A good Wikipedia Category: page is my happy place. And I just found one: journalistic hoaxes.

Some are serious and legendary: Stephen Glass, of The New Republic fame; Jayson Blair (New York Times); Janet Cooke (Washington Post). You’ve probably heard of these.

Some aren’t as legendary, like Ruth Shalit, another New Republic alum. And I’d never heard about Jonah Lehrer, or Tom Kummer, or Scott Thomas Beauchamp, yet another New Republic writer (seriously, what was going on at TNR back then? Good grief.)

While Glass et al were trying to pass off their hoaxes as legitimate journalism, a number of these others seem to have been intended as Yes Men-style social commentary. Like Paul Horner, whose fictitious articles may or may not have impacted the 2016 election, or Martin Eisenstadt, or Thatchergate, in which a British punk band faked a damning conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Still others are strange experiments: The Shed at Dulwich, Masal Bugduv.

The weirdest ones are openly unbelievable enough that whether or not they’re actually hoaxes, so much as absurdist satire, is debatable:

• The Global Warming Hoax of 1874. Apparently anthropogenic climate change has been a hoax for a lot longer than I realized, although in the late 1870s, it was caused by the transatlantic telegraph cable rather than fossil fuels.
• Old Man McGumbus, who sounds like a sketchier version of the Most Interesting Man in the World.
• Sweden’s sex competition. I don’t know. I could kind of see it…?

My favorite isn’t even really a hoax: The Order of the Occult Hand, “…a secret society of American journalists who slip the meaningless and telltale phrase ‘It was as if some occult hand had…’ in print as an inside joke.”

Let me know if you ever see one of these.