#Lindsay Beyerstein

[sepdet]

Oh gosh. It's like they've waited around just long enough for the bad press to die down, and are now preying on children, the only prople too young to have heard of them.

Which, I guess, has always been their way.

Don't take a random person on the internet's word for it. Here's a public domain version of journalist Rich Behar's award-winning, oft-cited investigative journalism report "Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power," [Reader view for small screens].

Suicide Tw.

Excerpt:

This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help "philosophy" group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's a school for psychopaths." Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents -- many charging that they were mentally of physically abused -- have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous."

Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream...

The Church of Scientology mustered lawsuits, a media campaign, ads, book burnings, and threats to Behar and other journalists blowing its cover.

Though some Scientology critics will surely be offended by Wright’s constant use of the word “church,” the term seems apt. History shows that there’s nothing intrinsically benign about churches or religions. Scientology holds no monopoly on corruption, or secrecy, or avarice.

But as far as I can tell, Scientology is the first religion to make litigation a sacrament. Hubbard wrote that lawsuits were important tools for bankrupting and demoralizing enemies of the church. He taught that critics were “fair game,” meaning that the faithful had a spiritual duty to ruin them by any https://archives.cjr.org/critical_eye/holy_mess.phpmeans necessary.

— Lindsay Beyerstein, "Holy mess: Lawrence Wright unpacks the mysteries of Scientology." Columbia Journalism Review (2013)

Beyerstein's article is a great read, even moreso than Bahar's, clear and more up-to-date.

I keep having to tear down extremely predatory/misleading Scien.tology flyers in my school's art building. This is the third fucking time I've ripped the fuckers up and I'm getting Real Fucking Tired of it.

[annushorribilis]

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Leith Mullings, via Flickr. Mullings passed away in 2020. She was a pioneering anthropologist committed to social justice. A president of the American Anthropological Association, her 2013 address “Anthropology Matters” (video, text) “laid out a vision of the field aimed at rehabilitating its often overlooked contributions by scholars of color, feminists, and radical thinkers, imagining how anthropology could be.”

[denialandavoidance]

i can’t decide which take is worse

[roberteshelman-hakansson]

Weekend Reads—11 April 2020

As of 9:25 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States was 500,399, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Deaths numbered 18,693. But those numbers don't tell the full story. Over 100,000 have died worldwide.

I finished watching Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz this week—brilliant stuff that leaves me shaking my damn head at the eagerness with which people celebrate mediocre television these days.

But I’m not here to be smug. I’m here to welcome you to The Immense Journey.

Let’s dig in.

I don’t know about you, but after more than a month of focusing on COVID-19, I could use a day or two to decompress from the topic. So just one item on it this week.

A central story line has been the availability of ventilators. Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have accused state officials of blowing out of proportion the need for the devices. At the heart of the issue is the question of who needs to be intubated.

Lindsay Beyerstein breaks down the debate over who should get a ventilator. Physicians are far from agreement on the protocols for putting patients on ventilators. Check out Beyerstein’s story, published in The New Republic.

In an effort to provide some respite from the outbreak, the London Review of Books has launched Diverted Traffic, “a new LRB newsletter, featuring a different piece from the archive each day – chosen for its compulsive, immersive and escapist qualities, and also for a complete absence of references to plague, pandemics or quarantine.”

I enjoyed James Buchan's piece about hogs (although it does reference foot-and-mouth disease). “[A] wood without pigs,” he wrote, “is like a ballroom without women.”

Indeed, Mr. Buchan. Indeed.

Finally, One America News Network's Chanel Rion has become a fixture at Trump’s daily briefings. She's a, uh, complicated and entertaining individual. Guest of a Guest provides the essential background. What a time to be alive …

Follow me on Twitter and sign up for my occasional newsletter (to be launched soon!). And if you enjoyed it, consider forwarding this post to someone you know.

Enjoy your weekend.

