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"Luke Ford reports all of the 'juicy' quotes, and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
- David Armitage and the History of Political Thought
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
- Scott Kraft: Foreign Correspondent and Newsroom Editor
- Terry Tang and the Custody of the Los Angeles Times
- Hector Becerra
- The Storyteller’s Empire: Yuval Noah Harari and the Authority of Synthesis
- How’s Bari Weiss Doing At CBS News?
- Jacob Bernstein and the Chronicling of American Elites
- From Jerusalem to the Backlot: The Two Careers of Sharon Waxman
- Jim Romenesko and the Invention of Daily Blogging on the Press
- Nikki Finke: A Life in Deadline Hollywood
- Joan Wallach Scott and the Politics of the Category
- Lynn Hunt and the Cultural Turn
- The Jewish Jesus and His Interpreters: Amy-Jill Levine and the Return of the New Testament to Second Temple Judaism
- The Keeper of the Dead: Timothy Snyder’s Hero System
- How Wide the We: David Hollinger and the Quarrel Over Solidarity
- The Anarchists’ Son in Perry Miller’s Chair
- Ruth Wisse Against the Schlemiel
- The Man Who Lived in the Conjunction: A Hero System Reading of Stephen J. Whitfield
- The Hero System of Literary Critic Robert Alter
BEST POSTS:
* American Epistemics (1-19-26)
* The Most Socially Toxic Inconvenient Truths (1-18-26)
* The Luke Ford Genre (1-18-26)
* The Filkins Pivot: Legacy Prestige and the Fracturing of the Chattering Class (1-16-26)
* Decoding The Trump Doctrine (1-4-26)
* If Tatiana Schlossberg were “Tatiana Smith” (12-30-25)
* ‘I’m So Trained’: How The Credential Society Burned Down the Palisades (12-28-25)
* Status Closure and The Lost Generation (12-25-25)
* The Bondi Massacre (12-15-25)
* Sydney Jews Learn That Their Aussie Social Contract Has Become A Suicide Pact (12-15-25)
* Terror in Sydney: Analyzing the “Chanukah by the Sea” Massacre (12-14-25)
* Decoding Nick Fuentes (11-2-25)
* The Landscape of Emotional Sobriety (10-29-30)
* The Rise & Fall Of Air Supply (10-19-25)
* No Kings, No Results: How Elite Pride Replaced Real Progress (10-19-25)
* You Are An Important Soldier In A Great War (9-7-25)
* The Revolt Of The Masses (8-31-25)
* The Covenant of Ashwood (8-24-25)
* If you can’t trust central bankers, then who can you trust? (8-23-25)
* Why Is The Elite Media Singing From The Same Hymnal About The Trump-Putin Summit? (8-17-25)
* Why Do Smart News Operations Sound So Uniformly Dumb So Often? (8-16-25)
* Nobody Is Coming (8-10-25)
* When Elites Restrict Our Speech, It’s Because They Love Truth, Freedom & Democracy (8-3-25)
Author Archives: Luke Ford
CNS: Right-wing talk show host Dennis Prager sues hospitals over medical malpractice
Hillel Aron writes for Courthouse News Service on March 16, 2026: Earlier this year, Prager expressed a degree of gratitude about his condition, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network: “A number of doctors, independently of one another, have described the fact … Continue reading
The Last Cassandras: Status, Trauma, and the Conservative Apocalyptic Genre
Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) argues in his cultural trauma theory that trauma is not the automatic result of material harm. It is a social claim, advanced by carrier groups who translate diffuse anxieties into a morally legible narrative. The conservative … Continue reading
The Last Cassandras: Status, Trauma, and the Secular Apocalyptic Genre
Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) argues in his cultural trauma theory that trauma is not the automatic result of material harm. It is a social claim, advanced by carrier groups who translate diffuse anxieties into a morally legible narrative. The secular … Continue reading
NYT: He Wrote Judy Blume’s Life Story. She Won’t Talk About It.
I find a humility and openness in Mark Oppenheimer’s work that makes him incredibly likable. Elisabeth Egan writes in the New York Times: Janet Malcolm, whose papers are also at the Beinecke Library, famously compared a biographer to a burglar, … Continue reading
The Last Virtuous Man: How the Death of American Morality Became a Career
The mournful-American-morality genre is not philosophy. It is a terminal signaling equilibrium, a compressed competition over the meaning of a failing moral order, conducted under legacy pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated lament, through institutional channels that select … Continue reading
The Corpse Who Writes the Autopsy: How the American University Authors Its Own Decline
The mournful-American-university genre is not scholarship. It is a terminal signaling equilibrium, a compressed competition over the meaning of a failing institution, conducted under legacy pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated alarm, through institutional channels that select for … Continue reading
Does This Story Make Evolutionary Sense?
On May 21, 2025, David Pinsof wrote a blog post that changed me forever. He said: A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a … Continue reading
Bowling Alone, Again: The Mournful-Community Genre and the Market for Civic Grief
The mournful-American-community genre is not sociology. It is a terminal signaling equilibrium, a compressed competition over the meaning of a dying social order, conducted under legacy pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated alarm, through institutional channels that select … Continue reading
The Coalition That Survived the Cross: Narrative Construction and Institutional Selection in the Making of the New Testament
The New Testament is a cultural trauma construction and sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s framework illuminates the incentives shaping such narratives. The founding situation determines everything that follows. The followers of Jesus after the crucifixion faced a specific and urgent problem that … Continue reading
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Again: The Mournful-Seriousness Genre and the Market for Cultural Alarm
The mournful-American-seriousness genre is not just cultural criticism. It is a terminal signaling equilibrium, a compressed competition over the meaning of a dying cultural capacity, conducted under legacy pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated alarm, through institutional channels … Continue reading