Dear Faithful Reader, it is spring here in New England, but the season has yet to kick the doors open. The buds are on the trees, and the daffodils are in full glory. But I look forward to the end of sweater weather. Perhaps soon.

I have been busy since my last missive. Most recently, I wrote about the scandal surrounding Woody Brown’s bestselling book Upward Bound in my April column for Skeptical Inquirer. The book was written using the Rapid Prompting Method, a discredited form of communication that strongly suggests his mother was the real author. That hypothesis is supported by the video of Brown’s April 1 appearance on the NBC Today Show, which shows that his pointing at a letter board bears no relation to the words attributed to him by his mother.

In late March, I wrote a short piece about an unusual amicus brief in a death row case. The famous magicians, Penn & Teller, filed a brief in support of Charles Don Flores, who was convicted of a 1998 murder solely on evidence obtained using hypnosis. Due to the unreliability of the evidence it produces, hypnosis in police investigations is now illegal in many states—including in Texas, where Flores was convicted—but because his trial took place before the law was changed, he remains on death row. Penn & Teller called the evidence against Flores “junk science of the worst sort.”

Finally, at the beginning of March, I wrote a piece called “Yes, Cognitive Dissonance Is Still Actually a Thing” in response to revelations that the famous book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter may have been based on false reporting and manipulation of the participants in a UFO cult. This and other factors prompted a New Yorker magazine reporter to question whether the concept of cognitive dissonance was still “actually a thing.” I reviewed the current literature and concluded that it is too soon to discard cognitive dissonance as a psychological concept. It still happens, and the theory is still scientifically useful.

That’s all for now. In the hope that spring will bring warmer temperatures and happier times, I will leave you with “a host of golden daffodils” sent to me by a friend. See you next time.

SV