In regards to elite magazines, I have not read anything unfavorable about New Age religious topics in recent years.

But when it comes to coverage of mainstream religion, watch out.

I was frustrated to read a recent New Yorker story — that I’ll call the Gospel of Poo — that soberly related the tale of a serial entrepreneur and corporate mysticism with the seriousness of someone trying to dissect the Talmud.

The entrepreneur at the center of the piece is given the kind of serious treatment that other groups, say, Southern Baptists, could only dream of. See Jia Tolentino’s disparaging New Yorker piece not long ago about her childhood at Houston’s Second Baptist Church. That’s a 180-degree treatment from the following article:

A few days after Suzy Batiz learned that she’d made Forbes’s 2019 list of America’s richest self-made women, she lay down on her kitchen floor and wept. Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at more than two hundred and forty million dollars, grew up poor. …

One day, she went to see a hypnotist, who told her that her life lacked purpose. He gave her the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, which inspired Batiz to take what she calls a “spiritual sabbatical.” She studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and metaphysics. “I had an insatiable desire to find something,” she said. “I was the ultimate seeker.” At a bookshop, she came across “Loving What Is,” by the motivational speaker and author Byron Katie, who teaches a method of self-inquiry called the Work.

“Two weeks later, I’m at her ten-day workshop,” Batiz said. “I went in drinking a big thing of Yellow Tail every night, and, when I came out, I was sober for eight years. After that, I was in a bliss state. I knew there was a larger meaning here.” She developed a self-help course called Inside Out: How to Create the Life You Want by Going Within. She started to meditate. She got out of her head and into her body. She listened to her gut. “Then,” she recalled, “I was at a dinner party, and my brother-in-law asked, ‘Can bathroom odor be trapped?’ And lightning went through my body.”

Finally we get to what journalists call the “nut” or main paragraph of the story.

Batiz is the creator of Poo-Pourri, a bathroom spray made from essential oils, which has sold sixty million bottles since it launched, in 2007. As its name suggests, Poo-Pourri is designed to mask the smell of excrement — or, more precisely, to trap unpleasant odors in the toilet, below the surface of the water, and to release pleasant natural fragrances, including citrus, lavender, and tropical hibiscus, in their stead.