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Bill Maher is tired of heaing about stuff like the Overton window, MKUltra, the “shadow docket” of the Supreme Court, looksmaxxing, “heuristic,” “cognitive offloading” and other examples of what he calls “pedantic bullshit.” (But he really hates the Overton Window. His curmudgeonly diatribe segues into a Dr. Seuss-like poem. He winds up arguing that his brain having been filled with useless knowledge—like the names of all the Kardashians and the characters in “Friends”—is “violence.” Indeed!

The guests you see are Financial Times editor Gillian Tett and NYT op-ed columnist Bret Stephens.

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae” - volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.

It is appealing to think something as simple as honey could cure a cold or prevent hay fever, but is there evidence to back up honey’s health benefits? Columnist Alice Klein finds that it has legitimate medicinal uses, depending on the type of honey you’ve got

A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar system

Scientists are using sunlight to turn plastic waste into clean fuels like hydrogen, offering a breakthrough solution to both pollution and energy challenges. While still in development, the approach could transform trash into a valuable resource for a low-carbon future.

I haven’t looked at Natasha Hausdorff‘s videos in a while, but you’ll remember her as a British lawyer, an expert in international law, and a “pro bono legal director of the advocacy group, UK Lawyers for Israel.” Here is her reaction to the latest anti-Jewish violence and anti-Israel protests in England, both of which have become regular events.  Here she goes up against Owen Jones,  left-wing “British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist,” whose Wikipedia entry shows a photo of him wearing a Palestinian flag shirt. The channel is LBC, or Leading British Conversation.

The question is whether the pro-Palestinian marches in the UK should be banned because because they fall outside the boundaries of free speech.  Hausdorff says they are violations because they constitute “hate speech” that incites violence against Jews, while Jones says that they’re not only legal, but a necessary outlet for opinions that Israel is committing genocide against Gaza. (He claims that Israel has killed 100,000 Gazans, which is surely untrue.) Jones is a big proponent of the “genocide canard”, and while I am not sure whether the marches violate British speech law, I agree with her that Israel has not committed genocide against Gazans. Anybody who knows what genocide is and how the IDF operates knows that’s a lie.  But of course Jones has nothing bad to say against Hamas.

In response to Jones, Hausdorff can’t come up with anything that the Israeli government has done to justify the accusations of genocide (she doesn’t mention the West Bank, but may have done so somewhere in her talks or writing). But she correctly notes that the accusations of genocide aren’t being raised against the noncombatant deaths produced by the U.S. in WWII—and in that case, as in virtually all other wars, the ratio of noncombatant deaths to combatant deaths is much higher than seen in Gaza.

Jones cites several academics and “genocide scholars” who back the “g-word” as what Israel is doing in Gaza He adds that one can find identifiable Jews participating in the marches on the Palestinian side.  He places the blame for hunger and destruction on Gaza squarely on the doorstep of Israel, while Hausdorff says that in contrast, it’s the fault of Hamas, which has embedded itself among civilians. Hausdorff argues that accusations of things like “starvation” are untrue, and also claims that the protests are a product of the “Hamas propaganda machine, ” which I think is an unwise accusation even though it is to some degree true: some of the figures and accusations bandied about by the protestors and by Jones and his experts come from Hamas.

Jones seems to argue largely from authority, citing none other than the Lancet and The Economist for the casualty figures, which must have come from Hamas.  Hausdorff says that she’d be willing to debate the cited pro-Palestinian “genocide scholars” any time, but so far they’ve refused to do so.

Here are the notes added to the YouTube site by the UK Lawyers for Israel. I’m not whether if Hausdorff was interrupted in an unwarranted matter: you be the judge.

This recording includes comments on whether restrictions should now be placed on anti-Israel marches in London and other British cities, as well as strongly disputed allegations regarding casualty figures in Gaza, war crimes and genocide.

Unfortunately, Natasha Hausdorff was repeatedly interrupted by the interviewer when she tried to set out the inaccuracy of these allegations. It seems that many interviewers cannot stand to hear the expression of any view that supports Israel – as soon as a person interviewed starts to deploy facts contradicting the false propaganda the interviewer interrupts to prevent the truth being told.

