In this age when people compete to be contrarian, it's rare to encounter a genuinely startling proposition. Thankfully the authors’ humour takes the edge of what could otherwise be a dry, and depressing read, it’s important to note however they don’t make fun of those caught it in the web of conspiracy thinking. Though we may think conspiracy theories appeal only to the naïve or uneducated, Shermer dispels that myth, showing how pervasive they really are.

Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. It wouldn't be fair to say, as some partisans have in the intervening years, that Owen Thomas was some reckless blogger who plucked some private citizen from nowhere for his story. It’s really a bottomless hole in the most enjoyable way (if paranoid fables are your thing): no matter how bad you realize it is, it’s actually worse. Their book is an innovative and crucial contribution to the understanding of the politics of uncertainty and suspicion in contemporary societies.Together they embark on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, and deserted cathedrals, and into the depths of. It not only showcases distinct conspiracies across global sites and time periods, but also petitions readers to examine their own investments in conspiratorial thinking. On the one hand, it's the story of how a billionaire destroyed a media organisation because he didn't like the way they wrote.

The story of our life, embellished for the benefit of the happily married lawyer with the kids and the lovely home. He is a cynical manipulative liar, a deeply unpleasant man, but I was intrigued by how far he would go and whether he would get caught out. Each compelling case covers the facts we think we know, and the theories that have been presented since. Kees van der Pijl was lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex in the UK.

He would come to pit Hogan against Gawker in a multi-year proxy war through the Florida legal system, while Gawker remained confidently convinced they would prevail as they had over so many other lawsuit--until it was too late. In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Like most movements that harness the power of an underappreciated class, the environment was temperamental and volatile, but you could not argue that the results were not also entertaining and forceful. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and once girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Turner looks at how conspiracy theories can be used by those in Black communities as a means of making sense of systemic oppression and disenfranchisement.

An epic science fiction story about the above ground world coming to an end and the remaining society living underground in Wool Silos. Conspiracy theorists, Robertson argues, develop a shadow kind of “capital” to confront the elites’ actual power: epistemic capital, based on their “knowledge” of what’s “truly” going on. In this timely book, Birchall and Knight provide a much needed and nuanced account of Covid conspiracy theories.

When Richard Hofstadter first coined the term “the paranoid style of American politics” in 1964, he saw the problem as belonging mostly to the fringe of America: he was writing in the wake of the failed Barry Goldwater presidential campaign—which benefited from the rise of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy-minded fringe group—and he saw Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Goldwater as proof that a sensible, rational, centrism was sufficient to beat back the paranoid weirdos that occasionally erupted into the American consciousness.

In the comments section at the bottom of Owen Thomas's story, Nick Denton, Valleywag's editor and the founder of its parent company, Gawker Media, had posted a few sentences in the form of an accusation that seemed to respond to itself: "The only thing that's strange about Thiel's sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long? Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental--it had been masterminded by Thiel.

Racing through scenes of danger and excitement, ABUSE OF POWER reaches a shattering conclusion that will make you think hard about issues of police corruption and personal integrity. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of storytelling - a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths. Roughly four months later, he launched a new site dedicated to his other, more primal passion: secrets and gossip. Technology may have been Denton's first love, but many would say this-his lust to expose, to reveal, to lob bombs-was Denton's true love, a side of him that ran parallel to his urge to build. Much of Under the Eye of Power is a reaction and a response to Hofstadter’s now-classic essay from 1964, in which he argues (among other things) that America is governed by a sensible, rational middle that keeps the fringe conspiracists on the left and the right at bay.