Deciding What’s True

I recently published a story called The Box Is Protection, Not Prison, and the idea for it started with a simple question my friend asked a few months back:

How do you decide what’s true?

My first thought was to tell him we don’t get to decide what’s true. Reality isn’t up to us.

But then Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth the word of the year. Then fake news came to mean not just stories from websites that invented facts to prank or deceive, but also stories from biased publications, or...