My pre-class song suggestion is Lady Gaga's "Yoü And I" because Gaga plays both the lead male and female romantic interest in the song, playing with gender identity. In addition, the male persona, named "Jo Calderone" is how she chose to attend/perform at the VMAs. Does this example of "gender play" speak to you? Do you feel like Gaga is doing something useful and thought-provoking here, or just attention-mongering? Does her performance lend support to or mock the many people for whom gender performance is a very real aspect of daily life?

Here's the music video.

Here's an article about her decision to "be" Jo Calderone at the VMAs.

And here's a link to the lyrics, which offer some interesting moments for gendered analysis as well, including: "There’s only three men that Imma serve my whole life/It’s my daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ"

Finally, here's the wikipedia entry about the song, which explains more about the background (Gaga has said that it refers to her former relationship with Lüc Carl).

I just finished reading The Packing Problem proposal and I really hope that the book actually gets released, because it was a very engaging read, which I think is a hard thing to do when talking economics.  As I was taking a break to eat with my family, a story about Sesame Street on the local news caught my attention.  It seems that Sesame Street will be introducing a new character, who is food insecure, during a special that will air this Sunday.  This story caught my ear because it highlighted the fact that there are 17 million hungry children in the US.  That figure was staggering to me and I wondered why, if so many children here are hungry, why there aren't late night commercials pleading for their care.  One of the things that I often think about, especially in the context of this class, is the fact that we share a common internalized myth about life in this country, that kind of dictates that issues like domestic hunger are not directly addressed very often.  When I returned to The Packing Problem, I wondered how living with food scarcity for the sum total of one's life would affect how that person opperated as an adult.  I think that it would affect how they approach most everything, since gaining money is not always a cure for a scarcity mentality.  I wonder if this idea may be feeding the common conception that the poor in America are in the position they are in because they are ineffective managers of money.

Today while we were discussing Traub's idea that "in the inner city, social capital barely exists", I was able to make a connection between the reading and what I have learned thus far in my Urban Sociology class, but I wasn't really sure how to fit it into in class discussion, so I'll put it here. 

What we didn't talk about is that the very nature of cities limits the social capital (as defined by Traub) between its residents. Louis Wirth, who wrote Urbanism as a Way of Life describes the physical structure and layout of a city and how this affects people. According to Wirth, a city can be defined as a large, heterogenous, high-density dwelling. He continues to assert that because there are so many people in cities, primary ties are replaced by secondary ties, and those moving about through the streets are more isolated and lonely because they are less likely to know everyone. This is the idea of the "metropolitan man" and although it's been almost 75 years since Wirth's work was published, we can still see our modern metroman in the city today. 

What I gave here is a very general summary of some of Wirth's points, but you can read the whole essay here: http://www.sociology.osu.edu/classes/soc367/payne/Wirth_1938_AJS.pdf 

Here we all are, anticipating.....

...are now accessible from this page. A number of you had tagged them to appear here, in this forum, but I thought they were sorta clogging things up/slowing down the conversation, so I re-tagged them to appear over there. Please feel free to go read and comment on one another's explorations--there's lots of interesting stuff going on over there!