sociology

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Thumbs up for Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity–What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves by Christian Rudder. Sociology.

The funny thing here is that Modern Romance (my review) was written by a comedian and Dataclysm was written by a numbers dweeb, and Dataclysm is way funnier. The topic is not quite the same—MR is about dating, and Dataclysm is more generally about how big data can be used to study many facets of sociology—but since the author of Dataclysm was one of the founding partners of OkCupid, he draws a lot of his data from online dating, making the two books feel very similar.… >> Read more

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Thumbs up for Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. Sociology.

The title accurately represents the topic. I did enjoy reading this book overall, but it fell flat for me personally because, as a sociology book written by a humorist, it wasn’t that funny (not Mary Roach-funny), and I was already familiar with a lot of the research presented. Two things I learned: Tinder is more sensible than it seems; and we should probably, as a society, take another look at the assumption of monogamy, because smart people should question the validity of any rule that is practiced more in the breach than the observance.… >> Read more