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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…

We all see the world through eyes colored by the psychological imposition of gender. Girls are girls and boys are boys and never the twain shall meet. We think what we see is natural reality, but is it really? Sociologists…

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 Bob Dylan once sang, times they are changing. Finally it does appear to be that way. The Middle East has boiled over with grass roots, ground up revolution! It’s too soon to tell what’s going to happen, and the…

As Republicans conduct an autopsy of the 2012 election they’ll need to acknowledge that their particular brand of vanilla–rich, white, and well-aged–is no longer a recipe for electoral success. No doubt, this will be a tough pill to swallow. After…