[azspot]

Trump thinks he's doing shock and awe. What he's really doing is chaos and fear. A lot of people backed him because they thought they could use him. If he persists in being so destabilizing, they're going to rethink their strategy and it won't end well for Trump. Trump needs to consolidate power if he's going to reshape the government according to his whims. Instead, Trump is systematically alienating centers of power that could support him. He blindsided Mattis on the Muslim Ban. He betrayed the congressional Republicans by using Judiciary Committee staffers to write the Ban behind their bosses' backs. He outraged the tech sector by striking at its human capital. He sent the markets into a tailspin. He became the first POTUS in living memory to fire an Attorney General. (Even Nixon's technically resigned.) He gutted the leadership of the State Department and declared war on dissident diplomats.

Lindsay Beyerstein

[lodelss]

Dear Reader,

I’ve been trying to think of what books this corona moment reminds me of. I don’t know why — uh, I guess I instinctively try to relate most things that happen in my real life to my reading life? What’s unsettling though is that — and this is something I’ve seen others saying already — this moment doesn’t really remind me of anything I’ve ever read. I started reading David K. Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate — a book about how a bubonic plague epidemic threatened to sweep through America in 1900 — a few months ago, but I didn’t get very far into it, and then I put my copy in a holiday gift box for my mom in Ohio. She read it last week while she was sick in bed with pneumonia. I don’t know what kind of pneumonia. (She didn’t get tested for flu; too expensive.) I don’t know if it was corona. I don’t even know how to know. There are, as you have heard, no tests.

And that’s what makes this coronavirus moment different from the little bit of Black Death at the Golden Gate that I read, and from the portions my mom described over the phone while she coughed and coughed and coughed. In that book, some American government officials and scientists heroically stop the plague from spreading. Which means the story being told in that book is more like the one in Singapore or South Korea today: the triumph of science.

So what’s the story here? What does the failure of science feel like? I listened to the latest TrueAnon podcast while I made dinner last night, and, as I recall, Liz Franczak described a sort of sensation she’s been having (out there in San Francisco) that there are visible particles of fear floating in the air. My boyfriend has reported something similar every time he’s come home from work for the past three days, after his 45 minute trek across Brooklyn — there’s something wrong out there, it looks weird. There’s something wrong with the air. (He works retail. There has been something wrong with his air.)

I have not been outside in over a week. I don’t know what it is he’s describing. (But whatever it is, there is a very good chance he has brought it in here with him. In his air.)

I thought of and dismissed a few other books that this moment might be like. For awhile — a few days ago? — coronavirus was a looming, impending crisis that I knew would lead to ruin and death, but which many people around me seemed oblivious to. That brought to mind books written in Germany in the 1930s, like Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin — books in which many people seem oblivious of society’s imminent doom, even the authors themselves, no matter how canny they try to be. I also thought of Anna Kavan’s Ice — a book I’d previously associated with climate change — in which a natural or perhaps supernatural force, a malignant and almost sentient ice, is engulfing the world, and no one is able to stop it.

But the thing is, someone could have stopped coronavirus. A lot of someones, up and down the various chains of command and control. They just … didn’t. And no one is oblivious to it anymore. We all know about it now. We’re all just sitting around, waiting to find out if we have it.

Honestly, the book I’ve been dwelling on the most these days is Mario Bellatin’s The Beauty Salon. It is a book about AIDS. It is a slight and brutal novella about a beauty salon in which gay men are dying of AIDS because hospitals will not take them in. It is a very grim book. I think it comes to mind so much mostly because I am cowardly, and I fear the overcrowded sick room: I fear being one among many stranded in beds lining hospital hallways or neglected in quickly converted conference halls or gymnasiums. I am childishly afraid of dying in the Javits Center.

But perhaps there is also a thread of connection here beyond my overwhelming cowardice. Covid-19 could very well be one of the few emergent diseases of the 20th or 21st centuries to become endemic, like HIV. People in cities across the country are sheltering in place, waiting to see if they are infected, because our country, unique among countries, does not have the tests to ease our minds. Failures of science like this are more frightening than just the diseases they fail to cure. Like with the malicious mishandling of the HIV epidemic, we know it is people, not gods, who have caused this thing. We look out our windows and we can see there’s something wrong in the air, something wrong in the world, besides the virus. 

