Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Kidney Theft in India

There’s a long-standing urban legend about where you meet an attractive person in a bar, they buy you a drink, and the next thing you know you wake up in a bath of ice with a pain in your lower back and a note telling you to get to a hospital. One of the reasons […]

Theory is dead, long live theory

In comments at Scatterplot, Dan Hirschman asks,

A colleague of mine in graduate school interested in social theory claimed there were no longer job postings available for specialists in theory. Instead, budding theorists have to masquerade as ‘cultural sociologists’ or something like it. Does that hold up to your impressions of the Sociology job market? What […]

National Histories

Ari at Edge of the West asks,

… who’s the most important … [American] historical figure about whom most people know nothing?

(I have edited the question slightly, because Ari is a historian and so writes 250-word blog posts that have five footnotes.) I don’t have many suggestions, because I am one of the “most people” in […]

Limousine Libertarians

I was driving home from the office this evening (yeah, yeah, I know—I prefer to think of it as Arizona taxpayers getting good value for money) and I saw this enormous Ron Paul Revolution limousine thing go by. It was as long as a semi. Arizona is McCain country, but there are also plenty of […]

Opt-Out Organ Donation for the U.K.?

The BBC reports that a change may be in the offing in Britain’s policies on cadaveric organ donation:

Gordon Brown says he wants a national debate on whether to change the system of organ donation. He believes thousands of lives would be saved if everyone was automatically placed on the donor register. It would mean that, […]

Moral Hazard

Activated “Time Machine” backup feature on office Mac: Friday afternoon.

First need to use Time Machine due to inadvertently deleted file: Monday morning.