Did you know that the early Church suppressed reports of Jesus’s marriage to Mary Magdaline? That a massive cover-up hid Francis Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays? That the moon landing of 1969 was a hoax orchestrated by NASA? Conspiracy theories circulated long before the Internet, though social media spreads them farther and faster than ever.

Hard evidence refutes some rumors. The D.C. pizza joint alleged to house a pedophilia ring in its basement, in the Pizzagate scandal of 2016, has no basement. Others are merely unlikely. Real conspiracies do exist. But most conspiracy theories fail the test of Occam’s razor: Of two competing explanations, the simpler one is more likely. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

With true believers, a conspiracy theory is nearly impossible to debunk. Anyone who denies it is part of the conspiracy. What’s the attraction? We humans are wired to see patterns. How else could we expect the sun to rise daily or spring to follow winter? Life would be chaos. Seeing patterns, the more intricate the better, allows a sense of control when events feel all too random.

We’re also wired to crave belonging, self-esteem, and purpose. Being privy to secret knowledge brings membership in a select, superior circle. The circle may share an intent to bring down the deep state, the pharmaceutical industry, or a cabal of global elites.

The harder you push a conspiracy theorist, the more their defenses go up. What’s to do? Forget about logic. Tell them your stories and listen to theirs. Acknowledge their feelings. To offer connection and respect has value in itself, whether or not anyone changes their mind.

Image: Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash.

You have only to look around you to see that humans fall into two biological groups: tall and short. They probably diverged early in the evolution of Homo sapiens in response to local conditions. Descendants of Mexicans and East Asians are generally shorter than the U.S. average. Still shorter are African Pygmies and the Jarawa of the Andaman Islands of India. Isolated for millennia, Pygmies and Jarawa most resemble our primate ancestors, whose fossil remains are much shorter than we are. Globally, the ancestral kin of the tall are still concentrated in east central Africa (Dinka, Maasai, Tutsi) and northwestern Europe (Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians).

Sure, we see lots of people of intermediate height. This is only natural, as tall and short people interbred in their migrations around the world. More of us are genetically mixed than pure. Though traits like hair type, skin color, and intelligence vary within each group, height stands out at first glance. While it’s evident that tall people have evolved well beyond their shorter distant cousins, there’s debate on how best to avoid heightism to give short people a chance.

Stuff and nonsense? Of course (except the presence of bias). But so are arguments for the existence of biological race. There are far more differences within each modern “race” than differences between races. Race exists, yes, but as a social construct and not a biological fact. Within the wide range of human variation, it’s we the people who decide which variations count.

Image: Brazil, March 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Rodrigo Pacheco. Photo by Ricardo Stuckert.

In a neighborly, largely homophobic, largely white Christian nationalist small town in Georgia, well-meaning citizens make the school library remove books they fear might harm their children. Lula Dean stocks a Little Library in her front yard with wholesome used classics, such as The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette. An enterprising teen swaps out the innocuous titles for books banned from the school, switching the dust jackets so no one will notice. Then the fun begins.

In case you haven’t discovered Little Free Libraries yet, they are book-sharing boxes posted near a walkway on public or private property. The boxes are always open, with anyone invited to “take a book, share a book.” Inspired in part by similar collections in coffee shops, in 2009 Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his book-loving mother. Others followed suit. By the end of 2012, there were more than four thousand Little Free Libraries in the English-speaking world.

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books (by Kirsten Miller, 1924) brings humor and hope to a wide range of serious issues. As teens and adults encounter content more eye-opening than they expected from the covers, docile wives find their voices. A devout Christian dabbles in witchcraft. Families confront old secrets. The book kept me chortling from start to finish with deft touches of parody and whimsy. There’s nothing like a good laugh for resilience in troubled times.

​Images: Photos by Madalyn Cox (left) and Nils Huenerfuerst (right, cropped) on Unsplash.

The first known written language was that of ancient Sumer, in the lower Tigris and Euphrates basin of what is now Iraq. Sumerian cuneiform writing, pressed with a stylus into wet clay, dates from as early as the fourth century BCE. Later Akkadians, who adopted the technique, spoke a Semitic language. Surviving bilingual clay tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian allow scholars to partially decode the more mysterious Sumerian tongue.

Who cares? Present-day nationalists of many stripes. Unsolved mysteries leave room for a mythical past, linking ethnic pride to roots in deep antiquity. Certain nationalist circles in Turkey and Azerbaijan point to similar words in Sumerian and Turkish, suggesting common descent from Turkic peoples of the Asian steppe. Some Hungarian Neo-Pagans, too, claim Sumerian/Turkic kinship and sing Sumerian prayers. For Tamil separatists in southern India, grammatical and phonetic parallels between their pre-Sanskrit tongue and Sumerian—along with a Sumerian allusion to dark skin—indicates the ancestors of both groups had migrated from Africa.

Linguists and historians care too, of course. Most people would find their work obscure. Scholarship doesn’t pack the popular punch of claims barely constrained by evidence. After all, who wouldn’t want to be related to the earliest known writers on Earth?

Image: Detail of Sumerian warriors from the Standard of Ur, found in a royal tomb.