INFORMATION CRISIS

Soplop surveys the dangers of scientific illiteracy and disinformation in this nonfiction book.

In 2020, the United States experienced both the Covid-19 pandemic and record-setting wildfires on the West Coast that destroyed over four million acres. The nation’s “fumbled” responses to both crises, per the author, stem from a “complicated relationship” with scientific information that “has prevented us from digesting and adequately confronting many of the greatest problems of our time.” There is plenty of blame to go around, Soplop asserts, including the rise of social media and “fake news,” which have been effectively exploited by politicians like Donald Trump, and the embrace of postmodernism by academic liberals in the 1970s and 1980s, which deemphasized “objective truth” in favor of “subjectivity.” Divided into four parts, the book begins with a history of science that transitions into conversations about the nature of evidence (emphasizing that not all evidence is “equal”) and how scientists reach a consensus. Parts two and three explore how rampant anti-scientific thought continues to persist into the 21st century. The topics discussed here include not only hot-button, politicized issues like masks, vaccines, and climate change, but also the popularity of “pseudoscience” in the burgeoning wellness industry, whose bevy of products, from essential oils to supplements, fails to stand up to basic scientific inquiry. While much of the book offers a grim portrait of the current state of education and information literacy, it ends with an optimistic appraisal of the promise that scientific methodology offers to solving the major problems of our era and combatting disinformation. To this end, the book’s appendix features a handbook for “Becoming a More Discerning and Less Vulnerable Consumer of Science News and Information.” As a science writer with a graduate degree in medical journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Soplop balances her convincing research (which is backed by over 900 endnotes) with an accessible writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with scientific scholarship.

A well-documented and frightening assessment of America’s fraught relationship with science.