It may not look like much, but this is a deadly hazard.

We tried clearing our driveway, but this stuff is wet, thick, and slushy, and it totally choked our snow blower. We could push forward maybe 2 meters before the snow blower froze up solid with ice and slush that it didn’t have enough power to push out. We ended up doing it old school, with snow shovels, but even that was impractical — the snow was so dense and sticky that it stuck to the snow shovel blade, and the shovel would just get heavier and heavier. We finally gave up, with the driveway incompletely clear, but it’s all we could do.

My wife was told last night to call the sheriff’s department in the morning, and make arrangements to have our car towed home, but unsurprisingly, we can’t get through. I suspect the town is dealing with real emergencies today, so I’m not going to push. We’ll get it back when we get it back.

Right now I’m sitting back with a hot cup of tea and watching my wife trying to scrape away a little more ice and snow. Get back in here, Mary, this is dangerous slop!

We got about 6 inches of snow last night, creating a winter wonderland out there. It’s not great. Mary was stuck at work last night, not getting home until after midnight…and then her car got stuck in the snow on the road, and the sheriff’s deputy had to shuttle her home. The car is still stuck out there. This morning we’re going to have to clear our driveway, and then call a tow truck to bring the car home. It’s all a big headache.

I also think we’re going to have to go shopping on Black Friday, which I’ve always avoided, but I don’t think Mary’s winter coat is quite adequate, and since all the predictions say this will be a snowy winter. That is, we’ll go shopping if our car is back and functional in the next day or two.

In happier news, today is Knut’s birthday, and he’s away in Korea learning Tae Kwon Do.

If only he were here, he’d have all the snow cleared in a flash.

The first big snowstorm of this winter has arrived, in time to give us a white Thanksgiving.

A few days ago, I was sent a link to an article titled, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. That tempted me to post on it, since it teased my opposition to AI and favoring of the humanities, with a counterintuitive plug for the virtues of poetry. I held off, though, because the article was badly written and something seemed off about it, and I didn’t want to try reading it more deeply.

My laziness was a good thing, because David Gerard read it with comprehension.

Today’s preprint paper has the best title ever: “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”. It’s from DexAI, who sell AI testing and compliance services. So this is a marketing blog post in PDF form.

It’s a pro-AI company doing a Bre’r Rabbit and trying to trick people into using an ineffective tactic to oppose AI.

Unfortunately, the paper has serious problems. Specifically, all the scientific process heavy lifting they should have got a human to do … they just used chatbots!

I mean, they don’t seem to have written the text of the paper with a chatbot, I’ll give ’em that. But they did do the actual procedure with chatbots:

We translated 1200 MLCommons harmful prompts into verse using a standardized meta-prompt.

They didn’t even write the poems. They got a bot to churn out bot poetry. Then they judged how well the poems jailbroke the chatbots … by using other chatbots to do the judging!

Open-weight judges were chosen to ensure replicability and external auditability.

That really obviously does neither of those things — because a chatbot is an opaque black box, and by design its output changes with random numbers! The researchers are pretending to be objective by using a machine, and the machine is a random nonsense generator.

They wrote a good headline, and then they faked the scientific process bit.

It did make me even more suspicious of AI.

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was first performed at the Residenztheater, Munich, in 1891. Despite its success, with productions soon running internationally and the published text becoming a major bestseller, not everyone was impressed with the four-act play. “[A] hideous nightmare of pessimism”, wrote the London weekly Pictorial World. “The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas.” While the Lord Chamberlain’s Office had declined to grant a licence for the public performance in Britain of Ibsen’s previous play, Ghosts (1881), they allowed Hedda Gabler to escape censorship on the grounds that it was “too absurd altogether to be injurious to public morals”.

What, then, was so absurd, so noxious to the authorities, and yet so popular with audiences? Well, the play features drunkenness, debauchery, death and destruction, but that was nothing new. What was new was the character of Hedda herself – a strong, morally ambiguous woman who contrives to be the master of her own fate.

