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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:
- Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
- Marine Le Pen
- The Coalition-Proximity Rule
- Nigel Farage
- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
- William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
- Rod Dreher: A Life in Exile
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: Self Help
Deepok Chopra: A Biography
In 1980, Deepak Chopra (b. 1946) ran the medical staff of New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, a Seventh-day Adventist institution north of Boston. He saw as many as forty patients a day. He smoked a pack of cigarettes … Continue reading
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Wayne Dyer: A Biography
On August 30, 1974, a 34-year-old professor of counselor education stood in a cemetery in Biloxi, Mississippi, over the grave of a man he had never met. Wayne Walter Dyer (1940-2015) was overweight, drinking hard, and by his own later … Continue reading
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Frank Kern: A Biography
Frank Kern (b. 1973) stood in the driveway of his house in Macon, Georgia, talking on the phone. A man in a white golf shirt climbed out of a burgundy Ford Ranger pickup, walked up to him, and asked, “Are … Continue reading
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Louise Hay: A Biography
The auditorium in West Hollywood filled early on Wednesday nights. Men arrived in pairs and small groups, some tanned and muscled in the gym culture of the moment, others gaunt, leaning on friends, faces marked by the purple lesions of … Continue reading
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Stephen Covey: A Biography
Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012) built the largest character-instruction business in American history out of ideas that a Harvard professor dismissed as common sense. He sold more than 40 million copies of one book, counseled a sitting president at Camp David, … Continue reading
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Napoleon Hill: A Biography
In 1895, in the mountains of Wise County, Virginia, a stepmother made a trade with a twelve-year-old boy. The boy carried a pistol through the backwoods and had a reputation for trouble. The stepmother, Martha, a school principal’s widow, offered … Continue reading
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Dale Carnegie: A Biography
On a fall night in 1912, in a rented room at the YMCA on 125th Street in Harlem, a 23-year-old instructor from Missouri ran out of things to say. The men in front of him had paid for a course … Continue reading
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Tom Peters and the Reinvention of the American Corporation
Tom Peters (b. 1942) stands among the principal theorists of managerial transformation in late twentieth-century American capitalism. He worked as a consultant, author, and seminar performer, but his larger role was that of a transitional figure who reshaped how corporations … Continue reading
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The Industrialization of Aspiration: Tony Robbins and the Making of Therapeutic Capitalism
Anthony Jay Robbins (né Mahavoric, born February 29, 1960) is an architect of modern self-optimization culture. He took the American self-help industry, a loose collection of inspirational books and hotel ballroom seminars, and built it into a vertically integrated global … Continue reading
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The Wisdom Market: How the Modern Self-Help Industry Produces, Selects, and Sells Unverifiable Claims
The modern wisdom literature industry presents itself as guidance for living well. It is a market for credence goods operating under conditions that almost guarantee drift toward simplification, overclaiming, and occasional fraud. A credence good is one whose quality the … Continue reading