It’s time for rollerblades!

It’s my granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, so yesterday we spent 7 hours traveling all across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and boy are my knees sore. We’ve got a party to go to tomorrow.

In more interesting news, David Gorski tears into RFK jr with his teeth — it’s transparently clear that RFK jr is rabidly anti-vax and the he’s definitely coming for all of your vaccines, since he’s now denying that they have any efficacy at all.

Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.

Yes, things are grim out there.

Fortunately, my granddaughter has responsible parents who have kept her vaccination status up to date, which is why I get to go hang out with her and watch her open presents and celebrate her 7th birthday. It’s absolutely insane that we have a director of health and human services who is committed to killing young children with disease, while our Secretary of War favors more direct execution of children. This really is the death cult coming into fruition in our federal government.

Reminder: we have a podcast this afternoon!

A few months ago, I was invited to present a series of events at FISM — often referred to as the Olympics of Magic. It’s a gathering of over 2,500 magicians from around the world, featuring days of intense magic competitions alongside workshops, lectures, and performances. This year, the event was organised by my friend Walter Rolfo, who kindly asked me to deliver a lecture, interview several well-known performers — including quick-change artist Arturo Brachetti, Luis de Matos, Mac King, and Steven Frayne — and also stage my show Experimental.

It was an incredible week. Magic is a small, strange, and tightly-knit community, and it was a joy to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in years. One highlight was a great workshop on acting and magic by actor Steve Valentine. Steve and I first crossed paths back in 1983 when we were both competing in The Magic Circle’s Young Magician of the Year. Neither of us won; that honour (quite rightly) went to Richard Cadell—now a regular performer alongside Sooty and Sweep.

My show Experimental is somewhat unusual because there’s no performer. Instead, the audience takes part in a series of illusions and psychological experiments by following prompts on a large screen at the front of the room. Each show is different and shaped entirely by the people in the room. I sit quietly at the back, guiding the experience by choosing the order of the material.

The idea for Experimental came to me years ago, as I was thinking about why magicians perform. It struck me that if a performer genuinely wants to entertain their audience, their words and actions tend to come from a place of generosity. As I like to say, their feet will be pointing in the right direction and so any steps that they take will tend to be positive. But if they come on stage purely to feed their own ego, the audience take second place and the show usually suffers. Removing the performer entirely forced me to design an experience that prioritises the audience from start to finish.

After each performance at FISM, we held a Q&A with the audience. Time and again, I was reminded of something the legendary illusionist David Berglas once told me. One night we were flipping through an old photo album when we came across a picture of him, aged about eight, putting on some kind of show. I asked if it was his first performance. He paused and said, “No. That wasn’t a performance—that was me showing off.”

Curious, I asked him what the difference was. His answer has always stuck in my mind: “Performing is for the good of the audience. Showing off is for the good of the performer.”

I have always thought that there was an interesting life lesson there for everyone, and it was nice to spend many a happy hour chatting about the idea at the amazing and unique event that is FISM.  

Jordan Peterson has been hospitalized with pneumonia and sepsis, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The psychologist, author, and bottomless fountain of tears is currently hospitalized and suffering from pneumonia and sepsis, as well as a spate of neurological issues that have apparently left him unable to regulate his emotions.

His daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, took to X to give the world an update on her father’s health, describing his recovery as “slow and scary”, and admitting “we’re not entirely sure what’s going on”.

The stated cause of Peterson’s ongoing neurological and physical deterioration is SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrome) caused by mold exposure. This is apparently the result of decades of living with mold, though it was recently exacerbated by exposure to an especially moldy environment.

Mold can be sneaky and dangerous, but he’s been a godawful mess for years — when he sprang on the scene, he was already deranged, and he’s only gotten worse. The stint in Russia in an induced coma probably didn’t help either.

Here’s hoping he recovers, but that someone realizes he is mentally unhealthy and should be spending the rest of his life quietly resting at home slurping his soup and shaking his fist at the TV.

His daughter thinks demons are involved, but this is a case where an undigested bit of beef might play a bigger role.

I hadn’t listened to this report on his history yet. Yeesh. He is and always been deeply racist — we’re talking cartoonish levels of racism. Just a repulsive shithouse pit of ugly ideas. Why is it that his appointment wasn’t a deal-breaker for Trump? How is he still allowed to whisper in Trump’s ear? Why hasn’t the Mainstream Media jumped on how problematic one of the president’s most important advisors is?

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last week, English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 91, and so while sad, this news offers me a unique opportunity: to make a second video …

We have a podcast scheduled for Saturday at 4pm Central. We’re bloggers, so maybe you’re not familiar with what we look like, so here’s a portrait.

You’ll never guess which one is me.

The topic: in preparation for Halloween, we’ll be discussing what it is about scary stuff that we like. We’re partly inspired by this Ologies podcast on “What’s Creepy”, which is better than anything we can do, but we’ll try.

Changing My Mind (Notting Hill Editions) by Julian Barnes

Shortly after the last US election – of whose outcome I had felt so certain, and had been so wrong – came a moment of personal crisis. I had thought the obvious next step of progress would be backward, away from the brink of chaos. Instead, it seemed the opposite was happening, that we were edging closer to existential oblivion: fire, flood, mass oppression, economic ruin, the dissolution of public structures, nuclear war.

There seemed to be a global consensus that change was needed – the haves and have-nots both yearning for a different life, sometimes aligning their principles, sometimes not. I had felt certain that it was through my personal tenets – a commitment to democracy, liberal values and fundamental rights – that the better life was to be had for all. Yet it seemed that the majority of voters in the US, and in many other countries around the world, held beliefs to the contrary that may have been just as strong.

