Author: Wendy M. Grossman
Wendy M. Grossman is an American freelance writer based
in London. She is the founder of Britain’s The Skeptic magazine, for which
she served as editor from 1987-1989 and 1998-2000. For the last 30 years
she has covered computers, freedom, and privacy for publications such as
the Guardian, Scientific American, and New
Scientist. She is a CSI Fellow.
Religion and Society: Britain according to Theos
An English atheist friend once tried to explain to me why she thought it was a good thing that British schools incorporated religious education (RE)—that is, Anglican religious education. She explained RE was so boring that it acted as a kind of “vaccination” against religious belief later in life. It’s certainly true that outside of …
The Year of Believing Badly
The sirens will tell the truth. On July 6th, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the removal of all COVID-related restrictions on July 19. Optional masks in shops and on public transport; no more requirement to check into venues with the contact tracing app; an end to limiting how many people may meet indoors and …
Skeptics in Germany: An Interview with Amardeo Sarma
The late James Randi often described a skeptic’s work as “shoveling water uphill”: frustration mitigated by only partial successes. Right now, Amardeo Sarma, who leads the German skeptics—Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP)—is enjoying one of those successful moments reading the results of a nationwide poll GWUP recently commissioned. The poll itself was a …
Parallel lines: Michael Heap and the Association for Skeptical Enquiry
To most Americans, Britain looks tiny. With a little reshaping, the entire mainland would easily fit inside Wyoming. Even so, intense localization outside of London makes it difficult to spark a national movement. The Skeptic never tried; its editors hoped the magazine would inspire others to organize their own local activities. The more skepticism the …
Freelance Philosophy: Julian Baggini
What do you do with a PhD in philosophy if you’re not going to stay in academia? This was the conundrum that faced Julian Baggini after finishing his PhD at University College London in 1997. Nearly twenty-five years later, his founding (and hand-off) of a magazine, twenty books, numerous press articles, and occasional talks add …
Searching for Rigor: Caroline Watt
In a sense, Caroline Watt’s career as a parapsychologist begins with the publication of an anti-totalitarian novel—Darkness at Noon (1940), author Arthur Koestler’s most famous work. Koestler, who committed double suicide with his wife in 1983, left £1 million to found a chair in parapsychology at a British university. After several refusals, the chair landed …
Michael Marshall, Born Skeptic, New Editor of UK’s The Skeptic
Some are born to skepticism. Some are called to it. And some have it thrust upon them. Liverpool-based Michael Marshall, who in September 2020 was named the new editor of Britain’s online skeptic magazine The Skeptic, thinks he was born that way. “I almost envy the moments people describe as a sort of Damascene conversion,” …
A Flight of Pelicans: John Rimmer
At its arrival in 1987, The Skeptic joined an existing ecosystem of UK media and networks interested in the paranormal. First and oldest was the Society for Psychical Research. Second was the Fortean Times, inspired by the writer Charles Fort and founded in 1973 as the purveyor of “the world’s weirdest news,” which seemed to …
The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories: Karen Douglas
In December 1996, when my editor at The Daily Telegraph asked me to write a piece about conspiracy theories on the net, we both thought of it as a light-hearted trawl through online wackiness. With Facebook, YouTube, and even Google years away, the leading social medium was Usenet, a collection of “newsgroups” that computers propagated …
Sense and Sensibility
One of the things I found most striking in the early days of The Skeptic was the number of British people I met who viewed their country as far less gullible than the United States. Numerous beliefs popping up in the United States—at least, according to the press—were described to me as the sort of …
Mike Marshall: Born Skeptic
Some are born to skepticism. Some are called to it. And some have it thrust upon them. Liverpool-based Mike Marshall thinks he was born that way. “I almost envy the moments people describe of a sort of Damascene conversion,” he says. He doesn’t mention names, but it’s easy to think of Chris French, whose beliefs …
Letter to America: The Black Box that Wouldn’t Die
It was in 1985 that I first read—in the LA Skeptics’ newsletter, LASER—that polygraphs were highly unreliable as a method of telling whether someone was lying. We popularly call them “lie detectors,” but even proponents admit this is not an accurate description. Polygraphs measure physical parameters such as heart and breathing rates, blood pressure, and …
Letter to America: A Short Tour of Thirty Years of British Skepticism
I’ve written elsewhere about how Britain’s The Skeptic magazine was founded. I heard James Randi speak in 1981, read Skeptical Inquirer, attended the 1985 London CSICOP conference, and asked what I could do. Starting a newsletter in Britain was suggested. It’s still alive. What hasn’t been collated anywhere is a précis of some of the odder events since. The …
Robert Brotherton: Curb Your Enthusiasm
My New York-based mother, who was born in 1913, remembered the 1938 Mercury Theater radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds”—or rather she remembered that it tricked many people into believing Martians were invading the area. “People panicked. There were suicides,” she told me, more or less. Rob Brotherton begs to differ. …
Kissed by a Wolf: An Interview with Deborah Hyde
“It has been the passion of my life,” says Deborah Hyde of studying the supernatural. “Belief in the supernatural sheds so much light on the human condition—social psychology, cognition, anthropology—that far from being just some frivolous add-on to what we are, it’s kind of at the center of us.” Like many, she says she began …
Who’d Be an Atheist in Ireland? Michael Nugent
It is hard to overstate how much the Republic of Ireland has changed since the 1980s. The Catholic Church was able to influence voters to reject the 1987 referendum proposing to remove the Tenth Amendment ban on divorce from the Irish constitution and ensure that safe sex (that is, condoms) was not mentioned in public …
The Power behind Misinformation
“My work focuses on why and how bad ideas spread,” Angela Saini says in The Misinformation Virus, a BBC radio program she wrote and presented in December 2019. She sounds like a skeptic—one of us!—and indeed much of the program familiarly explores how people promote pseudoscience by cherry-picking and misinterpreting scientific research and revive old, …
… Because Grown-Ups Get Measles Too
For most of the past fifty-odd years, I’ve moved through life with the smugness of someone who has an inner superhero on call. I mean my immune system, which demonstrated its superiority early in my life by allowing me to skip the then-common childhood experiences of measles, mumps, chicken pox, and rubella (then commonly known …
An Improper Researcher
Chris French and I both know how we met—at a skeptical gathering—but neither of us remembers picky details like when. We know it must have been 1990ish, because he was one of the earliest subscribers to the UK’s The Skeptic, which I founded in 1987. In 2000, French took over editing the magazine in conjunction …
When Psychics Come Under Control of Organized Crime
A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History. By Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken. New York: Atria Books. 2018. ISBN: 978-1-5011-6384-5. 304 pp. Hardcover, $26. In the 1990s, it was common to see ads in British magazines—chiefly aimed at women, if I remember correctly—for …
Spreading Skepticism
This goes to the heart of what, for me, skepticism is about: things we can test.
This article is available for free to all.A Celebrity’s Experience in Scientology
In her new book, Troublemaker, written with Rebecca Paley, Remini interweaves stories of her personal and professional life with her history in and growing doubts about Scientology.
This article is available for free to all.Clear and Fear: Scientology Under Review
We very likely have Katie Holmes to thank for the timing of this latest crop of books on Scientology, the belief system so notably promoted by her ex-husband, Tom Cruise. Yes, at least two of these authors have been researching their books for many years, but for promotional opportunities you can’t beat a good celebrity crack-up.
This article is available for free to all.