Grappling with AI through Film 

On By Karen SternheimerIn Behind the Headlines, Popular Culture and Consumption, Rob Eschmann, Social Problems, Politics, and Social ChangeLeave a comment
author photo Rob Eschmann

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 SternheimerLeave a 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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author photo Chau Anh

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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Armchair Experts vs. Social Science: From Opinion to Research

On By Karen SternheimerIn Karen Sternheimer, Statistics and MethodsLeave a comment
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By Karen Sternheimer

We’re all amateur would-be social scientists. We make observations of the world around us and draw conclusions. This is not social science: science involves creating hypotheses, or educated guesses, and then testing our hypothesis using a systematic empirical method. We also have to be open to being wrong. Always.

Many of us look around and see people on their mobile devices quite often. We might opine that this creates disconnection, isolation, and even rudeness in people who don’t pay attention to their surroundings in public.

Armchair experts just stop there: they’ve seen it with their own eyes, more than once, thus it is a social pattern as far as they are concerned. But this is not a systematic observation.

How would we make this assumption into a testable hypothesis?  Here are seven steps to consider:

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Social Role Shifts and Starting College

On By Karen SternheimerIn Karen Sternheimer, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Social PsychologyLeave a comment

By Karen Sternheimer

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We have written a lot about social roles on the Everyday Sociology Blog. Back in 2020, Jonathan Wynn wrote about the role a department chair plays within a university. Within this post, he described Robert Merton’s definition of social role sets:

A role might be a patterned set of expectations, but a role set is a complement of several roles, which can, in turn, create conflicting expectations and therefore, stresses. Such a development of the concept is connected to larger organizational structures.

We can experience role strain when our various social roles produce challenges, as Jennell Paris wrote about during the pandemic, when many people were working from home and had to be parents and employees at once. Role conflict can happen when the multiple roles we play might be incompatible, as I wrote about in 2024 when encountering my dentist at a small dinner party.

We all have social roles that connect us to the larger social structure and various social institutions. It can be unexpectedly challenging when the roles to which we have become accustomed shift.

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Challenging Inequality: Why We Should All Love Boosters

On By Karen SternheimerIn Class and Stratification, Crime and Deviance, Popular Culture and Consumption, Stacy Torres, TheoryLeave a comment
author Stacy Torres

By Stacy Torres

If you see one movie in theaters this year, make it I Love Boosters, Renaissance man Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, absurdist comedy crime caper and love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area.

What’s a booster? Musician, writer, producer, filmmaker, and activist Riley (Sorry to Bother You) defined the term in The Coup’s eponymous 2006 rap anthem: “A booster is a person who jacks from the retail/ And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale.” Both song and film pay tribute to the “hardworking women who risk jail-time just to make them a living.”

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The Sociological Importance of Mel Brooks

On By Karen SternheimerIn Class and Stratification, Karen Sternheimer, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change1 Comment

By Karen Sternheimer

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When I was a child, I really wanted to see Mel Brooks’ The History of the World, Part I. The ads on TV looked funny, and other kids I knew allegedly had seen the movie and talked about how good it was, re-enacting some of the funnier bits.

Alas, it was rated R, and I would have to wait until I was an adult to watch it and every other Mel Brooks movie. His movies blended silliness that appealed to children and sexual humor that appealed to adults, but they were off-limits for kids like me. The political satire that gets slipped into this comedic mix is a great example of the sociological importance of his work.

A recent plane ride gave me the time—nearly 4 hours— to watch Judd Apatow’s documentary Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man, complete with interviews and a multitude of clips from his comedy career that dates back to 1950. It’s clear from the body of his work that he sees himself not just as comedic writer, director, actor, and producer, but a social critic. He talked about the role of the court jester to make fun of those in power in an old interview. His movies tackle diverse themes like oppression, economic inequality, racism, and even homelessness (Life Stinks, one of his later movies from 1991).

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