Psychic Profiteer

Newsweek has a depressingly hilarious profile on Laura Day, a self-proclaimed psychic who charges gullible executives $10,000 a month to steer their companies in the right direction. The article by Tony Dokoupil is light on reporting any hard facts about Day's services. She apparently warned a film executive to pass on an animated movie that tanked at the box office. Of course, we're not told who this executive was or the title of the movie. The rest of her success stories are equally vague and unimpressive. She told hardware manufacturer Seagate that their corporate departments weren't communicating effectively, and she advised a money manager to pull out of an investment before it went south. Of course, if a company is hiring a psychic to restructure its organization, there's a good chance the bosses in charge weren't running a very tight ship in the first place. The best part is near the end of the article, which quotes a survey on psychic belief from Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things. I guess the reporter was in too much of a hurry to mention that the rest of that book points out how people like Laura Day become successful at selling nothing. More details here.