“I’m a journalist, not a social scientist, so I would say this, but it’s true: There is no substitute for walking around and talking to people, exploring a community, and sniffing the air. Qualitative methods can detect emerging trends, trace the intricacies of human interactions, and notice the small details that add up. In 2016, while statisticians and pollsters were busy declaring Hillary Clinton the almost-sure election winner, journalists and scholars who were driving around, chatting with voters, and counting yard signs knew something was up. Today, scholars like Arlie Russell Hochschild, Katherine J. Cramer and Andrew Cherlin demonstrate the continued relevance of the richly nuanced observational methods that established works by Edward Banfield, Elliott Liebow, Jonathan Rieder and James Q. Wilson as classics, despite having nary an R-squared among them.”