And that they’re not that different from normal kids.” 
 
 ‘I have two pieces of paper,” Krista announced. He was starting to get his life together, but he was haunted by something that his grandfather had said to him on his deathbed. That very impermeability is part of what makes the concept of the mind so challenging to researchers studying how it works, the neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio says in his book, “Self Comes to Mind.” “The fact that no one sees the minds of others, conscious or not, is especially mysterious,” he writes. He promptly formed a production company with the express purpose of bringing Landau's life to the screen. For the lead role, he had one stipulation: It had to be played by an actual genius, regardless of the discipline. She answers quickly, with a sigh: “That we’re a southern slave plantation. “His classes averaged about fifty or sixty people, and there would be maybe seven to ten people in it who would be Scientologists,” she says. Beatings aside, the most effective way to discipline prisoners was “short-term solitary confinement,” first in “an iron casket buried into the ground,” then the “pisser”—a series of windowless cells (“no bunk, no toilet, no ventilation”). If you feel that you need him out of here, I have no objections. “It is all so subjective, how is one supposed to know?” he wrote. “How does it feel to be smarter today than you were two months ago? But yes, I always felt false.” 
 
 He noted that a Scientologist hearing this would feel, with some justification, that he had misled his auditors about his progress. But, after hundreds of hours of auditing sessions, he said, “I remember feeling I just wanted it over. There was no easy way to say this, the doctor said: the twins were conjoined. “Within less than a decade Louisiana went from turning all lifers loose in ten-and-a-half years or less to keeping virtually all of them in prison for their natural lives,” writes historian Burk Foster. There are hallways that lead to apartments, and in the apartments there are kitchens, and in the iceboxes food, fresh and perfectly edible but with 1952 expiration dates. “There’s a point when there’s not any point in keeping an elderly inmate,” she says. At the same time, “these men have made this their community. "I was a late child, so I mostly interacted with my parents' friends," he says. "When I got out," remembers Yulia, "everyone was like, 'Did he ask you about sleeping with other women?' He and his colleague smiled at the girls, asked them some questions, pronounced them adorable and returned to their waiting drinks inside the bar. “You’re actually helping us promote it and do our sales, so thank you so much.” Cain describes the rodeo as “a gigantic morale builder” for prisoners and a “deterrent” for their children, adding that it’s ultimately about public safety: “This rodeo prevents victims of violent crime.” I ask Cain about his philosophy of “moral rehabilitation,” whether redemption at Angola is possible only through Jesus. He is a squat bearded man named Sergey, fizzing with cynical mirth. The mayhem level went up a notch, and Tatiana crawled under the table, wailing, as Krista was trying to pull her back up by the force of her neck. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. I just knew they were going to be fine.” 
 
 By the time she delivered, the doctors were preparing her for the worst; social workers met with her about grief counseling. “In my house growing up, everything didn’t have to be perfect,” she said. Another terrible minute later, it's rolling down an overgrown airfield between rusting husks of Aeroflot planes grounded by the empire's fall. “There were images, feelings, and thoughts that I suddenly realized, That’s not here. Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Could the girls’ connection go beyond sensory impressions to higher thoughts, thoughts as simple as “I want water” or as complex as “I’m tired of ‘Good Night Moon’ ”? But the ophthalmologist was concerned that not enough attention was being paid to some details of their care, and the dentist had similar concerns. "See, if one of the guards heard you, he would fine me a thousand hryvnias [about $125]," he says. Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. Simms is the first to acknowledge that her relationship with the twins is different from those she has with her other children. “You know: Everybody gets religion as soon as the prison gate closes behind them,” he says. Although Goodrich proclaimed their futures bright at the time of the separation, and one of the two boys is indeed thriving, his brother eventually developed debilitating seizures; the boy, now 9, takes medication that impairs his alertness and cognition. “‘He likes it to look like slavery times,’ the inmates observed.” 
 
 ‘Army of the Lord’ 
 
 Warden Cain ambles confidently toward the reporters outside the rodeo arena. Like the hospice, this is meant to imbue dignity in death, but for Diggs, it’s cold comfort. “It’s like when you go to college and you’re looking for your major.” 
 
 The prison has invested heavily in its PR machinery and Cain has a reputation for being intolerant of negative coverage. I know you didn't read every issue because you couldn't get every issue." “They put me on a program that took two years to complete,” she says. “We were never normal,” Simms says, and “that was O.K.” She thinks that in some ways it was easier for her family to accept the idea of conjoined twins than it might have been for a family that was more conventional. For someone so clearly questing after control and adulation, Dau was the best thing that could possibly happen. The fine system has also fostered a robust culture of snitching. It’s like she has one consciousness and can witness another’s.” 
 
