Author Archives: legallysociable

Placing “anomie” among states of sadness

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A writer discusses the different states of sadness including melancholy, mal du pays, neurasthenia, and anomie. Here is the description of anomie:

“Anomie” was another condition once favoured in the 19th Century by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, and from a sociologist, a sociological condition. Anomie was defined as an isolated mood caused by the breakdown of social norms, sense of purpose and rules of conduct.

This famous term came out of Durkheim’s thinking in Suicide. I’ve never thought of it as a sadness – I usually think of it as a slotting issue where some individuals don’t have roles within larger society. Durkheim was less interested in how it was experienced by individuals and more interested in why it occurred and then might lead to more suicides.

If I had to describe the kind of sadness that anomie represents, I might go with something like a feeling that one does not have a place in society, doesn’t fit, doesn’t have a role, and is outside society’s norms and rules.

Large “shadow inventory” lurking behind foreclosures

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While foreclosures have drawn a lot of attention, there may be yet another threat: the “shadow inventory” of homes where owners are at least one month delinquent on their payments.

In the eight-county Chicago area, 19 percent of mortgages — representing nearly 1 in 5 residential properties with a loan — are delinquent by at least one month, helping create an inventory of almost 204,000 homes at risk of reverting back to lenders, according to data provided to the Chicago Tribune by John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif. That “shadow inventory,” as experts define distressed homes not yet put up for sale, is the largest in absolute terms for any metropolitan area in the country.

Based on its calculations, the firm believes that 80 percent of those homeowners eventually will lose their property, either through foreclosure or a short sale, in which the lender permits the home to be sold for less than the value of the loan.

If these figures are correct, or even close to correct, the housing crisis will continue for years to come as they properties eventually come up for sale. This will continue to have a strong effect on housing values and new building starts.

This could also have specific effects for the Chicago region. While most of the foreclosure attention seems to be focused on the Southwest and Florida, this data suggests many homeowners are teetering on the edge of keeping their homes.

The presence of coyotes in cities and suburbs

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Residents of cities across the United States have reported seeing coyotes in recent years. This has been an issue around Wheaton, Illinois: earlier this year, I even had the opportunity to be about 100 feet behind a car that hit a coyote walking across a busy road.

Among other discussions, such as the exact background of coyotes, researchers suggest coyotes are long-term residents in urban areas:

Even in their new habitat of the great metropolises, with nary a sheep in sight, the coyote finds itself, at best, a nervously tolerated visitor. In recent years, urbanites have been simultaneously charmed and disturbed by coyotes strolling in Central Park, trotting into a Quiznos restaurant in downtown Chicago and taking a dash around a federal courthouse in Detroit. Such news is, more often than not, soon followed by the news that the coyote has been rounded up and removed. It doesn’t seem to matter that coyotes are relatively harmless, as researchers point out, as any person or pet is much more likely to be injured or even killed by a domestic dog.

Neither does it seem to matter that the removal of a single showy coyote is unlikely to leave a city clear of these animals, or even give any sense of just how many coyotes a given city harbors. Dr. Gehrt said that when he began his research he would have guessed there were some 50 to 100 coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area. After a decade of radio tracking and genetic analyses, he knows better. Dr. Gehrt said he conservatively estimates the number of these rarely seen creatures at more than 2,000.

The coyote is out there, and it is here to stay.

I would have liked to have seen more discussion in this article about why coyotes have returned to urban areas in such large numbers.

Seeing a coyote is also a reminder than even our most urbanized areas, like Manhattan or built-up suburbs, are closer to nature than we often think.

World War I reparation payments from Germany to end soon

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From the dustbins of history, CNN reports that Germany will on Sunday (October 3) make its last reparations payment from World War I. Here is a brief history of the payments:

The initial tally in 1919, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, was 96,000 tons of gold but was slashed by 40 to 60 percent (sources vary) a few years later. The debt was crippling, just as French Premier Georges Clemenceau intended.

Germany went bankrupt in the 1920s, Der Spiegel explained, and issued bonds between 1924 and 1930 to pay off the towering debt laid on it by the Allied powers in 1919’s Treaty of Versailles…

Germany discontinued reparations in 1931 because of the global financial crisis, and Hitler declined to resume them when he took the nation’s helm in 1933, Der Spiegel reported.

After reaching an accord in London in 1953, West Germany paid off the principal on its bonds but was allowed to wait until Germany unified to pay about 125 million euros ($171 million) in interest it accrued on its foreign debt between 1945 and 1952, the magazine said.

In 1990, Germany began paying off that interest in annual installments, the last of which will be distributed Sunday.

I had no idea that these payments were still being made. I don’t know the answer to this: are reparation payments between nations still a common method for helping to rectifying the wrongs of war?

