Is Social Science a Joke?

Richard Biernacki exposes fatally sloppy sociology, covered up with fake science. Are quantitative methods hopelessly compromised in social science?

Freud and Nude Psychotherapy for Criminal Psychopaths

One more addendum to the question of Freud and science. The gravest deployment of psychoanalytic theory was in psychopathology, and it’s here that I have the greatest trouble with Freud’s influence. Now, the history of ...

Jenny Diski on Erving Goffman

Rejecting any possibility of an essential identity, his notion is of the self as purely contingent, a shape-shifting construction of altering circumstances. The individual, Goffman says, arrives into an already established social world, and is ...

Thomas Frank: What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Only Dissent: Thoughtless Kind Again

Erving Goffman on the Thoughtless Kind