The Fall of the House of Moon
The scandalous history of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The church has lost political power and followers since Moon’s death in 2012, and Moon’s own family has fractured:
As it turns out, Moon didn’t always live up to his virtuous teachings, either. In April, I spoke by videophone with Annie Choi, a soft-spoken, 77-year-old Korean woman with ruddy cheeks and thick silver hair. Choi, who joined Moon’s church along with her mother and sister in the 1950s, alleges that she engaged in numerous sexual rituals—some involving as many as six women—beginning when she was 17 years old. Her story, which is consistent with the accounts of several early followers, supports the claim that Moon’s church started out as a sex cult, with Moon “purifying” female devotees through erotic rites.
After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back
Adrian Chen tracks down Perry Fellwock, also once known as Winslow Peck, whose revelations were shared four decades ago in the radical magazine Ramparts magazine:
We set a new date: Noon on a Friday, at a bench outside the train station in Oceanside. Just as I was about to hang up he stopped me.
“Wait, I don’t think meeting at the train station is a good idea because that seems a little spookish,“ he said. ”I’m not a spook, so I don’t want to do anything spookish. Maybe you could meet me while I’m grocery shopping. What’s a normal thing we can do?”
I tried to think of things a 67-year-old antiques dealer and a 28-year-old journalist might normally do together. Grocery shopping was not high on the list. Fellwock came up with another plan: We would go to a Chinese restaurant near the train station and grab lunch.
‘He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip’
Tom Junod’s profile of George Clooney, in which the actor takes on Russell Crowe, Tesla and Leonardo DiCaprio:
"And the thing about playing Leo is you have all these guys talking shit. We get there, and there’s this guy, Danny A I think his name is. Danny A is this club kid from New York. And he comes up to me and says, ‘We played once at Chelsea Piers. I kicked your ass.’ I said, ‘I’ve only played at Chelsea Piers once in my life and ran the table. So if we played, you didn’t kick anybody’s ass.’ And so then we’re watching them warm up, and they’re doing this weave around the court, and one of the guys I play with says, ‘You know we’re going to kill these guys, right?’ Because they can’t play at all. We’re all like fifty years old, and we beat them three straight: 11–0, 11–0, 11–0. And the discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what’s what. I’m not sure if Leo has someone like that.”
False Confessions: NYC Still Struggles in Aftermath of Central Park Five
In the spring of 1989, five teenagers from Harlem were convicted of raping and assaulting a woman jogging in Central Park after four of the five confessed to the crime. The confession of a convicted rapist and killer named Matías Reyes overturned the five men’s convictions in 2003. Since then, the NYPD announced it would adopt the practice of videotaping interrogations, but the rollout of the program has been minimal:
Five weeks after Browne spoke to The Journal, Kelly began an hour-long speech to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs by announcing that all precincts would adopt the videotaping of interrogations. The policy would also expand beyond just felony assaults, which Kelly said totaled around 300 interviews at the time, to include murders and sex crimes.
“We want to continue to stay ahead of the curve with the help of our recording initiative,” Kelly told the audience. He was not specific about a timeline for implementation, nor has the NYPD ever made that information public.
La Belle Simone
Simone Levitt was once married to one of the richest men in America: real estate tycoon Bill Levitt, who is widely credited as being the father of American suburbia. Simone now lives in a rented one-bedroom on New York City’s Upper East Side, where she told a reporter about her husband’s rise and fall:
“In the morning, I’m in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I say, ‘Honey, don’t forget the jewelry.’ And he said, ‘What jewelry?’ He told me not to put it in the safe! I said I took it off and put it right there. There was no jewelry.”
At the time, Simone believed the diamonds and rubies that had disappeared from her bedside had been stolen by a hotel employee or other intruder as they slept. But suddenly, as she spoke to me, a doubt appeared, a further mystery. “Something was put in my drink,” she said. “Whether something was put in Bill’s … until this second, I assumed he had it too! Because the minute I hit the pillow … but in the morning, come to think of it, he said ‘your jewelry’ as if he wasn’t surprised. All of a sudden, this is hitting me. Why wasn’t he surprised? Why wasn’t he upset for me?” She’ll never know.
Assets of the Ayatollah
A Reuters investigation into the Iranian supreme leader’s $95 billion economic empire—which was partly built on confiscating family property from ordinary citizens:
Several other Iranians whose family properties were taken over by Setad described in interviews how men showed up and threatened to use violence if the owners didn’t leave the premises at once. One man said he had been told how an elderly family member had stood by distraught as workmen carried out all of the furniture from her home.
According to this account, she sat down on a carpet, refused to move and pleaded, “What can I do? Where can I go?”
“Then they reached down, lifted her up on the carpet and took her out.”
The Beatles Succeeded Through Talent, Ambition, and a Lot of Arrogance
Andrew Romano sets out to debunk Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in Outliers that the Beatles made their success through the “10,000-hour rule”—in this case, spending thousands of hours of playing in Hamburg:
But this isn’t even the real problem with Gladwell’s theory. The real problem is that while the Beatles’ marathon stints in Hamburg did transform them as a band—they were so vibrant, so tight, and so unrecognizable when they returned from their first campaign that the crowds in Liverpool mistook them for a blistering new German combo—the “complex task” they had now “mastered” was not the same task that would eventually earn them world domination.
Being able to mach schau in a small club was a pivotal part of the Beatles development: it won them a fanatical following in Liverpool, which in turn drove their debut single “Love Me Do” up the charts even when the suits in London refused to promote it, and it was also the reason the Fabs were able record an LP as a thrilling as Please Please Me in a single ten-hour workday. But beyond that, Gladwell is wrong. The Beatles’ “excellence at performing” is not “what it took” for them to become the greatest rock band of all time. In fact, the Beatles were stuck in a rut even after they returned from Hamburg in 1961—and their live expertise was not enough to get them out of it.
Thanksgiving in Mongolia
Ariel Levy’s devastating personal essay on losing her baby:
I had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still a witch, but my powers were all gone.
That is not what the doctor said when he came back to the clinic in the morning.
Elizabeth Warren Is Hillary Clinton’s Nightmare
Noam Scheiber envisions a scenario in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren threatens the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016:
Which brings us to the probable face of the insurgency. In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a woman, given Democrats’ desire to make history again. She would have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.
The Nazi Anatomists
On “the long-buried history of Nazi-era anatomy” which used corpses of political dissidents and euthanasia victims, and how the work haunts modern science:
Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research—along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university collections that still exist today.
This history matters for its own sake. It also matters for debates that remain unresolved—about how anatomists get bodies and what to do with research that is scientifically valuable but morally disturbing.
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