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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: Porous
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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NYT: ‘Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?’
David Wallace-Wells writes: What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Nationalism, Porous, Soccer
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David Schnarch and the Problem of the Self in Marriage
David Schnarch (1946-2020) was an American clinical psychologist and sex therapist who built a comprehensive theory of marriage, sexuality, and adult development around a single problem: how a man holds onto a coherent self while staying close to someone who … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Marriage, Porous, Psychology
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The Buffered Economist and the Porous Citizen: How Market Liberalism Mistakes What Human Beings Are
The modern defense of free trade rests on a tacit anthropology that economists rarely acknowledge because it appears to them as common sense. Beneath the language of efficiency, comparative advantage, consumer welfare, and aggregate growth sits a particular image of … Continue reading
The Buffered Twenties
Smart educated young men in their twenties live at the peak of buffered self-confidence. The buffered self believes it stands outside its history. It treats inheritance as background, family as embarrassment, body as instrument, name as preference, career as canvas. … Continue reading
Posted in Buffered, Charles Taylor, Porous
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The Buffered, The Porous & The Iran War
When Trump-aligned voices call Democratic critics of the Iran war traitors, the charge does not function as legal description or strategic argument. It functions as boundary defense. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) developed the distinction between the buffered self and the … Continue reading
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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NYT: Smog in Phoenix and Salt Lake City? The E.P.A. Is Blaming Asia.
The New York Times reports: Without contaminants blowing in from Mexico and Asia, the reasoning goes, Phoenix would have been in compliance with federal pollution limits. Other regions are now taking up that strategy. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency … Continue reading
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
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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