Here’s a not-so-secret: over the years there have been discussions about what, if any, is the point of a newsletter these days. The question can be asked too generally to be useful—as in, “what is the points of newsletters at all these days” —or too specific to be comfortable, as in “what is the point of this newsletter these days.” Yet the real heavy lifting in these sentences is happening at their ends: it’s in the these days.
            Back when I was studying publishing houses a major concern was that the entire industry had fallen out of balance. Book publishing relies on two main types of new releases. The first are designed for quick, high-volume sales: memoirs and biographies that are  “written” by celebrities, books with more pictures than writing (such as children’s books, cookbooks, and Eras Tour books) that are sometimes even sorta written by celebrities, and short books on hot button topics that use lengthening tricks that undergraduate students could only dream of.  (Think hardcovers with small trim sizes, heavy deckled-edge paper, and minimalist covers—an art form in itself.) The second type of book is what are thought of as the “smaller,” “riskier,” more “intimate,” or “difficult” books that garner smaller advances and tend to be passion projects for an editor, an author, or both. These books are unlikely to hit, but in rare cases when they do hit, they hit big and can keep selling for a long time. The story I kept hearing back then was that the second type of book, the more “artistic” and “intellectual” ones, just weren’t possible any more these days. Like all “these days” statements, editors weren’t really only talking about the present days, as they were also pining for a “good old days” that, in their narrations, was locked in a casket that was just now descending underground. That younger editors—for whom the present days were the only days they’d actually experienced in the industry—also repeated the same stories about these days and the preferable good old days, was the giveaway as to what was going on. And sure enough, a simple perusal into the archives of industry trade publications and the memoirs of bygone editors revealed that anxieties about commercialization and the practical matters of book publishing superseding intellectualism and art have been a constant that nearly goes back to the founding of the modern industry.
            If we were to locate the “good old days” of this newsletter, they probably would have been in the mid-90s or so. The newsletter back then seemed to have multiple features in which section members were working out complex ideas in real time; a 1.5 draft of intellectual history. This version of the story is, perhaps, not entirely imaginary, as the newsletters of that era do seem particularly robust. But if you really venture back in the newsletter archives, and don’t just pick a special time for the good old days, you’ll find ebbs and flows, and variations on themes rather than the sea changes we tend to narrate after the fact. And like most people, I’m a solipsist of history, meaning it would be unsurprising for you and I to have different internal barometers of newsletter heights that suspiciously line up right along with other topics of nostalgia. (What also might be happening is that because I wasn’t sociologically around back then, when I read back issues from that era it feels more like sneaking a peak behind the curtain at heroic intellectual figures rather than skimming through a collection of half-formed thoughts and quarter-formed bon mots of real and flawed people who were doing favors for friends and writing on deadlines.)
             Something else missed in this misbegotten narrative is that even if my bespoke “good old days” really was the crescendo of the newsletter, that didn’t just happen. It took years of work, and practically all years of the newsletter weren’t those years. Instead of unfavorably comparing “these days” to the “good old days” we could start our story in the Fall 1987 issue when then Chair Richard Peterson shared that rather than just news, the newsletter would also begin to include 500 word essays on “substantive topics.” In the first these, newsletter editor Liah Greenfield argued that the study of culture should be a perspective, not a specialty, and therefore the section should be an inclusive big tent (achieved!), and Donna Gaines argued that during fieldwork cultural sociologists should move beyond participant observation and think of themselves as method actors instead (not achieved yet). And looking beyond these opening salvos, the “substantive topics” of the newsletter quickly began to take multiple forms. Some of those forms, such as interviews and book reviews, carried on. Others—such as the results from a brief survey that Gladys Engel Lang and Kurtl Lang administered on the audience for their talk at the 1988 ASA meeting—do feel like they’re from a bygone era.
            Most importantly, even if we accept the claim that the newsletter was brimming with more features and heavy intellectual lifting back then, we should not presume that was a good thing. Instead, what was likely going on was that as an emergent field, cultural sociologists simply lacked outlets to get their ideas out in the world. In that context the newsletter might have been more of a life raft than a cruise ship. Consider that in these supposedly “good old days” Kees Van Rees was only a few years into his transformational Editorship of Poetics. Both Cultural Sociology and The American Journal of Cultural Sociology didn’t even exist. The Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology book series also did not exist. Karen Cerulo’s editorship at Sociological Forum, Omar Lizardo’s editorship at American Sociological Review, and John Levi Martin’s editorship at American Journal of Sociology had also all not happened yet. And even within the section we were still decades away from Terence McDonnell instituting the Culture and Contemporary Life series, which as a semi-recent development is thriving. (Plug: join us on Zoom on Feb 11, 3:00pm EST for this year’s inaugural session organized by Rachel Rinaldo and Fauzia Husain, “Gender, Religion, and Nationalism in Global Perspective,” with panelists Raewyn Connell, Nandini Deo, and Saskia Schaefer!) Is that still not enough? Well, due to changes at ASA starting at the 2026 meeting in New York our section will have twice as many panels as we’ve ever had before. And we can’t forget that Twitter was a (sometimes) good place to more casually disseminate research until it wasn’t, and maybe Bluesky can (sometimes) become that too. Before this massive proliferation of forums and outlets for cultural sociologists to share and discuss their ideas, back then we had, I guess, the newsletter? So much for the good old days.
             But given all that, you still may ask, where does that leave the newsletter these days? As you’ll see the newsletter is still the home both for news, and for the type of more heady intellectual content that Richard Peterson first envisioned nearly 40 years ago. In this issue we’ve got an interview with Matthew Norton, a review of Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s new book Born to Rule, and reports on two conferences too. And of course, the real reason for the newsletter is the same as it ever was. If you’ll spare me the sentimentality, the point of the newsletter is community, and we as cultural sociologists are the most positioned to know that and intimately understand it. Sometimes the point of the newsletter is to just have a thing that offers the occasional reminder that we’re in this, and doing this, and figuring this all out together. As Lynette Spillman taught us in her award winning book, the point isn’t the newsletter, the point is us, and that’s precisely what we’re doing here. Think of it as the academic’s version of disinterested solidarity. That’s not so much a function of “these days” as it’s a function of everyday life. And as Joshua Gamson explained, it’s a mistake to pretend or insist that everything we do and enjoy has to be heady, intellectual and hard, or always held to those standards. Even when the newsletter is operating as a piece of shallow culture, there’s a depth to shallow culture, which is a lesson I first learned in a familiar place too.