For details of Gaza casualties according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry down to 10 November 2025, see this thread by Gabriel Epstein: https://x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status/…. This shows that even according to this information (which may itself be distorted by Hamas propaganda):

1. A much higher % of males of fighting age died than of females of the same ages, indicating that Israeli military action targeted combatants and was not indiscriminate.

2. A much higher % of male teenagers died than of female teenagers, indicating that a significant number teenagers, who are classified as children, were killed because they were combatants.

3. The claim initiated by Hamas and disgracefully maintained by the BBC, that 70% of those killed were women and children, is false.

The claim stated by Owen Jones, that the IDF has admitted that 83% of those killed were civilians, is completely bogus, as Chief Magistrate Goldspring found in paragraph 81a of this recent ruling: https://www.uklfi.com/wp-content/uplo…

The details provided by the Gaza Health Ministry do not identify how they died. They probably include around 10,000 who died of natural causes: see Salo Aizenberg https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2021…. Thousands more may well have been killed by Palestinian fire – rockets falling short, explosive devices, and crossfire. They certainly include 471 allegedly killed in the explosion outside Al Ahli hospital caused by a Palestinian rocket that fell short: see https://www.uklfi.com/false-al-ahli-c…. Well over a thousand other Palestinian rockets also fell short; each of them may have killed dozens of people.

Finally, here’s a related email I got yesterday from the editors of a small publication in the Pacific Northwest that has clearly fallen for some of the Big Lies. I am accused of being a histrionic Zionist, a proponent of settler colonialism—and pro-genocide (they call it “modern Holocaust denial”) as well. Their arguments are largely the same as those of Jones, even citing casualty figures taken from medical journals.  They also try to tell me how to write this website. Finally, they seem unaware of my criticisms of religious Judaism, made on this site as well as in Faith Versus Fact, so they haven’t done their homework. But they don’t really care if I’ve also criticized Jewish superstition: their point is that I am pro-Israel, which they see as immoral.

At any rate, they can take a hike. Their email will not change how I “write my blog”.  The email is indented:

Reading your blog, we were appreciative of the fact that you seemed to promote science and counter narratives from the religious establishments. However, your inability to separate your own Zionist histrionics from what should have been strictly an antitheistic, science-focused platform ruins the experience for anyone who isn’t A) a genocide apologist, B) deeply insecure about their ethnic identity to the point that they associate it with a 20th century settler-colonialist project, or C), both. Does your criticism of religion only extend to Christianity and Islam, or do you take on the Jewish religious establishment too? The most tangible and powerful form of that, of course, being the state of Israel, which reputed medical journals estimate has killed close to 100,000 civilians just since 10/23. Atheism today needs smart, conscientious voices to lead, not modern Holocaust deniers. We won’t change your views with this email, but maybe we can change the way you write your blog to not repel people (a hopefully increasing majority) who are appalled by the Zionist crimes of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement.

I came across a few news items that I could possibly write about today and couldn’t decide which to cover, so I will write about all of them, since they all relate to renewable energy. The first is a new study comparing direct air capture (DAC) to installing new wind and solar. This is a direct comparison between these two options, to see which provides the most bang for the buck.

DAC involves taking CO2 directly out of the atmosphere in order to mitigate carbon release through burning fossil fuels. If this technology were sufficiently efficient it could be hugely useful in reducing future climate change. This is the only approach that can potentially have a negative carbon footprint, actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Other technologies simply reduce the amount released. This negative carbon factor is highly attractive since it could theoretically zero out our carbon release and even take us back in time to an atmosphere with less CO2. Right now, it should be noted, we are not only continuing to release massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, the amount continues to increase. In 2025 the world emitted 38.1 billion tonnes, of carbon, a 1.1% increase over 2024.

But there are problems with DAC – it is currently not very efficient and is not scalable enough to have enough of an impact. Also, the efficiency of DAC depends heavily on how you power it – if you connect it to the grid and there is some fossil fuel energy on that grid, you may actually increase CO2 rather than decreasing it. Ideally DAC would be powered entirely by low carbon energy sources. This is why critics of DAC argue that it simply makes no sense to deploy this technology before we have decarbonized the energy sector, which we should do first.

