Remember When 2,000 to 5,000 Al Qaeda Operatives Had Supposedly Infiltrated America?
A litany of failed forecasts about terrorism
Conspiracy Theories
Friday A/V Club: The Muhammad Movie That Never Was
'The choice of Paris as the venue of the performance suggests there is a conspiracy against Islam.'
French Town Bans Clown Costumes Amid Nationwide 'Aggressive Clown' Terror
SPOILER ALERT: This story also involves Clown Hunters
The Return of Moral Panic
A scholar tries—and fails—to rehabilitate the sex-abuse hysteria of the '80s.
Ebola Conspiracies: A Tale of Two Daily Mail Articles
A newspaper chortles about dubious Ebola stories while spreading one of its own.
Now Available in Paperback: The United States of Paranoia
With a new afterword on the post-Snowden era.
Developer Wants to Build Hundreds of Homes for Hasidic Jews; Catskills Town Might Dissolve Itself to Stop Him
The strangest local-government story you'll read today.
The ISIS Conspiracies
How a century's worth of anxieties about America's southern border are affecting the latest foreign-policy crisis.
Michigan Readers: See Jesse Walker Discuss Political Paranoia This Afternoon
A talk in Ann Arbor.
Oath Keepers in Ferguson Area Condemn Militarized Police; Oath Keepers' Guest Speaker IS Militarized Police
Tensions on the populist right
Suspicious Minds in the 1970s
Rick Perlstein's new book shows the strange '70s interplay of skepticism and nostalgia.
The Trouble with Conspiracy Science
What the social scientists and psychologists who study conspiracy theories get wrong.
Complexity Without Conspiracy: Politics Harder to Produce Than a Pencil
Get in the weeds, not the sensationalism
Former Bircher No Longer Believes in Vast Communist Conspiracy, Fears Vast Conservative Conspiracy Instead
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel reviews Claire Conner's memoir.
New Poll Shows a Striking Drop in Popularity for JFK Conspiracy Theories
For the first time since the '60s, conspiracy believers can't even muster a plurality.
Why Did Nicholas Kristof Believe Somaly Mam's Lies?
The roots and consequences of a deception.
Disco Doesn't Suck. Here's Why.
Once largely derided as shallow, faddish, consumerist music, disco has been reappraised as the stifled sounds of cultural liberation. Of course, it could always be both.
When Satan Was Spotted at Head Start
A professor tries to rehabilitate ritual-abuse prosecutions of the 1980s and '90s.
Rumors of Rock'n'Roll Satanism
Jesse Walker talks about rock-music conspiracy theories on KUER.
Washington Funds Failed Twitter Clones Around the World
Apparently, the government isn't good at designing sustainable social networks.
Four Great Myths of the McCarthy Era
Sixty years after the Army-McCarthy hearings, we should reexamine some of our accumulated lore about the period.
