I’m just trying to help the AI out.

I think it’s time Guenevir had a lover.

Chuck Wendig is a well-known author, and unsurprisingly, people are curious about him. He’s the subject of various harmless inquiries, and he has discovered, entertainingly, that AI makes up a lot of stuff about him. For instance, you can ask Google Gemini the name of his cat.

Unfortunately, Wendig is catless.

Well! That answers that. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I actually do have a cat, as the *checks notes* Wengie Wiki will tell you. This isn’t unusual. Cats are very often little hide-and-seeky guys, right? Dear sweet Boomba is probably just tucked away in some dimensional pocket inside our house.

That leads him down a rabbit hole to discover that he has had and has multiple cats, swarms of cats, that have died and been replaced by other named cats, and he also has more dogs than he expected.

It’s a trivial example, but it illustrates a general problem with our brave new world of AI.

Generative AI is a sack of wet garbage.

Do not use AI for search.

DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.

AI can’t even do the basic math right. Meanwhile it hallucinates endless nonsense things! So many false things! It would generate new false things if I gave it the same question string twice. This is only the tip of the iceberg for the weird things I got it to assure me were true.

I’ll pass the word on to my writing class next semester.

Then I was curious about what chatGPT thinks about my cat, so I asked it, even though I’m nowhere near as prominent as Chuck Wendig. Of course it had an answer!

“Mochi”? Wait until the evil cat finds out. It will be shredded.

I couldn’t resist clicking on the button to find out more about PZ Myers’ pets. I got a whole biography!

That’s a grade-school level essay, full of generic nonsense written to be bland and inoffensive, and could be applied to just about anyone. I’d accept it if it were written by someone in 3rd grade, but I’d still ask them where they got the information.

Notice that it doesn’t mention “spider” even once.

I repeat: DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.

Try it. Tell me all about AI’s fantasies about your pets in the comments.

It’s unpleasantly cold this morning, and I was reminded of this old photo from the early years of the 20th century. That’s my great-grandfather Peter on the far left, with his sisters Karen and Marie, and his brothers Ole and Iver. I’m just impressed with their coats; I’d take any of the men’s coats right now. They knew how to dress for a Minnesota winter!

I’m a terrible YouTuber — uncharismatic, dull, lacking in visual skills, and incapable of maintaining a consistent schedule — but heck, I’ll try again. Tomorrow (Saturday, 20 December), I’ll go live around 3pm Central time. I’m open to talking about just about anything, but will center the discussion on this paper:

Christopher J. Kay, Anja Spang, Gergely J. Szöllősi, Davide Pisani, Tom A. Williams & Philip C. J. Donoghue (2025) Dated gene duplications elucidate the evolutionary assembly of eukaryotes. Nature, 3 December 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09808-z.

If you don’t want to read an 11 page technical paper, just contemplate this figure:

Or you can just tune in and maybe I’ll explain it.

In the darkest days of the year, when the sun doesn’t appear very much – and, when it does, stays unnervingly low – a miracle happens. In many windows, wrapped around spindly cranes on building sites or strung unevenly across cityscapes or country pubs, tiny twinkling lights pierce the gloom. Perhaps multi-coloured, possibly flashing, always hopeful, the message is clear: It’s time to get festive. If the origins of a winter festival are disputed, I know I relish the opportunity, or excuse, to get ludicrously sparkly. My family suspect I’d leave the fairy lights up all year round, if I could. You might think that, I tell them. I couldn’t possibly comment! But I do admit to an annual overdose of illumination.

When I was a child, at this time of year my parents unearthed a long-playing record from their collection called A Christmas Sing with Bing. Interspersed with the smooth tones of Mr Crosby (were you thinking of another Bing?) was a prize-winning letter from a young girl in the US, a place I’d never visited and that seemed as fabled and far away as the Moon. Delores – yes, that was her real name – had won a competition to describe "What Christmas Means to Me" and her words, set to stirring music, absolutely reflected my own feelings. She described an abandoning of the normal strictures – when bedtime became more flexible, when eating chocolate before lunch was allowed and when the grown-ups giggled about secrets and surprises. Most importantly of all, she finished her essay with a homage to a massive shining star on the top of the tree. Her father stood on a ladder and reached almost to the ceiling to put it in position. Delores and I might have been continents apart but we shared a similar affection for imperilling others in the service of Christmas cheer.