In the current study they ask a critical question – if we directly compare DAC to deploying wind and solar, which provides the greater reduction in energy pollution per dollar spent. They also considered both the environmental and health impacts. They further considered three scenarios – current DAC technology, significant advances in DAC technology, and a massive breakthrough in technology. They also did their analysis for the entire US and for different regions. What they found was that deploying renewable energy was more cost effective for every region of the country under the current technology and significant advances scenarios. In the massive breakthrough scenario the results were mixed by regions, with a slight net advantage country-wide to DAC.

In my opinion this just adds to the conclusion that we should first decarbonize the grid with a combination of low carbon energy sources, including maximizing wind and solar while maintaining or even expanding our nuclear infrastructure, and only then invest in significant DAC. We can continue to research DAC in the meantime, and then deploy only when it gets significantly more efficient, in order to offset industries that are difficult to decarbonize.

There are a couple of solar power updates worth discussing as well. The first is that we are getting very close to commercializing tandem silicon and perovskite solar cells. Silicon is the current standard, with most commercial panels at 22-23% efficiency, with high-end panels at about 26%. This is pushing up against the theoretical limit for silicon (32%), and many experts think we will not get much closer to this theoretical limit because of some unavoidable sources of energy loss. This is where perovskite comes in – this is widely considered to be the next material to replace silicon in high efficiency solar cells. But even better, silicon and perovskite absorb light at different frequencies, so when you combine them in tandem you get even higher efficiencies. The current record is produce by LONGi (a Chinese solar panel company), with a commercial tandem panel with verified 34.6% efficiency. They plan to make these panels available in 2027-2028. Also, the theoretical upper limit of efficiency of this tandem design is 43%.

However, perovskite still has a longevity problem. For these tandem panels the silicon component lasts 20-25 years with minimal efficiency loss. The perovskite, however, only lasts 10-12 years. This is insufficient for residential use, but still useful for grid-scale projects. With large projects it is cost effective to pay for the higher end panels, and replacing them with even better panels in 10 years is not a bad investment anyway. But home owners don’t want to do this. However, there is a great deal of research into extending the lifespan of perovskite panels (for example). Another Chinese company, GLC, has announced a tandem solar cell with a 25 year warranty, and with an efficiency of 26%. We are quickly heading for panels with both efficiencies in the mid 30s and a lifespan of 25 years.

The availability of relatively cheap and highly efficient solar panels has also given rise to a new industry – plug-in solar (also called balcony solar). These are stand-alone panels you simply plug into a regular outlet, which can both accept and deliver energy. That’s really it. You have to mount it somewhere, but most people do not put it on their roof but rather on a stand or attached to their balcony or similar structure. This is useful for renters, apartments, mobile homes, remote locations like cabins, or even to supplement existing rooftop installations. In general you will recoup the cost of the panel in reduced energy bills in seven years, while the panel itself should last for 30 years. These are already very popular in Germany where they have been used for a decade without any safety issues.

Utilities companies in the US have been trying to slow their adoption, arguing that they present safety issues. For example, if they are sending current to the grid they could endanger utility workers. However, this is likely a diversionary tactic to slow the adoption of a competing technology. Units are already designed not to send energy to the grid when there is a power outage. The safety record in Germany is pretty solid evidence that they can be used safely. For most users plug-in solar would not power their entire home, but would shave money off their energy bill and reduce their carbon footprint.

The great thing about plug-in solar is that there are no issues with grid stability since most users will be simply reducing their baseload demand, not producing excess energy that has to go to the grid. But because they can be widely distributed, these small reductions in grid energy demand can be significant. This could be a useful supplement to grid-scale and rooftop solar. And of course they can be especially useful when paired with home battery backup, or even just an EV.

