Ithaca, New York, sometime around 1986. An eighteen-year-old sits at a news desk in front of an IBM Selectric. To his right, a stack of tape cartridges, each one labeled on the front so the label can be read while the cart sits in the machine. To his left, single sheets of paper laid out on the table, each sheet paired with a cart. Each pair is a story.
Interviews get recorded on cassette in the field, on reel-to-reel in the office. Back at the station the useful seconds get copied onto the carts. If a clip needs trimming, you cut the tape with a razor blade and splice it. As he types each story he takes a cart off the stack on his right and sets it beside the page on his left. When it is time for the newscast he carries the pairs down the hall to the booth, hands the carts in order to the engineer, who is also the disc jockey, and keeps the pages to read. When he reaches the part with the quote in it, he points, and the engineer fires the cart. The cart rewinds to the start of the clip and waits, in case it is needed again.
He is a reporter at WHCU-AM/FM, the CBS affiliate, about thirty hours a week at something like five dollars an hour. He graduated from the local alternative high school in 1985 and did not feel ready for college. He had trained in news at WVBR, the Cornell student station, through a school district internship. He got the interview at WHCU because his parents were friends with the news director. He covers city council, school board, planning board, crime, and research news out of Cornell University.
The craft has rules. Each story needs two versions, each carrying a different quote, to run on alternating half-hour newscasts, plus one-sentence headline versions for the quarter hours. Same length every time, whether the story is a fire or a zoning variance. The quotes have to be gathered in person, which means walking up to the mayor after the meeting and managing an interaction with an adult who outranks you while listening closely enough to know whether you have two clean stretches of fifteen seconds. And the newscast is live. At the end of the local evening news he wraps the market report and the weather while the second hand sweeps toward twelve, because at six o'clock the CBS World News Roundup begins and his time is over.
In May 2026, when the CBS Radio Network shut down after ninety-nine years, Philip N. Cohen (b. August 12, 1967) posted the photograph of himself at that desk and explained the workflow to readers who have never seen a Fidelipac. He noted what Ithaca had then: fewer than thirty thousand year-round residents and three radio stations with full-time news reporters, plus reporters from the Ithaca Journal, the Ithaca Times, the Grapevine, and the student papers. Four or five reporters at a school board meeting. When something big happened, more came down from Syracuse and Binghamton.
He added a footnote his students have not read. He still runs an undergraduate class to fill the time allotted, and says thank you as the last second elapses.
Forty years later he is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, the author of the leading undergraduate textbook on American families, the founder of the largest nonprofit preprint archive in the social sciences, a former plaintiff against a sitting president, and the man most likely to tell you, with the arithmetic attached, that a celebrated study cannot be right. The habits from the news desk are visible in all of it: fixed deadlines, no retakes, an insistence on getting the quote in person, and a working assumption that a story exists to be handed to strangers.
He came from a house where science was the family trade and where the terms of women's employment in it were a live subject at the dinner table. His father, Marshall Cohen, took a doctorate in mathematics at Michigan in 1965, did a postdoc at Princeton, where Philip was born, and then went to Cornell as a geometric topologist and combinatorial group theorist. His mother, Avis H. Cohen (1941–2026), took a bachelor's degree at Michigan in 1964, moved with two small boys to Ithaca, and started graduate school at Cornell in the early 1970s. Writing about that decision decades later, she gave two reasons. One was that she had already worked out a view of dynamical systems, before enrolling, and had found a new Cornell professor in neurobiology who shared it. The other was shorter: “Being a full time mom was wearing very thin.”
Her dissertation concerned locomotion in rats. She switched nerves across muscles and filmed the animals running with x-ray cinematography. Her adviser, the biolinguist Eric Lenneberg (1921–1975), died before she finished. She took the degree in 1977 and went to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for two years, the family with her, and there she did the work she is known for. Cut a short segment out of a lamprey's spinal cord, isolate it in a dish, and the nerves keep firing in the pattern of swimming. No brain required. The capacity to generate the rhythm is distributed along the cord. Back at Cornell she worked with mathematicians on a model of these central pattern generators that neuroscientists still cite, and the finding turned out to matter most to engineers: robots walk better when the pattern lives in the limbs and gets corrected by feedback than when the brain has to compose each step. Her most cited paper is about a quadruped robot.
Cornell kept her for ten years as a research associate. She won her own federal grants and ran a lab. No tenure-track offer came. Maryland hired her in 1990 as a full professor, and she went on to found its interdisciplinary neuroscience program, direct a National Science Foundation project for women in science, and be elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her son's judgment on the Cornell decade, published on his blog after her death, is split: passing on her in 1979 may have been reasonable, and passing on her by 1990, with the grants and the publications in hand, was not. He notes that Suzanne Bianchi, the Census Bureau demographer who became his mentor at Maryland and died in 2013, followed the same route. Faculty women who were never assistant professors.
Avis Cohen liked to say that her understanding of nervous systems bore on how people should think about their societies, and that the nervous system was less hierarchical than male scientists had assumed. She also told a story from her Illinois girlhood in the 1950s: that if she got all A's, no one would want to marry her. Someone did.
Her son has never, as far as I can find, drawn the obvious line in print between a mother who showed that coordination can be distributed rather than commanded and a career spent dismantling central authorities in his own discipline. The facts sit next to each other and the reader can do what he likes with them.
Before sociology there was more journalism and more politics. He reviewed local bands for the Ithaca Times, finding something to write about every weekend on a weekly deadline. He worked in the Ithaca left, the environmental and labor and alternative-media world that a college town of that size sustained in the 1980s. He did editorial work at the Michigan Daily as an undergraduate. He took his bachelor's degree in American culture at Michigan in 1992, with high distinction, a master's in sociology at Massachusetts in 1995, and a doctorate at Maryland in 1999 under Reeve Vanneman, with a dissertation on Black population size and the structure of American labor market inequality. The sequence matters for reading him: he came to sociology as a writer with political commitments who then acquired the tools to test claims, rather than as a scholar who later learned to write for strangers.
Two apprenticeships in the government's statistical apparatus completed the training. He was a research assistant at the National Center for Health Statistics in 1997 and a statistician and demographer at the United States Census Bureau from 1998 to 1999. Anyone who has built a household roster for a federal survey learns the same lesson, and it turns up in his work for the next thirty years: the categories are constructed by people for purposes, they change, and when they change the numbers move even if the world stands still.
He went to the University of California, Irvine, in 1999, and made his reputation there with Matt L. Huffman on the economics of gender at work. The two of them pushed past the familiar observation that women crowd into low-paying jobs. They examined whether an occupation pays less because it has come to be identified with women, and found evidence that it does. They joined individual earnings data to organizations, occupations, and metropolitan labor markets, which became his lasting methodological commitment: a worker's education and experience are worth what the surrounding structure will pay for them. Their 2007 article in American Sociological Review on female managers and the gender wage gap won the section award for sex and gender; later work with Jessica Pearlman on workplace desegregation won an award from the organizations and work section. He extended the same logic into the home, studying housework, care work, paid domestic labor, and the way state policy and wage structures set the terms of bargaining between spouses.
At the University of North Carolina from 2005, and at Maryland from 2012, the subject shifted from labor markets to families, with inequality still the question. Families distribute money, time, care, housing, standing, and risk. They shelter people from markets and reproduce advantage between generations. An early paper with Lynne Casper reconstructed historical levels of unmarried cohabitation from census data, and the exercise shows the pattern of his mind: before you explain a trend, establish that the instrument did not change.
