Category: Review
Myths, Monsters, and Mysteries of Those Meddling Kids
Zoinks! is the first book to examine the folklore, myths, and legends about Scooby-Doo that inspired so many of the Mystery, Inc., gang’s adventures. Approaching the beloved cartoon with scholarly rigor and more than a bit of wit, Mark Norman (host of the Folklore Podcast and author of several books, including Black Dog Folklore and …
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The essence of what a science communicator does is try to make science relatable and accessible to the masses. Joe Schwarcz has been doing this for decades. His latest book, Superfoods, Silkworms, and Spandex: Science and Pseudoscience in Everyday Life, continues his legacy of making science both accessible and fun. It’s a veritable buffet of …
Bigfoot and the Folk
Musicologist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) spent his professional career traveling around the country making audio recordings of obscure American musicians, mostly poor and rural, playing obscure American music. He believed such folklore was an aspect of the American experience worth preserving and studying. He argued such music was crucial to understanding American history. It didn’t matter …
Kendrick Frazier’s Farewell
Kendrick Frazier, the longtime editor of this magazine, has written an excellent book on pseudoscience as it contrasts with real science. The book is different from others in that it does not emphasize detailed descriptions of studies showing that this, that, or the other pseudoscience is bogus. Oh, there are references to be sure, but …
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The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal by Chris French. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780262048361. 424 pp. Hardcover, $32.95. From Ghoulies and Ghosties, And long-leggedy Beasties, And things that go bump in the Night, Good Lord deliver us. —Traditional Scottish Prayer Experience is a great teacher; it guides our behavior, …
Disney’s Wish: A Century of Wishing on Stars
Wish. Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn. Starring Ariana DuBose and Chris Pine. Disney Studios, 2023. Last October marked Disney’s hundredth year. As part of the anniversary celebration, the studio leaned into the idea of wishing upon a star, which first appeared in their second theatrical animated feature film, Pinocchio (1940). The hit song …
This article is available for free to all.Healthy Skepticism about Wellness Culture
The Gospel of Wellness is the book I most strongly recommend to those who are invested in making themselves as healthy as possible through trendy products, practices, or services. It offers healthy skepticism, investigative reporting, fascinating insights, and the empathy of an author whose life became consumed by the enormous wellness industry, which consists of …
This article is available for free to all.A Foolproof Defense against Misinformation?
Fake news and misinformation in the media—especially social media—is obviously a serious problem, not only in the United States but worldwide. But what to do about it? There have been numerous suggestions over the years, most advocating better education in some form or other. While better education would no doubt be helpful, it seems a …
This article is available for free to all.The Movie Review THEY Don’t Want You to Read
Over the past year, UFO lore seems to have tightened its grip on the public’s imagination. This is thanks largely to politicians who think that “I know a guy who says he has stuff that’ll blow your mind” is evidence and “You can’t prove it didn’t happen” is the ultimate mic drop. So it is …
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Not all teen horror is vapid. The film Grimcutty manages to make a completely next-level contribution to a genre packed with recycled tropes. Though the reviews were bad, they were wrong. Grimcutty likely struck a nerve with its parent-targeted moral panic narrative but will delight anyone with a sufficiently nuanced background in the study of …
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Misanthropology: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Study of Humanity by Sean M. Rafferty, an anthropology professor at the University at Albany, is intended as an introductory textbook to teach anthropology students the difference between scientifically valid, accepted anthropological practices and nonvalid pseudoscientific practices seen in (or mistaken for) anthropology. Although the explanatory and theoretical portions are …
If You Should Go at Midnight …
In his new book If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America, Jeffrey Debies-Carl, associate professor of sociology at the University of New Haven, examines a curious and common phenomenon called legend tripping. A legend trip is an activity based on a preexisting narrative or legend, a “sort of quest, an …
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Philip Plait, PhD, an astronomer, skeptic, and science advocate, has authored another important book titled Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe. This book is a notable contribution to scientific outreach aimed at the general public as well as some professional astronomers and astrophysicists. My overall opinion about this work is distinctly positive. …
