Welcome to Roblox: A Lesson in Culture

On By Karen SternheimerIn Monica Radu, Popular Culture and Consumption, Statistics and MethodsLeave a comment
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By Monica Radu

I’m a sociologist, so I like to think I know a thing or two about culture. I teach about culture. I write about culture. I talk with students about cultural differences, and why we should be careful about judging ways of life that are different from our own.

Then my sons started playing video games. Suddenly, there was an entire culture operating inside my own home that I knew absolutely nothing about. Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite. At first, these were simply names of games to me. I knew Minecraft was the one with the blocks. Roblox was…well, I wasn’t entirely sure what Roblox was. And Fortnite involved a lot of jumping around and apparently some dancing. I was an outsider. But slowly, I started learning.

I learned the terminology and discovered that Roblox isn’t really one game at all, but a platform filled with different games and experiences. I started figuring out which ones my kids liked and which ones everyone seemed to be talking about. And somewhere along the way, I also learned that there were YouTubers who built enormous audiences around playing these games. And after enough exposure, I did something I never expected to do: I developed preferences. For the record, Foltyn is my favorite Roblox YouTuber. (Sorry, Caylus).

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House Hunting for Social Class: A Sociological Look at Zillow

On By Karen SternheimerIn Class and Stratification, Monica RaduLeave a comment
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By Monica Radu

I have a confession: I look up people’s houses on Zillow.

You might think we’re exchanging addresses so I can send you a Christmas card. Sure, maybe a Christmas card is coming. But there is also a very good chance I’m going to Zillow. How much did you pay for your house? What is it worth now? How many bedrooms do you have? When was it built? Oh, you remodeled the kitchen? I love it!

Why do I do this? I don’t know! Part of it is simple curiosity. Looking at houses is fun. I’m also a sociologist, which means apparently, I cannot stop observing people even in my free time. And Zillow has made it far too easy to be nosy from the comfort of my own couch.

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Can AI Replace Creativity?  Work and the Future of Artistic Occupations

On By Karen SternheimerIn Behind the Headlines, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and MedicineLeave a comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

Lisa Kudrow’s HBO Max show, The Comeback, features a sitcom actress trying to revive her career decades after her heyday. The first season in 2005 explored how reality television shaped the creative landscape at the time. The third season—released 21 years later in 2026— considers what happens when AI writes a sitcom and casts Lisa Kudrow’s character, Valerie Cherish, to star.

While not an ideal situation, Cherish has few other career options. She and her husband, who lost his job in finance, have downsized from a house to a high-rise condo. Cherish does the best she can to make the most of the opportunity, using her connections to famed television director James Burrows, real-life director of classic sitcoms Taxi, Cheers, Will & Grace, and Frasier to get him involved in the project.

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Working in Hell’s Kitchen: Labor Markets and the Communities they Shape

On By Karen SternheimerIn Cities and Urbanization, Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social ChangeLeave a comment

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By Karen Sternheimer

Before there was the reality cooking show and restaurants of the same name, Hell’s Kitchen was a New York neighborhood on the westside of midtown Manhattan. Now often called Clinton or Midtown West, the more colorful name represented the once rough-and-tumble community just west of the theater district, from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River, and approximately West 34th to West 59th Streets.

The origins of the name aren’t entirely clear, but it likely reflected the gang violence that once dominated the area, filled with crowded, dangerous tenement buildings. “Hell’s Kitchen” evokes a sense of discomfort, to say the least. Like many cities in the nineteenth century, new immigrants often found work in local slaughterhouses and on nearby docks, as well as breweries that once operated in the neighborhood. The work was difficult and dangerous, and often controlled by the mob. With jobs in the area for working-class people, the community was likely one that new immigrants flocked to and more affluent families stayed away from.

In the twentieth century, public housing projects concentrated poverty in this neighborhood. And with the eventual decline of shipping into Manhattan and relocation of the slaughterhouses that once provided jobs, the area declined further.

