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Most skeptics are familiar with modern psychics who pretend to read people’s minds and talk to dead people. In this review essay, Michelle Ainsworth discusses the many mind readers and fortune tellers between 1920 and 1940 who practiced their art of cold reading on the radio, fooling people then as they do today into believing that somehow the spirits were able to come through from the great beyond into radio stations.
Shermer, Sanford, and Novella try wheatgrass juice, with amusing results. PLUS: in a column from Skeptic magazine 26.2 (2021), Harriet Hall, M.D. recounts that Mark Twain was an enthusiastic proponent of “alternative medicine” long before the term was coined — and much of it remains the same as in his time.
![](https://www.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Mark-Twain-Alt-Med-illo-2x-510x432.jpg)
In this column from Skeptic magazine 26.2 (2021), Harriet Hall, M.D. recounts that Mark Twain was an enthusiastic proponent of “alternative medicine” long before the term was coined — and much of it remains the same as in his time.
![](https://www.skeptic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/alkaline-water-2x-510x510.jpg)
pH diets, alkaline water, urine pH tests, pseudoscience and bogus cancer cures abound. In this week’s eSkeptic, Harriet Hall, M.D. combats the plague of pH misinformation by distinguishing pHacts from pHiction.