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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:
- Tournier on Desmond Ford
- The Borrowed Robe: How Antisemitism Dresses in Each Age’s Virtue
- The Fence and the Blessing: How Jews Have Thought About Gentiles
- A Place For You
- 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
- 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)
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: Buffered
Jeff Pearlman: Chronicler of the Messy Truth Behind American Sports Myths
Jeff Pearlman is an American sportswriter and biographer born in 1972 in Mahopac, New York. He writes books that chronicle the gap between the public image of sports icons and the messier private reality. Over two decades he has produced … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Jeff Pearlman
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The Porous Professor
Philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) distinguishes between the buffered self that is insulated from the cosmos, from spirits, from meaning that imposes itself from outside and therefore experiences the world through a kind of protective membrane and the porous self … Continue reading
Andrew Gelman – The Gardener of Forking Paths
Andrew Gelman was born in Philadelphia in 1965 into a family with intellectual range. His sister Susan Gelman became a prominent developmental psychologist. His uncle Woody Gelman was a cartoonist. He attended MIT as a National Merit Scholar, earning degrees … Continue reading
Posted in Andrew Gelman, Buffered, Columbia
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Buffered Guardians, Porous Fighters: The Self Assumed by the Laws of War
The history of international humanitarian law is usually told as a story about rules, institutions, and doctrines. It can also be told as a story about the kind of person those rules require. Not just the soldier or the lawyer … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Human Rights, International Law, Porous, War
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Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships By David Schnarch
More people have told me that they found this book particularly painful to read than any other book mentioned to me. It will rock your world, and not in a pleasant way. Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch has a strong … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Daniel Siegel, Marriage, Porous
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Decoding FT Columnist Gideon Rachman
In David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, Gideon Rachman is the High Priest of the Transatlantic Server. As the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, he does not just report on geopolitics; he manages the Sacred Symbols of Global Stability … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Journalism, Porous
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Understanding The Elite Frame On The Iran War
Large news organizations learn from the last war. They rarely evaluate each conflict in isolation. Instead they carry forward the moral lessons they believe they failed to apply previously. Before the first Gulf War in 1990-91, much of the elite … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Journalism
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Amusing Ourselves To Death
I do not begrudge selfishness. Everybody self-interested, and that is not a scandal. I do not expect strangers to care deeply about me, and I rarely care deeply about them either. There is a kind of honesty in admitting that … Continue reading
FT: The lost art of self-validation
Stuart Kirk writes in the FT: Self-validation is all we have left now that everything else can be faked. And yet how few of us embrace our inner witness. Friends are shocked when I say I couldn’t care less if … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered
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Porous vs Buffered Identity
Are there any movies about times prior to the Enlightenment that vividly demonstrate porous identity? Which movies best embody buffered identity? ChatGPT says: Porous identity means the self is open to spirits, fate, curses, ancestors, God, demons. The boundary between … Continue reading