HeyJaredThe Neighborhood Sociologist
A newsletter using a sociological imagination to talk about society, culture, and politics.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 7
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- Sep 27, 2026
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- Jul 3, 2026
Latest issues
Boldly Going Nowhere? (opens the original)
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For a species that can imagine traveling faster than light, we are remarkably unimaginative about Fridays.A four-day workweek still sounds radical to plenty of people. I don’t even recall television shows depicting it in a fictitious world. We can’t even bother to imagine it. But a spaceship traveling across the galaxy at warp speed? Just another Tuesday on Star Trek.I was thinking about this recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (I’m currently binge watching this
The Yeoman Professor’s Leverage (opens the original)
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I have been particularly productive lately. Let me recount what I have been up to.Ahem.I am redesigning my professional website and produced a draft I’m pleased with. I’ll let that marinate for a while, and in the meantime I collected and analyzed user data from the social media platform Bluesky. It’s for my upcoming book that is taking way too long. Oh and then there’s the chatbot. I built a new version of Rozzer, my chatbot students will use to analyze cybercrimes. It’s early days, but I’m hap
The difference between thinking critically and critically thinking (opens the original)
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How did we adopt artificial intelligence so quickly and with so little public debate? How can almost everyone see that our democracy is in trouble while no one seems to know how to repair it? Why do we seem to be sliding back toward the xenophobia and hatred we tell ourselves belong to the past? And, just to throw in something existential, at least once every few months I encounter another warning that we are running out of water. We possess vast stores of expertise and information. So why do th
On Jason Arday, Charlie Kirk and Cyberviolence (opens the original)
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Recently, the sociological community lost one of its own. The circumstances surrounding Jason Arday’s death reminded me that society has not fully accepted how many of us now “live” in a digital environment. More people enter this world each year. Yet we still do not know how to reckon with the form of violence native to it: harm delivered through symbols.On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned as a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. Once celebrated as the university’s
The Odyssey Controversy and the Rise of Essentialism (opens the original)
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My plan was to write about the culture-war controversy surrounding the new adaptation of The Odyssey. For those unaware, the film has become a flashpoint after director Christopher Nolan cast Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, a choice that sparked significant backlash from critics who argued it was historically inaccurate and an exa… Read more
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