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Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds his sociology on a single unit: the situation. Not the individual, not the structure, but the encounter. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) he extends Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Erving Goffman (1922-1982) into a general theory. … Continue reading → The post Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
Dennis Prager (b. 1948) and his wife Susan sued (26SMCV01561) over his care following the November 12, 2024 shower fall that left him quadriplegic with a C3-C4 spinal cord injury. The case has gone through three phases so far, and … Continue reading → The post Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit first appeared on Luke Ford .
What is a ‘Received Idea’?
A “received idea” (French: idée reçue) is a commonplace, stereotypical, conventional, or clichéd opinion that circulates widely in society and is accepted and repeated without critical examination, original thought, or supporting evidence. The concept comes from Gustave Flaubert. In his … Continue reading → The post What is a ‘Received Idea’? first appeared
Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
The Paris Court of Appeal announced it would rule at 1:30 in the afternoon on July 7, 2026. The case concerned Marine Le Pen (b. 1968) and the misuse of European Parliament funds, but the man whose future hung on … Continue reading → The post Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality first appeared on Luke Ford .
Nigel Farage
On the morning of July 7, 2026, Nigel Farage (b. 1964) walked into Reform UK‘s headquarters at Millbank, a short walk along the Thames from the Parliament he had spent thirty years attacking and two years occupying. He was sixty-two. … Continue reading → The post Nigel Farage first appeared on Luke Ford .
The Coalition-Proximity Rule
Graeme Wood (b. 1979) published “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic, and built the article from Haykel’s analysis. Wood took a sentence that meant one thing in Haykel’s field and let it mean another somewhere else. Inside the study … Continue reading → The post The Coalition-Proximity Rule first appeared on Luke Ford .
Marine Le Pen
The bomb went off at four in the morning on November 2, 1976. Twenty kilograms of dynamite had been stacked in the stairwell of the apartment building at 22 Villa Poirier, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. The blast tore … Continue reading → The post Marine Le Pen first appeared on Luke Ford .
Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
In 1996, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) went on French television to attack French television. The two lectures, published as On Television, made a claim that sounded like media criticism but was social theory. The journalistic field, he argued, enjoyed little autonomy. … Continue reading → The post Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Ir
Walker Connor (1926-2017)
In the summer of 1944, an eighteen-year-old from South Hadley, Massachusetts, enlisted in the United States Army and shipped out to the South Pacific. South Hadley was a paper-mill town on the Connecticut River, Catholic and working class in large … Continue reading → The post Walker Connor (1926-2017) first appeared on Luke Ford .
Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
In 1984, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a firefight in Tripoli, Lebanon. Bernard Haykel (b. 1968) survived by luck. His parents, a French-Lebanese surgeon raised in Guadeloupe and an American mother of Polish descent, had come to Lebanon on their … Continue reading → The post Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun first appeared on Luke Ford
Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
Cambridge, November 1956. Students from India and Ceylon marched through the streets to protest the Anglo-French attack on Egypt. A crowd of English undergraduates, big men from the boat clubs and rugby fields, fell on them and started swinging. Benedict … Continue reading → The post Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination first appeared on Luke Ford
Ernest Gellner
Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) died at the Prague airport on Sunday, November 5, 1995. He had just flown back from a meeting of the Central European University Senate in Budapest, and the heart attack struck him a month and four days … Continue reading → The post Ernest Gellner first appeared on Luke Ford .
Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
On the evening of October 24, 1995, two men faced each other at the University of Warwick. The older man, Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), had fled Prague as a boy ahead of the Nazis, fought his way back into Europe with … Continue reading → The post Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer first appeared on Luke Ford .
Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
On the evening of February 22, 2024, more than eighty people gathered at the Legatum Institute, a think tank housed in a Mayfair townhouse a short walk from Grosvenor Square. The crowd ran to politicians, journalists, think tank directors, and … Continue reading → The post Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible first appeared on Luke Ford .
California Historian Kevin Starr
On June 25, 1978, Harvey Milk (1930-1978) stood before hundreds of thousands of people at San Francisco City Hall and named his enemies. He named Anita Bryant (1940-2024), the singer who had led the campaign to repeal a gay rights … Continue reading → The post California Historian Kevin Starr first appeared on Luke Ford .
Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
Around noon on a drizzly late-winter day in 2005, a newspaper columnist walking through Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles heard music. He followed the sound past the office workers with their lunch bags and found a man standing beside … Continue reading → The post Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist first appeared on Luke Ford .
Dominic Cummings: A Biography
The chief adviser arrived half an hour late to his own press conference. It was May 25, 2020, a hot bank holiday Monday, and Dominic Cummings (b. 1971) walked out of the back of 10 Downing Street into the rose … Continue reading → The post Dominic Cummings: A Biography first appeared on Luke Ford .
Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
In the winter of 1987, an American graduate student stepped off a train in Magnitogorsk, a steel city in the southern Urals that had been closed to foreigners for half a century. The air tasted of sulfur. The blast furnaces … Continue reading → The post Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power first appeared on Luke Ford .
The Place That Comforts: A Life of Naama Goldstein
She was sixteen the year she filled a brown notebook and titled it The Purple Book. The school was a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem, the kind where the creative work of a year amounted to a personal essay, a … Continue reading → The post The Place That Comforts: A Life of Naama Goldstein first appeared on Luke Ford .
Sana Krasikov and the Price of Belief
The girl is eight years old when she comes off the plane at John F. Kennedy. She arrives with her parents, her older sister, and her grandparents, out of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, released by a system that has … Continue reading → The post Sana Krasikov and the Price of Belief first appeared on Luke Ford .