Skeptophilia

Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea .  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man...

A recent study found that regardless how thoroughly AI-powered chatbots are trained with real, sensible text, they still have a hard time r...

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia  sent me a link to an interview with author Sharon Hewitt Rawlette about her recent book, The Sou...

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by ...

When I was a graduate student in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- an endeavor that lasted one semester, at whic...

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glanc...

The Star Trek: The Next Generation  episode "The Chase" is justly revered by Trekkies, and also by people who simply like a good s...

A friend of mine, knowing my interest in linguistics and birdwatching, sent me a link to a fairly mindblowing post on the blog Corvid Resea...

There's no denying that as careful as we try to be, language can be ambiguous.  One of the first things I used to do with my Critical Th...