As a fully fledged adult now, I’m only too aware of everything that goes on behind the scenes. For every wrapped present there’s a frenzy of buying or ordering or enclosing the receipt in case it’s the wrong thing after all. The Christmas Day lunch doesn’t exactly appear by itself. My father often despaired of finding the one faulty bulb that meant all the tree lights failed and, even if we’ve moved on from those days, it’s inevitable there’ll be a battery shortage or lost remote control. It would be foolish to try and recreate that freeze-frame perfection of childhood. Families fracture, friends move on. People die. Perhaps a bug spreads as quickly as Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve, laying everyone low in its wake.

But I try and find the festive. Whatever prompted our ancestors to mark this time of the year is still alive in me. The first strains of whatever their equivalent of Mariah Carey was (actually, it might well have been That Song, it seems to have been around forever) must have stirred them to leave their candle-lit homes and seek out a shared fire. At some point, the lights went big and public. The Victorians were probably responsible for the emergence of the displays (you’ll already have noticed this isn’t a history lesson) as they hijacked and reworked so many of the "traditions" foisted on us at this time of year, but now there isn’t a city, town or village that doesn’t get all lit up. During my stint as a Blue Peter presenter from 1983-1987 – the Golden Years – I once "helped" put the Christmas lights up over Regent Street. In reality, men twice my height and four times my strength manoeuvred heavy ropes and decorations into position while I clung to the sides of the cherry picker. It was November at three o’clock in the morning and the eery stillness of the street below didn’t suggest any kind of celebration. But the switch-on was as wondrous as ever and it’s entirely possible that for some harassed shopper, impressed child or just someone on their way home from work this display gave unexpected, free joy.

When my husband, John, died five years ago, the first Christmas without him seemed irredeemably bleak. The house, once decorated to extremes and noisy with music, was quiet, bare and still. In yet another bout of mindless tidying, an attempt at distracting myself, I found a little wire punctuated with bulbs the size of a grain of rice strung along the mantelpiece. Tracking the thread to its end, hidden from view, there was the plastic battery box. I found the switch and the equally miniscule batteries puffed enough strength to breathe the lights into life. No use, really – there was no warmth and you couldn’t read by them. But – forgive the allusion – this sudden spark flicked a switch in me.

These are small, ambitious sparks of light placed where someone might notice them. It’s a message from one human to another in minute light bulb form. When that person is you, please take their tiny twinkle to your heart.

Janet Ellis will take over as president of Humanists UK in January.

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In 2025, we buckled up for a bumpy ride. With Donald Trump and his accompanying gang of Christian fanatics in power once again, and conflict raging on in Europe and the Middle East, it was time to rise above the chaos and look at how we might get out of this mess.

So this year, we homed in on solutions, including how to push back against the religious right and its growing influence in the UK, and how to begin healing political divides.

We also celebrated the immense capacity of our fellow human beings to grow, adapt and show deep compassion. We dedicated an edition to cutting-edge developments in outer space and the rallying cry that the cosmos belongs to us all. We asked the great minds of our time how we can stay curious, smart and empowered in our age of AI and “enshittification”. And we explored the big question of "meaning": In an increasingly secular western world, how do we shape our lives and continue to build community with those who share our values?

Our aim is to help our readers take a step back from the turmoil, and make sense of what's happening around us. As we all reflect on the year that's been, here are the stories from 2025 you shouldn't miss.

Give the gift of journalism! We hope you've enjoyed reading New Humanist in 2025. If you'd like to spread the joy in the year ahead, we're offering gift subscriptions for just £21 until the end of December. Sign up now using code FESTIVE.

1. The Second Coming of Donald J. Trump
By Matthew D. Taylor

Published just a month after Donald Trump's reinauguration as US president, this fascinating look at the religious forces behind his return to power includes expert insight and hard-to-believe details. It became our most-read story of the year online – if you haven't read it yet, now's the time to catch up.

2. Teaching When To Trust
By Zion Lights

This article from our most recent edition explored how teaching children to think critically and spot misinformation is built into the Finnish education system. It struck a chord on social media, where it was shared hundreds of times and sparked intense debate about whether the model could or would be replicated elsewhere.

3. Stephen Fry: Why uncertainty can be a superpower
By Andrew Copson

Bringing some star power to the pages of our Spring 2025 edition was multi-award-winning actor, comedian and presenter Stephen Fry. He spoke to Humanists UK CEO Andrew Copson about happiness, toxic masculinity, and the benefits of doubt.

4. The Afghan women left to die
By Jamaima Afridi

The deadly earthquake that hit Afghanistan in August 2025 received news coverage around the world. But the particularly devastating impact on women received less attention. With few female doctors left, and male medics unable to touch women, the Taliban's policies are increasingly leaving women without access to healthcare – resulting in unnecessary deaths in the aftermath of the disaster, and creating a looming crisis for the country.

