make medical decisions amidst conflicting medical, financial, legal and training pressures. These conflicting pressures inevitably compel physicians to make trade-offs when formulating clinical decisions, which are rarely uniform. In some instances, financial considerations drive clinical protocols, in others, malpractice litigation fears play a primary role. Ultimately, while patient welfare is always an important feature of the clinical decisions providers make, it does not necessarily emerge as the driving factor in medical decisions due to the highly commodified and bureaucratized health care system in the United States.
Continue reading "Conflicted Care in a Post Roe v. Wade Nation" »
Education, cadence, and the pitfalls of perception
In The Battle Nearer to Home », I assess the politics of school integration in New York City from 1954 to the present. I examine policies and practices of the New York City Board of Education that perpetuated a system in which Black and Latinx children often attended substandard, segregated schools that fundamentally failed them, in a system that nonetheless, retained the glint of integration and inclusion. Crucially, I also spend many pages trying to capture what the long, exhausting, and ongoing quest for racial justice in schools felt like to those who were fighting for it: the determination, the exasperation, the frustration, and the sense of community that comes with waging an uphill struggle. My project Soundtrack to the Battle will, I hope, aid in this effort.
I’ve been making beats since the late 90s, when I transitioned from live deejaying—working until 4 AM didn’t mesh well with the academic life—to music production. The simplest reason for creating Soundtrack to the Battle is that I love making music. I love to write as well. Yet, as anyone who creates in more than one medium can tell you, the joys and struggles of each one are distinct. In many cases, I can create a demo of a song and enjoy it recreationally on my runs or in the car in a matter of days or weeks. I forgive my “mistakes,” which are sometimes the secret sauce in a song. I live and breathe with it. Of course, writing a book entails a more stretched-out timeline and rhythm, and that marathon contributes to the feeling of accomplishment and pride when your book enters the world.
Some of the songs on the soundtrack are instrumental. One listener commented that the album has “driving in the rain vibes.” Another said: “It’s really a city soundtrack.” I love those interpretations: people typically don’t react to academic books in such rich, impressionistic language. While the instrumentals refer abstractly to the emotional landscape of school equity struggles, other songs include interviews with friends who attended New York City public schools. (Those interviews were conducted after the book was complete.)
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S22XASA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
For the best shipping rates on orders outside of North America use the discount code S22XASA-FM at our international distributor, CAP.
Book Trailer for The Border Within » by Phi Hong Su
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S21XASA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
For the best shipping rates on orders outside of North America use the discount code S21XAOM-FM at our international distributor, CAP.
Marcela Maxfield, SUP's Sociology Acquisitions Editor, says hello to ASA and explains her areas of interest.
Continue reading "American Sociological Association Conference 2021" »
Nigerian beauty pageant contestants and the power of friendship
In December 2019 two different moments featuring Nigerian representatives at major beauty competitions drew considerable attention. At the 2019 edition of the Miss Universe competition held in Atlanta, Olutosin Araromi, who placed in the top 20, smiled broadly when Miss South Africa, Zozibini Tunzi was crowned the winner. Araromi gave an enthusiastic thumbs up sign, kissed the newly crowned Miss Universe on the cheek, and encouraged Tunzi to relish her coronation walk. Araromi, who was Tunzi’s roommate at the Miss Universe competition earned the media designation of being her personal “hype queen,” a riff off of the slang term “hype man” used in hip hop music for a backup performer who gets the audience energized and boosts the star’s stage presence. Less than a week later, at the Miss World competition held in London, Miss Nigeria’s Nyekachi Douglas, placed in the top 3, but lost to Miss Jamaica’s Toni-Ann Singh. Internet buzzed about her priceless reaction. Douglas danced, jumped for joy, and whooped animatedly, hugging a shell shocked Singh. Viewers commented on Douglas’ genuine support and kind-hearted reaction as embodying the epitome of a loyal friend.
