MPJ

Thrillers. Books that are perfect for the summertime. Even though they were not exclusively tied to the beach, in my case, of all occasions, somehow sand and Kindle went along hand in hand the best. Every time. As with the default definition, thriller stories and novels engage all your senses and trigger the right level of entertainment and all kinds of emotions during those couple of days of intense reading. Also, they always successfully keep away your thoughts from your job, your daily issues, and raw reality from your mind. In the previous couple of years (mostly summers), my stock of thrillers piled up significantly, so I decided to create a recommendation and small glimpse into stories of five different styles of writing, and with that, many main characters stored in the similar background of political or fictitious conspiracies. And all that in the familiar form of classic 'villains vs. heroes' storytelling, with the hero winning the girl every time. Cliché, I know, but ...

Let me start this story with the remarkable opening of Michael D. Gordin's book named "The Pseudoscience Wars". The full quote is this: "No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist. There is no person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself - I’ll just head into my pseudolaboratory and perform some pseudoexperiments to try to confirm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts". And this is the ultimate truth—there is no pseudoscience. It's not the real thing. You can, with more or less enthusiasm, add the adjective "pseudo" to anything you like and get yourself the bad or opposite meaning of the original word. But in the world we are currently living in and with, for example, TV shows like "Ancient Aliens" being vastly more popular than attending lectures or reading published scientific papers by professional archaeologists and historians, pseudo combined with science are now recognized words in al...