The day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I was teaching a college class on science, religion and magic. Our class was comparing the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with the McCarthy hearings of ...

Led Zeppelin released ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in 1971. A decade later, a minister claimed that the song included dark backmasked ...

Public fear, and those responsible for creating or promoting it, are major topics of discussion these days. The sociological and criminological concept known as moral panic offers valuable insights ...

The responses in the Western world to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent ...

Haidt argues that smartphones and social media have "rewired childhood" and made kids more anxious and depressed. My son agrees. He brings Haidt's argument to schools. Max Stossel's nonprofit, "Social ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) The aim of the class was to better understand the concept of moral panics, which are ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The aim of the class was to better understand the concept of moral panics, which are societal epidemics of disproportionate fear ...