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.
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.
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.
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…
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,…
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…