JFK, Karl Marx, the Pope, Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, Fox Mulder, Bill Clinton, both George Bushes—all have been linked to vastly complicated global (or even galactic) intrigues. In hindsight, I probably should have majored in psychology instead of business, but as a business school professor I still get to investigate all the little quirks and biases of the human mind.

We might also add anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, albeit they are less deranged and have wider support The problem, as the reviewer identifies, is that this focus may not have been made sufficiently clear at the start. One reason is that conspiracy theories can be a way for people to make sense of a complex and often confusing world.

You know, those wild, often outlandish theories claiming a secret group of people controlling everything from world events to the weather (if you just shook your head, check out this link. Explore this compelling collection of unexplained circumstances and uncover hidden agendas, startling Kriwaczk’s book is truly unique: the author claims to tell the history of a lost genre of music—the funerary violin—which was suppressed by the Catholic Church in the early 19th century, all traces of it in history and music having subsequently been destroyed. In what may be a sign of the difficulty of the task, a definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ is only offered by Uscinski roughly 50 pages into the book.

And while it’s important to approach these ideas with a healthy dose of skepticism, there’s no denying that they can be endlessly fascinating. Conspiracy theories can no longer be simply dismissed as the product of a pathological mind-set located on the political margins. Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch undertakes the exciting, if laborious, task of assembling clues and piecing back together a book that has disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works.This book presents an important resource for students and scholars from a range of disciplines interested in the societal and political impact of conspiracy theories, including Area Studies, Anthropology, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. He asks tough questions and connects the dots among five decades’ worth of suspicious events, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the attempted assassinations of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, the crimes of Watergate, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, the disputed presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, the major defense failure of 9/11, and the subsequent anthrax letter attacks. Countercultural mayhem … Oliver Senton as Robert Anton Wilson and Kate Alderton as Arlen Wilson in Daisy Campbell’s play Cosmic Trigger.

This collection of state-of-the-art essays explores conspiracy cultures in post-socialist Eastern Europe, ranging from the nineteenth century to contemporary manifestations.Rather than approach conspiratorial narrative as an irrational response to an obviously decipherable reality, Conspiracy/Theory identifies important affinities between conspiracy theory and critical theory. Seeking to debunk some common yet irrational conspiracy theories, Shermer explains what drives people's belief in them while also acknowledging that real conspiracies do occur. Following mysterious trails and uncovering esoteric stories: it’s what I love to do, and it’s also what I love to read about. I don’t think of myself as a paranoid guy – I don’t, for instance, believe in a real life Deep State – but these are the sorts of stories that resonate for me.