Build a conspiracy theory from scratch.
The best way to learn to spot a conspiracy theory is to make one yourself.
Pick a real news story. On the next step you'll choose who's behind it and why. Then walk through the four moves real conspiracists use, with a debunk on every step.
- Hunt anomalies — turn coincidence into evidence of a secret plot.
- Fabricate connections — draw lines between unrelated dots until they look meaningful.
- Dismiss counter-evidence — if a fact disagrees, make the fact part of the cover-up.
- Discredit the critics — dismiss people who point out flaws in your theory.
Pick the event.
Choose whichever real-feeling headline your imagination will run wildest with. Don't overthink it.
Populist Support Declines in Europe
An annual YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project survey, reported by The Guardian, finds that support for populist ideas has fallen across several European countries over the past three years. The survey measures attitudes like distrust of elites, favoring strong national control, and opposition to immigration. In the latest cycle, populist sentiment declined in ten European nations, indicating fewer people now express broad populist beliefs than in earlier years.
The Dictionary People" Review: Word-Loving Nerds
Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People tells the story of the people who built the Oxford English Dictionary by collecting words, quotations, and regional usages. Ogilvie, a linguist, shows that the OED was not made by a single team in isolation but by thousands of volunteers who sent slips of paper and examples from newspapers, books, and everyday speech. The book explains how this wide network of contributors helped record English across time and place.
Loch Ness Monster search resumes
The Loch Ness search, described as the biggest in fifty years, took place over the weekend at Scotland’s Loch Ness. The Loch Ness Centre partnered with Loch Ness Exploration to run the operation and invited volunteers to join boat patrols that ran from about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Organizers set up 17 official spotting points around the loch and asked the public to report any unusual sightings to the survey team.
LHC Conspiracy Theories and Fears
In 2009 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator near Geneva run by CERN, was preparing to restart after upgrades. Scientists said the machine would smash protons together at very high energies to study fundamental particles and forces, potentially revealing phenomena such as the Higgs boson or signs of new physics. However, some members of the public expressed fear that the machine could produce catastrophic effects, including miniature black holes or other unknown dangers.