Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace

Gemini says: The relationship between Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace was a deep, competitive friendship that soured following Wallace's 2008 suicide. Following Wallace's death, his literary estate has managed his works, while Franzen has penned controversial, unvarnished essays detailing his complicated grief. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. The Relationship & Feud

Franzen and Wallace were literary contemporaries and close friends who famously had a complex, "competitive wounding" dynamic. After Wallace’s suicide, Franzen published a highly controversial, raw essay in The New Yorker titled "Farther Away". In the essay, Franzen expressed immense anger over Wallace's death, describing the suicide as an act that betrayed and inflicted pain on those closest to him. He also pushed back against the "saintly" public mythos surrounding Wallace, arguing that the late author was much more troubled and complex. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

2. David Foster Wallace's Literary Estate

Wallace's literary estate is overseen by his widow, the artist and writer Karen Green, along with his agent and attorney. The estate guards his legacy closely. For example, they formally disavowed the 2015 film The End of the Tour (based on the road-trip memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), objecting to Wallace being turned into a Hollywood character. [1, 2, 3, 4]

3. Franzen's Ongoing Reflections

Franzen frequently writes about his late friend's work. In the years since Wallace's death, Franzen has explored the contrast between Wallace's pursuit of avant-garde, "art for art's sake" fiction and his own desire to remain grounded in social reality. Many literary critics also draw comparisons between the two; readers and scholars often note eerie similarities between Wallace’s famous characters and individuals found in Franzen’s later novels, such as his 2021 work, Crossroads.

'Raphael Health'

Gemini says: "Raphael Health" was a fraudulent entity operated by Los Angeles resident Harold Ten as a front to exploit terminally ill patients, steal their health data, and facilitate multi-million dollar variable annuity fraud. [1]

Operating in a scheme orchestrated by Philip M. Horowitz in the mid-2000s, Ten used "Raphael Health" to pose as a charitable organization that provided "assistance" to hospice patients. In reality, this was a scam to secretly harvest the identities and medical records of dying individuals. These details were then used to purchase variable annuities that contained "guaranteed minimum death benefits," allowing the fraudsters to cash out illegally when the patients passed away. [1]

In March 2014, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought civil fraud and administrative charges against Harold Ten and other involved parties for their roles in orchestrating and executing the scheme. To protect yourself from similar charity scams, always verify non-profits using official lookup tools such as the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search or Charity Navigator. [1, 2]

LAT: 'Wave of Wealth: Iranians No Ordinary Group of Immigrants'

The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 4, 1990:

Their first toehold in their new land was no squalid, crowded “Little Tehran” but rather the gracious hillsides of Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills and other nearby neighborhoods of the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

Khomeini’s revolution drove about half of Iran’s 80,000 Jews into exile. A few headed for New York or Israel, but the vast majority of those emigrants, probably at least 30,000, have settled in or near Beverly Hills.

Not all are fabulously wealthy. While some families have bought or built mansions north of Sunset Boulevard, at least as many are crowded into rent-controlled apartments on the south side of town.

But whether rich or merely middle-class, they have, like most immigrants before them, brought change to their adopted home and have themselves been changed by life in America.

“Before the Iranians came, this city was a sleepy city,” said Beverly Hills real estate broker Stephan Saeed Nourmand, an Iranian who moved to the area in the early ‘70s and has been on hand for the wave that followed. “Sure there were celebrities, but it was still a small town. There was a gas station and a hardware store on Rodeo Drive.”

The Iranians, Nourmand said, brought more than money.

“They brought their talents too. There were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, retailers, manufacturers--a variety of people who came and immediately contributed by boosting Beverly Hills’ international image,” he said

The stamp of Iranian success is seen in the glitzy Rodeo Collection, trendy shops and eateries on Rodeo Drive built by Dar Mahboubi, who is also part-owner of the fashionable Bijan boutiques of Beverly Hills and New York. Adrays, a chain of discount department stores, is owned by Masud Hakim and two partners. And Iranian-born developer Kambiz Hemkat is building a 22-story Center West tower in Westwood.

Nowhere is the immigrants’ impact more evident than in the Beverly Hills Unified School District, where nearly one out of every five students is Iranian. Their language, Farsi, is incorporated in announcements sent home to parents and taught in after-school classes to the children.

The district has hired a full-time counselor to ease the transition for students and to sensitize administrators and teachers to Iranian culture. And thousands of dollars have been contributed by parents to the Beverly Hills schools through the Iranian Education Foundation.

Despite this, many Iranians still manage to live their lives nearly surrounded in the culture of their homeland--going to Iranian nightclubs, worshiping at Iranian synagogues, shopping for clothing and jewelry at Iranian businesses.

The majority of the Beverly Hills-area Iranians are Jewish, and in many respects, they form a community of their own. At times, however, they also function as part of a larger Iranian community that is estimated to number 300,000 in Southern California. For Iranian Muslims, the largest concentrations are in Palos Verdes and Irvine. Ethnic Armenians from Iran have migrated in substantial numbers to Glendale, already home to a large Armenian community.

Gemini says: Persian Jewish business success is driven by a strong cultural emphasis on education, tight-knit community networks that foster trust and mentorship, and a history of forced adaptability. Because of minority status and frequent displacement, they historically gravitated toward easily transportable skills, finance, and trade. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Key factors contributing to their entrepreneurial success include:

• Adaptive Entrepreneurship: Often operating as minorities in environments with restricted land ownership and occupational barriers, Persian Jews developed a strong survival and self-sufficiency instinct. Starting one's own business became the most reliable way to secure a livelihood.
• Deep Community Support: Businesses often thrive because of built-in community networks. Strong trust and loyalty within the network lower transaction costs and encourage sharing resources, mentorship, and contracts with fellow community members.
• Financial Literacy & International Trade: Trading and finance skills have been culturally ingrained over generations. Because of a historic lack of geographic security, many families prioritized tangible, mobile assets (like gold, textiles, and real estate) and built international trade networks spanning from Iran to hubs like Los Angeles and New York.
• Next-Generation Mentorship: Business ownership is often a family affair. Knowledge, capital, and trade connections are deliberately passed down to the younger generation, building compounding economic success over decades. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Los Angeles Ponzi Schemes

Gemini: Los Angeles has been the site of several massive Ponzi schemes, most notably the Zachary Horwitz ($650 million) and NASI ($135 million) cases. These schemes often use the region's prominent industries—such as Hollywood film distribution or real estate—as a backdrop to lure investors with promises of high, guaranteed returns. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Recent & Notable Ponzi Cases in Los Angeles

• Zachary Horwitz (1inMM Capital): Sentenced in February 2022 to 20 years in federal prison for a $650 million scheme. He falsely claimed to have licensing deals with platforms like Netflix and HBO to secure investor funds, which he instead used to fund a lavish lifestyle and pay off earlier investors.
• Non-Atomic (NASI) ATM Scheme: Two Woodland Hills men were sentenced for a $135 million fraud. They sold non-existent ATMs to over 3,500 investors, using new money to pay "rent" to older participants.
• Steve Chen (USFIA): Sentenced to 10 years in 2021 for a $147 million pyramid/Ponzi hybrid. He sold "Gemcoins," a fake cryptocurrency supposedly backed by gemstones from mines that did not exist.
• Tamkin Case: In late 2023, the California Attorney General announced an indictment for an $8 million scheme involving fraudulent real estate investments. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

Ongoing Fraud Crackdowns (May 2026)

While not traditional Ponzi schemes, recent federal operations in Los Angeles have targeted sophisticated financial fraud: [1]

• Mortgage Fraud Sting (March 2026): Nine individuals were arrested in a $17 million scheme that stole the identities of elderly residents to secure fraudulent loans on their homes.
• Healthcare Fraud (May 2026): Authorities recently suspended payments to hundreds of hospice and home care agencies in L.A. over alleged massive fraud within federal health programs. [1, 2, 3]

Red Flags & Reporting

The L.A. County District Attorney and FBI Los Angeles identify several common warning signs: [1, 2]

• High returns with little risk: Guaranteed returns of 10%–20% are statistically impossible over the long term.
• Unregistered investments: Most Ponzi schemes involve unlicensed sellers or unregistered securities.
• Difficulty receiving payments: Operators often offer higher "returns" to discourage investors from cashing out. [1, 2, 3]

If you suspect you are a victim of a Ponzi scheme, you can report it to the SEC's Tips, Complaints, and Referrals (TCR) system or seek legal counsel from firms specializing in securities misconduct. [1, 2]

MONTY PYTHON'S CARL SCHMITT (A FOUND FRAGMENT)

 A lecture hall. A PROFESSOR stands at a podium. Behind him, a blackboard reads: "SCHMITT: FRIEND OR ENEMY? (A METHODOLOGICAL INQUIRY INTO WHETHER WE MAY PROCEED)" He adjusts his notes for forty-five seconds in silence.

PROFESSOR: I should like to begin, if I may, and I think you'll agree that I may, by saying, in the clearest possible terms, that I do not endorse what I am about to say.

STUDENT: What are you about to say?

PROFESSOR: I haven't decided yet. But whatever it is, I wish to distance myself from it preemptively.

He writes "DISAVOWAL" on the blackboard, underlines it three times.

PROFESSOR: Now. Carl Schmitt. (long pause) Brilliant. (shorter pause) Appalling. (pause) Brilliant. I think we can all agree on the sequence.

STUDENT: Can we use him or not?

PROFESSOR: (visibly relieved someone asked) Excellent question. The answer is yes, provided one has first said no. You say no in the footnote. A short no. Firm but not aggressive. Then you proceed as if the no had resolved everything.

STUDENT: But does the no actually resolve anything?

PROFESSOR: It resolves your position within this institution. Which is, I would argue, the more pressing concern.

A second PROFESSOR enters, slightly out of breath.

SECOND PROFESSOR: I've just written a paper using Schmitt.

PROFESSOR: Did you disavow?

SECOND PROFESSOR: Extensively.

PROFESSOR: How many words?

SECOND PROFESSOR: A hundred and twelve.

PROFESSOR: (impressed) Per footnote?

SECOND PROFESSOR: Total.

PROFESSOR: (sucking through teeth) Cutting it fine. What was the paper on?

SECOND PROFESSOR: The exception as a structural feature of constitutional order and its implications for contemporary democratic theory.

PROFESSOR: And you managed that with a hundred and twelve words of disavowal?

SECOND PROFESSOR: I said "deeply problematic" twice.

PROFESSOR: (relaxing) That's the equivalent of roughly forty words each. You're probably fine.

A STUDENT in the front row raises her hand.

STUDENT: If Schmitt's theory of the exception describes how a community defines itself against an enemy, and we define ourselves against Schmitt, doesn't that mean Schmitt's theory is correct and we are merely demonstrating it?

Long silence.

PROFESSOR: (carefully) That observation, while interesting, is itself somewhat problematic.

STUDENT: Are you disavowing my question?

PROFESSOR: I am contextualizing it within a framework that preserves our ability to continue.

STUDENT: Continue what?

PROFESSOR: The seminar. (beat) The department. (longer beat) The postwar liberal consensus.

A THIRD PROFESSOR bursts in carrying a large stack of papers.

THIRD PROFESSOR: Chantal Mouffe is here!

PROFESSOR: (standing straighter) Has she disavowed?

THIRD PROFESSOR: She's thinking with him against him.

PROFESSOR: That's the advanced technique. You need at least fifteen years in the field before attempting that.

THIRD PROFESSOR: She says the enemy becomes an adversary.

PROFESSOR: (nodding slowly) So she's kept the structure but changed the wallpaper.

THIRD PROFESSOR: That's roughly what Giorgio Agamben did too, except he made Schmitt the villain of his own theory.

PROFESSOR: Elegant. That way you get to use the knife while blaming the knife for cutting.

The STUDENT raises her hand again.

STUDENT: None of this seems to be about Schmitt anymore. It seems to be about whether we're allowed to talk about Schmitt.

PROFESSOR: Correct. That is political theory.

STUDENT: What about the actual argument? About sovereignty? About the exception?

PROFESSOR: (pause) That comes in week nine.

STUDENT: What happens in weeks one through eight?

PROFESSOR: Disavowal technique. (He turns back to the board) Now. Who can tell me the difference between a firm disavowal and a performative one?

Nobody raises their hand.

PROFESSOR: (writing on the board) A firm disavowal says: I reject this. A performative disavowal says: I reject this, and by saying so I am the kind of person who rejects this, which is the kind of person who can now safely use this. The second is considerably more useful.

SECOND PROFESSOR: What if someone doesn't disavow at all?

The room goes very quiet.

PROFESSOR: (in a low voice) Then we do not speak of them.

SECOND PROFESSOR: Not at all?

PROFESSOR: We cite them in order to note that they have not disavowed. That is the correct procedure.

STUDENT: So you cite them to exclude them.

PROFESSOR: We cite them to mark the boundary of the acceptable, yes.

STUDENT: Isn't that exactly what Schmitt said sovereignty does?

The PROFESSOR looks at her for a long moment.

PROFESSOR: (very quietly) I'm going to need you to write a disavowal of that question before next Tuesday.

BLACKOUT.

Mickey Kaus - The Partial Insider

Jurisdictional Wars  ·  Intellectual Portraits

Mickey Kaus

A Portrait of the Partial Insider

lukeford.net

Mickey Kaus was born into the system. His father, Otto Kaus, sat on the California Supreme Court. He grew up in Beverly Hills, attended Harvard twice, and entered journalism through the Washington Monthly, the neoliberal incubator that launched Michael Kinsley and shaped the center-left policy conversation of the 1980s. His career began at the center of things. The question is why it did not end there.

Born July 6, 1951, in Santa Monica, Robert Michael Kaus had every structural advantage the American meritocracy offers. A father on the state's highest bench, a civic-minded mother, a brother who became a California Superior Court judge. Grandmother Gina Kaus was a novelist. The family was steeped in public life. When Kaus arrived at Harvard for his undergraduate degree and stayed for law school, he was not climbing; he was moving laterally through the corridors he was raised to occupy. He never practiced law. He had a different destination in mind.

I. The Big Idea

Kaus joined the Washington Monthly, then wrote for Newsweek, Harper's, and spent nearly a decade as a senior editor at The New Republic. These were not marginal perches. They were central nodes in the liberal policy conversation during the Clinton years, when the Democratic Party was remaking itself around markets, responsibility, and the language of civic obligation. Kaus fit naturally into that project. He was an ideas journalist from the start, operating where policy, culture, and moral language intersect.

His signature contribution came in 1992 with The End of Equality. The argument was simple and unfashionable. Liberals spent too much energy chasing income equality, which markets resist and governments struggle to produce. The more achievable and more important goal was social equality: shared norms, work participation, civic cohesion, and institutions that mixed Americans across class lines. The book fed directly into the Clinton-era welfare reform debates, and Kaus was not on the margins of that fight. He was inside it, helping provide intellectual justification for what became the 1996 welfare overhaul. At that point his trajectory looked like the standard model. Credentials, network, a signature idea that landed at exactly the right political moment. That combination usually locks in a long institutional career.

II. The Divergence

"He took a stated value and ran it through a material analysis that produced uncomfortable conclusions for his own side."

In 1999 Kaus launched Kausfiles, one of the first major political blogs. This mattered more than it looked at the time. Blogging was not simply a new medium. It was a way to bypass editorial filtering and build a direct relationship with readers before gatekeepers understood what was happening. Kaus negotiated unusual freedom while hosted at Slate and, when that arrangement ended, already knew how to operate without institutional backing. Most pundits depend on institutions for distribution. Kaus built a parallel channel before he needed it. That early-mover advantage later proved decisive.

The second inflection point was immigration. Kaus took the same framework he had applied to welfare and ran it through labor markets. If you believe in social equality and wage dignity for low-income workers, then large-scale low-skill immigration pushes in the opposite direction. It increases the labor supply at the bottom. It weakens bargaining power. It benefits employers and upper-middle-class consumers while imposing costs on the most vulnerable workers, including many Black Americans. This is not an exotic argument. It is Econ 101 combined with a particular moral priority. What made it radioactive was not the logic. It was the coalition it threatened.