Then came a second, even more destabilising thought: what if, under the auspices of our current, dissatisfying, trickle-down meritocracy, things did actually get better? What if, under President Trump, we did not inexorably slide into a more dreadful world, but a better one? What if the values I held as elemental were actually, in some way that I could not divine, preventing the society I envisioned from coming to fruition? What if I was wrong about everything? Was I prepared to change my mind?

Julian Barnes’ new essay, Changing My Mind, tackles this dilemma in a short intellectual memoir. He examines his own changing mind through the themes of memory (he decides it’s not like a lost-luggage department, but a feat of imagination), language (it’s not a set of rules, but a loose framework for being understood) and politics (he’s not become more left-wing, he tells us, but the centre has moved to the right). These more abstract discussions are followed by a chapter on books, detailing a positive about-turn on Belgian writer of detective novels Georges Simenon (“I do now believe he should have won the Nobel Prize”); and – from a writer who will be turning 80 in January of next year – a reflection on time and ageing, in which Barnes concedes that adults, “whatever those are”, never have known and never will know what they’re doing.

In all cases, these shifted opinions involve a great deal of rethinking, rereading, reconsidering. Barnes’s mind never changes in a vacuum, but is aided by his willingness to return again and again to matters that displease him. He is as eloquent and self-questioning as ever in the dissection of his ideological journey. His internal struggle reveals a moderate liberal certain only of eternal oblivion after death, and the benefits of sport and literature.

Changing My Mind reminds us that humility, like a muscle, atrophies without use. For the moment, with the state of global affairs being what they are – no less existentially perilous than before November 2024 – rethinking my own ideology doesn’t seem necessary. But then, changing one’s mind rarely does. Political turmoil and evolution aren’t quite on a par with most instances of mental reassessment: the fact that I once detested olives, and now love them, for example, even if the process at work is the same. Despite the inevitability of being wrong, it’s customary to employ a kind of mental gymnastics to re-reason our already held beliefs to suit the circumstances: I didn’t hate olives, I was just eating the wrong kind! We preserve our self-respect through such contortions.

And so, changing one’s mind is almost always a private event, done in secret, with the lights out, and half taken up with finding reasons and excuses to convince ourselves that deep down we’ve really always been aligned with this new idea. “What if I’m wrong?” is not a thought one can keep up all day; it would send anyone to the loony bin. But, as Barnes has the courage to show in his latest book, it must be tested regularly, and kept accessible enough to be employed at the ready, lest we find ourselves inexplicably, but undeniably, mistaken.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War (Seven Stories) by Artem Chapeye

The Accidental Soldier: Dispatches from Quite Near the Front Line (Hodder & Stoughton) by Owain Mulligan

As Artem Chapeye well understands, the title of his book is wholly inaccurate. Ordinary people absolutely do carry machine guns: indeed, ordinary people carrying machine guns is pretty much the story of modern warfare. It is safe to assume that Owain Mulligan would concur with this view, just as Chapeye would recognise the concept of the accidental soldier: he is one himself.

These are two very different war memoirs, which nevertheless have a great deal in common. Chapeye is a prominent Ukrainian author and journalist who joined the Ukrainian army in the days immediately following Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country in February 2022. Mulligan is a British schoolteacher and Territorial Army reservist who does a stint as a troop commander in Basra, Iraq in 2006. Chapeye is serious, ruminative and serving in an existential war for his country’s survival. Mulligan is self-deprecating, funny – a genuinely gifted comic writer – and participating in a misbegotten occupation.

But neither man dons his country’s uniform out of any great martial ardour. For Chapeye, who had previously thought himself a left-wing pacifist, his new vocation descends in a moment of clarity. On 22 February 2022, as Russian forces pour over Ukraine’s borders, he flees Kyiv with his wife and children. Within 48 hours, he decides that he has greater responsibilities elsewhere. He initially feels uncomfortable at the thought that Ukraine will be defended by the people he has spent his career writing about – the poor, the rural, the less educated – while folk like himself, people with options, wait the war out elsewhere. Then the instinct becomes more primal: a question of what a man is, and what kind of man he is. “If I run away now,” he tells his nine-year-old son, “later I won’t be able to look you in the eye, or myself in the mirror when I shave.”

I have not seen Chapeye’s war up close, but I was in Basra about a year before Mulligan, as a journalist embedded with a Welsh Guards company stationed at a disused regional airport. By the time Mulligan deploys, things had gotten a great deal worse. The closest I came to combat in Basra was being woken by gunfire exchanged between two local tribes, the Geramsha and the Halaf, Basra’s answer to the Hatfields and the McCoys. The company commander explained to me that “The Scots Guards went up there once and asked them to put a sock in it, which worked for a bit. Now, we just take the view that as long as nothing comes over the fence, it isn’t really our problem.”

Plenty does come over the fence during Mulligan’s tour. He has a narrow escape from a mortar barrage, while outside the perimeters there are mines, militants and – at least as hazardous – the kind of mishap that can occur anywhere, but which can have much more serious consequences in a warzone. One of the best-told sequences in The Accidental Soldier is one of the least amusing, as Mulligan leads his troop’s vehicles on an ill-advised shortcut into a minefield, and then has to reverse them, slowly and sweatily. “No one wants to go so much as an inch onto the verge, so it’s like playing a hideous game of Land Rover Tetris.”

