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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:
- Robert Putnam: The Man Who Counted What America Lost
- W. Bradford Wilcox: The Sociologist Who Tells America to Get Married
- Peter Moskos: The Cop Who Talks to People
- Julius Krein
- Ryan Burge: The Numbers Man in the Empty Church
- Emily Oster: The Economist in the Delivery Room
- The Most Ridiculous Story Ever Told
- Tanner Greer
- Economist Tyler Cowen
- Richard Reeves: A Life in Institutions
- Jake Adelstein: The Reporter Who Became His Story
- Jim Goad (1961-2026)
- Moira Greyland
- 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
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: Journalism
You Are Looking Live: Brent Musburger and the Architecture of the Spectacle
Brent Musburger (b. 1939) belongs to the small group of men who taught American television how to feel about sports. He worked for more than five decades across newspapers, network television, cable, and gambling media, and in each setting he … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism
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The Network Intellectual: Michael Malice and the Migration of Ideological Authority
Michael Malice (b. 1976) works as a political commentator, satirist, podcast host, ghostwriter, and popularizer of dissident ideas, and he built nearly all of this outside the universities, newspapers, and think tanks that once produced public intellectuals. His authority rests … Continue reading
Posted in Alt Lite, Anarchy, Journalism
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The Sovereign Voice: Stephen A. Smith and the Remaking of American Sports Media
Stephen A. Smith (b. 1967) took the role of the metropolitan newspaper columnist and remade it into the role of the omnipresent multimedia personality. His career tracks the larger reorganization of American journalism, a movement away from print institutions and … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism, Skip Bayless
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Jill Stewart and the Unmaking of Civic Journalism in Los Angeles
Jill Stewart belongs to the generation of American metropolitan journalists formed by the prestige of post-Watergate investigation and reshaped by the commercial collapse of the newspaper that gave them their start. She holds an undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism
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Matt Drudge and the Collapse of the Editorial Gatekeeper
Matthew Nathan Drudge (b. 1966) reshaped American journalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. He assembled a hyperlink page and turned speed, selection, and amplification into a power that often surpassed the largest media institutions in the country. He … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Journalism, Matt Drudge
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The Permanent Witness: Jeffrey Wells and the Transformation of Film Criticism
The Jeffrey Wells career runs across the collapse of the metropolitan print order, the rise of independent internet publishing, the conversion of film criticism into continuous online commentary, and the arrival of personality-driven media economies that dissolved the old boundaries … Continue reading
Posted in Blogging, Journalism
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Beneath the Spectacle: David Rensin and the Oral History of Hollywood Labor
Coming up through the magazine culture of the 1970s and 1980s, David Rensin (b. 1950) became a principal architect of the celebrity oral history and the ghostwritten memoir during the years when Hollywood, television, magazines, and commercial publishing fused into … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism
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The Demand For Rigor is Often Suppression
An editor’s demand for more evidence from a reporter is often honest rigor and a suppression tool at the same time, and no one inside can tell them apart. Newsweek and Monica Lewinsky, January 1998. Michael Isikoff (b. 1952) had … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism
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Sandra Braman: Information Policy as Modern Sovereignty
Sandra Braman (b. 1951) is a major theorist of information policy in the transition from the industrial order to the information state. She works across communication theory, legal analysis, political philosophy, science and technology studies, and governance research. Her central … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism
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The Outside Auditor: Steven Brill and the Engineering of Elite Transparency
Steven Brill (b. 1950) belongs to a generation of entrepreneurs who treated reporting as an instrument for restructuring elite systems rather than as a craft of observation alone. Across five decades he moved among media, law, technology, public policy, and … Continue reading
Posted in Elites, Expertise, Journalism, Law
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