This story by Alan Pyke about a predatory lending company caught my eye today: MoneyMutual will pay a $2.1 million settlement to New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) and stop doing business in the state following an investigation that found the loans its customers received violate state law. New York sets a 16 percent […]
Photo credit: Bruce F. Press Photography In an open letter on his website, he writes: At 86 years of age, I feel that it’s now well time to officially retire, so I’m stepping down from my position with the JREF –- the James Randi Educational Foundation. This doesn’t mean that I’m retiring from my battle […]
A profile of James Randi by Adam Higginbotham in the New York Times Magazine… Born Randall James Zwinge in 1928, Randi began performing as a teenager in the 1940s, touring with a carnival and working table to table in the nightclubs of his native Toronto. Billed as The Great Randall: Telepath, he had a mind-reading […]
In a Miami Herald profile, James Randi discusses how he helped Johnny Carson show up Uri Geller when the latter was booked on the show to do one of his mentalist tricks: Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, an amateur magician himself, called Randi for advice about an upcoming Geller appearance on the show. Geller had […]
Being a Woody Allen fan does not mean liking everything he does. The man makes a movie a year, and no one could keep up that pace and create a cinematic success every time. While his early movies like “Play It Again Sam” and “Sleeper” gave way to classics like “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” his output […]
“Lucy” may have won the box office this weekend, bringing in an estimated $44 million, but as with so much summer fare, that doesn’t mean it’s a good movie. The initial idea is a good one. Scarlett Johannson gets dragged into a scheme to smuggle a new drug from Taiwan to Europe. It’s a blue […]
Another member of the Florida psychic con artist family has been sentenced for fraud. Sharon Hill at Doubtful News has the details.
Ken Levine on the state of sitcoms, which seem to have forgotten the importance of funny. Nolan Dalla on getting conned by a fake rock star. Karen Stollznow on why a “psychic medium” knew so much about her.
A sample of stories you missed if you didn’t listen to my America Weekend show on Saturday and Sunday: Another “psychic” is found guilty of fraud and didn’t see it coming. Why Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” won’t be shown in movie theaters in India. Donald E. Miller Jr. is dead and not dead — at […]
Here’s an excellent piece from skeptic Mark Edward after he was contacted by a producer for National Geographic TV who wanted to do a piece on psychics. As Mark feared, the show was not going to reveal psychics to be frauds and con artists, but to present yet another pro-psychic piece of pablum that would […]