As the digital revolution dawned a few decades ago, commentators peddled optimism about its potential to expand humanity’s collective knowledge. Needless to say, that optimism has hit a few snags. The Internet has become a bazaar of information hawkers, where expertise is looked on with suspicion, traffic in hooey is high, and truth is harder and harder to discern.

As Jonathan Rauch puts it in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, consumers of online content feel “epistemic helplessness,” the “inability to know where to turn for truth”… (Read more)