Crucially, there is little cruelty to Mulligan’s humour, even when he vents exasperation at the ineptitude and corruption of Iraq’s own police and military (of an inspection of one police outpost, he writes, “It’s the usual story. Half the workforce are at their cousin’s funeral in Baghdad, the keys to the evidence locker are with Mahmoud, who’s visiting the outermost ice-water rings of Saturn, and the station itself would make the Marie Celeste look lively”). His attitude to Iraq’s bewildered and brutalised people is altogether sympathetic, his jokes much more often on himself. The Accidental Soldier is a worthy heir to Spike Milligan’s memoirs of the Second World War, or George MacDonald Fraser’s “McAuslan” series – the Flashman author’s lightly fictionalised account of his post-Second World War service with the Gordon Highlanders in the Middle East.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns has perhaps more in common with Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here – his account of his time in Burma during the Second World War – or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, even if Orwell was fighting to save someone else’s country rather than his own. Chapeye – who as of this writing is still in the army – is an acute and astute observer of his fellow citizens in uniform, and not the first to discover that, counter-intuitively, soldiers at war can be the most unabashedly tender and compassionate of people. “Initially,” he writes, “with an impression of war based on anti-war books, I was scared that people would quickly turn feral ... I haven’t seen this at all. In my opinion, soldiers are becoming, I don’t know, somehow gentler or something.”

Though both these authors have displayed considerable physical courage in going to wars they could have avoided, both are at pains to communicate that they do not see themselves, or wish to be seen by others, as remotely heroic. Like most soldiers in most conflicts, they did – or are doing – their best in circumstances all at once wretched and elevated. Chapeye speaks for every ordinary person who has carried a machine gun – or a rifle, a sword, or a spear. “You’re a small part of something greater ... you feel that greatness, as well as the desire at every single moment for all this ‘greatness’ to come to an end right now.”

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I’ve been covering and correcting misinformation for several decades now, and in that time I’ve definitely had to deal with false statements from high level politicians. I’ve also had to deal with faked media, whether through Photoshop or video editing or “AI.” I have never, ever seen something as ludicrous as what happened this weekend …

Abortion: A History (Hurst Publishers) by Mary Fissell

There is a common perception that abortion in pre-modern times was dangerous, difficult and illegal. Yet, as the American academic Mary Fissell argues in this timely volume, the story of abortion is neither simple nor linear, with both attitudes and levels of repression varying considerably over the centuries. Take the Catholic Church, for example. In the 15th century, it viewed early termination as a relatively minor sin. Attitudes hardened during the Reformation, and in 1588 Pope Sixtus V ordered anyone who had or provided an abortion to be excommunicated. But this policy was partially overturned by his successor. Only in 1869 did the Catholic Church adopt its current stance that abortion is never justified.

Concern about the rights of the unborn child is another recent development; historically, the rights of men were acknowledged to be the real priority. Roman wives who had abortions were condemned for denying their husbands heirs, and centuries later, enslaved women were accused of deliberately depriving their owners of labour and profit. Opposition was also fuelled by a desire to make women behave, with 19th-century anti-abortion campaigners fretting that feminism would encourage middle-class wives to restrict their families, leading to an America populated by “the ignorant, the low lived, and the alien”.

Yet even the strictest restrictions have not eradicated abortion. For more than two millennia, women have used effective, though potentially lethal, herbs such as penny-royal. Early modern women read about reproductive health in respectable publications such as The Ladies Dispensatory (1651), and Victorian newspapers printed discreet adverts for medicines such as “Dr Bond’s Spanish Female Monthly Pills”, which promised “immediate removal of obstructions”. Such knowledge, along with the ministrations of skilled practitioners, allowed unknowable numbers of women to terminate unwanted or unviable pregnancies.

But Fissell is careful not to romanticise pre-modern female solidarity and skill, instead foregrounding the distressing experiences of real women – including an ancient Greek sex slave made to jump until a tiny fragment fell from her vagina; a 17th-century emigrant whose married lover forced a foul-smelling pill down her throat; and an early 20th-century US teenager raped by her own father, who was denied an abortion because her life was not at risk.

In the US, matters came to a head in the mid-20th century, when moral panic made both providers and their patients fair targets for the police. Though some brave medics continued to perform abortions, Fissell describes how many women resorted to backstreet practitioners such as Beatrice J., a Baltimore housewife whose only training was the two procedures she had successfully performed on herself. Consequently, in 1950s New York, over 40 per cent of pregnancy-related deaths resulted from abortion.

By the mid-60s, public opinion was shifting, and in 1973 the Supreme Court’s verdict in Roe vs Wade legalised abortion nationwide. For several decades, it seemed that the battle for reproductive freedom had been won. But since 2022, when the Dobbs ruling overturned this landmark judgement, many states have banned or restricted access to abortion – and the subject has become increasingly politically charged in many other countries, including the UK.

History, Fissell argues, offers hope: attitudes to abortion have changed in the past, and they will surely change again. In the meantime, Abortion: A History offers not just an engaging and thoroughly researched study of a much-contested medical procedure, but a powerful case for the importance of safe, effective and legal abortion.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I know things are pretty depressing right now in the United States, so I’m going to open today’s video with some good news: Jimmy Kimmel is back! His show was taken off the air …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: About 3,000 news cycles ago, by which I mean about two weeks ago, a video hit social media, showing a college student at Texas A&M challenging her professor. (Plays video) When I first saw …

The oft-repeated observation that the Labour Party owes “more to Methodism than Marxism” annoys Neil Kinnock, who served as the party’s leader for much of the 1980s and now sits in the House of Lords. “Harold Wilson used it as a way of reassuring the general public that we hadn’t come directly from the work of Soviets, that we were in the British mainstream, and so on,” he says. “And I don’t blame him for doing that at all … But it is a very lazy understanding of where the British Labour Party came from, and crucially the fact that we’ve never been afflicted by religious sectarianism. In the Labour movement we’ve had Marxists and Christian Socialists and liberals and a lot of humanists, right from the beginning.”

Kinnock’s frustration with this historical oversimplification is a perfect starting point for our conversation, which coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Trades Union Congress Conference that led to the formation of today’s Labour Party. And it’s music to my ears. For too long, the story of the Labour movement’s organisational, intellectual and ethical origins has over-emphasised the religious contribution, sidelining a powerful and persistent current of secular, rationalist and humanist thought. And today, when religious propagandists are increasingly putting out the idea that everything in our culture – from democracy to justice to freedom itself – has a Christian origin, that narrative matters.

