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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:
- Jacob Bernstein and the Chronicling of American Elites
- 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
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 Emotional Economy of the Exception: Randall Collins, Carl Schmitt, and the Affective Failure of Liberal Order
Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception is almost always read as a claim about law. The sovereign decides when normal legal order no longer applies and thereby reveals the ground on which every constitutional arrangement rests. This reading is accurate … Continue reading
The Traumatized Sovereign: Jeffrey Alexander, David Pinsof, and the Ritual Reception of Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt argued that the sovereign decision never disappears. It migrates. What he could not have anticipated is that one of its most revealing migrations would occur within the institutions devoted to his reception. The academic encounter with Schmitt is … Continue reading
Tacit Sovereignty: Stephen Turner, Carl Schmitt, and the Sociology of Convenient Power
Carl Schmitt’s assault on liberal constitutionalism is one of the most searching acts of political demystification in the twentieth century. In Political Theology (1922) and Constitutional Theory (1928), Schmitt argued that liberalism survives by denying the very condition of its … Continue reading
The Philosopher of the Primate Brain: Alliance Theory and the Naturalization of Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt thought he had discovered the essence of politics. What he discovered was the surface expression of evolved coalition psychology. His framework feels compelling because it resonates with how we are wired. David Pinsof, Martie Haselton, and Douglas Sears, … Continue reading
Mickey Kaus – The Partial Insider
Mickey Kaus was born into the system. His father, Otto Kaus, sat on the California Supreme Court. He grew up in Beverly Hills, attended Harvard twice, and entered journalism through the Washington Monthly, the neoliberal incubator that launched Michael Kinsley … Continue reading
Ben Sasse & The Wisdom
Ben Sasse sits across from Ross Douthat with dried blood on his face, a side effect of the experimental drug daraxonrasib that prevents normal skin growth. He is funny about it. He has been funny about everything. His pancreatic cancer … Continue reading
David Brooks – The Useful Man
David Brooks did not rise to prominence because he is a great journalist. He rose because he solved a problem that American elite institutions could not solve for themselves. The problem is this: how do you maintain the appearance of … Continue reading
David Samuels & The Cost
David Samuels grew up in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish family whose immigrant roots gave him an outsider’s eye on American life before he ever set foot in a newsroom. He graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a degree in … Continue reading
Alana Newhouse: Editor, Founder, Entrepreneur
Alana Newhouse was born on February 26, 1976, in Lawrence, New York, in the Five Towns area of Long Island, and spent portions of her childhood in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Her father was Ashkenazi and her mother Sephardic. She attended … Continue reading
Net Power: The Political Science of Michael Beckley
Michael Beckley has made his name by insisting that most analysts count power wrong. That sounds like an academic quibble. In his hands, it is the fulcrum on which an entire debate turns. The debate concerns American decline and Chinese … Continue reading