Jed Oelbaum
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She Built a Shady Guru’s YouTube Army. Now She’s His Fiercest Critic — But Who Will Believe Her?
It was May 2015, and the Hotel Surya in Varanasi, India, was hosting “Inner Awakening,” the flagship spiritual training program of Paramahamsa Nithyananda. To his followers, he is a god incarnate, “His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam,” the living avatar of Shiva, or, as one devotee put it, “the only reviver of authentic Hinduism…
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Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real
On a sunny morning in early 2000, Joseph Matheny woke up to find conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn again. He was making coffee when he noticed a face peering in a ground-floor window of the small, three-story building he rented in Santa Cruz. Past the peeper, there were three other men in their…
