- https://PayPal.Me/lukeisback
"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:
- Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
- Marine Le Pen
- The Coalition-Proximity Rule
- Nigel Farage
- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
- William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
- Rod Dreher: A Life in Exile
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
Category Archives: San Francisco
The Hero System of San Francisco Chronicle’s Ace Investigative Journalists
The database does not care who reads it. Susie Neilson sat at her desk at the San Francisco Chronicle and worked through LexisNexis CourtLink, a repository of court filings, and found a lawsuit that gave her pause. She had read … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism, San Francisco
Comments Off on The Hero System of San Francisco Chronicle’s Ace Investigative Journalists
The Hero System of San Francisco Columnist Emily Hoeven
For years a man carried a machete through Jefferson Square Park. The police logged about fifty encounters with him after 2014. Two restraining orders. Cycles of jail, treatment, release, the same park, the same blade. The neighbors waited for the … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism, San Francisco
Comments Off on The Hero System of San Francisco Columnist Emily Hoeven
The Hero System of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie
Daniel Lurie (b. February 4, 1977) takes a salary of one dollar to run San Francisco. He could take the full mayor’s pay. He does not need it, and he wants the city to see that he does not need … Continue reading
Posted in San Francisco
Comments Off on The Hero System of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie
Moral Grammars of American Elite Life: Four Cities and Four Accounts of Legitimate Influence
From a distance, American elite life looks like one culture. Up close it splits into rival moral orders, and the clearest fault lines run between cities. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington each reward a different virtue, punish … Continue reading
Posted in Elites, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C.
Comments Off on Moral Grammars of American Elite Life: Four Cities and Four Accounts of Legitimate Influence
The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento
San Diego paints in soft pastels. Sun-bleached cream, eucalyptus green, sandstone gold, the muted teal of the Pacific seen from a cliff in La Jolla. Light arrives filtered through ocean air and looks permanently late-afternoon, even at noon. Visible stress … Continue reading
Posted in California, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco
Comments Off on The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento
Four Cities, Four Jewish Imprints: How Jewish Demography Shapes California’s Legal Capitals
Jewish populations and Jewish communal character shape the elite cultures of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento in different ways and to different degrees. Population size matters. So does the historical origin of each community. So does the … Continue reading
Posted in Jews, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco
Comments Off on Four Cities, Four Jewish Imprints: How Jewish Demography Shapes California’s Legal Capitals
The Two Legal Californias: Stewards and Rainmakers
California’s two great legal markets share an identical regulatory baseline. They operate under the same state bar, the same evidence code, the same civil procedure rules, and the same constitutional framework. They draw on the same statewide pool of judges. … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
Comments Off on The Two Legal Californias: Stewards and Rainmakers
Operators and Their Cities: Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles
The structural difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles produces a downstream consequence at the level of individual careers. A man optimized for one city often arrives in the other carrying a set of skills that no longer pay. His … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
Comments Off on Operators and Their Cities: Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles
The Closed and the Open: San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access
The contrast between San Francisco and Los Angeles holds a peculiar place in American urban writing. The popular version flattens the difference to temperament. San Francisco reads as cerebral, closed, and judgmental. Los Angeles reads as sprawling, improvisational, and forgiving. … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
Comments Off on The Closed and the Open: San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access
The Daniel Lurie Set
San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie (b. 1977) sits at the meeting point of two San Francisco aristocracies. The first is old Bay Area Jewish philanthropic money. His mother, Mimi Haas (b. 1946), owns a large block of Levi Strauss stock … Continue reading
Posted in San Francisco
Comments Off on The Daniel Lurie Set