The Awakening

If you have time for only one long-form journalism story this week, read "The Apostate" by Lawrence Wright in the current issue of the The New Yorker. (The story is not behind a paywall.) Wright's piece is superb on multiple levels- as a profile of a wayward young man who goes on to become an acclaimed screenwriter and filmmaker; as a deep dive into one of the strangest and most successful religious cults; as a larger portrait of a subgroup within a famous entertainment community that has been brainwashed. No doubt, Tom Cruise, the most famously outspoken devotee of this cult, will be called on for damage control.