Promoters and fans view beauty queens as cultural ambassadors. The relationships between beauty queens represent microcosms of diplomatic affairs.
Pageants are often dismissed by the general public as superficial yet they hold significance at the individual, national, and global levels. Araromi and Douglas’ viral moments generated Internet memes, social media commentary, and news coverage. A less charitable interpretation of these moments might conclude that the Nigerian beauty queens held ulterior motives of stealing the limelight. This understanding depends in part on common perceptions of Nigerians as playing an outsized role in Africa as the most populous country and at the forefront of cultural trends in fashion, literature, music, and film. There is a long-standing desire to translate this recognition onto the world stage through events like beauty pageants. Industry insiders view winning and hosting beauty competitions as avenues of promoting hospitality, entrepreneurship, and positive attributes of Nigeria by showcasing charming, attractive, and intelligent young women.
On the whole, responses commended how Araromi and Douglas’ joyous reactions highlighted solidarity, sisterhood, and support despite their personal defeat. These instances belie conventional understandings of beauty queens as catty, hyper-competitive, and self-absorbed. Indeed, in my own book, I write about how beauty contestants often stress the social connections, camaraderie, and life-long friendships that they gain from their participation in beauty competitions. Their involvement in these contests also provided opportunities to network outside of the pageant world. Effectively networking relied on their self-presentation as virtuous and formidable women concerned with the greater good of their communities. They are expected to use their platforms selflessly, to help vulnerable segments of the Nigerian populace through public speaking and charity work. Beauty queens leveraged these forms of civic labor into social capital to catapult their careers and ambitions to the next level. Participating in Nigerian beauty contests provides the chance to enter into the upper echelons of Nigerian society through hobnobbing with celebrities, lobbying politicians, and striking business deals with executives.
Ming Hsu Chen on American membership and exclusion.
This piece was previously posted on the Scholars Strategy Network.
For the last decade, U.S. federal immigration policy has focused on enforcement. Indeed, an anti-immigrant thrust undergirds many of the major domestic policies of the last thirty years – from the tough on crime initiatives of the 1980s, to the welfare and work reforms of the 1990s, to the anti-terrorism efforts following September 11, 2001. Most recently, powerful political forces have pushed ethno-nationalism as a strategy for protecting America during a public health crisis. Beyond so many tendencies to reject immigrants are the underappreciated roles immigration policy can play in integrating immigrants rather than excluding and deporting them.
Compared to U.S. citizens, immigrants hold statuses far short of full membership in U.S. society. For many, membership is circumscribed by their legal status as noncitizens. There also social, economic, and political barriers to full membership, even for naturalized citizens. Many immigrants, including naturalized citizens, struggle with access to language instruction, face economic barriers in the workplace, and find themselves without a political voice or vote. Increasingly, many fear brushes with law enforcement or immigration authorities that may lead to detention or deportation.
U.S. immigration law, unfortunately, tends to draw boundaries and exclusions. Noncitizens sit outside the circle of membership, and in many areas the laws are not obligated to afford them the equality or fair treatment due to citizens. Rather than seeing immigrants as individuals who are, at present, partial members of the U.S. community, and in many instances moving toward possible full citizenship in the future, U.S. authorities tend to regard immigrants as the responsibility of someone else, somewhere else.
Continue reading "HOW THE U.S. CAN SUPPORT IMMIGRANTS EN ROUTE TO CITIZENSHIP " »
A Q&A with Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Earlier this month, Stanford University Press hosted an online discussion between Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, authors of the recently released The Costs of Connection », and Safiya Umoja Noble, author of the bestselling Algorithms of Oppression. The Costs of Connection uncovers "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Because attendees of the talk posed far more questions than could be answered in a short amount of time, we invited Nick and Ulises to continue the conversation here.
What do you think are the key/most concerning issues in the age of data colonisation and why?