It is also a reminder of the major consequences of World War I, a war that gets a lot less attention in the United States due to a smaller US role and a majority of the fighting taking place away from American shores.

How a curved glass Las Vegas hotel can burn people at the pool

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According to a story in the Daily Mail, the design of the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas is leading to burnt guests at the pool. Because of the concave design of the building plus its glass exterior, several guests have reported being burned by this “death ray”:

Due to the concave shape of the Vdara hotel, the strong Nevada sun reflects off its all-glass front and directly onto sections of the swimming pool area below.

The result has left some guests with burns from the powerful rays and even plastic bags have been recorded as melting in the heat…

The Las Vegas Review Journal quotes one hotel employee as saying the building’s design causes the sunshine to be diverted ‘like a magnifying glass that shines down’ over a space of about 10 by 15 feet as the poolside.

And as the Earth rotates, the spot moves across the pool area. The ‘death ray’ can increase temperatures by around 20 degrees.

The article also suggests the architects foresaw this problem but their initial solution didn’t solve the issue.

Interesting stuff – the unintended consequences of building a large, concave, glass building in desert conditions. This could lead to a cheesy movie or some pontificating about the folly of humankind trying to build in a climate like that of Las Vegas.

A more upbeat assessment of the state of Detroit

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In recent years, numerous media outlets have focused on the troubles of Detroit. Photo essays of now abandoned but once glorious buildings have become normal.

There is one grassroots news organization that is now pushing back against these more bleak images. VICE/VBS.TV explains their approach:

In August 2009, Vice published a story called “Something, something, something, Detroit: Lazy journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff,” about the roving gangs of photojournalists prowling the empty city and feasting on its highly photogenic carcass. Since then, some of the worst offenders have abashedly changed their approach to covering Michigan’s largest city. But most outlets are still fixated on the all-you-can-click pageview buffet that is “misery porn” of the decaying Motor City…

The fact of the matter is that the situation in Detroit is daunting. The city that so successfully realized the 1950s American dream is now a visual testament to its grandiose demise. But is that really news?

We like to think that the story is better told by identifying those who remain in Detroit and those who are moving back precisely because it is challenging. We set out to give the people of Detroit a platform to tell their story. The city has become a place where enterprising classes can find the space and time to do whatever they want, cheaply and hassle-free. It’s a raw space where they can create community and start rebuilding their city from the inside out.

I’ll be curious to see how much attention their coverage generates. And the possible transformation/regeneration of Detroit will continue to be a fascinating story.

NRC ratings of doctoral programs

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The National Research Council has released its long-awaited report that measures and compares doctoral programs in a number of disciplines. Check out the interactive tool at the Chronicle of Higher Education that allows users to compare programs on a variety of the 21 criteria.

Some interesting features of the data:

1. The surveys were conducted in 2006-2007 so the information is somewhat dated. This would be particularly true in departments with productive new or departed faculty.

2. The NRC doesn’t assign ordinal ranks to schools but instead now gives ranges for each program. This seems like a sound decision that helps suggests what schools are like/near each other without having to introduce what may be artificial distinctions by saying one school is #4 while another is #6.

Just quickly looking through some of the S-rankings in sociology, some schools seem to be quite a bit off compared to other rankings over the years.

Sorting the good from the bad statistics about Evangelicals

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Sociologist Bradley Wright talks with Christianity Today about his latest book: Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media. Here is CT’s quick summary of the argument:

Young people are not abandoning church. Evangelical beliefs and practices get stronger with more education. Prayer, Bible reading, and evangelism are up. Perceptions about evangelicals have improved dramatically. The data are clear on these matters, says University of Connecticut sociologist Bradley Wright, but evangelicals still want to believe the worst statistics about themselves.

One question to then ask is why Evangelicals buy into these negative statistics. The subculture argument, when applied to evangelicals, might suggest that these numbers help keep people fired up by reminding them that the group could lose its distinctiveness if drastic action is not taken.

Wright suggests his goal is to encourage Evangelicals:

This is not a call for complacency but for encouragement. Why not say, “We’re reading our Scriptures more than most other religious traditions; let’s do even better”? Instead, what we hear is, “Christianity’s going to fail. You’re all a bunch of failures. But if you buy my book, listen to my sermon, or go to my conference, I’ll solve everything.” These fear messages demoralize people, hinder the message of the church, and hide real problems.

I would like to see exactly what statistics he looks at and debunks. Wright is not the first to suggest Evangelicals have some issues with statistics.

The zip codes with the most expensive real estate

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Forbes put together a list of the American zip codes with the most expensive real estate. Of the top 10, 9 out of 10 are in California or New York City. (The lone outlier is a New Jersey zip code.)