How does Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World hold up today? Once every few months or so, some passage or another from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark goes viral online for its seemingly prescient descriptions of a world in which critical thought and skepticism are waning, leaving behind a morass of misinformation and credulity. This one, for example: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues… when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Sagan wasn’t some sort of Nostradamus, but he believed powerfully in the scientific method, in evaluating claims …