With recent events in the Mideast, including national average gas prices at $4.45 per gallon and electricity costs up 7.4% over last year, it seems like a good time to push for energy technologies that are not reliant on a vulnerable infrastructure partly in unstable parts of the world. These events also highlight that we can never achieve true energy independence simply by producing more oil, as oil prices are set as a global commodity. Solar, however, can be true energy independence, harvested right where it is used. Of course, this raises an entirely different discussion about maintaining domestic renewable energy technology and raw material supply chains. This is why invested in the technology of tomorrow rather than doubling down on fossil fuels is so critical.

The post Some Renewable Energy Updates first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

For decades, relaxor ferroelectrics have powered everything from medical ultrasounds to sonar systems, yet their inner atomic structure remained a mystery—until now. Researchers have finally mapped their three-dimensional structure in unprecedented detail, uncovering hidden patterns in how electric charges are arranged at the nanoscale. The breakthrough not only challenges long-standing assumptions about how these materials behave but also allows scientists to refine the models used to design them.

For decades, relaxor ferroelectrics have powered everything from medical ultrasounds to sonar systems, yet their inner atomic structure remained a mystery—until now. Researchers have finally mapped their three-dimensional structure in unprecedented detail, uncovering hidden patterns in how electric charges are arranged at the nanoscale. The breakthrough not only challenges long-standing assumptions about how these materials behave but also allows scientists to refine the models used to design them.

On April 30, 2026, David Copperfield took his final bow at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, closing a residency that lasted more than 25 years. Longer than many entire entertainment careers, it was an extraordinary run. For audiences, it marked the end of a show. For magicians, it marked the close of a defining era.

As a professional magician, I’ve spent years studying the craft, performing, and thinking about how wonder is created and how human perception operates. Like many in my field—and millions of others—I grew up watching Copperfield’s television specials.

The Copperfield Theater at MGM Grand, Las Vegas.

Most people still recognize Copperfield’s name, even if they can’t name a particular illusion. When he rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, stage magic was no longer central to popular entertainment. Copperfield changed that almost single-handedly, placing large-scale illusions alongside blockbuster films, arena concerts, and major sporting events.

Over more than four decades, he sold tens of millions of tickets worldwide—more than 7 million at the MGM Grand alone—and became one of the highest-grossing solo entertainers in history, with career ticket sales reportedly exceeding $4 billion (more than The Rolling Stones!). He earned 21 Emmy Awards for his television specials—as many as The Sopranos—and accumulated multiple Guinness World Records.

Promo poster for Copperfield’s 1996 show Dreams & Nightmares co-created with Francis Ford Coppola.

But what stands out is not just the numbers. It is the consistency with which he delivered complex, high-precision performances night after night, often multiple times per day. In the final eight weeks (56 days) of his MGM Grand residency alone, he performed an astonishing 120 shows. That level of scale and reliability reshaped what audiences expect from a magic show. The bar was raised, and it stayed there, elevating the entire field.

The television specials were cinematic events that reached tens of millions. Perhaps none captured the public imagination like the 1983 disappearance of the Statue of Liberty. In front of a live audience seated on Liberty Island, with an estimated 50 million viewers watching on television, Copperfield made a national icon appear to vanish. The illusion became an instant cultural phenomenon, prompting people around the world—many for the first time in their lives—to exercise skepticism and critical thinking, asking: “How did he do it?”

David Copperfield with Penn and Teller at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony honoring Copperfield with a star. Photo courtesy of David Copperfield.

What made the illusion groundbreaking was not only the audacity of “vanishing” the Statue of Liberty. It was the way Copperfield blended spectacle, storytelling, and technical precision, elevating magic to the status of a major cultural event. This contrasted powerfully with earlier high-profile magicians such as Harry Houdini, whose 1918 vanishing of an elephant was a theatrical sensation in its day but remained confined to the stage.

Copperfield brought illusions to a television audience of millions while also delivering them live, night after night, with remarkable reliability. The specials invited skepticism—viewers naturally wondered about camera tricks—yet the live performances answered that doubt directly. In theaters and arenas, there were no cuts and no retakes: just a performer and an audience sharing the same space, often with volunteers participating. That made the experience more powerful than that of any performer who relies on camera tricks, and the resulting lessons in skepticism and questioning the limits of perception all the more impactful.