5. The greatest astronomy PhD ever written
By Marcus Chown

Everyone knows that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, and that Charles Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection. But how many people know that Cecilia Payne discovered what makes up the Universe?

Our astronomy column often highlights the brilliant female scientists who have been written out of history. In this edition, we zoomed in on the contributions of Harvard's first female professor, who almost didn't get the credit for her groundbreaking discovery.

6. What's the point of politics
By James Ball

This article by political journalist James Ball – who was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Snowden leaks – was written near the start of the year. It focused on the contentious issue of the two-child benefit cap, which is now due to be lifted by the Labour government after a decade of controversy. But the underlying message – on the age-old debate between pragmatism and idealism in politics – has continued to feel relevant and will help make sense of political divisions for many years to come.

7. Five voices on space and society

Our new Voices section debuted in the magazine this year, bringing together expert perspectives on key issues. In our Autumn 2025 edition, with both nation states and billionaires battling for control of the cosmos, we asked how we can protect space to ensure that it benefits all of humanity. Five experts, from philosophers to astronomers, responded.

8. 'Palestine's literary scene is thriving': A Q&A with Selma Dabbagh
By Niki Seth-Smith

Israel's devastating assault on Gaza continued through much of this year and the Strip is now facing an uncertain future. In this interview with our editor published in May, British-Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh reminded us of the power of literature in preserving Palestinian culture and the many talented writers sharing the Palestinian experience with the world – a message that resonated with many.

9. The 80s can teach us more than how to wear spandex
By Samira Ahmed

Our columnist, the brilliant BBC radio presenter Samira Ahmed, brings cultural insights to every edition of New Humanist. In this column, she explored why young people are so fascinated by the 80s – and what they risk forgetting.

10. Skiing is bonkers, but so am I
By Shaparak Khorsandi

It's hard to pick just one piece by fan-favourite Shaparak Khorsandi, the award-winning comedian who unpicks generational divides in the backpage of New Humanist. But with ski season rolling around again, we'd recommend learning from her experiences before you head out to the slopes.

11. Minds in search of meaning
By Frank Tallis

If you ever feel like your life lacks purpose, you're not alone. In fact, writes clinical psychologist Frank Tallis in this thought-provoking long-read, it's an increasingly common cause of anxiety. And yet therapists still seem reluctant to address existential issues with their clients. Could and should they be doing more?

12. Rise of the science sleuths
By Euan Lawson

Science today is plagued by fake papers, profit incentives and unreliable studies. We met the science sleuths bringing the truth to light and pushing for more transparency to save the scientific method.

13. Nuclear choices
By Dominic Hinde

In an age of conflict and climate change, we face difficult decisions about the future of nuclear. Nowhere is this complexity clearer than in Japan, where the memory of nuclear war and the danger of civil nuclear disaster sit firmly in the public consciousness.

On the 80th anniversary of the US atomic bombings, Dominic Hinde travelled to Hiroshima and Fukushima to hear the experiences and perspectives of people there.

14. Naomi Alderman on surviving the Third Information Crisis
By Niki Seth-Smith

Award-winning writer Naomi Alderman – author of The Power – says we're living through a new information crisis, with technology opening up new modes of division and conflict. In the latest edition of the magazine, she offered tips on how we can get through it.

15. An atheist goes on pilgrimage
By Christopher Dorrell

Why are so many non-religious people going on pilgrimages these days? In this intriguing travel piece, our writer walked to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to find out.

Thank you for reading New Humanist! If you've enjoyed reading these articles, please share them with your networks.

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I think I’m trapped at home today — I tried walking to work, and didn’t get beyond my driveway, because we had a thaw and a refreeze and it’s slick as snot out there. Then we’re supposed to get more snow this morning, with temperatures plummeting down to -15°C with 50mph wind gusts, so I’m cowering at home today. The spiders will go hungry for a day (they are opportunistic feeders, they can handle it).

If you’re similarly stuck at home, here’s an hour long video that I thought was very good. It rips into a couple of self-styled “science” based influencers who are anything but.

The most shocking bit was seeing Joe Rogan getting furious at any push-back on his anti-vax views, and basically shutting down the conversation by claiming that the polio epidemic was co-incident with they years of heaviest DDT use. He also made the standard skeptical claim that vaccines were a late response to an already fading plague, which is sort of true. There are multiple approaches to a serious disease: behavioral shifts, like self-quarantine, and improved hygiene can reduce the incidence and severity of infections, but it takes efficacious medical responses to deliver the coup de grace. And Joe Rogan doesn’t understand science at all if he falls for the correlation equals causation canard. DDT does not cause polio.

