INTERVIEWER: I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of guru, whether political or metaphysical.
LESSING: I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying.
A writer embarks on a seven-year trek from Africa to Tierra Del Fuego.
A recent history of ‘bupe’ Suboxone film, which is described as a miracle cure for opiate addiction but flows freely from for-profit clinics to dealers and inmates, sometimes melted into the pages of smuggled Bibles.
In 1985, a lost 22-year-old wrote a letter to a Manson girl-turned-model prisoner, asking for advice on conquering his demons. Then they fell in love.
“And the Holocaust trumps art every time.”
The $200 billion industry behind the Snuggie.
The gospel according to nine-year-olds; a missionary group that won the right to evangelize in schools and how children process their message.
A pair of undercover journalists, a boatload of refugees, 200 miles of ocean and a journey that has claimed more than a thousand lives.
On art and dead bodies.
How to get Americans to “pay $45 to $75 to run for their lives from 1,500-pound, bad-tempered beasts.”
An essay on those who don’t get caught by health care’s so-called safety net.
The realities of the fighting life.
Notes from a Black Panther fundraiser on Park Avenue.
In 2008, Hana Williams left an Ethiopian orphanage to join a large, Christian fundamentalist family in America. Three years later she was dead.
On the Kunsthal heist and the murky economics of making money from stolen paintings.
Searching for the real reason why a bunch of kids partying at the empty home of an NFL player became a national story.
The $95 billion empire supporting Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
A trip to Hempfest with cannabis breeder DJ Short.
Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery are the co-editors of Mother Jones.
"We probably pay more attention to our fact-checking and our research than almost everybody in our industry. By the time we publish stuff, we make sure it's unimpeachable because people would like to impeach it."
Thanks to TinyLetter and HostGator for sponsoring this week's episode.
A history of scandal and civil war within the first family of the Unification Church.
The scientific pursuit of the afterlife.
A profile of Perry Fellwock, a.k.a. Winslow Peck, who exposed the NSA in an 1972 article for Ramparts magazine.
Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales vanished from the ocean. The mystery is not who killed them, but why.
Growing up in a Toronto suburb while a serial rapist is on the loose.
On Twitter’s pleasures and perils.