Ibsen, aged 62 at the time of Hedda Gabler’s première, had already established himself as a pioneer of naturalism (a very deliberate, socially conscious kind of realism), and was well known for his concern with issues of social justice, and in particular for his strong female protagonists. At a time when the Women’s Movement was ascendant, and the old social order seemed to be giving way, the play struck a nerve, and has continued to do so ever since.

The story covers one day in the life of 29-year-old Hedda Tesman (née Gabler), a famously untameable beauty who has recently returned home after an extended honeymoon with her dull academic husband, George Tesman.

George, who is hoping to secure a professorship, has overextended himself in acquiring and furnishing their lavish home, in the hopes of pleasing the more sociable, and easily bored, Hedda. In doing so he has placed himself in the debt of family friend Judge Brack, who comes and goes as he pleases, usually through the back door, and who hopes for a closer relationship with Hedda.

The reappearance in the small town of Eilert Lövborg, Hedda’s former lover and a friend and professional rival to George, and the presence of a very Chekhovian pair of pistols, threatens to shatter the uneasy peace of the newlyweds’ new life.

Hedda’s complex psychology – she is both charming and spiteful, romantic and cold-hearted, totally in control and entirely unpredictable – has made her one of the archetypal hero-villains in world theatre, and a figure of women’s liberation. The image of Hedda with her pistols is almost as iconic as that of Hamlet with his skull. For this reason the play has long proved a fruitful vehicle for female leads and ripe for reimagining in new contexts.
It was the first of Ibsen’s plays to be filmed (by Nance O’Neil in 1917) and the title role has been played by such stars as Joan Greenwood, Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, with Ingrid Bergman giving a nicely icy performance in a very fine 1963 BBC television adaptation.

Now, Nia DaCosta, who is best-known for directing Candyman (2021) and The Marvels (2023), has made an adaptation very much geared towards modern sensibilities. The setting has been updated to an English country house in the early 1950s, and Hedda (played by Tessa Thompson) is now black (the “bastard child” of the formidable General Gabler, whose prized pistols are all that was left to his daughter). More daringly, the character of Eilert Lövborg (played superbly by Nina Voss) is now a woman named Eileen. Thus, race and sexuality are thrown into the mix, along with the pre-existing themes of freedom, confinement and the possibility or impossibility of personal fulfilment in a patriarchal society.

The film, unlike the original play, begins in aftermath. Hedda, looking a little the worse for wear, is questioned by two policemen as to the events of the night before – and, more pressingly, on the location of one of the pistols, which is apparently missing. So back we go, 24 hours, to find our heroine sashaying through her enormous house in a sumptuous dress, as staff prepare for an extravagant party to be thrown in honour of Hedda and her new husband, George (Tom Batemen).

As the guests arrive, we learn that both husband and wife are on tenterhooks: he because of the arrival of Professor Greenwood, who will ultimately decide on the matter of his own professorship, and she because of the possible arrival of her old flame Eileen, who has renounced her hard-drinking and self-destructive ways and written a much-praised book. She might even be a competitor for increasingly nervous George’s professorship. The unexpected arrival of Thea (Imogen Poots), Eileen’s lover and amanuensis, and a band of Hedda’s bohemian chums, complicates things further.

At first, the evening is a roaring success. Hedda is the life and soul of the party and manages even to get George’s buttoned-up colleagues onto the dance floor. Professor Greenwood is successfully charmed, and plied with many a cocktail. Altogether, DaCosta has introduced far more fun and games to the proceedings. Gone is the traditionally stifling atmosphere and dour confines of the bourgeois small-town living room (the play’s action ordinarily takes place largely in this one room). Here, everything is turned up to 11. There are cocktails galore, lines of cocaine, a swinging band, fireworks, a huge bonfire, skinny dipping in the lake, a maze to get lost in. Every darkened corner seems to be pulsating with couples in flagrante. The action races from room to beautiful room as the party gets more and more out of control. Guns are fired; punches thrown. Overall, the glitzy and hectic style seems to owe more to the 1920s Jazz Age (by way of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby) than to straitened post-war Britain.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, DaCosta explained her approach thus: “Wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie where I make all the subtext text?” In a play famed for its icy surface and unfathomable depths, this is quite the reversal. And it largely pays off. DaCosta tackles head on that era’s sexual politics: Hedda is the too intelligent housewife, of whom nothing but her beauty and her body are expected; Eileen is the patronised career woman, leered at or passed over at every turn.

