Skeptical Inquirer: A Magazine Everyone Should Read

I recently published an article in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Never heard of it? It is definitely worth a look.

*

I saw my first issue of Skeptical Inquirer back in college. I was doing research for a paper on parapsychology and in the stacks of the library I came across a glossy magazine mixed in among the dry academic journals. What’s that doing here? I thought. When I started reading it I saw that this wasn’t a normal magazine, and it wasn’t quite an academic journal. It was something entirely different. Something I had never seen before. A glossy and fun magazine with high-quality academic articles, full of citations and written by some of the smartest people in every field of study. How have I never heard of this? I thought. It did something that the academic journals never do (but should): take on pseudoscience and superstition directly with research and experiments. Not only were the topics fun (who doesn’t love a comically written ghost story?) they were well-researched, thoughtful, and highlighted a style of thinking that influenced me deeply. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve been a fan of Skeptical Inquirer, or SI as it is affectionately known. So you can only imagine how thrilled I was when the magazine recently published my article on how to teach children critical thinking skills.

Before I get into what my article is all about, let me introduce you to SI with a little history.

Skeptical Inquirer was launched in 1976, which makes it a Gen Xer, so of course it gets ignored by the popular media while playing a huge role in the culture. Like most Gen Xers, it has avoided going corporate. SI has stayed true to its ideals in a world constantly pushing for more ad space in everyone’s mental real estate. Instead, SI stuck to the vision of its founders, who originally called themselves the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, pronounced like “psy-cop”). Who were these founders? They were folks like Carl Sagan, James Randi, and Ray Hyman, a group of scientists, scholars, and activists who were on a mission: to promote critical thinking and skepticism in a world where the stakes of magical thinking were growing more serious by the decade. That mission is more relevant than ever.

The founding editor, Paul Kurtz, was an American philosopher who popularized the term “secular humanism” to describe a view of the world that embraced the dignity of humans without appeal to gods or the supernatural. As you can imagine, he became a bit of a boogyman to fundamentalists and evangelicals across the world. But that didn’t stop him. In fact, he published an amazing number of articles and books (over 80!), in which he argued that the paranormal and supernatural are natural products of the human imagination which require a “skepticism of the third kind” – active public investigation that is accessible to everyone. Kurtz and the other founders envisioned the magazine as a resource for this type of skepticism. SI is intended for both the public and scholars, for the ivory tower and the local coffee shop. Skeptical Inquirer is a beacon of reason in an unreasonable world that anyone can enjoy. As Douglas Hofstadter put it in an article in Scientific American:

“The purpose of The Skeptical Inquirer is simply to combat nonsense. It does so by recourse to common sense, which means it is accessible to anyone who can read English. It does not require any special knowledge to read its pages, where nonsensical claims are routinely smashed to smithereens. All that is required to read this maverick journal is curiosity about how truth defends itself (through its agent CSICOP) against attacks from all quarters by unimaginably imaginative theorizers, speculators, eccentrics, crackpots, and out-and-out fakers.”

Over the years, Skeptical Inquirer has featured contributions from notable figures in the fields of science, psychology, and philosophy, and their board has included leading lights such as Isaac Asimov, Elizabeth Loftus, Steve Allen, Daniel Dennet, Steven J. Gould, B.F. Skinner, and many other amazing thinkers. Its latest issue includes an article written by Bill Nye on climate change.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the magazine expanded its reach and influence, becoming a cornerstone of the skeptical movement and fostering a community of skeptics worldwide. According to the SI website, there are dozens of skeptics groups across the US, and 28 countries have skeptics groups that are modeled on the example set by CSICOP. To put it simply, SI inspires people around the world to actively push back against scams, hoaxes, and bad ideas. It is one of the good guys in the misinformation age.

And that brings me to my article, Beyond Belief: Raising a Skeptical Kid in the Misinformation Age. In it, I describe my own journey as a parent trying to find information on how to teach my kid critical thinking skills. What I found was… not a lot. And when I tried to get support from parenting groups online it didn’t go well. I finally took a look at the research and discovered that not only can kids learn critical thinking skills, they are already very good at them; they just don’t know it yet. That put me on a path of discovery where I tried dozens of different ideas for teaching my son critical thinking skills. The article summarizes ten of those things that actually worked. My hope is that when a parent finds themselves in the situation I was in, and searches online for how to teach their child critical thinking skills, they will find my article in SI. And maybe they will have the same experience I had in stacks of that library so many years ago. Maybe they will read my article, and then antoher, and then another, and wonder why they have never heard of this amazing magazine.

Curious yet? If you haven’t heard of Skeptical Inquirer then I strongly encourage you to take a look at their website and see what kinds of things they write about. If you read my articles and enjoy them, then you will likely love SI.