About

I am not much of a daddy type. Don’t get me wrong, I like kids. But mostly other people’s kids. So when my wife told me she was pregnant, my first reaction was “you’re fucking with me, right?” We had tried for a while to get pregnant, even with some medical intervention, but I assumed we could go about our happy, comfortable, child-free lives. DINKs – dual-income, no kids. But it turns out we’re going to have a kid after all. It’s like a bad Law and Order episode, really: In the hetero-patriarchal prenatal system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the women who do the work of carrying the child, continuing to work, and suffering the high joys and low indignities of motherhood, and the men who can’t exactly figure out how to fit into that picture but still want credit for being progressive. These are their stories.

More concretely, I am currently a professor of sociology at a fancy-pants college in New York City. Six years ago, newly married, I moved from the Midwest to New York. I am educated up to my ears, and my work focuses on economic sociology and organizations. I am interested in the gap between how markets in financial futures, pollution, and fine art all work on the books, versus in the world. And I can make homemade ginger beer.