Envy Apartment

The following testimony from JD Hall regarding a recent visit to Jim Bakker’s studio and Morningside Ministries was sent to Pulpit & Pen for publishing. While on a working vacation in Branson, Missouri on August 2 – just prior to my debate on Cessationism and Charismaticism in Cleveland the following weekend – I spent time with my extended family on the campus of College of the Ozarks. While there, I planned to visit the television studios and survivalist retreat (for lack of a better word) of Jim Bakker, the disgraced televangelist who had a multi-millionaire fund his ministry come back and who is now hustling survival supplies in the name of Jesus. Prior to leaving on vacation, I planned this visit to Morningside and received permission for what I had expected would happen from my local church leadership , lest anyone think I am a completely crazy man who had gone rogue or something like that. My leadership gave me the okay to do what I, indeed, ended up doing. First, a few th...

Illustration by Luke Shuman Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2017 | 9 minutes (2,122 words) Our latest Exclusive is a new story by tennis writer Ben Rothenberg and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine . To hear Alexander Zverev Sr . tell it, the tale of how his younger, golden- haired son began to play tennis has the simplicity of a fairy tale involving the Three Bears. “It was all natural for Sascha,” he said. “Mama played, Papa played, brother played . And so, he started to play.” While the Williams sisters have made family reunions in the finals of Grand Slams feel normal , multiple branches of a family tree breaking through to the top of the sport remains a rare phenomenon. This is particularly so in the men’s game, where brothers have rarely shared space in the top 200 together over the past decade. But in a sport that demands individualism, the Zverevs have managed to become the archetypal tennis family , a story line that’s become increasingly prom...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...