The Live Questions in Anthropology

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

A question is live when knowing the asker’s politics does not let you predict his answer. That test disqualifies a great deal of what anthropology currently treats as its cutting edge, and it clarifies the rest.

By that standard the discipline has fewer live questions than its conference programs suggest, and the ones it has cluster in the subfields with the least cultural authority inside the American Anthropological Association. The 2026 AAA meeting convenes in St. Louis in November under the theme “On the Verge,” which the association describes as covering climate tipping points, encroaching authoritarianism, the transmutations of racial biopolitics, the fate of neoliberalism, the spread of artificial intelligence, and teetering institutions. Read the list again and ask what a paper accepted under it might conclude. The theme names a mood and a set of expected findings. Six items, and a competent reader can predict the sign of the argument on five of them.

Anthropology now has two courts that award status, and they issue contradictory verdicts. The internal court consists of the AAA, its sections, its journals, its prizes, and the hiring committees at twenty or so departments. The external court consists of deans, provosts, funders, the science press, the labor statisticians, and the small readership of higher education journalism. Until recently a scholar could ignore the second court. That ended this summer.

On June 5, 2026, the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis released a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, written by a ten-person committee chaired by Paul Boghossian (b. 1957) and including Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954) and the Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich. The committee reported that every field it studied showed a deterioration in scholarly standards driven by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones, and it singled out anthropology as the most extreme case, describing a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a climate in which dissent on charged topics is suppressed and punished. Among its evidence was the AAA’s 2023 cancellation of an accepted panel titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” which the association said would harm members’ safety and dignity and contradicted settled science.

The AAA fired back within a week. Its president, Carolyn M. Rouse of Princeton, called the report undertheorized, poorly sited, and politically motivated in a letter published in The Washington Post on June 15, and argued that the greatest threat to the humanities comes from the insistence that only one side of a debate represents legitimate knowledge. Then on July 14 The Chronicle of Higher Education published Stephanie M. Lee’s interview with Rouse. Rouse defended the 2023 cancellation, said the idea that there are two sexes is factually incorrect, compared teaching a sex binary to converting an astronomy department into an astrology department, and, when Lee cited a 2022 survey showing a substantial minority of anthropologists treat sex as binary, replied that she does not believe in opinion research. The reaction ran heavily against her, including from people with no stake in the Vanderbilt committee’s politics. The Chronicle‘s own editors asked their readers whether she had validated the report she meant to refute.

Rouse rose through the internal court, and her answers are competent by its standards: she treats the dispute as a coalition conflict, identifies her opponents’ interests, and declines to concede a claim her side has invested in. The external court reads the same answers as a confession. Both courts are now watching, and the internal court has not adapted. Status inside anthropology and standing outside it have come apart, and the people highest in one are increasingly liabilities in the other. Didier Fassin (b. 1955), who holds the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Huxley Memorial Medal, is among the few who still rise in both, which has less to do with his politics than with his habit of grounding moral claims in police stations, prisons, and clinics where the reader can check him.

On the division between those who ask and those who answer, the accurate description is an economy. Cultural anthropology pays in portable nouns. Anna Tsing (b. 1952) holds friction and capitalist ruins. Audra Simpson holds refusal. Elizabeth A. Povinelli (b. 1962) holds geontopower. Fassin holds humanitarian reason. A portable noun is a claim on citations from researchers the coiner will never meet, collectible for decades. The ethnographers who supply the case material collect nothing comparable, which is why the plenary invitations and the coinages travel together.

The noun economy has been depreciating for about five years, and the reason is inflation rather than refutation. Nobody disproved the ontological turn. The field minted more terms than it could absorb, and the marginal term stopped buying anything. Viveiros de Castro (b. 1951), Descola (b. 1949), and Strathern (b. 1941) taught the discipline that other peoples inhabit other worlds, and the lesson took, which is exactly why announcing it now earns no credit. The same exhaustion is overtaking generic multispecies vocabulary. Work that names water rights, mineral concessions, land titles, and who pays the insurance still rises, because the noun has to be earned against something a reader can dispute.

The four-field asymmetry follows from this. Ancient DNA, isotopes, proteomics, and comparative energetics are revising deep human history on an annual cycle. That work appears in Nature and Science under author lists of thirty or forty names, and the AAA’s prestige apparatus cannot process it, because that apparatus was built to reward a single author who writes a book. So the discipline’s most consequential empirical output is produced by people nearly invisible in its own hierarchy, publishing outside its own journals, and its most visible figures produce vocabulary.

Which questions pass the test I started with? Five, by my count.

Whether the standard sequence of social evolution happened. David Wengrow (b. 1972) asks whether agriculture, cities, bureaucracy, inequality, and the state form one irreversible chain, and whether early societies alternated among political arrangements by choice. Specialist archaeologists split on whether his generalizations outrun his evidence, and the split runs through political camps rather than along them. That is a live question, and it is the strongest reason UCL currently draws attention in archaeology.

Whether repatriation increases or decreases what can be known. The 2024 NAGPRA regulations require institutions to obtain free, prior, and informed consent from tribes before exhibiting, permitting access to, or conducting research on covered remains and objects. The American Museum of Natural History closed its Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls in January 2024 in response. Two claims are both true and neither settles the matter: the collections were largely assembled coercively, and consent requirements have stopped some forensic and biological research.

What large language models do to theories of language and personhood. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published a themed cluster in April 2026, introduced by Webb Keane and Constantine Nakassis, on the pressure that machine-generated discourse puts on prevailing concepts of language, personhood, and the human. Linguistic anthropology got there first because it has the tools. Whether the discipline builds sustained fieldwork inside model labs, data-labeling operations, and automated state agencies remains open, and it is where a mid-sized department could make its reputation in five years.

Whether ethnographic authority survives a field that refuses observation. Platforms, supply chains, closed war zones, and firms that require nondisclosure agreements do not permit the year in the village. Refusal became a concept in this territory, and refusal also names a practical problem with no agreed solution.

Whether biological variation carries explanatory weight for human difference. This is the question the AAA closed in 2023 and has spent three years failing to reopen. Metabolic and skeletal and genomic work continues to produce results with implications for race, sex, health, and category validity, and the association’s leadership has committed itself to a position on part of it that its own membership does not uniformly hold.

No single department defines the discipline’s center now, and Chicago‘s inability to do so is the significant change of the past twenty years, since its quality has not declined. Princeton holds the AAA presidency and a compact faculty strong in medicine, race, migration, and policing, and it is also, this month, the address of the discipline’s public embarrassment. Columbia concentrates high theory. Berkeley, UCLA, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Stanford together carry more of the rising work on environment, Indigenous authority, migration, technology, and method than any one campus does, and Stanford’s linguistic anthropology matters more now than its size suggests. Oxford holds the safest general reputation. Harvard and the Max Planck institutes hold the biomolecular frontier and are barely legible as anthropology to the association’s cultural wing.

Four parties are trying to close questions. The AAA closed one in 2023 by canceling a panel, and its president has defended that closure this month rather than quietly abandoning it. The membership voted in July 2023 to boycott Israeli academic institutions, with 2,016 of 2,851 votes cast in favor on a 37 percent turnout, which narrows exchange whatever one thinks of the cause. The Vanderbilt and WashU report, having identified suppression, recommended that administrators reform departments using advice from minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent fields with better standards, which the two campuses’ AAUP chapters called a heckler’s veto over any syllabus an administrator dislikes, and on that point the chapters are right. Legislatures and boards restrict teaching on race, colonialism, gender, and Palestine.

The largest closer is the budget office. The New York Fed’s February 2026 release put anthropology first among seventy-three majors for unemployment among recent graduates at 7.9 percent, roughly double the average across majors, with underemployment at 55.3 percent. UNC Greensboro is closing its department. Sheffield closed archaeology. The AAA has run an emergency town hall on defending departments and published a crisis toolkit. Eliminating a program closes every question its faculty and students might have asked, permanently and without argument, and no one has to defend the decision in a journal. Anthropology is generating live questions at the same moment it is losing the institutional capacity to pursue them, and its leadership is spending that capacity on a fight about whether the questions were ever contestable.

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Turner v Turner

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

In mid-December 2023 the senior editors of Theory and Society learned that Springer Nature had decided on a different view of the journal going forward. The notice appointed two new editors effective January 1, said the editorial structure under Janet Gouldner would not continue past December 31, and asked the ten senior editors to step down. Gil Eyal published that language later, correcting the account that had them resigning. The corresponding editors did resign, on January 4, 2024. The names came out on a listserv and then on the sociology blog Scatterplot: Javier Auyero at Texas, Tim Bartley at Georgetown, Jean Beaman at Santa Barbara, Karida Brown at Emory, Miguel Centeno at Princeton, Claire Decoteau at Illinois Chicago, Jack Goldstone at George Mason, Tianna Paschel at Berkeley. The letter thanked the executive editor, Janet Gouldner, and the managing editor, Karen Lucas, for years of service, and said the signers had lost confidence that the journal would continue the project Alvin Gouldner founded five decades earlier.

Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980) took his doctorate at Columbia under Robert Merton and held the Max Weber Research Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis. He founded Theory and Society in 1974 to renew social theory against what he took to be the constraints of positivism. He wrote The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. He described the rising intellectual class as a flawed universal class, one that claimed to speak for humanity while pursuing its own interests, which is the argument Musa al-Gharbi has been running with better data ever since. In 2026 Washington University in St. Louis, which paid Gouldner’s salary and named his chair after Weber, paid for a commission to investigate whether scholarship in the humanistic social sciences has been subordinated to politics.

The publisher replaced Gouldner’s widow with two men. Janet Gouldner had held the post since 1981, the year after her husband died in Madrid at sixty. Kevin McCaffree, an associate professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, and Jonathan H. Turner (b. September 7, 1942), the 38th University Professor of the University of California. They published a statement of goals for the journal, subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology,” which said that a monoculture of critical approaches dominates the discipline and undermines its professional legitimacy, and called for a theory journal devoted to scientific theorizing. Philip Cohen at Maryland wrote that he would not submit to the journal or review for it, and suggested others do the same. Turner told Retraction Watch he was surprised and saddened by the board’s reaction, could not see why they were upset, and intended to ignore the controversy until the first issues came out and everyone saw that the mission was being served.

Thirty-three years before this, Sage published The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. It remains the standard one-volume history of the discipline. It has two authors who share a surname and little else. One is Jonathan H. Turner. The other is Stephen Park Turner (b. March 1, 1951), born in Chicago, now Graduate Research Professor and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

The book argues that American sociology kept failing to become a science for institutional reasons rather than intellectual ones. It grew out of the reform movements of the Progressive era, so it inherited a demand for moral usefulness before it had a method. It lived on undergraduate enrollment, so its size tracked student taste rather than discovery. It depended on foundation and government patronage, so its questions bent toward what funders wanted asked. It fragmented into subfields that shared no core, so each generation could announce a fresh start without owing anything to the last. The scientific ambition was real and recurrent. So was the failure. The title is a diagnosis.

The two authors then went in opposite directions.

Jonathan Turner kept building. Forty-two books. General theory of interaction, the sociology of emotions, social institutions, stratification, and in the last two decades evolutionary sociology and neurosociology, a program that asks sociologists to reconnect with biology and takes their refusal as an overreaction to sociobiology. He has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association, a fellow of the AAAS, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the ASA emotions section. He directs an institute for theoretical social science in Santa Barbara. He is a man who read the diagnosis in 1990 and spent the decades after trying to supply the missing core by writing it.

Stephen Turner took the tools apart. In The Social Theory of Practices (1994) he argued that the concept everyone was leaning on, the shared practice, a tacit understanding held in common by a group, has no plausible route by which it gets transmitted or reproduced. He traced the contortions from Durkheim to Kripke’s Wittgenstein and concluded that this defect explains why social theory cannot get past constructing fuzzy analogies. Brains/Practices/Relativism followed, then Explaining the Normative, which asks what the appeal to normativity explains that the social sciences do not, and finds the answers all over the place and nobody embarrassed. Then Understanding the Tacit, on what can be made explicit and what cannot. Then American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal (2014), an update on the near-death of the discipline in the 1980s and its transformation inside the new university.

He has written that his intellectual community is European social theory and that he lives on European time. He is happiest in an outdoor cafe on a European square, talking with colleagues. Brill published a volume of essays on his work. A biographical volume, Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, traces the career from the violent South Side of Chicago through the rebellion against the hegemony of Merton and Parsons. None of it registers in American sociology’s status system, which reads four markers: association office, an editorship at ASR or AJS, a Du Bois award, a chair in a ranked sociology department. He has none of them.

In 2022 he coedited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? with Robert Leroux (b. 1964) of Ottawa and Thierry Martin (b. 1950) of Franche-Comté. The book asks whether the subjugation of sociology to political ideology reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the founding program of making sociology a science. That is the question the American academy would spend 2026 shouting about. Jonathan Turner reviewed the volume in Contemporary Sociology in 2023. A review appeared in Philosophy of the Social Sciences in early 2026. The book entered no fight.

Then the fight arrived without it.

