It’s hard to believe this blog has another year under its belt!
I marked the first anniversary with this pair of posts: “1 Year of Bullfish Hole” and, for paid subscribers, “What is A Bullfish Hole, Anyway?”
For this year’s anniversary, I’ve gifted all paid subscribers a 1-month extension on your subscription. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, take advantage of this Special anniversary sale: Click here to subscribe for 30 percent off! (Expires June 25)
A sincere thank-you to all my subscribers, especially those of you willing to part with your money! Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions or feedback.
Content Overview
For new readers: I’m a homeschooling father of two, professor in a department of sociology and anthropology, and gardener on a couple hilly West Virginia acres. Though I hope it continues to grow, Bullfish Hole is currently more of a hobby than a side-hustle. My posting cadence is about three long posts per month, slowing down during holiday and university exam times, and faster when life is less busy.
Most posts so far fall into four series: There’s a monthly links roundup (most recent here), posts summarizing and discussing books (most recent here), posts on how social scientists explain human behavior (most recent here), and posts on aspects of moral culture (most recent here). And there’s some podcast series as well.
I also do the occasional one-off post — sometimes on sociological ideas (“The Ronin Effect”), only rarely on current events (“Israel and Gaza”). Sadly, I recently had two posts to mark the passing of sociologist Donald Black: One by myself and one by my friend Bradley Campbell. This year I also experimented by sharing two short stories: “Giant Monkeys Eat Children” (literary, Bukowski-influenced) and “The Conversion of Paul Kaufman” (comedy, Pratchett-influenced).
There’s now a substantial archive of material.
Year 2 Hits
My Books posts still do the best numbers, both in terms of views and garnering subscribers. I guess this is fitting given that my profile bio is “I read things and write about them.”
By far the most popular post of the last year was on Richard Hanania’s Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
Anything on wokeness or other culture war topics tends to get more attention and subscribers. And I think I’ve shed some customers who joined up expecting more about victimhood culture. Were I smarter, I’d write more about that sort of thing. But I don’t think I can do that without devolving into a pundit having hot-takes, which I just don’t have the temperament for.
Also, much of my content is shaped by what I’m reading for my day job. This year, my job involved prepping an honors course on collective violence in American history. My posts on collective violence have been hit or miss, but one of the hits was my second most popular of the year: On William Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919.
Similarly, third place goes to my two-part account of Bryan Burroughs’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
With the course prep out of the way, I expect the coming year’s Books posts will once again have more sociology and anthropology in the mix.
Year 2 Misses
I kept experimenting with audio content, though it generated less engagement than my written posts. This included two new Bullfish Hole podcasts: One interviewing executive coach Harsha Perera about his line of work, and another interviewing sociologist Chris Scheitle about his study of religious graduate students in the sciences.
I tried audio versions of my Books posts as a paid-subscriber-only series No Time to Read. The first one, on Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, used my own voice. For the second, on The Rejection of Continental Drift, I experimented by using an AI generated voice.
I also did three episodes of a new series Collective Violence in American History, based on the course I prepped at WVU this past year: 1. “Violence as Moralism,” 2. “Fault Lines,” and 3. “Bloody Tidewater.”
None of these so far has more downloads than my first podcast, “Secrets of the Amish.” People are really interested in the plain folk.
Looking Ahead
I plan to keep doing the collective violence series, though less often than I would if they were big hits. Next up is a short episode on the Paxton Boys uprising. After that we’ll switch from focusing on particular events and go back to general patterns with an episode on lynching. That’ll put me back on more familiar ground as a sociologist who deals in generality.
Likewise, as noted, my books series will probably shift back toward sociology, maybe with some ethnography as well (I just read a good one I’d like to take notes on!).
I anticipate six more entries in the Explaining Behavior series before it comes to a conclusion. The next entry, on rational choice theories, will be out this month.
The moral cultures series has slowed a bit as I have fewer new things to say on the topic. I expect a few more posts over the year, probably focusing on empirical research.
I work better when I have a series or theme in mind, so I’m considering what other topics I should make part of the regular rotation. Sociology of conflict? Sociology of law? More history or ethnography? More on violence? Reviews of children’s books (which I read more of these days than academic writing)? Iron Age Comics? Let me know in the comments what you’d like to see.
And as always, thanks for reading!
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