The Cult of Influencing: “The Algorithm Giveth, The Algorithm Taketh Away”

As a young teenager, Darls Centola was searching for something steady in a chaotic world. What she found was the Jehovah’s Witnesses—a religion that felt warm, structured, and safe.What she didn’t exp...

30 Mar 1h 3min

If Part 1 was the seduction… this is the unraveling.By now, Celeste is fully in - the "true believer" phase we like to call it. The relationships feel real. The stakes feel real. And the consequences ...

23 Mar 51min

At 16, Celeste Mott was alone, grieving, and searching - for meaning, for connection, for something that felt bigger than her small, suburban life.And then she found them.An online world inspired by A...

23 Mar 56min

Michelle Dowd was born into a cult that was literally training boys to fight in God’s army when the apocalypse came.It started in sunny Pasadena, California when her grandfather - a former Boy Scout l...

9 Mar 1h 5min

Star Stone walked into a fluorescent-lit room on Market Street in San Francisco where a man who looked like Mark Zuckerberg stroked a woman's clitoris in business casual while thirty people watched. "...

2 Mar 1h 7min

In Part 1, David Archuleta was the church's golden boy - the voice, the fame, the perfect Mormon billboard. In Part 2, that billboard comes down.David goes on a two-year Mormon mission to Chile post f...

23 Feb 1h 7min

David Archuleta was seventeen years old, Mormon to his core, and singing in front of thirty million people on American Idol. America saw the golden boy - the angel voice, the humble smile, the kid who...

17 Feb 1h 4min

When you're numbered among the Lord's anointed, you're supposed to feel special, but for Jeremy Tucker, he was just another mindless cog in the machine of the Kingdom of God. It didn't matter though, ...

9 Feb 1h 3min