Of course, Christian and humanist elements often combine, and Kinnock’s own life illustrates this. Growing up in a working-class south Wales community, the chapel was a part of life. “I did quite enjoy going to Sunday school,” he says, recalling a time around the age of 15 when he was “probably more religiously inclined than at any other time in my whole life”, inspired by a “terrific young Methodist minister and his lovely wife, both of whom were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and fully paid-up Christian Socialists”.

But it was precisely at this moment of potential conversion that his rationalism kicked in. “It was at that time, I thought: wait a minute, what the hell is all this about? And can I really accept … the foundations of faith … And I realised, of course, that simply wasn’t possible for me.” His own family, while embodying values of “honesty, care for others, hard work”, was largely secular. His father wasn’t religious. “He dismissed the whole notion, though not in any strident way.” And his mother, though Christian, hardly ever went to chapel. His uncles, all staunch trade unionists and socialists, “totally dismissed any idea of religion or conformity to religious requirements”.

A movement with many tributaries

This personal history reflects the overlooked secular stream in the Labour Party’s story. The early movement was a confluence of many tributaries: the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the Fabian socialists, and the humanist ethical societies. The party drew inspiration from the Welsh political philosopher and reformer Robert Owen and the socialist communities he founded, as well as from the rationalist presses that provided cheap, enlightening literature to a newly literate working class. This was, as Kinnock puts it, a “generous open house on the left”, and its greatest strength was its determinedly “anti-sectarian” character. He recalls with admiration the trade unionists in Northern Ireland who, “in the dark times” of the Troubles, refused to segregate their branches by religion. “They were very gutsy people,” he says, and their principled stand helped preserve the movement’s integrity. This openness prevented the religious divisions that afflicted other European socialist movements and allowed Labour to build a broad coalition based on a shared commitment to improving the human condition in the here and now.

The glib “Methodism not Marxism” line obscures this richer and more complex reality. Of course there were tactical reasons, historically, to peddle this line – and not just in the Cold War. The pages of this magazine played host in the early 20th century to more than one unsuccessful Labour general election candidate writing that they felt the charge against them of “atheism” had been decisive. Kinnock himself acknowledges attending the party conference Sunday service during his time as leader, “in order to reassure people that Christians were welcome in the Labour Party … to show neighbourliness, comradeship, reassurance”.

But there is another reason for this public amnesia: the influence of humanism in the movement has seldom been explicit. The humanist current is best understood not as an abstract philosophy, but through the lives of individual Labour humanists who embodied it. When you survey them, you find they were often those who drove the party’s most transformative achievements.

Take the late Roy Jenkins, whom Kinnock describes as having “a very strong ethical vein, a definite moral compass … both a child of and a prophet of enlightenment”. While Jenkins’s later career took him away from Labour, his period as home secretary in the 1960s was a high-water mark for humanist-inspired reform. He oversaw or secured the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship, the liberalisation of divorce law, and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons. This was a revolution in personal freedom, dismantling a legal framework built on religious dogma and replacing it with one based on compassion, reason and individual autonomy. Jenkins’s contribution, Kinnock reflects, was to understand that a “tide in the affairs of men” was flowing. The “seismic change in national sentiment” wrought by two world wars, the rise of the welfare state, and a growing public appetite for reform created a moment “ripe for change”. But, he adds crucially, “without people like Jenkins … the change wouldn’t have come … not maybe as early as the 1960s without the commitment and courage.”

Labour's humanist giants

This courage was prefigured by an earlier generation. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, was a humanist and president of the Ethical Union (as Humanists UK then was). And then there was Clement Attlee, the quiet architect of the 1945 government. Kinnock delights in recalling Attlee’s famous sentiment, written in a letter to his devout brother, that he didn’t mind the ethics of Christianity but couldn’t “stand the mumbo jumbo”. It was, he laughs, “such a down-to-earth dismissal of this gigantic edifice of religion”. Attlee’s humanism was expressed not in speeches but in deeds: the creation of the NHS, the establishment of the welfare state, the beginning of decolonisation. His socialism was a practical creed for improving human life, rooted in his experiences as a social worker in London’s East End, not in any scripture.

Attlee’s minister for health, the man who brought the NHS into existence, was the Welsh orator Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – another humanist. He was, in Kinnock’s analysis, part of a generation of “socialist rationalists” whose political convictions were forged in the crucible of post-war disillusionment with old certainties. “The slaughter and stupidity of [the First World War],” he explains, “devastated a generation’s belief in religious engagement.” For Bevan’s generation in the Welsh valleys, which saw congregations collapse in the face of such senseless violence, political action through the Labour movement replaced chapel-going as the primary vehicle for community and social change. His vision for the NHS was a profoundly humanist one: that healthcare should be a universal right, available to all based on need, not wealth. It was a declaration of the intrinsic value of every human life.

Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, was a humanist and a political force in her own right. As Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, she fought to establish The Open University – a project derided by her opponents but one that perfectly encapsulated the humanist belief in the transformative power of education and the importance of lifelong learning for all. And then there was Michael Foot, Bevan’s successor in Ebbw Vale and a future Labour leader. Kinnock, who knew him well, describes Foot’s humanism as deeply intellectual, rooted in a scholarly understanding of “political and social free thinking in Britain from the Revolutionary War”. He was, Kinnock says, “intellectually as well as spiritually totally against religion, but not in any draconian way. He was ‘live and let live’.” It was a liberal tolerance so complete that Kinnock could joke, “Some of his best friends were
Christians.”