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Most readers of this magazine probably thought that the scientific validity of astrology was settled science, with the conclusion that astrology is completely invalid. It would follow from this conclusion that research on astrology would have come to a halt. It is certainly the case that the issue of astrology’s validity and its ability to …
Double the Weirdness but Not Double the Fun
I formed my first impression of Postcolonial Astrology while browsing in a bookstore. It seemed to be an aggressively stupid amalgamation of two normally separate species of nonsense. Flipping through it, I encountered the classic weirdness of astrology, where critical intelligence goes to die. Mixed in were hints of the sort of puritanical social justice …
This article is available for free to all.The Rises and Falls of One-True-Cure Oddballs
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling devotes most of his engrossing book If It Sounds Like a Quack… to describing how some of the most preposterous panacea promoters in the United States came to conclude they had found the “One True Cure,” gained devotees, and—with one exception—suffered humiliating downfalls. The purported One True Cure promoted by dentist Larry Lytle …
Moore (and Yet More Moore) on the Scopes Trial
After a trial held over eight scorching days in July 1925, John Thomas Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted of violating a recently enacted state law forbidding educators in the state’s public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, …
This article is available for free to all.The View from Above
There is no shortage of science fiction stories involving alien visitors to Earth, but the temperaments of these fictional space tourists run the gamut. On one end of the spectrum are the mindlessly destructive heat-ray wielding giants of H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds, and on the other is the adorable adopted pet …
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Just another run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road Pinker volume. Which is another way of saying it’s bloody marvelous. What a consummate intellectual this man is! Every one of his books is a bracing river of fluent readability to delight the non-specialist. Yet each one simultaneously earns its place as a major professional contribution to its own field. Grasp …
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The title of Loren Pankratz’s latest book reminds me of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, a popular and controversial series of network television programs broadcasted beginning in 1997. The series featured the “Masked Magician” performing various feats of conjuring and then revealing the trickery he used, which sometimes differed from what …
Patterns of Fear and Factual Distortion in America
Do the news media sometimes provide a distorted picture of the world around us? Undoubtedly, and social media even more so. And of course the two interact. Social media comments upon or shares the news, and social media’s comments, memes, and concerns become news themselves. The interaction between the two increases and accelerates distortion. Often …
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The 2009 National Academy of Science report Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward first brought to public attention the serious problems with the forensic sciences. Now, well over ten years later, the state of forensic science in the United States still leaves much to be desired. Brandon L. Garrett, a law …
Predictions—or Coincidences?
“Premonitions are impossible but they happen all the time,” says the jacket text on this book, quoting the author. This is true up to a point. The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story is a difficult book to pin down. Fortunately, it is not a wide-eyed promotion of the idea that some people can predict the …
Questioning the Quest for Immortality
In Greek mythology, Orpheus goes to the underworld to recover his deceased wife, Eurydice; Hades—the god of the underworld—grants his wish, under the condition that he not look back at her. Orpheus does not comply and loses Eurydice forever. Peter Ward uses this story as the starting point of The Price of Immortality, because it …
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In the final chapter of her book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Christine Garwood estimated “there are probably no more than a few thousand flat-earth believers alive in the world today and fewer still who would be willing publicly to declare their conviction.” That was in 2007. Fifteen years later, flat-earth conventions …
A Feminist Guide to Rethinking Menopause
The Guardian has referred to Dr. Jen Gunter, author of the bestselling The Vagina Bible, as “the world’s most famous—and outspoken—gynecologist.” In her follow-up book, Gunter lives up to that appellation. The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism is just that—a manifesto that declares “what the patriarchy thinks of menopause is irrelevant. …
