In 1950, a retired Marine Corps major named Donald Keyhoe published The Flying Saucers Are Real and, with it, authored the operating system that ufology still runs on three-quarters of a century later. The claim was never simply that strange things are seen in the sky; people have repo...
You can’t keep a bad idea down. You fight it with all weapons at hand—science, reason, research, history, and, when they fail, yelling—until you are sure it is dead as a doornail. Then, one day while you are quietly reading the latest terrifying news, you see a revenant: the corpse reawakens. For us, that was last year’s blockbuster, Amy Griffin’s The Tell, which ...
Somewhere in America this week, a depressed Christian will sit down across from a counselor who believes that her fundamental problem is not a disorder but a sin. In another office, a different Christian will see a licensed psychologist who prays with her, assigns scripture alongside cognitive-behavioral homework, and bills her insurance. In a third, an Orthodox priest wil...
New Zealand is known for its enthusiastic embrace of its indigenous cultural heritage. However, this has recently crossed into the uncritical promotion of pseudoscientific ideas. In Skeptic (April 30, 2025), I documented how the gove...
A robotaxi stops awkwardly in traffic. A Waymo gets confused near a construction zone. A child runs into the street and is struck. A fleet of empty autonomous cars circles a residential neighborhood. A self-driving vehicle passes a stopped school bus. The incident becomes a headline, then a symbol, then a warn...