American Exorcism
Priests are fielding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is finding new footing in the modern world.
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Priests are fielding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is finding new footing in the modern world.
Mike Mariani The Atlantic Dec 2018 25min Permalink
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his spokeswoman Ma Anand Sheela moved their commune and its thousands of followers from India to an Oregon ranch. The poisoning of a nearby town, election manipulation, and plans to murder government officials and the writer of this story soon followed.
The events chronicled in this original 1985 series are the basis for the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.
How followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh came to Oregon from India, and transformed eastern Oregon’s Big Muddy Ranch into Rancho Rajneesh.
How a small-town Indian boy became a religious guru that followers compared to Jesus Christ, Buddha and Krishna.
Before coming to Oregon, the Bhagwan built his following in Poona, India, attracting disciples from around the world.
What are the real reasons the Rajneeshees left India for Oregon? Rising tensions with the Indian government and police, and a lot of unpaid taxes.
Tales of smuggling – gold, money and drugs – dogged the Rajneesh movement since the late 1970s, and continued when they arrived in the United States.
Somewhere between India and Oregon, the life-or-death melodrama surrounding Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s failing health dissipated like a contrail against a summer sky.
How Ma Anand Sheela used family ties to help purchase the land for the Rajneeshees’ Oregon commune.
Ma Anand Sheela was much more than the guru’s personal secretary. She was a tigress of the two-minute TV interview, and wielded words like weapons.
To turn Racho Rajneesh from farmland to a city, the Rajneeshees needed to incorporate. It was a blurring of church and state that caught the eye of Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer.
While followers talked about free love, the Rajneeshees armed themselves with assault weapons, grenade launchers and submachine guns, turning Rajneeshpuram into one of the most-heavily armed places in the state.
Followers of the Bhagwan saw their ranch as a place of peace, but the universal bliss was laced with threats of violence and threads of paranoia.
Antics by the Rajneeshees during legal proceedings – including making faces and obscene gestures – confounded lawyers and judges.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh hardly led a humble life, with his diamond-encrusted Rolex watches and fleet of 74 Rolls-Royces.
The Rajneesh financial machine reached around the globe, and channeled millions of dollars to its Oregon headquarters.
How a lust for money propelled the Rajneesh movements into the arms of Big Business.
Ma Anand Sheela and other ranch officials kept a tight grip on followers.
Rajneesh used various techniques – some of them strong-armed – to separate followers from their cash, property and jewelry.
Rajneeshees bristled at the word “cult,” but it was clearly one according to religious experts.
Of all the threats to the Rajneesh movement, an immigration fraud investigation that was four years in the making loomed the largest, and focused on arranged marriages and fake relationships
The Rajneeshees took advantage of sleepy immigration officials to sneak followers into the United States. The government then bungled cases, and irritated potential witnesses to the point that they no longer cooperated.
Les Zaitz The Oregonian Jun–Jul 1985 Permalink
Mac McClelland is a human rights reporter for Mother Jones.
"There's a lot of strength and resiliance even in the worst stories ever. I mean, you do get bogged down by how much evil so many people are willing to perpetrate in the world. But I guess the little beam of sunshine that you're looking for, that hits me in the face in the morning, is just the character and intergrity of the people who are involved. "
Sep 2012 Permalink
Business History Politics Tech
If jobs as we’ve known them for a century are going away, what will replace them?
Derek Thompson The Atlantic Jul 2015 35min Permalink
“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”
Teju Cole The Atlantic Oct 2012 15min Permalink
Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.
“I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusions about the morality of the whole thing — that's where I’m most comfortable.”
Apr 2023 Permalink
For the first time, Janet Reitman discusses her Rolling Stone cover story on accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
"My editors, myself, a lot of people who work for the magazine — we lived through an act of terrorism. We know what it feels like. There have been accusations to me personally of being insensitive, and I can tell you that I'm far from insensitive, not only to the political realities of terrorism but to the personal realities of terrorism. I breathed it in, literally. … The cover elicited an emotional response from people; that is not always what magazine covers do. I think it's great on a certain level, because terrorism is emotional, it's real, it affects us. It is not something that happens just overseas or just to people who are somehow "Other." If you talk to terrorism experts around the world, what they will all say is that the vast majority of people who are involved in these violent, extremist acts are what we would consider otherwise to be very normal people. One of us. Part of our community. That's a reality, and it's a very emotional thing and it makes people very uncomfortable. I totally understand that. But that was the point of my story."
Thanks to this week's sponor, Squarespace.
Aug 2013 Permalink
Why did it take so long for the systems that are supposed to police problem doctors to stop him from operating?
Laura Beil ProPublica Oct 2018 35min Permalink
THEY SAY YOU never hear the one that hits you. That's true of bullets, because, if you hear them, they are already past. But your correspondent heard the last shell that hit this hotel. He heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incommg roar like a subway train to crash against the cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster. And while the glass still tinkled down and you listened for the next one to start, you realized that now finally you were back in Madrid.