Three words organize his textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, now in its fourth edition and the standard assignment in the course. The mid-century arrangement of early marriage, a breadwinning husband, a homemaking wife, and several children was a historical episode resting on a particular labor market, legal order, and economic expansion. Its erosion widened women's options and produced cohabitation, later marriage, same-sex marriage, one-person homes, childless adults, and stepfamilies. Diversity did not abolish hierarchy. People with money, education, health, and support build flexible family lives; people without them experience the same freedom as instability.
His essay collection Enduring Bonds appeared in 2018 from the University of California Press. His wife, the historian Judy Ruttenberg, supplied the title, having found the phrase in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. The subtitle promises everything that makes families great and terrible, and the book delivers the second half as fully as the first. The same bonds that produce intimacy and obligation produce dependency, unequal labor, and stigma. His position is that sociology's job is to explain how the benefits and burdens get distributed.
The paper that made him famous among people who follow family statistics is “The Coming Divorce Decline.” He posted it to his own archive in September 2018, where three thousand people downloaded it, and Socius published it a year later. The proportion of married women divorcing each year fell about eighteen percent in the decade after 2008; adjusting for age, education, race and ethnicity, nativity, marriage order, and years married, it still fell about eight percent. The decline came from younger women. Newer marriages carry lower risk because the people entering them are older, better educated, more often marrying for the first time, and less often bringing children into the marriage. His conclusion was not comforting to either side. Marriage is becoming rarer and more durable at once, and stable marriage is concentrating among people who already have the resources that make it stable. He then did the thing that distinguishes him: every year, when the new American Community Survey data came out, he checked his own prediction in public. And in his own comment section he let a reader make the case against his framing, that divorce has become a poorer measure of instability as cohabitation, serial cohabitation, and third marriages have risen, and that a falling divorce rate can be used to paint a rosy picture.
This is the ground on which he has fought his longest fight, against what its advocates call the success sequence: finish school, get a job, marry, then have children, and you will very probably avoid poverty. Cohen does not dispute the correlations. His objection is that the sequence converts a description of who is not poor into an instruction for people who are, and that a public campaign urging the sequence supplies none of the things that make the sequence available, which are affordable schooling, steady employment, health care, housing, and a suitable partner. He points to the federal marriage promotion programs and their evaluations, where couples received their allotted hours of services and the measured effects on marital stability came out small or absent. His research with Joanna Pepin sharpened the argument into a question of supply: the availability of unmarried men differs sharply between Black and White metropolitan populations, so the advocates who compare married people with unmarried people and attribute the difference to marriage are assuming that the men are there to be married.
His antagonist in this argument has been W. Bradford Wilcox (b. 1970) of the University of Virginia and the Institute for Family Studies, and the argument has not stayed methodological. Cohen accuses Wilcox of overstating the causal benefits of marriage, minimizing selection, and presenting a preferred family form as an empirical result, and his blog post titles now say that Wilcox lies. A reader who wants to evaluate the selection argument has to walk past the accusation to get to it. That is the recurring cost of his method, and he has never shown much interest in avoiding it.
Two research controversies established his standing as a man who audits his own side. The first was Mark Regnerus's 2012 study of adults whose parents had same-sex relationships, which conservative litigators used against same-sex marriage. Cohen was among roughly two hundred researchers who signed a letter arguing that the comparison groups did not support the conclusions, and he spent years on the study's funding, its review process, and its afterlife in court filings. Politically, that intervention cost him nothing.
The second cost him something. Alice Goffman's On the Run, an ethnography of policing and warrants in a poor Black Philadelphia neighborhood, had been celebrated in the discipline and beyond it. Cohen went at the one component of the work that could be checked by anybody: a household survey Goffman reported conducting with a man she calls Chuck. Her article in American Sociological Review described 217 homes in the neighborhood, 308 men aged eighteen to thirty found in residence, and 144 of them with warrants outstanding. Cohen did the arithmetic against census figures for comparable Philadelphia neighborhoods and found more than twice as many young men as those homes should hold. He noted that the residence rule, three days a week, could count the same man in two places, and that the reporting fell short of ordinary standards. Goffman's answer was that this was an ethnographic survey with different sampling and different definitions of who belongs to a home, designed to capture people whom conventional surveys never see. Readers can decide whether that answer covers the arithmetic.
American Sociological Review declined to publish his comment. The editors agreed he had identified errors and chose not to correct the record. He put the comment on his university web page and eventually published a version as a review in Social Forces in 2017. What began as a dispute about one survey became his standing complaint about the discipline: that a request to inspect the evidence behind admired work gets treated as a breach of manners.
Ten years later he is still counting. In December 2025, having been invited to talk with a National Academies panel on corrections and retractions, he sat down and went through Volume 90 of American Sociological Review article by article, clicking the links, and posted the results. Of eighteen quantitative papers, twelve provided code and data or information about obtaining the data, and six provided nothing. He counted the qualitative and mixed papers too. He gave his earlier tallies for comparison: four of fifteen in 2020, eight of twenty-five in 2023. He described his own methods as squishy and invited corrections, to be mailed to his office written on the back of a fifty-dollar bill. He noted that one article has been retracted from an American Sociological Association journal this century, in a case of documented fraud by a Dutch psychologist, and that the association's 2018 guide for editors does not contain the word retraction. He also advised the journal's staff to click their own links before publishing, since several papers carried blinded review links, and one pointed to a repository that required asking the author's permission.
In the comments, one of the authors he had marked as providing nothing agreed with him, promised a replication package when teaching quieted down, and thanked him.
The association was the institution he tried hardest to fix from inside. He chaired its family section, served as secretary-treasurer of its population section, sat three years as an elected member of its Committee on Publications, and co-edited Contexts, its public-facing magazine, with Syed Ali. In 2019 the association's leadership signed a letter to the White House opposing open distribution of federally funded research. He organized a petition against it, gathered more than two hundred signatures, got the Publications Committee to pass a resolution urging the governing Council to take up the question, and watched the Council ignore it. Committee members spent years trying to get the journals to adopt a policy that would merely tell readers whether a published article came with its data and code. Two subcommittees produced a mild version. The Council rejected it. At one point, he says, staff invented a rule that would have barred him from taking part in the discussion of his own proposal.
He resigned his membership in November 2021 and published his reasons. Membership and the annual meeting cost too much, and the association's own survey said so. The staff outlast the elected leadership and can stall anything. Publications are the largest source of revenue, which means library subscriptions, which means a transfer from teaching-heavy institutions to research-heavy ones, since publication in the association's journals is dominated by elite universities. Subscription prices had more than doubled in eight years. The association signed a new seven-year contract with Sage in 2018 without notifying members in advance. And, in the sentence that gives the whole document its flavor: “Sage throws the leadership a nice party at the conference.”
He also listed what the association does well, which he does more often than his reputation suggests. It publishes good research. It creates community. It has raised the standing of women and scholars of color through member elections. His conclusion was that these were no longer enough for him, and that the organization would have to hit bottom first.
The best objection came from his own comment section, from a junior scholar who agreed with the analysis and asked where new people would build professional networks if established people left. Cohen, a tenured full professor at a research university with a large blog audience, is the man in this dispute least exposed to the cost of exit. A commenter who said they had grown up with him added that they had always been the sibling who made trouble and started arguments about what was right, and that it was nice to see he had picked up the habit.
