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The American Medical Association and the Fight Against Quackery (2015)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Insight blog at Skeptic.com on June 14, 2015. An archived version is available here.

“The American Medical Association is finally taking a stand on quacks like Dr. Oz,” announced a post yesterday by Julia Belluz. A health writer at Vox, Belluz has emerged as a sharp critic of popular medical talk show personality Dr. Mehmet Oz with posts such as this, this, and this. (I recommend her thoughtful reflection on the ethics, challenges, and public health concerns of countering medical misinformers, titled “How should journalists cover quacks like Dr. Oz or the Food Babe?” Generations of skeptical critics of quackery have asked those same troubling questions.)
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Ghosts, Knowing, and a Lesson at Bedtime (2013)

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This article was originally published at the defunct Skepticblog.org on Sep 11, 2013.
An archived version is available here

Story time is a big deal at the Loxton household. For years, my young son and I have been working through a stack of some of the great adventure novels, just as my dad used to read poetry to me and my brothers. I’m delighted by my son’s edge-of-his-seat immersion in the worlds of hobbits and pirates and talking lions.

On other nights, we lie awake talking about ideas. As Carl Sagan once said, “Kids can understand some pretty deep things.”1 My son has long since discovered the irresistible trick of asking fascinating questions about those deep things right after I turn off the lights. I’m a sucker every time. Recently, our conversation turned to “true” ghost stories related by his young colleagues on the playground.
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American Mastodon on the Cover of Junior Skeptic 61

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American Mastodon on the Cover of Junior Skeptic 61

Daniel’s latest Junior Skeptic cover illustration for his story “Mammoth Mysteries Part Two,” bound inside Skeptic Vol. 21, No. 4. The image is a digital painting depicting an American Mastodon. The story continues Part One‘s intellectual history of the discovery of mammoths and mastodons and the startling truths these fossils revealed about extinction, evolution, and time. Daniel also discusses 19th century media hoaxes that claimed mammoths were still alive—and critically considers far-fetched cryptozoological claims that this might even be true today.

Read the table of contents for this story.

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Junior Skeptic 56 Cover

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Junior Skeptic 56 Cover

This digital painting by Daniel Loxton is the cover illustration for the current issue of Junior Skeptic (Daniel’s story “Bat-People On the Moon!,” bound inside Skeptic Vol. 20, No. 3. Telling the tale of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the story does indeed feature bat-people, beaver-people, blue unicorns, and other bizarre creatures that a famous media hoax once claimed to thrive upon the surface of the Moon.

Read the table of contents for this story.

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Daniel Loxton Elected as a CSI Fellow

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The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI—formerly the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has named Daniel Loxton as a new Fellow of the organization:

Ten distinguished scientists, scholars, educators, and investigators from five countries have been elected fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), copublisher of the Skeptical Inquirer. CSI (formerly CSICOP) is one of the world’s leading organizations for the promotion of scientific thinking and the critical examination of extraordinary claims from a scientific point of view.

Fellows of CSI are selected for their “distinguished contributions to science and skepticism.” They are nominated and elected by CSI’s twelve-member Executive Council.

Other newly named Fellows include John Cook (of Skepticalscience.com), Julia Galef (president and cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality), and historian of science Naomi Oreskes (co-author of Merchants of Doubt with Erik M. Conway).

Past Fellows include Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Martin Gardner. Current Fellows include science educator and television host Bill Nye, astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, anthropologist Eugenie C. Scott, psychologist Ray Hyman, and Cosmos creator/writer Ann Druyan.