In The News: Department of Sociology

Emailing, texting, tweeting - endless streams of information coming at us hour by hour, minute by minute through desktops, laptops, smartphones, smartwatches, Alexa and Google Home.
The University of California, Davis is offering professors grants of up to $10,000 to conduct research that employs “feminist ethics and methodologies.”

It’s fun to test a college professor. After reading a few chapters from Simon Gottschalk’s new book, The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times (Routledge), I emailed him late on a Friday to see if he'd walk the talk. Would he instantly reply (F)? Or would he wait until Monday (A-plus) and resist our culture’s “increasingly pervasive and mandatory interaction with terminals”? After all, according to Gottschalk, a UNLV sociology professor, to fully be alive and human, we should avoid adjusting to “terminal logic.” Well, he aced my informal exam.
On Jan. 27, the state of Washington gave adults a third sex option on birth certificates — an “X” to indicate neither male nor female — without medical documentation. As gender scholars, we applaud this. It’s a big deal for the state to say that we don’t simply have males and females. Just adding one more category is a good start but doesn’t solve the problem of how we use these categories.
We hadn’t done an intersex fiction list… until today! Here are eight great fiction books featuring intersex characters, three of which are written by intersex authors!?
If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this week, you’ve probably heard about The New York Times profile of neo-Nazi Tony Hovater. “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” contrasted Hovater’s presence at the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist march and extreme views on whether or not Hitler did anything wrong with his upcoming nuptials and love of “Seinfeld.”

Brothels are legal in Nevada, but only in counties with populations of fewer than 450,000. But could a move by Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite Bunny Ranch and six more brothels, lead to more acceptance of brothels?
Nearly a third of business leaders and technology analysts express “no confidence” that education and job training in the United States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decade’s labor market demands, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds.

The killings of six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin has thrust attention on white power music, a thrashing, punk-metal genre that sees the white race under siege.