NYT Magazine Rehashes Younger Dryas Claims, Continues Graham Hancock Fixation

I am currently knee-deep in revising and editing my manuscript for my publisher and on deadline for a forthcoming piece for a major media outlet, so I don't have the time to break down today's New York Times Magazine piece about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis point-for-point. I will just observe that it is another entry in the Times' ongoing fascination with all things Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse a year and a half after the show aired. I am not sure why the Times is still rehashing Ancient Apocalypse speculation, or spending so many words to say that the show's claims have no value but they want to hope they could be true anyway. I do recommend that you read the full piece, but the conclusion is sadly quite correct: People want to believe things that are just a bit beyond true to experience the frisson of transgressive excitement, and when these claims are repeated often enough, they become a maker of group identity, frequently in opposition to a perceived oppressive mainstream that has ill-served them:

In a recent paper, two psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Spencer Mermelstein and Tamsin German, have argued that pseudoscientific beliefs, which range from the relatively harmless (astrology, dowsing) to the deeply malignant (eugenics, Holocaust denial), tend to find cultural success when they hit a sweet spot of strangeness: too outlandish, and the epistemological immune system will reject it; too banal, and no one passes it on. [...] The [Younger Dryas Comet Impact] hypothesis has already penetrated deeply, and perhaps indelibly, into the public imagination, seemingly on its way to becoming less a matter of truth than a matter of personal and group identity. Nobody I spoke with seemed to think it would go away soon, if ever.