Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Amanda Montell is a writer and linguistics scholar from Baltimore, Maryland, who currently lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the nonfiction book on language Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language as well as essays in popular magazines like Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan. Wordslut and Cultish are being developed into television shows. She was formerly the features and beauty editor of Who What Wear and is now the host of a podcast called Sounds Like a Cult. She holds a degree in linguistics from New York University, and her studies in language have informed much of her writing.

She was also heavily influenced by the personal experience of her father, who was forced into the cult Synanon when he was a teenager and appointed to work in a lab. This led him to love the sciences, and eventually, he managed to escape the cult. He raised Amanda to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true promises and dangerous rhetoric. She also has an acute awareness of perspectives that are marginalized by language, and this is demonstrated through the way she handles the subject matter in Cultish, like how communities of color were specifically targeted by Jim Jones and how certain groups targeted women.