He remains at Northwestern and in 2003 was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Fine has written ethnographies of a number of diverse small group activities from analyses of Dungeons & Dragons players and mushroom hunters to high school policy debaters and restaurant workers.
A recently published manuscript deals with the social production and communication of scientific work at the National Weather Service.
Another area of research includes the complicated historical and social reputations of figures such as Thorstein Veblen, Benedict Arnold, Fatty Arbuckle, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Warren Harding, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Ford.
On August 4, 2004, several months before the 2004 Presidential Election, he set off a minor storm, especially in the political blogger community,[citation needed] with his op-ed piece in The Washington Post "Ire to the Chief" that argued that the commonly expressed hatreds of presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Richard Nixon reflected their behavior and activities in youth more than their specific policies as President.
He co-edited with Gregory W. H. Smith a major compilation of Goffman's work and of criticism and analysis of his contribution to the social sciences.
His writing style, punchy and wry, can also be seen in his review of Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, for Reason magazine.
He studied the cases of major outsider (self-taught) artists like Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, Edgar Tolson, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Martin Ramirez, Sam Doyle, and Howard Finster.