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Iisms and Schisms and postmodern standpoints. We live in spineless world were we all “go along” just to get along and where “playing the game” (i.e. complying with social conventions, avoiding confrontation, and letting the status quo exist unchallenged) is…

Thomas Kuhn (1996) argued that scientific revolutions take place when dominant paradigms are dislodged by emergent paradigms. Science undergoes such transitions when established paradigms fail to account for an increasing number of empirical anomalies. Anomalies may be understood as enigmas…

If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Morpheus in The Matrix. Ray Kurzweil is obsessed with artificial intelligence (AI). Kurzweil has written a series of bestselling…

As a sociologist I often get heartburn listening to others talk about evolution. As every sociology student knows, from the time Herbert Spencer first coined his “survival of the fittest,” Darwin’s thoughts have been used, misused, and exploited in service…

Ah, Black Friday. It’s typically the biggest shopping day of the year and, for that reason, the happiest date on the calendar for retailers. On Black Friday, retailers who have been languishing in the red can count on raking in…

Academic communities and higher learning facilities like universities are the places where great knowledge is born and passed on with the purpose of ‘enlightening’ our societies for the better. Or is it? Aren’t academies and universities about socialization into The…

On Sunday, July 22, 2012, Penn State University removed the statue that the university had erected in Joe Paterno’s honor at Beaver Stadium. In removing the statue, the university has made an emphatic statement: Penn State University no longer wishes…

Morality – Has it ever occurred to you how difficult it is to be a good person? In fact it seems that even the best people amongst us, cannot be good all the time – how many times have we…

The world in 60 seconds? A sociologist looks at daily life differently. Walking through a market with melon in hand, we see interrelationships, economic realities, injustices, and a world that “could be” or “might be” if we stopped buying into…

So what’s with professional athletes and violent behaviour? Are these individual just “thugs” or is something else going on. In this short article Earl Smith traces some of the social, class, and economic roots of questionable athlete behavior showing that…