Introduction 1 Get Quick Context: It Can Take as Little as Thirty Seconds--Seriously! The Three Contexts "Do I Know What I''m Looking At?" Introducing SIFT Stop! (Or, How to Fail at Source-Checking Even If You''re the New York Times ) Investigate the Source Find Better Coverage Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context Takeaways 2 Cheap Signals: Or, How Not to Get Duped Easily Fakeable Questions Gameable Signals of Credibility First Impressions Matter . Except When They Don''t URLs Matter . Except When They Don''t 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 Takeaways 3 Google: The Bestie You Thought You Knew Interpreting and Mining Search Results Why Seeing on the Internet Isn''t Believing Decoding Google''s Knowledge Panel Different Sources, Different Purposes Going Deeper: What Arsonist Birds Teach Us about Different Sources When Featured Snippets Get It Wrong Going Deeper: Google''s Three Vertical Dots Are a Great Hack for Lateral 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" Takeaways 4 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 Takeaways 5 Reading the Room: Benefiting from Expertise When You Have Only a Bit Yourself Why You Can''t "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? Takeaways 6 Show Me the Evidence: Why Scholarly Sources Are Better than Promotional Materials, Newsletters, and Random Tweets What''s Peer Review? Peer Review: "The Worst Way to Judge Research, Except for All the Others" The Problem of the Single Study Literature Reviews: A Bird''s-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 Scholar''s Results Page Using Google Scholar as a Quick Reputation Check Takeaways 7 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, Can''t They? Isn''t 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 Bibliographical Reference The Messiness of Making Knowledge Takeaways 8 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 Takeaways 9 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 Takeaways 10 Once More with Feeling: Using Your Emotions to Find the Truth Emotion Doesn''t Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About Going Deeper: Man versus Machine "Compellingness" Tells Us What''s 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 Takeaways 11 Conclusion: Critical Ignoring Postscript: Large Language Models, ChatGPT, and the Future of Verification Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index.