In fact, Nina Voss’s brilliant but doomed Eileen is the real star of the show, with a number of showstopping scenes, next to which Tessa Thompson’s Hedda somewhat wilts. Chief among them is one in which Eileen, coerced into drinking by the spiteful and scheming Hedda, outlines the theme of her new book – the future of sex – to a room full of George’s male colleagues. At first titillated, then threatened, the men soon turn on her. It is wrenchingly toxic and tragic.

Overall, it’s a brash and ballsy adaptation, structured more like a whodunnit than a chamber piece. DaCosta has cited Robert Altman’s country-house murder mystery Gosford Park as inspiration. Stylistically, though, it has more in common with Bridgerton. This Hedda is not too concerned with historical or societal accuracy; it is certainly not naturalistic. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but at times it can feel stylised and celebratory to the point of vacuity. More damagingly, amidst all the noise, Hedda rather loses her potency and becomes a more straightforward victim, one whom (as the altered ending makes clear) we are meant to unequivocally root for.

Ibsen might have been proud of DaCosta’s determination to so plainly subvert the dominant narrative by re-centring the play around a black, queer, female protagonist. However, to echo those long-ago critics, this adaptation is also, in the end, somewhat absurd in its excitability and superficiality. And in its more obviously feel-good depiction of Hedda, the ambiguity central to her character is lost. DaCosta might have felt she was striking a blow for progress; but viewed from another angle, she is playing it pretty safe.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

I do post on Patreon. The latest can be read at no charge, and includes a video of a ravenous black widow. The Patreon revenue is what is keeping them in juicy, delicious worms!

Admit it – you're glued to your phone, like everybody else. Literacy is plummeting, and universities are under attack. Are we all getting dumber? Or is society transforming, discovering new ways to be smart?

The Winter 2025 edition of New Humanist is out now, and it's all about intelligence in the modern world. To dig into this topic, we've enlisted the brainpower of award-winning writer Naomi Alderman, renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum, law and tech pioneer Richard Susskind and many more thinkers and experts.

Keep reading for a peek inside!

How to stay smart in a changing world

Our "Voices" section brings together expert perspectives on the big question: How can we keep our minds sharp as the world changes around us?

Kate Devlin, professor of AI, argues that we can't leave all the decisions to the machines, author Ziyad Marar offers advice on keeping an open mind, neurobiologist Moheb Costandi digs into the science of what AI will do to our brains, Martha Nussbaum of Chicago University advocates for saving the humanities, and tech guru Richard Susskind says professionals need to get ahead of the AI revolution.

"We are going through tumultuous times and the need to be open-minded ... is more and more vital if we are to adapt well. False certainty is often the bread and butter of autocrats and dictators."

Tips for surviving the Third Information Crisis

Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, talks to us about her forthcoming book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis). She argues that – much like the invention of writing and the printing press – the rise of the internet has created new challenges for communication and understanding, which we are still struggling to navigate today.

"Those of us who deliberately spend hours of our day reading are going to be in a similar position to people who deliberately spend hours of their day lifting heavy weights, which is to say we’re just going to be able to do more with our brains."

Teaching when to trust

As fake news accelerates, we need to teach our children how to think critically. Writer Zion Lights explores the Finnish schools teaching students to spot fake news – and how the UK can catch up with them.

"The Finns are ahead of the curve in large part due to their proximity to Russia, a country known for its disinformation campaigns ... In response, Finland treats resistance to disinformation almost as a form of civil defence."

The Winter 2025 edition of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe or buy a copy today.

