TY - BOOK AU - Weill,Kelly TI - Off the edge: flat Earthers, conspiracy culture, and why people will believe anything SN - 9781643750682 PY - 2022/// CY - Chapel Hill, North Carolina PB - Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill KW - Conspiracy theories KW - United States KW - Earth (Planet) KW - Figure KW - Philosophy N1 - Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-245); Prologue -- In the beginning -- The tyrant -- The joke -- The reboot -- The rabbit hole -- Alone in a flat world -- Mike -- Flat and Fascist -- Away from the edge N2 - "A history of the Flat Earth movement and a look at the recent boom in conspiratorial thinking in America"--; Since 2015 there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is flat. Weill draws a direct line from today's conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. When faced with a complicated world out of our control, humans have always sought patterns to explain the inexplicable. Powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms, the Flat Earth movement is growing. Meet historical figures who first popularized the theory, as well as the many modern-day Flat Earthers Weill herself got to know. She explores how we arrived at this moment of polarized realities-- and explains what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe. -- adapted from jacket ER -