 As profound as it is to consider that each may witness the other’s consciousness, equally striking is their ability to maintain their individuality. It’s possible that they are developing in such a way that their brains are trying hard to filter out input that originates from the other girl’s body. When his friends finished, however, Haggis had his own set of grievances. One by one, they had disappeared from Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone. If the two girls are unique individuals, then each girl’s experience of that stimulus would inevitably be different; they would be having a parallel experience, but not one they experienced in some kind of commingling of consciousness. Proceeds pay for inmate funerals, maintenance on Angola’s inmate-constructed chapels, and programs aimed at “moral rehabilitation.” Cain once told Christianity Today that the program helps inmates “accept they’re in prison and that it’s God’s will that maybe they don’t get out—and that while you’re here you do your best for him.” The rodeo may break bodies, but Cain is in the business of saving souls. In 1998, six years before he defected, Rathbun told the paper that he had never seen Miscavige hit anyone. “Now I do it,” Tatiana said, reaching for the cup from which her sister was just drinking. You can go from life to life to life without being cognizant of what is going on. They thought they had seen inside; but what they learned, tragically, was how little they knew about the union after all. And against all reason—there is a microphone in the ceiling, for fuck's sake—I consider it. “They were ten years old, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their parents go along with this?” Haggis told me. The night I watched them doze off, both girls faced the bed, and then Tatiana started climbing up its side with her feet, using Krista as a kind of bracing post. It was as if even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves, with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage of development, under these unusual circumstances — or maybe not existing at all. "What's going to happen to the set after the shooting is over?" Like all of Angola’s wardens, Cain has continued the tradition of hard labor: most inmates work in the fields eight hours a day, five days a week, harvesting hundreds of acres of soybeans, wheat, corn, and cotton—picked by hand and sold by Prison Enterprises, the business arm of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Despite the interest of the scientific community, the girls, because of their age, have not experienced extensive investigation. Later in the week, Simms was getting Tatiana and Krista dressed for a five-hour van ride on treacherous roads in the snow to Vancouver, where the girls had a series of doctors’ appointments. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out." Davis says that the figure comes from the number of people throughout the world who have donated to the church. Inmate ministers tell new prisoners that they can either work on their “moral rehabilitation” or remain a “predator”—“the choice is yours.” The radio station plays gospel music. Since 2008, more than a few crew members stopped pretending this was a temporary gig and have moved to Kharkov. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. “I think I have a lot more respect for nature than a lot of other people.” 
 
 Now 25, Simms is a mother of five children: Rosa, 8; Christopher, 6; Tatiana and Krista; and Shaylee, who is 3, born a year and a half after the twins. But within the walls of the set, for the 300 people working on the project—including the fifty or so who live in costume, in character—there is no difference between "on" and "off." “The last thing I’m interested in is dredging all this up again.” He kept putting me off, saying that he was too busy to get together, but he promised that we would meet when he was more available. Once at the compound, Yulia waited for over six hours; finally the director showed up. “Every time I talk to my grandma she’s trying to talk me out of [competing],” says Lathen. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. Scientology, Davis said, doesn’t pretend to be perfect, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. They like to show how they can jump up and down, which they do like any other children, or climb into their crib, which they do like self-taught gymnasts. Patterson says that he looked into the matter, at the suggestion of Scientologists, but found nothing. They are somebody here.” I ask if there is one myth about Angola she would like to dispel. “Yeah,” the girls affirmed in their frequent singsong unison, nodding together. Since leaving the church, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found helpful.
– The year's best magazine articles cover everything from Scientology to conjoined twins to religious slavery in a Louisiana prison. Slate lists 10 favorites via Longform.org, including: "The Apostate," The New Yorker. Famed Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis reveals his falling out with the Church of Scientology. "I just went along, to my shame," Haggis says. "I did what was easy ... without asking them, or myself, any hard questions." "The Movie Set That Ate Itself," GQ. "Madman" director Ilya Khrzhanovsky assembled a cast of thousands in a Ukrainian city, built a totalitarian society, and filmed his actors all the time. "He looks completely, utterly delighted." "Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?" New York Times Magazine. Twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan are joined at the head, with a unique neural anatomy. "Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs. ... One girl drinks, another girl feels it." "Dispatch From Angola," Colorlines. Inmates working hard labor on 18,000 acres of Louisiana farmland are ordered to believe in God. "Choosing not to do what God commands is rebellion, and such disobedience has consequences," says a former prisoner. See the rest of Slate's list here.