The Last People Who Know How to End a World
The Classics Department stages immersive rituals about doomsday religions. Its founders believe the ironic distance of performance is the last door...
Longform & investigations
Investigations
The desk that follows the money, the deaths, and the curve — and asks what the count is actually measuring.
How the World Learned to Count Its Cults
Fifty years ago, a busy year produced a handful of new movements. This year produced nineteen by summer. The Data Desk on what the curve is actuall...
The Martyrs and the Missing Millions
A radical animal-liberation order practices civil disobedience with a martyr's discipline. Its funding, it turns out, came from a crypto founder wh...
The Map Was Perfect. The Mapmaker Was Not.
A personal-development school was built on unnervingly accurate models of the mind and of civilization — and on a founder who concluded that the on...
The Rocket, the Magus, and the Pulp Writer Who Built a Religion
Three men — a rocket engineer, an English magician, and a science-fiction author — turned Western occultism into a space-age church. A new investig...