Michael Shermer

"For fifteen years, bestselling author Michael Shermer has written a column in Scientific American magazine that synthesizes scientific concepts and theory for a general audience. His trademark combination of deep scientific understanding and entertaining writing style has thrilled his huge and devoted audience for years. Now, in Skeptic, seventy-five of these columns are available together for the first time; a welcome addition for his fans and a...

"The author discusses how we should think about conspiracy theories, who believes them and why, which conspiracy theories are likely to be true or false and what criteria we can use to assess them, and what we should do to combat dangerous conspiracism and reestablish trust in our democratic institutions, in the media, and in one another"--

"In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans' belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality by radical life extentionists, extropians, transhumanists, cryonicists, and mind-uploaders, along with utopians who have attempted to create heaven on earth. For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, the place where souls go after...

H.L. Mencken was America's most prominent iconoclastic journalist of the first half of the 20th century, and he still has a considerable following. Mencken's writings have been in print continuously for over 100 years, including a collection published in the 1950s that's still in print almost 70 years after it was first published.This is the first new collection of Mencken's writings to appear in decades, and it consists primarily of complete pieces...

Have you ever wondered why people believe things like religion, spirituality, conspiracy theories and political ideology? Explore the psychology and science of belief and why we believe, sometimes falsely, in things that are not true.

Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his Victorian peers as a man of formidable mind and equally outsized personality. Michael Shermer rescues Wallace from the shadow of Darwin in this biography. Here we see Wallace as perhaps the greatest naturalist of his age-spending years in remote jungles, collecting astounding quantities of specimens,...