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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:
- William K. Wimsatt Jr.: The Judge of Evidence
- Larissa MacFarquhar: The Woman Who Slows Judgment Down
- Stanley Fish: A Biography
- Hortense Spillers: The Grammar Lesson
- Paul Gilroy: A Biography
- Walter Benn Michaels: A Biography
- Harvey Cox: The Theologian Who Bet on the City
- Love is Love
- The Great Delusion About The Great Books Curriculum
- Renee DiResta and the Information Wars
- Brandy Zadrozny: The Librarian Who Went to War
- Lee Edelman: The Man Who Said No to the Future
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.: The Man Who Rebuilt the Archive
- N. Katherine Hayles: The Chemist Who Rewrote the Human
- The Disorder of Jack Halberstam
- Sports, Family & Tribe
- David Morgan: The Man Who Took Cheap Pictures of Jesus Seriously
- Mark Juergensmeyer: The Man Who Interviewed the Holy Warriors
- David Enoch: The Philosopher Who Says Morality Is Real
- The Unsaying of Karen Armstrong
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
Why do elites argue that Iran’s war plans are super rational and coolly calculating while Trump’s plans are impulsive and crazy?
The contrast between the “Rational Iran” and “Irrational Trump” narratives is a perfect example of what David Pinsof calls patchwork narratives. These are moral or intellectual stories created on the fly to support a specific alliance’s status. The Logic of … Continue reading
NYT: In War’s First Week, a Punishing Military Campaign With No Coherent Endgame
The New York Times reports: “The U.S. and Israel have pounded Iran’s leadership and undercut its defense capabilities, but President Trump has offered wildly different explanations for what he hopes to achieve.” The blob aka the foreign policy establishment places … Continue reading
Decoding David Rothkopf
Wikipedia says: “David Jochanan Rothkopf (born December 24, 1955) is an American foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator. He is the founder and CEO of TRG Media and The Rothkopf Group, a columnist for The Daily … Continue reading
Journos Take Public Pronouncements Too Seriously
Here’s another cliche from the FT’s historian Eugene Rogan: “Given conflicting American aims and justifications for the war, it is difficult to predict just how it will reshape the region.” Conflicting American aims (stated by public officials) and justifications (stated … Continue reading
When The Search For Meaning Leads To War
Ross Douthat writes in the NYT: The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative … Continue reading
The Leading Iran Experts
Academic and Policy Scholars Afshon Ostovar: An Associate Chair at the Naval Postgraduate School and FPRI Fellow, Ostovar is widely cited for his expertise on the IRGC and Iranian military strategy. He recently provided extensive commentary on the limitations of … Continue reading
Decoding Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher serves as the high-priestess of accountability within the Silicon Valley “clerisy.” If Christiane Amanpour is the moral ambassador of the international order, Swisher is the internal auditor of the meritocratic elite. Using David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, she manages … Continue reading
Decoding CNN’s Christiane Amanpour
Christiane Amanpour’s position as a moral narrator within the Western foreign policy ecosystem functions as a mechanism for what Jeffrey Alexander calls social performance. She does not just report on events; she scripts them into a binary of sacred and … Continue reading
‘The last thing the Middle East needed was another war’
“The last thing X needed” is one of the most revealing clichés in journalism because it quietly smuggles in a worldview. It pretends to describe reality but it actually expresses a moral wish. When a journalist writes “the last thing … Continue reading
Where Do The Elites Get Their Iran War Info?
I’ll group them by the real prestige ecosystems that feed decision makers. Think of them as different alliance clusters in the information market. 1. The “insider strategy” publications These are read by Pentagon staff, intelligence analysts, and think-tank people. Many … Continue reading