This same practical, compassionate and secular outlook was shared by so many others, including the former first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan, who had the first government-sponsored humanist funeral in the UK, and who it turns out was Kinnock’s flatmate in the 1960s. When I asked Morgan, years ago and in a rather chippy manner, what he planned to do about religious influence in Welsh schools, he told me he would simply “let it wither on the vine”. I asked Kinnock why so many Labour politicians, even the keen humanists, have been rather diffident secularists in practice (although they have often achieved significant changes without fanfare). His response was that it’s pragmatism – trusting in social progress rather than confrontation to solve the structural problem of religious privilege. Wales, he points out, is now the least religious nation in the UK. A testament, perhaps, to the quiet success of that approach?

The next generation

This brings us to the future. If the great humanist and socialist achievements of the past were rooted in the living memory of war on the home front, genocide in Europe, mass unemployment and extreme poverty, how do we sustain them now that memory is fading? How do we inspire new generations to extend those freedoms?

Kinnock believes the answer lies in education and civic engagement. He doesn’t lament the loss of chapels as such, but he does believe one “casualty” is the experience of democratic participation that they and the trade unions gave to people. The Nonconformist chapels in particular, he says, “gave people a real rehearsal in representation, organisation, conducting meetings, chairmanship … having honest [financial] accounts and all the things that maybe would have taken much longer to develop if they had initially been political … That made a hell of a contribution.” He worries that this training ground for democracy has vanished. “Where would people get that now?” he asks. He sees today’s young people as having “all the right instincts about sharing and caring and endurance and responsibility”, but feels they have “not got a clue how to organise.” His advice is characteristically direct: “You find somebody who agrees with you, and one of you becomes chair, and the other one becomes secretary. And you get on with it.”

His proposed solution is a robust and properly resourced citizenship education, a cause championed by another great humanist about whom we reminisce: Bernard Crick. Such education, Kinnock argues, is essential for fostering a “discerning society”. He is furious at the austerity-driven scrapping of initiatives intended to foster greater citizenship and engagement, such as projects designed to teach inner-city children to organise politically for change, and the downgrading of the citizenship curriculum in English schools. “It was such stupidity and counter to any kind of economic sense or productiveness or efficiency,” he says, arguing that sustained citizenship education would have “saved a hell of a lot of money” by creating a more engaged and resilient populace. A proper civic education, woven throughout the curriculum, would give citizens a “sense of agency”, countering the powerlessness and apathy that plague our politics.

What about the political and economic challenges facing a future Labour government? Kinnock speaks with deep concern about the “capture of the government by the Treasury” with its “small ‘c’ conservative… conformity”. He worries this mindset will stifle the change the country needs. “I regret to say that our highly intelligent ministers, and they’re all wonderful people, in the Treasury … have accepted the Treasury nostrums,” he says. His solution is radical: split the Treasury into a department of finance focused on fiscal discipline, and a department for economic development and progress, free to think about investment and growth.

Unmoored from history

This leads him to the great, unresolved issue of our time: Brexit. After leaving frontline politics in Westminster, Kinnock served in the European Commission for a decade, including as vice president. Now, he sees Brexit as the primary obstacle to the nation’s prosperity and influence. The great nightmare, he believes, is being trapped in anaemic growth outside the single market, with the one policy that could genuinely lift the economy remaining a political taboo.

His defence of the European project is passionate and rooted in that same historical consciousness he urges on others. He laments how the recent VE Day commemorations, for all their importance, failed to celebrate the “extraordinary miracle” that followed: the creation of institutions that made war between European neighbours impossible. “They did it with Nato, and they did it with the European Union,” he states with force. “In the part of Europe that is in the European Union … War is unthinkable. Unfightable. And that’s great.” I ask if he thinks Britain will ever rejoin. His reply is a mixture of realism and hope. “Not in my lifetime. I’m 83 … but in my children’s lifetime, hopefully and definitely in my grandchildren’s lifetime.”

Ultimately, Kinnock’s humanist message is one of historical consciousness as a spur to future action. He is alarmed by the sense that “we are unmoored in our times from so much of what has occurred before, to give us the conditions in which we live.” The antidote is not the backward-looking nostalgia of the populists (“they’re a bloody waste of time”) but a clear-eyed understanding of how our freedoms were won. “We are the products, not just of the present time, but of the past … and our self-interest and our duty is to be helping to construct the future,” he says. His final call is for a sustained political and cultural effort to help people be “confidently aware of why they’ve got what they’ve got, and how it could be improved, and then improve it, by being good citizens, discerning citizens making rational judgments.”

That, in essence, is the humanist project. It is the thread that connects the rationalist pioneers of the 19th century to Attlee’s welfare state, from Jenkins’s liberalising reforms to the ongoing struggle for a more just, compassionate and reasonable world. As the Labour Party looks to its future, it should remember and reclaim this vital part of its heritage. The conscience of the party has always been, and must continue to be, profoundly humanist, in the most inclusive meaning of the phrase.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Way back before I was living under an actual authoritarian theocracy, I enjoyed making videos about, well, relatively inconsequential bullshit. For those who are new here, I do what I do today because when I was a kid I was a magician and a juggler, and a fan of Penn & Teller. They introduced me …

At 8:15am on the morning of 6 August 1945, 600 metres up and a few metres north of what is now a 7-Eleven convenience store in central Hiroshima, the world changed forever. In the sky a piece of uranium-235 was slammed into another disc of the same element in the barrel of the bomb its designers had christened “Little Boy”. Reaching criticality, it emitted a silent flash and heated the air around it to over 4,000 degrees centigrade in less than half a second. Around 60,000 people were killed instantly, vaporised by the heat. Those further away were thrown to the ground and trapped under their homes as they burned. There had been no warning.

“Every time I walk through the Peace Memorial Park I remember the faces of Hibakusha I have met and their stories,” says Yuna Okajima, a human rights activist and guide who is tasked with preserving the memory of both the victims and survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Hibakusha, or bomb-affected people, is the label given to survivors of this and the second US atomic bombing in Nagasaki a few days later. As the number of atomic bomb survivors dwindles 80 years on from the twin attacks, their descendants have begun to assume the responsibility of showing the horrors of nuclear warfare.

