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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 Man Who Lived in the Conjunction: A Hero System Reading of Stephen J. Whitfield
- The Hero System of Literary Critic Robert Alter
- ‘The journey is over. Love to all.’
- The Private Case
- Eager to Fight: The Hero System of John Podhoretz
- The Hero System of Norman Podhoretz
- Cynthia Ozick’s Hero System: The Idol and the Word
- The Editor Who Decided What Survives: Jules Chametzky and the Hero System of the Canon
- Good Faith and Its Strangers: The Hero System of William Shernoff
- The Whistle in the Garden: Leo Marx’s Hero System
- The Self-Fathered Man: Daniel Aaron’s America
- I Can’t Remember A Leader As Unpredictable As Trump
- Allen Guttmann and the Myth of Rational Secularization
- The Illusion of the Sovereign Imagination
- The Myth of Cosmopolitan Transcendence
- Lionel Trilling and the Liberal Imagination
- Mearsheimer’s Wager on Human Nature
- Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003)
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
- Fredric Jameson
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
The Boundary at Sinai: Principle 8 as Coalition Technology
Principle eight is the live wire of Orthodox theology today, and Shapiro’s chapter on it is the most explosive in his 2011 book, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. The Principle holds three claims at once. The … Continue reading
Reappraised: The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (2011)
Marc Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology is a book about a coalition document that does not know it is a coalition document. Shapiro’s argument runs at the level of doctrine and historical scholarship. The thirteen propositions Maimonides put forward … Continue reading
The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (2011)
The book demands a Stephen Turner tacit knowledge frame. Here’s why, with the others slotting in underneath. Marc Shapiro’s argument structure runs like this. Maimonides articulates thirteen propositions as the explicit content of Jewish belief. The subsequent tradition accepts the … Continue reading
Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (2015)
Marc Shapiro’s book documents the pattern: rabbinic authorities censoring, altering, or rewriting earlier sources to bring them into line with current Orthodox norms. Maimonides loses his Aristotle. The Hatam Sofer loses his contact with maskilim. Photos lose their women. Biographies … Continue reading
‘Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah’
Marc B. Shapiro writes: Lieberman begins by saying that he had not written to R. Herzog—who was a very close friend[3]—because he did not want to create difficulties for R. Herzog by bringing him into the controversy swirling around his … Continue reading
The Coalition Engineers: William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and the Architecture of American Movement Conservatism
Following David Pinsof, David Sears, and Martie Haselton’s “Strange Bedfellows,” political belief tracks coalition membership more reliably than ideology. Men hold positions because positions bind them to allies they need. The content of a position carries less weight than the … Continue reading
NYT: ‘This Is What’s Behind Trump’s Relentlessness’
Randall Collins gives the structural account that Jackson Lears reaches for and never quite specifies. Lears treats animal spirits as a vital current, a metaphysical-cultural inheritance running from camp meeting to Wall Street. The phrase names something real but explains … Continue reading
Sailer: Is the Black Caucus the “Conscience of Congress?”
Steve Sailer’s core argument is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is right. The 1990s political science literature on this packed/cracked trade-off has serious pedigree. David Lublin, The Paradox of Representation (1997). Charles Cameron, David Epstein, and Sharyn O’Halloran in the American … Continue reading
Turner Against The Hidden Room
Stephen Turner refuses to grant social life a hidden substrate. The instinct of much modern theory holds that beneath observable conduct sits something stable: a shared meaning, a collective representation, a tacit rule, a habitus, a form of life. Turner … Continue reading
Holding Both Halves: The Intellectual Life of Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok was born Herman Harold Potok in the Bronx in 1929, the eldest child of Polish Jewish immigrants. His father Benjamin came out of Belzer Hasidic piety and survived the trenches of the First World War. The household held … Continue reading