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Grappling with AI through Film 

On By Karen SternheimerIn Behind the Headlines, Popular Culture and Consumption, Rob Eschmann, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change1 Comment
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By Rob Eschmann

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey  features an unexpected twist in perspective, reframing the legendary Trojan Horse as a war crime that contributed to the fall of Greek civilization. This creative decision makes the 2,700-year-old epic more relevant than it has ever been, speaking directly to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

The film highlights the deep connection between Greek culture and “Zeus’ law,” which demands that people show hospitality towards strangers, any of whom could be gods in disguise. When the hero Odysseus, played by the always impressive Matt Damon, invented the Trojan Horse, he made a mockery of Zeus’ law by using a gift offered under a banner of peace, a gift offered to the goddess Athena, to burn Troy to the ground and enable the massacre of countless civilians.

Throughout the film, Greeks are fearful of attacks from the mysterious “people from the sea,” thought to be outsiders and barbarians that threaten to destroy Greece. Later we learn that the people of the sea are just Greeks who have shunned “Zeus’ law.”

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Social Economy: Public Investment and Social Priorities

On By Karen SternheimerIn Cities and Urbanization, Class and Stratification, Karen Sternheimer1 Comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

While visiting Roosevelt Island in New York, I came upon a park named for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, which I discuss in this blog post. I vaguely remembered this speech, and as I re-read it, I stumbled upon the phrase “social economy,” or institutions that are created with a social mission.

This seemed a perfect description of some of the beautiful buildings I visited while in New York: art museums, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, and the New York Public Library. These buildings are not all owned by the public, but exist to fulfil a public service. It made me think about how and why communities decide to invest vast resources in making spaces like these beautiful, ornate, and works of art themselves when they could easily be simple utilitarian buildings.

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Losing My Sisters and Finding Myself in the Collective Trauma of September 11th

On By Karen SternheimerIn Behind the Headlines, Relationships, Marriage and Family, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change, Stacy TorresLeave a comment
author Stacy Torres

By Stacy Torres

Every year September 11th fills me with peculiar grief. I lost my younger sisters that day. They lived, but after fleeing destruction, they never really returned. And that day never really ended.

I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to understand the unraveling of our relationship.

Let me explain.

Six days before the attacks, the twins began tenth grade at the High School for Public Leadership, one of two closest schools to the World Trade Center. I had high hopes for their new school, transferring them there for its educational, career, and internship opportunities and partnership with Syracuse University. Since my mother’s death five years before, when I was sixteen and the twins were ten-years-old, I’d inherited outsized responsibilities for running the household and taking care of my three younger sisters, including making major decisions about their education.

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Collective Memory, Public Health, and FDR

On By Karen SternheimerIn Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change, Social PsychologyLeave a comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

“Excuse me, do you know who that is?” asked a woman with an Eastern European accent. I was taken aback, because she was pointing to a bust of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). We were standing on Roosevelt Island, just east of Manhattan, named for our 32nd president.

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Urban Spaces Paradox: Embracing Change and Preserving the Past

On By Karen SternheimerIn Cities and Urbanization, Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social ChangeLeave a comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

I love exploring Los Angeles. Even though I have lived here for more than 30 years, there’s always someplace new to see. As a temporary local, living across town from my former home, I recently had the chance to explore Angelino Heights for the first time.

Angelino Heights is a small community just north of downtown, famous for well-preserved Victorian homes. It’s approximately 4 miles from where I am living now, and one summer morning I decided to check it out on foot. My morning run to the community made me think about the paradox of urban spaces. One the one hand, gentrification means people like me feel comfortable traversing them on my own, while some long-time residents can no longer afford to live there. And communities with status like Angelino Heights fight change to maintain their historical value, limiting who can live within them. Housing is complicated indeed.

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Resistance and “Brain Rot”

On By Karen SternheimerIn Marci Cottingham, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change2 Comments
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By Marci Cottingham and Chau Anh

Chau Anh Nguyen is from Hanoi, Vietnam and currently a senior at Kenyon College majoring in English and sociology

If we take words of the year as indicators of the current zeitgeist, then what can sociologists make of brain rot, Oxford’s 2024 word of the year? It is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Low-quality internet content is presumed to have a negative impact on one’s intellect. The rot-inducing qualities include nonsensicalness, short-form, lack of context, absurdity, and so on. It comes in multiple forms, including shorthand slang (e.g. skibidi toilet, rizz/rizzler, goon, edge, beta sigma alpha, sus, among us, ohio), rapid reels and TikTok, and absurd AI-generated videos.

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