How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between

 Foster critically examines the relationship between social media and deception. He argues that platforms built on algorithms and advertising are structurally amoral and designed for manipulation. Although social media companies are frequently summoned to appear before Congress, Foster suggests that lawmakers fail to ask the right questions, thus allowing the same problems to persist.

To illustrate, he cites a Huffington Post headline (“Kellyanne Shreds Jim Acosta”), noting that “shred” is a “clickbait” term intended to provoke reactions rather than convey meaning. Social media prizes traffic and emotional immediacy, as the hostile tone of comment sections reflects. Foster explains that the system’s underlying mechanism (the “algorithm”) encourages users to engage impulsively while simultaneously gathering and selling their data. Advertising sales drive this process. He reminds readers that such outcomes occur because programmers intentionally instruct systems to treat user data in this way.

The author describes social media as unhealthy, focusing on its use of epidemiological terminology. The term “viral,” he explains, is deliberate: “[T]he language is that of epidemics […] the goal is for the item to infect as many people as possible” (264). Titles and thumbnails rely on superlatives and emotional triggers to maximize spread. Turning to The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, Foster notes that the most widely shared online story of 2016 (a false claim that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump) originated from a Romanian website, EFT News, which published numerous fabricated yet popular election stories.

Continuing the metaphor of contagion, Foster characterizes misinformation as a communicable infection that digital connectivity enables. He revisits the topic of Russian interference in the 2016 election, explaining that the operation aimed less to support one candidate and more to destabilize the US. The initial propagator of these efforts (“Patient Zero”) remains unidentified but was likely state sponsored. Social media, Foster writes, functioned as an “amplification system,” spreading falsehoods through a network of hackers, content creators, bots, and trolls. The author defines these terms, such as “bot,” “web spidering,” “botnet,” and “internet troll,” to clarify the mechanisms of digital manipulation. He notes that the full extent of Russian interference emerged only years later. American groups, he reminds readers, have also engaged in disinformation campaigns, from the “Pizzagate” conspiracy to Democratic attempts to mislead voters during the 2017 Alabama Senate election. Such tactics, he argues, reflect a longstanding political pattern in which each side seeks to discredit the other.

Foster declares that the proliferation of misinformation demands vigilance from readers. Critical consumers must “vet sources.” Though time-consuming, this work is essential for maintaining integrity in the digital age.

The author acknowledges that while people have a great capacity for good, some act with deceitful intent. Returning to his earlier analogy of poisoned pills, he examines forms of deliberate misinformation, focusing on hoaxes, forgeries, false data, and bad-faith reporting.

Foster starts with hoaxes, noting that deception in writing is as old as literature itself. Hoax writers, he explains, often imitate older works to borrow their authority, exploiting the perception that age equals credibility. He divides fraud into two main categories: forgeries, which are intended to mimic, and hoaxes, or lies presented as truth. Historical examples include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Education of Little Tree, in which Asa Carter, a former KKK leader, falsely posed as a Cherokee author under the name Forrest Carter.

Foster emphasizes that exposing such frauds can take years and argues that readers must develop habits of cautious evaluation. Turning to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, he recalls how the publisher rejected it as fiction, leading to it being mislabeled as a memoir. While readers cannot catch every falsehood, Foster argues that experts such as editors and publishers should serve as the first line of defense. Still, readers can protect themselves by asking simple questions, such as whether a story “sounds too good to be true” (283), and by withholding judgment until evidence supports a claim.

In addition, Foster examines the Washington Post’s retraction of Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a fictional child heroin addict, followed by Jayson Blair’s pattern of plagiarism and invention. Foster devotes special attention to Stephen Glass, who “published forty-one articles over a three-year period” and fabricated evidence in 27 of them (284). These cases, he argues, demonstrate how even established publications can fail when systems of verification break down.

The chapter then turns to false data, particularly in economics and medicine. Foster criticizes Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation for repeatedly advocating tax cuts despite overwhelming evidence against their effectiveness. As another case, he examines Andrew Wakefield, who published the false claim that vaccines cause autism, a fraud that continues to shape public mistrust of medicine decades later. Foster advises readers to “keep an open mind, not accept[] the initial pronouncement, wait for the professional response, [and] watch for anomalies and oddities in the data” that may reveal manipulation (291-92).

Expanding from individuals to institutions, Foster discusses the deliberate misinformation campaigns of big tobacco and big energy, referencing Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. These industries, he explains, “sowed confusion” to delay regulation and maintain profit, demonstrating how false data can shape policy and public health. To counteract such manipulation, Foster offers another checklist: Readers should verify authors’ credentials, identify funding sources, examine claims for logical coherence, and question whether conclusions align with credible evidence.

The author admits that he has “barely skimmed the surface of bad-faith writing” (299), but he asserts that his examples reveal how intentional deceit distorts the information landscape and undermines public trust. This results in wider consequences, like slowed social progression and unnecessary suffering. Such writers, he argues, “contaminate” the broader pursuit of truth and leave lasting damage.

Foster closes the book by reiterating that not every writer acts in good faith and that readers must therefore continue to practice defensive reading. Much of his discussion, he writes, has been “mechanical,” built around methods and checklists for critical literacy. Now, he turns from procedure to creativity, urging readers to approach nonfiction with imagination.

Through what Foster calls “imaginative reading,” the reader becomes a “cocreator of meaning” (301), actively participating in interpretation rather than passively absorbing information. He argues that readers never come to a text “empty”: They bring personal experience and perspective, which make “understanding richer” and “can help protect [them] against bad-faith writing” (301). By combining critical skill with imagination, readers bring their “whole self” to the page, strengthening both comprehension and discernment.