Skeptical Inquirer Audio Edition

Wendy M. Grossman argues that treating artificial intelligence as a single, humanlike entity blurs important distinctions between technologies and distracts from more immediate concerns, including corporate power, privacy violations, security risks, and real-world harms. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-a...

Stuart Vyse examines research into meditation's potential adverse effects, including anxiety, panic, sleep disruption, and difficulties that can interfere with daily life.  Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/is-meditating-bad-for-you/ About the Author: Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Super...

Benjamin Radford examines the recurring claims that Noah's Ark has been "rediscovered," arguing that these discoveries repeatedly rely on confirmation bias, pareidolia, poor fact-checking, and interpretations that begin with the assumption that the Ark must exist. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-re-re-re-re-discovery-of-noahs-ark/...

Nick Tiller examines the Enhanced Games as less a revolutionary new frontier in human performance than a commercial venture designed to funnel customers toward the Enhanced Group's testosterone, peptide, supplement, and telehealth businesses. He argues that the Games' failure to produce significant new records exposed the limits of drug-based optimization, while the event's financial filings revea...

Susan Gerbic provides five tips for getting a psychic reading. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/tips-for-your-psychic-reading/ About the Author: Affectionately called the Wikipediatrician, Susan Gerbic is the cofounder of Monterey County Skeptics and a self-proclaimed skeptical junkie. Susan is also founder of the Guerrilla Skepticism o...

Brian Kerby reviews Limitless: Live Better Now. National Geographic Docuseries, 2025, arguing that the National Geographic docuseries is less a serious exploration of science than a celebrity's "midlife crisis" built around Chris Hemsworth's personal experiments with brain health, chronic pain, and risk-taking.  Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2...

Katie Suleta reviews Everyone Else Is Lying to You: How Our Medical Establishment Weaponized Doubt to Spread COVID, Normalize Quackery, and Undermine Public Health by Jonathan Howard. Redhawk Publications, 2025. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/sounding-the-alarm-about-medical-misinformation/ About the Author: Katie Suleta is a public hea...

Christopher B. Steiner traces the history of nineteenth-century "spirit photography," focusing on William H. Mumler's famous photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the supposed ghost of Abraham Lincoln. By having students recreate the image using an iPhone long-exposure app, Steiner demonstrates how photographic effects and digital technology can reproduce seemingly supernatural images, highlighting...

Andrea Love argues that direct-to-consumer "food sensitivity" tests are a lucrative form of pseudoscience that misrepresents IgG antibodies—markers of exposure and immune tolerance—as evidence of disease. She explains how these unvalidated tests can lead to unnecessary dietary restrictions, health anxiety, and delayed medical care, and argues that the broader lesson is how wellness marketing can s...

Melanie Trecek-King argues that the current panic over generative AI is largely a symptom of a much older media literacy crisis, not the root problem itself. She calls for replacing outdated tools like the CRAAP Test and blanket restrictions on information with stronger habits of lateral reading, calibrated skepticism, and understanding how algorithm-driven feeds blur the lines between reliable in...

Mick West argues that skeptics should help people distinguish between legitimate risks and unfounded worries without simply replacing one anxiety with another. Using examples ranging from UFO and alien-invasion fears to sharks and the supposed significance of 2027, he emphasizes that facts and statistics alone may not overcome emotionally driven fears, and concludes that practical skepticism shoul...

Carlos Orsi recaps LiliCon 2026 at  California State University Fresno. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/critical-thinking-as-a-collective-endeavor-the-2026-lilicon/ About the Author: Carlos Orsi is a journalist and writer, the director of Instituto Questão de Ciência, and author of What Science Says about Astrology (Columbia University P...

Malorie Mackey and Michael Maldonado explain how the ideomotor response provides a neurological and psychological explanation for Ouija boards and other divination tools. They argue that our desire for control and our expectations can trigger tiny, unconscious movements—likely involving brain regions associated with anticipated actions and agency—that move planchettes, pendulums, and dowsing rods...

Janyce L. Boynton argues that The Telepathy Tapes revives long-discredited facilitated communication (FC) by mistaking facilitator-generated cues for evidence of telepathy. She points to physical, visual, and verbal cues—including movements of letterboards, hand signals, touch, and verbal prompts—and argues that the podcast's experiments fail to properly blind facilitators, making rigorous authors...

Katharine Beals traces the persistence of facilitated communication (FC) and its modern variants to a convergence of social, educational, and cultural forces, arguing that profound autism's communication challenges create fertile ground for the belief that hidden language abilities can be "unlocked."  Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/tele...

Stuart Vyse argues that The Telepathy Tapes has evolved from promoting dubious claims about telepathy among nonspeaking autistic people into a broader platform for paranormal and New Age pseudoscience. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/the-telepathy-tapes-a-portal-into-a-world-of-woo/ About the Author: Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and aut...

Stephen Hupp previews the upcoming issue of Skeptical Inquirer, titled The Telepathy Tapes Silences Voices . Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/how-the-telepathy-tapes-silences-voices/ About the Author: Stephen Hupp, PhD, is the executive director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the editor of Skeptical Inquirer . Subscribe to Ske...

Stuart Vyse argues that California's State Council on Developmental Disabilities has endorsed discredited communication methods such as facilitated communication, rapid prompting, and spelling to communicate despite overwhelming evidence against their validity and warnings from major professional organizations. He warns that the policy could legitimize pseudoscience, encourage public funding and i...

Benjamin Radford examines public beliefs about aliens, Bigfoot, and chupacabra through recent polling data, finding that belief varies widely between these legendary creatures.  Read this article and find accompanying references at: skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-abcs-of-belief-aliens-bigfoot-and-chupacabra/ About the Author: Benjamin Radford, M.Ed., is a scientific paranormal investigator, a...

Nick Tiller argues that modern science communication risks becoming science commodification when evidence is transformed from a process of inquiry into a product designed for attention, profit, and influence. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-commodification-of-science-the-last-da-vinci-offers-insights-about-aspartame/ About the Auth...

Stuart Vyse visits Lily Dale —the world's largest Spiritualist community—to explore the history and enduring appeal of Spiritualism while examining the methods behind famous mediumistic phenomena such as slate writing, spirit trumpets, and precipitated spirit paintings. Although he concludes that these practices are better explained by deception and psychology than the paranormal, he argues that L...

Nick Tiller argues that a recent UFC fight in which medical advice was effectively overridden illustrates the dangerous erosion of respect for expert judgment, especially when entertainment and a culture of performative toughness take precedence over athlete safety. Using the incident to examine combat sports more broadly, he contends that ringside physicians—not referees, promoters, or fighters—s...

Terence Hines reviews  The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. By David Baron. Liveright Books/W. W. Norton, 2025. Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/06/percival-lowell-and-the-canals-on-mars/ About the Author: Terence Hines is professor of psychology at Pace University and adjunct professor of...

Aymen I. Idris reflects on how modern academia has transformed scientists from hands-on experimenters into grant writers, managers, and administrators, eroding the craft of direct inquiry that once defined scientific discovery. Drawing on his own career and conversations with researchers worldwide, he argues that the future of science depends on reclaiming time at the lab bench, protecting curiosi...

Benjamin Radford investigates the claim that James Randi wrongly concluded the famous Cottingley Fairies were suspended as marionettes, tracing the allegation through decades of sources and finding no evidence that Randi ever made such a claim. Instead, the article shows how a tentative early image analysis by other investigators evolved into a persistent myth, illustrating how careful historical...