Where Conspiracy Theories Come From & Which D...

Junk mail seems like a relic of another era. Physical ads showing up in your mailbox feel easy to ignore in a world dominated by digital marketing. Yet companies still spend billions sending those mailers every year. Why? Because for certain groups of people, those pieces of mail ...  Show more

Memory feels dependable — we rely on it to tell the story of our lives. But the truth is, memory behaves in some surprisingly strange ways. For one thing, your brain forgets far more than it remembers, and that’s not a flaw — it’s actually part of how memory is designed to work. ...  Show more

This past year, COVID-19 and the U.S. elections have provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories—with sometimes disastrous consequences. Karen Douglas, PhD, of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, discusses psychological research on how conspiracy theories start, why ...  Show more

When do conspiracy theories stop being theories? Today’s episode visits real accounts of deadly misconduct committed at scale by governments and businesses. Poisoned alcohol, contaminated medicine, mind control experiments — in every case, the truth came out… eventually. Learn mo ...  Show more

Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the theory's popularity is largely about its loudest proponents' racist fear-mongering.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the link ...  Show more

For the last few decades, the government has been telling us what to eat and what not to eat. Somehow their advice to eat low-fat, limit cholesterol, avoid red meat, and the like hasn't done us any favors. We are less healthy as a populace t ...