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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:
- 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
- Strange Bedfellows in the Academy: Alliance Theory and the Straussian Schism
- Tournier on Desmond Ford
- The Fence and the Blessing: How Jews Have Thought About Gentiles
- Tournier on Luke Ford
- Tournier on The Nostradamus Kid
- An Alliance Theory of Antisemitism
- Tournier on Cinema Paradiso and Desmond Ford
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: Literature
Walt Whitman: A Life
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) stands among the founders of modern American poetry. His central work, Leaves of Grass, first appears in 1855 and grows through repeated revision across the rest of his life. Whitman breaks with inherited poetic form. He writes … Continue reading
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Life
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) stands at the center of nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. He worked to build a national philosophy out of native materials, and he grounded that philosophy in individual judgment, spiritual self-culture, and direct experience. His writings supplied the … Continue reading
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Henry David Thoreau: A Life in Method
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) stands at the source of several traditions that later separated into distinct fields. He wrote prose that helped fix an American literary style. He reasoned about conscience in ways that shaped modern theories of civil resistance. … Continue reading
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Toni Morrison: The Architect of an American Literature
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) worked as a novelist, an editor, a critic, a teacher, and a public intellectual, and across those roles she changed both the content of American literature and the assumptions through which scholars and readers had long interpreted … Continue reading
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Richmal Crompton and the Author She Meant to Be
Richmal Crompton (1890-1969) holds an unusual place in English letters. She wrote for nearly half a century, sold millions of copies, and created a fictional child who entered the national imagination. Readers know her as the author of the Just … Continue reading
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Henty’s Classroom: Adventure Fiction and the Reproduction of Victorian Britain
George Alfred Henty holds a peculiar place in the cultural history of Victorian Britain. Memory reduces him to a writer of boys’ adventure stories. The reduction misses most of what he was. Henty stood at the crossing point of journalism, … Continue reading
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Reading as Revelation: The Intellectual World of Harold Bloom
Across a career that ran more than six decades, Harold Bloom (1930-2019) reshaped the academic study of literature, and mounted the last sustained defense of aesthetic judgment as the proper task of criticism. He wrote as a theorist of influence, … Continue reading
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James Wood and the Last Defense of the Novel
James Wood (b. 1965) arrived at the moment when the authority of literary criticism was collapsing and for a generation restored the role of the critic as a feared and consequential public judge. His career traces the institutional migration of … Continue reading
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The Password and the Argument: Merve Emre Among Her Set
Merve Emre (b. 1985) belongs to the cohort of American critics who came up as the humanities lost their old footing and criticism migrated from the seminar room to the prestige magazine, the podcast, and the festival stage. She was … Continue reading
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Sianne Ngai and the Emotional Texture of Late Capitalism
Sianne Ngai (b. 1971) is a literary theorist whose work reorganized how scholars in the humanities describe emotion, aesthetic judgment, and the everyday feeling of life under capitalism. She built a vocabulary for the weak, compromised, and politically ambiguous affects … Continue reading
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