Amanda Montell

Montell read linguistics, and Cultish puts that training on a question usually handed to psychologists: not why people join extreme groups, but what the language does to them once they are inside. Loaded terms, thought-terminating cliches, a private vocabulary that makes the outside world harder to describe, and the same machinery running through a start-up, a fitness brand and a multi-level marketing scheme as through Jonestown. She is careful that this is a spectrum and not an equivalence. Wordslut, on gender and English, preceded it. She co-hosts a podcast on the same subject, and her later book turns the method on cognitive bias.