The video also jumps on Bill Maher. He’s got this canned response to any claims, saying that we don’t know 100% of everything, more like 20% or 10%, so his weird fads might be true. It’s nonsense. Of course there is much left to learn, but we can say with 100% confidence that you shouldn’t eat cyanide, or that the earth is spherical, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, because smart, skeptical people have studied that stuff and have objective data to back up their arguments. We don’t even quantify knowledge as a percentage fraction of everything, so that’s a bogus metric anyway. I’m willing to go along with a claim that we only know 0.00001% of everything, but that the bits we know, we know pretty damn well, so please, Bill Maher, don’t jump off the roof of a New York skyscraper to test your ‘theory’ of gravity.

Another good topic was about what having a PhD means. It’s not a free pass to make everything you say valuable, important, and true. It just says you passed an apprenticeship. You presumably got some training in critical thinking which the Joe Rogans of the world lack, but you have to demonstrate your skills throughout your life. There are also some really bad theses out there — there is some pressure to get students out the door so you can get a new crop started, and some bad PIs who will let garbage pass as long as they get a publication out of it.

(By the way, I think my PhD thesis holds up. Not only did multiple researchers build on it afterwards, but it wasn’t even just mine — it was the product of a collaboration with several absolutely brilliant mentors and colleagues, which is how every thesis ought to be.)

Mons Gaudium, the mountain of joy, was the name given by pilgrims to the hill from which they could spot Jerusalem for the first time. It marked the final stage of a dangerous journey, which would have taken months, if not years, to complete.

Every major medieval pilgrimage route had its version of Mons Gaudium. My own journey – a five-day trek through the rolling hills of the Scottish borders – could not compare to a medieval voyage to Jerusalem, but I still felt genuine joy on the Kyloe Hills in Northumberland looking out over the sea. There, shimmering on the horizon of a bright September day, was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

Sheep scattered as I bounded down the grassy slopes, forgetting for a moment the pain in my knees. My journey was nearly at an end, but I still faced a nagging question: was I really a pilgrim?

Pilgrimage is more popular in the west than it has been for centuries. Nearly half a million people completed the Camino (Spanish for “path”) to Santiago de Compostela in 2024, historically one of Europe’s most important pilgrimage routes. In 1972, the records show just 67 pilgrims.

In Britain, a 2024 YouGov survey commissioned by the British Pilgrimage Trust, a charity launched in 2014, found that 9.2 per cent of adults in Britain had already made a pilgrimage. A further 19 per cent – nearly 8 million people – were considering it.

The revival has coincided with the continuing decline of Christianity in the west. Why are people going? And are they actually pilgrims?

Pilgrimage is a slippery concept. The word comes from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “being away from your own land or home”. At its core, it involves going on a physical journey to a designated site. But there is also a deeper aspect. The hope is that the act of travelling becomes a spur to self-realisation and inner growth.

Historically, these ritual journeys have been firmly tied to religion. In the high Middle Ages, pilgrimage was big business. If you include local saints’ shrines alongside the major routes to Jerusalem or Rome, then it is likely that the vast majority of medieval Christians performed some form of pilgrimage in their lives. The naked exploitation of pilgrims, and the superstitious aspects, made the practice a target for reformers. “All pilgrimages should be done away with; for there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments,” Martin Luther wrote in 1520.

The modern variant is proudly agnostic. For example, the British Pilgrimage Trust says it wants “to make pilgrimage accessible to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or background”. The practice helps to “nurture our relationship with the land” and adds “meaning and purpose to our lives”, the charity says. The 250 routes listed on their website include a wide variety of destinations. The majority are centred on churches or cathedrals, but there’s a healthy smattering of springs, stone circles and river mouths on the website too.

I am an atheist but my “pilgrimage” route, St Cuthbert’s Way, was clearly Christian themed: connecting Melrose Abbey, where Cuthbert first joined the monastery in 651AD, to Lindisfarne, where he served as bishop and was canonised shortly after his death in 687AD. The Holy Island itself has been a site of Christian worship since the early seventh century.

That said, the geography of Holy Island gives it a charisma that even the most convinced materialist can feel. Twice a day the island is cut off from the mainland by the North Sea. At low tide, you can walk across the mudflats to the island. Out on the flats, the sea, land and sky do not just meet, they merge. Each seems to reflect the other. The wooden sticks that guide you from shore to shore provide the only sense of fixed definition, a line through the haze.