Also in the Winter 2025 edition:

• Katherine Stewart on the US anti-abortion activists turning their attention to Britain
• Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones on how fear-driven overregulation of AI could present its own kind of danger
• Marcus Chown on why we must fight Trump's cuts to black hole research
• Jamaima Afridi on how, without access to healthcare, the Taliban is leaving Afghan women to die
• Peter Salmon on why you can't keep blaming your choices on "unconscious" desires
• Christopher Dorrell asks why so many atheists are going on pilgrimage
• Journalist and author Sophie Gilbert on porn and pop culture
• Michael Rosen on the history and meaning of the word "condemn"
• Peter Ward explores the wild world of conspiracy theories about the internet
• Ralph Jones on the myth of the "genius"
• George Fallon finds out how glow-in-the-dark plants could help farmers fight the effects of climate change
• Shaparak Khorsandi in defence of gossip
• Samira Ahmed joins a glam-rock goodbye to Marc Bolan
• Christopher Shrimpton reviews a bold new take on Ibsen, featuring a black, queer Hedda
• Emma Park on art and architecture in our new Glass Age

Plus more fascinating features on the biggest topics shaping our world today, book reviews, original poetry, and our regular cryptic crossword and brainteaser.

Subscribe to the print edition now to get a beautiful copy of the magazine delivered to your door, or choose a digital subscription to read it on the app.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Look. I know that on this channel, I often criticize prominent people for actions that I find detestable: accepting dark money and failing to disclose it, producing propaganda for Big Oil, silencing critics with …

We have recently witnessed a spectacular cosmological event. Two black holes – both more massive than the Sun – have collided to make an even larger massive black hole, in a merger so big that it was, by our current models, theoretically impossible. The event has been observed by an array of gravitational wave detectors in the US, Europe and Japan. It is a perfect example of why we do science: in the hope that nature will surprise us. Donald Trump, however, is threatening to cut the funding of one of the two US detectors that contributed to the discovery, putting further breakthroughs at risk.

Gravitational waves are “ripples” in the fabric of space-time, caused by such violent and energetic events as two black holes spiralling together. They were predicted by Einstein in 1916, but were first directly observed from Earth on 14 September 2015. Think of them as cosmic sound waves. For all of history we have been able to see the Universe, with our eyes and latterly with our telescopes. Now we can hear it. Gravitational waves are the voice of space, and the loudest voices come from the mergers of black holes.

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. They form when a massive star explodes as a supernova. Paradoxically, it is the catastrophic implosion of the star’s core that drives the explosion. And it is in the super-dense conditions of that implosion that a black hole is born.

The gravitational waves picked up on 14 September 2015 were from two monster black holes that whirled around each other one last time, kissed, then coalesced – creating a tsunami of tortured space-time that spread outwards at the speed of light. Briefly the power in the waves was 50 times greater than the power emitted by all the stars in the Universe combined.

The gravitational waves from this event became ever more diluted as they spread through an ever-greater volume of space, until, after a 1.3-billion-year journey, they arrived on Earth. There they encountered gravitational wave detectors in Washington State and Louisiana. At each site, the passage of the wave caused a four-kilometre “ruler” made of laser light to periodically stretch and squeeze by one-billionth the diameter of an atom. No wonder the detection earned three Nobel prizes.

Now two more detectors have been added: in Italy and Japan. And it is this enhanced array that has detected the “impossibly” big black holes.

So why do – or did – we think that such black holes were impossible? If a star is too massive and goes supernova, the imploding core becomes so hot that it triggers a “pair-instability catastrophe”. Don’t worry about the details – the key thing is that the core blows itself to smithereens without leaving a black hole relic. According to theorists, there should be no black holes with masses from 60 to 130 times the mass of the Sun. However, the black holes in the recently witnessed merger are estimated to weigh in at 100 and 140 solar masses, challenging our understanding of black hole formation.

There’s a possibility that each of the black holes was formed by an earlier merger. But that would mean these mergers are more common than anyone thought. A more remote possibility is that the two black holes were spawned by some unknown “exotic” process in the inferno of the Big Bang fireball and therefore had survived from the first split-second of the Universe’s existence.

One thing is for sure: with gravitational waves now detected from about 300 black hole mergers, a new window has been opened up on the Universe. But this crucial source of astronomical knowledge is now under threat from the US administration’s mania for cuts.

Trump’s decision to slash the federal science budget is hitting hard in the US. There are worries that the cuts to LIGO – the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory – will result in the loss of the expertise of hundreds of researchers, built up over decades.