We need to listen to their voices. The Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists after the Hiroshima bomb dropped is later than it has ever been: now at 89 seconds to midnight. The time is meant to symbolise how close we are to “destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making”.

In recent years, the threat of nuclear conflict has resurfaced, non-proliferation movements are faltering, and climate change and technological acceleration have created ever more complex dangers. Russia is threatening to use its nuclear capabilities on the battlefield, rogue states like North Korea are armed, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme is in the spotlight after the US-Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Britain stands alongside many other developed countries in committing to new nuclear power stations to meet energy demand and decrease the use of fossil fuels. Nowhere is this nuclear complexity clearer than in Japan, where the memory of nuclear war and the danger of civil nuclear disaster sit firmly in the public consciousness.

Powerful weapons

Okajima and I are sitting on the roof terrace of a high-rise hotel next to the Peace Memorial Park, about as near to the actual point of detonation of the A-bomb as it is possible to get. At the moment the bomb went critical, anything and anyone located under the hypocentre would have been instantly vaporised. At 8.16am, Okajima’s great-grandfather was a few hundred metres away, on a horse on his way to Hiroshima Castle on the north side of town where the local air raid command was located. He was one of the first victims of the new age of the atom. “For me personally, ever since I learned that my great-grandfather died because of the atomic bomb and that my grandparents are survivors, I have felt that the atomic bomb is something deeply connected to me,” she says.

The bomb announced to Japan and the world that the US had the ability to sweep whole cities off the map, far from its home shores, with a single aircraft. After the initial shock of sudden mass death on a scale never seen before, the death rate continued to rise in the days, weeks and months after, as more and more people succumbed to radiation poisoning and burns without understanding why. There have been many more victims of radiation exposure since 1945, including Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist who helped build the Hiroshima bomb and constructed the world’s first functioning reactor at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project.

Fermi died from stomach cancer nine years after Hiroshima, likely from radiation exposure during his experiments. He lived just long enough to see the US embark on a project that President Eisenhower christened “Atoms for Peace”. Allies around the world were encouraged to build nuclear power stations with American technology, showing that US nuclear development was a force for good, powering the post-war economic booms. Japan was one of the biggest buyers, and at its peak had 54 operable nuclear reactors. Anxiety about nuclear conflict was glossed over with technological utopianism about the limitless energy of the atom.

Mayu Seto is an anti-nuclear weapons campaigner in Hiroshima with Peace Culture Village – an NGO that helps people perpetuate the memory of the nuclear attack through education and peace dialogue. Her grandparents were in Nagasaki when the second bomb hit. She is one of many campaigners and descendants of survivors who fear that rising global tensions are leading us once more to the brink of nuclear attack. “Look what a single bomb was capable of doing 80 years ago. Now there are even more powerful weapons,” she says. “We imagine something like that could not happen again, but the risk of repeating [a nuclear attack] is high.” Activists have begun to talk about Gurobaru Hibakusha – global Hibakusha – extending not just to victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to all victims of nuclear testing, accidents and contamination.

Nuclear meltdown

These include the victims of civil nuclear disaster. Sixty-five years, seven months, 233 days and six hours after uranium met uranium in the barrel of the Hiroshima bomb, something emerged from the Pacific depths that would re-awaken Japan’s nuclear anxieties. On 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake – the fourth most powerful quake ever recorded – struck off the coast of Fukushima prefecture. Peaking at nine on the Richter scale, the shockwaves created a tsunami that raced toward the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located a few hours north of Tokyo.

At the plant, earthquake sensors triggered an automatic shutdown of the three active nuclear reactors. But even with fission stopped, the reactor was still at operating temperature. Less than an hour after the shutdown, the plant was hit by the first of several tsunami waves, the largest of which was 15 metres. It began a chain of events that resulted in a meltdown, followed by a non-nuclear hydrogen explosion that ripped through the reactor halls, sending plumes of radioactive particles across the countryside and out to sea.

I meet Miyuki Ishii in her hometown of Futaba, near the power station. She was at home when the power plant failed, getting ready to see her grandchildren. “Through the glass I saw buses and people wearing protective [hazmat] suits. I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine it would be a hydrogen explosion or anything like that,” she tells me. We’re having tea at one of the government-sponsored retail spaces that have recently opened in the town, now habitable again after a decade-long restoration operation, involving the demolition of buildings, deep cleaning and topsoil removal.

Whole villages had vanished under the wave that day, while the rescue operation was hampered by the radiation danger. Ishii tells me how her daughter-in-law, a teacher at a primary school on the coast north of the power plant, sprinted a whole kilometre with her class to higher ground, saving their lives. Like thousands of others, Ishii became an internal refugee, moving from place to place as the scale of the contamination became clear. She left Futaba with her mother and sister, but both died of age-related natural causes before they could return. Now she lives in a new house by the rebuilt railway station and town square. “I feel like I’m carrying their feelings and wishes,” she says.

The 20km exclusion zone declared after the disaster has slowly shrunk as the cleanup has progressed. The towns around the old power station are now habitable again, with doses as low as 0.1 microsievert per hour, around the same as background radiation worldwide. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the plant itself, is responsible for cleaning up and decommissioning the reactors. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has poured billions into cleanup and revitalisation efforts, repopulating the area and developing a renewables industry.

The energy challenge

Japan is one of the world’s most energy intensive economies and its huge electricity demand is a big challenge. The loss of the six reactors at Daiichi and the decision to shut down the nearby Fukushima Daiini station (daiichi and daiini are Japanese for one and two) meant that the Tokyo megalopolis had to rely on coal power to keep its trains moving and air conditioning units running. After the disaster, Tokyo suffered rolling blackouts. Japan’s renewables progress is far behind other developed economies, but Fukushima prefecture is now a lab for low-carbon technologies. Abandoned rice paddies have been repurposed as solar farms, and on the ridge behind Fukushima Daiichi, the biggest wind farm in the country has just come online.

