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"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:
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- 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
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
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* 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)
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* What would it look like if the Washington Post 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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* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
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Category Archives: Literature
Lauren Berlant: The Theorist of Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant (1957–2021) was a theorist of affect, intimacy, precarity, and ordinary life. Across four decades, Berlant reshaped literary studies, queer theory, feminist thought, cultural studies, and political theory by asking a single persistent question: why do people stay attached … Continue reading
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Sally Rooney: The Chronicler of Institutionalized Self-Consciousness
Sally Rooney (b. 1991) is the most widely read literary novelist of her generation, and among the few serious literary writers who have turned literary fiction into a global mass phenomenon. Her ascent tracked the exhaustion of the post-2008 liberal … Continue reading
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Mark McGurl and the Institutional Turn in American Literary Studies
Mark McGurl (b. 1966) is an American literary critic and the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His scholarship treats the relation of literature to social, educational, and technological institutions from the late nineteenth century to the … Continue reading
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Jonathan Franzen and the Last Defense of the Social Novel
Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959) works in two registers, the long realist novel and the public essay, and across both he chronicles the psychological exhaustion, institutional fragmentation, and moral uncertainty of the educated American middle and upper-middle classes under conditions of … Continue reading
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Is Middlemarch The Greatest Novel?
The Guardian crowned Middlemarch the greatest novel of all time on May 12, 2026. The methodology: votes from authors, critics, and academics worldwide. Through the Strange Bedfellows lens, neither the novel’s content nor an abstract standard of literary merit explains … Continue reading
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David Foster Wallace: The Writer of Attention in an Age of Distraction
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) attempted to diagnose the interior life of Americans formed by television, consumer abundance, therapeutic culture, higher education, bureaucratic systems, and a collapsing confidence in inherited moral languages. His work returns to one question: what becomes of … Continue reading
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Daphne Merkin and the Ethnography of Elite Neurotic Culture
Daphne Merkin (b. 1954) is an American essayist, memoirist, novelist, and cultural critic whose career occupies the borderlands between confessional writing, intellectual journalism, psychoanalytic reflection, and observation of upper-middle-class Jewish social life. She emerged in the late twentieth-century New York … Continue reading
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Taffy Brodesser-Akner Is in Trouble
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is shouting at her son to do his laundry. He has not done his laundry. He leaves for camp tomorrow and the camp, which costs more than some adults earn in a season, has a packing list, and … Continue reading
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My Frame
Turner Against Essentialism Turner on Expertise Turner on the Tacit Turner on the Normative My Turner Framework Turner on Convenient Beliefs The Great Delusion Alliance Theory Interaction Rituals Chains by Randall Collins Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity ‘A Big Misunderstanding’ … Continue reading
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The Empathy Myth: Literature, Status, and the American English Department
Teaching literature gets sold as expanding our empathy. But empathy did not evolve to reach strangers. It evolved to manage coalitions. When English professors claim their discipline makes students more ethical, they are making a resource argument dressed as a … Continue reading
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