He made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it.

Copperfield’s cultural influence extends far beyond performance. He founded the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, a private museum available to researchers that houses one of the most extensive archives in magic, including rare books, original props, and artifacts from Harry Houdini and many others.

In 2021, he brought parts of that collection to a wider audience with David Copperfield’s History of Magic, co-authored with Richard Wiseman and David Britland. The book (reviewed in Skeptic Vol. 27 No. 2 featuring exclusive, unpublished photographs) profiles 28 groundbreaking magicians across centuries, from 16th-century conjurers to modern innovators. Readers receive a guided tour through artifacts such as Houdini’s straitjackets and Water Torture Cell, along with a 16th-century manual on sleight of hand. The book beautifully connects grounded explanations of the craft’s evolution to what audiences experience in actual performances.

Harry Houdini’s straitjacket at the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts. Photo courtesy of David Copperfield.

This work helps keep magic connected to its past and rooted in reality. Without that connection, magic can become a series of disconnected tricks and empty stage patter rather than a technically intricate art form with deep roots, ongoing innovation, and a unique ability to test the boundaries of human perception.

That is exactly where Copperfield excelled. He helped define what audiences expect from large-scale illusion: strong production values, clear narrative, emotional engagement, and technical reliability. He never presented himself as supernatural. Compared with many other figures who rose to prominence around the same time, such as Uri Geller, Copperfield made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it. You knew it was an illusion, yet for a moment you still wondered, “What if?”

The close of the MGM Grand residency marks the end of a long chapter in an illustrious career. Copperfield proved that magic could be romantic, theatrical, and emotionally resonant without relying on supernatural claims or pseudoscientific nonsense. In doing so, he became one of the most emulated illusionists in history and helped elevate the cultural standing of the entire art form.

An update to an experiment run by Henry Cavendish in 1773 could be a cheaper and faster way to spot a potential dark matter particle – and may be 10,000 times more sensitive

Artemis II proved NASA’s deep space systems are ready for the next leap. Orion survived its high-speed return with improved heat shield performance and pinpoint landing accuracy, while the SLS rocket nailed its trajectory. Even the launch pad upgrades paid off, with minimal damage despite the powerful liftoff. With only minor issues to resolve, NASA is now gearing up for Artemis III and future Moon missions.

Voyager 1 just powered down a nearly 50-year-old instrument to stay alive in deep space. The spacecraft is running critically low on energy, forcing NASA to make careful sacrifices to keep its mission going. Despite the shutdown, it continues to send back unique data from beyond our solar system. Engineers are now working on a bold plan that could extend its life — and possibly revive the instrument later.

To mark David Attenborough turning 100, New Scientist staff have been set a tricky task: pick your favourite of his many amazing documentaries...

A small trial found that chewing gum containing nitrate can ease the symptoms of gum disease by favouring the growth of beneficial mouth bacteria

Recently, I've noticed articles from outlets aligned with MAHA calling for the elimination of the FDA. It's all recycled "health freedom" revisionist history and ahistorical nonsense.

The post MAHA vs. the FDA: Dredging up old anti-regulation revisionist history first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A device you attach to your underwear reveals how often you really break wind – and it’s probably more frequently than you think

The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET), installed at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO's ESPRESSO instrument to study the sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the solar system.

One of the most dramatic aspects of grand dreams of the human spirit is how quickly they come crashing down to gritty, grimy earth. This is nowhere more true than with the internet. What began as a promise of global connection and unlimited access to knowledge has become a hornet’s nest of hatred, distortion, and lies. Conspiracy theories, which blend all of those elements into novel shapes and patterns, are thriving in ways that would put to shame the architects of the most poisonous false narratives in history.

For the first time, conspiracy is not just a political or geopolitical tool, as it has been for centuries, but a booming industry. Conspiracy theories are now the blood sport of the 21st century; social media platforms that profit off them are the contemporary colosseum where the masses go to watch individuals, nations, religions, and ideas get ripped to shreds. It’s officially sanctioned barbarism. And the crowds love it.

