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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:
- 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
- Strange Bedfellows in the Academy: Alliance Theory and the Straussian Schism
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
Reading Against the Novel
Tim Parks writes for the July 18, 2024 edition of NYBooks.com: In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism, Literature
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The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Mark McGurl writes in this 2011 book: …the creative writing program produces… a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society. …Postwar American literature provides endless testimony, for starters, of the agonizing importance of the institution of the family in making … Continue reading
Posted in America, Literature
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Larry McMurtry’s Struggle Against Anti-Gentile Prejudice
Here’s an excerpt from the new biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty: She [McMurtry’s literary agent Dorothea Oppenheimer] gave [Editor Michael Korda] an earful about how East Coast reviewers just didn’t get McMurtry though to be fair he … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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The Orwellian Life
Colin Burrow writes in the Oct. 5, 2023 issue of the LROB: The Orwellian person seeks surgically to separate himself from every person who materially or emotionally supports him, but then finds he can’t actually live that way. You leave … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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Wellness by Nathan Hill
Daphne Merkin writes for The Atlantic: A Worthy Heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more. …That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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Annie Ernaux – The Latest Winner Of The Nobel Prize For Literature (11-16-22)
This low streaming quality video was shot on my Oppo A15 on my cheap Aussie phone plan (80GBs of data for $40 a month).
Posted in France, Literature, Nobel Prize
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NYRB: ‘The Illusion of the First Person’
In Merve Emre’s essay in the Nov. 3, 2022 edition of the New York Review of Books, she claims that the individual is a fiction. I grant that the individual is never only an individual. They have other identities. But … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Tom Wolfe
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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Peter Brook writes in this 2022 book: * Seth Godin, who runs the Story Skills Workshop, much appreciated in the corporate world, posted his response to the events roiling the United States in the summer of 2020: “The way forward … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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Senses of Style By Jeff Dolven (2017)
Here are some highlights: * Nonetheless the claim there are only interpretations is as flattening as the claim style is everything… * Style holds things together, things and people, schools and movements and periods. It makes us see wholes where … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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The Rapid-Response Novel
Giles Harvey writes in the New York Review of Books: * Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing … Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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