Shelley Correll took the ASA presidency and chose a theme for the New York meeting in August 2026: putting sociology to work for a more equitable society, with an argument that the discipline needs solutions, externally engaged research, and theories of change. Sociologists for Palestine petitioned for a membership vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, the association declined on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the meeting. Melissa Wilde ran for the presidency on the position that the association should stay out of politics and lost to Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame, a quantitative sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former editor of ASR. Paul Boghossian of NYU delivered a report to the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis finding that scholarly standards in several fields have been subordinated to political goals. Several scholars named in it said they had never been contacted. Pamela Paul told the story in the Wall Street Journal on July 24, 2026, and quoted Christian Smith, lately of Notre Dame, wondering what would happen if the discipline were liquidated.

Every source in that fight reaches for Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Almost nobody reaches for The Impossible Science, which is in print and known. Smith wrote a moral indictment, and a moral indictment can be picked up by either side and swung. Stephen Turner wrote an institutional history, and an institutional history gives both sides worse news than they want. It tells the reformers there is no golden age of scientific sociology to restore, because the program failed at the founding and kept failing under Merton and Parsons, who were nobody’s activists. It tells the association that the moralizing it defends is the discipline’s oldest habit, present in the reform societies before the departments existed, and no vocal minority put it there. Nobody can build a coalition out of that.

Grant the incoming editors their premise about the monoculture and grant Springer its case. The publisher says it spent years trying to discuss a successor with Janet Gouldner and got nowhere, raised the question with five senior editors in person in 2019 and got no engagement, and inherited turnaround times that had become indefensible, which the departing side does not much dispute. Take all of that as true. A journal is still a referee network before it is a doctrine. The competence to tell a good theory paper from a bad one lives in the people who have done it for years, and by Stephen Turner’s own argument that competence has no route of transmission apart from those people. It cannot be written into a statement of goals. It cannot be installed by memo. The board was told to go, and the new editors report that the scholars they approached with critical credentials refused. You can announce standards. You cannot appoint the tacit skill that applies them. That inference is mine, drawn from his 1994 book. He has not made it about this journal. What the displaced editors did was carry the competence out the door and rebuild around it. Theory and Social Inquiry began publishing in 2025 on the platform of the Open Library of Humanities, no author fees, no paywall, about fifty associate editors, owned by an association of sociologists formed in 2024 to make the seizure unrepeatable. Its lead editors are Monica Prasad and Nitsan Chorev. It calls itself the descendant of Gouldner’s journal and launched on what would have been its fiftieth anniversary.

One Turner holds a journal, a program, and a fight, at eighty-three, after nearly six decades of trying to give the discipline the core it lacks. The other holds the argument that explains why the fight will produce nothing, and holds it in books shelved under philosophy, honored in Uppsala and Manchester and read in Europe, uncited by the people whose situation he described. Gouldner’s chair sits at a university that now audits politicized scholarship. The journal he founded to renew critical theory prints a manifesto against critical monoculture under a masthead that now reads An Interdisciplinary Social Science Journal. His widow was replaced by mail, and the people who had worked for her took his lineage to a nonprofit and left Springer the title.

A discipline with a cumulative core would owe The Impossible Science an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around it. It has.

Notes

Theory and Society’s impact factor in 2024 was 1.4. That’s the Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor, from the Journal Citation Reports. The arithmetic: take every citation recorded in 2024 to articles the journal published in 2022 and 2023, divide by the number of citable items published in those two years. So 1.4 means the average article from that two-year window picked up about one and a half citations during 2024. One tracker puts the underlying counts at 36 articles in 2022 and 24 in 2023, drawing 43 and 21 citations in 2024, which lands near that figure. Different databases compute different versions of the same idea and disagree; Scopus-based measures put the journal above 2 for the same period. Clarivate dropped from three decimals to one in 2023 to discourage people from treating small gaps as real.

Three things follow.

It is a mean over a skewed pile. Sixty articles, sixty-odd citations. A few pieces carry most of that and a large share get cited zero times in the window. The mean tells you almost nothing about the typical article.

The two-year window punishes theory journals by construction. Sociology cites slowly. Arguments arrive in books, get absorbed over a decade, and show up in footnotes long after publication. An empirical paper in the American Sociological Review on a hot inequality question gets cited within eighteen months because a dozen people are running adjacent regressions. A theory paper on Bourdieu and valuation gets cited in 2031. ASR has run around 9 on this metric, AJS around 3, both figures a few years old. Theory and Society was never going to sit near them, and never did, including in the decades when the people who just resigned considered it essential.

The third point. The 2024 figure counts citations to articles published in 2022 and 2023. Every one of those articles was submitted, reviewed and accepted under Janet Gouldner. McCaffree and Turner took over in December 2023. Their first acceptances began appearing in 2024, so the earliest report that measures their editorship is the 2026 or 2027 JCR. This is a fact about the old regime.

Springer inherited a journal with long turnaround times and modest measured reach, which is the strongest part of its case for acting.

What would show whether the reform took hold is all countable and none of it comes from Clarivate. Submission volume. Desk rejection and acceptance rates. Time from submission to first decision, since that was the publisher’s stated reason. Whether the new editorial board got populated, given that Turner said the scholars with critical credentials he approached declined. Who publishes there now, and whether job candidates from top-twenty departments list it. Whether the Annual Review of Sociology essays and the section syllabi cite anything from the new volumes. Two more years and that record will exist.

Posted in Philosophy, Sociology, Stephen Turner | Comments Off on Turner v Turner

The Live Questions in Sociology

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

The live questions, sorted on two axes that come apart: consequence outside the discipline, and reward inside it. First, whether sociology is a science or a movement. It ranks first on consequence and last on reward. Everyone named below who asks it has paid for asking. That question is live because money and state power now attach to it. Florida stripped introductory sociology from general education at its public colleges. A commission chaired by Paul Boghossian, the NYU philosopher and no relation to Peter Boghossian, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, delivered a report in April 2026 that found political goals had come to sit above the advancement of knowledge in several fields, and it was addressed to presidents and chancellors rather than to the disciplines. The American Sociological Association declined to hold a membership vote on a Sociologists for Palestine proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions, on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the August meeting in return. ASA leadership defended the refusal by pointing to members who left after the 2024 ceasefire resolution, saying the association had been harmed. Melissa Wilde ran for president on associational neutrality and lost. Every substantive question below now gets asked inside that fight.

Second, what artificial intelligence does to work, skill and authority. The weak version counts vanishing jobs. The strong version asks who gets to define skill, which workers keep discretion, whether surveillance replaces supervision, and whether automated systems hide badly paid human labor. Arne Kalleberg won the 2026 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award for the institutional frame, and Allison Pugh won the 2025 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for The Last Human Job, which asks what happens when organizations economize on the human relationship. Ya-Wen Lei is asking the sharper technological questions.

Third, what kind of inequality now counts. Income no longer exhausts it. Wealth, debt, inheritance, housing, incarceration and geography do more work, and the hard question is how they interact. Fabian Pfeffer on wealth transmission, Fenaba Addo on racial wealth and debt, Kimberly Kay Hoang and Ken-Hou Lin on elite wealth and financialization.

Fourth, how inequality survives after formal exclusion becomes unacceptable. Organizations endorse equality and produce unequal outcomes. Cecilia Ridgeway built the account of how status beliefs reproduce gender inequality in ordinary interaction. Michèle Lamont made evaluation and boundary work central. Shelley Correll showed how neutral-looking practices produce gendered results. Fabien Accominotti‘s work on meritocratic status orders is the most promising newer entry.

Fifth, fertility, which sits high on the outside axis and low on the inside one. Declines have outrun the models across countries and classes. The work lives in demography and reaches sociology departments through the population-center line, while roughly eighty percent of articles in the flagship journals touch inequality. Sociology is losing this question to economists and demographers, partly because several candidate explanations are awkward to state inside the discipline.

Then polarization and democratic strain, immigration enforcement as a producer of legal status and racial category, mortality inequality and how to measure it, state capacity and why competent bureaucracies fail, climate as institutional lock-in rather than attitude, and the methods fight over whether digital traces and language models measure meaning.

On who gains status from asking, you have to separate four currencies. Association office is one. Correll holds the presidency and chose a theme built around solutions and externally engaged research, asking how sociology can be put to work to build a more equitable world. Alford A. Young Jr. of Michigan follows her. Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame, a quantitative political sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former ASR editor, won the 2026 election, with Dina Okamoto of Indiana as vice president-elect. Awards are a second currency, and the 2026 slate rewards two things at once: classical labor-market stratification in Kalleberg, and global-South racial and labor history in Zophia Edwards of Johns Hopkins, whose book on Black radical trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago took the top book prize. Joya Misra took the Jessie Bernard, Prudence Carter the Cox-Johnson-Frazier, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field and Anna Romina Guevarra the public understanding award.

Journal control is the third and least discussed currency. The ASR editorship sits at UMass Amherst with David Cort, Laurel Smith-Doerr and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, joined by Misra in 2026. AJS sits at Chicago with John Levi Martin, who defends theory and mechanism against technique. Whoever holds those desks sets the price of publication for a decade of assistant professors.

Citation authority is the fourth. Lamont is the closest thing to a general agenda setter. Mario Luis Small, now chair at Columbia after Harvard, is probably the sociologist whose judgment is trusted across the most methodological camps. Robert Sampson is the empirical benchmark. Viviana Zelizer holds nearly universal affection. Matthew Desmond has the largest public footprint and less internal authority than his public profile suggests.

What gains status from asking right now? Interventions with measured effects. Correll‘s theme converts the discipline’s reward structure toward testable theories of change. Whoever produces credible experiments on organizational inequality over the next five years converts that into prizes, chairs and grants.

No single department is most prestigious for the live questions. The old block holds: Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, Chicago, Stanford, UNC, NYU, Northwestern. Prestige for a given question sits elsewhere. UNC for work and the life course. Minnesota for mortality. Michigan and Wisconsin for population and stratification data. Berkeley for economic sociology and digital classification, where Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy‘s account of ordinal ranking has more traction inside the discipline than Shoshana Zuboff‘s surveillance capitalism, which is a business-school idea. Princeton for poverty and for technology-and-race in the public sphere. The department moving fastest is Johns Hopkins, which has taken Monica Prasad from Northwestern as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, holds Pugh, and now holds the book-award winner. Columbia moved up by taking Small from Harvard and making him chair.

On askers versus answerers: The people known for questions collect the presidencies, the theme statements and the book prizes. Lamont asks what sociology’s next large project should be. Christian Smith (b. 1960), Musa al-Gharbi, Kevin McCaffree and Ilana Redstone ask what has gone wrong with the discipline. Andrew Abbott and John Levi Martin ask whether technique has displaced explanation. The people known for answers are mostly quantitative and mostly hold their authority inside one subfield. Sampson answered the neighborhood question with collective efficacy. Bruce Western answered the punishment question. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev answered the diversity-training question by showing which programs move numbers and which do not, which is why they get cited by human resources departments and by critics of human resources departments alike. Prasad wrote the method book for producing answers and moved to Hopkins to do it.

Asking pays better than answering because a question cannot be refuted and an answer can. That asymmetry explains a good deal of what the critics call theory-ladenness.

Moving up: the solutions program, intervention research, wealth and asset inequality, AI and work, mortality measurement, bureaucracy and state capacity, Johns Hopkins, Columbia. Moving down: the descriptive monograph, theory as pure critique, the association’s own leverage, and the undergraduate franchise. Also moving down, the heterodox reform project inside the discipline. Wilde lost. Al-Gharbi holds his appointment in Stony Brook‘s School of Communication and Journalism rather than a sociology department. Springer Nature replaced the executive editor of Theory and Society, asked the ten senior editors to step down, and installed McCaffree and Jonathan Turner, who announced they would break what they called a dominant monoculture of critical approaches undermining the field’s professional legitimacy. The publisher’s stated grounds were scope and speed: authors had complained for years about turnaround times, and feedback suggested the field was growing more interdisciplinary while the journal stood still. The masthead now reads An Interdisciplinary Social Science Journal. The displaced editors founded Theory and Social Inquiry in 2025, diamond open access, owned outright by an association of sociologists so that no publisher can do this to them twice. Both halves of the 1974 masthead now publish.

Philip N. Cohen writes:

On the Scatterplot sociology blog there are two posts describing the situation at the Springer journal Theory & Society, one by Dan Hirschman and one by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, both of which I recommend. The gist of it is the executives at Springer chose new chief editors for the journal without consulting the editorial board or other editors, so they all quit, and now there are new editors with a very different mission for the journal. Specifically, they want to upend the “monoculture of critical approaches” that “utterly dominate” the discipline, “undermining sociology’s professional legitimacy.”

The two new editors are Kevin McCaffree and Jonathan Turner. The latter of these is a famous “greatest generation” (in his words) sociologist. Probably not coincidentally, Turner has just written a ridiculous get-off-my-lawn screed about the state of the discipline, which he sees as being overrun with women, nonbinary people, and racial/ethnic minorities doing social justice warrior mesearch, and generally wrecking the place (“What drove the change away from science,” Turner writes, “were changes in the demography of sociology.”) It’s basically a recapitulation of Christian Smith’s Sacred Project of American Sociology, which Turner loves (practically the only thing he cites) and which I reviewed here.

