Patrick J. Kiger
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Actor-director Ben Affleck’s Argo, which won the Best Picture statuette at Sunday night’s Academy Awards, is such an evocative spy thriller that from now on, it’ll be difficult to resist picturing Affleck as the CIA agent who ingeniously rescued six U.S. diplomats from Tehran in 1980 by staging a fake movie production. But if you want to…
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, but some have said that his spirit has lingered on—and not just figuratively, either. Over the years, there have been multiple purported sightings of his ghost—at the White House and Ford’s Theatre where he was assassinated, at Fort Monroe in Virginia, and at his tomb in Springfield, Ill. The…
By Patrick J. Kiger The new Fox TV series The Following, which premieres January 21 at 9 p.m. Eastern time, offers an unusual—and zeitgeist-infused–twist on the usual police procedural in which an investigator pursues a serial killer. After Joe Carroll (portrayed by James Purefoy)—a former college literature instructor who murdered 14 female students-escapes from death…
The participants in the National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers tend to be preparing for scenarios that many of us would consider remote, such as a catastrophic collapse of the global economic system, or an electromagnetic pulse attack by terrorists or a foreign enemy that would disable the nation’s electricity grids and render much of our…
Deep-sea exploration, of course, is an inherently dangerous pursuit. Venturing nearly seven miles down into the Challenger Deep, for example, means surviving perhaps the most extreme, forbidding environment on the planet. The pressure is 1,000 times that experienced at sea level, the rough equivalent of having 50 jumbo jets piled atop the submersible, and the temperature…
In March, as filmmaker and undersea explorer James Cameron recently descended nearly seven miles into the Challenger Deep section of the south Pacific’s Mariana Trench in a submersible of his own design, a retired Navy officer named Don Walsh waited on the surface in Cameron’s support ship. Of all the people who were part of…
Brent Jeffs, one of the subjects of I Escaped a Cult, was born in 1983 behind the walls of a concrete compound in Salt Lake Valley that was an outpost of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The group, also known as FLDS, is a breakaway Mormon sect which still clings to the…
In 1982, Maura, along with her husband and 12-year-old daughter Rebekah, moved to Sacramento to join a religious community that was then called Free Love Ministries, in what Maura says was a quest to find purpose in life. “God was calling us, and we needed to be obedient to God’s calling,” she recalls. But Maura’s…
