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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: Sociology
A Strongly Identifying In-Group Requires An Enemy
My conservative friends glibly dismiss victimhood as weak and unworthy, but the stronger your in-group identity, the stronger your sense of victimhood, with only insignificant individual exceptions by people like me making a status play. In the real world, group … Continue reading
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Experts Need More Power For Your Own Good
Randall Collins writes in his 1979 book, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification: A better explanation of professionals’ altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients. An occupation … Continue reading
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The calling of social thought: Rediscovering the work of Edward Shils
In this 2019 book, Christopher Adair-Toteff writes a chapter on the late sociologist Edward Shils and his views on ideology: * Shils insisted that ideologies came about in the nineteen and twentieth centuries, and he offers several reasons for this. … Continue reading
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Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
Here are some highlights from this 2013 book: * Oxytocin appears to alter the dopaminergic response of mammals to their own infants, tipping the balance from avoidance to approach. It has been suggested that oxytocin is a love drug or … Continue reading
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Explaining away crime: The race narrative in American sociology and ethical theory
Stephen Turner writes in 2020: Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts … Continue reading
The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)
Here are some excerpts from this book sociologist Randall Collins: * The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity. * Individuals who participate in IRs [interaction rituals] are filled with emotional … Continue reading
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The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)
Here are excerpts of a review of this Randall Collins book: * Great doctrines must have great imperfections it they are to continue to generate excitement (32). And those who are most theoretically creative in developing these doctrines will typically … Continue reading
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Interaction Ritual Chains
Here are some highlights from this 2010 book by Randall Collins: * humans have intrinsically limited cognitive capabilities, and that they construct mundane social order by consistently using practices to avoid recognizing how arbitrarily social order is actually put together. … Continue reading
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Interaction Ritual Chains
Here are some highlights from this influential 2004 book by sociologist Randall Collins: * Eminent thinkers are energy stars. They are highly productive, turning out large amounts of published (and often unpublished work), only some small portion of which becomes … Continue reading
Interaction Ritual Chains
Randall Collins writes in this 2005 book: * “Every dog will have its day” is more accurately “every day will have its dog.” Incidents shape their incumbents, however momentary they may be; encounters make their encountees. It is games that … Continue reading
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