For those who didn't see it, a recent episode of Squaring the Strange featured special guest Matt Crowley and I talk about our experience at Bigfoot conferences, the rise and fall of "Bigfoot's Butt Print" evidence, and why Matt decided that the credibility of...
Media Literacy
Squaring the Strange episode ‘Sin Numero’: Social Media Fallacies
Squaring the Strange time! This started off as a little bonus mini-episode where we have a little roundtable about some frustrating patterns of thought we have spotted on social media and other types of public discourse; some have actual fallacy names, some don't...
The Trump ‘Distraction’ Quasi-Conspiracy
One common claim about Donald Trump is that he often says and does things not only for effect, but with the specific goal of distracting the public and news media from something else he wants to keep hidden. The claims have circulated for years, especially on social...
Squaring the Strange #99: Movie Curses!
Squaring the Strange time! Join us for a deep dive into some popular movies of the past few decades and their associated curses . . . some that are due to genuinely tragic or strangely coincidental circumstances, others that have been a bit cultivated by those wishing...
Mass Shootings And Media Literacy
This is part three of a three-part series. You can read the rest of the series here. Mass shootings have captivated America for years with little progress in understanding the nature of the problem. The topic of mass shootings is fraught, not only with political...
Who Are Mass Shooters? Mass Shooter Demographics
This is part two of a three-part series. You can read the rest of the series here. With the recent tragic attacks in El Paso and Dayton, the world once again turned its attention to mass shootings. It’s a subject that has captivated America for years with little...
How Common Are Mass Shootings? The Nature And Frequency Of Mass Shootings
This is the first part of a three-part series examining mass shootings from a critical thinking and media literacy perspective. With the recent tragic attacks in Dayton and El Paso, the world once again turns its attention to mass shootings. It’s a subject that has...
Why Chupacabra Reports Only Go Back To 1995
I recently came across a blog by a fellow cryptozoology writer, Nick Redfern, which began with a well-deserved rant about armchair debunkers. The shabby state of research into Fortean topics is widely acknowledged by skeptics—and some “believers” (for lack of a better...
The Pseudoscience of Personalysis
Speaking at the Center for Inquiry, Buffalo New York. Corporate America is ripe for scams, half-baked twaddle masquerading as insightful business advice, and dressed-up children’s books about misplaced cheese. One needs only to peruse the Business section of a local...
‘Bring Back Our Girls’ At 5: Boko Haram’s Forgotten Captives
It was a bold and brash attack on innocent girls that outraged the world and spawned unprecedented online activism: Boko Haram, an extremist Muslim group in Nigeria, abducted about 276 schoolgirls from a rural secondary school in the town of Chibok on April 14, 2014....