The other exit was involuntary. On June 6, 2017, the president of the United States posted about a plan to hand air traffic control to a private nonprofit. Cohen, who had learned that the fastest replies to a presidential tweet get the most attention, and who was verified, replied with a picture of Donald Trump (b. 1946) and a caption: “Corrupt Incompetent Authoritarian. And then there are the policies. Resist.” He had no view on air traffic control. Fifteen minutes later he found he was blocked.
He became one of seven individual plaintiffs in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, filed in the Southern District of New York in July 2017, arguing that the interactive space beneath the president's tweets was a public forum from which citizens could not be excluded for their views. The district court agreed in May 2018 and granted declaratory relief. The Second Circuit affirmed in July 2019. The Supreme Court vacated the judgment as moot in 2021, after Trump had left office and the account was gone.
The best image of him comes from a reporter at the courthouse. Leaving a hearing, Cohen hands the clerk his numbered chip, gets his phone back, and says: “Who knows what he did while we were in here?” Outside on Pearl Street he bounds down the steps to the photographers and holds the phone up to the cameras so they can shoot the blocked notice on the screen. He told a British education reporter that some of his friends thought the whole enterprise was a waste of time, playing into the president's hands and feeding the outrage industry without improving anything. “And honestly, they may be right,” he said.
His other public campaign was quieter and worked. In May 2021 he circulated an open letter to the Pew Research Center, signed by roughly a hundred and fifty demographers and social scientists, urging it to stop using labels like Silent Generation, Baby Boom, X, Millennial, and Z. The argument: the boundaries are arbitrary, they invite stereotyping, and they blur the difference between the effects of age, the effects of a period, and the effects of a birth cohort. Pew's director of social trends, Kim Parker, replied in July that “Generations are one of many analytical lenses researchers use,” acknowledged the risk of age stereotyping, and offered to discuss it. In May 2023 Pew published a new policy: generational analysis only where historical data allow comparison of people at the same age in different periods, the standard labels used sparingly, readers advised to treat them as reference points.
Cohen's own illustration of the distinction is the essay he wrote on turning fifty. Being fifty was of no analytic interest. Having been fourteen in 1981 placed him at a particular intersection of technology, music, politics, and money.
He founded SocArXiv in 2016, after Elsevier bought the Social Science Research Network and the discipline discovered how a commercial owner can change the terms of a repository it has acquired. The archive is free, nonprofit, run through the Open Science Framework, and supported by the University of Maryland Libraries. Its rationale is a sociological claim about sociology: journals do not only transmit findings, they allocate prestige, impose delay, restrict access, and convert unpaid academic labor into corporate revenue. A preprint archive cannot flatten the hierarchy. It can let work circulate before the hierarchy has processed it, and let a researcher in a country whose libraries cannot buy the packages read the same paper as a researcher at Harvard.
By the time the Kohli Foundation gave it the 2025 Infrastructure Prize for Sociology, ten thousand euros and an invitation to Fiesole, the archive held around seventeen thousand papers. It accepted 3,162 new ones in 2025, twenty percent more than the year before, and in early 2026 was running at a pace of about forty-three hundred a year.
Then the volume turned into a different problem than the one he built the thing to solve. Much of the growth was machine-generated. In November 2025 the archive stopped accepting papers about artificial intelligence to relieve its moderators. In February 2026 he wrote up the case that had unsettled him. Someone submitted a paper the archive would have accepted a few years earlier: dull, unoriginal, thin on literature, competent in its statistics, coherent, relevant, with real citations. Attached was a disclosure listing the tools used to generate the code, run the literature search, advise on the models, and draft the text. The author claimed to have formulated the question, chosen the variables, directed the analysis, interpreted the results, and verified every data point and quotation, and offered an audit on request. To reject it, the archive would have to reject it for the tools.
He worked through the arguments in public, against himself as much as anyone. He is not persuaded that using such tools is unethical, because all knowledge is learned from someone else and no norm requires citing everything you read. He thinks training may be fair use and that displacing the original producers' income would not be. He grants that an archive that assigns digital object identifiers without peer review is an attractive place for machines to deposit and to harvest. He also says he will not enter an arms race he expects to lose, and that a disclosure requirement he cannot verify is close to useless, since the chatbots read the rules too. And he says, more bluntly than most administrators would, that there is a great deal of bad work on his platform, that this does not damage the good work, and that where rejecting is more expensive than accepting, accepting may be the practical course.
The policy came out in March 2026, drafted by a subcommittee and revised by the full moderation team. One passage in his announcement is worth setting beside everything else in his career: “We feel the need to express our humanity in this process.” The archive will make human judgments, will not defer to automated detection, and promises fairness without any claim to algorithmic purity.
The man who spent a decade demanding that journals let readers check the code has ended up defending a queue of volunteers reading papers by hand and admitting that their standard cannot be written down completely.
His third book, Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists
, appeared from Columbia University Press in January 2025, and is the closest thing he has written to a statement of method. Its argument is that a researcher need not choose between an invented neutrality and unrestrained advocacy. Values shape the questions anyone asks. The obligations that follow are disclosure of where you stand, honesty about uncertainty, deference to evidence, and clarity about the edges of your expertise. A man may speak as a researcher, a teacher, an activist, an officer of an institution, a litigant, or a private citizen, and the trouble starts when academic authority is used to smuggle him from one role into another.
He practices the disclosure part relentlessly. In June 2026 he published a tribute to his mother nine days after her death, including his own assessment of the promotion she did not get, and quoted the line she had used near the end when asked how she was: “Thank god, I'm fine!”, which he notes tended to amuse the doctors treating whatever was wrong with her. In her last years she would tell him that he had grown. He would protest that he was fifty-eight. She insisted. Two weeks later he published an account of a year on a weight-loss drug, including the detail that his state government health plan covers GLP-1 medications only for diabetes, so the year cost him about six thousand dollars out of pocket, and the advice that people should not comment on anyone's body unless invited. A demographer who publishes on deaths from alcohol, overdose, and suicide, and on the mortality of the married and the unmarried, treating his own metabolism as a public data point with the insurance code attached.
The same instinct produces his least defensible work. In July 2026 he published a post whose title asserts that Lyman Stone, a demographer associated with conservative family research, is a bigot, and set out the evidence: a 2023 thread in which Stone said the share of the population that is baptized and churchgoing is his primary measure of a good society and that he would dislike a high-functioning Sikh country, and a January 2026 post in which Stone wrote that “The Somali community is a scourge on the republic” and called for reviewing naturalization forms and deporting those with deportable offenses. Stone's defense, quoted in the post, is that the objection concerns pastoralist clan social organization rather than race, and that plenty of other African immigrants do fine. Cohen answers that condemning a whole community for its supposed behavior is the oldest available cover for condemning it, and compares Stone to Charles Murray (b. 1943), who once told him that his own position was not shouting fire in a crowded theater but “saying quietly and unhysterically, 'there's smoke.'” Cohen ends by saying that he would not hire Stone or publish his work and that his readers should not either.
Everything in that post is sourced, quoted, and linked, which is more than most such accusations offer. It is also a piece of writing whose conclusion is a hiring recommendation, from a man whose authority rests on his willingness to check arithmetic. Readers who think that judgments about evidence and judgments about character should travel separately will find the post an argument against its author's method. Readers who think a scholar owes the public a verdict when the evidence supports one will find it the method's fulfillment. He knows the reaction; he mentions, in a footnote, that Stone regularly calls him a liar.
