If you click on this you will see that one list of things that is the 2022 year end review

We had 99 problems in this society in 2022, and one of them was definitely headlines like this:

At some point someone in leading news organizations decided that their mission was not to inform people but to get people to click on things. I sincerely hope the other good people who work at these companies, who have different — loftier — goals, prevail next year and realize that giving people information before the click is a public service readers and subscribers will eventually reward.

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Anyway, where were we. Year in review.

Papers

Here are some things I wrote in 2022 or co-wrote, in the category “paper, grouped by topic:

Marriage and family

• Cohen, Philip N. 2022. “Rethinking marriage metabolism: The declining frequency of marital events in the United States.” [SocArXiv] An attempt to describe trends in marriage, divorce, and widowhood using a new measure, the Total Rate of Marital Events.
• Chen, Hao-Chun and Philip N. Cohen. “The Variability of Age at First Marriage across Birth Cohort and Education Level: A Case of Taiwan.” 2022. [SocArXiv] Hao-Chun is a PhD student in our program, writing his dissertation on historical developments in the timing of marriage and cohabiting unions.
• Cohen, Philip N. 2022. “What’s the story? Family demography at the end of progress.” [SocArXiv] Transcript of talk I gave at the Population Association (which you can see presented here).
• Cohen, Philip N. 2022. “Projected lifetime prevalence of marriage for US Black and White women from a multiple decrement life table.” [SocArXiv] Still hacking away at life tables.
• Caudillo, Mónica L., Andrés Villarreal, & Philip N. Cohen. 2022. “The Opioid Epidemic and Children’s Living Arrangements in the United States, 2000-2018.” Forthcoming. [SocArXiv] Our analysis found convincing evidence that the rate of opioid overdose deaths is strongly associated with changes in family structure across US counties.

Science and knowledge

• Cohen, Philip N. “How do we tell what’s true?” 2022. [SocArXiv] An essay for the forthcoming edition of Families As They Really Are, for students in family courses.
• Polka, Jessica, Iratxe Puebla, Damian Pattinson, Philip Hurst, Gary Mcdowell, Richard Sever, Thomas Lemberger, Michele Avissar-Whiting, Philip N. Cohen, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Gabriel Stein, Kathleen Shearer, Clare Stone, Victoria Tianjing Yan. 2022. “PRef: Describing Key Preprint Review Features.” [OSF Preprints] Part of an ongoing effort to bring peer review into the arena of preprints.
• Altman, Micah, Philip N. Cohen, and Jessica Polka. “Interventions in Scholarly Communication: Design Lessons from Public Health.” [MetaArXiv] A paper that compares interventions in scholarly communication — open-access publishing with author charges, and preprints — with public health efforts like DDT application and vaccines, to make suggestions for better design and assessment.
• Altman, Micah, and Philip N. Cohen. 2022. “The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information.” DOI:10.3389/frma.2021.751553. [article] A review of multiple reports on the evolution of the system of scholarly communication, with implications.

Public health

• Cohen, Philip N. 2022. “Pandemic-related decline in injuries related to women wearing high-heeled shoes: Analysis of U.S. data for 2016-2020.” DOI:10.22037/sdh.v8i1.37227. [journal | PDF] Yes, there was a marked decline in women showing up at emergency departments with injuries related to high heeled shoes. Will it last?

Books

I kept writing Citizen Scholar, though I am now officially late on finishing it. I’ve posted some early drafts at the link. Writing a whole book is hard for me. Also, my chapter on social media, especially about Twitter, is now somewhat up in the air — including a survey and a series of interviews with social scientists I conducted to understand how researchers use social media, for better and worse. Very optimistic for 2023! (Related, I gave a zoom talk for the Scholar Strategies Network on Open Social Science and Public Engagement.)

Also, I’m a few months into writing the fourth edition of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change. This is going very well. I always look at this deadline approaching with trepidation, then enjoy the process. This is partly the magic of my amazing editor, Sasha Levitt, at W. W. Norton, who generates a suite of expert reviews and then guides me through the process of turning them into a new edition. Although it’s a very big project, the fact that it’s broken into many sections makes it surprisingly compatible with my attention issues. Expect it at the end of the year.

I also read about 30 books, discussed previously.

In the News

Ivermectin in Mexico was a big story this year, though it seems like ages ago. It started when SocArXiv decided to remove a misleading paper written by Mexico City government officials (explained here; some fallout and a response from one of the authors here), then covered in the news here:

• Animal Politico, February 1, 2022: Gobierno de la CDMX gastó 29 mdp en tratamiento con ivermectina no autorizado contra COVID

Then came around to the US media:

• Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2022: Gobierno mexicano critica “campaña de ataques” por uso de la ivermectina
• Washington Post, February 9, 2022: Opinion: Mexico City’s decision to distribute ivermectin marked a new low for pandemic mismanagement

And Spain, etc:

• El País, February 10, 2022: La ivermectina en México, un conflicto entre la ciencia y la política [archived, with translation]

Other news stories I contributed to included:

• Baby names: The Atlantic, February 4, 2022: The Age of the Unique Baby Name
• Women’s age when they have babies: Associated Press, May 6, 2022: Motherhood deferred: US median age for giving birth hits 30; New England Cable News, May 16, 2022: More Women Choosing to Have Kids Later in Life
• Generations: The Takeaway, May 20, 2022: Deep Dive: Generation Z
• Knocking on conservatives: Deseret News, June 5, 2022: Are fatherlessness and societal breakdown to blame for mass shootings?
• Abortion rights: Wired, June 24, 2022: Roe Stood for 49 Years. It Revolutionized Life for Women.
• Life expectancy: Scientific American, October 17, 2022: The U.S. Just Lost 26 Years’ Worth of Progress on Life Expectancy

And, of course, Santa: BBC Family Tree, December 14, 2022: Time to end Santa’s ‘naughty list’?

Blog posts

Here are a posts that went over well during the year:

• Science says: Get married at age Whatever You Want (and these are the odds of divorce)
• Black and White women’s lifetime marriage projections
• US name androgyny at record high
• Demographic facts for students: 2022

On social media

Toward the end of the year I mostly moved off Twitter and onto Mastodon. You can find me here, and I hope you will! https://mastodon.social/@philipncohen. Lots of reasons to leave Twitter, but I am keenly aware of all the benefits I got from using that platform as well. (In my first month mostly not using Twitter I lost about 1 million impressions from what I was averaging before, according to the app’s metrics for me.) I want to help other people have a productive online social-professional experience, and give you the advice to try Mastodon in that spirit. Here’s one short post that explains why I believe this.

I’m happy you read this far! I hope to see you in the coming year, here or wherever. Thanks for reading.