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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:
- Jim Goad (1961-2026)
- Moira Greyland
- Robert Oscar Lopez: The Inconvenient Witness
- Two Ledgers: Decoding the Gurus and the Price of Talk
- The Pervert’s Progress: Costin Vlad Alamariu and the Making of Bronze Age Pervert
- Curtis Yarvin: A Life Against Democracy
- Mark Helprin: 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
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: Los Angeles
Moral Grammars of American Elite Life: Four Cities and Four Accounts of Legitimate Influence
From a distance, American elite life looks like one culture. Up close it splits into rival moral orders, and the clearest fault lines run between cities. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington each reward a different virtue, punish … Continue reading
Posted in Elites, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C.
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The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento
San Diego paints in soft pastels. Sun-bleached cream, eucalyptus green, sandstone gold, the muted teal of the Pacific seen from a cliff in La Jolla. Light arrives filtered through ocean air and looks permanently late-afternoon, even at noon. Visible stress … Continue reading
Posted in California, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco
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Four Cities, Four Jewish Imprints: How Jewish Demography Shapes California’s Legal Capitals
Jewish populations and Jewish communal character shape the elite cultures of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento in different ways and to different degrees. Population size matters. So does the historical origin of each community. So does the … Continue reading
Posted in Jews, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco
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The Two Legal Californias: Stewards and Rainmakers
California’s two great legal markets share an identical regulatory baseline. They operate under the same state bar, the same evidence code, the same civil procedure rules, and the same constitutional framework. They draw on the same statewide pool of judges. … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
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Operators and Their Cities: Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles
The structural difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles produces a downstream consequence at the level of individual careers. A man optimized for one city often arrives in the other carrying a set of skills that no longer pay. His … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
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The Closed and the Open: San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access
The contrast between San Francisco and Los Angeles holds a peculiar place in American urban writing. The popular version flattens the difference to temperament. San Francisco reads as cerebral, closed, and judgmental. Los Angeles reads as sprawling, improvisational, and forgiving. … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco
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The LACMA Social Set
Michael Govan (b. 1963) runs the kind of world where a man can fly his own small plane, spot an abandoned Nabisco factory from the air, and turn it into a museum. He did that at Dia:Beacon. He keeps a … Continue reading
Posted in Art, Los Angeles
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The San Vicente Bungalows Set
The website tells you the whole ethic. No photographs of faces. No names. No prices. A nomination from a current member is obligatory, and a nomination confers nothing, because the Membership Committee decides each month who gets in. Three doors … Continue reading
Posted in Los Angeles
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The City of Private Rooms
Los Angeles in 2026 holds a set of overlapping prestige worlds, each with its own gatekeepers, its own real estate, its own theory of why its members deserve the room. The most powerful figures sit in several of these worlds … Continue reading
Posted in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Los Angeles
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Paul Pringle and the Sociology of Institutional Self-Protection
Paul Pringle (b. 1956) investigates the hidden administrative logic of powerful institutions. Across decades he studied how universities, municipal governments, unions, police agencies, child welfare bureaucracies, and media organizations shield themselves from scrutiny while presenting an image of civic legitimacy. … Continue reading
Posted in Journalism, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, USC
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