He has kept a running account of how he is seen. Updating the media page on his website, he found himself mentioned in a piece about a journal editor, and in the anonymous comments beneath it, one reader asking “Why give Philip N. Cohen a voice in this discussion?” and another answering, with a laughing emoji, that he was the best sociologist of his generation. He posted both, said ouch, and added the observation that time spent on public outreach is time not spent on research, so if he had fewer media mentions he might have more research worth mentioning. The alumni blog of his old high school, meanwhile, has filed his career under a crusade for equality.
The checkable work has moved things. Anyone can recount the divorce rates in the American Community Survey, and the finding that marriage is becoming rarer and steadier has entered the standard account. Anyone can compare the number of young men Goffman reported in 217 homes with the number census data would predict, and the episode changed what sociologists expect to be able to inspect in celebrated ethnography. Anyone can count how many articles in a volume of the flagship journal come with their code, which is why the fraction has climbed from roughly a quarter to two-thirds in five years. Anyone can read the arbitrary birth years behind a generational label, which is why the largest survey organization in the country changed its policy. And anyone can download a paper from his archive without a subscription.
The unverifiable work has moved less. Whether a researcher at a think tank is lying or merely wrong, whether a man's views disqualify him from employment, whether an association's staff act in bad faith or merely in their own interest: these are judgments that ask the reader to trust the writer's character, and they are exactly the sort of claim that his own program says should be inspectable. He makes them anyway, in the prosecutorial register he learned reading copy against a clock, and they are the reason some colleagues who accept every one of his statistical arguments will not cite him.
His career amounts to an argument that sociology should be answerable to its data, its subjects, its students, the public that pays for it, and the readers who never get past the paywall. He has made that argument in journals, in a textbook, in a thousand blog posts, in federal court, in a letter to a survey organization, and finally in infrastructure, which is the form that outlasts an argument. What remains uncertain is whether the tool he built can survive a flood of writing that no one wrote, and whether the discipline that keeps improving its transparency numbers under his counting will keep counting once he stops.
He is fifty-eight, turning fifty-nine in August. He still posts most weeks. He still ends class as the second hand reaches twelve, and says thank you.
Notes
Opening scene (1986 newsroom). All detail is from his own account — the Selectric, the carts and paired pages, razor-blade editing, pointing at the engineer, two versions per story plus quarter-hour headline versions, ~30 hours/week at ~$5/hour, the job obtained through his parents’ friendship with the WHCU news director, WVBR training via a school-district internship, high school graduation 1985, the 6:00 p.m. CBS World News Roundup, the Ithaca media census, and the footnote about ending classes on the second. Earlier account of the Ithaca Times music reviewing (a review due every weekend, around 1988) and his Mastodon note to the same effect.
Parents. Marshall Cohen’s Cornell page (PhD Michigan 1965; geometric topology, combinatorial group theory). Avis Cohen’s obituary post, the source for her birth (November 29, 1941, Chicago) and death (June 6, 2026), the 1964 Michigan BS, the Cornell PhD in 1977, Lenneberg, Karolinska 1977–79, the lamprey work, the ten years as research associate without a tenure-track offer, the Maryland professorship, NACS, the AAAS fellowship (2008), Distinguished Scholar-Teacher (2011–12), the robotics afterlife of central pattern generators, the Bianchi comparison, the “all A’s” story, “Thank god, I’m fine!” and “You’ve grown!” — verbatim quotes used: “Being a full time mom was wearing very thin.” (originally from her 2013 GGSTEM essay, quoted in his post) and “Thank god, I’m fine!” There is also a Transmitter obituary linked from his post. One softening on my part: his post says Lenneberg died by suicide. I wrote only that Lenneberg died before she finished.
Lehman Alternative Community School. Confirmed by Wikipedia and by his old school’s alumni blog, which titled its profile of him “How ACS Inspired Philip Cohen’s Crusade for Equality” (November 22, 2017) (search that title if the URL has moved).
Degrees, positions, awards. His CV and Wikipedia. Date discrepancy to resolve: Wikipedia gives UNC 2005–2011 and Maryland 2011–; his CV-derived material gives professor at UNC in 2011 and Maryland from 2012. I used 2012. Same for Contexts: Wikipedia says 2014–2017, his own site says 2015–2017.
Huffman collaboration. “Working for the Woman? Female Managers and the Gender Wage Gap,” ASR 2007, and Huffman, Cohen and Pearlman on workplace desegregation, 1975–2005
Divorce decline. Paper: Socius 2019. Preprint. Blog version with the 18% unadjusted and 8% adjusted figures and the reader objection about serial cohabitation and redivorce. The three thousand preprint downloads before journal publication.
Success sequence and Wilcox. The failure of the success sequence; on marriage markets and partner availability, Who are you gonna marry?; on the Supporting Healthy Marriage evaluation and the 27 hours of services, This Supporting Healthy Marriage, I do not think it means; the 2025 post whose title accuses Wilcox of lying.
Goffman. His comment as filed; the original blog post with the arithmetic; the ASR rejection; the Social Forces review (95:4, June 2017, p. e5) and the full text. Goffman’s “ethnographic survey” reply is as paraphrased by Jesse Singal and quoted in Cohen’s post. The 217/308/144 figures are from her 2009 ASR article. Paul Campos’s Chronicle piece is the other place the arithmetic is laid out. Note: I deliberately did not say the ethnography was fabricated, and neither did he.
Regnerus. I wrote “among roughly two hundred researchers who signed” rather than crediting him with organizing the letter, because the 2012 letter to Social Science Research was organized by Gary Gates and others. His account of the review process.
ASR transparency audits. The December 2025 audit, with the 2025, 2023 and 2020 counts, the National Academies panel invitation, the single retraction from an ASA journal this century, the 2018 Publications Manual lacking the word retraction, the fifty-dollar-bill joke, the advice about blinded OSF links, and the author conceding in the comments. Earlier audits: Sociologist, scientist: toward transparency, accountability, and a sharing culture and Quick update on American Sociological Review’s failure to meet current social science standards. Sociological Science’s reproducibility policy, which he holds up as the comparison.
ASA. The two-stage exit: end of his elected term on the Committee on Publications and the resignation, source for the doubled subscription fees, the 2018 Sage contract, the library wealth-transfer argument, the invented rule barring him from discussing his own proposal, his list of what ASA does well, and the verbatim quote “Sage throws the leadership a nice party at the conference.” The petition against the 2019 ASA letter to the White House. The junior scholar’s objection and the sibling’s comment are both in the comment thread of the resignation post. I did not name the commenter who says they grew up with him, and did not assign a gender or relationship beyond their own words; the display name is “Ness Blackbird.” Also note: there is a widely circulated 2025 “Letter of Resignation from the American Sociological Association” over the Sociologists for Palestine resolution. It is by a different sociologist.
Trump. The tweet, the block fifteen minutes later, and the June 6, 2017 air traffic control post: complaint coverage at Forward and Lawfare. The courthouse scene, including the numbered chip, the steps on Pearl Street, and the verbatim quote “Who knows what he did while we were in here?” His explanation that he replies fast without reading, and the verbatim quote “And honestly, they may be right.” Case history: SDNY May 2018; Second Circuit, 928 F.3d 226 (2019); vacated as moot by the Supreme Court in 2021. Full plaintiff list: Buckwalter-Poza, Cohen, Figueroa O’Reilly, Gu, Neely, Papp, Pappas.