I read Turner’s paper and made some notes on the PDF, and I share that version here. Here’s a flavor of his prose:

“Once a professional organization dedicated to the study of all dimensions of the social universe begins to mix highly moralized ideologies with the study of inequality, the possibilities of value-neutral science decline and are replaced by ideological advocacy and political calls to redress the problem on injustice. And once injustice, which is just one aspect of human social organization is over-taught in academic departments—from English through ethnic, gender, sexuality programs to sociology departmental curricula—the curricula all over campuses and the programs at most sociological meetings operate merely to magnify ideological hype at the expense of pushing science and value-neutral research. Indeed, value-neutral research and science are often seen by the new activists as “part of the problem” in overcoming injustices. Thus, sociology has mobilized those who have committed to giving up their professionalism, thereby demonizing those who have created the large knowledge base that now exists in sociology.”

The problem with sociology, in his view, is people obsessed with injustice, who have given up their professionalism, steamrolling over value-neutral research and failing to show appropriate deference to those who came before them, who bequeathed us their knowledge base.

Turner’s position reads differently in his own words. He gave a talk at Colorado on March 16, 2023 titled “The Consequences of the Transforming of the American Sociological Association, and Sociology More Generally, into a Movement Organization.” The abstract argues that the conflict between value-neutral science and value-laden programs for ameliorating social conditions was perhaps inevitable, that the shift away from science is accelerating and unlikely to reverse, and that sociology may have to be reinvented under another name, his preference being Comte’s original, Social Physics. The abstract also carries the membership arithmetic: about 9,000 when he entered graduate school in 1965, two peaks just under 15,000 in 1972 and 2007, and 9,400 at the last year the association reported. Those are the numbers the Wall Street Journal ran in July 2026. The reform camp did the counting the coverage now uses.

Who is trying to close down questions? Everyone in all directions. From outside, Florida closed the teaching franchise. From inside, the norm Redstone identifies, that a group disparity establishes discrimination, raises the price of stating alternative causal hypotheses, and price is how closure works in a peer-reviewed field. Boycott politics closes a set of collaborators and a set of questions by design. The association closed a membership vote and called it procedure. On the reform side, the Boghossian commission named living scholars as examples of defective work, and several told Inside Higher Ed they had never heard of the report and considered their work misrepresented, which is closure by administrative referral rather than argument. Smith’s line about liquidating the discipline is a closure fantasy even said in exasperation.

I’m a Stephen P. Turner partisan. Why isn’t he in this discussion? Because these maps get built from status signals, and he emits none in the register they read. Turner is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He holds none of the four markers the system reads: association office, an editorship at ASR or AJSDu Bois award, or a chair in a ranked sociology department. His books come out in Routledge and Brill series and his articles land in Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the Weber literature. Ask a model to rank sociologists by who gains status from asking live questions and it reads ASA politics, award lists, journal desks and citations inside sociology journals. Turner registers on none of those instruments. The silence is a property of the measuring device.

(Stephen P. Turner sits on some fifteen editorial boards and is the longest-serving Collaborating Editor of Social Studies of Science. He holds no editorship at sociology’s core journals.)

The second reason is that his question has no dataset, no funder and no incoming cohort. He asks what conditions would have to hold for sociology to be a science and whether they have ever held. Nobody is competing for that question, so nobody shows up in a status map for holding it.

On rank, three answers.

On the meta-question, whether the discipline is a science or a movement, he ranks first on priority and first on argument. He co-wrote The Impossible Science, the standard one-volume history of American sociology, and later updated it as American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal. The 2026 fight is downstream of that book and almost nobody in the fight cites it. The critics reach for Christian Smith‘s Sacred Project because a moral indictment travels. Turner’s account gives worse news to both camps. It says the trouble is structural and present near the founding, that the scientific program kept failing for institutional reasons rather than ideological capture, and that a return to science has no golden age to return to. Neither the ASA nor Heterodox Academy can use that, so neither picks it up.

He also got there four years early in print. He co-edited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? (Routledge, 2022), which asks whether sociology’s subjugation to political ideologies reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the original program of making sociology a science. That is the Boghossian question and the Pamela Paul question, posed with better distinctions, by people who know the history. Jonathan H. Turner reviewed it in Contemporary Sociology, and it produced no traction in the argument that broke a year later.

Jonathan Turner, his co-author on The Impossible Science, now co-edits Theory and Society and announced a campaign against the critical monoculture. One author of the standard institutional history runs the reform journal. The other, the stronger philosopher of the two, appears in none of the coverage.

Second register. On the AI and skill question, he holds capital nobody is spending. The live problem is which capacities can be made explicit and which cannot, and that is the subject of Understanding the Tacit and The Social Theory of Practices. Pugh’s connective labor, the deskilling argument, the fight over whether language models capture meaning: all of it needs an account of the tacit, and the sociologists doing the work reach for Polanyi secondhand or for practice theory. Practice theory is the thing Turner argued cannot work, because there is no plausible route by which a shared practice gets transmitted or reproduced. A negative result of that kind is exactly the constraint you need when asking what a model can absorb from a workplace and what stays in the worker. If I were betting on an unfashionable apparatus getting rediscovered in the next five years, this is my bet.

Third register. The Politics of Expertise and Liberal Democracy 3.0 sit on top of the expertise-and-democracy question, and there he has standing, cited by political theorists and science studies people. That is where his authority lives.

So: near zero in the currencies I described in the map, high in the philosophy of social science, first in priority on the discipline’s own meta-question, holding unused theoretical assets on the AI question. He is honored, with a Brill volume of essays on his work edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff, and a memoir of his own, Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, published by Emerald in 2022.

His absence from these maps supports his thesis. A discipline with a cumulative core would owe him an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around him, and does.

Stephen Turner’s argument resists testing, which is awkward for a man arguing about scientific standards. He is stronger at showing why programs fail than at specifying what would succeed, so the reform camp gets no usable instructions from him. He writes for a small European-inflected audience. And the claim that a discipline ignores a critic because the critic is right cannot be checked.

Notes

The Centre for Heterodox Social Science ran the Heterodox Social Science Conference 2026 at the Vinson Centre, University of Buckingham, July 23 to 25, second annual after the inaugural June 2025, directed by Eric Kaufmann, with tracks on critical woke studies, feminism and gender, populism and the nation, settler colonialism, and a document called the Buckingham Manifesto, described as a countercultural vision for a politically neutral social science. In January the Centre launched a Heterodox Social Science Database, a curated catalogue of work from outside what it calls the dominant cultural left paradigm, with a stated plan to attach its own retrieval model so that researchers querying it get channeled to heterodox sources where mainstream systems channel them to progressive ones.

Korom measures prestige by citation, across generalist, specialist and international journals. A curated rival index with a language model on top is an attempt to build a second citation universe, which is to say a second prestige system. Whether a reference class can be manufactured that way is an open empirical question. Who is asking it?

Germany gives you the nine-year test case. The Akademie für Soziologie was founded July 14, 2017 in Mannheim, out of an April call with 112 signatories, first chaired by Thomas Hinz of Konstanz, committed to analytisch-empirische Soziologie and to sociology as a Realwissenschaft. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, founded 1909 by Tönnies, Weber and Simmel, carried on. A 2023 piece in the International Review of Sociology treats the split as a case study in disciplinary power. Nine years of congresses now exist, so the question has an answer available: has the Academy produced work that DGS members are obliged to cite. Psychology has the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, founded 2022, which held its first conference on February 24, 2023, scheduled against the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and which Lee Jussim introduced as a samizdat. Anthropology’s version of the science fight runs back to the 2010 quarrel over the American Anthropological Association’s mission statement and the Society for Anthropological Sciences.

Turner appears in the Korom paper three times.

He is in Appendix B, the register of 346 candidate authors. He is in the bibliography twice, cited as the authority: Turner and Turner 1990 supports Korom’s claim that the Columbia, Harvard and Chicago departments established the discipline’s norms, and Turner 2014 supports the footnote that orthodox Parsonianism did not survive Gouldner‘s Coming Crisis and that the money began collapsing in the 1970s. He does not appear in either top fifty. Jonathan Turner appears in the 2010s fifty. So the paper that maps sociology’s prestige elite uses one Turner to explain how the elite was built and ranks the other Turner inside it.

Habermas and Butler entered the 2010s elite as philosophers. Korom notes the shift from anthropologists in the 1970s to philosophers in the 2010s. Korom’s finding is that status requires reception in the discipline’s core, no scholar in either era scored higher with specialists than with generalists, and dominating several communities inside sociology is insufficient. Turner’s reception sits in philosophy of social science and science studies, which are adjacent rather than core. His self-description, engaged internationally and not with American sociology, describes a reception profile that Korom’s data says cannot produce elite status in the discipline, whatever it produces elsewhere.

In 1987 South Florida made Stephen P. Turner the Graduate Research Professor in Sociology. In 1989 he moved the same title to Philosophy. He took the exit thirty-seven years ago, at his own university, and the new book, Cognitive Science and the Reconceptualization of Social Theory: Naturalizing the Social, is listed by Routledge for July 29. He expects no American sociological review and will probably be right. The Buckingham project and the Mannheim academy are the collective version of what he did alone in 1989. The question is no longer whether reform of the incumbent journal takes, but whether exit builds anything that accumulates.

Who Gets to Publish the List

On the night of July 25, 2026, Ashley Rubin sat down to write up the third and final day of the Heterodox Social Science Conference at the University of Buckingham. She had blurry vision from lack of sleep. She said so in the post, along with a warning that she had not coded her notes, that the themes she drew out might reflect her own selective attention, and that she was not going to run the draft through GPT for a coherence check. She is a sociologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, author of The Deviant Prison and Rocking Qualitative Social Science, and the sociologist who worked on the report that the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis commissioned on politicization in the social sciences. She wrote that only in a room like that one can you see how narrow your usual range of exposure is.

The room was at the Vinson Centre. Registration was free, places limited, and the Thursday evening gala dinner also free. Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Buckingham, runs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, and organized the thing. Buckingham is private, which is part of the point. The tracks covered the end of woke, critical woke studies, higher education policy, feminism and gender, psychotherapy and psychology, populism and the nation, and settler colonialism. Attendees debated a document called the Buckingham Manifesto, described as a countercultural vision for a politically neutral social science. This was the second annual meeting. The first ran in June 2025.

Two proposals surface in Rubin’s account, and they are the same proposal in two costumes.

The first is a decadal survey. She has been pushing this for a while and put it at the end of her latest article in Theory and Society. Astrophysics does it: a panel of respected scholars sits down and lays out the research agenda for the next ten years, naming what should be studied and what has been neglected. Rubin wants sociology to do the same, with attention to topics that fell out of fashion because they read as conservative, theories nobody has bothered to test, and questions the field could answer if it were willing to ask them. The purpose is to give direction to the people holding money.

The second is Kevin McCaffree’s. He has been talking about the Hilbert problems, the twenty-three unsolved questions David Hilbert (1862-1943) set before mathematics in 1900. Hilbert named the gaps and mathematicians spent the next century filling them. McCaffree wants a list like that for sociology, so the money follows the unknowns.

A decadal survey and a Hilbert list are both lists of live questions. So is a presidential theme. So is an award slate.

Shelley Correll took the American Sociological Association presidency and set the theme for the New York meeting in August: putting sociology to work for a more equitable society, with an argument that the discipline needs solutions, theories of change, and research partnerships outside the academy. The 2026 awards went to Arne Kalleberg for a career on precarious work and employment institutions, to Zophia Edwards of Johns Hopkins for a book on Black radical trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago, to Joya Misra, to Prudence Carter, and to Elizabeth Wrigley-Field for public understanding of the discipline. Read those together and you have a statement about which questions carry status and which do not. Nobody involved calls it a list. It functions as one, and it reaches every assistant professor deciding what to write next.

The association publishes its agenda through themes, prizes, journal desks and syllabi, and the publication is invisible because it is continuous. What Buckingham is proposing is the same act performed deliberately, in one document, by a panel with names attached. The novelty is the visibility.

Which brings the story back to a journal.

In mid-December 2023 Springer Nature told the senior editors of Theory and Society it had a completely different view of the journal’s future and asked them to step down. The corresponding editors resigned in protest on January 4, 2024. The corresponding editors resigned in protest on January 4, 2024. Kevin McCaffree of the University of North Texas and Jonathan H. Turner took over and published a statement of goals subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology,” announcing that a monoculture of critical approaches dominated the discipline and undermined its professional legitimacy. Philip Cohen at Maryland said he would not submit or review. The 2024 impact factor came in at 1.4, computed from articles the old regime had accepted, and people read it as a verdict on the new one.

The journal has a constituency now. In 2024 it ran John Iceland and Eric Silver on how commitments to social justice distort what the field knows about racial disparities. In 2025 it ran a study that coded every article published in Sociological Theory and Theory and Society across the decade from 2008 to 2018, four hundred and forty-five articles, tracking protagonists, antagonists and citation counts. By late June 2026 its roster of contributors included Philip Tetlock, Rubin, Callie Burt, Thomas Schubert and Roy Baumeister. Rubin’s own piece asks where the line falls between appropriate and inappropriate conduct for a researcher who has politics.