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It’s common knowledge that Prince Charles is a persistent and outspoken champion of alternative medicine, but the full story has never been told—until now. Edzard Ernst reveals all the shocking details in this unauthorized biography. The shocks come from Charles’s own words, which Ernst quotes extensively. It is ironic that Charles’s supporters were responsible for …
A Skeptical Look Down Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley isn’t just a film experience; it’s a tutorial in the practices and techniques of the psychic marketplace we live in and a dark reflection of the world we have come to accept as normal. We can no longer deny lying has become a successful business practice, and del Toro has …
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William of Occam is a hero of the skeptical movement, and the importance of Occam’s razor to skeptical analysis is well known to readers of this magazine. But just who William of Occam actually was and what he actually said is less well known. Johnjoe McFadden’s book not only provides a biography of William but …
Hollywood Finally Listened to Scientists
Hollywood has always had trouble with science. To its credit, the American Film Institute (AFI) recognized the problem and ran a series of Catalyst Workshops to help scientists learn the art of storytelling and translate their work into film. In 2009, AFI asked applicants to write essays including sections describing movies they think portray science …
Royally Misinformed
Charles, the Alternative Prince: An Unauthorized Biography. By Edzard Ernst. Exeter, United Kingdom: Imprint Academic (Societas), 2022. ISBN 978-1788360708. 210 pp. Softcover, $29.90; kindle, $15.99. The title of the latest book by Edzard Ernst is somewhat misleading. Though certainly unauthorized, this is not a standard biography. Rather, it is a searing, ruthlessly efficient account of …
Hollywood Finally Listened to Scientists
Hollywood has always had trouble with science. To its credit, the American Film Institute (AFI) recognized the problem and ran a series of Catalyst Workshops to help scientists learn the art of storytelling and translate their work into film. In 2009, AFI asked applicants to write essays including sections describing movies they think portray science …
John of God: The Many Crimes of a Spiritual Fraud
John of God: The Crimes of a Spiritual Healer is a Netflix true crime documentary series from Brazilian filmmakers Mauricio Dias and Tatiana Villela about the titular scoundrel (real name João Teixeira de Faria). Known for decades in South America, João de Deus (John of God) was a prolific medium who claimed to channel the …
Are New Gender Beliefs Based on Science and Research?
There’s been some strange paradigm shifts among the educated classes of the Western world lately concerning gender. For one thing, in some circles, people are asked to state their gender and give their preferred pronouns. Controversies exist about bathroom assignment. Specialized therapists, speakers, and publications have emerged to encourage the wider public to develop greater …
The Storm of Weird and Dangerous Beliefs
Once when asked about her name, Madonna replied, “I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name.” Although the life of a pop star and an investigative journalist are worlds apart, there are few who fit this quote as well as Mike Rothschild. In the conspiracy community, no surname is as detested …
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True crime shows are not for everyone, but if you are a fan of the genre and a student of critical thinking, this docuseries is for you. It is dark, gritty, loaded with unexpected turns and twists, and is a fascinating historical window into British society in the 1970s. In focusing on one of the …
Watch That Fringe and See How It Flutters
A historian of science at Princeton University specializing in modern physics, Michael D. Gordin is also the author of The Pseudoscience Wars (2012), a book devoted to—in the words of its subtitle—Immanuel Velikovsky and the birth of the modern fringe. (David Morrison reviewed The Pseudoscience Wars in the March/April 2013 SI.) But, as the title …
Irreducible Unfathomability
Michael J. Behe is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. With the publication twenty-five years ago of Darwin’s Black Box, Behe began to advance an argument against Darwin’s theory that evolutionary traits said to alter a species by natural selection typically consist of multiple component parts, resulting from separate genetic mutations …
Tilting at Old Strawmen on Climate Science
I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist promising “the truth about climate science that you aren’t getting elsewhere,” because such language is a red flag. But I’ve known the author of Unsettled, Steven Koonin, since I took his quantum mechanics course as a PhD student at Caltech in the 1970s. He’s smart …
Superstitionology for People in a Hurry
Readers of Stuart Vyse’s engaging, enlightening, and fair-minded Behavior & Belief columns in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and at Skeptical Inquirer Online won’t be surprised that his Superstition: A Very Short Introduction makes another significant contribution to promoting skeptical inquiry. The book is part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series of more than 600 …
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