He is an ethnographer interested in how people construct and maintain meaning in everyday life. His most recent work is about the occupational subculture of bicycle messengers, “Urban Flow: Bike Messengers and the City“ (Cornell University Press, 2011). Isaac Martin is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He has helped develop the new subfield fiscal sociology. He is the author of “The Permanent Tax Revolt: How Property Tax Transformed American Politics” (Stanford University Press, 2008), numerous journal articles, and co-editor of “The New Fiscal Sociology: Comparative and Historical Approaches to Taxation” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).