Southland Books Owner Fights Tennessee Demon Claims

01 • 25 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Stephanie McCrummen

A service at the Well, the Maryville, Tennessee church described in the story

Mike and Andrea Brewer decided the bookstore across the street from their Tennessee church was a stronghold for a demon named Lilith. Stephanie McCrummen traces how the Well, a charismatic congregation practicing "strategic spiritual warfare," targeted Southland Books and its owner, Lisa Misosky, over drag shows and a mah-jongg group. Masked men showed up armed. Misosky slept on the floor with a shotgun. The same language now runs through Trump's cabinet, Tucker Carlson's nightmares, and the war room where a lieutenant governor calls his opponents demonic, which raises a sharper question about where a metaphor stops and a plan begins.

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02 • 60 Minute Read

Atavist Magazine

Alex Ronan

The Extremist in the Family

When their daughter Abigail was born jaundiced, Rachel and Josh Piland put her in a sunny window instead of a hospital, refusing repeated midwife warnings that she needed emergency care. Alex Ronan reconstructs how Abigail died at sixty-one hours old, and how three more of the couple's children died in infancy, before a Michigan jury convicted the Pilands of second-degree murder. At her grave, Josh spoke the words Jesus used to raise a dead girl. Nothing happened. Rachel was pregnant again when she heard the sentence: twenty to forty-five years, with what she owes the children she has left still unsettled.

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03 • 18 Minute Read

The New York Times

Azam Ahmed

Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse.

A forensic lab in Estonia testing synthetic opioids

Estonia crushed its fentanyl crisis, cutting overdose deaths more than 70 percent by 2018. Azam Ahmed spent months tracing what replaced it: nitazenes, then a newer opioid called cychlorphine, drugs so potent that police who fought fentanyl for a decade say they miss it. A mother describes finding her son's body in a public toilet, his phone still on his lap. A prosecutor says the fight will take generations. Estonia beat one drug and got a worse one within a year, and the rest of Europe is still sitting on a heroin stockpile that will not last forever.

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04 • 25 Minute Read

Aeon	Joshua Habgood-Coote

The Radical Reasons Why You Dream of Making Things by Hand

In September 2025, the U.S. Labor Department posted an image of a white man under the slogan Make America Skilled Again, styled after Nazi-era propaganda. Joshua Habgood-Coote uses that image to ask why so many people now dream of beekeeping, blacksmithing, and hand-thrown pottery as AI closes in on everything else. He traces the same longing back through John Ruskin's stonemasons and William Morris's textile workshops, both trying to turn nostalgia into a demand for better work rather than a wish to relive the past. Not all nostalgia stays that pure. Ours is still an open question.

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Southland Books Owner Fights Tennessee Demon Claims

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