What’s the story (with the future of family demography)

Do family demography in light of disasters, inequalities, identities, and policies as messy, incoherent, unpredictable features of society – not bugs in the ointment of modern progress.

Families, inequality, and sociology in pandemic times (video)

If you asked me what's happening with families, and inequality, in the pandemic times, and I talked for 12 minutes.

Visualizing family modernization, 1900-2016

After this post about small multiple graphs, and partly inspired by two news reports I was interviewed for -- this Salt Lake Tribune story about teen marriage, and this New York Times report mapping age at first birth -- I made some historical data figures. These visualizations use decennial census data from 1900 to 1990,…

Families and Modern Social Theory, revised syllabus

One of my favorite courses, new and improved.

Sixteen minutes on The Tumbleweed Society

My review of Allison Pugh's book, in 16 minutes.

Interview: Independence, uncertainty, defamilialization

Is marriage respected when we do it less? And the tradeoffs of independence.

Certain death? Black-White death dispersions

So what is the difference between two populations, one of which has a greater variance in age at death than the other?

Why Don’t Parents Name Their Daughters Mary Anymore?

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com. Understanding the rapid decline of what was once America's most popular name Each year I mark the continued calamitous decline of Mary as a girls' name in the United States. Not to be over-dramatic, but in the recorded history of names, nothing this catastrophic has ever happened before. Mary was the most common…