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- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
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* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
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* 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)
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* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
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* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
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* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
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* 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)
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Category Archives: Holocaust
The Pan-European Holocaust: The Scholarship of Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill
Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill is an American historian of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. He pursues his doctorate in international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his research treats the relation among … Continue reading
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The Will to Meaning: The Life of Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905, the second of three children in a Jewish family of modest means. His father, Gabriel, worked as a civil servant in the ministry of social affairs, a disciplined man … Continue reading
Posted in Holocaust, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Psychology
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The Apparatus and Its Honesty: A Comparative Survey of Genocide Memoir Across Memory Regimes
The most important finding of a comparative survey of genocide memoir is not about the memoirs themselves. It is about the relationship between the institutional power of the apparatus surrounding a genocide and the willingness of witnesses to speak honestly … Continue reading
The Competitive Construction of Jewish Suffering: Cultural Trauma as a Market in Moral Meaning
Jeffrey Alexander argues that cultural trauma is never the automatic social consequence of terrible events. It is a competitive achievement. Carrier groups identify an injury, narrative entrepreneurs code it as evil, weight its significance against other claims on collective attention, … Continue reading
The Suffering Olympics: Hierarchy, Gatekeeping, and the Competitive Construction of Victimhood
Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma predicts that the successful construction of an event as the paradigmatic moral catastrophe of an era does not simply establish that event’s moral authority. It reorganizes the entire field of moral claim-making around the … Continue reading
Niche Construction and the Holocaust Memoir Ecosystem
Niche construction theory, developed by Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman as an extension of standard evolutionary biology, describes the process by which organisms modify their environments in ways that alter the selection pressures acting on subsequent organisms. The key insight is … Continue reading
The Performance and Its Discontents: Holocaust Memoir Authors and the Question of Market Awareness
Pierre Bourdieu argues in The Field of Cultural Production that the intellectual field operates on an inverted economy in which the refusal of commercial success is itself the primary marker of distinction. The serious writer demonstrates seriousness precisely through the … Continue reading
The Silence That Explains Everything: Why the Holocaust Industrial Complex Has Produced No Honest Insider Memoir
Every significant American institution generates its confessional literature eventually. The CIA has produced memoirs of operational disillusionment. Wall Street has produced accounts of the gap between stated purpose and actual practice. The Catholic Church has produced narratives of institutional failure … Continue reading
How Can You Possibly Resent A Holocaust Survivor?
I assume many people who were out-stripped by those they regarded as their inferiors keenly resented people who got status, money, and fame through their place in the Holocaust industry, but the resentful ones couldn’t exactly say that. Did that … Continue reading
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The Abortionist of Auschwitz: Gisella Perl and the Ethics the Trauma Drama Cannot Canonize
Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma explains which narrative forms succeed in expanding the circle of we. It is less explicit about a related but distinct question: which narrative forms are necessary to the apparatus (the Holocaust Industry is Norman … Continue reading