A Sociological Eye

This is the story of David DePape : gamer, nudist, and rightwing conspiracy theorist. In the early morning of October 28, 2022, Depape broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. She was in Washington, DC, with her security detail. But her husband Paul Pelosi was home. DePape beat him with a hammer, fracturing his skull and injuring his arm and hands. Within minutes of this news being announced, hot takes were being posted on Twitter. I looked, and here is what I saw: on the political right, the claim was that DePape was a crazed leftist. The “proof”? Well, come on, he lived in San Francisco! He had long hair! Googling the man turned up a history of participating in nudist protests. That couldn’t be a conservative! Oh, look, he listed his occupation in a newspaper article from a decade ago as a hemp jewelry artist. What could be a more ridiculous, emasculated lib-type job for a man? So, hmm, if he’s a leftist, why did he break into the Pelosi home and attack Paul, ...

I teach a course on the Sociology of the Body with graduate and undergraduate students. Students write a lot in the class, and that gives me a window into the zeitgeist when it comes to thinking about the body. Students reveal what is taken-for-granted about the body in the current moment in our society, and it is always shifting over time. This can be fascinating! For example, I've watched the language of "body positivity" replace the norm of self-shaming, over the 20 years I've been teaching the class--while, tellingly and fascinatingly, the amount of shame and insecurity students express about their own bodies has not decreased in the least. Students today just feel embarrassed by experiencing that shame. For students in an earlier period, expressing contempt for their bodies was experienced as a moral obligation, whereas now it seems to feel more to students like a failure of selfconfidence. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about ...

I'd like to show you a fascinating graph. In fact, I'll show it to you a few times! It shows the number of people in the U.S. who died each day from Covid-19, since the pandemic took hold here in April 2020 until today. And it breaks them down by political party. Have a look:   I want to talk about the partisan gap in Covid-19 death rates in the U.S.. It has a wild history of flips, spikes, growth and shrinkage. At the moment I write, the gap remains significant, but is much reduced from where it was in 2021. Why is that? And will it swell again, or disappear? Is partisanship literally killing people? And could it be that a reduction in partisanship over Covid responses is, counter to expectations, leading to more deaths, not fewer? The graph above comes from an article published in February of 2022 in the NY Times , written by David Leonhardt. I've color coded the multiple Covid waves for clarity.  A quick overview shows this: during the first wave, when the world went i...