Religion: The Secret of Stelle

Richard Kieninger is a softspoken, bespectacled Chicagoan who believes that he has a holy task—preparing for civilization's destruction. He and his followers are currently building a Noah's Ark community on the Illinois plains, where they hope to survive a series of disasters that they believe lie in store for most of the rest of mankind

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Tree Believer: Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Vision

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick’s debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, “Would you please tell Mr

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Books: Stained with a Different Darkness

THE CHRONICLE OF THE LODZ GHETTO, 1941-1944 Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki; translated by Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel and others; Yale; 551 pages; $35Ghetto is an Italian word, but it is defined in German. In 1939 the Third Reich took the obsolete custom of separating Jews from the human community and gave it new meaning

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They Had A Plan

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it

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