He built a German utopia in the Chilean Andes. Pinochet's secret police used it to torture and kill.

1 • 38 Minute Read

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Bruce Falconer

Colonia Dignidad compound in the Chilean Andes

Paul Schaefer ran a spotless German village in the Chilean Andes, with flower gardens and a free hospital. This Bruce Falconer piece from 2008 is a great read on Colonia Dignidad, and you may remember the 2021 Netflix documentary "A Sinister Sect" or the 2015 film "Colonia Dignidad", that told the story. Bruce spent years working out what was happening underneath the placid surface of this post-WWII colony, from banned private conversations, nightly confession, and sexual assault against young boys. When Pinochet's secret police needed a place to torture people, Colonia Dignidad became one of their stops.

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2 • 19 Minute Read

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Eli Saslow

When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Digital Twin

I am no luddite, I use technology every day, including AI, but it feels gross watching it seep into institutions built on community, trust, and spiritual belief. Justin Lester spent months feeding his sermons, texts, and emails, almost two million words in all, into an AI model built to sound like him. Now that model talks to strangers who find it online, mostly late at night. Someone asks it about a suicide attempt. Someone else asks if she can still be Christian and transition. It answers in Lester's cadence, using his slang, even retelling his own suicide attempt from years ago.

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4 • 20 Minute Read

AEON	J F Martel

How art invented humanity

Four teenage boys went looking for a legend about buried gold near Montignac, France, in 1940, and found the Lascaux caves instead: horses, elk, and bulls painted some 20,000 years ago, with almost no humans anywhere on the walls. J F Martel thinks that absence matters more than it looks. Human figures don't show up in cave art until 8,000 years later, well into the Neolithic. Martel works through Herzog's idea of ecstatic truth, Baudelaire on beauty, Oscar Wilde's claim that Impressionist painters invented the London fog, to make an odd argument: humans didn't invent art. Art invented humans.

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He built a German utopia in the Chilean Andes. Pinochet's secret police used it to torture and kill.

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