Influencers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Dave Smith, and Ian Carroll are gladiators of falsehood, deepening their fame and fortune with every next lie. But these are only the most high-profile examples. On streaming platforms, messaging apps, and social media sites, thousands more aspirants work daily—by the minute—to spin and re-spin false narratives. Some, like anti-Jewish blood libels, are as old as time. Others, including the idea that the moon landing was staged, that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, and that commercial jets emit “chemtrails,” have persisted for decades. Still more, including the idea that vaccines are an instrument of social control, have come to the fore in recent years.

What separates our modern era of conspiracy theorizing from the long tradition behind it is the scale of the rewards and incentives. Recently, the leader of one of the internet’s most prominent and successful new media companies told me that, by his estimate, Candace Owens earns around $50 million annually from YouTube ads alone—not counting speaking engagements, merchandise, and other brand sponsorships. Whether or not this precise number is accurate, it’s clear that the correlation between financial gain and what we might call a largesse with the truth is tight.

In this bewildering flurry, it’s difficult to zoom out. Yet we have to ask: How did we get here? Where is this all going? And can we find a way back—or a way forward? 

Only a few years ago, many people embraced the idea that the internet had ushered in a new dawn for information and communications. The media marveled that Twitter could be used by journalists as a tool to produce real-time reporting from far-flung corners of the world. Wikipedia offered a bottomless trove of free information on everything from big, broad concepts to the marginalia of unsung knowledge. 

Facebook made “friends” out of strangers; Google made urban labyrinths now navigable and dynamic. E-commerce opened up entire new vistas of opportunity. Micro-loans, made possible by digital technology, would lift developing nations of endemic poverty. The vast, inscrutable world of the pre-digital era had magically become legible. We could discern truth from falsehood, fact from distorted fiction. The panacea was just on the horizon, burnishing the sky with hope.

Looking back, it now seems as if that bright glow was a conflagration—the deep tradition of Enlightenment thought in flames. While the fire has burned for years, a clearly defined break,  a rupture in the epistemological chain, came in 2016, when the unthinkable took place in American politics: Donald Trump won the presidential election. There were many reasons for this, tied to the social and cultural dynamics of a country whose demographics and economics had been in flux for over two decades. But for the gatekeepers of American culture, the election represented such an upheaval, a kind of Copernican turn that upended everything they thought they knew about American society and politics.

As in so many instances in history, the response by the ruling elite was not to adapt their worldview to the newly born reality, but to mold reality to their existing worldview. Weeks after the election, Hillary Clinton declared a “fake news epidemic.” The thesis was painfully clear: The U.S. was under attack by its geopolitical adversaries, who were weaponizing social media platforms to sway electoral outcomes. Over the following years, this thesis would be unpacked over and over: The Trump campaign had worked with the Kremlin to stage a mass-scale campaign to distort public views, swinging the election in Trump’s favor. 

How this could have been ascertained little more than days after the election was never explained. Nor was any evidence ever presented that activities on Facebook—the platform that was identified by the media as the primary vector for this attack—had succeeded in moving the needle. One of the few studies on this topic found that election-related false narratives on social media resulted in a shift of only a few hundreths of a percent. 

But none of these very legitimate questions were raised. In fact, the narrative was deepened. The idea, deployed by the Clinton campaign in conjunction with the high-powered political PR firm FusionGPS, was that we had entered an era where information was so compromised that government intervention was urgently needed. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama pushed through an administrative determination that designated elections—and, by virtue of this, the information surrounding them—as critical infrastructure. Information now came under the purview of government action and control.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets.

The media seemed to openly disavow the idea of neutrality and objectivity. Vox journalist Sean Illing made one of many such declarations. Illing wrote in 2020, just months before the November election, that,

The American media ecosystem has become saturated with misinformation and noise because the press remains committed to a set of norms that are ill-adapted to the digital age … the obsession with “objectivity” in particular has led to an obsession with “balance” or “fairness” that makes it easy for bad-faith actors to get away with pushing falsehoods.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets. In this politically driven determination, they rejected not only neutrality—an idea debated for decades on the premise that journalists, as human beings, can never fully detach from their own perspective—but also objectivity—the idea that truth exists independently of the observer.

