Introduction1 Get Quick Context: It Can Take as Little as Thirty SecondsSeriously! The Three Contexts Do I Know What Im Looking At? Introducing SIFT Stop! (Or, How to Fail at Source-Checking Even If Youre the New YorkTimes) Investigate the Source Find Better Coverage Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context Takeaways2 Cheap Signals: Or, How Not to Get Duped Easily Fakeable Questions Gameable Signals of Credibility First Impressions Matter . . . Except When They Dont URLs Matter . . . Except When They Dont What about Dot-Coms? Going Deeper: The Org of Dot-Org Is Big Business Nonprofit Status: Nearly Anything Goes Numbers That Bamboozle Links That Lead Astray Takeaways3 Google: The Bestie You Thought You Knew Interpreting and Mining Search Results Why Seeing on the Internet Isnt Believing Decoding Googles Knowledge Panel Different Sources, Different Purposes Going Deeper: What Arsonist Birds Teach Us about Different Sources When Featured Snippets Get It Wrong Going Deeper: Googles Three Vertical Dots Are a Great Hack forLateral Reading Keywords and Inferred Intent: How to Think like Your Search Engine Keywords: The Underlying Architecture of Search Inferred Intent: Providing Google with a Tell Google Is a Mirror Reflecting Back What You Give It A Search Engine, Not a Truth Engine Takeaways4 Lateral Reading: Using the Web to Read the Web Get off the Page! Lateral Reading: Checking Information like a Fact-Checker Why Lateral Reading Works Little Shift, Big Payoff Lateral Reading Puts You in Control Avoid Promiscuous Clicking: Practice Click Restraint The Vibe of the Search Engine Results Page Takeaways5 Reading the Room: Benefiting from Expertise When You Have Only a BitYourself Why You Cant Just Do the Math Reading the Room: Quick Assessment of a Range of Expert Views Going Deeper: Why We Call This Reading the Room Trust Compression, or How to Avoid Info-Cynicism Reading the Room on the Mask Issue The Perils of the Single Academic Contrarian Going Deeper: What Makes a Good Summary Source? Takeaways6 Show Me the Evidence: Why Scholarly Sources Are Better than PromotionalMaterials, Newsletters, and Random Tweets Whats Peer Review? Peer Review: The Worst Way to Judge Research, Except for All theOthers The Problem of the Single Study Literature Reviews: A Birds-Eye View of Multiple Studies Going Deeper: Journals That Prey on Unsuspecting Victims Real History, Fake History: How to Tell the Difference Using Google Scholar to Find Scholarly Sources The Vibe of Google Scholars Results Page Using Google Scholar as a Quick Reputation Check Takeaways7 Wikipedia: Not What Your Middle School Teacher Told You What about the Mistakes? Going Deeper: Wikipedia to Britannica: He That Is without Sin . . . Anyone Can Change Wikipedia, Cant They? Isnt Wikipedia Biased? Wikipedia as a Tool for Research Using Wikipedia to Validate Sources Going Deeper: Quickly Validating a Reference from a Book Using Wikipedia for Quick Checks of Unfamiliar Websites Quick Investigation of a Claim Quick Checks of an Unfamiliar Academic Source Using Wikipedia to Read the Scholarly Room Using Wikipedia to Jump-Start Your Research Going Deeper: Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of a BibliographicalReference The Messiness of Making Knowledge Takeaways8 Video Games: The Dirty Tricks of Deceptive Video False Context Exploiting Seeing Is Believing Going Deeper: Online News Is Often More Credible Than You Think Falsely Implied Date Connect My Dots, or Creating a False Sense of Research Deceptively Cropped Video Takeaways9 Stealth Advertising: When Ads Masquerade as News The Problem: Stealth Advertising Works A Con Is Born Newspapers Become Ad Agencies The Problem in Three Words: Conflict of Interest Disappearing Warning Labels Sponsored Propaganda Half Truths Are Not Whole Truths When Stealth Ads Move to Social Media Going Deeper: How Stealth Ads Lose Their Warning Labels Protecting Yourself in an Age of Slimy Advertising Takeaways10 Once More with Feeling: Using Your Emotions to Find the Truth Emotion Doesnt Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About Going Deeper: Man versus Machine Compellingness Tells Us Whats Important to Check Surprise Is a Sign Our Assumptions Might Be Wrong Why Compellingness and Surprise Beat the Checklist Going Deeper: Mutant Flowers Feeling Overwhelmed? Rethink Your Approach Takeaways11 Conclusion: Critical IgnoringPostscript: Large Language Models, ChatGPT, and the Future of VerificationAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex