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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:
- Curtis Yarvin: A Life Against Democracy
- Mark Helprin: A Life 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
- The Self-Hating Jew
- The Alliance Theory in the Academy
- The Borrowed Robe: How Antisemitism Dresses in Each Age’s Virtue
- A Place For You
- 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
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: Stephen Turner
Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023)
Grant John J. Mearsheimer his anthropology, and most of this book survives. Authors Stephen Turner and George Mazur have already done much of the demolition Mearsheimer wants done. They deflate. Democracy is a majoritarian procedure for making law and choosing … Continue reading
Posted in Democracy, Stephen Turner
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Stephen P. Turner’s Anthropology & Epistemics
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote: My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary … Continue reading
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‘Improving on Democracy’
This is the title of chapter two of the 2023 book, Making Democratic Theory Democratic. Stephen Turner wrote: In the decades after John Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice (1971) and especially over the past 20 years or so, many books … Continue reading
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The Buffered, The Porous & The Political
I often investigate topics via Google and it is fun to see my work cited and explained. Gemini says today: The concepts of the “buffered” versus “porous” self come from philosopher Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age. Blogger and … Continue reading
Posted in Blogging, Buffered, Porous, Stephen Turner
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The Norm Explainers
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) sets a hard test in Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory and in the work behind it, and most thinkers fail it. The argument he is best known for, in Explaining the Normative, attacks … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Stephen Turner
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Show Me How It Travels
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career taking apart a single habit of mind. Social theory keeps reaching for hidden collective things to explain what men do. Tacit knowledge. Shared practices. Norms. Culture. Social imaginaries. Group minds. A scholar … Continue reading
Posted in Essentialism, Stephen Turner
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Steven B. Smith and the Vocation of Liberal Education
Steven B. Smith (b. 1951) belongs to a fading generation of political theorists who treat the older humanistic understanding of their subject as compatible with, and even necessary for, the modern research university. Across four decades at Yale, where he … Continue reading
Posted in Leo Strauss, Stephen Turner, Yale
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Halakhic Liberal Democracy 3.0: Expert Capture in Sperber’s Project and Hollander’s Analysis
R. Daniel Sperber’s Modern Orthodoxy project wants to give more power to experts with elite secular educations such as himself. Stephen Turner’s work on expertise and democracy is a good tool for examining the expert capture of a communal practice. … Continue reading
Posted in R. Daniel Sperber, Stephen Turner
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Do My Deflationary Frames Move Me Along The Buffered vs Porous Axis?
My favorite AI chatbots say: The buffered self believes it sees the social world from outside. It treats coalitions, status games, and convenient beliefs as features of other people’s lives. It stands at the analytical desk, sovereign and uncaptured. When … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Dallas, Personal, Porous, Stephen Turner
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Stephen P. Turner Against Essentialism: Iran, the IRGC, and the Evolutionary Sociology of Institutions
Much contemporary commentary on the Islamic Republic of Iran suffers from conceptual instability. Analysts oscillate between two inadequate explanatory frameworks. On one side lies a naïve voluntarism that treats all political actors as indefinitely malleable and assumes that sufficient diplomatic … Continue reading
Posted in Iran, Stephen Turner
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