In Namie, another of the towns most affected by the evacuation and radioactive contamination, Takatoshi Shiga proudly shows off a recently constructed hydrogen plant that uses solar panels to create zero-carbon hydrogen for use in fuel cells. He is younger than most of the returnees. “The image of Fukushima remains that of the tsunami and the nuclear accident. That hasn’t really changed. But now, as we undertake renewable energy projects, we want the world to see this region in a new light,” he says.

Despite these efforts in solar and wind, today Japan has the lowest renewables share of any of the G7 countries – around 20 per cent, made up largely of hydro schemes. Responding to increasing energy demands, and the need to move away from fossil fuels, the Japanese government announced plans early this year to reopen and extend the lives of nuclear reactors in other areas of the country. Prior to the Fukushima disaster Japan had 54 operable reactors, all of which were taken offline after the disaster for safety checks. By 2025, 14 had been restarted and the Tokyo government has now also committed to building new generation reactors starting from the 2030s. Public opposition has been high, but Japan is the world’s second biggest importer of fossil fuel, and it is keen to change this to combat climate change and reduce reliance on Chinese and Russian sources of energy.

Tomoko Kobayashi is one of the many residents of the Fukushima coast who believe it is important to keep the memory of the disaster alive. In 2016, she reopened a traditional Japanese inn in the town of Odaka, on the northern edge of the former exclusion zone – one of the first tourist sites in the area. Guests are often in town to take guided tours of the Daiichi and its damaged reactor buildings. As you walk into the inn, one of the first things you notice is a Geiger counter strapped to the wall by the door.

“I feel that continuing to observe and learn from this experience is important to me personally,” Kobayashi tells me. “Ideally, I think we don’t need nuclear power. So I’d prefer we find ways not to rely on electricity so much, or pursue other energy options, but that hasn’t really happened [across Japan].” Other residents of Odaka took the compensation packages offered by TEPCO and built lives elsewhere. But Kobayashi, like many elderly returnees, wanted to reclaim her hometown from the disaster and spend her final years there. The corridors of the inn are adorned with pictures of what in Japan has come to be known as the “Triple Disaster” of the earthquake, tsunami and meltdown, as well as posters from Ukraine showing solidarity with victims of the Chernobyl disaster and – more recently – the Russian invasion. Kobayashi herself has made several trips to the site on the Ukraine-Belarus border where a Soviet designed reactor experienced a meltdown in 1986.

Two kinds of threat

Meanwhile, the cleanup in Japan is not over. One of the major challenges is contamination of the coastal farmland. Millions of bags of contaminated earth were collected and buried around the plant. After 30 years they will be dug up and moved again, but the destination is unknown as Japan still has no long-term storage solution for highly radioactive waste. It is one of the reasons some in Japan, like Kobayashi, are against any new nuclear power plants being built at all. Yet, as climate change continues to knock at the door, exacerbating Japan’s vulnerability to climate shocks and natural disaster, the risks of nuclear accidents are – in the eyes of many – still outweighed by the benefits of carbon-free energy.

Eishige Konno has experienced both challenges. He returned home to his farm a few miles from the plant when the soil was declared safe again in 2017. But now he faces another problem, around heatwaves and drought. “We had ‘dead rice’, you know, white centred grains and that kind of thing,” he says, describing how the unusual heat dries out the interior of the rice whilst it is still in the ground, causing it to crack. “It’s something you feel in your skin,” he says. “It doesn’t snow at all anymore … And maybe it’s because of what they call global warming.”

It’s a difficult task, to compare these two kinds of threat. The scientists working on the Manhattan Project had feared there was a small possibility that nuclear fission could ignite the atmosphere. It never came to pass, but climate scientists have calculated that the amount of energy being trapped in the world’s oceans due to global heating is equivalent to the heat produced by five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs going off, per second, over the past three decades. As the world barrels towards two degrees of global warming the urgency of ending our addiction to coal and oil grows ever stronger.

Futaba once had a sign in the main street saying “Nuclear Energy for a Bright Future”. It was removed by the local mayor after the disaster – he could not bear to see it. The sign now resides in a museum. Before entering the Fukushima Daiichi plant to see the damaged reactor buildings, visitors encounter a very different message: a mea culpa by its operators. “Our confidence was in fact arrogance,” reads the text. Persuading the public that nuclear energy can be safe, and that recovery is possible, is key to the sector’s offer to slash carbon. The utopian refrain of nuclear power for a bright future has been replaced by the new realism of nuclear power for a liveable one. But nobody is under any illusions about how easy it will be to convince the Japanese public, given the nation’s history.

Any moment of supreme human suffering deserves to be commemorated and remembered, but only afterwards do we see them for what they are. Hiroshima and Fukushima are very different tragedies, yet they can both tell us about our common future. Both offer lessons in how to recover without forgetting, of how to renew without obscuring the enormity of what has happened. As we confront the spectre of climate change, and the transformation of our world by our own hands, that is perhaps the most important message to carry with us.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I am going to perform a new show at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival called ‘The World’s Most Boring Card Trick.’

The show has its roots in the notion that creativity often comes from doing the opposite to everyone else. Almost every Festival performer strives to create an interesting show, and so I have put together a genuinely dull offering. Because of this, I am urging people not to attend and telling anyone who does turn up that they can leave at any point. Everyone who displays extraordinary willpower and stays until the end receives a rare certificate of completion.  Do you have what it takes to endure the show and earn your certificate?  

