“I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst” – Gore Vidal. By Aaron Dabbah.

The fake science that keeps threatening to kill us. By Corey Pein.

Based on population research, more than half of people in the Western world have had at least one experience that might be called “paranormal.” So why then do we hear so little about them? By Donagh Coleman.

While we have many problems in our media landscape, the most dangerous is how it is being weaponized to gaslight people. By Danah Boyd.

I just thought I might give you a little taste of what it means to your personal life to express dissent from the government line in the UK in 2018. By Craig Murray.

On facts, fallacies, and power. By Kristian Williams.

You haven’t seen headlines recently about the Large Hadron Collider, have you? By Sabine Hossenfelder.

“I'm proud of being a leader of a poop cult,” Jillian Mai Thi Epperly once joked to fans of her signature recipe: a fermented slurry of salted cabbage that produces “waterfalls” of diarrhea. Here's the wild story of how she convinced thousands to believe her dangerous science, and how a grassroots movement shut her down when Facebook wouldn't. By Nidhi Subbaraman.

Historian Liam Hogan has spent the last six years debunking the Irish slave myth. By David M. Perry.

The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow

Jane Mayer is a great journalist. But in a 15,000 word profile on Christopher Steele and his dossier, she adds just two new bits of news, and along the way muddles the timeline as badly as all the Steele boosters who have gone before her. By Marcy Wheeler.

An artificial intelligence bot called Zach is creating a stir in the medical community. A doctor in Christchurch is teaching it to write patient notes. An Otago professor has it interpreting ECG results. But AI experts are not convinced. David Farrier goes in search of Zach.

Octopus fandom is out of control and blind to the evidence. By Daniel Engber.

The Dangerous Diffusion of Basic Infantry Tactics. By Leo Blanken, Kai Thaxton, Michael Alexander.

Bruce Robbins reads Merve Emre’s “Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America.”

With little more than a website and some nerve, a prankster did the unthinkable: turned his home into the top-rated restaurant listing in London. By Eli Rosenberg.

After months of carefully explaining my politics every time I wrote about Russiagate, I finally sat down to explain my position in essay form. By Nina Illingworth.

Not a lot concerning the artist, erotic publisher, explorer, and general enigma Count de Waldeck can be taken at face value, and this certainly includes his fanciful representations of ancient Mesoamerican culture which — despite the exquisite brilliance of their execution — run wild with anatopistic lions, elephants, and suspicious architecture. Rhys Griffiths looks at the life and work of one of the 19th century's most mysterious and eccentric figures.

Even in the era of "net neutrality" powerful corporations controlled internet content. By Megan Mcardle.

Last month, in the process of exploring the awkward fact that most people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think, I talked at some length about thoughtstoppers: those crisp little words or phrases that combine absurdity and powerful emotions to short-circuit the thinking process... By John Michael Greer.