Conventional third places have declined among marginalized communities, yet what takes their place in fostering solidarity has been undertheorized. This article introduces the concept of “emotional third places” to explain how marginalized groups temporarily transform ordinary environments through collective emotional practices. Unlike frameworks emphasizing formal organization or planned resistance, emotional third places emerge through spontaneous gatherings and recurring rituals in spaces never intended for community-building. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, I identify four key mechanisms: formation through collective recognition, boundary maintenance through performative solidarity, dissolution through external pressure, and spatial transformation through collective behavior. By theorizing how collective emotions can reorganize spatial power relations through affective rather than political processes, this framework illuminates community formation across varying physical spaces. As traditional communal spaces become inaccessible to marginalized populations, understanding how these groups foster temporary but significant connections through shared emotional experiences is vital for comprehending social life.

Institutional secularization does not necessitate a secular public. In fact, as church memberships decline, more individualized sources of supernatural belief can emerge. Using a nationally representative survey of American adults (n = 1812), we analyze the popularity of “secular rationalism” and how it relates to belief in non-Divine supernatural causation, i.e., magic. Our findings suggest that belief in magic is not simply the inverse of religiosity or secular rationalism. Instead, belief in magic emerges most strongly among those who are both scientifically oriented and residually religious. Secular rationalism does not erase belief in supernatural mechanisms—it affirms the individual’s agency to decide what they are. In short, magic thrives where reason and spirituality meet, suggesting that modernity’s rational turn does not disenchant so much as release faith from institutional restraints.

Prior studies document a declining but persistent gender housework gap since the 1960s, with declines in women’s housework time far exceeding increases in men’s. Yet scholars differ in their assessment of what these trends mean about the pace and extent of gendered change in family life. Using individual-level longitudinal data from the 1976–2023 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study addresses this theoretical impasse by asking whether housework has become fundamentally degendered over time. I assess degendering using two novel indicators: the residual gender housework gap relative to the total gap and gender symmetry in associations between key predictors and housework. Results show that although the overall gender housework gap has declined substantially, the share of the total gap accounted for by theoretically relevant observed predictors remains small and has not increased over time. Individual fixed-effects models further show that cohabitation, marriage, and children remain much more strongly associated with increases in women’s housework than men’s across periods. Associations of paid work hours and earnings with housework, in contrast, attenuate over time, with less consistent evidence of gender asymmetry. Overall, these findings indicate limited progress in degendering housework and are more consistent with a stalled gender housework revolution.

Different conceptions of inequality of opportunity have been developed in political philosophy. We focus on two competing conceptions: fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity. We develop an empirical framework to measure and compare these conceptions. Both fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity consider it unjust if ascribed characteristics such as social origin, gender, race, and ethnicity affect life outcomes. However, they differ in what they regard as just: fair inequality of opportunity considers it just if abilities and individual choices affect life outcomes, while luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity considers it just only if individual choices affect life outcomes. We measure fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity in education, occupation, income, and wealth using survey data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Our results show that conclusions about inequality of opportunity depend on the conception of inequality of opportunity employed. From the perspective of fair inequality of opportunity, the United States is a rather just society, while the nation’s degree of luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity is high. The difference between fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity is largest for education, followed by occupation, and finally income and wealth. There is no evidence that changes across cohorts differed between fair and luck egalitarian inequality of opportunity.

Academic knowledge—such as biology, psychology, and economics—is found both in university majors and specific occupations. When educational attainment expands in the population, does it improve or weaken the academic match between university majors and occupations? Using nationally representative data from Great Britain and Canada, we find heterogeneous effects by field of study that are consistent across countries. Increases in the proportion of individuals with university degrees improves matches for economics, mathematics, and fine arts majors, such that they enter occupations that utilize more of their major-specific academic knowledge. The reverse is true for graduates in philosophy and theology, sociology and anthropology, and several majors in the natural and physical sciences. While some high-status fields see stronger matches between major and occupation as education expands, the natural and physical sciences remain a clear exception. These idiosyncratic results suggest that field-level prestige partly explains the heterogeneous effects of educational expansion on major-occupation matching, but that more research is needed on shifts in academic knowledge usage in the labor market.

According to official statistics, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is no more. After a 2013 federal court ruling declared the program unconstitutional, recorded stop-and-frisks fell from a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 by 2020. We demonstrate that this portrayal of the program's demise is more fiction than reality—a simulation sustained through underreporting and reclassification of pedestrian stops into categories that draw less attention. The simulation persists not through deception but through a working consensus involving police, politicians, media, and even advocacy groups. These actors tacitly accept the statistics despite countervailing evidence, allowing each to hold otherwise incompatible positions: officials proclaiming stop-and-frisk outmoded even as the same stops continue under new labels, advocates celebrating its end even as the communities they represent report no real change. Our analysis shows how mechanisms designed to ensure government accountability can become instruments that enable highly scrutinized agencies and programs to evade reform.

The relationship between school competition and educational outcomes has been widely studied. Yet evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains scarce, including from contexts where private or non-public schools provide a substantial share of education. This study investigates the link between school competition and academic achievement in Bangladesh’s secondary schools, where most are classified as private or non-public. Using original school-level longitudinal data and multilevel regression analysis, the results suggest that achievement is lower where school competition is weaker, measured by the distance to nearby schools. However, this association becomes non-significant once school rurality is taken into account, pointing to potential selection bias. Urban areas tend to have more and better-quality schools, and relatively wealthier families. The findings also point to stratification across academic streams: weaker competition is associated with a larger decline in achievement in the science stream than in arts/humanities or business studies. This may again reflect selection, since science students typically come from more advantaged backgrounds and are more likely to have access to private tutoring and better-resourced schools. The results are consistent across several specifications and alternative outcome measures. The study suggests that competition in a largely private/non-public education system does not necessarily raise achievement and may reinforce existing inequalities in educational outcomes.