Skeptic Magazine
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Skeptic, colloquially known as Skeptic magazine, is a quarterly science education and science advocacy magazine published internationally by The Skeptics Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. Founded by Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, the magazine was first published in the spring of 1992 and is published through Millennium Press. Shermer remains the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine and the magazine’s Co-publisher and Art Director is Pat Linse. Other noteworthy members of its editorial board include Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond, magician and escape artist turned educator James “The Amazing” Randi, actor, comedian, and Saturday Night Live alumna Julia Sweeney, professional mentalist Mark Edward, science writer Daniel Loxton, Lawrence M. Krauss and Christof Koch. Skeptic has an international circulation with over 50,000 subscriptions and is on newsstands in the U.S. and Canada as well as Europe, Australia, and other countries. Source
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| Scope | National |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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| Frequency | Quarterly |
Recent Articles
Search ArticlesThe Search for Consciousness
In the early 1990s, the human brain began to glow. Not literally, of course. But for the first time, scientists could watch living brains change while a person was still alive, still thinking, still themselves. People crawled into a doughnut-shaped machine, formally known as a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, and waited as the computer translated tiny shifts in blood oxygen levels into ember-flecked images on a screen. The colors were not thoughts.
Mysteries, Meteors, and Foo Fighters
Might luminous meteoric dust be a possible explanation for some of the mysterious orgs spotted by pilots in World War II known as foo fighters?
The State of the Trans Debate, 2026
Nearly half a decade ago, I wrote an overview1 for this magazine of the debates—and, let’s face it, vicious culture wars—around what’s become known as “gender-affirming care” for youth—psychological and medical interventions based on an internal “gender identity.” Since then, many revelations about both the research and history of youth gender medicine, and a series of shocking scandals, have emerged.
The Detransitioner’s Dilemma: The Road From “Sunk Cost” to “Radical Acceptance”
I was having lunch with a friend, a respected internist, and asked him whether his trans patients posed any particular medical concerns. I asked because I had received an email from a Canadian physician who, I thought, perfectly summarized his position. “I love my few transgender males,” he wrote. “They all have other mental health issues.
The Seven Mountains Mandate: The Latest in Christian Nationalism
On June 14, 2025, Vance Boelter assassinated Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman, along with her husband Mark, in their home. Boelter also shot and wounded Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope.
The Science of the Declaration of Independence
On America’s 250th Anniversary, a New Look at its Founding Document It is altogether proper for so many commentators on this 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding to treat the Declaration of Independence as a work of political philosophy unprecedented in history—drafted, edited, and approved as it was by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Madison, and the other Founding Fathers, who were the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment.
Sciencing With a Primate Brain: Reflections on the Nature of Scientific Thought
I was once a flat-earther. But probably you were too, so … Please. Allow me to elaborate. Let us begin with the assumption that there is such a thing as objective truth. “Objective knowledge” means knowledge that is increasingly constrained by reality rather than by our preferences, intuitions, or inherited myths; put more simply, knowledge of a thing as it is, in-and-of itself, independent of us.
How Hype Becomes Automated Consensus
A Conversation With AI on the False Origin Story of EMDR Controversies surrounding Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) make for an interesting chapter in the history of clinical psychology. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, EMDR refers to a well-known and widely used treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—one that is claimed to be empirically supported.
The Terrorist in the Brain
What Robin Williams and Bruce Willis can teach us about dementia—and about the industry that has grown up around our fear of it In the last two years of his life, Robin Williams was being hunted by a stealthy predator. The early signs were easy to ignore: stubborn constipation, trouble sleeping, a sense of smell that had quietly faded, and the usual “senior moments.” Then symptoms came that were harder to dismiss. A tremor appeared in his left hand. His walk grew stiff and stooped.
God Isn’t Dead: The World Is Becoming More Religious
On April 7, 1966, Time magazine generated headlines by asking “Is God Dead?” Four decades later, the “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett famously heralded religion’s unraveling. A mere eight years after their declaration, Pew Research Center reported that the percentage of those identifying as agnostic/atheist was projected to increase substantially in the United States and Europe.