Before embarking on their journey, medieval pilgrims would often write a will in case anything should happen to them on the route, an indication of how dangerous travel could be back then. There’s been no recorded deaths on the sands to Lindisfarne, but I thought there’s a first time for everything. I quickly drew up a will and left it on the fridge for my flatmates. “In the event of my demise, the cat gets everything,” I scrawled. (The cat has been looking at me funny ever since.)

Having got my affairs in order, I started the journey north. The weather forecast for the week ahead was bleak: rainy and windy every day. I was staying overnight with friends in Edinburgh before heading to the start of the path in Melrose, a small town in the Scottish Borders. “If at any point you want to come back, then just let us know,” they said. It was all starting to feel a bit ominous.

Nevertheless, I dutifully traipsed off to Melrose on Monday morning. I didn’t get off to a good start. Out of the town, the trail quickly climbs up the side of the Eildon Hills, three peaks which dominate the border lands. The rain was nowhere to be seen. Instead it was warm, and I was overdressed. I slowly climbed the hill, sweat starting to sting my eyes. Pausing at the top for water, I struggled to catch my breath. My head hurt, my bag felt too heavy and my eyes strained through the sweat. Maybe it had been a good decision to write my will after all.

But from there the path got easier, leading down to the banks of the River Tweed. I stopped at a church which had a prayer for passing pilgrims. It urged the walker to find “the imprint of the infinite in all that you see”, a sentiment I tried to carry with me over the following days.

This romantic appreciation of nature is an important inspiration for modern pilgrimage, and is part of the reason I had picked St Cuthbert’s Way. The route takes you along riverbanks, through forests and over hills before the dramatic walk across the sands to Lindisfarne.

The desire to authentically connect to the past felt like another crucial pillar of my pilgrimage. Through walking, I hoped to understand the landscape in the way that Cuthbert might have. Both of these goals could be understood as “spiritual”. They were attempts to anchor my life in a wider architecture of meaning.

But having done a bit of homework before my journey, I knew that I had to be careful about my grand aims. Modern pilgrims like me may be tracing the footsteps of our ancestors, but our attitudes are very different.

Dr Anne Bailey at the University of Oxford argues that for medieval pilgrims, the trip was often about the destination, not the journey. “For many, the journey to a saint’s shrine seems to have had little or no spiritual value, and it was only when their destination was reached that penitential exercises were performed,” she writes.

She cites the example of Margery Kempe, a prolific 15th-century pilgrim who managed to complete a round trip to Santiago in 25 days, less time than it takes modern pilgrims to walk the Camino through France. Her outbound journey lasted just seven days, because she took the boat from Bristol directly to the northwestern tip of Spain. She clearly wanted the journey to end as soon as possible.

Another pilgrim, Abbot Daniel, admitted to “doing every kind of unworthy deed” on his route to Jerusalem, sins which would be atoned upon arrival at the holy sites. The transfer of meaning from destination to journey reflects our modern discomfort with the idea that certain places are genuinely imbued with special powers.

Of course, Christians in medieval Europe do not have a monopoly on the idea of pilgrimage, and there were many different experiences of pilgrimage even in medieval times. But we should be cautious: just because we are walking the same trails and using the same language, it does not mean we are in some way continuing an unbroken tradition of spiritual wandering. If I was a pilgrim, I was a distinctively modern pilgrim, guided by modern sensibilities.

And it was not just the inner journey that had changed, so too had the physical landscape. The village of Morebattle, which marked the halfway point of my journey, had once been a lakeside town. But the lake had gradually shrunk, before finally being drained in the 19th century. The village church still stood on a hill overlooking the site of the lake, only now it looked across rows of neat fields.

Making my way between the towns and villages, I often saw no one in the fields or the hills. But in pre-modern Britain, the countryside would have been much more densely populated given the importance of agriculture, and the need for many more labourers. The deserted landscapes in which I found it easiest to connect to the past were, in many ways, modern creations.

As I started my final descent to the shoreline, I stopped at a bench with fantastic views across to Lindisfarne. Two sisters were sitting there, and they invited me to join them. What brought them to these hills? They had walked the first half last year, and were now completing the route. Theirs was a different kind of pilgrimage, a personal act of remembrance. “Our mother died three years ago and our father died sometime before, but they were both keen walkers. Every year we try to go on a walking trip around one of their birthdays to remember them. It’s a kind of little pilgrimage,” they said.

We walked together for the rest of the day, swapping notes on the walk and giving thanks for the miraculously good weather – it had barely rained all week!

