Category Archives: Academia

Beliefs Are Like Possessions

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Luke Ford

When people most need to feel special, they are most likely to adopt special beliefs such as Holocaust denial or 9-11 truthism. Childless people are more likely to adopt exciting beliefs because their ordinary life does not provide sufficient excitement. … Continue reading →

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Nathan Cofnas: ‘Podcast Bros and Brain Rot: The only thing worse than an expert is a non-expert’

Posted on May 9, 2025 by Luke Ford

One of the great things about psychotherapy is that you can get insights that end your petty obsessions. For example, after a year of therapy, in 1999, my therapist told me that the reason I was obsessed with writing about … Continue reading →

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Trump vs the Universities

Posted on March 21, 2025 by Luke Ford

I ask Grok: “Paint for me the most intense fears suffered currently by the leaders of America’s elite universities as they battle Trump. What are the keenest humiliations they are most eager to avoid?” Grok says: The leaders of America’s … Continue reading →

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Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (1991)

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Luke Ford

Susanne Klingenstein wrote: Being a transnational philologist was for [Leo] Wiener‘s mind what being a farmer was for his body: it eased tension. And it rooted the self — in the soil and in humanity… He did not belong [at … Continue reading →

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The rise of the “substackademic”

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

Chris Bickerton writes: A successful academic entrepreneur must make themselves their primary focus. In an odd way, the academic entrepreneur is the realisation of Foucault’s call for a “cultivation of the self”. The constant curation of one’s status as a … Continue reading →

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