Back Issues, volumes 25–26
volume 26 number 4
Havana Syndrome Hysteria
Havana Syndrome Hysteria and the Great Wild Goose Chase • Stupid Videos and Marketing Ploys • Environmental Conspiracies: Why do conspiracy theorists believe natural events are intentionally manipulated? • “You Can’t Say That!” Corporate Policing of Language • Excerpt from The Conjurer’s Conundrum: My Life in Magic & Skepticism • Vexed by the Un-Vaxxed • Misunderstanding Vaccines • Why Would God Create the Universe? • Distorting Darwinism • Electrohypersensitivity as a New Psychological Disorder • Reviews of Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity; Mysteries and Secrets Revealed; The Conjurer’s Conundrum; The Century of Deception • Special Investigation: Penguin Paradox — Serious Skeptical Lessons from an Apparently Silly Story
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volume 26 number 3
UFOs and UAPs
In Memoriam: Pat Linse (1947–2021); U.S. Government Says UFOs are “Real”: An Analysis of the 60 Minutes Investigation; Are UFOs and UAPs Ordinary, Extraordinary Terrestrial, or Extraordinary Extraterrestrial Phenomena?; Anti-Vaccination in the Age of COVID-19; 5G Conspiracy Theories & Other Popular Delusions; The Paradox of Free Will; Plausible Sociocultural Explanation for the Persistence and Universality of Gender Inequality Over Thousands of Years; How Science Works (and Why Pseudoscience Fails); Pandemic Politics: How 2020 Impacted Americans’ Social and Political Attitudes; Thought Experiments: What Good Are They, Anyway?; Expert Bullshit Detection…
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volume 26 number 2
Drug Trips & Reality
DMT and the Nature of Reality: Are the Entities and Experiences of a DMT Drug Trip Real or Imagined?; Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Scientific Martyrdom; Lizard People, 5G and the Nashville Bomber; Why Weird Beliefs Are a Normal, Central, Almost Universal Aspect of Human Affairs; Astrology as a Spiritual Belief System; How Science Can Explain Ghosts and Haunted Houses; Trial, Error, and Success: How People Learn and Think; Twenty-five Fallacies in the Case for Christianity; Junior Skeptic: Cognitive Dissonance
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volume 26 number 1
Cosmic Beginning
How Did It All Begin? Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof; The SkepDoc: Osteopathy Then and Now, by Harriet Hall, M.D.; Psychological Risks with COVID-19 Vaccines; The Future of Civilization after COVID-19; The Future of Higher Education Reengineering Learning for a Post-Pandemic World; Havana Syndrome Skepticism—Why We Should Be Skeptical: It Was Probably Psychogenic; Why Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Belongs in English Literature Curriculum Despite—Indeed Because—of its Use of the N-Word; Why Time, Causality, Consciousness, the Self, and Free Will Are Not Illusion; Alien Skulls and Their Makers: The Creation of the “Sealand Skull” and the Hoax It Unintentionally Inspired; Why We Are Not Hybrids of Earthling and Extraterrestrial Ancestry; Skeptic Extraordinaire; As Seen by Skeptic Magazine Artists; Junior Skeptic 78: Conspiracy Theories
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volume 25 number 4
QAnon & Conspiracies
QAnon and Conspiracy Theories; Why We Can’t Unsee Patterns — Real or Imagined — Once We See Them; QAnon in Conspiratorial Context; QAnon is Just a Warmed Over Witch Panic (and It’s Also Very Dangerous); Harriet Hall, M.D. on How Gwyneth Paltrow Spins Straw into Gold; The Art of the Skeptic: Finding Your Niche if You Love Both Science and Art; Fat Man and Little Boy: On the 75th Anniversary of Nuclear Weapons, a Moral Case for Their Use in Ending WWII and the Deterrence of Great Power Wars Since, and a Call to Eventually Eliminate Them; The Rise and Fall of Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum; The Testimony of Witnesses: Raising the Dead; Do Diversity Training Programs Work? Creating a Culture of Inclusion through Scientific Reasoning; Unpacking Political Life in America: The Skeptics Society’s Social and Political Attitudes Study; How Do You Get People to Care About Truth in Politics?; Are Laws of Nature Discovered or Invented?; Junior Skeptic: The Honest Truth About Vaccines
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volume 25 number 3
What Science Says About Race
Did Race Evolve, or is It a Social Construct? What Does Science Say? Plus: The Pope and Mussolini; Harriet Hall, M.D. on wearing face masks; Junior Skeptic on Pandemics Throughout History; Hollow Earth; Wicked Games: Lance Armstrong and Doping; Finding Meaning and Purpose Without Religion; A Naturalist Model for Reducing Speciesism, Racism, and Bigotry; What Moby-Dick Can Teach Us About the Current Pandemic Crisis; Is Science Amoral?; Faked Death Stories and Resurrection Myths; How Religions Use the Threat of Punishment to Terrify, Manipulate, and Control Believers; Reviews of Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, and The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies; and more…
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volume 25 number 2
Giving the Devil His Due: When Should Speech Be Censored?
Giving the Devil His Due, by Michael Shermer • Claims About a Government “UFO Program” — How Much is True? • Religious Intolerance, Witchcraft, Superstition, and Underdevelopment in Africa • Ark of Absurdities: Creationism Comes to Brazil • The Mystery of Göbekli Tepe: A New Chapter in History • What’s to be Gained Through Rationality? • Where and Why Science and Religion Conflict • The Conditions Under Which Common, Everyday Bullshit is Most Likely to Emerge • Ptolemy Revisited: The Return of Earth-Centered Cosmology • Reviews of: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control; Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them; Estrogen Matters: Why Taking Hormones in Menopause Can Improve Women’s Well-Being and Lengthen Their Lives—Without Raising the Risk of Breast Cancer
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volume 25 number 1
Conspiracies!
Who believes in conspiracies and why? Read real conspiracy theories and conspiracies with no theories. Also in this issue: Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Michael Shermer; Apples and Oranges: The Misunderstood Art of Making Comparisons; Drone Sightings in the Midwest — But Rule Out the Mass Hysteria Explanation; What Board Games Teach Us About Capitalism and How to Modify It; Meditation as Ideology and Meditations on Meditation: A Scientific and Clinical Perspective; Biological Beauty; Integrative Cancer Care Below the Bar of Science; Can We Ever Explain It All? Eight Key Points from World History; Countless Counterfeits: A New Logically Fallacy?
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