Jennifer Miller looked into the network of Christian inpatient counseling centers known as Mercy Ministries, and what she found is disturbing: denial of access to psychiatric drugs, use of draconian punishments and control mechanisms, a belief that most psychological and some physical problems are caused by demons. “Mercy illustrates what happens when a hard-line, religiously oriented organization inserts itself into a gaping hole in the United States’ mental health system,” Miller writes. “Because organizations like Mercy are barely subject to government oversight, it’s likely not an anomaly.”
Are liberals of 2016 killing liberalism with their smugness? That’s what Emmett Rensin argued on Vox last week. Jamelle Bouie offers an enthusiastic counterpoint: “Rensin misses the huge degree to which his vantage point on American liberalism isn’t the vantage point. Depending on where and who you are, liberalism looks different, both as politics and culture. This is blinkered. And the result is an essay that doesn’t criticize ‘liberalism’ so much as it positions Rensin against other members of his cultural cohort.”
Donald Trump’s camp is now trying to convince the GOP establishment that he can play ball. But, Jim Newell writes, Trump is Trump, and that’s it. “There’s no reason to believe that the personality Trump has presented in his campaign is anything other than an extension of his truest self, which” (Newell minces no words) “is a pig.”
Now that fewer people are using Facebook to share personal content and connect with friends and family—it’s just gotten way too big—its powers-that-be are figuring out how to morph the platform into something new. “What has the Facebook app and site become, if not a social network?” asks Will Oremus. “The answer is rather obvious when you watch how people use it. It has become a personalized portal to the online world.”
What does Beyoncé’s album Lemonade—which debuted in film form on HBO on Saturday—sound like, all dazzling imagery and juicy gossip aside? Carl Wilson reports on his listening experience. “If, as an aural album, Lemonade is a little less fascinatingly singular and eccentric than [her last album] Beyoncé, so be it,” Wilson writes. “The risk with a sustained storyline is that whenever a song sags it can feel as if the whole is sagging, at which points the personal content in particular can begin to seem more indulgent, especially with the extraordinary visual film always there to overshadow it. At least that’s how this white dude heard Lemonade in its first 24 hours of existence.”
For fun: John James Audubon once made up a bunch of fake species, including a bulletproof fish, to prank a rival naturalist. Atlas Obscura’s Sarah Laskow has the story.
All hail the brindled stamiter,
Rebecca