So one network went out and another came in, through a door the publisher had opened on purpose. Teresa Krauss, Springer’s publishing director for the social sciences, said author feedback showed the field growing more interdisciplinary while the journal’s scope stood still. The masthead now reads An Interdisciplinary Social Science Journal. Tetlock and Baumeister are psychologists. The journal became the press on which the rival agenda gets printed, and its co-editor is the man floating the Hilbert list. Anyone measuring the reform by citation counts is measuring the wrong thing, and will keep getting the wrong answer for years, because the incoming constituency is small and sits outside the discipline’s core where citations accumulate fastest.

Here is why the fight over the list is the fight that decides everything.

Philipp Korom of Graz spent a study of about forty-nine thousand pages establishing who belonged to sociology’s prestige elite in the 1970s and the 2010s. His finding: elite status requires reception in the discipline’s core, and dominating several communities inside sociology does not suffice. In neither period did any scholar score higher with specialist audiences than with generalist ones. Eminence lasts under forty years. Besides Durkheim and Weber, only Parsons and Merton held the top ten across both eras. The 1970s elite came out of Chicago, Columbia and Harvard; by the 2010s no single breeding ground remained. The currency throughout is citation, which means status flows to whoever poses the question that other people have to answer in print.

That explains the database. In January the Centre for Heterodox Social Science launched a curated catalogue of work from outside what it calls the dominant cultural left paradigm, with a stated plan to attach a retrieval model so that researchers querying it get channeled to heterodox sources where mainstream systems channel them to progressive ones. If prestige is citation, a rival index with an engine on top is an attempt to manufacture a reference class from scratch. It is also the movement’s worst instinct, for the reason Rubin identified about her own conference report: an index that answers your questions with your own literature cannot test you.

The deeper problem is the one nobody in the fight has picked up, and it comes from the co-editor’s own book.

Hilbert could name twenty-three problems because mathematics had a cumulative core and agreed criteria for what counts as a solution. Astrophysics can run a decadal survey because the field agrees what an instrument is and what a result looks like. The Impossible Science, which Jonathan Turner co-wrote with Stephen Turner in 1990, argues that American sociology never built either, and that the scientific program kept failing for institutional reasons: reform-movement origins, dependence on undergraduate enrollment, dependence on patronage, and fragmentation into subfields that owed nothing to each other. That book is the standing objection to a sociological Hilbert list, and it is the standing objection to Correll’s theories of change. One of its authors now edits the journal where the proposals appear. The other keeps publishing the argument and expects no American review of the new book (Cognitive Science and the Reconceptualization of Social Theory: Naturalizing the Social) Routledge issues on July 29.

Lee Jussim launched Unsafe Science on Substack in early 2022, left Psychology Today for it that spring, and routes two thirds to eighty percent of his subscription income into a Rutgers research account that backstops student projects and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, founded that same year, whose first conference he scheduled against the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in February 2023. Small money, and nobody can withdraw it over a paper he accepts. Heterodox Academy, whose inaugural president John Tomasi left an endowed chair at Brown in January 2022 to take, has been criticized since before he arrived over funding from Charles Koch and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. Both sides now take money from people with views about the answers. The 1990 book predicted the shape of that problem without predicting who would occupy which side of it.

Tomasi has called publicly for more reports like the one Rubin wrote. Rubin says the documentation phase has reached saturation and the work now is filling the holes. She reports colleagues describing short-term plans that run ten to twenty years and longer plans framed as hundred-year projects, and a recurring line she renders as “no one is coming to save us except us.” She wants journals first, then centers, then interdisciplinary social science departments where scholars can be rehoused after becoming unemployable in their own fields.

There is a third list and it belongs to the people who were pushed out. Theory and Social Inquiry launched in 2025 on the platform of the Open Library of Humanities, with no author fees, no paywall, article lengths the commercial journals will not allow, and about fifty associate editors. An association of sociologists formed in 2024 owns it, for the stated purpose of ensuring that only sociologists set the direction of sociology journals. The founders include Gil Eyal at Columbia, Nitsan Chorev at Brown, Neil Gross at Colby, Greta Krippner at Michigan, Charles Camic at Northwestern, Mara Loveman at Berkeley and Chandra Mukerji at San Diego. They call it the descendant of Gouldner‘s journal and timed the launch to its fiftieth anniversary. The lead editors are Chorev and Monica Prasad, whose problem-solving sociology is the mainstream’s own program for producing answers. So the count is three: a presidential theme, a Hilbert list, and a journal built to outlive its publisher.

Both lists will get published. The test is narrow and countable: whether either agenda gets cited by people who had no hand in writing it. An association can compel attention to its theme through prizes and journal desks. A movement in exile has to earn it. Nine years after the Akademie für Soziologie broke from the German association to pursue sociology as an empirical science, that question has data attached and I wonder if anybody in the American fight has gone to look.

Posted in Sociology | Comments Off on The Live Questions in Sociology

What are the Live Questions in Economics Now?

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Tariff incidence and the sequel to the ruling comes first. Who bears the cost, over what horizon, and what happens when a tax is removed. Gopinath and Neiman own the aggregate accounting. Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein own the border incidence estimates. Alberto Cavallo owns the high-frequency retail data. Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortaçsu, Felix Tintelnot, Nicolás Urdaneta, and Daniel Xu own the supply-chain decomposition. The 2026 addition is refunds: the government collected at least $160 billion in IEEPA duties through February 20, and the majority opinion says nothing about whether refunds will be available. A potential transfer of that size, with contested legal incidence, is an unclaimed research question.

Second, the production function for AI. It contains labor displacement, firm productivity, aggregate productivity, and knowledge production. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen own the entry-level finding. Humlum and Vestergaard own the administrative-data nulls. Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond own the call-center evidence. Ethan Mollick and Fabrizio Dell’Acqua own the jagged-frontier framing. Chad Jones and Anton Korinek own the growth theory. The subordinate questions: whether AI substitutes for junior labor while complementing senior judgment, and whether removing junior work destroys the apprenticeship system that manufactures future experts.

Third, r-star and monetary-fiscal interaction. Reis, Williams, Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi are the names. The live question concerns which instrument carries the signal, and whether high debt changes the inflation cost of tightening.

Fourth, fiscal capacity, phrased without a threshold. What combination of debt service, maturity, primary deficits, and market absorption forces monetary policy or fiscal policy to yield.

Fifth, fertility. Claudia Goldin (b. 1946) on the mismatch between women’s economic autonomy and men’s domestic adaptation, Matthias Doepke and Fabian Kindermann on the household bargaining models, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine on the American decline. Distinguish between postponement and lower completed fertility.

Sixth, industrial policy design. Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, and Rodrik hold the field.

Seventh, the inflation postmortem: under what market structures do sectoral supply shocks raise markups temporarily and propagate. Bernanke, Blanchard, Isabella Weber, Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, Laurence Ball.

Eighth, top-income measurement. Piketty, Saez, Zucman, Auten, Splinter. The deeper question is whether distributional national accounts can carry the political weight placed on them.

Ninth, geoeconomic fragmentation, which subsumes friendshoring, export controls, and critical minerals. Laura Alfaro, Davin Chor, Kyle Handley, Pinelopi Goldberg.

Tenth, China’s transition away from property and investment-led growth. Kenneth Rogoff, Zhiguo He, Wei Xiong, Chang-Tai Hsieh. The answer moves commodity exporters, German manufacturing, global savings, and r-star, which is why it ranks above several better-covered topics.

Eleventh, housing, split into the three propositions the review document separates: whether supply moderates rents, whether upzoning produces housing, and whether reform delivers inside a political horizon. Ed Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, Enrico Moretti, Evan Mast.

Twelfth, private credit. Where leverage and liquidity transformation migrated, how private funds connect to banks and insurers, and whether reported values conceal correlated losses until redemptions force recognition. Victoria Ivashina, Gregor Matvos, Jeremy Stein.

Thirteenth, remote work and urban fiscal structure. Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Jose Maria Barrero on the labor side; Arpit Gupta and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh on the office-value and municipal-revenue side.

Fourteenth, the structure of the AI industry as distinct from its labor effects. Whether foundation models are natural monopolies, who captures the surplus, and how antitrust treats vertical integration across compute, models, and applications.

Fifteenth, methods. How to combine local identification with structural models and explicit external-validity tests, and whether LLM-generated synthetic respondents can substitute for human samples. Guido Imbens (b. 1963), Susan Athey, Isaiah Andrews, John Horton.

Then a second tier that could move up: climate adaptation and insurance retreat, with Benjamin Keys and Parinitha Sastry on mortgage and insurance markets; GLP-1 drugs and whether they pay for themselves; the minimum wage at high bite, with Dube, Reich, Neumark, and the automation margin; stablecoins and Treasury demand; and the 2021-24 immigration surge as an identification strategy.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on What are the Live Questions in Economics Now?

Why Do So Many University Professors Hate AI?

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

With change, there are winners and losers. With change, some things get better and some things get worse.
I don’t share the hysteria about AI in any direction because I accept that life is a series of trade-offs. And nobody is coming to save us.
And our problems are not in our stars, but in ourselves.
And a stitch in time saves nine.
I’m tired of the one-sided coverage of AI (it seems like 80% of the public hates it). In particular, I’m tired of all the university professors publishing one-sided essays decrying AI abuse by their students.
The professors always have good points to make. What they lack is a sense of proportion. I grant the professors every point they land.
This is what I want to know about any group complaint: How much is self-interest and how much is public interest?
Interest shapes what a man notices, and a threatened man often notices problems first. So the useful question is whether the claim hold up.
Start with what professors say they fear. The complaints cluster around students. A January 2026 national survey found large majorities warning that the tools drive student overreliance, weaken critical thinking, and erode academic integrity and the value of degrees. College Board research on more than three thousand faculty found the sharpest negativity in writing-intensive fields such as English and history, while faculty in STEM and business report using AI for their own research and writing and hold more positive views. The AAUP survey registers damage to the teaching environment and to job enthusiasm. Almost nobody writes essays saying a blogger with a chatbot might match his monograph. They write essays saying they can no longer tell whether a twenty-year-old learned anything.
Why exactly would they care if their student learns anything? Most professors at research universities don’t have many incentive to care about their undergraduate students.
If the take-home essay was your instrument for measuring thought and the instrument now measures access to a subscription, you have lost the ability to do your job the way you expected to do your job. Whether the replacement assessments are better or worse, the transition cost falls on the professor, unpaid, while administrators announce initiatives.
Second fact that complicates the picture: seventy-seven percent of faculty use AI in their teaching, up sixteen points from 2025. The loudest critics are often the same people using the tools. That looks less like a guild sealing its borders and more like ambivalence under deadline.
Andrew Abbott (b. 1948) showed that professions defend task boundaries by claiming exclusive possession of judgment that cannot be written down. Every encroachment gets recast as a quality problem or an ethics problem, and sometimes the recasting is honest and sometimes it is a jurisdictional move dressed as principle. Randall Collins (b. 1941) argued in The Credential Society that credentials often mark position in a queue rather than skill. Where AI threatens the queue, expect noise. One survey detail points this way: negative sentiment rises with institutional selectivity. Faculty with the most positional capital dislike the tools most. You can read that as pedagogy or as portfolio.
The status anxiety I’d locate in a felt loss of prestige. Fluent, well-cited, register-appropriate prose used to be rare and expensive. It took years to acquire and it certified membership. It is now cheap. That devalues an asset many people paid for in their twenties and thirties, and men rarely experience the devaluation of their hard-earned asset as a neutral fact.
Prose fluency and argumentative competence were never what separated good academic work from bad. Plenty of fine scholars write badly. The moat is elsewhere: new evidence, and knowing the live question.
New evidence means somebody read the court records, sat in the room, ran the experiment, worked the archive, interviewed the man who was there. AI cannot do that. Where a field’s contributions require primary material, an outsider with a chatbot produces synthesis, and synthesis is the most abundant commodity in academic publishing.
Knowing the live question is harder to see from outside. I don’t know which 2021 article everyone in the subfield privately thinks was refuted at a conference in 2024. I don’t know which framing marks you as ten years behind. A specialist knows what would count as news to eleven people who care. That tacit map is what a PhD buys, and it decays without contact.
Then verification. AI citations require checking, and the checking is where the hours go. A man who skips it publishes fabrications and gets caught, and the field’s suspicion of outsiders gets one more data point.
So, can fluency with AI plus some knowledge of a topic produce work equal to what the average professor publishes? Against the median low-cited article in a mid-tier journal, often yes. Against work that adds evidence or moves a live argument, “some knowledge” is not enough. AI is a multiplier on what you already hold. Productive output tracks the depth of your reading, your instinct for what is missing, and your willingness to check. A man with thin knowledge and high fluency produces confident mush, and specialists smell it in a paragraph.
The test is whether a reader in the field learns something he didn’t know. That test doesn’t care about your credentials, and it doesn’t care about AI.

Posted in Academia, AI | Comments Off on Why Do So Many University Professors Hate AI?

I Finally Read The Novel ‘Submission’

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

The second paragraph of Submission is silly and cliche.