The sisters would finish their pilgrimage the day after me, so I crossed the sands the next morning alone. Following the wooden sticks that guided the way, I found myself thinking less about my grand spiritual ambitions, which seemed as spectral as the early morning light. Instead, I thought about the people I love, the people I’ve lost, and the people I fear I’m on the cusp of losing. I tried to carry them all with me as I approached the end of my walk. Only then did I feel comfortable describing myself as a pilgrim.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. 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: Two years ago I made a video about Avi Loeb, a man who achieved some degree of prominence in his chosen field of physics and managed to become the Director of the Institute for …

Naomi Alderman is a novelist, games writer, broadcaster and producer. Her debut novel “Disobedience”, which follows a rabbi’s bisexual daughter as she returns to her Orthodox Jewish community having lost her faith, has been translated into 10 languages, while her science-fiction novel “The Power” won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a television series. She is also a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her latest book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis), published by Penguin, is based on her Radio 4 essay series, in which she discusses how new technologies open up new ways of being. We sat down with her to discuss the book, as well as tips and tricks to help navigate our current tumultuous era.

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today draws on millennia of history to give us lessons for our own era. You propose that we’re living in the third information crisis. If the first and second crisis start with the invention of writing and then the printing press, does the third begin with the internet?

It’s the invention of the world wide web. So the internet is when all the computers are connected, and the world wide web is the [information system] where humans are talking to each other, reading each other’s words and getting annoyed by each other, which is one of the things that makes it an information crisis.

It started in the late 90s, but it’s a full-blown crisis now. But when you say “world wide web” enough, it does start to sound really silly, so we can just go back to saying “the internet”.

These crises are marked by a sudden leap in information access, which leads to new forms of conflict. Are these mainly conflicts of interpretation?

It’s so many different kinds of conflicts. In the book I talk about the ancient Sumerians, who had a legend around how writing was invented – because they were the first people to write in script. Their legend was that their king wanted to have an argument with another king, but the messengers kept forgetting the entire message that he wanted to send. So he invented writing in order to be able to accurately insult the lord of Aratta. And now we can all insult anybody we want at the drop of a hat.

It would be ridiculous to claim that conflict is caused by digital communications. You have only to watch birds in your garden fighting over a bird feeder to know that you can have conflict without human language. And you can have conflict without writing. But communications technology – writing and printing and now the web – introduces the possibility of conflict with somebody that you have never actually met. Maybe you have not even met anybody who has met them. You can just send them your anger – via a clay tablet or a tweet – and they can receive your anger.

So it introduces a really wide range of different kinds of possible conflict. A war of interpretation can only happen once there is writing. Anyone who spends time on the internet has had the experience of [being misinterpreted]. Take [the classic Twitter meme about] waffles, where Person A says, “Yes, I love pancakes”, and Person B jumps to the conclusion, “Oh, so you hate waffles.” We don’t have the social norms yet around how to make sure that we’re expressing what we want to be expressing.

You do write about actual stake burnings, during what you identify as the second information crisis and the religious wars that followed. But you’re also using burning at the stake to make a broader point, around dehumanisation.

It’s to do with treating another human being not as a person but as a symbol. It’s anything that would make you feel ashamed afterwards, where you subsequently go, “I didn’t live up to my values there.” It’s incredibly easy to throw a stone in a crowd full of people throwing stones, and yet that’s also a reason not to do it. There are several stories now, of people who’ve been driven to suicide by [online] public shaming. Would you feel brilliant to have taken part in that?

Controversially, I even believe we should probably think about politicians and the royal family as humans, and they are obviously people who are very much turned into symbols by the world.

This relates to your point about people seeking purity. We see this clearly in right-wing politics, around the call to return to “traditional” values, or to religious doctrine. But you think this is also a left-wing phenomenon, and you give the example of efforts to decolonise the curriculum.

I stole this from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. On their podcast The Rest Is History, they talk about how everyone involved in the education system now wants to go back to the “pure” root of education, to remove some kind of “taint” that they perceive. A right-winger might say, “We’ve got to go back to teaching Shakespeare and the Bible”, which is the root of the British culture and of the English language. And then a left-wing person might say, we need to get rid of the “taint” of colonisation. There’s a sense of wanting to remove, instead of contextualising.

You may not know this, but on the church in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door, there is a carving in stone of rabbis suckling at the teats of a pig. So that’s some pretty extreme anti-Semitism, and there are calls now to remove that. And I would strongly argue, don’t remove it. Contextualise it. Put a statue next to it of a famous Jewish citizen of Wittenberg, or a plaque explaining why this is hateful.

Would you take the same approach for statues in the UK, around that debate?

