Throughout last week, I was an emotional wreck - obsessed with facebook postings and dribbles of messages coming from my friends in Western North Carolina. For five days, we didn’t know if they were alive. The morning of the Writing Symposium, I snapped off a news report, needing to keep my focus and not let fear take over. It was a couple more days before we began to hear details of how their idyllic home and land had been ravaged by Helene's catastrophic impact.

Robert Jay Lifton is 98 years old and he’s planning his next book. When he published his first one,  Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), he was unaware of its relevance for cult survivors, but it became a seminal book on coercive persuasion and ideological extremism. 20 books and 63 years later, he’s not done. His current project centers on “the attraction of factual reality” because, as he recently told Dr. Steve Hassan, “Facts Matter!”.