Johnson’s good friend Samuel Shenton founded a small fringe group dubbed the Flat Earth Society in the 1950s. In 1972 Johnson became the president of the society after Shenton's death, transforming the group from a small collection of conspiracy theorists into an organization with thousands of members. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, a man named Charles Kenneth Johnson became a minor celebrity for his refusal to believe the Earth is round, Cheryl Eddy writes for iO9. But this wasn't the first resurgance of the idea. So many were surprised to hear the flat Earth concept still kicked around. People have known that the Earth is round since at least the sixth century B.C.E. Since then, the rapper has drawn the ire of all sorts of incredulous people, including astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. took to Twitter and proclaimed that the Earth is flat. (Feb.This week, a particularly odd little bit of pseudoscience reared its head again when rapper B.o.B.

The result is an illuminating take on a much scrutinized subject. Weill’s immersion in the Flat Earth community and acknowledgment of her own conspiratorial thinking gives her reporting a refreshingly compassionate slant. Weill also delves into Pizzagate and QAnon, arguing that the “flat earth and pro-Trump movements share strands of the same conspiratorial, counter-factual DNA” details how Big Tech’s efforts to stop the spread of misinformation have backfired and notes that “real-world communities” can pull people out of the rabbit holes they find online. According to Weill, conspiratorial thinking is not some “weird pathology,” but part of the same “powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns.” She documents spikes in conspiracy thinking during historical periods of “rapid industrialization and income inequality,” and links the resurgence of Flat Earth theory in the early 2000s to Y2K paranoia and 9/11 trutherism. Daily Beast reporter Weill focuses this insightful and surprisingly empathetic survey of conspiracy theories on the history of Flat Earth theory, “the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking.” She traces the belief’s origins to a 19th-century utopian English commune and profiles modern-day believers including “Mad Mike” Hughes, who died in February 2020 while attempting to reach the earth’s upper atmosphere in a homemade rocket.

Flat earth society fails