Longreads

From The Daily Beast's David Sessions, a collection of stories on gun violence and policy in the U.S., featuring The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and Mother Jones.

Astra Woodcraft was seven when she indoctrinated into the Church of Scientology via an arm of the church known as Sea Org. What she endured, and how she escaped:

"One of my first jobs as an official member of the Sea Org was in the security department, meaning I had to make sure people obeyed church rules and ethics. It seemed that people were always in some kind of trouble—the place felt ruled by fear. You could get in trouble for random things; for instance, someone might question why there were so many loose papers on your desk. Another thing you could get in trouble for: masturbation. Early on in my new job, I had to sit down with a man in his 40s who had admitted to masturbating, and tell him to cut it out. I was 15 years old."

Life as a mob boss's girlfriend:

"By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, 'Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.'

"Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the 'other woman' entered the picture.

"Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, 'I think we need to talk.'"

Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.

The site's internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent -- growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers. Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled its audience, and the Huffington Post has a global readership roughly three times as large. Through October, the Daily Beast racked up publicity with long, will-they-or-won't-they talks of a merger with Newsweek. When media people talk about the future of publishing online, in other words, they don't talk about the site with the 12-year-old CMS.

In this exclusive excerpt from The Council of Dads, Bruce Feiler, having just been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, asks a dear friend to be a father to his young twin daughters. Plus: Read how Bruce Feiler formed The Council of Dads.

As Afghanistan’s president is inaugurated for his second term, author Christina Lamb, his former neighbor, on his transformation from an affable bon vivant to a paranoid shut-in.

The Daily Beast has obtained the speeches Sarah Palin planned to deliver on Election Night 2008—win or lose. Read the words the McCain camp didn’t want her to say.

Read an exclusive excerpt from John Grisham’s debut collection, Ford County, a heartbreaking tale of one family’s visit to death row.