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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:
- The Heaven He Could Reach With His Hands
- Liza by the Curb
- Bob Burge Draws The Line
- Chuck Evans and the Sacred Body
- The Boy Who Did the Right Things
- God Comes First, and Sports Comes Second
- The Sportswriter
- Live
- The Whole Cup
- Mulholland Drive
- Good Evening, Folks
- The Joe Starkey Hero System
- Mike Adamle and the Meaning of Heart
- Special Progress
- Amy Gutmann: A Life in Democratic Theory
- NYT: ‘Searching for Clues in Jeffrey Epstein’s Boyhood’
- Who Has Discussed Realist Anthropology in Polite Society?
- Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023)
- Stephen P. Turner’s Anthropology & Epistemics
- What Might A Democratic Party Platform Look Like If It Aligned With Reality?
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* 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
Four Cities, Four Jewish Imprints: How Jewish Demography Shapes California’s Legal Capitals
Jewish populations and Jewish communal character shape the elite cultures of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento in different ways and to different degrees. Population size matters. So does the historical origin of each community. So does the … Continue reading
The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture
Sacramento operates as the command center of the largest state government in the United States. Its legal culture reflects that role rather than any other industrial or commercial base. San Francisco built its bar around banking, technology, and venture capital. … Continue reading
The Quiet Republic
San Diego sells itself as the disciplined alternative to Los Angeles. The city markets competence over spectacle, restraint over flamboyance, scientific seriousness over entertainment myth. Visitors see beaches, naval installations, golf courses, biotech campuses, convention hotels, and clean coastal money. … Continue reading
The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture
San Diego contains substantial wealth, sophisticated institutions, federal jurisdiction over one of the heaviest international borders in North America, a major military presence, an important biotechnology corridor, and a long-established corporate bar. Yet San Diego never developed the prestige theater … Continue reading
The Two Legal Californias: Stewards and Rainmakers
California’s two great legal markets share an identical regulatory baseline. They operate under the same state bar, the same evidence code, the same civil procedure rules, and the same constitutional framework. They draw on the same statewide pool of judges. … Continue reading
Operators and Their Cities: Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles
The structural difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles produces a downstream consequence at the level of individual careers. A man optimized for one city often arrives in the other carrying a set of skills that no longer pay. His … Continue reading
The Closed and the Open: San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access
The contrast between San Francisco and Los Angeles holds a peculiar place in American urban writing. The popular version flattens the difference to temperament. San Francisco reads as cerebral, closed, and judgmental. Los Angeles reads as sprawling, improvisational, and forgiving. … Continue reading
Jonathan Haidt and the Big Misunderstanding
Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) grows up in Scarsdale, New York, the son of a lawyer in a family of liberal Jewish professionals whose grandparents came to the United States from Russia and Poland. He becomes an atheist by fifteen. At … Continue reading
James Wood and the Last Defense of the Novel
James Wood (b. 1965) arrived at the moment when the authority of literary criticism was collapsing and for a generation restored the role of the critic as a feared and consequential public judge. His career traces the institutional migration of … Continue reading
‘An Unsentimental Education’: Merve Emre introduces ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’
Merv Emre writes for the April 24, 2025 New York Review of Books about the Tom Wolfe novel I am Charlotte Simmons. The introduction reads: “This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to a new edition of … Continue reading