Jane Borden
Author, Culture Journalist, Freelance Editor
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Coming 2025
Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America
Longlisted for a Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, this colorful and enlightening pop history explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders still drive American culture today, contextualizes the current rise in division and extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, and proposes the United States is the largest cult of all.
Since the Mayflower sidled up near Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it just went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the almighty dollar, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.
With in-depth research and compelling insight, Borden uncovers the American history you didn't learn in school, including how we are still being brainwashed, making us a nation of easy marks for con artists and strong men. Along the way, she also revisits some of the most infamous cults in this country—including, the Branch Davidians and Love Has Won, presenting them—as integral parts of our national psyche rather than as aberrations.
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I Totally Meant To Do That
Like Cerberus, a griffin or one of those joints near Port Authority that’s both a Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell, Jane is a hybrid too horrifying to exist: a hipster-debutante. She was reared in a proper Southern home in North Carolina, and sent to boarding school in Virginia, then a sorority in Chapel Hill.
She next moved to New York and discovered that none of this grooming meant a lick to anyone. In fact, she hid her upbringing—it was easier than explaining what a debutante “does” (answer: not much).
I Totally Meant to Do That is a memoir in essays of Borden’s transformation from Southern Belle to Brooklyn hipster to somewhere in between. It muses on the intersections of and altercations between Southern hospitality and Gotham cool. It is also a love letter to the two homes Borden wanted and between which she ultimately had to choose.
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Meet Jane
Jane Borden is an author, culture journalist, and editor. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, and has written for the New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post, among other outlets.
Her book Cults Like US: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America will be published in March 2025 by One Signal Publishers. Her first book, I Totally Meant to Do That, was published by Crown. Before all of that, she was a culture editor at Time Out New York.
She is also a professional editor, book coach, and ghost writer. Jane lives in Los Angeles.
Editorial Services
For a decade now, Borden has worked with authors as an editor, book coach, and ghost writer. Her sweet spots are human potential, the sciences, and memoir.
She writes and edits proposals and query letters, helps authors conceptualize and roadmap books, edits completed manuscripts, doctors fubar manuscripts, and sometimes produces the whole operation.
Please reach out with your needs.