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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 Restless Heart: A Hero-System Reading of JD Vance
- The Man Who Will Not Lose
- Lowell Cohn: ‘Shame on the New York Times’ (May 16, 2026)
- Wayne Judd – Star Teacher
- The Answered Letter: A Hero-System Essay on Philosopher Gary Chartier
- The Good Report
- I Watched Craig Van Rooyen Soar
- 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
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- The Whole Cup
- Mulholland Drive
- Good Evening, Folks
- The Joe Starkey Hero System
- Mike Adamle and the Meaning of Heart
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
Franzen at the Closing Door
Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award for The Corrections in November 2001. The book sold three million copies. He appeared on the cover of Time. Oprah Winfrey picked his novel for her book club. He became, for a moment, … Continue reading
Mark McGurl and the Institutional Turn in American Literary Studies
Mark McGurl (b. 1966) is an American literary critic and the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His scholarship treats the relation of literature to social, educational, and technological institutions from the late nineteenth century to the … Continue reading
Jonathan Franzen and the Last Defense of the Social Novel
Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959) works in two registers, the long realist novel and the public essay, and across both he chronicles the psychological exhaustion, institutional fragmentation, and moral uncertainty of the educated American middle and upper-middle classes under conditions of … Continue reading
Is Middlemarch The Greatest Novel?
The Guardian crowned Middlemarch the greatest novel of all time on May 12, 2026. The methodology: votes from authors, critics, and academics worldwide. Through the Strange Bedfellows lens, neither the novel’s content nor an abstract standard of literary merit explains … Continue reading
David Foster Wallace: The Writer of Attention in an Age of Distraction
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) attempted to diagnose the interior life of Americans formed by television, consumer abundance, therapeutic culture, higher education, bureaucratic systems, and a collapsing confidence in inherited moral languages. His work returns to one question: what becomes of … Continue reading
Claire Hoffman: Chronicler of American Enchantment
Claire Hoffman (b. 1977) writes about American spiritual culture, celebrity religion, and therapeutic individualism during the decades when twentieth-century institutional life fragmented into the personalized, media-driven authority of the digital age. Her journalism and books sit at the intersection of … Continue reading
Matthew Randazzo V and the Chronicle of Informal America
Matthew Randazzo V (b. 1984) holds an unusual position in twenty-first century American nonfiction. He works between literary journalism, oral history, regional ethnography, and political anthropology. He built his reputation through long collaboration with gangsters, political fixers, wrestlers, hustlers, and … Continue reading
Michael Fumento and the Career of the Empiricist Dissenter
Michael Fumento (b. 1949) belongs to a distinct generation of American journalists who fused investigative reporting with policy polemic, epidemiological skepticism, and technological advocacy. Over four decades he cultivated the role of empiricist dissenter, positioning his work against media-amplified moral … Continue reading
Mark Ebner: Chronicler of the Los Angeles Underside
Mark Ebner (b. 1959) is an American investigative journalist whose career maps the convergence of celebrity culture, organized crime, religious heterodoxy, and media spectacle in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Los Angeles. His work belongs to the freelance magazine tradition … Continue reading
Evan Wright and the Ethnography of American Decentralization
Evan Wright (1964-2024) developed a method of immersive journalism that joined literary realism, ethnographic observation, war correspondence, and subcultural anthropology into a long investigation of institutional fragmentation in late modern America. Over nearly three decades, he embedded himself in groups … Continue reading