This imperative is not rhetorical—it is the premise of his book. As Gordin’s subtitle promises, The Pseudoscience Wars centers on a single figure around which defunct theories, elaborate ...

We live in an era where information is more accessible than ever before. Paradoxically, this hasn’t made us wiser—it’s made us more vulnerable to misinformation. Pseudoscience, once confined ...

I have come to think of pseudoscience as science’s shadow. A shadow is cast by something; it has no substance of its own. The same is true for these doctrines on the fringe.

The word pseudoscience means “false science,” and that’s where my definition starts. Pseudoscience is a practice, a mode of investigation, that looks like science but misses the point.