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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:
- 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)
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Category Archives: Book Reviews
Are You Ready For The Next Stage?
Shabbat dinner at the home of Rabbi Claudia Rubin in London. "Which is?" asks Robin Buckley, a journalist at the Times (of London). "Drinking the blood of Christian babies…" I’m reading a great new novel by Charlotte Mendelson — When … Continue reading
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Five Great Books On Journalism
Tom Brokaw writes for the WSJ: 1. "The Boys on the Bus" by Timothy Crouse (Random House, 1973). The five books I’ve chosen to write about reflect my own attitudes about the craft I’ve practiced for 45 years now. They’re … Continue reading
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100 Notable Books Of The Year
From the New York Times: Fiction & Poetry THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town … Continue reading
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‘Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics,’ by Bill Boyarsky
Peter Schrag writes in the LA Times: Not only was Unruh a central player in the forging of California’s great postwar highway, university and water systems and the creation of its progressive governmental institutions, he also was a man with … Continue reading
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Naked Ambition
Click here for photos and report.
Posted in Book Reviews, Party
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‘Sometimes You Are What You Wear – An Argument For Modesty’
From ModestyBook.com: “Beauty diminishes, but a good name endures.” Everyday, people are bombarded by images from the media that promote sex, stick-thin figures as ideal, music, movies and books that idealize relationships mirroring our disposable society. World famous fashion models … Continue reading
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9/11 Is Seen as Leading to an Attack on Women
Michiko Kakutani writes in the New York Times: This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name. With “The Terror Dream,” Susan Faludi has taken the momentous subject of 9/11 and come … Continue reading
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The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
This is a great new book by Jeffrey Toobin. From Publishers Weekly: "It’s not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal … Continue reading
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Ehud Havazelet’s First Novel – ‘Bearing The Body’
Francine Prose writes in the New York Times: His central character, Nathan Mirsky, receives a letter from his brother, eats dinner, gets drunk, smokes pot and then rapes his sympathetic, appealing girlfriend. I mention this to warn readers who might … Continue reading
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How The Japanese Media Is Like The Parochial Jewish Media
Ian Hargreaves writes in his 2003 book Journalism: Truth or Dare: …But the workings of Japanese news media are barely recognizable to journalists from the United States or Britain… Japanese journalists, for example, are bound together in a network of … Continue reading
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