Skepticality

» see skepticality.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Skepticality dates itself to April 2005, though the hosts' own account puts the making of it in May, after Derek Colanduno and Robynn McCarthy became friends in Las Vegas. McCarthy went by Swoopy on the show and in the credits. What they built was an audio magazine rather than a conversation: regular segments contributed by other people, then a long interview with somebody worth an hour.

The guest list has aged better than most of the show. James Randi, Phil Plait, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye all sat for it, alongside Adam Savage and Ann Druyan. The segments were run by named contributors with their own beats, Tim Farley on the history of the movement and Bob Carroll on logical fallacies, with a recurring piece on coincidence produced by the Independent Investigations Group. Episodes came out roughly every two weeks.

Awards followed early and kept arriving. A Parsec and a Podcast Peer Award both landed in 2007, The Times named it podcast of the week in August 2008, and as late as April 2014 it took the Ockham for best podcast at QED in Manchester. That last one matters for the dating, because the show was still being handed prizes four years into the slowdown that eventually finished it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the magazine's podcast ~

On 14 August 2006 Skepticality became the official podcast of Skeptic magazine, which is the arrangement that gave it an institution behind it. The Skeptics Society published the magazine out of Altadena, ran a lecture series at Caltech and had Michael Shermer's name on the masthead. The magazine's name is most of why the booking list looks the way it does.

None of that apparatus existed here. Turkey argued about astrology and faith healing constantly in the same years, on television and in newspaper columns, but there was no membership society publishing a quarterly and no annual meeting in a hotel to attach a microphone to. What arrives here is the audio by itself, an American argument with its own institutions and its own in-jokes already attached.

~ the slow stop ~

The ending is legible in the feed and almost nowhere else. Episode 286, an interview about post-truth politics, is stamped 4 July 2017. Episode 287 follows on 19 December 2017 and episode 288 on 19 January 2018. Then the file goes quiet for nineteen months.

Episode 289, "Intuition and Consciousness", is stamped 29 August 2019 at one minute past midnight UTC, which is the evening of 28 August on the American east coast. Nothing in it announces anything. There is no final segment and no post anywhere explaining the gap. The show had been limping for two years and then it simply stopped filing.

~ what is still being served ~

skepticality.com still answers today, and the front page still leads with episode 286 from July 2017. The website froze two years and two episodes before the podcast did, which means the site has been advertising a show as current since before the show's last three installments existed. The libsyn feed, by contrast, carries all four of those late episodes and has carried them untouched for seven years.

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