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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:
- What’s the Average Somali IQ?
- Samuel Moyn: The Historian of Contingency
- The Hero System of George Soros
- Walter J. Ong and the Technology of the Word
- Bruno Latour: The Anthropologist of the Moderns
- Adam Tooze: A Historian of Material Power
- Quinn Slobodian: Historian of How Capitalism Is Governed
- Jamie Martin: Historian of Sovereignty, Empire, and the World Economy
- Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems
- Mordecai Finley and the Hero System of the Soul
- Looking for Lost Jews
- James Boyd White & the Legal Imagination
- Katrina Forrester: Climate Activist, Political Theorist, Intellectual Historian and Public Intellectual
- Michael Kammen and the Making of American Cultural History
- H. L. A. Hart: A Life in Law and Philosophy
- Robert Dahl, from Pluralist Optimism to the Problem of Economic Power
- If It Happened At All: The Hero System of David Wolpe
- Dark Idealism
- Refusal of Status is Status
- Learning for its Own Sake
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
Avishai Margalit: The Philosopher of Humiliation
Avishai Margalit (b. 1939) is an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual whose work reshaped how moral and political philosophy treats dignity, humiliation, memory, compromise, and betrayal. He spent the core of his career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and … Continue reading
The Cover Story: Joseph Kahn and Independence as Sacred Value
David Pinsof writes: 10. Status game collapse. When players of a status game gain common knowledge that they’re playing a status game. They suddenly see each other as vain, insecure, or self-absorbed, which sends them scrambling to play a different … Continue reading
The Man Without Appetite: Joseph Kahn Through Anti-Status
David Pinsof’s status concepts begin with an ordinary observation and end somewhere cold. We compete, all the time, to be smarter, cooler, braver, kinder, more virtuous than the people near us, and the competition runs as a game with points … Continue reading
Seeing Like the Times: Joseph Kahn’s Newsroom Through James C. Scott
James C. Scott (1936-2024) published Seeing Like a State in 1998 and opened it with a forest. Eighteenth-century German foresters, needing timber yields the crown could count, replaced the chaotic old-growth woods with a scientific forest: Norway spruce in straight … Continue reading
The Editor’s Two Bodies: Joseph Kahn Through Ernst Kantorowicz
Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963) published The King’s Two Bodies in 1957, a study in what he called medieval political theology. The Tudor jurists he quotes, Edmund Plowden (1518-1585) foremost, held that the king possesses two bodies. The body natural is mortal … Continue reading
The Fifth Generation: The Sulzbergers and Joseph Kahn Through Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) built the Muqaddimah around one engine, asabiyyah, the group feeling that binds men into a force capable of taking and holding power. Asabiyyah is born in the desert, in hardship and scarcity, where survival requires absolute mutual … Continue reading
The Cathedral and the Gift Shop: Joseph Kahn’s Times Through Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) published Systems of Survival in 1992, a Platonic dialogue hiding a hard thesis. Human livelihoods divide into two kinds, taking and trading, and each kind has evolved its own complete moral system, which she called syndromes. The … Continue reading
The Steward: Joseph Kahn Through Philip Selznick’s Leadership in Administration
Philip Selznick (1919-2010) published Leadership in Administration in 1957, a short book built on one distinction. An organization is a technical instrument, a tool for doing a job, expendable the moment a better tool appears. An institution is something else. … Continue reading
Blocked Exits: Joseph Kahn’s Times Through Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in 1970, and the book’s machinery fits in a paragraph. When an organization deteriorates, its members and customers have two recuperative responses. They can exit, taking their business or their labor elsewhere, … Continue reading
The Crown and the Premier: Joseph Kahn’s Times Through Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) published The English Constitution in 1867 to explain why the textbook account of British government was wrong. The textbooks described a balance of Crown, Lords, and Commons. Bagehot said the working constitution divided along a different line, … Continue reading