Ernest Hemingway The New Republic Jan 1938 Permalink
“These documents show how Palantir applies Silicon Valley’s playbook to domestic law enforcement. New users are welcomed with discounted hardware and federal grants, sharing their own data in return for access to others’. When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”
Mark Harris Wired Aug 2017 20min Permalink
Meribah Knight is a reporter with Nashville Public Radio. She won the Polk Award for Podcasting for “The Kids of Rutherford County,” produced with ProPublica and Serial, which revealed a shocking approach to juvenile discipline in one Tennessee county.
“Where does it leave me? It leaves me with a searing anger that is going to propel me to the next thing. But we’ve made some real improvement. And that’s worth celebrating. That’s worth recognizing and saying, This work matters, people are paying attention.”
This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Apr 2024 Permalink
Tessie Castillo, a journalist covering criminal justice reform, and George Wilkerson, a prisoner on death row in North Carolina, are two of the co-authors of Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row.
“I want other people to see what I see, which is that the men on death row are human beings. They’re incredibly intelligent and insightful and they have so many redemptive qualities...I don’t think I could really convey that as well as if they get their own voice out there. So I wanted this book to be a platform for them and for their voices.” –Tessie Castillo
“For me, writing was like a form of conversation with myself or with my past, like therapy. So I just chose these periods in my life that I didn’t really understand and that were really powerful and impactful to me, and I just sat down and started writing to understand them and make peace with them.” –George Wilkerson
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Jul 2020 Permalink
In the U.S. military, more than half of rape victims are men.
Nathaniel Penn GQ Sep 2014 Permalink
“Super tunnels” are a speciality of the Sinaloa drug cartel – and its leader, El Chapo.
Monte Reel New Yorker Aug 2015 20min Permalink
An indigenous leader reflects on a lifetime following the law of the land in Australia.
“What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control exerted on us to make us like you. And you should take that a step further and recognise us for who we are, and not who you want us to be. Let us be who we are – Aboriginal people in a modern world – and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past had thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people – our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.”
Galarrwuy Yunupingu The Monthly Jul 2016 35min Permalink
On competing in the High School Fed Challenge Championship as “Ed Gramlich”:
A team of five students prepares and presents a 15-minute analysis of the US economy, recommends a course of action with respect to interest rates, and then withstands a 10-minute question-and-answer period from a panel of Federal Reserve economists. To prepare for the competition, students look at the same economic indicators and the same forces influencing the economy that our nation's economic leaders examine. And to lend extra verisimilitude to the whole proceeding, competitors are also advised, as we were, to act out the parts of real members of the Federal Open Market Committee.
Jim Newell The Baffler Mar 2012 Permalink
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In “Shelf-Love,” Ben Dolnick recounts his feverish, hilarious, occasionally mortifying love for the writing of Alice Munro. It’s an essay for everyone who has ever truly loved a book, and for anyone who has ever thought about writing one.
Weekly sponsorships of Longform are available in July.
When the best three months of your life are “called three of the uglier months in the recent history of the National Football League.”
Elizabeth Merrill, Wayne Drehs ESPN Oct 2012 15min Permalink
Recently discharged, an undocumented immigrant discusses his treatment.
In a city with a large immigrant population, it is not rare for hospitals to have one or more patients who, for reasons unrelated to their medical condition, do not seem to leave. At Downtown, where a bed costs the hospital more than $2,000 a day, there are currently three long-term patients who no longer need acute care but cannot be discharged because they have nowhere to go. The hospital pays nearly all costs for these patients’ treatment. One man left recently after a stay of more than five years.
John Leland New York Times Oct 2011 10min Permalink
How a Texas woman pushed for autopsy reform.
Clinical autopsies, once commonplace in American hospitals, have become an increasing rarity and are conducted in just 5 percent of hospital deaths. Grief-stricken families like the Carswells desperately want the answers that an autopsy can provide. But they often do not know their rights in dealing with either coroners or medical examiners, who investigate unnatural deaths, or health-care providers, who delve into natural ones.
Marshall Allen ProPublica Dec 2011 10min Permalink
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This week, Zinio recommends “In a Dangerous Place,” an amazing article from Elephant about the trials and tribulations of acclaimed artist Marcus Harvey.
People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.
This article, which was #1 on Longform’s top articles of 2018 list, just won the National Magazine Award for feature writing. Hear Batuman discuss it on the Longform Podcast.
Elif Batuman New Yorker Apr 2018 40min Permalink
Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?
Ryan Gabrielson, Topher Sanders ProPublica Jul 2016 Permalink
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Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer from northeastern Syria, and the winner of the 2021 Kurt Schork News Fixer Award.
”I can see from my experience that there is a gap between the editors, who are kind of elites in their luxury offices, and the amazing journalists who are in the field, who all sympathize with what they are seeing on the ground and want to cover [it], but they have to satisfy the editors. And this is how we end up having little gaps in the ways of covering in general. It's not a matter of like, they shaped it in this way. The problem, I think, it’s bigger. How this industry is working, how this industry is deciding what they should cover.”
Jan 2022 Permalink