I would accept moving a statue, maybe putting it into a museum with this context around it. But we have not reached the end of history. We need to be able to tolerate the presence of things that do not perfectly accord with our values. If we’re not able to do that, we will eventually end up doing some atrocities.

How does that perspective relate to your novel The Power, in which women develop the ability to electrocute men? Some of these women believe they have the right to exercise their new superpower because of their history of oppression.

The Power was an exploration for me of what would happen [if women suddenly became physically superior to men]. What do I think would be right? Do I think that women are somehow so much better [than men], that if every woman were able to electrocute people at will, we would usher in a world of peace and harmony? I took myself all the way through it, and at the end I was like, “Oh, you’ve got to have rules about how we behave that apply to everyone, no matter how just your causes.”

Look, I am Jewish. I support the right of the State of Israel to exist. I do not agree with many of the things that the government of Israel does. And I do not think that there is any level of having suffered that makes it impossible for a group to contain sadists and psychopaths. There can be no such thing as giving an entire group a free pass because of what they personally have suffered. I think we have to have the same rules applying for everybody. I don’t think the oppression of Jews justifies Jewish violence against innocent children. I don’t think the oppression of Palestinians justifies Hamas violence against innocent children.

Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today is a testament to the power of writing. What do you make of the decline in literacy and book reading, in favour of video and aural formats? Are we returning to a new kind of oral culture?

There’s a book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which makes this argument. It’s a very good survey of the field, but I would strongly argue that we are not going back to an oral culture. Listening to a podcast or YouTube video has some things in common with oral culture. But an oral culture world is a warm, flexible, human-scale world in which the only people you can talk to are the people that you are physically present with. And we are in such a different world to that. We’re not going back. We’re going forward into something.

On literacy, we can think about exercise. A hundred years ago, no one had to ask themselves, “Am I getting enough physical exercise?” Because most people’s daily lives were physically tough, they were getting plenty. And now we do have to think about it. So I suspect that [it will be the same now with] reading long pieces, that are more than 30,000 words long, say, keeping track of an argument, holding characters in your head. We never used to have to think about how much of that we were doing, because that was the way we got information. I think 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.

Also, it doesn’t harm me if I live in a world where a lot of people don’t get enough exercise, but it really does harm me if I live in a democracy where people are neglecting their brains and therefore voting for the most stupid, objectionable things.

It’s hard though isn’t it, to put down our smartphones. And you have a dumbphone, I think?

I have a smartphone which has all the apps on it, and I have a smartphone which only has a few things. It doesn’t have email, but it does have the maps and The New Yorker. And so I decide which one to take with me. I’m interested in a little device called a brick [an app and bluetooth device designed to set boundaries on phone use], which I can touch to the side of my phone, which will stop a lot of the apps from working.

You’ve said that it was through the process of writing your debut novel “Disobedience” that you “wrote yourself out” of believing in religion. Does writing do something unique, in encouraging us to think and change our minds?

I did. I wrote my way out of Orthodox Judaism. But I think the smartphone is more addictive than Orthodox Judaism. Long-lasting religions, of which there are a few in the world, have lasted because they have given some benefits to the people who hold to them. They may also be producing terrible problems – most of them are in some ways – but also most of them are time-tested through hundreds of generations of people.

I think most of us would not want to pass smartphones on to our children in the way that they currently exist. It’s a brand-new, weird, human mind-hacking cult. Much worse than religion.

In comparing our own era to the religious wars of the Reformation, we can see that there’s a lot of tribalism and dogmatism that’s happening today in a non-faith context.

I mean, this is the thing. In the late 1800s, when Darwin was publishing on evolution, it’s like a meteor hit religion. But it’s not that religion vanished, it just splattered on everything else. If you are a humanist, you have, I hope, the values of the Enlightenment, of Erasmus, of Petrus Ramos [the French humanist, logician and educational reformer], who’s a hero of mine. You value education and knowledge and truth and treating humans as equal. And today there are so many systems working against that. It’s not as simple as “Oh, the enemy is organised religion.” Surely, it’s also [the American political conspiracy theory] QAnon. It’s anti-vaxxers. Or at least not the people, but the systems that have caused people to believe in this really pernicious, dangerous nonsense. Humans are a storytelling species. We understand who we are through stories. And it’s very, very easy to hijack that system.

You believe that a new framework will emerge to help us navigate this third information crisis. In the Enlightenment, that framework was the scientific method. Can I challenge you by asking, do we need a brand new framework? Could it just be the scientific method again, but perhaps with new and different ways to tell stories that are connected to that?

