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185 MIN READ TIME

Straw Man on a Slippery Slope

“What one generally calls a fact is an interpretation of a situation that no one, at least for the moment, wants to call into question.” —Gerard Fourez

“Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” —Leonard Cohen

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Skeptic
24.1
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COLUMNS
The SkepDoc
Is Low-Dose Radiation Good for You? The Questionable Claims for Hormesis
The Gadfly
Define Your Terms (or, Here we Go Again)
ARTICLES
Making Gasoline from Water
John Andrews and the Invention of a Legend
Online Gaming
A Virtual Experiment in the Dark Side of Human Nature
Duped by Data Mining
DATA MINING INVOLVES RANSACKING DATA AND searching
How Science Will Explain and Fix Fake News
THE INSTANT, GLOBAL SPREAD OF INFORMATION through the
The Cult of Falun Gong
How this Group Raises Big Money Using a Dance Troupe and its Own Victimhood
The Opioid Epidemic Misunderstood
DRUG OVERDOSE IS NOW THE LEADING CAUSE OF death for
Why the Human- Centered View Has Not Served us Well
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s
Behe’s Last Stand
The Lion of Intelligent Design Roars Again
A Disproof of God’s Existence
THE TRADITIONAL DEFINITION OF GOD CREDITS HIM WITH
REVIEWS
Coddling Untruths
A Review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
How to Know What’s Really Real
A review of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake, by Steven Novella with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein.
What Are Ghosts, Anyway?
A review of Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits by Benjamin Radford
Hoaxed!
Reviews of Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post- Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young and Hoax: A History of Deception: 5000 Years of Fakes, Forgeries, and Fallacies by Ian Tattersall and Peter Nevraumont
The Mead-Freeman Controversy 4.0
Review of Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War Over Anthropology by Peter Hempenstall.
CONTRIBUTORS
Michelle E. Ainsworth holds an MA in history. She enjoys
JUNIOR SKEPTIC
QUEST FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
Today we’ll sharpen our pencils, pick up our magical
INVENTING WARGAMES
As we’ll learn, role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons
PLUNGE INTO FANTASY
Strategy board games like Risk were complicated enough
A DARKER MAZE
It took a year to sell the first thousand Dungeons
THE SATANIC PANIC
Fear of Satanic cults trickled first through certain
D&D’s TRIUMPHANT RETURN
Eventually the Satanic Panic faded away. The FBI concluded