Longreads

Up and down the East Coast, offices are closing ahead of Hurricane Sandy, and millions of workers are preparing to pretend to work from home. If you’re one of them, let us distract you with…

Sociologists often argue that apocalyptic creeds appeal primarily to the poor and the disenfranchised – those for whom the afterlife promises more than life itself has ever offered. But on that day in 1844, judges, lawyers and doctors, farmers and factory workers and freed slaves, the educated and the ignorant, the wealthy and the impoverished: all of them gathered as one to await the Rapture