A group of babies with various emotions

The Science of Baby-Name Trends

What makes a name suddenly pop—and then die? Social scientists and historians have been puzzling over this for decades.
A child and old man sitting at a table with their respective music technologies

The Importance of Technological Change in Shaping Generational Perspectives

If we name each generation based on the technological conditions it experienced, generations may soon encompass only a few years apiece.
Protestors from lesbian, gay and bisexual rights charity Stonewall, carrying a banner reading 'Lesbian & Gay Rights are Human Rights' during the Gay Pride parade in London, England, United Kingdom, 6 July 1996

The Stonewall Riots Didn’t Start the Gay Rights Movement

Giving Stonewall too much credit misses the movement’s growing strength in the 1960s, sociologists note.
French Revolution Calendar

Why the French Revolution’s “Rational” Calendar Wasn’t

What ever happened to "the most radical attempt in modern history to challenge the Western standard temporal reference framework?"
Mechanical Turk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has Reinvented Research

Online services like Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" have ushered in a golden age in survey research. But is it ethical for researchers to use them?
Queer aging

Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting”

What constitutes adulthood has never been self-evident or value-neutral. Queer lives follow their own temporal logic.
Bride alone on couch

Why Pay the Costs of a Wedding for One?

Self-marriage may be, at least in some cases, a ritual reclaiming a sense of control when women may have felt they've lost it.
Stonewall Inn

Why Stonewall?

The Stonewall riot in June, 1969 is generally remembered as be the beginning of the gay liberation movement. But there was precedent for the event.
Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) and Gloria Allred

The History of Outlawing Abortion in America

Abortion was first criminalized in the U.S. in the mid-19th century. A key argument was that too many white women were ending their pregnancies.
First United States Labor Day Parade 1882, Union Square

A Labor Day Look at the Future of Work

If computers endanger the hard-won gains of the labor movement, do we need a new way of addressing tech-driven income inequality?