Here are a few interesting sources I've come across on the web that raise questions of authenticity, ethos, audience, etc. I haven't bothered to make them into assignments because my own class has a different focus, but I figured people might find them useful.

The first one is a pheromone cologne called Pherlure that claims to be the only university-tested product of its kind. It's designed to increase attention from the opposite sex (I think specifically females). If you google Pherlure you can easily find the product page, which includes a link to an abstract of a study supposedly done by the University of Chicago proving its claims. There's pretty good evidence that that site is itself fake, created by the manufacturers of Pherlure. You can see a summary of that evidence here: http://www.di-dehydroepiandrosterone.info/

A similar product called Liquid Trust Spray claims to contain oxytocin, a pheromone associated with bonding (and various other amazing things) in mammals. Its website, http://www.verolabs.com/, is an amazing piece of marketing, and the spray sounds pretty awesome. An endocrinologist friend of mine, however, assures me that it is physically impossible for oxytocin to exist outside the human body for more than a matter of seconds.

On a different note altogether, some of you who are more in tune with the whippersnappers than I am may be aware of a recent youtube phenomenon known as lonelygirl15. This is a series of videoblogs posted by a homeschooled teenager living in a religious commune of some sort about her struggle to reconcile her feelings for her boyfriend with her religion. Pretty standard teen drama stuff (except that she's a satanist). Anyway, this girl generated quite a following on the net before it was revealed that she's the fictional product of a Hollywood scriptwriter and played by an aspiring actress from New Zealand. The whole story is laid out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15.

Happy rhetorizing,
Brian