In a vacuum, this idea would have made for good copy, but little more. In reality, it was married to a social justice movement that operationalized it. Just a few weeks before the Vox piece, journalist Wesley Lowery published a wave-making op-ed in The New York Times that married the political rejection of objectivity and neutrality with the then emerging Black social justice movement. In his piece, “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” Lowery opined that, “Black journalists are speaking out because one of the nation’s major political parties and the current presidential administration are providing refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies, and our industry’s gatekeepers are preoccupied with seeming balanced, even ordering up glossy profiles of complicit actors.”

One of the “glossy profiles of complicity actors” Lowery had in mind was an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R) in The New York Times. The piece, which had been solicited by the paper’s opinion editor, called for National Guard troops to be called in to restore order in American cities rocked by Black Lives Matter protests that frequently devolved into riots. 

Had Cotton issued this call on Fox News or the Washington Examiner, no one would have thought twice. But the fact that he was able to make this argument in the flagship news outlet of the center left was an outrage that demanded not just action—the op-ed prompted a mass walkout by NYT newsroom staff—but a public rethinking of the entire enterprise of journalism itself. The theory of new journalism built on a rejection of neutrality and objectivity would not be quietly embraced by journalists at legacy outlets, but trumpeted in the pages of news outlets across the country. It would become a cause célèbre of journalism in itself.

Lowery’s racially motivated rejection of objectivity was not new to The New York Times. The previous year, Nikole Hannah-Jones had published her 1619 Project, which argued in an entire edition of The New York Times Magazinededicated to the theme that Americans had been born not in liberty, but in slavery. That Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project had been repudiated by virtually the entire field of American history, including historians at elite American universities, mattered little or not at all. The reason was exactly the one promulgated by Lowery and Illing: The subjective truths of the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for racial equity powering not only outweighed the imperatives of truth-seeking, but negated them entirely.

By now, readers of this piece will have detected the core philosophical framework undergirding this shift. For decades, post-modernism had taught that there is no such thing as objective truth, but only social constructs built by those in power. In this case, the power was “white supremacy.” This served the movement remarkably well. With a wave of the collective hand, it could dismiss hard data about police shootings of Black Americans relative to the general population as racially biased and stigmatize those dared to raise questions around the data as full-blown racists. 

Over subsequent years, the same template would be applied to whatever political cause was championed by the left at any given moment. The most prominent of these waves was the gender movement, which used this machinery to overwrite the science of biology with the social science of gender ideology. Those, like J.K. Rowling, who chose to debate the merits of these ideas were labeled anti-trans bigots, or, in Rowling’s case, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFS. 

With COVID, the argument shifted in the direction of near total enforcement of the science establishment orthodoxy on the issue. If you explored the idea that the virus may have originated from a lab that worked to enhance the virality of coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2, you were branded a conspiracy theorist. If you questioned the efficacy of non-respirator masks, which the head of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci, had only weeks before publicly claimed were not effective in stopping transmission, you were called not only anti-science, but a disease vector. Government, newly empowered by post-2016 election information policing powers, stepped in to censor inconvenient facts on social media.

The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission.

In the introduction to my book about The New York Times, I warned that although the bien pensant had managed to successfully pull off the great epistemological feat of the 21st century—using narrative machinery to reconstruct public truth—this feat would not go unnoticed. The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission. As with any war, however, the enemy defeated by a powerful new weapon inevitably learns to build and wield that weapon itself. The warfare that results becomes far more destructive. 

Over the past five years, we have witnessed exactly this effect take hold of the American public consciousness. In the wake of the greatest clampdown on information, there has been a counter-weaponization of it. Accounts banned or “throttled” by Big Tech censors returned to platforms with a literal vengeance. Users that had been punished for questioning the efficacy of COVID vaccines would now build conspiratorial narratives about inoculation as an instrument of evil. People who were labeled racist for asking if BLM’s central claims withstood real scrutiny would turn to open race-baiting as a form of retribution.