So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotised by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product – addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that ‘tireless Proteus’, money itself). Above all they’re hypnotised by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanised as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, film stars and models.
For various psychological reasons that I have neither the skill nor the desire to analyse, I wasn’t that way at all.

I don’t believe the narrator. We are all status-seeking primates. We want to feel pride because pride feels good and it correlates with how much we contribute to others.
I’m less troubled by the unreliability of the narrator than that I don’t like him. He’s a freak.
More silliness soon follows: “Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilisation now ending before our very eyes…” Literature is not ending, and a single overstatement like that destroys credibility in my eyes. Why would I want to read on about this silly deluded man?

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can’t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters – as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them.

It’s not just the books, bro. It’s the reader response. We respond to people like ourselves. We love people like ourselves. Read John J. Mearsheimer and David Pinsof and embrace reality and enjoy the feeling of pride that comes from contributing to the lives of those around you.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature – it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time.

As opposed to other jobs? How is the study of literature less full of meaning than normal work? Does work as an insurance adjuster lead somewhere?
The primary purpose of work is to support yourself and those you love by making a lawful contribution to your community.
I don’t like the protagonist from the start which makes reading the novel a chore.

The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, holidays) that were not only sexual, but social. At the same time, there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships – in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step towards one’s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and final, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.
The complete idiocy of this model…

Sigh. Everyone’s an idiot.
Grow up, bro. There’s no one model of love and relationship that is globally superior to others. The problem is not in France but in you. You’re miserable and that distorts your perceptions.

My own sex life, during my early years as a lecturer at Paris III, hadn’t evolved in any notable way. Year after year, I kept sleeping with students, and the fact that we were now teacher and student didn’t change things much at all. At the beginning, there was scarcely any age difference between us. Only gradually did an element of transgression enter in, and this had more to do with my rising academic status than with my age, real or apparent. In short, I benefitted from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from year to year, or even from month to month. The one real change, since my student years, was that now I was usually the one who broke it off when the academic year began. It wasn’t that I was a Don Juan, or yearned for some kind of untrammelled sexual freedom. Unlike my colleague Steve, who also taught nineteenth – century literature to the first – and second – year students, I didn’t spend the first days of university eagerly checking out the ‘new talent’.

Does this still fly in France?

‘You know, François …’ she said, after she’d taken a first sip, ‘I’m not a whore. I’m not a nymphomaniac, either. When I go down on you, it’s because I love you. I do love you, you know?’
I did know. And I knew there was something else, something she hadn’t yet told me. I looked deep into her eyes, but I didn’t know how to ask what was the matter. She finished her champagne, sighed, poured another and said: ‘My parents are leaving the country.’
I was speechless. She drained her glass and poured herself a third.
‘They’re emigrating to Israel. They fly to Tel Aviv on Friday. They’re not even waiting for the run – offs. The crazy part is, they’ve done it all behind our backs, completely in secret. They opened a bank account in Israel, they lined up a flat, my father cashed in his pension, they put the house up for sale, and they never said a word to any of us. My little sister and brother I could maybe understand, they’re pretty young, but I’m twenty – two years old and they didn’t even consult me. They’re not forcing me to go with them. If I insist, they’ll rent me a room in Paris, but we do have the summer break coming up, and I don’t see how I can leave them, not right now. They’re too scared. I hadn’t really noticed till now, but in the last few months they’ve stopped going out. The only people they still see are other Jews. They stay in at night, working each other up – and they’re not the only ones, they’ve got at least five other friends who’ve sold everything so they can move to Israel. I spent a whole night arguing with them, but they’ve made up their minds. They’re convinced that something really bad is going to happen to Jews in France. It’s weird, it’s like a delayed reaction fifty years after the war. I told them they’re being idiots, the National Front stopped being anti – Semitic a long time ago – ’
‘It wasn’t all that long ago. You’re too young to remember, but the father, Jean – Marie Le Pen, he still had connections to the old French far right. He was a drunk and a total philistine, he certainly hadn’t read Drumont or Maurras, but I’m sure he heard people talk about them. They were part of his mental landscape. The daughter doesn’t even know who they are, obviously. At any rate, even if the Muslim wins, I don’t think you’ve got much to worry about. He’s still allied with the Socialists, he can’t just do whatever he wants …’
‘Hmm …’ She shook her head, unconvinced. ‘I guess I’m less optimistic than you are. When a Muslim party comes to power, it’s never good for the Jews. Can you think of a time it was?’

This lands.

She stepped into her skirt. ‘With everything that’s going on now, it’s obvious the National Front’s going to win. That’s all we’ll talk about at lunch. “We told you so, sweetheart.” Still, they’re good people, they only want what’s best for me.’
‘Yes, they are good people. Truly good people.’
‘But what about you? What will you do? What do you think’s going to happen at the university?’
We were standing at the door. I realised that I hadn’t the slightest idea, and also that I didn’t give a fuck. I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, ‘There is no Israel for me.’

This lands.

I realised – I’d known for years – that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable…
‘What about the Jews?’ The question slipped out – I hadn’t planned on asking. The image of Myriam on my bed that last morning, in her T – shirt, with her little round bottom, flashed through my mind. I poured myself another large glass of Cahors.
‘Ah,’ he smiled again. ‘With the Jews, of course, things are somewhat more complicated. In theory, it’s the same – Judaism is a religion of the Book, Abraham and Moses are recognised as prophets of Islam. In practice, though, relations with Jews in Muslim countries have often been more difficult than with Christians. And of course the Palestinian question has poisoned everything. Some small factions of the Muslim Brotherhood call for retaliation against the Jews, but I don’t think they’ll get anywhere. Ben Abbes has always maintained good relations with the Grand Rabbi of France. Every once in a while he may let the extremists act out, because even if he really hopes to convert Christians in massive numbers – and who says he won’t? – he can’t possibly have high hopes for the Jews. What would really make him happy, I think, is if they left France on their own and emigrated to Israel. In any case, I assure you, he’d never compromise his vast personal ambitions out of love for the Palestinians…
The change in the political regime had left no visible mark on the neighbourhood. Tight knots of Chinese men still gathered in front of the OTB, racing forms in hand. Others hurried along pushing handcarts full of rice noodles, soy sauce, mangos. Nothing, not even a Muslim government, could curb their incessant activity – Muslim proselytising would dissolve without a trace, like the Christian message before it, in the vast ocean of their civilisation…
It was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork…
From outside, nothing about the university looked different, except for the gilded star and crescent above the doors, next to the big inscription ‘Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III’. Inside the administrative buildings, the transformations were more visible. In the waiting room, one was welcomed by a photograph of pilgrims making their way around the Kaaba, and the offices were decorated with posters bearing hand – lettered verses from the Koran. The secretaries had changed, I didn’t recognise any of them, and they all wore veils. One of them gave me a pension application. Its simplicity was disconcerting. I filled it out right there, on the corner of a table, signed it and gave it back. As I walked out into the courtyard, I realised that my academic career had just ended in a matter of minutes…
I had no friends, that was true, but when did I ever? Besides, if you really thought about it, what was the point of having friends? Once you reach a certain stage of physical decline, the only relationship that really, clearly makes sense is marriage (the bodies blend together, to a degree, and produce a new organism, at least if you believe Plato)….
This brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes’s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a ‘state of grace’….
Story of O contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me, and the whole thing was so ostentatiously kitschy – the apartment on the Île Saint – Louis, the hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint – Germain, Sir Stephen , all that stuff was shit. All the same, the book had a passion, a vitality that swept everything before it.
‘It’s submission,’ Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God. You see,’ he went on, ‘Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such , Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha – unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called “the prince of the world”? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to His laws. In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea to learn about Islam by reading the Koran, unless of course you take the trouble to learn Arabic and read the original text. What I tell people to do instead is listen to the suras read aloud, and repeat them, so you can feel their breath and their force. In any case, Islam is the only religion where it’s forbidden to use any translations in the liturgy, because the Koran is made up entirely of rhythms, rhymes, refrains, assonance. It starts with the idea, the basic idea of all poetry, that sound and sense can be made one, and so can speak the world.’
…Yes, my intellectual life was finished, though I could still participate in vague colloquia and live on my savings and my pension; but I started to realise – and this was a real novelty – that life might actually have more to offer.

When you are in a fight you can’t win, submission and making the best of things seems like a good idea.
This book deserves its fame. It’s not a fun read, there’s nobody to like, but for me it was a haunting and horrifying read. I don’t look at Islamic civilization right now and see anything the West lacks. I don’t look at Islam and think, “I wish we had more of that in America!” I am open to the argument that increased Islamic immigration blesses Western countries, but I’ve never heard anyone make a compelling case for that.
Here are objective criteria that might lead immigration restrictionists such as myself say, “I’m fine with more immigration from X group.”
1. Net lifetime fiscal contribution. The National Academies panel of 2016 found the 75-year net present value per immigrant swings from strongly positive to strongly negative depending on education level. Test: does the group’s median member, with dependents counted, pay more over a lifetime than he draws? Education distribution, earnings by age, and program participation give you this.
2. Program use compared to natives at the same income. This tests behavior rather than earnings, and it separates a group that is poor from a group that is oriented toward transfers.
3. Second-generation and third-generation trajectory rather than first. Immigrants are selected; their children reveal what the group brings. Test: does the education and earnings gap with natives close by the third generation or persist? George Borjas (b. 1950) documents Mexican third-generation stagnation. East and South Asian convergence runs the other direction, and fast.
4. Crime, adjusted for age and sex, measured in the second generation. First-generation rates flatter almost every group because migrants are self-selected for low time preference.
5. Political and civic attitudes. Support for free speech including blasphemy, legal equality for women, religious liberty for apostates, acceptance of election results. Pew Global Attitudes and the World Values Survey run these instruments. Test: diaspora attitudes sit inside the native distribution by the second generation.
6. Whether the origin state claims authority over its diaspora. Turkey funds and staffs mosques abroad. China runs United Front organs. Eritrea levies a tax on emigrants. A group whose home government organizes it politically on your soil imports a foreign state’s interest along with the people.
7. Naturalization rates and language. Do members seek citizenship, and does second-generation fluency approach universal?
8. Rate and volume, measured against both the receiving population and the co-ethnic population already present. The same group at different rates produces different results. Above a density threshold, enclaves form.
9. Selection control and chain multipliers. A nationality admitted through a points system is a different sample from the same nationality admitted through family reunification. Ask how many additional admissions each primary admission generates over twenty years.
The biggest difference between this novel and the discussion about it is that there is not one negative sentiment about Islam or Muslims in it. Instead, the portrait is overwhelmingly positive.
I love the Acknowledgements at the end: “I did not attend university, and everything I know about academic life I learned from Agathe Novak – Lechevalier, maître de conférences at the University of Paris X – Nanterre. If the backdrop to these inventions of mine is at all credible, it is entirely thanks to her.”
I love Mark Lilla’s review:

Given all this, it will take a long time for the French to read and appreciate Soumission for the strange and surprising thing that it is. Michel Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Soumission is not the story some expected of a coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. It is about a man and a country who through indifference and exhaustion find themselves slouching toward Mecca. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever…
François is shipwrecked in the present. He doesn’t understand why his students are so eager to get rich, or why journalists and politicians are so hollow, or why everyone, like him, is so alone. He believes that “only literature can give you that sensation of contact with another human spirit,” but no one else cares about it. His sometime girlfriend Myriam genuinely loves him but he can’t respond…
Except in the schools, very little seems to happen at first. But over the next months François begins to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. Though the government has established no dress code, he sees fewer skirts and dresses on the street, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. It seems that non-Muslim women have spontaneously adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq describes so chillingly in his other novels. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.
François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, inspired by a religion he knows little about, and which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François, who lives alone and has lost contact with his parents, is impressed. His fantasy (and perhaps Houellebecq’s) is not really the colonial one of the erotic harem. It is closer to what psychologists call the “family romance.”
…At a certain point he couldn’t ignore how much the Islamists’ message overlapped with his own. They, too, idealized the life of simple, unquestioning piety and despised modern culture and the Enlightenment that spawned it. They believed in hierarchy within the family, with wives and children there to serve the father. They, like he, hated diversity—especially diversity of opinion—and saw homogeneity and high birthrates as vital signs of civilizational health. And they quivered with the eros of violence. All that separated him from them was that they prayed on rugs and he prayed at an altar. But the more Rediger reflected, the more he had to admit that in truth European and Islamic civilizations were no longer comparable. By all the measures that really mattered, post-Christian Europe was dying and Islam was flourishing. If Europe was to have a future, it would have to be an Islamic one.

The reader experience with Submission is going to be very different from The Camp of the Saints, which shocks and appalls and angers. Submission moves slowly. There’s no hatred of out-groups. There are no heroes.

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Had We But World Enough: On Reading Marvell at Twenty Two

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Every year, in every English-speaking country, several hundred thousand adolescents receive a photocopy of the finest argument for sex ever written in English and are asked to identify the metaphysical conceits. The teacher discusses the three-part syllogism. If we had time. But we do not. Therefore. The class notes the hyperbole, the tonal shift at line 21, the couplet at the end. Then the bell rings.

