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"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:
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- Robert Oscar Lopez: The Inconvenient Witness
- Two Ledgers: Decoding the Gurus and the Price of Talk
- The Pervert’s Progress: Costin Vlad Alamariu and the Making of Bronze Age Pervert
- Curtis Yarvin: A Life Against Democracy
- Mark Helprin: Against the Current
- Mark Brandt: The Man Who Asked Who Else Is Prejudiced
- John T. Jost: The Psychologist of Acquiescence
- Strange Bedfellows in the Academy: Alliance Theory and the Straussian Schism
- Tournier on Desmond Ford
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- Tournier on Luke Ford
- Tournier on The Nostradamus Kid
- An Alliance Theory of Antisemitism
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- * 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)
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Category Archives: English
The Custodianship Question
Part Two The Custodianship Question In Canada, Latin America, Africa Australia, New Zealand Europe Asia Alliance Theory Selig Perlman (1888-1959), a professor of Economics at Wisconsin, reportedly warned his Jewish graduate students, that “History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. You belong … Continue reading
Posted in Christianity, English, Jews, Susanne Klingenstein
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Ten Convenient Beliefs In The Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia’s Department of English & Comparative Literature department (ENCL) sits where high theory entered the American university and stayed. Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) taught there. Edward Said (1935-2003) wrote Orientalism there. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) still holds the rank of … Continue reading
Ten Convenient Beliefs In The Harvard Department of English / History & Literature
Stephen Turner calls some ideas good bad theories. They do little to explain the world and much to hold a group together. A good bad theory coordinates hiring, teaching, grants, and self-image. It tells the members who belongs and what … Continue reading
The Latest Jargon Among Elites In English Departments
English departments don’t invent jargon randomly. They import it from adjacent prestige markets like critical theory, sociology, and media studies, then redeploy it as boundary markers. The current layer is less about “the text itself” and more about positioning literature … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Caleb Smith – The Warden’s Critic
Yale English department chairman Caleb Smith grew up in Arkansas, in a world where power operated without the psychic refinements that the northeastern intellectual tradition associates with discipline. Clinton, Walmart, Tyson Poultry, evangelical preachers: this was a political economy that … Continue reading
Yale’s English Department & The Culture of Discipline
Tenured full professors, the Director of Graduate Studies, the Department Chair, and the senior hiring-committee gatekeepers at the Yale English Department do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking languages of Close Reading Excellence, … Continue reading
Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?
When you speak one language, you think and feel differently than when you speak a different language. Lian Greenfeld wrote in her 2016 Advanced Introduction to Nationalism: “Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly … Continue reading
Posted in English, French, Linguistics
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The Craft of Writing Effectively
“Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.” Here are some excerpts … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Why Do Some People End Their Sentences In ‘Yeah’?
From Quora: “Most British people don’t say Yeah at the end of a sentence. It would be most prevalent in certain dialects in South Eastern England. It is used as a affirmation of the sentence it ends, or the series … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
From the LROB: * It isn’t just that everyone now has a story; it’s that everyone is a story. Who you are is the narrative you recount about yourself. Whether the life history of someone forced into sex work reflects … Continue reading
Posted in English
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