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About the Journal
I began this journal upon realizing that I had produced a number of good ideas over the years, only a few of which I really cared to revise for journal publication. Sometimes the ideas were small ones -- perhaps an insight that no one had published that didn't warrant a full article. Other times the ideas were pretty big, but didn't fit standard journal format. Most recently, I wrote a computer simulation of a particular theory of religious markets. I found that was more interested in the simulation than in spending two-months writing a journal-worthy article based on it, especially as I didn't care too much for the theory. I thought that others might find the simulation a useful tool for their own research, but regular journals don't publish simulations nor (it seems) articles based on less-than-deep applications of them. And that isn't how I want to spent my time. Like Marx with his 1844 Manuscripts, I used to stick such things in a drawer, leaving them "to the gnawing criticism of the mice". Not that I've ever written anything in that league, but it still seems a shame. Fortunately, I am at that time in life when I don't need to turn every idea into a formal publication. I've already been promoted as far as I'm going to be, my employers think that I already have a decently long publication record, and I have never aspired to a post at Stanford, Harvard, or the like. (I was an undergraduate at the first of these, and I didn't notice my professors having particularly enjoyable lives.) Am I alone in this? I doubt it. How many other interesting ideas are sitting in sociologists' file cabinets or on their hard drives? Think of all the intellectual effort we're wasting. Cool Sociology is designed to give sociologists a way to put their interesting ideas in front of a wider office, recognizing that they will get no social status for doing so. Not all of the ideas found here are fully formed, nor need they be. They should, however, be stimulating. -- Jim Spickard Professor of Sociology
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