Pew. Open letter, May 26, 2021. Signatory count is reported variously as ~150 and ~170; I used “roughly a hundred and fifty.” Kim Parker’s July 12, 2021 response, source of the verbatim quote “Generations are one of many analytical lenses researchers use.” Pew’s new policy, May 22, 2023. His Washington Post op-ed, “Generation labels mean nothing. It’s time to retire them.” The turning-fifty essay.
SocArXiv. The archive’s own public figure is about 17,000 papers. See SocOpen news and essays. It accepted 3,162 papers in 2025, up 20%, and was running at roughly 4,300/year in early 2026: SocArXiv new submissions at record pace. Kohli Prize (€10,000, ceremony November 2025 at the European University Institute, Fiesole): SocArXiv wins Kohli Foundation for Sociology 2025 Infrastructure Prize and Kohli Foundation. The AI material is the freshest and most useful thing in the file: the case of the paper he would once have accepted, at Where should SocArXiv draw the AI line?, and the policy announcement at SocArXiv releases AI policy, source of the verbatim quote “We feel the need to express our humanity in this process.” The November 2025 moratorium on AI-topic papers and the November 2025 decision to stop accepting arts and humanities work are linked from those posts.
Citizen Scholar. January 2025.
GLP-1 post — source for the insurance detail (state plan covers GLP-1s only for diabetes; about $6,000 out of pocket for the year) and the verbatim quote “never comment on anyone’s body unless invited.” I omitted his weight, BMI, and body-composition numbers, which are in the post. They are his to disclose and I saw no reason to relay them.
Lyman Stone post — source for both Stone quotations (Cohen links the original X posts), Stone’s clan-organization defense, the Murray comparison, the hiring recommendation, and the footnote about Stone calling him a liar. The Murray line, verbatim “saying quietly and unhysterically, ‘there’s smoke,'” comes from What they say about race, where Cohen reports Murray confirming it to him. I gave Stone’s own framing in his own terms and left the adjudication to the reader.
Self-assessment. The anonymous exchange about giving him a voice, and his remark that outreach eats research time (verbatim quote used: “Why give Philip N. Cohen a voice in this discussion?”).
Extrapolations I made without citation: that a razor-blade splice, a live newscast, and a weekly music-review deadline train particular habits; that anyone building a federal household roster learns categories are constructed; that a tenured full professor bears less risk in leaving a professional association than a job candidate does. The one interpretive move I want to flag explicitly is the paragraph pairing his mother’s distributed-control science with his own institution-building. I say in the text that he has not drawn that line in print, and I did not assert a causal relationship. Her claim about hierarchy and nervous systems is quoted from his own post and is hers, not mine.
Luc Boltanski
In Paris, at the start of the 1980s, a sociologist sat with a box of letters that a newspaper had received and not printed. Luc Boltanski (b. January 4, 1940) had 275 of them, sent to Le Monde between 1979 and 1981 by people who wanted an injustice exposed. Working with Yann Darré and Marie-Ange Schiltz, he coded everything he could think of. The characteristics of the affair. How long it had been going on. Whether the letter came typed or on letterhead. Whether the writer had underlined heavily. Whether he had used insults.
Then he did the two things that made the study. He convened a jury of ordinary readers and asked each of them to rate every file for normality after one quick pass. And he defined the positions any denunciation has to fill: a victim, a denouncer, a persecutor, and a judge. Each position got coded for size, on an axis running from a single named individual to a collective.
What came back from the jury was not a ranking of grievances by how badly the writer had been wronged. It was a ranking by configuration. A letter in which a man speaks for himself about a persecutor who wronged him alone reads as private business, or as illness. The same complaint, with the victim enlarged into a category and the persecutor turned from a man into an office, reads as a cause. Boltanski called the work required to move from the first to the second desingularization, and the rise to generality. His paper's central sentence, in the standard English rendering, is that a normal denunciation is marked by the otherness of the denouncer and the victim, and that carrying one out requires the standing to speak up for someone else, to come symbolically to his aid.
Normality here is a judgment made by an audience. It runs loose from truth. A man can be right and be filed.
Boltanski built this instrument at the moment he was breaking with Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) over what a sociologist does. Bourdieu's sociologist unmasks. Boltanski's studies the unmasking, treating ordinary people as competent accusers whose grammar can be described. He got a theory of denunciation by declining to denounce. Anyone who picks up the instrument should keep that in view, because the model rates admissibility and says nothing about who deserves condemnation. Used as a verdict, it becomes the thing it describes.
Philip Cohen has spent twenty years filling the denouncer position in a discipline that has no established procedure for it. His work sorts along Boltanski's axis, and the sort explains something that complaints about his tone cannot.
Start with the case that works.
In December 2025, having been asked to meet a National Academies panel on corrections and retractions, Cohen opened Volume 90 of American Sociological Review and went through it article by article, clicking the links to see whether the code and data were there. Eighteen quantitative papers. Twelve arrived with replication packages or directions to the data. Six arrived with nothing. He counted the qualitative and mixed papers too, and he printed his earlier tallies for comparison: four of fifteen in 2020, eight of twenty-five in 2023. He added that the association's 2018 guide for editors does not contain the word retraction, and that a single article has been pulled from an association journal this century, in a documented fraud case involving a Dutch psychologist.
Now read the positions. The victim is anyone who wants to check a result and cannot, which is a category with no face. The persecutor is a procedure, a journal that permits the phrase available upon request. The judge is any reader holding the same volume, and the judge can overturn the denouncer, which Cohen invites when he calls his own methods squishy and asks that corrections be mailed to his office written on the back of a fifty-dollar bill. He appears in the file as a man who counted, and who can be recounted.
Boltanski's jury would have rated it high, and the discipline did. An author whose paper Cohen had marked as providing nothing arrived in the comment thread, agreed he was right, promised a package once teaching quieted down, and thanked him for what he does for the field. The share of quantitative papers shipping code has roughly tripled across the three audits.
The Pew campaign has the same architecture built by a different route. There Cohen enlarged the denouncer rather than shrinking him: an open letter in May 2021 carrying about a hundred and fifty signatures from demographers and social scientists. The victim is a category, everyone sorted by arbitrary birth years and described by traits assigned to the sort. The persecutor is a practice at a research organization, never a person. Kim Parker answered in July in the organization's voice, granting the risk of age stereotyping. In May 2023 the organization published a new policy: generational analysis only where the data support comparing people at the same age in different periods, the labels used sparingly.
Nobody was accused of anything. The configuration did the work.
The most exacting case in the file is the one where the victim is his mother.
Avis Cohen ran a lab at Cornell University for ten years on her own federal grants and got no tenure-track offer. Maryland hired her as a full professor in 1990. Her son published his account of this nine days after her death in June 2026, and every operation Boltanski describes is visible in the paragraph. He concedes the defensible version first: passing on her right after the postdoc may have been reasonable. He specifies the indefensible one: with the grants and the publications she held by 1990, it was not. He names no chairman and no colleague. The persecutor is a department that had no offer for her. And then he desingularizes the victim, setting Suzanne Bianchi beside her and naming the category they share, faculty women who were never assistant professors.
A grieving son writing about his own mother sits in the corner of the diagram Boltanski's jury filed as pathology, and Cohen gets out of that corner in four sentences. He knows how the filter works. He passed his mother through it.
The Goffman affair is where the configuration starts to move.
