*This article is a preview of a forthcoming book of the same name.* “Work hard, play hard!” Tons of folks live by this maxim. If you can’t reap the rewards, then why roll up your sleeves? The logic is simple enough. Of course, just as many folks find this aphorism…

“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison If a picture is worth a thousand words, a catchy graphic is worth a million. PolitiFact has the “Truth-O-Meter”. The Washington Post has its “Pinocchio scale”. Snopes’s iconic yellow lamp stands out from miles away. One thing’s for certain —…

Although the “fact-checking” phenomenon is a very recent one, to trace its boundaries we must go back nearly half a century. When the first semblances of a fact-checking entity appeared, the internet was an infant. There was no Google, no Facebook and certainly no Twitter. Before all of this there…

What is a “conspiracy theory” really? We can start with a dry yet intuitive defintion: “conspiracy theories are allegations that powerful people or organizations are plotting together in secret to achieve sinister ends through deception of the public.” This is the hardcore side of things, a nation-wide or perhaps even…

What follows is a brief dialogue on the difference between theism and atheism (or any two worldviews for that matter!) Let's liken worldviews to pairs of colored glasses. Trite? Yes. But this metaphor can be extremely useful. The theist puts on his blue-hued lenses and says, "Wow! I get it…

Here’s an amusing question — what do Barack Obama and Milo Yiannopoulos have in common? “Umm… literally nothing!” is the response any rational human would expect to hear. Look to the left, and you’ll struggle to find anyone willing to compare their suave person-of-color-idol Obama to someone who basks in…

Chances are, you’ve heard of the "political compass". The political compass--first rolled out in the year 2000--is a 62 question quiz designed to evaluate political ideology. The quiz is built along two main axes: economic (left-right) and social (libertarian-totalitarian), and its results are displayed on the familiar "Cartesian coordinate graph". The…