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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: Narrative
The Coalition That Survived the Cross: Narrative Construction and Institutional Selection in the Making of the New Testament
The New Testament is a cultural trauma construction and sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s framework illuminates the incentives shaping such narratives. The founding situation determines everything that follows. The followers of Jesus after the crucifixion faced a specific and urgent problem that … Continue reading
Posted in Christianity, Narrative
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The Last Market: Wisdom Literature from the Dying and the Calibration of the Final Narrative
Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma describes how carrier groups convert suffering into collective moral identity through narrative construction shaped by institutional needs and audience requirements. The series has traced this process across Holocaust memoir, Aboriginal advocacy, early Christian scripture, … Continue reading
The Success They Mourn: How the Death of American Jewish Literature Became a Career
The mournful-American-Jewish-literature genre is not criticism. It is a terminal signaling equilibrium, a compressed competition over the meaning of a dying literary tradition, conducted under legacy pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated elegiac clarity, through institutional channels that … Continue reading
Posted in America, Jewish Literature, Jews, Narrative
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The Authenticity Trap: How Aboriginal Advocates Learned to Navigate Majority Australia’s Guilt
How did Australia’s Aborigines develop narratives that garnered maximum sympathy for their concerns from the majority population? The Aboriginal case is analytically interesting because it represents a community that has had to navigate a specific and unusually difficult set of … Continue reading
Posted in Aborigines, Australia, Narrative
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The Apparatus and Its Honesty: A Comparative Survey of Genocide Memoir Across Memory Regimes
The most important finding of a comparative survey of genocide memoir is not about the memoirs themselves. It is about the relationship between the institutional power of the apparatus surrounding a genocide and the willingness of witnesses to speak honestly … Continue reading
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
The Uses of Catastrophe: Post-Tragedy Wisdom Narratives and the Selection of What Suffering Is Allowed to Teach
The dying wisdom genre operates on a specific authentication mechanism: proximity to death confers the ultimate credential, the testimony of someone with nothing left to lose and no future reputation to manage. The post-tragedy wisdom genre operates on a different … Continue reading
The Competitive Construction of Jewish Suffering: Cultural Trauma as a Market in Moral Meaning
Jeffrey Alexander argues that cultural trauma is never the automatic social consequence of terrible events. It is a competitive achievement. Carrier groups identify an injury, narrative entrepreneurs code it as evil, weight its significance against other claims on collective attention, … Continue reading
The Suffering Olympics: Hierarchy, Gatekeeping, and the Competitive Construction of Victimhood
Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma predicts that the successful construction of an event as the paradigmatic moral catastrophe of an era does not simply establish that event’s moral authority. It reorganizes the entire field of moral claim-making around the … Continue reading
Niche Construction and the Holocaust Memoir Ecosystem
Niche construction theory, developed by Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman as an extension of standard evolutionary biology, describes the process by which organisms modify their environments in ways that alter the selection pressures acting on subsequent organisms. The key insight is … Continue reading