Somewhere in that room sits a boy who has just been handed an argument for the only thing he wants and cannot get.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) wrote “To His Coy Mistress” for a coterie of readers who would have recognized every move in it. The carpe diem argument was old when Horace (65-8 BC) made it, and Catullus, Ovid, and Herrick had all worked the same ground. Marvell’s contribution is the compression and the logic. What the poem became, four centuries later, is a document read by the sexually unsuccessful in private, long after the class discussion ends, and read differently by them than by anyone else. Nobody has written about that reader. He is the most numerous reader the poem has.

Start with what he lacks. Fluency. Social skills. Status. He wants and cannot speak, and the gap between the wanting and the speaking is the misery. He rehearses sentences in his head and delivers none of them. He has watched other boys say ordinary things in ordinary voices and get ordinary results, and he cannot work out how it is done.

Marvell’s speaker is nothing except fluency. He has no body in the poem, no face, no circumstances. He is a voice that will not stop until it has won. To read the poem is to borrow a mouth. This is the first and largest part of what the poem does for the boy who cannot speak, and no critical account of the poem has registered it, because critics have assumed a reader who can already talk.

Then notice the situation the poem describes. She is coy. Present tense. She has not said yes. She does not say yes anywhere in the hundred and twenty-four words of argument, and the poem ends with the case still open. The speaker of “To His Coy Mistress” stands, at the moment of speaking, in the same condition as the boy reading it. He wants and has not got. This is why the poem consoles. It is not a report of somebody else’s conquest. It is a record of an unconsummated argument, delivered by a man with everything to say and nothing yet to show. The boy reads it and feels represented.

The middle movement is where the poem takes hold. At my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near. The deserts of vast eternity. The worms that will try that long-preserved virginity. Read as an argument aimed at her, this is pressure applied through the threat of her own decay. Read by the boy, it does something else. It is about his death, not hers.

A twenty-year-old virgin experiences time in a way nobody else does. Every month is a verdict. Every birthday is a figure entered in a ledger he believes everyone else can read. The hurry he feels is shameful to him because it looks, from outside, like appetite without dignity. What Marvell does is convert that private hurry into a cosmic one. Your urgency is not pathetic. It is the condition of a mortal creature under the aspect of eternity. The poem launders shame into philosophy, and the boy takes the loan gratefully, and reads the passage over and over.

He also understands the grotesque better than the erotic. The tomb, the ashes, the worms, the dust. He can picture these. What he cannot picture is a bed with a woman in it, because he has never seen one, and his imagination fails at the point where experience would supply detail. Morbidity and lust arrive in the same year of a boy’s life and the culture gives him almost no text that fuses them without flinching. Marvell fuses them in eight lines.

The last movement runs on force. Roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball. Tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. Make the sun run. There is no tenderness in it. Critics have often held this against the poem, and against the speaker, and the reading is defensible. But a boy who has never been touched has no experience to draw on. He has plenty of experience of force as fantasy, of wanting to break through something that will not open. Marvell’s closing images describe wanting as it feels to somebody who has only ever wanted.

The poem can be read as a man overriding a woman’s reluctance with rhetoric. What that reading assumes is a reader standing where the speaker stands, holding what the speaker holds. The boy in the back row holds nothing. He has no power over any woman anywhere, and he knows it. He experiences the poem as a fantasy of having a chance. The distance between those two is the distance between his life and the speaker’s, and it is the reason the poem works on him because it opens a window into a better life.

He misses the jokes, too. An hundred years to praise the eyes. Two hundred to adore each breast. Thirty thousand to the rest. The hyperbole is comic, and the speaker is a man who talks far too much and knows it, and the poem is partly a comedy about the ratio of argument to result. None of this is visible to a reader for whom nothing in the situation is funny. On first reading the poem is a war cry. Twenty years on it is a joke about a man who has confused eloquence with progress, and the joke is generous, because the man in it is not going to get anywhere.

Marvell gives us no picture of the woman. She has coyness, skin, a heart somewhere, and a body distributed across the world’s geography, rubies by the Ganges, complaints by the Humber. She has no face, no speech, no history, no name. The boy reading does not notice the vacancy, because he has no picture of a woman either. He has a picture of women. The poem is legible to him because its object is empty.

Then he meets somebody. She has a face and opinions and a particular laugh and a way of being wrong about things. He goes back to the poem and finds it smaller. The argument still gleams. The woman is still not there. Some poems open as you age. This one closes. It is a poem calibrated to one condition. A boy needs a text that speaks for the unspeakable painful yearning. That text exists. It has been in the anthologies for three hundred years, and every teacher who assigns it hands a lifeline to a boy in the room.

During the school year 1988-1989 at UCLA, he had this poem above his dorm room bed and he regularly recited it to his girlfriend and any other attractive woman who would listen.

He loses his virginity in February 1989, and afterward the poem doesn’t work the same way. He keeps it anyway. Men keep the stories that get them through stuff.

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On Loving John Donne

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Stanley Fish opens his essay on Donne with a confession. For years he could not teach the poems. He had nothing good to say about them. He kept returning with approval to C. S. Lewis, who had written half a century earlier that Donne is the saddest and most uncomfortable of English poets, and that his verse exerts the fascination we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore, the hot-eyed, unescapable kind. Fish went further than Lewis. He found the poetry sick. He assumed he must be missing whatever everybody else could see.

Then he stopped assuming that. He built the essay out of the aversion because he found a poet who uses language to dominate, poems that exercise verbal power and then report the exercise, so that any question about a local choice receives one answer, that the choice secures further control. That essay has organized Donne criticism for a generation. Defenders of Donne now defend him against Fish.

Read the confession again. Fascination. Inescapability. A voice that will not release you. Fish and Lewis are two hostile witnesses testifying to a grip, and the grip is what the lovers report. Ask a man who reads Donne for pleasure what the pleasure consists of and he will tell you about the sentence that refuses to let him breathe until the last word, the argument that arrives before his objection can form, the feeling of being taken over. He says it fondly. Fish says it and files a complaint. The two camps agree about the sensation and split on the verdict. What divides them is a prior disposition toward being overpowered by words.

John Stuart Mill laid down a rule in 1833. Eloquence is heard. Poetry is overheard. The poet writes as though no one listens. Donne breaks the rule in his first line, every time.

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love. Mark but this flea, and mark in this. Busy old fool, unruly sun. Batter my heart, three-person'd God. Death, be not proud. Go, and catch a falling star.

Someone gets addressed. A woman, God, the sun, Death, a friend who has said something stupid. In none of these is it you. The second-person slot arrives already occupied, and you find yourself standing in the doorway of a room where a man is working on somebody else.

Arthur Marotti supplies the historical fact underneath. Donne wrote for named readers. Friends, patrons, men from the Inns of Court, the woman he married in secret and ruined his career over. The poems went out in manuscript to people who knew who the you was, and they came to us four hundred years late, out of the private circuit and into print. We read another man's correspondence while the ink is still wet. Part of the intoxication is the intoxication of access we were never granted.

Being argued at hurts. Watching a man argue at somebody else, at close range, with everything he has, delights. This is why the syllogisms please. They are aimed past our heads. The flea has bitten her and bitten him, their bloods are mingled in it, so the mingling has already happened and her objection collapses. The logic is fraudulent and we know it and we are not the ones being asked to yield. We get the rhetoric without the bill.

Fish sat down in the chair. Reading in 1990, inside a criticism organized around the critique of masculine rhetoric, he took the addressee's position and reported assault. I read the same work and feel intoxicated.

Donne turns to the reader at length in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and he says, No man is an island. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

There is the address, aimed at us, and it consoles. That passage left literature and entered common speech. When he speaks to somebody else we get intoxicated. When he speaks to us we get a proverb. Two pleasures, and they run on different circuits.

Donne's speakers lose. TThe woman in “The Flea” kills the flea, and the speaker has to improvise a new argument out of the wreckage of the old one. The woman in “Woman’s Constancy” has prepared her exit. The speaker of “The Apparition” is reduced to threatening her with his ghost, which is what a man does after running out of arguments. “The Sun Rising” wins its case against the sun, and the sun keeps rising. The Holy Sonnets ask God for violence and record no answer. A rhetoric this overwhelming, deployed this often, with this rate of failure, might be doing something other than domination.

Hans Robert Jauss gives us the vocabulary for the rest, and Dayton Haskin gives us the evidence. Every generation reads the Donne it needs. The eighteenth century could not read him at all. The Victorians recovered a churchman named Dr. Donne through Izaak Walton's biography, and printed the sermons. Grierson edited him and T. S. Eliot reissued him as the poet of unified sensibility, after which admiring Donne became a credential in modernist company. The the New Critics found the well-made conceit. John Carey found an apostate consumed by ambition. Marotti found a coterie careerist working the patronage circuit. Fish found a coercer. Each of those was the real Donne to the people reading, and each reading tells you as much about its decade as about the poems.

Who loves Donne in 2026?

Donne returns as the poet of the unpermitted address, in a decade that has thought harder about consent to being spoken to than any since the Victorians. Every screen we own delivers speech we did not ask for. We have built an entire apparatus of blocking, muting, unsubscribing, and opting out, and we have grown a fine sensitivity to the demand made without invitation. Donne's imperatives land in that atmosphere and feel dangerous again in a way they did not feel to the the New Critics, who heard only wit. His speaker demands, and accepts that he might be refused, and gets refused, and demands again. That combination has become rare. We are surrounded by address that cannot be argued with and by argument that risks nothing. Donne risks everything on a syllogism and loses.

Roland Barthes divided texts that give pleasure from texts that give bliss. The first confirm the reader in what he already is. The second unsettle him and put his relation to language at hazard. Donne belongs in the second category, and the people who love him love a small controlled annihilation, administered by a stranger, on a schedule of their own choosing, in a room where the door stays open.

Donne's contemporaries copied his poems out by hand into commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies, and Deborah Aldrich Larson has used those books as evidence for his early reputation. What a man chooses to transcribe with a pen is a record of pleasure, made at cost, without an audience, and there are hundreds of such records. The Variorum commentary volumes digest three and a half centuries of what readers said about the Songs and Sonets. Nobody has read either archive with the question of intoxication in hand.

Some readers will always find the voice a bore, and Lewis was too good a critic to be wrong about what he felt. He was wrong only in thinking that what he felt disqualified the poems. He felt the grip. So do I. I close the book with my pulse up and no idea whether the argument was sound, and I go back the next night to be worked on again, from the doorway, while he talks to somebody else.

I like to watch.

Notes

The landmark piece of reader-response criticism proper is Stanley Fish (b. 1938), “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,” in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago, 1990), 223-52. It gets reprinted in Andrew Mousley’s John Donne casebook (1999) and again in Fish’s Versions of Antihumanism (Cambridge, 2012). Fish opens by admitting he could not teach the poems, that he found them sick, and endorsed C. S. Lewis‘s verdict on Donne (1572-1631) as the saddest and most uncomfortable of English poets, whose verse holds a reader the way the worst kind of bore holds him. He then converts that reaction into a thesis: the poems exist as occasions for exercising the power words exert, they report that exercise and stage it again in the reporting, and the answer to any question about a local choice is that it secures further control. Achsah Guibbory, Heather Dubrow, and others have pushed back, and the Essays in Criticism piece “Donne Rethinks Misogyny” (2019) treats Fish as the position to argue against.

Fish had already done the Donne prose. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972) is the standard practical criticism of seventeenth-century texts from the reader-response side, and its Donne text is the sermon Death’s Duell. The method there is what Fish called affective stylistics: track the incremental and disruptive effects of the language on the reader at each stage, and make the reading experience the object of inquiry.

The second tradition is reception history. Dayton Haskin’s John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2007) came out of his Variorum assignment: tracing how Donne’s Songs and Sonets were received between 1800 and 1900, and telling the story the Variorum’s editorial limits would not let him tell, of how the Doctor Donne of Izaak Walton‘s Life became the poet John Donne by 1900. Reviewers call it a reception study that credits Americans other than T. S. Eliot with the recovery, and praise the readings Haskin extracts from nineteenth-century writers rather than critics. Behind that sits A. J. Smith’s John Donne: The Critical Heritage (1975) and the Variorum’s own commentary volumes, one of which digests general and topical commentary on the Songs and Sonets from the early seventeenth century through 1999, with sections on critical reception, autobiography and persona, and the manuscript tradition.

The third tradition studies Donne’s first readers. Arthur Marotti‘s John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986) argues that Donne kept his verse among chosen readers, friends, acquaintances, patrons, and the woman he married, and that criticism has to attend to work designed for manuscript transmission. Ilona Bell‘s “The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets,” SEL 23 (1983), 113-29, reads the poems as addressed to a woman whose implied reactions govern the speaker’s moves. Deborah Aldrich Larson worked the commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies for evidence of Donne’s contemporary reputation in the John Donne Journal 12 (1993).

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Iran Declines as an Empire and Survives as a Veto Power

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Written with AI: Iran will probably decline as an empire and survive as a veto power. That is the base case for 2031.