  1. “Lawrence Wright’s New Pandemic Novel Wasn’t Supposed To Be Prophetic” by Lawrence Wright, The New York Times

This is the second time Lawrence Wright has done this.

2. “I’m Not Feeling Good at All” by Jess Bergman, The Baffler

Jess Bergman notices an emergent new genre and criticizes its implications. “With this literature of relentless detachment, we seem to have arrived at the inverse of what James Wood famously called ‘hysterical realism’ … Rather than an excess of intimacy, there is a lack; rather than overly ornamental character sketches, there are half-finished ones. Personality languishes, and desire has been almost completely erased…”

3. “Escaping Blackness” by Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books

In a review of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ latest memoir, Darryl Pinckney surveys the history and literature of resisting and ‘transcending’ race. “Even when you’re done with being black and blackness, it seems that you cannot cease explaining why.”

4. “I called out American Dirt’s racism. I won’t be silenced.” by Myriam Gurba, Vox

Less than a month after Myriam Gurba wrote the essay that triggered a wave of well-deserved backlash against American Dirt, she was put on administrative leave at the high school where she teaches.

5. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” by Mary South, The White Review

Mary South’s short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten published this past week. One story from the collection, excerpted in The White Review earlier this year, is told in the style of a brain surgeon’s FAQ for patients.

Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

6. “Heroic Work in a Very Important Field” by David Gelber, The Literary Review

A book review of a book about book reviews. “Uncertain why you are reading this? Good, because I’m not any more certain why I’m writing it.”

7. “How Shakespeare Shaped America’s Culture Wars” Sarah Churchwell, The New Statesman

A review of Shakespeare in a Divided America, James Shapiro’s account of the uses and abuses of Shakespeare in American political history.

8. “‘Minor Feelings’ and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity” by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino on Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. “Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for.”

9. “What Happened to Jordan Peterson?” by Lindsay Beyerstein, The New Republic

The self-important self-help guru seems to have suffered a severe health episode and his daughter has made some very peculiar statements about what happened.

10. “Pigs in Shit” by Hunter Braithwaite, Guernica

Hunter Braithwaite reviews Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, a disturbing multi-generational pig-farming novel. “Animalia will come as no surprise. It does not speculate. It doesn’t offer warnings. Which is fine, because if climate change has taught us anything, it’s that warning signs don’t mean shit.”

11. “Woody Allen’s Book Could Signal a New Era in the Publishing Industry” by Maris Kreizman, The Outline

Hachette employees staged a walk-out to protest the house publishing Woody Allen’s memoir. Surprisingly, it worked.

12. “What’s So Funny About the End of the World?” by Rumaan Alam, The New Republic

Rumaan Alam writes about Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, another recent novel that revels in its disgust for industrial farming (this time chickens, not pigs) and views its violent practitioners as a doomed species. As Alam notes, “We might be sad about the end of humanity, but the chickens are probably relieved.”

  Happy reading! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky Books Editor @danasnitzky Sign up here

[dianeintransit]

Favorite tweets

Someday, this footage will be played at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. https://t.co/sA3Cy1xjyJ

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) May 30, 2020

[rudiologytweet]

RT @beyerstein: Commercial landlords will force restaurants and other small business to open their doors if there's no stay-at-home order. Which means they're on the hook for wages and overhead for businesses that can't turn a profit at 25% capacity. It's a small biz death sentence.

Commercial landlords will force restaurants and other small business to open their doors if there's no stay-at-home order. Which means they're on the hook for wages and overhead for businesses that can't turn a profit at 25% capacity. It's a small biz death sentence.

