All posts tagged: Skeptics

Cornyn, Crockett remain top skeptics of their party’s Senate nominees after primary losses

Cornyn, Crockett remain top skeptics of their party’s Senate nominees after primary losses

Published by Sam Flores

This week when Democrats meet at their state convention to energize and organize their party ahead of November, they’ll be doing so without U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, who declined an invitation to headline the event from James Talarico, the Senate nominee who defeated her in March. Last week, Crockett told The Dallas Morning News that she hadn’t listened to Talarico’s message asking her to speak but thought the invitation was an “afterthought.” She added that she “had no idea” if she’d be actively campaigning for her primary opponent because she was focusing more on down-ballot candidates. Across the aisle, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is no closer to letting up on his beef with Attorney General Ken Paxton, who bested him for the Republican Senate nomination last month. In recent interviews, Cornyn said he would not campaign nor raise money for Paxton and stands by his sharp criticisms of the attorney general from the primary as corrupt and unfit for office. A month since the U.S. Senate race in Texas was set, Paxton and Talarico’s …

Communities in Action: Sikivu Hutchinson, Black Skeptics LA

Communities in Action: Sikivu Hutchinson, Black Skeptics LA

Published by Sam Flores

Sikivu Hutchinson Sikivu Hutchinson is an accomplished author, creative, and community organizer. She’s the leader of Black Skeptics Los Angeles – a chapter of AHA – but her work doesn’t stop there. Sikivu is heavily involved in local youth education, with a focus on empowering Black queer and gender-expansive youth. She and her colleagues truly exemplify humanist action, putting community, collaboration, and youth empowerment at the forefront of their work.  Please introduce yourself – when did you become involved with your organization, and why?  My name is Sikivu Hutchinson – I actually have two organizations. One is Black Skeptics Los Angeles, which was established in 2010-2011, and serves the needs of African American secular humanists, atheists, skeptics, and freethinkers in the South LA area. Our focus is on educational justice and organizing. We also have the Women’s Leadership Project (WLP), which is a Black feminist mentoring, civic engagement, and advocacy program that is also based in South LA. WLP serves Black girls, girls of color, and queer and gender-expansive youth. The WLP focuses heavily on …

The Skeptic’s Guide to Red Light Therapy

The Skeptic’s Guide to Red Light Therapy

Published by Jenni Sidey

This story is from Manual, GQ’s flagship newsletter offering useful advice on style, health, and more, four days a week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. You don’t have to run in biohacking circles to have noticed that red light therapy is having a moment. You could just go to the mall. Previously the domain of private medspas and bleeding-edge self-optimizers who worship at the altar of Dave Asprey, red light therapy has been steadily finding its way into everything from your face mask to your Theragun, promising better skin, faster muscle recovery, and much, much more. Like many of the novelties to emerge from the fringes of the wellness industry, red light therapy’s myriad purported benefits appear to be out of this world. But in this case, technically speaking, they are very real. “Red light therapy has been a well-documented and researched practice since the 1990s, when NASA introduced red-light emitting diode (LED) devices to help grow potatoes in space,” says Greg Hammer, MD, physician and professor at Stanford University School …

How Skeptics Might Save the World

How Skeptics Might Save the World

Published by Sam Flores

In late 2025, several European countries took increasingly significant actions in response to what they believed was a wave of unusual drones flying near sensitive infrastructure. Airports were shut down. Local police and the military went on high alert. Politicians and commentators talked about this being part of a “hybrid war” executed by Russia. At its peak, the situation even prompted calls to invoke NATO’s Article 5 collective defense mandate. From the start, other observers and I noted the parallels between these events and a similar situation in New Jersey a year earlier, which I had investigated in depth (see Skeptical Inquirer May/June 2025). Back then, there were numerous official claims of drone sightings. Yet every time actual data were provided, those sightings turned out to be misidentifications. The New Jersey events amounted to little more than a media frenzy and some embarrassing learning experiences for law enforcement, the military, and airport authorities. The European events had, and continue to have, the potential to be far more significant. Here, the role of scientific skepticism becomes …

Weird Things Some Scientific Skeptics Say about Science

Weird Things Some Scientific Skeptics Say about Science

Published by Sam Flores

Despite their commitment to critical thinking and evidence-based approaches to solving problems, some otherwise very clear-thinking skeptics occasionally promote some very odd views about the day-to-day practice of science that would come as a surprise to most scientists and philosophers of science. Claim #1: Distinguishing between Science and Pseudoscience Is Easy Some skeptics are quick to label pseudoscience with an alacrity that would surprise most philosophers of science who regard distinguishing between science and pseudoscience as a major problem. Philosophers even have a name for it: the demarcation problem. Some philosophers even claim it is not possible to distinguish between science and pseudoscience (e.g., Laudan 1983)—save perhaps in a fuzzy way. Obviously in some fields, pseudoscience is easier to identify when scientific-sounding claims are made with no evidence. Spurious claims have been made for centuries for the efficacy of strange treatments, unguents, and pills in the absence of evidence. Even today, there are homeopathic practitioners and even germ theory rejectionists claiming their beliefs rest on scientific evidence. However, such fields and claims are the low-lying …