It was at this exact moment that the world was plunged into geopolitical chaos. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. A year later, Hamas stormed into Israel, slaughtering 1,200 civilians, raping women, and dragging 200 hostages, including women, children, and even infants, into Gaza. In both cases, the major combatants—Russians under a leader trained by the KGB, the master-agency of propaganda, and the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamists for whom psychological manipulation constitutes the essence of their war against the West—reached naturally, almost reflexively, for the dark arts.

On social media platforms, they found legions of willing soldiers. In the pre-digital era, propaganda required either building media infrastructure—creating newspapers, standing up broadcast channels—or infiltrating existing ones by recruiting or bribing journalists as assets. Both endeavors are expensive, time consuming, and carry significant risk. Today, every one of those factors has been inverted. The creation of bot networks is, for a state actor, a relatively trivial affair. Paying off top-tier influencers through shell companies or using advertising deals with inflated pricing is virtually impossible to detect. 

The vast sums at stake make this kind of activity irresistible. In 2024, news reports identified influencer Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, as two figures mentioned in an unsealed indictment against figures tied to Russian state media outlet Russia Today (RT). The indictment alleged that individuals working for RT paid Tenet Media, the company owned by Chen and Donovan, to distribute content produced by other influencers. Ultimately, neither Chen nor Donovan were charged.

For the first time, however, we were given a glimmer of insight into the amounts at stake. The company belonging to Chen, a mid-level influencer, was paid $10 million. For top-tier influencers, the numbers likely scale disproportionately higher.

Conspiracy theory is the most optimized format … it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts.

All this has created the conditions for a perfect storm of propaganda. The demand is bottomless. All that is required is a ceaseless flow of content to feed the flywheel of social media engagement. In this maelstrom, conspiracy theory is the most optimized format. On the supply side, it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts. Instead, the latest, zaniest, and most dangerous ideas that come to mind are instantly turned into “investigations” with dark portent. The material exists prepackaged: antisemitic tropes, tales of flying saucers and alien abductions, and alternative histories that discard established fact as their starting point. The only barriers are technical, and even then they are strikingly low—two or three cameras, a microphone, and a small production team.

On the other side of the market, the demand is bottomless. In the 1990s, when talk radio was on the rise, the content had to be heard in real time and could only be accessed on stations, and in regions, where it was available. Today, all podcasting—the modern equivalent of talk radio—is accessible at any time to every person on the planet. Hyper-specific niches open into mass audiences whose scale dwarfs that of pre-internet broadcast media. The economics scale at breakneck speed.

But there is another factor at work. In his book, How to Win an Information War, disinformation scholar Peter Pomerantsev makes a powerful point expressed in the title of the book’s first chapter: “Propaganda is the Remedy for Loneliness.” This notion traces back to French sociologist and philosopher Jacques Ellul, who wrote that modern man

feels the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication … That loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances.

 If loneliness had been a driving factor in the 1960s when Ellul was writing, today it’s more than even an “epidemic,” as it’s sometimes described. It is the very premise of digital life. The all-encompassing solution to it, the rectangular black holes into which we pour our loneliness, is both remedy and cause of the disease. The atomization of living life with heads bowed, eyes locked on the device of our hands, is total. The common culture defined by books and magazines is gone. And with it, the shared vocabulary of generally agreed upon fact—the moon landing was a triumph, safely administered vaccines keep populations healthy, biological reality exists, and a complex dynamic of politics and markets, not a shady cabal of uber-rich Jews, determines the course of nations—has been dispatched.

 The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists.

Audiences, instead, walk through the doorways of conspiracy theory, where they can join a club of initiates given access to something hidden from the broader world. As Ellul put it: 

For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

This is the age of propaganda. The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists. It can be studied, measured, and theories about it can be tested. More than anything, in the final analysis, reality always asserts itself. Getting there is about acknowledging this basic fact—and agreeing that no single party or school of thought has a monopoly on the truth. Instead, we collaborate to build models that aim not to advance interests but get close to “the real thing,” whatever it might be.

The dialectic of theorizing, testing, and improving is painstaking. It’s not sexy, and it’s certainly not lucrative. But if there is any path forward, it is this one. It’s time for us to take it.