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) April 27, 2020

from Twitter https://twitter.com/Rudiology April 27, 2020 at 03:59PM via IFTTT

[obastard]

A tweet

Well-written and thought-provoking. https://t.co/q6lOYLEjfJ

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) December 3, 2018

via http://twitter.com/twinforces

[ivanpierre]

J'aime une vidéo @YouTube : "Lindsay Beyerstein: On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt, Donald Trump, and Indifference to Truth" à l'adresse

J'aime une vidéo @YouTube : "Lindsay Beyerstein: On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt, Donald Trump, and Indifference to Truth" à l'adresse

— '(Ivan Pierre) (@ivanpierre) June 15, 2018

from Twitter https://twitter.com/ivanpierre June 16, 2018 at 12:15AM via IFTTT

[crichton007]

RT @Beyerstein: Sessions spox now says the meeting was in person in his office and not on the phone, like she said earlier: https://t.co/IRUcSCQj6r

Sessions spox now says the meeting was in person in his office and not on the phone, like she said earlier: https://t.co/IRUcSCQj6r

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@Beyerstein) March 2, 2017

via Twitter https://twitter.com/crichton007 March 02, 2017 at 08:49AM

[lodelss]

This Week in Books: This Moment Doesn’t Remind Me of Anything

Dear Reader,

I’ve been trying to think of what books this corona moment reminds me of. I don’t know why — uh, I guess I instinctively try to relate most things that happen in my real life to my reading life? What’s unsettling though is that — and this is something I’ve seen others saying already — this moment doesn’t really remind me of anything I’ve ever read. I started reading David K. Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate — a book about how a bubonic plague epidemic threatened to sweep through America in 1900 — a few months ago, but I didn’t get very far into it, and then I put my copy in a holiday gift box for my mom in Ohio. She read it last week while she was sick in bed with pneumonia. I don’t know what kind of pneumonia. (She didn’t get tested for flu; too expensive.) I don’t know if it was corona. I don’t even know how to know. There are, as you have heard, no tests.

And that’s what makes this coronavirus moment different from the little bit of Black Death at the Golden Gate that I read, and from the portions my mom described over the phone while she coughed and coughed and coughed. In that book, some American government officials and scientists heroically stop the plague from spreading. Which means the story being told in that book is more like the one in Singapore or South Korea today: the triumph of science.

So what’s the story here? What does the failure of science feel like? I listened to the latest TrueAnon podcast while I made dinner last night, and, as I recall, Liz Franczak described a sort of sensation she’s been having (out there in San Francisco) that there are visible particles of fear floating in the air. My boyfriend has reported something similar every time he’s come home from work for the past three days, after his 45 minute trek across Brooklyn — there’s something wrong out there, it looks weird. There’s something wrong with the air. (He works retail. There has been something wrong with his air.)

I have not been outside in over a week. I don’t know what it is he’s describing. (But whatever it is, there is a very good chance he has brought it in here with him. In his air.)

I thought of and dismissed a few other books that this moment might be like. For awhile — a few days ago? — coronavirus was a looming, impending crisis that I knew would lead to ruin and death, but which many people around me seemed oblivious to. That brought to mind books written in Germany in the 1930s, like Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin — books in which many people seem oblivious of society’s imminent doom, even the authors themselves, no matter how canny they try to be. I also thought of Anna Kavan’s Ice — a book I’d previously associated with climate change — in which a natural or perhaps supernatural force, a malignant and almost sentient ice, is engulfing the world, and no one is able to stop it.

But the thing is, someone could have stopped coronavirus. A lot of someones, up and down the various chains of command and control. They just … didn’t. And no one is oblivious to it anymore. We all know about it now. We’re all just sitting around, waiting to find out if we have it.

Honestly, the book I’ve been dwelling on the most these days is Mario Bellatin’s The Beauty Salon. It is a book about AIDS. It is a slight and brutal novella about a beauty salon in which gay men are dying of AIDS because hospitals will not take them in. It is a very grim book. I think it comes to mind so much mostly because I am cowardly, and I fear the overcrowded sick room: I fear being one among many stranded in beds lining hospital hallways or neglected in quickly converted conference halls or gymnasiums. I am childishly afraid of dying in the Javits Center.

But perhaps there is also a thread of connection here beyond my overwhelming cowardice. Covid-19 could very well be one of the few emergent diseases of the 20th or 21st centuries to become endemic, like HIV. People in cities across the country are sheltering in place, waiting to see if they are infected, because our country, unique among countries, does not have the tests to ease our minds. Failures of science like this are more frightening than just the diseases they fail to cure. Like with the malicious mishandling of the HIV epidemic, we know it is people, not gods, who have caused this thing. We look out our windows and we can see there’s something wrong in the air, something wrong in the world, besides the virus. 