The United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, 2026. Iran answered with missiles and drones against Israel, American bases, and Arab states, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait struck back at Iran and its allies. Mojtaba Khamenei took the leadership on March 8, 2026, after the death of his father. A June memorandum of understanding gave way to renewed bombing. The United States has just run thirteen consecutive nights of strikes, Donald Trump has said he is not ready to negotiate a ceasefire, and he has promised to destroy a bridge or a power plant for every ship Iran attacks in Hormuz. Oil has passed a hundred dollars a barrel.

Israeli intelligence assesses that the Assembly of Experts elevated Mojtaba Khamenei under pressure from IRGC commanders, that he was seriously wounded, that he now approves rather than formulates military decisions, and that authority sits with a hardline group working through the Supreme National Security Council and the Guards, which has slowed Iranian decision-making to the point where answers to American proposals take days. Iran has already had its revolution. A clerical arbiter has given way to a military committee. That change cuts in two directions and neither is obvious. A committee survives decapitation better than a single man, which lowers the odds of collapse. A committee also cannot seize a diplomatic opening, which lowers the odds of a settlement.

Call that outcome the militarized rump state, and put it at roughly 45 percent. Iran reaches an armistice without a comprehensive agreement. It rebuilds missiles, drones, coastal defenses, and clandestine nuclear work. It holds Hormuz as its main instrument of coercion and its main bargaining chip. The economy stays broken. The IMF projected in April that Iran’s economy shrinks 6.1 percent in 2026 with inflation at 68.9 percent, and the rial has fallen past 1.3 million per dollar. It hit 1.81 million on April 29, down about fifteen percent in a week. The World Bank puts food price inflation at 99 percent year over year in February 2026, and the government has answered with an electronic voucher worth about seven dollars per person for eighty million citizens. Anyone who quotes Iranian economic probabilities to two significant figures should read the footnotes first. Iran has published no GDP data since 2024, and internet blackouts degrade the domestic statistics that remain.

Next, the opaque nuclear threshold, at roughly 20 percent. Most estimates run higher, and the buried infrastructure argues for restraint. The IAEA reports near-total loss of monitoring, an unaccounted-for enriched uranium stockpile, and long-standing compliance failures, and Iran backfilled all three tunnel entrances at its buried enrichment site before the 2026 fighting resumed, sealing them shut. Sealed works against inspectors and against Iranian engineers. American and Iranian officials both say Iran has not resumed enriching uranium, and Iran says it has no plan to recover the buried material. That material, 440.9 kilograms of sixty percent uranium on the eve of the June 2025 attacks, holds enough for perhaps nine weapons if Iran can reach it and process it. Ambiguity remains Tehran’s best available play.

Negotiated rehabilitation deserves about 15 percent, and the reason it stays low goes past Iranian stubbornness. Iran no longer commands the assets it needs to trade. Houthi fighters sank two commercial bulk carriers in the Red Sea in early July 2026. The Houthis have announced a blockade of Saudi Arabia. Both serve Houthi aims. Tehran cannot credibly promise Washington to switch off men who fight for their own reasons. The standard account says Iran lost its proxies. The sharper claim is that Iran lost command and kept alignment. That arrangement raises Iranian disruption per dollar spent and destroys the merchandise Iran needs at a table. Cheap influence and sellable influence are different goods, and Iran now holds the first.

Fragmentation and strategic collapse take the remaining 15 percent or so, and the evidence runs both ways. The protests of December 2025 and January 2026 were suppressed without any sign of defection from the government or its security forces. That is the strongest single argument against collapse. Set against it: the Guards and Basij have stayed deployed in the streets for months, the parliament remains suspended to keep factional conflict out of public view, and the judiciary is fast-tracking death sentences for protesters. A state that suspends its own legislature and executes young people is buying time and paying for it.

The comparative question changes once you notice that the coalition facing Iran is splitting. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had diverged sharply by 2026 and now find themselves more in competition than agreement, with the UAE resenting Saudi efforts to attract capital away from it and Saudi warmth toward Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan. A new grouping of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey has formed outside the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the UAE is absent from it. Iran in 2031 faces two Arab poles rather than one. That fragmentation offsets some of the rearmament aimed at Tehran.

Islamabad sent 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia after the ceasefire. The September 2025 Saudi-Pakistani mutual defense agreement proved largely symbolic when Iran hit Saudi civilian infrastructure, and Riyadh’s answer to its threat environment is multidirectional hedging, including Turkish co-production and technology transfer on the Kaan fighter program. If the Saudi response to a threshold Iran runs through Pakistan and Turkey rather than through a Saudi weapon, the Iranian nuclear option buys less coercive return than the standard model assumes.

Iraq is the prize. Iraqi militia attacks on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states drew a joint Gulf statement demanding Baghdad stop them, and Gulf messaging has made clear that continued attacks damage the effort to realign Iraq with the Arab world. Forecasts that treat Iraq as an Iranian buffer zone have the pressure running the wrong way.

My ranking for 2031 puts Israel and Turkey at the top on aggregate capability, Saudi Arabia and Iran below them with Riyadh stronger in money and coalition-building and Tehran stronger in coercion, and the UAE and Egypt influential without deciding much alone. Iran might rank fourth in constructive power, meaning the capacity to finance development, attract allies, and build institutions. It might rank first in destructive leverage, meaning the capacity to raise oil prices, close shipping lanes, strike infrastructure, and force other states to change their behavior. Iranian hegemony is very unlikely. Iranian disappearance as a major power is also unlikely.

The variable that moves this forecast most is American. Trump went from a June memorandum to a naval blockade to threats against bridges inside five months. Iranian commanders issue warnings daily, and the strikes have run seven nights, then thirteen. The base rate for the United States sustaining this intensity across five years is low. Most published scenarios hold American commitment constant and vary Iran. Reverse the two and the weights move further than anything Tehran chooses to do.

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The Rescue Witness: How Former Performers Became the Face of the Fight Against Pornography

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

The Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas holds the Adult Entertainment Expo every January. The aisles fill with middle-aged men wearing lanyards and cameras, moving from booth to booth for autographs and photographs. In a far corner of the hall sat a table of anti-porn tracts under a pink banner. Most of the men who wandered that deep into the building looked at the banner and kept walking. The booth belonged to the Pink Cross Foundation. Its volunteers wore black T-shirts with a hot pink cross on the front. On some shirts, beneath the cross, ran a second line: “Ex-Porn Star.” A poster read “Porn Is Not Glamorous.” The woman who ran the booth, Shelley Lubben (1968-2019), had performed in hardcore films in the mid-1990s under the name Roxy. She had come back to the industry’s largest trade show to talk performers into leaving it.

Two hundred miles of desert highway and a decade of history separate that booth from the older image of the anti-pornography campaigner: the priest at a city council hearing, the prosecutor with a stack of magazines, the feminist theorist at a lectern. By the 2000s the movement’s face had changed. The person standing between the industry and the public was now, in the most visible cases, a former participant. She had an entry story, an exit story, an organization with a memorable name, and continuing contact with people still inside. Her previous work in the industry supplied the credential on which her fame rested.

The people who became known for helping others leave pornography came from several traditions that sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought: religious campaigns against obscenity, radical feminist opposition to pornography, evangelical outreach to sex workers, survivor-led ministries, anti-trafficking organizations, and campaigns against nonconsensual material on internet platforms. What connected them over time was the emergence of a recognizable public character, the rescue witness, and the two clearest examples were Lubben and Annie Lobert (b. 1967), founder of Hookers for Jesus. Their fame came entirely from their public campaigns to rescue sex workers.

They became familiar to audiences watching Christian television, documentaries, conference speeches, legislative testimony, and online video. Their names circulated among churches, anti-trafficking coalitions, adult-industry performers, and journalists covering the cultural politics of pornography. Each joined a personal exit story to an organization whose name did half the publicity work. Pink Cross and Hookers for Jesus functioned at once as brands, institutions, and stories.

The earliest organized American campaigns against pornography paid little attention to helping performers leave. Operation Yorkville, established in New York in 1962, became Morality in Media and then, in 2015, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The changing names track a longer migration from the vocabulary of obscenity and morality to the vocabulary of exploitation. The public figures of that tradition were clergy, lawyers, prosecutors, and legislators.

A separate anti-pornography tradition grew inside feminism during the 1970s. Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media formed in San Francisco in 1977 after a conference on violence against women. Along with Women Against Pornography in New York and Women Against Violence Against Women in Los Angeles, it moved pornography toward the center of the feminist agenda through demonstrations, tours of adult-entertainment districts, and campaigns against violent or degrading images. These campaigns also split feminism into factions that have never reconciled, divided over censorship, free speech, labor, and the relation between images and violence. The movement’s spokesmen were writers and theorists: Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005), Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946), Susan Brownmiller (1935-2025), Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), Robin Morgan (b. 1941), Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). Their institutional product was argument. They built conferences and ordinances, seldom shelters or job programs.

The prototype of the rescue witness appeared inside that feminist campaign. Linda Boreman (1949-2002), known professionally as Linda Lovelace, was already famous from Deep Throat, released in 1972. After the publication of her memoir Ordeal in 1980, in which she described her husband and manager Chuck Traynor (1937-2002) as violent and coercive, she became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement. She appeared with Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Steinem, spoke at universities, and testified before government bodies. Her celebrity gave anti-pornography activists access to audiences that theory alone could not reach.

Her testimony is too inconsistent to serve as reliable proof of almost anything. Four autobiographical books published under her name gave divergent accounts of her sexuality, her participation in pornography, and her marriage. The first two presented her as an enthusiastic sexual adventurer. The later books described beatings, forced prostitution, rape, and performances compelled at gunpoint. The earlier books were shaped or written by other people, and claims in the later account were disputed by performers, filmmakers, and people who had known Boreman and Traynor.

Her historical importance survives those conflicts. Activists presented Boreman as the paradigmatic witness whose first-person account revealed what the finished film concealed. Her biography became testimony, publicity, and political argument at the same time, and she established the pattern in which one former performer’s story served as evidence about an entire industry for people who wanted that story.

Dworkin and MacKinnon tried to convert this testimony into law through the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which defined certain pornography as a practice of sex discrimination and created civil causes of action for coercion into performance, forcing pornography on a person, trafficking in covered materials, and assault caused by particular pornography. Minneapolis passed versions in late 1983; Mayor Donald Fraser (1924-2019) vetoed them. Indianapolis enacted a modified ordinance in 1984. The Seventh Circuit struck it down in American Booksellers Ass'n v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985), aff'd mem., 475 U.S. 1001 (1986), holding that the ordinance regulated expression by content and viewpoint; coercion and assault could be punished under laws of general application, while Indianapolis had attached liability to whether sexually explicit material expressed a forbidden view of women. The Supreme Court affirmed without opinion.

The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, the Meese Commission, developed at the same time from a different political tradition and published its two-volume report in 1986. Boreman testified before it and repeated her account of coercion. A federal commission had now adopted the former performer as a source of public knowledge about a private industry. But Boreman built no lasting organization. She remained a witness and speaker, and the practical work of assistance, where it existed, stayed scattered among churches, social workers, attorneys, therapists, and informal networks. The later movement would gather those functions around single founders.

Home video, cable, and the internet changed both pornography and the campaigns against it. Pornography grew more accessible while evangelical Christianity grew more media-fluent, with websites, recovery programs, testimony videos, and deliberately unconventional brands. The line between ministry, media production, and nonprofit promotion blurred.

XXXchurch, founded by Craig Gross and Mike Foster in 2002, became the national example. It called itself “the Number 1 Christian Porn Site,” launched at the AVN show in Las Vegas, and gave away accountability software that reported a user’s browsing to a designated partner. Its signature move was physical presence inside the industry’s commercial spaces. Gross and fellow pastor JR Mahon walked the Las Vegas convention floor handing out New Testaments stamped “Jesus loves porn stars,” with an ABC Nightline crew documenting the trip. At the show Gross stood in front of a tall sign in early-1970s lettering, telling a reporter, “we really just want to help people.” He toured colleges debating Ron Jeremy (b. 1953), the industry’s best-known male performer, sharing a twelve-passenger bus with Jeremy, his own wife, and his two young children. Jeremy, for his part, told CNN, “I like what Craig does, believe it or not.” The debates settled nothing and were never meant to. They put a pastor and a porn star on the same stage, and the stage was the point. Religious outreach would now happen inside the industry’s rooms rather than on the sidewalk outside with a megaphone.

Heather Veitch (b. 1974) extended the method through JC’s Girls. Veitch had worked as a stripper for four years before leaving the industry in 1999. She founded JC’s Girls on Good Friday in March 2005 at Sandals Church in Riverside, California, with the support of the California Southern Baptist Convention, and in January 2006 the organization took a booth at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo that drew heavy traffic and news coverage. At the booth her volunteers handed women Bibles wrapped in T-shirts printed “Holy Hotties.” The booth was dressed to match the exhibits around it, and the visual continuity generated coverage from London to India. The ministry supported women who wished to leave the industry without pressing the others to quit, a policy that drew fire from Veitch’s own religious flank. A Baptist minister from San Bernardino commended her zeal, asked how a woman could stay in the industry and keep a relationship with God, and cited the verse about serving two masters. Veitch answered, “Do we ask gluttons to stop eating too much before they come to church?” Even the industry’s parodists confirmed the model’s visibility: adherents of the Raëlian movement formed “Raël’s Girls,” copying the outreach format while encouraging sex workers to stay and enjoy the work.

