Skeptophilia

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urb...

The always-hilarious Gary Larson, whose ability to create absurd combinations of cultural references is unparalleled, had a Far Side  comic ...

Never say "How much weirder can things get?" Ordinarily I'm the least superstitious person in the room, but I make an excepti...

Ever heard of a witch bottle ? Witch bottles are magical items that are a type of apotropaic magic  -- spells meant to ward off evil (the wo...

There's a general rule that if you have to lie about the facts to support a claim, you might want to reconsider your stance. That was my...

Combatting magical thinking can be an uphill battle, sometimes. Even as a diehard skeptic, I get where it comes from.  It can sometimes be a...

It's been a good while since I've written a post about a story that's just plain loony. Maybe it's because here in the Uni...

One of the hardest biases to overcome is dart-thrower's bias , which is the tendency to notice outliers and ignore all of the background...

Because it's always a losing bet to say the state of things in the United States couldn't get any weirder, today we have: a priest ...

Most of you are probably familiar with the famous "King Tut's Curse." The story goes that when British archaeologist Howard ...