  1. “Lawrence Wright’s New Pandemic Novel Wasn’t Supposed To Be Prophetic” by Lawrence Wright, The New York Times

This is the second time Lawrence Wright has done this.

2. “I’m Not Feeling Good at All” by Jess Bergman, The Baffler

Jess Bergman notices an emergent new genre and criticizes its implications. “With this literature of relentless detachment, we seem to have arrived at the inverse of what James Wood famously called ‘hysterical realism’ … Rather than an excess of intimacy, there is a lack; rather than overly ornamental character sketches, there are half-finished ones. Personality languishes, and desire has been almost completely erased…”

3. “Escaping Blackness” by Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books

In a review of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ latest memoir, Darryl Pinckney surveys the history and literature of resisting and ‘transcending’ race. “Even when you’re done with being black and blackness, it seems that you cannot cease explaining why.”

4. “I called out American Dirt’s racism. I won’t be silenced.” by Myriam Gurba, Vox

Less than a month after Myriam Gurba wrote the essay that triggered a wave of well-deserved backlash against American Dirt, she was put on administrative leave at the high school where she teaches.

5. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” by Mary South, The White Review

Mary South’s short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten published this past week. One story from the collection, excerpted in The White Review earlier this year, is told in the style of a brain surgeon’s FAQ for patients.

Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

6. “Heroic Work in a Very Important Field” by David Gelber, The Literary Review

A book review of a book about book reviews. “Uncertain why you are reading this? Good, because I’m not any more certain why I’m writing it.”

7. “How Shakespeare Shaped America’s Culture Wars” Sarah Churchwell, The New Statesman

A review of Shakespeare in a Divided America, James Shapiro’s account of the uses and abuses of Shakespeare in American political history.

8. “‘Minor Feelings’ and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity” by Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino on Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. “Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for.”

9. “What Happened to Jordan Peterson?” by Lindsay Beyerstein, The New Republic

The self-important self-help guru seems to have suffered a severe health episode and his daughter has made some very peculiar statements about what happened.

10. “Pigs in Shit” by Hunter Braithwaite, Guernica

Hunter Braithwaite reviews Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia, a disturbing multi-generational pig-farming novel. “Animalia will come as no surprise. It does not speculate. It doesn’t offer warnings. Which is fine, because if climate change has taught us anything, it’s that warning signs don’t mean shit.”

11. “Woody Allen’s Book Could Signal a New Era in the Publishing Industry” by Maris Kreizman, The Outline

Hachette employees staged a walk-out to protest the house publishing Woody Allen’s memoir. Surprisingly, it worked.

12. “What’s So Funny About the End of the World?” by Rumaan Alam, The New Republic

Rumaan Alam writes about Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, another recent novel that revels in its disgust for industrial farming (this time chickens, not pigs) and views its violent practitioners as a doomed species. As Alam notes, “We might be sad about the end of humanity, but the chickens are probably relieved.”

  Happy reading! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky Books Editor @danasnitzky Sign up here

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2w5H2ST via IFTTT

[listsandmore]

Links and Longform Loves No.9

Why Women Smile by Amy Cunningham

Smile, love.

Women Writers and Bad Interviews by Lorraine Berry for Talking Writing

This is about the ridiculous questions that female writers get asked in interviews.

Breaking Bad’s Skyler White: Victim or Villain? conversation between Lindsay Beyerstein and Sady Doyle for In These Times

Something that has hugely perplexed me this past year has been the reaction to the character of Skyler White in Breaking Bad. I had no idea the amount of hate directed at her until I randomly came across one link online (which led me down the rabbit hole). I think I could write far too many words on why this baffles and enrages me, but I’ll let this article speak instead.

Building a New Racial Justice Movement by Rinku Sen for Colorlines

"We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name, and the biggest obstacle facing Americans today is that, in the main, we don’t want to talk about race, much less about racism."

The Astronomer’s Guide to Solace by Anne Valente for Freerange Nonfiction

Astronomy, love, heartache, family.