Gary Alan Fine to Edit Social Psychology Quarterly

Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, is an inspired choice for the editorship of Social Psychology Quarterly. Though his appointment is not a surprise, some readers may be surprised by the varied interests and activities of this creative and prolific sociologist. As the writer of a restaurant blog, Veal Cheeks, he describes the birth of his interest in food, “Once long ago in College, I worked as a restaurant critic for an entertainment weekly in the years before the Philadelphia restaurant renaissance….” If you join him for a meal, you will discover all the ingredients in the food, have a discussion with the wait staff about the chef and other restaurants, sometimes meet the chef, and have a wide-ranging conversation about much of social life.

A few years ago Montréal sent its baseball team (The Montréal Expos, for you non-baseball fans) to Washington, DC (to become the now two-yearold Nationals team), and, in return, the DC-based American Sociological Association, feeling sorry for the baseball-less Montréal, held its 101st Annual Meeting in the welcoming city of Montréal, Quebec, Canada, this past August.

Wisdom, defined by the dictionary as the knowledge and experience needed to make sensible decisions and judgments, or as the “good sense” shown by the decisions and judgments made, is no longer a commonly used word. Perhaps this is because it has so few contemporary exemplars.