At the core there are two issues. First, the capture of what in our book we call ‘the space of the subject,’ the basic protection from interference and monitoring that is essential to our integrity as individual selves. This affects all possible selves, even if detailed effects are, as we just said, deeply unequal. But then, second, there is data colonialism’s way of deepening and obscuring how inequality gets reproduced through automated algorithmic processing — the implications of this for social life in every country in the next decades will also be severe, all the more so, because much of that will be easy to hide from view.
Data colonialism might be free of violence, but only of the once applied in the former colonial times. I believe it is just a different time of physical violence, which is even more profitable. Digital platforms are clearly damaging brains, propelling sedentarism as well as social isolation. It is also pulling people into debt by promoting consumption in each website which in an more extreme way is pulling people into poverty, which in the long run shortens life expectation. Do you agree?
Absolutely. As we said in the webinar, the question of violence is complex. It would be wrong to even hint that the situation with data colonialism involves anything like the brutal and sustained physical violence that was at the core of historic colonialism. But for sure data colonialism is introducing a social order that relies on a lot of force and pressure. So if you are in a low-paid job, you won’t have the chance to negotiate whether or not you put on your phone the app that tells you where your next assignment is, even if it takes your data. When these sorts of pressures are overlaid with others (about debt, housing etc), then the net effect may well be physically violent. And then there’s the effect on people’s brains of their continued exposure to digital devices and the intense pressures this can bring, as noted in our last answer. Finally, there is the symbolic violence that lies at the core of how data colonialism categorises and orders everyday life. All of this is important to our reading of data colonialism, and justifies the statement, as you say, this is a time of a different type of violence, even if the apparent difference from the immediate brutality of historic colonialism must always be recognized.
Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.
In light of Bernie Madoff's recent request for compassionate release we are republishing this entry from 2017.
In May, HBO’s The Wizard of Lies brought in the largest premiere audience that the network has seen in four years. The film, an adaptation of Diana Henriques’ journalistic account of Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, saw, 2.4 million viewers, the weekend of its release—a sizable audience, especially considering that actors Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner headlined Madoff, a four-hour ABC miniseries on the same subject, only a year prior. Perhaps as a way to seize upon the renewed interest generated by the film, which cast Robert De Niro in the lead role as Bernie and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, the New York Post ran a lengthy article, “The sad new life of exiled Ruth Madoff,” with paparazzi-style photos of Ruth, her preferred bagel shop, dry cleaners, local clothing shop, and other quotidian details about a no-longer-privileged existence. The UK’s Daily Mail published a similar story with photos of the “recluse” Ruth emerging from a local CVS. With a distinct note of schadenfreude, the piece indicated just how far down the social ladder she had fallen. With the ten-year anniversary of Bernie’s arrest approaching, public appetite for this story and curiosity about its principal characters remains robust.
Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures.
Understanding the world of institutional review boards.
Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Regulating Human Research» author Sarah Babb
What made you want to write about the history and the evolving role of IRBs?
I was the Graduate Director in the Boston College sociology department. Sometime around 2006, I began hearing from many students encountering problems “getting through IRB.” In an attempt to tackle this problem, I volunteered to serve on our IRB at Boston College. There I discovered that federal regulations were a great deal more flexible than our local Boston College IRB policies--for example, federal rules could allow most social research to be carried out without informed consent forms. As a faculty board member, I tried to get the BC IRB to adopt more flexible policies, but was unsuccessful.
I suppose you could say that this project was born out of my frustration with that experience. But once I started learning more about the IRB world, I began to see that there was something much bigger going on, and that this bigger thing was also happening in other areas of American regulation. So my book attempts to capture this.
What was the research process like?
As a qualitative researcher, I tried as much as I could to immerse myself in the IRB world. I became an avid reader of a trade journal for IRB administrators. This helped me understand the issues (which are surprisingly complex), and also gave me the names of contacts to start interviewing. It also allowed me to ask better, more targeted questions, and to connect more effectively with my informants (I ended up talking to about 50 of them). I also started attending the annual meeting of the IRB professionals’ association. This immersion made me sympathize with the dilemmas of these professionals, and I have tried to bring this out in the book.
