Since 2015, there has been a boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is fiat. More and more people believe that we live on a pancake-shaped planet capped by a solid dome and ringed by an impossible wall of ice. In Off the Edge, journalist Kelly Weill draws a direct line from today's conspiratorial moment, brimming with Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. We learn the natural impulses behind these beliefs: when faced with a complicated world out of our control, humans have always sought patterns to explain the seemingly inexplicable. But something else has shifted. Powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms, the Flat Earth movement is growing. At once a definitive history of the movement and an essential look at its unbelievable present, Off the Edge introduces us to a cast of larger-than-life characters, like the historical figures who first popularized the theory and the many modern-day Flat Earthers Weill herself gets to know. We discover what, and who, converts people to Flat Earth belief, and what happens inside the rabbit hole. In this incisive and powerful book, Kelly Weill explores how we arrived at this polarized moment and explains what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe.
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