I have identified the seven steps that are central to almost every card trick and devised the most boring version of each stage. Along the way, we explore the psychology of boredom, examine why it is such a most powerful emotion, and discover how our need for constant stimulation is destroying the world.

It will seem like the longest show on the Fringe and success is an empty auditorium. There will only be one performance of the show (20^th August, 15.25 in the Voodoo Rooms). If you want to put your willpower to the test and experience a highly unusual show, please come along!

As ever with my Fringe shows, it’s part of PBH’s wonderful Free Fringe, and so seats are allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. I look forward to seeing you there and us facing boredom together.

Around 2010, psychologists started to think about how some of their findings might be the result of several problems with their methods, such as not publishing experiments with chance results, failing to report all of their data, carrying out multiple analyses, and so on.

To help minimise these problems, in 2013 it was proposed that researchers submit their plans for an experiment to a journal before they collected any data. This became known as a Registered Report and it’s a good idea.

At the time, most psychologists didn’t realise that parapsychology was ahead of the curve. In the mid 1970s, two parapsychologists (Martin Johnson and Sybo Schouten from the University of Utrecht) were concerned about the same issues, and ran the same type of scheme for over 15 years in the European Journal of Parapsychology!

I recently teamed up with Professors Caroline Watt and Diana Kornbrot to examine the impact of this early scheme. We discovered that around 28% of unregistered papers in the European Journal of Parapsychology reported positive effects compared to just 8% of registered papers – quite a difference! You can read the full paper here.

On Tuesday I spoke about this work at a University of Hertfordshire conference on Open Research (thanks to Han Newman for the photo). Congratulations to my colleagues (Mike Page, George Georgiou, and Shazia Akhtar) for organising such a great event.

As part of the talk, I wanted to show a photograph of Martin Johnson, but struggled to find one. After several emails to parapsychologists across the world, my colleague Eberhard Bauer (University of Freiburg) found a great photograph of Martin from a meeting of the Parapsychological Association in 1968!

It was nice to finally give Martin the credit he deserves and to put a face to the name. For those of you who are into parapsychology, please let me know if you can identify any of the other faces in the photo!

Oh, and we have also recently written an article about how parapsychology was ahead of mainstream psychology in other areas (including eyewitness testimony) in The Psychologist here.

I am a big fan of magic history and a few years ago I started to investigate the life and work of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello.

Harry enjoyed an amazing career during the early nineteen hundreds. He staged pioneering seaside shows in Edinburgh’s Portobello and even built a theatre on the promenade (the building survives and now houses a great amusement arcade). Harry then toured Britain with an act called The Silver Hat, which involved him producing a seemingly endless stream of objects from an empty top hat.

The act relied on a novel principle that has since been used by lots of famous magicians. I recently arranged for one of Harry’s old Silver Hat posters to be restored and it looks stunning.

The Porty Light Box is a wonderful art space based in Portobello. Housed in a classic British telephone box, it hosts exhibitions and even lights up at night to illuminate the images. Last week I gave a talk on Harry at Portobello Library and The Porty Light Box staged a special exhibition based around the Silver Hat poster.

Here are some images of the poster the Porty Light Box. Enjoy! The project was a fun way of getting magic history out there and hopefully it will encourage others to create similar events in their own local communities.

My thanks to Peter Lane for the lovely Marvello image and poster, Stephen Wheatley from Porty Light Box for designing and creating the installation, Portobello Library for inviting me to speak and Mark Noble for being a great custodian of Marvello’s old theatre and hotel (he has done wonderful work restoring an historic part of The Tower).

I have recently carried out some detective work into one of my favourite paranormal studies.

It all began with an article that I co-wrote for The Psychologist about how research into the paranormal is sometimes ahead of psychology. In the article, we describe a groundbreaking study into eyewitness testimony that was conducted in the late 1880s by a paranormal researcher and magician named S. J. Davey (1887).

This work involved inviting people to fake séances and then asking them to describe their experience. Davey showed that these accounts were often riddled with errors and so couldn’t be trusted. Modern-day researchers still cite this pioneering work (e.g., Tompkins, 2019) and it was the springboard for my own studies in the area (Wiseman et al., 1999, 2003).

Three years after conducting his study, Davey died from typhoid fever aged just 27. Despite the pioneering and influential nature of Davey’s work, surprisingly little is known about his tragically short life or appearance. I thought that that was a shame and so decided to find out more about Davey.

I started by searching several academic and magic databases but discovered nothing. However, Censuses from 1871 and 1881 proved more informative. His full name was Samuel John Davey, he was born in Bayswater in 1864, and his father was called Samuel Davey. His father published two books, one of which is a huge reference text for autograph collectors that runs to over 400 pages.

I managed to get hold of a copy and discovered that it contained an In Memoriam account of Samuel John Davey’s personality, interests, and life. Perhaps most important of all, it also had a wonderful woodcut of the man himself along with his signature.

I also discovered that Davey was buried in St John the Evangelist in Shirley. I contacted the church, and they kindly send me a photograph of his grave.

Researchers always stand on the shoulders of previous generations and I think it’s important that we celebrate those who conducted this work. Over one hundred years ago, Davey carried out a pioneering study that still inspires modern-day psychologists. Unfortunately, he had become lost to time. Now, we know more information about him and can finally put a face to the name.

I have written up the entire episode, with lots more information, in the latest volume of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If anyone has more details about Davey then please feel free to contact me!

My thanks to Caroline Watt, David Britland, Wendy Wall and Anne Goulden for their assistance.

References

Davey, S. J. (1887). The possibilities of malobservation, &c., from a practical point of view. JSPR, 36(3), 8-44.

Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The spectacle of illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. Thames & Hudson.

Wiseman, R., Jeffreys, C., Smith, M. & Nyman, A. (1999). The psychology of the seance, from experiment to drama. Skeptical Inquirer, 23(2), 30-32.

Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the seance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297.

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]