Having previously allowed Megan McArdle to rent out her column to the likes of the Koch Brothers in return for Crate & Barrel gift cards, The Atlantic has now cut out the middleman and is just whoring themselves out to any bugfuck crazy cult that stops you on the street.
Obviously this is a preemptive strike before Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief drops later this week. Kudos to Jeffrey Goldberg for sticking his thumb in the eye of his bosses.
“The Looming Tower,” of course, is one of the greatest works of narrative non-fiction published in the past several decades, but all of his work on religion — he’s an unparalleled spelunker of the religious mind — is very much worth reading. Which is why I’m so particularly excited this week to read his just-published investigation of the Church of Scientology, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.”
In related news, Tom Cruise is going to save us all:
Superstar actor and Church of Scientology member Tom Cruise is a high-ranking Church official and he’s on a mission to save people from the aliens that live inside of all of us, according to a new book.
The claims come from a new book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Lawrence Wright who alleges that Cruise has focused on bringing non-believers into the fold in order to bring salvation to Earth from thetans.
In Scientology doctrine, thetans are the alien life forms that inhabit humans and have destroyed the planet in the past.
Who would have thought that Earth was going to be saved by a five-foot three closet case?
Not me.
(Obligatory Pauline Kael remembrance of her describing Cruise as a “nautilized dinky thing“.)
(UPDATE) Apparently The Atlantic can be embarrassed