Cohen went after the one element of On the Run a stranger could test: a household survey reporting 217 homes on the block, 308 men aged eighteen to thirty in residence, and 144 of them carrying warrants. Census figures for comparable Philadelphia neighborhoods gave less than half that many young men. The residence rule, three days a week, could put the same man in two homes. He declined to say the ethnography was fabricated, which kept the persecutor from collapsing into a single young scholar: the file also indicted the referees who let the survey through, the committees that gave the book its prizes, and the professional habit of treating a request for the evidence as a discourtesy.
Then American Sociological Review rejected his comment. The editors agreed he had found errors and chose not to correct the record.
At that moment Cohen became the victim of his own affair, which is the position from which no denunciation travels. Watch the repair. He published the rejection. He put the comment on his university web page and later a version of it in Social Forces. And ten years on, in the audit, his rejected comments appear as evidence about journals rather than as evidence about him: two comments submitted, errors conceded by editors both times, no correction either time, one case described and the other withheld. The injury got converted into a data point in a series. Boltanski would recognize the maneuver as the only legitimate route out of that corner. A denouncer who is also the victim can be heard if he makes his own injury an instance of a general condition.
The Wilcox posts run the other way.
The empirical dispute has a high-normality victim: people with no money being instructed that finishing school, working, marrying and then having children will keep them out of poverty, when the schooling, the work, the health care and the available partners are the things they lack. That victim is a category, and the argument about selection into marriage is checkable by anyone who understands what a comparison group has to do.
Then there is the title asserting that Brad Wilcox lies, and the tag on the end of it, part whatever.
Boltanski's team coded for insults. They also coded for duration, the accumulating file, the correspondent who writes again. Both markers are in that title, one announcing the insult and the other announcing the series. And the persecutor has contracted to a single named man at the moment the reader needed him to stay general. The consequence is measurable in the reading: a person who wants the selection argument has to walk past a character verdict to reach it. The selection argument invites him to check. The verdict asks him to trust.
The Lyman Stone post from July 2026 is the strongest file in the drawer on evidence and the weakest on form.
The victims are general and plural: Somalis, and everyone outside the denouncing party's religion. The evidence is sourced and linked, which is more than most such accusations offer, and it consists of Stone's own posts. Stone's defense is in the file too, that his objection concerns clan social organization rather than ancestry.
Two moves then take the configuration apart. Cohen delivers the verdict rather than submitting the case, and he instructs the judge to act against the man: he would not hire Stone or publish his work, and neither should you. The judge position folds into the denouncer position, and the audience Boltanski's model reserves for weighing is handed a sentence to execute. Then Stone returns the same word, calling Cohen a liar, and Cohen answers in a footnote that he will not spell it out and that readers should ask Stone for receipts.
Two men trading the accusation of lying is the configuration ordinary readers file as a quarrel, whatever the record shows. None of this bears on whether Cohen has read Stone correctly. The jury in Paris was not rating truth.
The association posts are the interesting mixed case, because Cohen was himself the injured party and knew it.
He had served three years on the Committee on Publications and failed to get a policy adopted that would have told readers whether a published article came with its data. He says the staff invented a rule that would have barred him from taking part in the discussion of his own proposal. That grievance is as singular as a grievance gets, one man wronged by named colleagues in a committee room.
His resignation post in November 2021 puts the money first. Dues and conference costs that the association's own membership survey identified as the largest problem. Subscription prices more than doubled in eight years. A seven-year contract signed with a commercial publisher in 2018 without notice to members. Library revenue that transfers money from teaching-heavy institutions to research-heavy ones, since publication in the association's journals is dominated by elite universities. The personal insult about the invented rule appears well down the page, after the victim has been established as somebody else.
And then the model's signature: the victim showed up. A community college instructor wrote in the comment thread that the subscription fees had always been prohibitive for faculty like her, that she had stayed out of commitment to the organization, and that she was now cancelling. A denunciation that has completed its rise to generality recruits the people it claimed to speak for.
The best reply in that thread also turns on configuration. A junior scholar agreed with the whole analysis and asked where new people would build networks if established people left. The question resingularizes Cohen. A tenured full professor at a research university with a large audience bears none of the cost of exit. He speaks for the community college instructor and he does not stand where she stands. Boltanski's requirement of standing to come to another man's aid cuts in both directions, and the junior scholar found the edge that cuts back.
Something in the 2026 material suggests Cohen understands all of this in practice, whatever he would say about it.
His archive spent late 2025 and early 2026 drowning in machine-written submissions, and had to start refusing papers it would once have taken. Read the March 2026 policy announcement next to the July post about Stone. The policy comes in the first person plural. It names the five people on the subcommittee. It states the competing interests it is trying to balance, the scholars who want a reliable literature, the volunteers facing the queue each day, the independent researchers who need guidance. It declines to promise a fair standard that could be written down completely, says the archive will make human judgments and will not defer to detection software, and invites appeals. The line everyone quotes from it is that the team felt a need to express its humanity in the process.
That is a man writing from the judge's chair, and writing carefully, four months before he wrote a hiring recommendation from the denouncer's.
A complaint about tone locates the trouble inside a man, where nothing can be done about it, and where the complaint doubles as an excuse for ignoring arithmetic that happens to be correct. Boltanski locates it in a system of places, and places can be occupied differently. Cohen's consequential work stands where the injured party is somebody else and the accused is a procedure. His inconsequential work stands where he is the injured party and the accused has a name and a face.
Two things follow.
The filter has a cost, and the cost falls on the people it looks most reasonable to protect. Requiring desingularization means that a man wronged by an institution, alone, with nobody to speak for him and no series to attach himself to, cannot make himself heard until he finds a category to stand in front of. Institutions benefit from that requirement continuously and without arranging it. The editors who conceded Cohen's error and printed no correction were protected by his singularity for ten years, until he could file his injury as one of a pair inside a longer count. Most people never get the second instance.
And arithmetic is the cheapest desingularization available. A number anyone can recount arrives without an author. The reason Cohen's audits move journals while his verdicts move nobody is that a count of replication packages in Volume 90 has no interest in the outcome, no history with the accused, and no standing to establish. It does not need to come symbolically to anyone's aid. It just needs to be right, and to be checkable by a stranger with the same volume open on his desk.
Notes
Luc Boltanski, with Yann Darré and Marie-Ange Schiltz, “La dénonciation,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 51 (March 1984), 3–40. Full text free at Persée: https://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1984_num_51_1_2212. Corpus confirmed as 275 letters sent to Le Monde, 1979–1981 (summary; a pedantic correction of a common overstatement of the corpus size is at https://thesociologicalpages.org — see https://thesocietypages.org/theory/2021/01/06/shai-dromi-reads-luc-boltanski/, which notes the letters went to something like the paper’s investigative desk). The English-language development is Love and Justice as Competences (Polity, 2012), whose opening chapter is the source for the coding scheme (typewriter or letterhead, underlining, insults), the jury of ordinary readers rating each file for normality after a rapid first reading, the four actants, and the coding of each actant for size on a singular-general axis. The key sentence I paraphrase about the otherness of denouncer and victim is Boltanski et al. 1984, p. 32; the English rendering I worked from appears in a 2025 Open Book Publishers volume applying the model to denunciations in the arts. On normality as a function of how a political order relates private interest to the common good, see the discussion of Love and Justice as Competences pp. 193–94 in https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/16/1/olab024/6408727. On the Bourdieu break and the pragmatic sociology of critique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Boltanski and Boltanski, “Sociologie critique et sociologie de la critique,” Politix 10–11 (1990).
