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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:
- From Jerusalem to the Backlot: The Two Careers of Sharon Waxman
- Jim Romenesko and the Invention of Daily Blogging on the Press
- Nikki Finke: A Life in Deadline Hollywood
- Joan Wallach Scott and the Politics of the Category
- Lynn Hunt and the Cultural Turn
- The Jewish Jesus and His Interpreters: Amy-Jill Levine and the Return of the New Testament to Second Temple Judaism
- The Keeper of the Dead: Timothy Snyder’s Hero System
- How Wide the We: David Hollinger and the Quarrel Over Solidarity
- The Anarchists’ Son in Perry Miller’s Chair
- Ruth Wisse Against the Schlemiel
- 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
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
Chicago, Peru, Rome: The Making of Pope Leo XIV
Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, looks like a rupture if you focus on nationality. Track his formation instead of his passport, and the story becomes almost archetypal. Leo is a creature of specific institutional … Continue reading
The Liturgy of the Identifiable: UC Berkeley Economics and the Performance of Rigor
UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics presents itself as a temple of empirical seriousness. Clean identification, administrative datasets, causal inference rendered in careful prose. The tone stays restrained in print. The claims grow confident in policy settings. To the analyst of … Continue reading
Niall Ferguson & the Performance of History
Niall Ferguson was born in Glasgow in 1964 to a father who taught medicine and a mother who taught physics, into a Scottish Presbyterian household whose atmosphere shaped him more than he often acknowledges. The household valued argument, moral seriousness, … Continue reading
Daniel Siegel: From Synthesis to Cosmology
Daniel J. Siegel trained as a rigorous biomedical scientist and became a global brand. His intellectual biography traces the arc from disciplined synthesis to universalizing cosmology. Siegel came up through the most conventional credentialing pipeline American medicine offers. He took … Continue reading
NYT: Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes, Study Finds
Carl Zimmer writes in the New York Times April 15, 2026: Some researchers hold that evolution hasn’t much altered humans in the past 10,000 years. A new analysis of ancient DNA indicates that natural selection continued to shape hundreds of … Continue reading
The Dime in the Phone Booth: John M. Doris and the Science of Moral Failure
John M. Doris is born in 1963 and raised in Ithaca, New York, a Cornell faculty brat. His father, John L. Doris (1923-2008), is a developmental psychologist in Cornell’s School of Human Ecology, an applied scholar who works on the … Continue reading
Amy Wax: Truth, Transgression, and the Modern University
Part Two Part Three Amy Laura Wax is a pressure point inside the modern university, a figure through whom deeper institutional contradictions become visible. Her biography tracks a classic ascent through the highest tiers of American meritocracy. Having secured that … Continue reading
‘Jewish Studies Draws a Line on Tablet’
This 2022 article by Mari Cohen says The Association for Jewish Studies paused its advertising relationship with Tablet after members complained. The AJS statement noted that some members felt direct harm from views Tablet had promulgated. The specific grievances included … Continue reading
The Patient Man – Paul Bloom and the Misunderstanding Frame
Born in Montreal on December 24, 1963, Paul Bloom entered McGill University intending to become a clinical child psychologist, having spent his teenage years working with autistic children. The clinical impulse did not survive contact with cognitive science. Under philosopher-psychologist … Continue reading
What Then Shall We Do: The Work Adlerstein Left
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein built the most sophisticated coalition architecture in American Orthodox intellectual life in the past three decades. He held together Haredi seriousness, Modern Orthodox professional ambition, evangelical interfaith alliance, and secular academic respectability without triggering defection from any … Continue reading