content analysis

content analysis is still a work in progress and one unexpected reality of blogging is that it’s sometimes hard to think of some thing worthwhile to say.  In order to provide the loyal reader(s) of ca with something to read on a daily basis, I have decided to implement the following changes:

• the sunday reads closes up shop: I think we can all agree that this planned series that only happened once was a well-intentioned failure.  Truth be told, it takes away from my beloved Sunday if I have to post a whole collection of the articles that I’m reading.  In place of the sunday reads, I will post a carefully chosen article every day in a section called slow news.  For a full explanation, see the coming debut.
• america for europeans: This may well be a harebrained idea, but I came up with this watching last week’s great Frontline special on healthcare around the world.  The basic idea is to briefly discuss things that are, for better or for worse, uniquely American and slowly document what it is to live in  America in the early 21st century.  I’m pretty sure that’s kind of the idea of This American Life, but I’m stealing it.
• marx’s diary: In the February issue of Dave Eggers’ The Believer, Sam Stark had a disorganized, but interesting article about a 96 page violet notebook written by the young Karl Marx.  Marx’s notebook included poems, the first act of a Hamlet-like play, a novel about constipation, and, apparently, a lot of nonsense.  In the marx’s diary section, I will highlight some aspect of sociologists’ lives other than our work.  It could be something creative by a sociologist or something silly.  This column could be really fun or really short-lived.  Keep an eye on it.

Also, this week: look out for a tirade on the life and supposed death of newspapers in response to Eric Alterman’s fantastically dumb article in The New Yorker a few weeks back.  For more on Alterman, see here (on him becoming the “Aging-Lefty Lindsay Lohan”), here (on him just being wrong a lot), and here (on him being self-aggrandizing and picking stupid fights).