Social Media Sociology

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

When journalist Tom Morton suffered a heart attack in 2015, his close encounter with death led him on an extraordinary journey into the world of the dead. He decided to train to become the only independent funeral celebrant on the remote Shetland islands. Armed with a new black suit and a second-hand undertaker's coat, Tom quickly learned that death requires you to think on your feet, and often to take a magpie approach to faith and philosophy.

In his blistering new audiobook, Bias in the Booth, sports reporter and commentator Dylan Gwinn takes you inside the sports media spin machine to reveal what they hope you won't notice: The sports media are no different from the news and entertainment media.

In any time of disruption or grief, many of us seek guidance in the work of great writers who endured similar circumstances. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, historian and biographer Robert Zaretsky did the same while also working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas. In Victories Never Last, Zaretsky weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the testimony of six writers on their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus.

This book embarks on a journey that is as much sociological and psychological as it is deeply personal. It seeks to unravel the complex dynamics between adolescence and the screens that surround them, uncovering the echoes of this digital world that reverberate through their thoughts, emotions, and relationships. Through the stories, experiences, and insights of adolescents themselves, I will traverse the realms of self-discovery, connection, addiction, and empowerment that social media brings to the forefront of youthful existence.

Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism.

The US Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that law-enforcement agencies have access to more than 100 million names stored in criminal history databases. In some cities, 80 percent of the black male population is registered in these databases. Digitize and Punish explores the long history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past 40 years - with devastating impact on poor communities of color.

As more of us live longer, the fear of an old age devastated by brain diseases like dementia is growing. Many people are already facing the challenges posed by these progressive and terminal conditions, whether in person or because they are caring for loved ones. Dementia is now the fifth most common cause of death across the world. It is a small wonder that understanding, preventing, and finally curing these illnesses is now a global priority.

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of time; but the paths of ancestors toward her - paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land - lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time.

From the New York Times reporter whose beat is culture and ideas comes a fascinating, revelatory, and timely social history of the concept of middle age. For the first time ever, the middle-aged make up the biggest, richest, and most influential segment of the country, yet the history of middle age has remained largely untold. This important and immensely listenable book finally fills the gap.

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies.

Developed as the commercial hub of the Texas cotton and sugarcane industries, Houston was designed for profit, not stability. Its first residents razed swamplands into submission to construct a maze of highways and suburbs, giving the city a sprawling, centerless energy as storms and floods rattled coastal Texas. When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, Fields set off from his home in Iowa back to the battered city of his childhood to rescue his mother. Fields tracks the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, one storm in a long lineage that threatens the fourth largest city in America.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

Night delivers a litter of eight puppies in a poor neighborhood in Springfield, Tennessee, the week before Melissa Armstrong first meets her. As a volunteer for a local nonprofit, Melissa has experience with strays and plans to rescue Night and her litter within days. But nothing goes as planned. For the next six months, Melissa and a ragtag cast of characters try to trap the mutt with nets, catchpoles, spring traps, cheeseburgers, hot dogs stuffed with Benadryl, and the dog’s crying puppies. They fail so many times that Melissa is on the brink of giving up.

Challenging Operations takes up the apparent paradox of medical professionals resisting reforms designed to help them and their patients. Through vivid anecdotes, interviews, and incisive observation and analysis, Katherine Kellogg reveals the complex ways that institutional reforms spark resistance when they challenge long-standing beliefs, roles, and systems of authority. Shedding new light on the difficulty of implementing reforms, Challenging Operations offers concrete recommendations for effectively meeting that challenge.

In 2005 Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, unveiled a new state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar cancer center. Determined to understand the whole spectrum of factors that determine what kind of medical care people receive in this country, best-selling author Julie Salamon spent one year tracking the progess of the center and getting to know the characters who make the hospital run.

Elevate the Debate helps researchers of all types more effectively communicate their work in any number of areas, from traditional news outlets to the new media platforms of the digital age. After listening to this book, you will be inspired and equipped to use traditional and digital media environments to your advantage. This real-world guide helps you present your data-driven research with greater clarity, coherence, and impact.

This comprehensive manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law explains how to get the healthcare you need - by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides listeners through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America and offers ways to fight back, including how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems.

When you sit down at a play, movie, or concert—or even in front of the TV or scrolling on your phone—you are taking part in one of the oldest and most mysterious forms of human behavior. Being part of an audience is an age-old experience that we all crave, one that has evolved from amphitheaters to screens. Right This Way is a pop history of audiences through the ages. Playbill editor Robert Viagas unfolds the unique aspects of what he calls “audiencing” with stories from the age of the Greeks to the world of Zoom.

In order to resolve the significant racial, ethnic, language, and financial inequities that exist in healthcare quality and access, health systems must undertake the development of systematic approaches to advance diversity, inclusion, and health equity.