As I carried out my research, I added my trade journal articles, interview transcripts, and other sources into a file in the qualitative data analysis program Atlas.ti, and coded them for themes. This process allowed me to be guided by what my data were telling me, and brought me to my final research question and arguments.
For scholars of regulation, I think the book speaks to the weirdness of the way we regulate in the United States. Instead of having strong federal bureaucracy, our system spins off thousands of locally financed compliance bureaucracies.
How Americans shifted from civic optimism to political polarization.
In 1963 the seminal political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba coined the term “civic culture” to describe the exceptional nature of American democracy. Compared to Western Europe, American democracy had features that were unusual. The following were essential features of this political culture: citizen optimism, confidence in government, generalized trust of other citizens, consensus between the parties on the policies of post war reconstruction of Europe, and civil discourse between political combatants. American citizens also exhibited different behavior: they were more engaged in their communities via volunteer activities, they exhibited less suspicion of others’ motives, and they were more involved in political discourse within their families and in the community. Women were also more engaged in familial political discussions. Voting rates were higher and “we’re all in it together” was a common sentiment.
In today’s U.S. political system polarization, distrust, lack of confidence in major institutions, and contentiousness have taken hold. Robert Putnam1 described this phenomenon as “Bowling Alone,” a narrative in which citizens withdraw from communities into the private life of family and work. Earlier Morris Janowitz (1978; 1983) had pointed to declining civic consciousness, symbolized by the rejection of the ‘citizen-soldier’ model of citizenship, as a major social change. The decision to end the draft in 1973 and turn to an all-volunteer army signaled the death of this concept. In this view citizen rights then became a more compelling issue than citizen responsibilities. In both explanations the result is declining civic consciousness and patriotism.
Seymour Lipset2 in 1996 offered an alternative to these perspectives. He focused on the return to normalcy that post- war policies and the reconstruction of Europe produced in the U.S. The result was a resurgence of classic American cultural narratives. American individualism revived from its slumbers in the ‘50s when elites emphasized collective action and social mobilization to combat Russian aggression; to reconstruct Europe; and to avoid nuclear annihilation. A more activist model of citizenship emerged. A revival of populism energized Americans, particularly younger generations, which gave rise to the turbulent ‘60s.
For Americans with disabilities home care is a right.
Democratic presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, recently unveiled a plan about how Americans with disabilities will fit into his “Medicare for all who want it.” This is a big deal. While healthcare reform is on everyone’s mind, candidates have been silent about how their plans will specifically address long-term community-based care for non-elderly people with disabilities. Millions of Americans currently depend on Medicaid funds in order to realize their civil right to live free from confining and isolating residential facilities.
Medicaid (not Medicare) is the largest payer of in-home care in the US but that doesn’t mean people with disabilities are entitled to it. As a result, cuts to Medicaid almost always lead to cuts to optional community-based care, not nursing home care which states are legally required to provide.
Millions of Americans currently depend on Medicaid funds in order to realize their civil right to live free from confining and isolating residential facilities.
For years following the early 1980’s implementation of a waiver system meant to channel money from nursing homes to home care, both Democrats and Republicans recognized this institutional problem. Despite numerous (often bipartisan) attempts to reform the bias favoring nursing home care, little real change has come about.
The 1990s began with a great deal of promise as the ADA was supposed to clarify and extend disability rights, although it wasn’t immediately clear how the ADA alone could limit needless institutionalization without actual reforms to Social Security and Medicaid. Bill Clinton’s focus on healthcare reform signalled new political opportunities to legislators and activists. By then, growing inpatient and disillusioned with the political process, activists took to the streets demanding that long-term community-based care be part of the healthcare reform conversation – an eerily familiar cry as the disability community today is left wondering where they fit into proposed Democratic plans.
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