This post is to announce that “Bruce Carruthers”:http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/carruthers/home.html has very kindly agreed to join _Crooked Timber_ as a guestblogger for a week. Bruce is professor of sociology at Northwestern; while both Eszter and Kieran have known him for a while, I first got to know him at a Russell Sage workshop last May, where he presented some of his work on risk and financial markets. I was fascinated by the paper that he gave – it looked at the different ways in which US financial markets have tried to deal with uncertainty over the last century – and more to the point, it turned out to be in some respects prophetic of the kinds of trouble that US financial markets are finding themselves in today. Bruce will be posting on whatever he wants as do all our guest bloggers, but I imagine that he’ll have a lot to say about the current situation of markets, how we got to where we are, and, perhaps, where it is likely to end up.