False Times

by Anna Merlan

Anna Merlan has been the senior reporter at Jezebel for the last several years, consistently producing some of their most widely-read and buzzed-about work. She’s also been researching, reporting, and thinking deeply on conspiracy theories for years – their import, their varied manifestations, and their roots and their roles in American life. Conspiracy theories have long been a force in American life. But now we have– remarkably — an American President who is a devoted conspiracy theorist, a spreader and benefactor of conspiracies, and deeply entwined with the previously somewhat marginalized conspiracy culture and its main figures.

There are profound international elements included as well, whether those have to do with the roles that conspiracies play in citizen’s lives in autocratic or opaque regimes throughout the world, or with figures like England’s David Icke and his popular and durable beliefs that “reptilian humanoids” are controlling the planet. Conspiracies have shifted in form and content, and recent events should have reminded us all of the seriousness with which they should be treated. With FALSE TIMES, she will deliver a narrative blend of analysis, history, and investigation of the worlds of conspiracy theorists, and will bring vividly alive for readers the followers and the leaders of the anti-Vaccine movement, Sovereign Citizens, those who deny the reality of Sandy Hook, Holocaust deniers, Flat-Earthers, those who await alien visits, and more.

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Anna Merlan is a New Mexico-born, New York-based journalist, specializing in politics, crime, religion, subcultures, conspiracy theories, and women’s lives. She is currently a reporter at the Special Projects Desk, an investigative division within Gizmodo Media Group. She has previously worked as a senior reporter at Jezebel, and as a staff writer at the Village Voice and the Dallas Observer. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, BBC Travel, Topic, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. She has been accused of being both a lizard person and a CIA agent, but never at the same time.