JC’s Girls introduced most of the features that would define the survivor-rescuer. A former sex-industry participant led the organization and gave it her story. Outreach occurred in clubs and conventions. The name provoked, and the branding borrowed the industry’s own visual language. Websites and television turned local ministry into national story. What Veitch’s model lacked was infrastructure for the day after the conversation: housing, therapy, case management. Two women in Las Vegas and California were about to add it.

Annie Lobert came out of the Las Vegas escort economy. Born September 26, 1967, in Minneapolis, the daughter of Chet and Joanne Lobert, she graduated from Frederic High School in Wisconsin in 1986 and worked as a Las Vegas call girl for more than ten years, leaving after a near-fatal overdose and repeated beatings from pimps. This distinction shapes everything about her organization. Hookers for Jesus was never narrowly a program for women leaving pornographic film production. It addressed prostitution, escorting, stripping, and trafficking, with pornography folded into a broader conception of the commercial sex trade.

She founded Hookers for Jesus in 2005 as a survivor-led outreach, built around what she summarized as Hook, Hope, Help, and Heal: outreach, Jesus, housing, restoration. In 2007 she set up the Destiny House safe-house program through The Church at South Las Vegas, because, as she later put it in an interview, she had nowhere to bring the girls. The house changed the practical meaning of her work. Contact in a casino, hotel, club, or jail was only the first step. A woman leaving a controlling pimp might need secure housing, transportation, identification documents, medical care, therapy, legal help, and protection. An organization that could supply those things was doing something different from an organization that could supply a conversation.

Television made her a national figure. Investigation Discovery aired the three-part series Hookers: Saved on the Strip in 2010, following Lobert, who had sold her body in the city for over a decade, as she and her volunteers worked casino floors, nightclubs, and escort circuits that other organizations avoided, and as three women at Destiny House confronted their pimps, their court dates, and the problem of earning a legal living. The documentary form put the uncertain middle of an exit on screen, the part between the first conversation and the redemption story. Her memoir, Fallen: Out of the Sex Industry & Into the Arms of the Savior, followed in 2015. The status details of her life reinforced the brand: in 2009 she married Oz Fox (b. 1961), guitarist of the Christian metal band Stryper, a union of Vegas ministry and Sunset Strip religion that no publicist could have improved.

Her organization’s name did the same work as Veitch’s. Hookers for Jesus states the reversal in three words: former identity, new allegiance, target audience. Federal recognition eventually followed, and with it scrutiny. In 2020 the organization received a Department of Justice grant and drew criticism over its 2018 safe-house handbook, which described homosexuality as immoral and made attendance at weekly church services mandatory. The episode marked the boundary dispute of the whole movement in miniature: a survivor-led religious charity performing a social service that secular agencies had not performed, funded by a government constitutionally barred from establishing religion.

Hookers for Jesus remains active in 2026. It currently describes Destiny House and Dream House as separate residences offering no-charge transitional housing, with trauma-informed care, jail programs at the Clark County Detention Center, and Saturday Night Love outreach to the Strip hotels. The organization reports having served more than 15,000 women across twenty years of residential care, outreach, and case management. That figure is the organization’s own service count. It records contacts and assistance, without establishing how many contacts became departures, program completions, or durable independence.

Shelley Lubben built the parallel institution for pornography proper. Born May 18, 1968, in Pasadena, she performed in hardcore films in 1993 and 1994 under the name Roxy, battling drug and alcohol addiction during and after her years in the industry. In 2005 she began an aggressive online campaign, using social-networking sites to contact people in the sex industry, and in 2008 she established the Pink Cross Foundation, which concentrated on outreach and evangelism to performers and support for those wishing to leave. When she identified interested people, she sent care packages: religious literature, Bibles, Christian music, grocery and department-store gift cards. The gift card is the movement’s most concrete artifact. It answers the objection that testimony costs the witness nothing; groceries are a material offer, small enough to accept without commitment.

Lubben concentrated in one person the roles that earlier movements had distributed among many. She was the former performer giving testimony, the evangelist addressing churches, the founder raising money, the outreach worker messaging current performers, and the political witness in Sacramento. She supported a California legislator’s effort to tax the industry, describing to lawmakers the scenes she said she had experienced on hardcore sets. She spoke to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and she formed an alliance of convenience with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation over condom requirements on porn sets, an organization founded to protect gay men joining forces with a woman who had preached that Jesus saves homosexuals. “We didn't have much in common,” she told a reporter, aside from wanting health and safety laws enforced. Her accounts of the industry, infections, injuries, drug use, and the difficulty of finding straight work afterward were presented as her experience and her conclusions, and her speeches often moved between personal memory, claims about other performers, and statements about the industry at large without keeping the evidentiary lines distinct.

The industry quickly picked up there was something off about Lubben. Porners kept telling me she was not what she claimed, and they didn’t say that about the other crusaders who tried to to live by their principles. I kept hearing accounts of Lubben’s lewd and off-brand behavior at porn events, all in the name of outreach. In 2011 the industry advocate Michael Whiteacre made her the subject of a documentary, The Devil and Shelley Lubben, that disputed her account of her career. Some of the criticism came from women she had helped. A former associate complained to LA Weekly that when the performer Kacey Jordan received flowers, Lubben posted the picture online with an appeal for donations; every act of help, the associate said, became a fundraising occasion. The same article noted that a critic had parsed Pink Cross’s tax returns on YouTube and found little, and it quoted Crissy Moran of the rival outreach group Treasures drawing her own distinction: “We're not anti-porn. We are pro-women.”

Pink Cross closed in the mid-2010s. Lubben died on February 9, 2019, at the age of fifty. Google/Gemini report the death as a drug overdose. “Shelley Lubben died from an apparent accidental drug overdose. She passed away on February 9, 2019, at the age of 50 in Springville, California. Death Details: Date: February 9, 2019. Location: Springville, California. Circumstances: Found unresponsive by a friend in a trailer area; deputies reported no signs of foul play or suicide, pointing initially to an accidental overdose.” She was living in a trailer park. The organization did not survive its founder, but her recorded testimony did. Sermons, interviews, and reposted clips remained searchable and kept reaching new audiences, a structural feature of the digital rescue movement: the institution can die while the witness keeps speaking.

While Lubben focused on pornography, performers, and the behavior of consumers; Pink Cross was an outreach and transitional-support network, Lobert focused on prostitution, trafficking, hotels, and jails; Hookers for Jesus became a residential and case-management institution. Their common structure explains why both became famous. Each converted a former sex-industry identity into a claim of specialist knowledge. Each built an organization whose name told the story. Each placed personal testimony at the center of fundraising and outreach. Each became better known for the work of bringing others out than for the work she had once performed.

While clergy, lawyers, and organizers could be dismissed as people who had never set foot on a set or a casino floor, Lubben, Lobert, and Veitch could claim the industry’s language, its networks, its working arrangements, and its pressures as firsthand knowledge. The structure also suited television. A policy organization offers no protagonist. A founder with an entry story, an exit story, an organization, and continuing contact with people still inside offers a complete narrative arc, and that arc, entry, injury, conversion, return, ran through the memoirs, documentaries, sermons, and podcasts of the whole movement. Its usefulness to media says nothing about whether any single account was accurate or representative. It explains why founders became famous while caseworkers, therapists, shelter staff, and donors stayed invisible.

The role outlived its creators. In July 2019, Craig Gross handed leadership of XXXchurch to Brittni De La Mora, who had performed for years under the name Jenna Presley, and her husband, Pastor Rich De La Mora, saying he had heard the Lord tell him in prayer to give them the ministry. De La Mora traced her own conversion to the “Jesus loves porn stars” sign she had seen at an adult convention while still performing, which gave the succession the closed shape of a parable: the ministry’s outreach product returned as the ministry’s leader. Gross left to launch a venture called Christian Cannabis, a detail that says something about the entrepreneurial religious culture from which the movement came.

Joshua Broome became the visible male version of the survivor-preacher. Performing as Rocco Reed, he worked in pornography from 2006 to 2013, then became a Baptist pastor in Iowa, a speaker, and a podcast regular, describing a career that brought money and profound isolation. His significance is architectural rather than statistical, and it does not depend on promotional claims about how many films he made. The dominant rescue narrative had cast women as the recovered and men as consumers, producers, pimps, or pastors. Broome showed the same public structure could carry a man, and the podcast era gave him distribution that required no television network and no permanent organization.

While the character stabilized, the industry it addressed dissolved and reformed. Tube sites, webcams, and subscription platforms scattered production from studios into apartments. OnlyFans, founded in 2016, attached pornography to the creator economy: the performer became her own producer, marketer, and distributor, paid through subscriptions and tips. This broke the movement’s geography. There was no longer a set, a club, or a convention where outreach could find a large share of the population. Decentralization also failed to remove intermediaries; it replaced studios with platforms, payment processors, and recommendation systems, leaving the performer with more control over production and continued dependence on a company’s rules and its willingness to move her money. Meanwhile the tube sites concentrated distribution in a handful of firms. MindGeek, renamed Aylo in August 2023, aggregated professional, pirated, and user-uploaded material at a scale no studio had approached.

The platform era produced a new kind of rescue celebrity. Laila Mickelwait was never a performer. She had spent years at the anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry when, in February 2020, she published an op-ed accusing Pornhub of hosting rape and child sexual-abuse material, launching the Traffickinghub campaign and a petition that gathered more than two million signatures from 192 countries. On December 4, 2020, Nicholas Kristof (b. 1959) published “The Children of Pornhub” in the New York Times after months of investigation, describing videos he said recorded assaults on unconscious women and girls; Pornhub denied the allegations, and Mastercard announced an investigation within days. Visa and Mastercard cut ties with the site, which then deleted roughly ten million videos, the material uploaded by unverified users, and restricted future uploads to verified accounts. Mickelwait credits Kristof’s article with breaking a year of corporate inaction; the card companies had expressed concern repeatedly, she said, and moved only under the pressure that followed the Times. The changes came from a convergence of survivor lawsuits, journalism, advocacy, investor pressure, and corporate self-protection, and no single actor can claim them. Mickelwait went on to found the Justice Defense Fund and published a book, Takedown, in 2024.

Her rise redefined the central act of rescue. For Lubben the act was a conversation at a booth; for Lobert, a bed in a house; for Mickelwait, the removal of a video and the severing of a payment rail. Digital permanence had complicated the classic exit story. A woman can stop producing pornography without withdrawing what exists; copies persist on tube sites, piracy networks, and private drives, and her name stays searchable. Leaving production and leaving circulation are separate processes, and the second can take years or fail. The photographs of the movement changed accordingly. Lubben was photographed at a booth inside the Sands. Mickelwait appears with screenshots, legal filings, and payment-company announcements. The site replaced the studio and the street as the location of intervention.

Every phase of this history generated its counter-tradition, and the objections repeat across fifty years. In the early 1980s the U.S. Prostitutes Collective picketed Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media, demanding the organization respect sex workers’ decisions and stop interfering with their livelihoods. In December 2020, performers pointed out that the Visa and Mastercard cutoff fell on the workers who depended on the platform, and sex-worker advocates noted that the campaign against Pornhub was run by organizations opposed to the industry as such, whatever its moderation practices. A 2022 study of unsolicited anti-trafficking text messages found that the workers receiving them often experienced the messages as irrelevant, stigmatizing, or indistinguishable from spam, and recommended outreach built around the recipient’s stated needs and consent. The dispute over who may speak for participants predates the internet, the trafficking statutes, and the convention ministries. Organizations like Hookers for Jesus partly answer it in their service language, which describes help for women who want to escape, placing willingness inside the program’s formal definition even where the surrounding publicity speaks of rescue.

The movement’s public record favors testimony over measurement. Organizations publish counts of contacts, gift bags, residents, petition signatures, and removed videos. Those figures record activity. Exit has no single definition: it may mean a weekend away, a permanent departure, a completed program, a removed video, or services accepted by a woman who stays. Without shared definitions and independent follow-up, the numbers from different organizations cannot be compared, and no one can say which model worked best. A first-person story requires no such apparatus. It fits a sermon, a documentary, a podcast, and a fundraising letter, which is why fame attached to the founders and never to the process.

The gallery, viewed whole, contains every variation on a single figure. Boreman, the famous performer whose contested testimony a movement adopted. Dworkin and MacKinnon, the theorists who tried to turn testimony into a cause of action. Gross, the pastor with the sign and the tour bus. Veitch, the former dancer with Bibles wrapped in T-shirts. Lubben, the former performer with a foundation and a booth in the far corner of the hall. Lobert, the survivor with a safe house and a metal guitarist for a husband. De La Mora and Broome, the survivor-preachers of the podcast era. Mickelwait, the campaigner with the petition and the payment processors. The industry moved from theaters to film sets to tube sites to subscription accounts, and rescue moved with it, from picket lines to booths to safe houses to content removal and corporate pressure. The most recognizable form remains the one Lubben and Lobert fixed in place: the former participant who returns with an organization, a first-person story, and an offer to the people still inside.

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