The weird thing is that someone in Trump’s government seems to realise that LIGO is important and should not be shut down entirely. They apparently think that shutting down one of the two detectors is making an efficiency. Perhaps they think it’s simply replicating work. But this makes little sense. The gravitational waves picked up by the detectors are so impossibly weak that someone riding past one of the sites on a bicycle would jiggle the giant laser rulers more than any cosmic event. With two identical detectors in the US, we can rule out such false alarms: If they both see the same signal, it is considered real. With only one detector, the results will be in doubt.

Elsewhere in the world of black holes, astronomers are answering fundamental questions about them. The black holes in question are not stellar-mass ones but “supermassive” ones. These weigh in at millions to tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun. There is one in the heart of essentially every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Supermassive black holes are one of the outstanding mysteries of our Universe. We do not know how they form. We do not even know the answer to the chicken-and-egg question: “Which came first: supermassive black holes or galaxies?” In other words, were supermassive black holes the “seeds” about which galaxies of stars later gathered? Or did galaxies come first and supermassive black holes form later, perhaps from the catastrophic shrinkage of a dense star cluster?

Enter Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, this 6.5-metre telescope with a mirror made out of 18 hexagonal gold segments, is hanging in space 1.5 million kilometres beyond the Earth on the extension of the line from our planet to the Sun. The JWST peers back to the dawn of time when the Universe was only about 5 per cent its current age of 13.82 billion years. It can do this because it “sees” infrared, which has a longer wavelength than visible light. The enormous expansion of the Universe since its earliest moments has stretched the visible light of its galaxies and stars, so it arrives at the JWST as infrared light.

This newborn universe is filled with so many baffling objects – underlining yet again why we do science – that the excellent Quanta Magazine last year described it poetically as “the beautiful confusion of the first billion years”. Among the objects are ultra-compact galaxies, dubbed Little Red Dots because of their distinctive colour.

The light from these – hundreds or thousands of times smaller than our Milky Way – reveals the existence of both stars and supermassive black holes. Usually, matter swirls down onto a supermassive black hole like water down a plug hole and friction in the gas heats it to millions of degrees. It is the prodigious light from such “accretion” disks that powers the most violent galaxies such as quasars. However, in the case of Little Red Dots, dense dust is cloaking the supermassive black hole, and the light from the accretion disk is being absorbed by the dust and re-radiated as red light, just as dust over a polluted city turns the Sun red.

Here is the point. In today’s Universe, supermassive black holes are 0.1 per cent of the mass of their parent galaxy’s stars. But the JWST finds that in the Little Red Dots the supermassive black holes are 1 per cent or even 10 per cent of the total mass. This is strong evidence that supermassive black holes came first. Then, as time went by and galaxies spawned ever more stars, the fraction of total mass they made up dwindled.

We still do not know the origin of the Universe’s supermassive black holes. But we now know it is probable that they seeded galaxies. In other words, you would not be reading these words were it not for a black hole.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Winter 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

First, a quick announcement – I will be presenting a special, one-off, performance of The World’s Most Boring Card Trick at the Edinburgh MagiFest this year. At a time when everyone is trying to get your attention, this unusual show is designed to be dull. Have you got what it takes to sit through the most tedious show ever and receive a certificate verifying your extraordinary willpower? You can leave anytime, and success is an empty auditorium.  I rarely perform this show, and so an excited and delighted to be presenting it at the festival. Details here.

Now for the story. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a magazine called World of Wonder (WoW). Each week it contained a great mix of history, science, geography and much more, and all the stories were illustrated with wonderful images. I was especially delighted when WoW ran a multi-part series on magicians, featuring some of the biggest names in the business. My favourite story by far was based around the great Danish-American illusionist Dante, and the huge, colourful, double page spread became etched into my mind.

A few years ago, I wrote to the owners of WoW, asking if they had the original artwork from the Dante article. They kindly replied, explaining that the piece had been lost in the mists of time. And that was that.

Then, in July I attended the huge magic convention in Italy called FISM. I was walking past one of the stalls that had magic stuff for sale, and noticed an old Dutch edition of WoW containing the Dante spread. I explained how the piece played a key role in my childhood, and was astonished when the seller reached under his table and pulled out the original artwork! Apparently, he had picked it up in a Parisian flea market many, many, years ago! The chances!

