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Quickies
Quickies: Food Babe Doesn’t Ingest Chemicals, Facebook and Native American Names, and Scams in the 1800s
The Food Babe is a Raving Lunatic – “Quick: what’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever heard a person say? That vaccines cause autism? That lizard people live under Los Angeles? How about that ‘there is no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever?’ “ Facebook Name Police: Native American Names Aren’t ‘Authentic’ Enough – “If you’re John Smith…
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Quickies
Quickies: Denouncing Catcalling, How Psychological Biases Affect Decision to Vaccinate, and Spray-On Pheromones Don’t Work
But Seriously, ‘Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?’ – “In 1859, The Atlantic published an essay asking a simple—and very, very complicated—question.” ‘Stop Telling Women To Smile’: Denouncing ‘Jackals’ And Catcalling In Mexico – “The campaigns first international foray is in Mexico City, where rampant sexual harassment has led the city to provide female-only subway cars and buses. The campaign…
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Feminism
Cross-Post: Foiling Fallacies – Women Who Use Abortion As Birth Control
Editor’s Note: This article is written by Steph and cross-posted from Grounded Parents and it’s the first part of her exciting new series on debunking anti-feminist rhetoric. If you like this, check out the rest of her work! Comments are disabled on this post so if you want to leave a comment (and finish reading the post), click the link at…
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Skepticism
Quickies: The Problem with Calling Women “Females,” Lesbian Separatists of the ’60s, and Why Your Memory Is Unreliable
10 Things People Once Complained Would Ruin The English Language – “You’ve probably heard that English is being ruined — by the Internet, by texting, by Americans, by young people who have no respect for proper grammar. But it turns out that people have always worried over English, and over the centuries, have accused all sorts of things of ‘ruining’…
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Skepticism
Skepchick Book Club: 1491
Welcome back to the Skepchick Book Club! This month (or rather, over the past 2 months) we read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Unless you’re familiar with archaeology and anthropology, this book will contain a lot of interesting and perhaps surprising information. The book starts off with talking about Holmberg’s Mistake (and in fact, you…
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Guest Bloggers
Guest Post: Skeptics Have a PR Problem
Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post, from Jenny Splitter, is a good reminder to step out of your comfortable echo chamber and engage with people instead of lecturing at them. **** A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for Grounded Parents called In Defense of Gluten Free. As I’m obsessed with site stats, I was pouring over all of…
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Quickies
Quickies: Misleading Supplement Ingredients, Anti-Vax Stuff, and Daria
New York Attorney General Targets Supplements at Major Retailers – “The authorities said they had conducted tests on top-selling store brands of herbal supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Walmart — and found that four out of five of the products did not contain any of the herbs on their labels. The tests showed that pills…
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Quickies
Quickies: Anita Sarkeesian’s Haters, The “Whiteness” of Public Radio Voices, and Walking can Help With Depression
Here’s what Anita Sarkeesian’s harassers do with the rest of their Twitter time – “As it turns out, some of the most direct threats come from throwaway accounts, or ones that have been suspended. But some of them are extant, long-running feeds from people who… well, it’s hard to say that they have regular lives, or passions, because their timelines…
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