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"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
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- 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
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- * 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)
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Category Archives: UC Berkeley
The Liturgy of the Identifiable: UC Berkeley Economics and the Performance of Rigor
UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics presents itself as a temple of empirical seriousness. Clean identification, administrative datasets, causal inference rendered in careful prose. The tone stays restrained in print. The claims grow confident in policy settings. To the analyst of … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, UC Berkeley
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Robert Alter: The Authority of Attention
Robert Alter was born on April 2, 1935, in the Bronx, the child of Jewish immigrants’ descendants. He grew up in a secular but culturally Jewish household in New York, began serious Hebrew study after his bar mitzvah, and deepened … Continue reading
Posted in English, Hebrew, UC Berkeley
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Ten Convenient Beliefs in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health
Grok says: UC Berkeley SPH (ranked #8 nationally) is a historic public-university program with deep roots in California’s activist traditions. It explicitly centers environmental justice, critical race and decolonial frameworks, community-engaged research, and “public health as social justice.” The school … Continue reading
Posted in Health, UC Berkeley
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Ten Convenient Beliefs In UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department
Grok says: UC Berkeley Anthropology is a historic top-5 powerhouse with a self-described legacy of “innovation and leadership in emergent areas” and a four-field structure that leans heavily into critical cultural/medical/political anthropology. It emphasizes engaged/public anthropology, decolonial approaches, critical theory, … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, UC Berkeley
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Ten Convenient Beliefs In UC Berkeley’s Sociology Department
Grok says: UC Berkeley Sociology is a historic powerhouse in social movements, political sociology, comparative-historical work, inequality, race/ethnicity/immigration, culture, and critical theory. It combines rigorous empirical methods with an explicit public-university mission of “critical inquiry… contributing to a better world” … Continue reading
Posted in Sociology, UC Berkeley
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Ten Convenient Beliefs In The UC Berkeley Departments of English and Rhetoric
Berkeley’s English and Rhetoric departments share faculty, seminars, and a creed. English runs hard toward postcolonial, ethnic, and identity-centered literature. Rhetoric runs toward Continental philosophy, critical theory, and the analysis of power. The two read literature and rhetoric as tools … Continue reading
Posted in English, Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
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Ten Convenient Beliefs For Leaders Of UC Berkeley Now
UC Berkeley leaders believe their institution’s identity as the world’s greatest public university, a self-description whose deployment in fundraising materials, presidential speeches, and institutional communications has achieved the status of a founding myth whose repetition substitutes for the ongoing demonstration … Continue reading
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Decoding UC Berkeley’s Economics Department
Written with AI: David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory suggests that intellectual belief systems do not stem from deep moral values, but from the strategic coordination of alliances and rivalries. Academic departments function as high-stakes alliance structures where “truth” often serves as … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, UC Berkeley
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Decoding UC Berkeley School of Law
Berkeley Law functions as a sophisticated engine for elite alliance formation, where the primary currency is not just legal knowledge but the mastery of high-status moral and ideological signaling. Through the lens of Alliance Theory, the school provides a platform … Continue reading
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Decoding University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley functions as a high-stakes arena for alliance signaling because its prestige depends on its proximity to the most influential nodes of the American elite. In the framework of Alliance Theory, the university does not simply educate students or … Continue reading
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