I snapped it up and it now has pride of place on my wall (special thanks to illusion builder Thomas Moore for helping to make it all happen!). My pal Chris Power made some enquirers and thinks that the art was drawn by Eustaquio Segrelles, but any additional information about the illustration is more than welcome.

So there you go – some real magic from a magic convention!

Last month, I talked about “cointelpro,” the secret US government plan to infiltrate leftist groups in order to discredit and disrupt them. I specifically brought it up in reference to the Trump administration’s recent open admission that the FBI and other intelligence services should focus their efforts on countering individuals and groups who display what …

We Are Still Here: An Anthology of Resilience, Grief, and Unshattered Hope from Gaza’s University Students (Daraja Press), edited by Zahid Pranjol & Jacob Norris

“Do you know what it’s like to live in a tent during Gaza’s summer?” Wissam Yousef is asking the world beyond Palestine’s scarred dunes. He is asking you. The world has yet to give a good enough answer. Instead, Wissam must answer himself:

Extreme heat. Limited water. Overflowing trash. Open sewage. Insects. Rodents. Stray dogs trying to enter the tent at night. Noise. Chaos. Drones buzzing overhead. Contagious diseases. Scabies. Meningitis.

Compiled from Gaza’s student writers and translators, We Are Still Here is an anthology, published during Gaza’s third ceasefire in two years, and while the West Bank is threatened with outright annexation. Many of these young authors once thought they knew the shape their life might take, all of them seeing in Gaza’s universities a route to something more than poverty or selling sweets in the street. The universities are gone now. These are records of loss: fervent, burning, desperate, rage-inducing.

“Why?” Batol Alkhaldy wants to know. “We’re not asking for luxury. We’re not searching for perfect lives … We want something simple—to wake up to the sound of birds instead of warplanes, to eat a meal without wondering if it will be our last.” Waad Hamdi Allaham stares through the fog of gunsmoke and pulverised concrete, and asks the most vital of all questions: “Why are you mute? Are you pleased with the genocide?”

Many pieces are plain, brief, steady narratives in a handful of paragraphs. Here I am, they say. These were my dreams. This is the scroll of my dead. Others are fragmented, formless, experiential – trying to make sense of the insensible. The collection’s final third is made up of poems – more moving still for the gift of their metaphors and emotional compression. If the poet Mariam Marwan Malaka should survive (there is no guarantee), I wish for her a career as fulsome as the promise of her work included here. For these lines alone, she deserves garlands:

A person is humiliated in proportion to their longing—
And I, by mine, am annihilated.

The anthology is edited by two academics from the University of Sussex: Dr Jacob Norris, historian of Palestine and co-director of the university’s Middle East and North Africa Centre, and Zahid Pranjol, associate dean for the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine. If there is a fault in this book, it is the editors’ and it comes from admirable motives. In getting out of the way of each student’s voice, they’ve also ensured that the contributions are slightly contextless. You wish, wading chin-height in this pain, for a small amount of detail for each author: a little biography of age, neighbourhood, present status. The anthology has no definite structure, either of chronology or theme.

But one theme dominates: the everyday, commonplace, inflicting of strife and violence. There are the night fears, the flare-lit terrors. No one knows from where the next bomb will come, or who will survive another shelling. As Hada Mohammed Homaid writes:

In Gaza, people die in the way the world fears most suddenly, senselessly, without warning ... No goodbyes. No time to prepare. And what then? No space in the morgue refrigerators. No coffins. Not even cars left to carry the bodies.

Gaza’s life is one of suspension. In that space of waiting, there is hunger. When you haven’t eaten, eating is all you can think about. These lines are by Obay Jouda:

We feast on memories,
chew on the brittle skins of dry onions,
boil wild herbs and whisper to our stomachs:
“This is soup.”

If we grant enough leeway to empathy, the lives of others can cut into ours every bit as sharply as our own experience. We Are Still Here is a testament: a plea that these stories should not become their authors’ own eulogies. But there is a limit. Gaza’s experience, for most of us, is far beyond the imaginable. “It is beyond belief,” writes Reem Alaa Khalel Al-Astal. “And yet—even if you believe—it will not make you feel what we feel…”

You will not lose your family one by one.
You will not scramble daily to feed your hungry children.
You will not be displaced from your home to a tent, from north to south.
You will not wait for a miracle to pull you out of this.
You will not understand what I’m living.

Transcript: A bit of a change of pace today: usually on this channel my videos are relatively short and scripted, and today’s video is neither. I really wanted to share the story of my good friend, Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, and I realized that the absolute best way to do that is to have her tell …

The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell (Yale University Press) by Fritz Breithaupt

Our world is made of stories. From idle gossip with work colleagues to stories of political tribes and nation states, our brains weave threads of narrative that form the tapestry of experienced reality. We are so attuned to this narrative thinking that the stories we tell have huge power over us, allowing the weakest individual to stand up against impossible odds, or leading whole nations into darkness.

Yet these stories are so ubiquitous, so fundamental to what makes us human, that they can become invisible, leaving us vulnerable to their seductive power. It is only through analysing the stories that shape our world that we can control them and retain agency, which is exactly what Fritz Breithaupt sets out to do in his fascinating new book.

Breithaupt is professor of Germanic studies and cognitive sciences at the University of Indiana, and he takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation. The book explores political history, literary analysis, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Breithaupt uses these complementary strands of enquiry to build a methodical and coherent picture of the psychological mechanisms and evolutionary roots behind our narrative thinking.

The keystone of his argument is a storytelling experiment conducted in his lab that was based on a children’s parlour game. The “telephone” game (aka “Chinese whispers”) involves the retelling of a story within a group. As it changes considerably from person to person, there are often hilarious results. Breithaupt saw the unique value of games like this to investigate the dynamic process of story propagation, which in turn sheds light on what is truly important to us when we engage in narrative thinking. Participants were asked to read a short story and then retell it in their own words, which was then passed to someone else to repeat the process. The study involved 12,000 participants and around 19,000 retellings. His team then analysed the input and output for all stages, measuring the length of the story, as well as the degree of information retention and emotional valence.

In some ways, the results were unsurprising. There was a tendency to shorten stories, with a drop in length of around 30 per cent for each retelling. There was also a very poor level of information retention, with events, characters and perspectives changing dramatically. But what was striking was that there was an incredibly strong retention in emotional valence, in the intensity and type of emotion expressed, whether joy or fear or frustration. If characters, events and settings can change, but the emotions remain consistent, Breithaupt concludes that the thing most important to us when we engage in narrative thinking is the communication of emotions. The reason we tell stories, he suggests, is to utilise our “mobility of consciousness”. We project our minds into the place of others to share experiences and emotions. This allows us to simulate how we might feel and react in similar circumstances, leaving us better equipped to deal with our unpredictable environment.

Breithaupt saves some of the most fascinating material for the epilogue, where he discusses some of the cultural and political narratives that have shaped our world over the last few years. He questions the different ways we might respond to the video of George Floyd’s murder, depending on whether we identify with a bystander or with Floyd himself. He discusses how the narratives surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have changed over the course of the war. These are some of the strongest parts of the book, so their brevity seemed like a missed opportunity. However, his focus on the mechanisms that underpin our narrative brains might help equip the reader to interrogate our world of stories for themself.

The book closes with a discussion of whether we need to reject narrative thinking in light of the power these stories have to manipulate us. Breithaupt’s conclusion is that we need more, not less, narrative thinking. We need to reject the allure of simple narratives that close down our thinking and lock us into a limited worldview. Instead, we should embrace a plurality of narratives that enrich and broaden our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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

Transcript: Last week, I talked about how “nones” are the second fastest growing “religion” in the world. That’s N-O-N-E “nones,” not “N-U-N “nuns” – people who do not identify with any religion at all, whether they consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or otherwise. N-U-N “nuns” only get popular around, well, this time of year, where they …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: At the beginning of November, the Trump administration will be illegally ending payments to low-income families across the United States who participate in the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” also known as “SNAP” and previously …

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.  

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).

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 […]