There was a fortieth-anniversary colloquium in Paris in March 2024 with Boltanski present, and a resulting volume, Théories et pratiques de la dénonciation publique (Le Bord de l’Eau, 2026): https://www.editionsbdl.com/produit/theories-et-pratiques-de-la-denonciation-publique/ and https://carism.assas-universite.fr/fr/colloque-scenes-denonciation-publique-medias-langages-societes.
I applied only the 1984 model and its direct extension in Love and Justice as Competences. I kept Distant Suffering and On Justification out, though both are tempting: the topic of denunciation in the former and the orders of worth in the latter would each pull the essay into a second frame. The single line I let in from outside is the historical note that Boltanski developed the model while breaking with Bourdieu, which sets up the instrument rather than analyzing Cohen with it.
Two claims I want to flag as mine rather than Boltanski’s. First, that arithmetic is the cheapest desingularization available, because a recountable number arrives without an author. Boltanski does not say this; the singular-general axis in his paper runs over persons and collectives, not over kinds of evidence. It follows from his framework and it is the closest thing in this essay to an original contribution, so it should be defended as an extension rather than smuggled in as exegesis. Second, that the requirement to desingularize systematically advantages institutions over the individuals they have injured. Boltanski implies something adjacent when he says the constraints of normality depend on how a political order relates private interest to the common good, and he is describing rather than complaining. The sharper version is mine.
The essay reaches an unflattering conclusion about Cohen’s verdicts and a flattering one about his counts, and it reaches both by the same procedure, which is the only defense against the charge that the frame was chosen for the outcome. The Stone passage states his evidence, states Stone’s defense, and declines to say who is right, which keeps me out of a fight neither man needs me in. The guardrail paragraph is early on, that the model rates admissibility and not merit. Without it a reader can take the essay as a claim that Cohen’s accusations are false, which it does not make and which the frame cannot support.
The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification
Michael Power trained in the philosophy of the social sciences, then qualified as a chartered accountant and did audit work for Deloitte Haskins and Sells. He arrived at the London School of Economics as a lecturer in accounting and finance in 1987, which put him in Britain at the moment the word audit slipped its moorings. Medical audit. Environmental audit. Teaching audit. Technology audit. Quality audit. Value-for-money audit. A term that had meant a licensed professional checking a company’s books against evidence was suddenly available for any activity that somebody wanted held to account.
He wrote a pamphlet about it for Demos in 1994 called The Audit Explosion, and three years later a book of 183 pages, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, from Oxford. The argument has six moves, and the chapter titles carry them: the rise of audit, the audit explosion, audit and the dialectic of regulatory failure, audit knowledge and the construction of auditees, and then the last chapter, “Beyond Audit, Towards Trust.”
Audit expands where confidence in professional self-regulation has failed, which means audit demand is a symptom of withdrawn trust. Audit does not restore the trust whose absence created it; it relocates trust onto the audit process and the auditor, at a further remove and with less visibility. What audits check, once they scale, is the system of control rather than the substance of the work, which Power calls control of control. Activities do not arrive auditable; they have to be made auditable, and the making reorganizes them around what can be documented. And the audited respond in one of two ways, either by producing compliance for the inspection while leaving the work untouched, or by internalizing the audit’s categories until the activity becomes the thing the audit can see.
Power has been careful about being read as a debunker. In a 2021 paper on the logic of the audit trail he wrote that accounting and auditing are “not inherently value-subverting and may be value-enhancing.” His complaint has always been narrower and harder to answer: the audit explosion has never been subjected to the scrutiny it applies to everything else.
Philip Cohen calls his own procedure an audit. In December 2025, reporting that two-thirds of the quantitative papers in the most recent volume of American Sociological Review came with replication packages, he described this as better than the results of his previous informal audits.
He counts replication packages by volume. He counts how many articles have been retracted from the association’s journals this century, and arrives at one. He counts the birth years behind generational labels and demonstrates that the boundaries float. He counts the association’s subscription price increases across eight years and reads its revenue structure out of its own audited accounts. He counted the households and young men in Alice Goffman’s neighborhood survey against census figures for comparable Philadelphia blocks. He counts his archive’s submissions in thirty-day windows and posts the Stata code that pulls the metadata. When his own divorce prediction was published under a title that promised a future trend, he went back every year as new survey data landed and checked it in public.
A sociologist who does this much counting of other people’s compliance is running a private regulatory regime with no budget, no statutory basis, and one employee.
Power’s precondition for that regime is stated more clearly by Cohen than by any regulator. Asked to meet a National Academies panel on corrections and retractions, Cohen’s message was that sociology almost never corrects or retracts, and that the reason is circular: the discipline’s practices make it impossible to know whether serious errors or fraud are occurring. Trust cannot be extended because nothing can be checked, and nothing can be checked because trust has been extended. Elsewhere he describes the professional reflex he ran into over the Goffman survey, where asking to inspect the evidence behind an admired book got treated as a breach of collegial manners. That reflex is the claim of professional self-regulation, and Power’s book is about what happens after the claim stops being believed.
Cohen does not count correct findings. He counts whether a package exists. In the 2020 version of the audit he said so, noting that he had assessed the packages at a glance and had not tested anybody’s code. The improvement he has documented, from four of fifteen quantitative papers in 2020 to eight of twenty-five in 2023 to twelve of eighteen in 2025, is an improvement in documentation. Whether the code runs, whether the data support the tables, whether the models were specified before or after the results were seen: none of that is in the count. Nobody has run those replications. The audit checks the control system.
Power’s term for the produced condition is auditability, and the tripled proportion is a record of auditability being manufactured across five years. The relation between auditability and correctness is an open empirical question that Cohen’s series does not address and could not address, and he does not claim otherwise.
The auditees behaved as Power’s fifth chapter predicts. Cohen’s tables catalogue the ceremonial forms: data available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, materials on the author’s personal website where they are not, a PDF of the code linked from a homepage, a repository link that requires asking permission, and blinded review links pasted into published articles by authors who had no interest in whether a reader could follow them. He tells the journal’s staff to click their own links before publishing. Each of those artifacts is what compliance looks like when the count is known and the substance is not.
Then the other response arrived in his comment thread. A sociologist who had published in a journal with a mandatory reproducibility policy wrote that assembling a replication package for the first time took a full day of work despite tidy file management, that people default to available upon request because collating for a stranger is labor rather than because they are hiding anything, that most researchers keep a system only they understand, and that the experience had converted him: he plans to build packages from now on whether or not journals require them, and at fifty-nine he does not accept being set in one’s ways as an excuse.
Both of Power’s responses to audit, ceremonial compliance and internal conversion, appeared in the same thread on the same December morning, one in the tables and one in the comments. The compliance cost the convert described, a day of skilled labor per paper, appears nowhere in the count. Power’s observation is that audit generates work whose value is invisible to the audit that generated it.
The regress is the part of Power’s argument that usually closes the trap. If audit displaces trust onto the auditor, then the auditor has to be trusted, and audit has produced a new object of faith rather than eliminating the need for faith. Financial audit cannot escape this, because the evidence the auditor examined belongs to the client and the auditor’s report is an opinion delivered to a principal. The public gets the opinion and never the working papers.
Cohen’s practice escapes it, and this is the most defensible thing about him. His evidence is a journal volume sitting on a library shelf. His caveat is that his methods are squishy. His invitation is that corrections be mailed to his office, written on the back of a fifty-dollar bill. His metadata code is posted. Anyone who thinks he has miscounted Volume 90 can open Volume 90. The audit’s inputs are as public as its output, which makes trust in the auditor optional, and optional trust is the only kind that survives contact with a discipline that has stopped extending it.
