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🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

🔗 United States 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Sociology 🔗 United States/Hispanic and Latino Americans

The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world. The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites. According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites.

There are multiple hypotheses which aim to determine the reason for the existence of this paradox. Some attribute the Hispanic paradox to biases created by patterns or selection in migration. One such hypothesis is the Salmon Bias, which suggests that Hispanics tend to return home towards the end of their lives, ultimately rendering an individual "statistically immortal" and thus artificially lowering mortality for Hispanics in the United States. Another hypothesis in this group is that of the Healthy Migrant, which attributes the better health of Hispanics to the assumption that the healthiest and strongest members of a population are most likely to migrate.

Other hypotheses around the Hispanic paradox maintain that the phenomenon is real, and is caused by sociocultural factors which characterize the Hispanic population. Many of these factors can be described under the more broad categories of cultural values, interpersonal context, and community context. Some health researchers attribute the Hispanic paradox to different eating habits, especially the relatively high intake of legumes such as beans and lentils.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Islam 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Syria 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Arab world 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Islam/Shi'a Islam 🔗 Lebanon

The Druze (; Arabic: دَرْزِيٌّ, darzī or Arabic: دُرْزِيٌّ durzī, pl. دُرُوزٌ, durūz), known to adherents as al-Muwaḥḥidūn (Monotheists) or Muwaḥḥidūn (unitarians), are an Arab and Arabic-speaking esoteric ethnoreligious group from Western Asia who adhere to the Druze faith, an Abrahamic, monotheistic, syncretic, and ethnic religion whose main tenets are the unity of God and the belief in reincarnation and the eternity of the soul. Adherents of the Druze religion call themselves simply "the Monotheists" (al-Muwaḥḥidūn). Most Druze religious practices are kept secret. The Druze do not permit outsiders to convert to their religion. Marriage outside the Druze faith is rare and strongly discouraged.

The Epistles of Wisdom is the foundational and central text of the Druze faith. The Druze faith incorporates elements of Isma'ilism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, and other philosophies and beliefs, creating a distinct and secretive theology based on an esoteric interpretation of scripture, which emphasizes the role of the mind and truthfulness. Druze believe in theophany and reincarnation. Druze believe that at the end of the cycle of rebirth, which is achieved through successive reincarnations, the soul is united with the Cosmic Mind (al-ʻaql al-kullī).

The Druze have a special reverence for Shuaib, who they believe is the same person as the biblical Jethro. The Druze believe that Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Isma'il ibn Ja'far were prophets. Druze tradition also honors and reveres Salman the Persian, al-Khidr (who they identify as Elijah, reborn as John the Baptist and Saint George), Job, Luke the Evangelist, and others as "mentors" and "prophets".

Even though the faith originally developed out of Isma'ilism, the Druze are not Muslims. The Druze faith is one of the major religious groups in the Levant, with between 800,000 and a million adherents. They are found primarily in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, with small communities in Jordan. They make up 5.5% of the population of Lebanon, 3% of Syria and 1.6% of Israel. The oldest and most densely-populated Druze communities exist in Mount Lebanon and in the south of Syria around Jabal al-Druze (literally the "Mountain of the Druze").

The Druze community played a critically important role in shaping the history of the Levant, where it continues to play a significant political role. As a religious minority in every country in which they are found, they have frequently experienced persecution by different Muslim regimes, including contemporary Islamic extremism.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This effect, discovered by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931), illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss (i.e., reductions in performance effectiveness or efficiency) and group productivity, Ringelmann (1913) found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.

🔗 Books 🔗 Sociology

The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen in modern times is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those three entities.

🔗 Sociology

The circulation of elites is a theory of regime change described by Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923).

Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Gender Studies

The master suppression techniques is a framework articulated in 1945 by the Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen. These techniques identified by Nissen are ways to indirectly suppress and humiliate opponents. In the late 1970s, the framework was popularized by Norwegian social psychologist Berit Ås, who reduced Nissen's original nine means to five, and claimed this was a technique mostly used in the workplace by men against women. Master suppression techniques are defined as strategies of social manipulation by which a dominant group maintains such a position in an (established or unexposed) hierarchy. They are very prominent in Scandinavian scholarly and public debate, where the expression is also used to refer to types of social manipulation not part of Ås's framework. Master suppression techniques are sometimes called domination techniques.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

The Gen Z stare is a generally pejorative phrase coined by social media users to describe a "blank stare that members of younger generations give in situations where a verbal response would be more common" or appropriate. It most commonly occurs in customer service interactions in response to ostensibly simple questions about products, services, or signage in the establishment. Reflecting a generation gap, instead of responding to the customer, the generation Z cohort members have been described as "dumbfounded or disinterested" in these questions.

Kalhan Rosenblatt of NBC News says, "[w]hile there are several definitions for the stare, the most common meaning is a vacant expression a Gen Zer gives in response to a question. The stare occurs in classrooms, restaurants, at work and more settings." The term "Gen Z stare" garnered widespread coverage in the mainstream media in July 2025. The concept of the "Gen Z stare" was first explored in research conducted by Kaiden Jones, who proposed that while the stare shares some similarities with the nonverbal responses of both deadpan humor and stonewalling, it can signal social critique and a refusal to conform to social scripts.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Media 🔗 Culture 🔗 Sociology/social movements 🔗 Toys

The Barbie Liberation Organization or BLO, sponsored by RTMark, were a group of artists and activists involved in culture jamming. They gained notoriety in 1993 after switching voice boxes in talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. The BLO performed "surgery" on a reported 300–500 dolls from retail and returned them to shelves, an action they refer to as shopgiving. Thus, Teen Talk Barbie dolls would say phrases such as "Vengeance is mine", while G.I. Joe dolls would say phrases such as "The beach is the place for summer!"

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Sociology

An edgelord is someone on the Internet who tries to impress or shock by posting edgy opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.

The term is a portmanteau derived from "edgy" and "shitlord" – a person who "basks in the bitterness and misery of others".

Merriam-Webster gave the following example:

We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, “Every year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it” - merry Xmas from the original edgelord.

Edgelords were characterised by author Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:

...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability...

It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan.