cults
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My End of the World at Rajneeshpuram
I used to play a game with myself: who should die first, me or daddy? When I was very little, I could never come up with a good answer.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerald Walker
Jerald Walker discusses his memoir, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, the story of his childhood in The Worldwide Church of God, and how the act of writing delivered him from bitterness.
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The Rumpus Interview with Carolyn Parkhurst
Carolyn Parkhurst discusses her latest book, Harmony, writing about your personal life and family in fiction, and her fascination with cults.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Keith Newton
What’s interesting, of course, is how modern life could easily be seen in the opposite way—as an ever-expanding domain of individuality and self-expression.
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Podcatcher #1: Oh No, Ross and Carrie!
In the first installment of our new column all about podcasts, we talk with Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!.
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Deep Conditioning with Wilson Phillips
“Don’t become a professor,” he said. “I’d rather you become a garbage man. They get paid more and have better benefits.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Fiona Maazel
Writer Fiona Maazel talks about her love for the “sad, lonely, self-loathing guy,” the appeal of cults, setting her latest novel in the wildly divergent worlds of North Korea and Cincinnati, and her current fascination with neuroprosthetics.
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“The Sheer Fun of Researching” Cults
Sociologist Susan Palmer studies new religious movements—“cults,” as the rest of us might call them—not out of morbid fascination or a desire to catalog their evils, but because she considers them “beautiful life forms, mysterious and pulsating with charisma.” Of…
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“Talk Dirty and Live Clean”
If reading our interview with Peter Rock (and getting psyched for his reading tomorrow) has whetted your appetite for cult stories, check out this piece on Synanon by George Pendle, highlighted by Longform earlier this week. Things start out all…
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All in the Family
Ellen Meeropol’s debut novel tackles bizarre cult rituals, political violence, drug abuse, infanticide, and the Klan.
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Notable New York, This Week 5/10 – 5/16
This week in New York, Granta’s Sex Party, The Moth Mainstage presents Saints and Sinners, SLEIGH BELLS perform, Emily Gould celebrates her new memoir with a party, Sebastian Junger discusses his latest work, Chip Kidd, The Thing Quarterly presents issue…
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An Interview with Spoken Word Legend Bucky Sinister
“That was my other big misconception. That if I got sober and went to a meeting they’d make me believe in God. Not true.”