The modern Democratic coalition includes professional-class voters, ethnic advocacy groups and NGOs, and corporate sectors that benefit from labor inflows. Working-class voters are nominally central but institutionally weak. Kaus kept pointing at that mismatch. Not abstractly but repeatedly, concretely, and with increasing irritation at what he read as bad faith. Coalition logic treats internal peace as sacred. Arguments that expose trade-offs the coalition depends on obscuring are intolerable, whatever their empirical merit. Kaus crossed that line. The result was predictable: fewer mainstream platforms, short stints that ended in conflict, and eventual exile from prestige liberal outlets. He quit the Daily Caller in 2015 after editorial battles over his immigration writing and moved to independent publishing, where he has remained.

III. The Brooks Contrast

The divergence between Kaus and a figure like David Brooks clarifies what the system actually rewards. Both began inside elite institutions. Both built reputations as interpreters of American social life. The difference is functional. Brooks translates social complexity into moral narratives that are legible and affirming to his audience. Even when he criticizes, he stabilizes rather than destabilizes the coalition he speaks to. Kaus does the opposite. He takes a stated value, equality, and runs it through a material analysis that produces uncomfortable conclusions for his own side. That is not a difference in intelligence. It is a difference in coalition function.

The system rewards the latter more than the former. Brooks accumulates honors, fellowships, and institutional trust. Kaus accumulates a smaller, combative audience and a reputation in establishment circles as a crank or obsessive. One manages the coalition. The other stresses it. Elite media does not primarily select for the most empirically consistent thinker. It selects for the most effective coalition manager.

IV. Why He Survived

Most contrarians who break with the center-left disappear. Kaus did not, and the reasons are structural rather than personal.

He owns an issue. Immigration is not a passing controversy. It is a structural feature of modern economies, returning to the center of political life at regular intervals. When it spikes, his relevance spikes with it. People know where he stands and what he will say. That looks like monomania to critics, but it functions like branding. A consistent, specific, durable argument on a durable issue is more valuable over a long career than range without a center.

He built independence early. The blogging era allowed him to retain a voice after losing institutional platforms. He did not need permission to keep publishing, because he had already built the channel.

He was never a true outsider. His Harvard background and early career at top magazines give him a baseline credibility that pure fringe figures lack. He is not dismissed as ignorant. He is dismissed as wrong, fixated, or ideologically compromised. That is a different category and a more durable one. In alliance theory, a defector carries more weight than an external enemy, because a defector understands the internal logic of the group he attacks. Kaus's critics know he knows what he is talking about. That forces engagement, however grudging.

V. The Cost

The failure mode is real and worth naming. Kaus's focus narrows over time. Immigration becomes less one issue among many and more the lens through which everything passes. That creates the impression of monomania, which his critics emphasize and his supporters tolerate. It also limits his ability to build a broader positive program. He is strongest as a critic exposing contradictions, weaker as a synthesizer offering a comprehensive alternative.

His tone contributes to the narrowing. The blog format rewards provocation and quick hits. Over decades, that style hardens. It energizes a niche audience but alienates the broader one needed for institutional reintegration. He ran a protest campaign in the 2010 California Democratic Senate primary, explicitly to put immigration and welfare on the record, and received a small but nonzero vote share. That episode captures his career in miniature: serious enough to run, independent enough not to care about winning, too heterodox to build a movement.

He voted for Obama twice, then Trump twice, describing himself as a populist Democrat who gave up on the party. That trajectory is not incoherence. It is a consistent application of his original argument across a changing landscape. The party moved. He did not.

VI. What He Reveals

Kaus is what a partially rejected insider looks like in a system that cannot fully absorb or fully discard him. He had every opportunity to become a standard establishment pundit. He had the credentials, the network, and a signature idea that landed at the right moment. Instead he became something rarer: a standing reminder that certain lines of argument, even when grounded in basic economics and long-standing liberal concerns, will push you to the edge if you refuse to soften them.

At 74 he still publishes independently, still arguing the same case. The system did not reward that stubbornness. But it could not erase it either, because the tensions he identified did not go away. That is the harder lesson. Elite institutions do not select against wrong ideas. They select against ideas that expose what the coalition needs to leave implicit. Kaus kept making those ideas explicit. The result was predictable, and so is his persistence. Every time the gap between rhetoric and material outcomes becomes too wide to ignore, the argument he has been making since 1992 becomes newly relevant, and he is still there to make it.

lukeford.net  ·  Jurisdictional Wars