That is also the best available account of why his counts move institutions and his verdicts do not. A count anyone can redo carries no author with it.
The costs of his regime are visible in two places. The first is his own career, which has migrated from first-order work to second-order work. The man who established a reputation on the devaluation of women’s work, on metropolitan labor markets, on divorce rates and marriage markets, now spends December afternoons clicking other people’s links. He has said as much: time spent on public outreach eats research time, and with fewer media mentions he might have more research worth mentioning. Power’s audit explosion is precisely the growth of second-order activity, checking, at the expense of the first-order activity being checked, and here it can be traced through one publication record.
The second is the archive, which publishes its own compliance costs. Rejection rates far above historical levels. Moderation burden up. Revised versions now passing through the queue, which is welcome and which doubles the reading. Volunteers thanked. Cohen is one of the few people running an inspection regime who audits the cost of his own inspection in public.
Then came the paper that took the argument to its end.
Somebody submitted work to the archive that would have been accepted a few years earlier. It had an abstract. It had a title that reflected the contents. It had an ORCID. It had cited references, and the citations and quotations appeared to be real. Its statistical models were complex and apparently competent, with graphical and tabular results. It was coherent and relevant to existing research. The code was in a public repository. And at the end there was an AI disclosure listing the tools used to write the code, run the literature search, advise on the statistics, and draft nearly all of the text, alongside the author’s claim to have formulated the question, chosen the framework and the variables, directed the analytical decisions, interpreted the results, and verified every data claim and every citation. He offered a methodology audit on request.
Every element of the audit trail was present. The paper was dull, unoriginal, superficial, thin in its literature review, and empty where it claimed a theoretical contribution.
Power’s 2026 essay on auditability in the digital age describes the general condition: notions of evidence and auditability have become fluid, the spread of algorithms through the systems being audited pushes audit toward becoming algorithmic in turn, and the evidentiary basis loses its independence, until at the limit the audit becomes self-referential and the auditor is left as a “de-skilled curator” of models and their outputs. Cohen reached the same place from the other direction and wrote it out in the first person. The audit trail was manufactured by the technology whose presence the trail exists to disclose. He noted that a disclosure requirement he cannot verify is close to worthless, since the chatbots read the rules and will help an author appear to satisfy them, and that any attempt at detection would be an arms race against the people who own the machines, lost at the cost of the archive’s actual work.
He conceded the further problem in the same breath. His platform accepts work without peer review and assigns digital object identifiers and the other trappings of scholarly legitimacy, which makes it an attractive place both to deposit synthetic papers and to harvest real ones. He built an institution that issues auditable form without quality judgment, and the form is now being produced at industrial scale by systems with no interest in the judgment.
The policy that came out in March 2026 reads like the last chapter of Power’s book. It is written in the collective voice with the five members of the drafting subcommittee named. It states the competing interests it tries to balance. It refuses automated detection, refuses the arms race, commits the moderators to human judgment using perception and experience, makes no promise of a rule that could be stated completely, and invites appeals. Cohen and his colleagues wrote that they felt a need to insist on their humanity in the process.
Beyond audit, towards trust, arrived at by the auditor.
Which leaves the concession that anybody applying this frame has to make, and Power supplies the warrant for it. Cohen did not choose audit over gentler methods. He spent three years as an elected member of the association’s publications committee trying to get a policy adopted that would merely tell readers whether a published article came with its data. Two subcommittees produced a mild version. The governing council rejected it. He organized a petition against the association’s letter opposing open distribution of federally funded research, got more than two hundred signatures, got the committee to pass a resolution, and watched the council ignore it. Persuasion inside the institution moved nothing across three years. Counting in public moved the proportion of quantitative articles shipping code from a quarter to two-thirds across five. A reader who takes Power’s book as an argument against auditing has to explain that record, and Power’s own revision, that these practices are not inherently value-subverting and may add value, is the honest place to stand.
What the frame recovers is the limit rather than a verdict. An audit trail records what a person can be made to show. It was always a proxy, and everyone involved knew it, and the proxy held for as long as producing the trail was more expensive than doing the work. That condition failed sometime in 2025. The archive’s queue is now full of papers whose trails are immaculate, and the only remaining question about them is the one no trail has ever been able to answer, which is whether anybody meant it.
Cohen built the trail, followed it to the end, and came out into a room where somebody has to decide.
Notes
Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford University Press, 1997; paperback 1999), 183 pages, six chapters, the last titled “Beyond Audit, Towards Trust.” Table of contents and publisher description. The precursor pamphlet is The Audit Explosion (Demos, 1994). Biographical detail, including the philosophy training, the Deloitte Haskins and Sells years, and the 1987 arrival at LSE, is from https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/michael-power and the publisher’s author note.
The two later pieces I lean on: “Modelling the Microfoundations of the Audit Society: Organizations and the Logic of the Audit Trail,” Academy of Management Review 46, no. 1 (2021): 6–32, open access at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100243/, source of the verbatim phrase “not inherently value-subverting and may be value-enhancing” and of the argument that the audit trail is performative of the conditions of its own expansion. And “Auditability in the Digital Age,” International Journal of Auditing (2026), https://doi.org/10.1111/ijau.70038, source of the fluidity of evidence, the platformization risk, the non-independence of the evidentiary basis, and the verbatim phrase “de-skilled curator.” Also relevant: “Theorizing the Economy of Traces: From Audit Society to Surveillance Capitalism,” Organization Theory 3, no. 3 (2022), which won the 2024 James G. March Prize, and the new book Economy of Traces: Traceability, Tracking and the Accounts We Live By (Oxford, 2026). The self-critical retrospective is “Afterword: Audit Society 2.0?” (2022), http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115189/.
Power’s own vocabulary carries the essay. I kept out the neighboring literature that would have turned this into a composite: Espeland and Sauder on reactivity, Meyer and Rowan on ceremonial conformity, Strathern on audit cultures, Muller on metric fixation. The two-response pattern I describe as ceremonial compliance and internal conversion is Power’s chapter 5 material on the construction of auditees, in his terms rather than the institutionalist terms it draws on.
Two claims that are mine. First, that Cohen’s practice escapes Power’s regress of trust because his audit inputs are public in a way financial audit evidence never is. Power’s regress argument turns on the privacy of audit evidence and the delivery of an opinion to a principal; he does not consider the case where the audited material is a published artifact available to every reader. This is the essay’s contribution and it is arguable, since a reader still has to trust Cohen’s coding decisions about what counts as a package, which is why his squishy-methods caveat is doing more work than it appears to. Second, that the proxy held only while producing the trail cost more than doing the work, and that the condition failed in 2025. Power’s 2026 essay gestures at the same collapse without dating it.
The debunking pull is real and the essay resists it in three places: the paragraph early on where Power disclaims being read as a debunker, the sentence conceding that the relation between auditability and correctness is unknown in both directions rather than known to be absent, and the late paragraph laying out the three years of failed committee work against the five years of successful counting.
The obvious next move is to ask whether Cohen’s audits have improved the correctness of published sociology, and the honest answer is that nobody knows, because the replications have not been run. Saying more than that would require me to assert something the record does not support. It is also the strongest single sentence available to a critic of open-science reform, and the fact that Cohen has never claimed otherwise is to his credit.
