Author Archives: Luke Ford

About Luke Ford

My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).

The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show

Clay Travis (b. 1979) and Buck Sexton (b. 1981) split the talk-radio job into two voices, and the contrast between those voices carries the show. They took Rush Limbaugh’s old slot in June 2021, and Limbaugh ran that slot alone … Continue reading

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The Declaration of Independence

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote: My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary … Continue reading

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Helen Lewis: A Scholar of Legitimacy

Helen Lewis (b. 1983) is a British journalist, author, and broadcaster whose work circles a single question: how a society decides who deserves authority, and what happens when the old grants of trust come undone. She writes about politics and … Continue reading

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Jack London: A Life

Jack London (1876-1916) was a literary craftsman and a public celebrity. He worked as a novelist, a journalist, a war correspondent, a socialist organizer, a sailor, a rancher, and a self-styled adventurer. His fiction drew on naturalism, evolutionary theory, social … Continue reading

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Ayn Rand: A Life

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, and public intellectual who built a defense of reason, individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism that reached far beyond the universities that ignored her. She gathered her arguments into a system she named Objectivism, … Continue reading

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Walt Whitman: A Life

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) stands among the founders of modern American poetry. His central work, Leaves of Grass, first appears in 1855 and grows through repeated revision across the rest of his life. Whitman breaks with inherited poetic form. He writes … Continue reading

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Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Life

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) stands at the center of nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. He worked to build a national philosophy out of native materials, and he grounded that philosophy in individual judgment, spiritual self-culture, and direct experience. His writings supplied the … Continue reading

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The Melania Trump Voice

Melania Trump (b. 1970) speaks little in public, and the silence does most of her work. Her voice carries a Slovenian accent that decades in New York never sanded down. The register sits low. The pace stays slow and even. … Continue reading

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The Usha Vance Voice

Usha Vance (b. 1986) gives you far less to work with than her husband, and the scarcity is the most telling thing about her public voice. Start with how little there is. She built a successful legal career and then … Continue reading

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The JD Vance Voice

JD Vance (b. 1984) talks like a man trained to win arguments. The training shows up in nearly everything he says. Start with the voice as it began. The Vance of 2016 wrote and spoke as a memoirist and an … Continue reading

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