I love this question. And I do think it’s very helpful that we’ve had an Enlightenment already. The scientific method, thus far, has not been improved upon in terms of ways to find out what’s going on in the physical world. So it’s still important. [What is new is that] today, we can see the world through so many different people’s eyes. We are challenging ourselves to live in a way that isn’t just tolerant of difference, but is able to look out via someone else’s eyes who is different. I mean, you can literally watch images from cameras that people are holding up as they’re going around in so many different places in the world.

If that doesn’t end up changing what we think about humanity, I would be quite surprised. For example, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to justify why some countries are wealthy and powerful and some countries are poor and have no power. We’re very close to achieving simultaneous translation. If I’m not looking out on a favela or a slum, it’s easy to not think about it, but once you start listening to people, watching other people’s lives?

Each information crisis, you say, eventually leads to us understanding one another more clearly. But is it also about expanding the number of people we’re able to understand or empathise with? How far can that reasonably extend?

We’ve been exploring the limits to that for a really long time. You would have thought that the limit for a species that did hunting and gathering was about 300 people, maybe up to 1,000 people, like the size of a secondary school. But humanity has gone much further than that. I find us very touching in some ways, human beings. Evolution tried out something with us. It was like, “What happens if I give a species an absolutely enormous brain – so big that the babies have to be born much, much too early, so they have to be raised for a minimum of 12 years?” And we’ve been quite a successful species, actually. We’re a bit concerned about what we’ve managed to do to the planet, but we’re also the first species that has ever managed to be concerned about what is done to the planet.

Were you conscious that your book, by using the technology of writing, could help us avert the worst aspects of this current information crisis? That’s quite meta.

I genuinely think that writing Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today might be the most useful thing I do with my life. It really does take the temperature down when you’re aware of [living through a historical crisis]. You might think: actually, I don’t need to break up with all of my friends and family [because of differences of opinion]. You might recognise the value of doing the taxing but not complicated work of being a sane adult on the internet. I am sending this message all the time on BlueSky: “You’re sounding quite aggressive. Is that what you intended?” I’m trying to keep remembering that everyone else is a person, not a symbol, and I’m going to sometimes mess it up, and I’m going to forgive myself and just carry on.

I actually find that quite inspiring. We’ve all got a little job. We’re living through this really tumultuous epoch, and each one of us can decide whether we are going to be fighting for the civil public space, and how long our “wars of reformation” are going to go on for. We’re not going to be able to stop them all, but if we can remove ourselves from the crowd around the stake burning, that is a good start. Then we can hasten the moment where we get to the good parts.

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

Condemn, c. 1400: Sentence to a punishment, express complete disapproval of

In the world of politics, “condemn” is a very popular word. We might draw several different conclusions from this. Perhaps politicians are principled people who denounce inappropriate behaviour, breaches of the law and evil transgressions. Or cynics, only too willing to condemn others for sins that they themselves commit. Or some might say that the act of condemning serves as a useful distraction.

The word comes from Old French condemner (or condamner), which came from the Latin condemnare. The prefix “con” can be regarded as an intensifier to the word demnare/damnare (to damn), and “condemn” was used in English as early as the mid-14th century in its sense of being found guilty of a crime. By 1400 though, the word was used in the broader sense, as with lines like this: “The clergy, which some of the common people … judge and condemn to be evil” (c. 1449).

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “condemn” is one of the 5,000 most common words in modern written English. It appears in the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, as with the scene in Twelfth Night in which Sir Toby Belch tricks Malvolio into thinking that the lady of the house is in love with him. The servant Fabian says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

One of its most famous usages is from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while the American writer and teacher Dale Carnegie is credited with the acerbic line: “Any fool can criticize, complain and condemn – and most fools do.”

Though Carnegie’s saying is popular, it hasn’t stemmed the flow of condemnations coming from our politicians – an outpouring that is in no way matched by the equivalent level of action. It could almost be a principle: “condemn and do nothing.”

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Back in April of this year, I talked a bit about a truly ridiculous case that was being heard by the Supreme Court: in Mahmoud v. Taylor, religious fundamentalists objected to the mere existence of …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! A few weeks ago, I reported on a successful rightwing social media campaign to get a “woke” professor fired. To recap, an incredibly stupid woman who somehow made it into a college class recorded herself …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I’ve talked about this before, but I swear it’s relevant and some of you are new here, so: 8 years ago, I found Indy as a homeless 3-month old puppy. He looked like this. …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: There are two memes currently fighting it out in my head as I think of how to introduce this video’s topic: one is “the Simpsons predict the future.” Because the Simpsons has now been …

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!

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 […]