Dear Magicians,

I used to pride myself on reading the primary literature. Every claim, traced to source. Every headline, reverse-engineered to the underlying paper.

“Question Everything” was my motto.

I was the guy at dinner parties who’d say “well, actually, that study had an N of twelve.”

I don’t do that anymore. Not because I’ve gotten lazy — because I’ve gotten exhausted.

Basically It’s surrender. I didn’t stop caring and I didn’t lack access. I stopped because the metabolic cost of discernment exceeds what any single human can sustain. Every claim demands verification. Every verification surfaces three competing counter-claims. Each counter-claim has its own ecosystem of citations, podcasts, and Substacks. At some point your epistemic immune system doesn’t crash from a virus — it crashes from overwork. I got fact-check fatigue in my personal life. I still have to maintain it in my work life of course.

I see this in my students. The brightest ones are not naive. They’re resigned. They’ve internalized a rational heuristic: if parsing reality requires infinite energy, allocate zero; basic thermodynamics.

The people who benefit most from your confusion know this. They don’t need you to believe their version of events. They need you to believe that no version is useable other than theirs. “Everything is fake news” is itself a conspiracy theory, and it just happens to be the one that serves power most efficiently.

I don’t know the cure. But an antidote may be choosing specific domains where you refuse to surrender. One field. One question. One dataset you personally verify. Not everything — that’s impossible. But something. The act of maintaining even one calibrated belief is a form of resistance. Like me, it may be in your work. I picked cosmology. Thirty years of one dataset. One sky. One set of instruments I built with my students, collaborators and sometimes even my own hands. That’s my epistemic anchor. Everything else I hold loosely — but that one thing, I hold with everything I have.

What’s yours? Maybe it’s a trusted influencer you follow on Instagram or TikTok — yes there are good ones! Reply. I can’t respond to everyone, but I do read every reply – if only to check for facts!

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian