I got an invitation to collaborate (that is, host advertising)! With Red Bull!

Hi there!

This springs from the team at Red Bull Partnerships. We detect how your
uploads boosts people — that’s something meaningful! We believe as a
team we can create something influential.

What we propose:
• Product trials or name drops within your uploads
• Professionally produced advertising feature at the start of your video
• Exposure of Red Bull gatherings through your channel

Collaborating with Red Bull means VIP passes, behind-the-scenes info,
and opportunities that will help your visions come alive.

Ready to talk? Ready when you are.

Stay motivated,
Red Bull GmbH, Am Brunnen 1, 5330 Fuschl am See, Salzburg, Austria
Red Bull ©2025

Wow, I must have finally made it! Either that, or Red Bull is desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I’m sorry if you’re all clamoring for more Red Bull content, but I’d have to turn them down.

• I don’t drink Red Bull.
• I think gulping down stimulants is bad for you.
• I hate advertising.
• I despise capitalism generally.

I guess I’m disappointing my readership again.

In the comments, we got a mild objection to the term “Alligator Auschwitz”, which is fair, except that it reminded me of this cartoon.

“Remember: When discussing modern atrocities that sicken the conscience, we must always be SCRUPULOUSLY FAIR.”

We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.

Although, to be totally fair to the other side, I’d rather we did the scolding before the death camp fires up the ovens.

I thought I struggled with two small children over the weekend, but I just cracked a container in the lab and found one Parasteatoda mama dealing with a few hundred little spiderlings. Everyone was scampering all over the place.

Look! They’re all over the jungle gym! Seemed familiar.

I was just served Pascal’s Wager in my email. Anyone who deploys that ill-formed nonsense is a fool in my book — including Pascal himself, who invented it after a weird Jansenist epiphany. My reply is always the same, after Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have avoided the “revelation” of religion:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

That’s good enough for me.

What happened to Pascal’s brain? He must have read some deeper philosophy than the tripe he wrote.

I’ve long wondered how any woman can bear to stay with the selfish scum of the right. There’s no accounting for taste, and some of those women are probably sleazy themselves, but sometimes we can see lines being crossed and spouses just plain giving up on their terrible men.

Case in point: Angela Paxton is divorcing her slimy partner, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. I’m happy to applaud her imminent independence, but she stuck with him for forty years — what was she thinking?

Some gossip we’ll have to wait on is the rumors that Katie Miller and her rat-faced evil partner, Stephen Miller, are on the outs. She’s rumored to be shifting to Elon Musk, which is the one choice that debatably is not an improvement in her situation.

I know I’m being petty, but I enjoy seeing these people suffer.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: what is beyond the edge of the Universe? Given that the Universe is defined as all there is, this is not exactly a well-framed question!

Our best description of the Universe is provided by Einstein’s theory of gravity. Unfortunately, it tells us merely how every point in the Universe is receding from every other point in the aftermath of the Big Bang. As far as Einstein is concerned, the Universe could be infinite in extent or curve back on itself like the 3D equivalent of the surface of the Earth. In both cases, there would be no edge.

The Universe does, however, have a pseudo-edge. This is because it has not existed for ever but was born 13.82 billion years ago. It means we can see only the galaxies whose light has taken less than this amount of time to reach us. The spherical volume of space, centred on the Earth, from which light has had time to reach us is known as the “observable universe”. It contains about two trillion galaxies and is bounded by a “light horizon”. And, just as we know there is more ocean over the horizon at sea, we know there is more of the Universe over the cosmic horizon.

So, the question is: beyond the cosmic light horizon, does the Universe march on for ever or curve back on itself in some way? What, in short, is the shape of the Universe? If you think this is a hard question to answer, you are right. Nevertheless, it may be possible to obtain an answer with the aid of computer power that did not exist a decade ago, and by analysing existing observations of the “cosmic background radiation”, the relic of the Big Bang fireball.

This oldest light in the Universe comes from a time about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when for the first time light was able to fly across space unhindered by matter. Today, greatly cooled by the expansion of the Universe in the past 13.82 billion years, it appears as low-energy “microwaves”. If you had eyes that could see microwaves rather than visible light, you would see the whole night sky glowing white. Incredibly, the fireball radiation accounts for 99.9 per cent of all the photons of light in the Universe, with the light from the stars and galaxies making up only 0.1 per cent.

Crucially, the matter in the Big Bang fireball sloshed about like water in a bath. And these sloshing modes – effectively sound waves – imprinted themselves on the afterglow of the Big Bang, causing subtle variations in its brightness over the sky, which were observed by the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory in 2010. It is these that may contain clues to the shape of the Universe: whether it is infinite, or like a doughnut with a hole in it (a torus), or any other shape.

Think of a mystery musical instrument. If a physicist is told the loudness of the sound it makes at every possible frequency, in principle they can use this information to figure out the shape of the instrument. Similarly, the sound waves impressed on the cosmic background radiation can be used to determine the shape of the Universe.

Currently, an international team known as the “COMPACT Collaboration” is using supercomputers to predict the background radiation signature for the 17 simplest cosmic shapes, or “topologies”, so they can be compared with Planck’s observations. Already, we know of tantalising anomalies in the cosmic background radiation. For instance, there are correlations between the sound waves that span less than 60 degrees of the sky, but inexplicably not above this. Could there be such a low-frequency cut-off for the same reason there is one for an organ pipe: because its size imposes a lowest-frequency vibration?

Admittedly, this effort is a longshot. The COMPACT team will either determine the Universe’s shape or conclude that it is so big that its shape cannot be determined. Though we may discover we are bounded in a nutshell, to distort Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we may be unable to discover whether or not we are living in infinite space.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: In a perfect world, scientists could do their research based upon what topics interest them, and if they find something cool, they should be recognized–celebrated, even!–for their discovery. Maybe they even get a raise. …

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press) by Jordan S. Carroll

Right-wingers are usually seen as political advocates for the past, associated with traditional values and hierarchies. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness demolishes this assumption that the right always look backwards in a brisk 106 pages. His main focus is on the alt-right: a self-rebranded, mostly online movement which proliferated from around 2010 to 2017, when it mostly collapsed and was absorbed into other far-right movements. The alt-right, as Carroll shows, were obsessed with the future in general and with the science-fiction genre in particular. They didn’t just want to return to an era of patriarchy and white supremacy; many also wanted to use this blueprint to go further, creating a radically new society.

Figures like blogger and writer Theodore Beale and white nationalist activist Richard Spencer have expressed beliefs that the white race is innately expansionist and ambitious and that white people, and white people alone, have therefore driven all human progress. Building on the racist musings of past works – like Oswald Spengler’s sweeping book of white supremacist theory The Decline of the West (1937), which characterised Europeans as having the only culture still moving forward, or William Luther Pierce’s pulp dystopian The Turner Diaries (1978), in which white freedom fighters murder their Jewish overlords – alt-right figures argued that tomorrow is inherently white.

It was in this context that Beale, in 2013, infamously insulted Black science-fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, telling her that while his ancestors were “fully civilized”, Africans still were not. Only white people, he said, were “capable of building an advanced civilization”, and only white people could, therefore, create science fiction. Beale’s comments were despicable. But, Carroll is careful to point out, such racism is not new to science fiction.

On the contrary, speculative whiteness has deep roots in the genre. Novelists of the genre’s golden age in the 40s and 50s, such as Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt, trafficked in quasi-eugenic fantasies. These often involved hyper-evolved elites laying plans across the centuries to impose more or less benevolent oligarchies on the less prescient, less vigorous and virile masses.

Carroll also acknowledges that far-right tropes continue to permeate the genre. It’s not hard to think of examples of narratives like, say, Avengers: Endgame in which, as Carroll says, “militaristic supermen” crush “biologically inferior invaders”. Even works like Frank Herbert’s Dune, which are meant to evoke authoritarian speculative whiteness in order to refute it, have been embraced by fascists. Many see its hero Paul Atreides as a feudal European with the prophetic foresight and ruthlessness necessary to carve out a galactic empire.

Carroll thinks this is a misreading of Dune. He also argues that the alt-right imagination makes for bad science fiction, because these thinkers aren’t actually interested in envisioning new futures. “Speculative whiteness will always remain self-imprisoned in a racist solipsism that prevents it from imagining anything outside or after itself,” he says. In contrast, he argues, the best science fiction – like Star Trek, or Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, which chronicles the revolt of an enslaved people who can cause earthquakes – seeks to think itself into new worlds and freedoms.

I share Carroll’s preference for science fiction that is not disgustingly bigoted. But given the connections he draws between classic science fiction and alt-right racism, I think his effort to marginalise speculative whiteness as a betrayal of the genre may be too easy. Is the alt-right really misreading Herbert’s Dune, for example? Or is Herbert perhaps ambivalently but powerfully invested in the very racist tropes he’s trying to reject? It’s not always so easy to write yourself out of the racist past. The struggle over what will be is always a struggle over what is now, and vice versa.

Carroll’s book is valuable as part of that struggle. Speculative Whiteness provides a chilling analysis of what the worst people want to do to us, now and tomorrow. Armed with that knowledge, we can, perhaps, chart a path to different and better stars.

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

Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter (William Collins) by Kat Hill

In the summer of 1847, Oxford academic Arthur Hugh Clough, in a slump, travelled north to the Scottish Highlands seeking solitude, solace, a direction forward. There, he settled into a “Hesperian seclusion,” in a “pleasant, quiet, sabbatic country inn”, “out of the realm of civility”. The following year, he published The Bothie of Toperna-fuosich, a narrative poem of love and adventure.

In the summer of 2020, Oxford academic Katherine Hill, in a slump, travelled a similar path. She settled into a small mountain lodge, in the belief that “bothies would provide me with a kind of shelter as I navigated the complicated path away from a life that was making me unhappy.” In 2024, she published Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter, a work of love and adventure.

Bothies are buildings found in the hinterland of the British countryside, often old farm structures, croft houses or stalking lodges. Kept unlocked and free to use, these simple spaces are primarily used by outdoor enthusiasts as overnight lodgings. There may or may not be a fireplace, a table, a raised structure for sleeping, some leftover accoutrements from previous visitors. Through this inherent minimalism, Hill uses “bothy culture” as a conduit “to examine the appeal and value of a simpler way of being, as well as the problems it throws up.” Hovering above that investigation is a search for acceptance into a community “built on a humbler sense of people sharing community in places that are a little damp, sometimes muddy, often smoky and dark”.

In every chapter we find the author in a different bothy (11 in Scotland, one in Wales), usually escaping some undetailed stress, pressure, anxiety. Upon arrival, she flips through the “bothy book”, or guest log, and from there creates, through a series of sometimes tortured assumptions, an essay framed around a theme: secrets, walking, wilderness, climate change. Yet what begins as an interesting inquiry ends as a kitsch homage to the life pastoral.

That Clough doesn’t feature in Hill’s book at all seems an odd omission, given her background as a historian and the similarities of their themes. Compare Hill – “The apparent simplicity of everything you do in a bothy made me feel at peace ... I sought a respite from the stresses of life ... That sense of walking away from the world into the wild ...” – with Clough: “This fierce furious walking—o’er mountain-top and moorland / Sleeping in shieling and bothie, with drover on hill-side sleeping / Folded in plaid, where sheep are strewn thicker than rocks by Loch Awen / This fierce furious travel unwearying…”

Hill might not mention tartan or sheep, but the Victorian idea of a better world to be found in nature, poverty and “simple folk” still penetrates modern nature writing, as urban and suburban writers individually discover over and over again the virtues of a stroll in the countryside.

Hill shares a lot of the characteristics of other British nature writers: a tendency to use Latin; the predictable tutting at the excesses of the Global North; frequent soliloquies on guilt and guilty pleasures. Self-interrogation can undermine the authority of non-fiction, as it does here where Hill doubts and redoubts herself. Post-statement qualifiers like “Maybe that’s all irrelevant, or maybe it’s just virtue-signalling from my position of privilege” appear again and again. I found myself imploring Hill to make a bold statement and stick with it.

I have schlepped to dozens of bothies across Scotland, including some of those mentioned by Hill. Arriving at one after a long walk is indeed a satisfying experience, like cool water on scalded skin. I’ve found each of them different, sometimes alone, sometimes occupied by a rogue’s gallery of drunks, intellects, goons, sweethearts, fools and gentlefolk.

Hill had run-ins with strangers, too, but, for one seeking community, she mentions them only in passing. Bothying has much to recommend it – some of it captured by Hill, yet most of it remains out there, for oneself to find.

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

There’s a new preprint out about how tools like ChatGPT might be affecting human cognition. It comes courtesy of MIT Media Lab titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.”  As I mention every time I talk about a preprint, I’d like to remind you …

As I went to meet Alex O’Connor for lunch in Soho, I have to admit I was feeling slightly intimidated. O’Connor is only 25 years old, yet he’s already managed to amass more than 1.3 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, the Cosmic Skeptic. He shows up wearing a black leather jacket, white T-shirt and silver necklace, and I’m immediately struck by his intense confidence – invaluable onstage, no doubt, but disarming in person.

I’m keen to know how O’Connor became the media’s go-to atheist pundit. He is celebrated for having respectful, in-depth conversations with the religious, as well as the irreligious. “I do think I’m a good interviewer,” he says. “I think I know how to ask the right questions of the right kind of person.” Apart from making a living from his own prolific output, including the podcast Within Reason, he is now the man you call to join a panel on the future of Christianity, or moderate a debate between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson (the episode on memes and archetypes, aired on Peterson’s channel in October, quickly went viral). Just don’t ask Peter Hitchens to go for a drink with him – more on that later.

O’Connor knew from his teenage years that he wanted to broadcast his thoughts to the world. His first video, uploaded when he was just 17, was “The Paradox of Prayer – Why Praying Is Pointless”. “Hey everybody; it’s your friendly neighbourhood atheist here,” it begins. It is much more didactic and performative than the content that would come to define his channel. The distinctive moustache is years away. But his articulate commentary and ability to talk without hesitation (I suspect he’d be excellent on Just A Minute) is there fully formed. Not long after, when he “scraped” into Oxford to study philosophy and theology, he had 150,000 subscribers. By the time he left university, being a YouTuber was his job.

Since then, he’s made videos about subjects as varied as ChatGPT, veganism, pandemics and nuclear missiles. But it’s his encounter with Peter Hitchens that ranks as his most popular, with 3.5 million views. The reason it made such a splash is because, 42 minutes into the interview, Hitchens says he is fed up with talking about drug decriminalisation and spends 17 minutes berating O’Connor while standing off-camera, trying to leave. Hitchens erroneously claims that he was there under false pretences, leaving the baffled O’Connor to calmly defend himself. “I never ever want to see you again,” Hitchens says.

“It was entertaining,” O’Connor says now, knowing full well that the drama did wonders for his channel.

There is another Hitchens who looms large in any conversation about atheism, of course. O’Connor’s rise to fame occurred during, and perhaps contributed to, a cultural drift away from the New Atheism of the early 2000s. When O’Connor started YouTubing, Christopher Hitchens had already been dead for years. “He was the greatest rhetorician of the past 100 years,” O’Connor says, invoking the 2009 debate in which Hitchens and Stephen Fry trounce Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan on the question “Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?” But he now thinks the late atheist firebrand was less like a philosopher and more like a stand-up comedian, whose points tended to fall apart under scrutiny. He believes, in fact, that Hitchens was selling a kind of con. “He was insinuating that he had some kind of objective ethical framework, the adoption of which would improve the lives of those who adopt it. And that just hasn’t been the case.”

O’Connor first met the most renowned of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, as a student. Since then, they’ve had many encounters – recently in front of a packed Los Angeles theatre, with O’Connor hosting an evening on Dawkins’ last US tour. While he recognises Dawkins’ impressive contributions, he also points to what he believes are some “quite outdated and shallow ideas” on issues of theology. The appeal and the apparent promise of Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris et al were positive, he says. If they hadn’t been, the movement wouldn’t have experienced the colossal level of support and coverage it achieved. But he calls its legacy “hollow and lukewarm”, as it failed to give people a sense of meaning in their lives. “I think that basically New Atheism failed to live up to its promises,” he says. He adds that he’s unsurprised that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the conservative thinker and former politician, another of the prominent New Atheists, recently turned to Christianity.

Indeed, O’Connor believes that the Christian faith is making a sort of comeback. “I don’t know if Christianity will become dominant again – especially in England – but in the online intellectual space, let’s say, it’s becoming cool to be Christian.” When I press him on this point, he admits that it’s hard to put a finger on, and is anecdotal rather than statistical, but he believes that “something is changing in the air; the culture seems to be shifting a little bit.”

He points to figures like Jordan Peterson, who may be filling the vacuum that New Atheism left behind. Peterson offers sometimes controversial advice on how to live a good and fulfilling life which, while you might disagree with it, has captured the hearts of many. The Canadian philosopher is agnostic – but, much like O’Connor himself, seems to find value in Christianity’s teachings. Peterson’s latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, analyses Biblical stories in order to promote understanding “of our souls and our societies”.

O’Connor doesn’t think people are taking Peterson as seriously as they used to, but he finds much to admire in him. “I can tell that he is a man who really cares about what he’s doing. And he listens to you. It’s the one thing I always say to people; if you speak to him he stares at you. A bomb could go off and he’s there going, ‘Mm, mm, mm-hmm.’”

Peterson’s restyling as a lifestyle guru has proved particularly attractive to young men, who make up much of his follower base. He has also been accused of promoting regressive, patriarchal ideals. I ask O’Connor about why the online atheist community is male-dominated, with figures like Aron Ra, Matt Dillihunty and TJ Kirk – and of course O’Connor himself – attracting most attention. I also ask whether he sees any irony in atheism decrying misogyny while potentially being guilty of similar crimes itself. “Both YouTube and philosophy are male-dominated areas,” he says. “I’m not sure that there are more male than female atheists, but there are more who speak about it publicly. The same is likely true of Christianity, and certainly of Islam.” He reflects that prominent female atheists (Rebecca Watson, Emma Thorne and Jaclyn Glenn, for example) face far more negative attention from online trolls. “I find those women who manage to persevere in the face of it to be of outstanding courage,” he adds. “It is difficult to know how to fix this problem, but it is unfortunately not unique to any one online community, but rather a feature of everyday reality for many women, and more urgent still for that reason.”

While the disproportionate lack of high-profile women might have discouraged female viewers and engagement, might young men also be attracted to the atheist online community because they are seeking a sense of identity and direction? If so, O’Connor’s influence over his millions of viewers becomes even more noteworthy. He tells me that he’s an “aisle-reacher”, bridging a gap between Christians and atheists. Still, you might imagine that the Cosmic Skeptic, someone who regularly lambasts religion from an informed perspective, would fall confidently down on the atheist side of the spectrum. Not so. Instead he’s “painfully agnostic”, telling me that he’d love to be a Christian. “I’m still awaiting my religious experience. I hope and pray that it comes one day soon.” Does he really mean that? “Yeah, seriously, I mean that.”

What about it is appealing, I wonder? He says that when he’s close to being convinced by the arguments of Christianity, it’s because they scratch an itch that lies somewhere between comfort and logic. “It makes sense of something a bit more inexplicable,” he says. “It makes sense of the moral sensibilities of the people. It makes sense of some of the foundational mysteries of the universe that people just assume quite blindly that science will one day answer [but] they’re not even in the category of scientific explanation.”

Gravity, for example – while Newton was able to describe it, scientists still can’t explain why the laws of physics act as they do. O’Connor seems to believe they never will. By analogy, he imagines coming across a Shakespearean text completely cold, and noticing that it abides by various “laws”. “It’s like saying the laws of literacy will one day be able to describe the origin of a book of Shakespearean sonnets. It’s just a category error.”

While I may not agree on the idea that Christianity might better explain our world than science, O’Connor is a formidable opponent I wouldn’t want to go up against on any subject, let alone the one that he has been researching for half his life. When I leave my encounter with him, I don’t storm out and I certainly don’t feel like I never want to see him again. I think, in fact, that we’ll all be seeing a good deal more of him in the years to come.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: When I was a kid, people were allowed to smoke inside restaurants. Prior to the ‘80s they would just smoke anywhere, but by the time I was old enough to not be a little …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Fifty years ago, a seminal film hit the theaters to rave reviews and massive crowds. It would go on to become a classic, but in doing so it would stoke a fear so great …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Every now and again, I get a comment on an older video along the lines of “wow, this aged like milk. Like this guy, who thinks my video about how the Shroud of Turin …

Stuart Phelps opens the door to Cafe Conscious, a busy coffee shop in the middle of Barton Hill estate in Bristol. As he steps in, staff and customers alike turn around to greet him. He’s come to talk about the struggles facing people living here, their distrust of the council, and a community vision to build a huge vertical solar farm on the tower blocks.

The cafe is a hub of activity for other reasons, too. On Tuesday evenings, another residential campaign – East Bristol Open Roads – meets here to oppose the council’s low-traffic neighbourhood plans. Right-wing politicians are ramping up rhetoric criticising policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused of starting a “culture war on climate”. In this light, it might seem that the two community groups in Barton Hill would slot into opposing sides: one in opposition to change and one in favour. Instead, the relationship between them is quite different, offering a potentially important lesson for decision-makers when paving the road to net zero.

Barton Hill is among the most deprived areas in the country. Most residents identify as Muslim and non-white, and more than half of the children there are growing up in poverty. The estate area has a history of mobilising over energy projects. Back in 2017, a resident-led campaign chased off planning applications for two gas power plants, one of which was to be built just 100 metres from a nursery school. This battle helped set the estate on a new path towards community-owned energy.

Community energy describes groups of people who come together to buy, manage and/or generate renewable energy, or to reduce energy use. Projects can vary in size and structure, from solar panels on the roof of a community centre to an onshore wind turbine or, in the case of Barton Hill, a battery storage project co-owned by Bristol Energy Cooperative. With a strong emphasis on community benefit and participation, the sector has huge potential to raise public support for renewable energy generation. Successful projects can replicate this model by allocating revenues to help other community energy groups grow, which is what happened in Barton Hill.

A grant generated via the battery helped Stuart and others set up Barton Heat, a community organisation which set out to find a way to create renewable energy to serve the residents’ needs. Through partnerships with several universities, feasibility studies have been conducted to assess what shape the projects could take. One idea is to set up a local energy cooperative, with residents co-designing and managing a renewable energy project for the eight tower blocks.

Inequality and distrust

One of the tower blocks on the estate is Barton House. In 2023, concerns over structural integrity prompted the council to evacuate 400 of its residents overnight, leaving people traumatised. “I was there that night. It was sort of like a dream,” Fadumo Farah, community activist and resident representative of Barton House told me on the phone. “I grew up in a war zone in Somalia. We used to run out in the middle of the night all the time. It was very triggering for me.”

After months in temporary accommodation, highlighted in one report as unclean and overcrowded, families were eventually told to return to their homes. “We have a real feeling of segregation,” Fadumo continued. “Most people in the high rises are Global Majority,” a collective term for people who are black, brown, mixed heritage or indigenous to the global south. “There is mould and damp. The children are going through respiratory issues, anxiety, all those things. The East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood trial added another layer,” she said. “Right now it is being forced on us ... There is all this inequality being created.”

Fadumo was talking about a trial scheme run by Bristol City Council, which aims to stop drivers cutting through residential areas, including Barton Hill. “Liveable Neighbourhoods can make communities quieter, safer, healthier and improve air quality for everyone,” the council say on their website. “We are working with people who live, work, study and travel through east Bristol to design people-friendly streets.” But not everyone is happy. “Some residents felt boxed in, not listened to. Trust in change has worn thin,” Fadumo said. Among some of the concerns raised over the road closures were that businesses would not be able to receive deliveries, and disabled people could not use their cars. Protests early this year put a brief pause on the plan, which has since resumed its roll-out.

Back at Cafe Conscious, Stuart sips his coffee. “It is the feeling of being powerless rather than any sense of being ‘anti-net zero’ which lies at the heart of this anger,” he says. The government is committed to reaching net zero by 2050, which means building more renewable energy generation. Central to this is Labour’s GB Energy Bill, which sets up an investment body to fund such projects. But as energy bills continue to soar, it is becoming increasingly important for people to see the material benefits of the
energy transition.

“GB Energy was such a popular policy going into the election,” said Sarah Nankivell, director of research and strategy at think tank Common Wealth. “The trust was there. The public supported it and it had backing. Now there is an increasingly dwindling window: if people don’t see any concrete benefit from GB Energy (and net zero by extension), instead they just see their energy bills going up and up over months and years, the perception is going to be that it was at best something that was a waste of money and didn’t happen, and at worst something harmful to household living standards.”

The rise of community energy

Improving living standards is the theme that unites Barton Heat and East Bristol Open Roads. In fact, both groups are evolving to become different arms – one on campaigning and one on sustainable energy – of the same organisation, the Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum. “People want a better neighbourhood with less pollution, better services and better chances for their kids, and are tired of imposed ‘solutions’ that actually benefit everyone but them,” Stuart added.

Barton Heat is all about facilitating ways for locals to design their own energy supply, brainstorming ideas together. One requirement, for example, is that residents are able to stay in their homes while the project is being constructed. This might affect which ideas are feasible. “What we need is imagination,” Stuart said. “People say change is difficult but change is never difficult if you’re giving people what they want.”

Research suggests that, generally speaking, community energy is indeed what most people want. A poll of nearly 5,000 people in Britain, published in January by Common Wealth, showed that 60 per cent of people would support a community-owned renewable energy project in their area, compared to 40 per cent for a privately owned one.
Currently, community-owned energy is a small sector, with plenty of room to grow. In 2023, there were around 580 organisations across Britain, according to data from Community Energy England. These contributed £12.9 million to local economies from organisational spending and grants, with a capacity to generate 400 megawatts of energy.

After years of obstructive policies, there was a lot of hope that the Labour Party’s new vision of home-grown renewable energy to replace expensive imported gas would herald a new era for the sector. By tapping funding streams that were outlined in the GB Energy Bill, the Local Power Plan promises to support local authorities and community groups to vastly expand community-owned projects as a key part of the road to net zero. Its aim is to ramp up community energy to 8 gigawatts – enough to power up to 4.35 million homes – over the next five years.

Participation for positive change

But funding is only part of the challenge. For community-owned energy projects to succeed, consent has to be granted for construction, and trust needs to be built, so that residents feel their voice matters. That means opening up the sector to people who might not normally get involved and encouraging open discussion in both rural and urban areas. Most community energy groups follow the co-operative structure and raise money through share offers. But if the main route to membership is limited to financial investment, that puts obvious limitations on the demographic.

“We knew generally the sector was skewed old, male and white, but we didn’t know why beyond guesses,” said Nick Stromberg from the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), which conducted a research project with community energy group Repowering London last year. The project started after Repowering experimented with a share offer. To encourage more people to join, they asked for a minimum investment of £1. Despite this, uptake was low. “We found the idea of investment was a big barrier at the beginning but there were other factors, too, like lack of integration into ... different communities in terms of culture and activism,” Nick said. One conclusion was to find ways to participate that weren’t financial. These included taking part in training sessions on cooperative business models and how to spot good roof space for solar panels.

The findings were very locally rooted, he added. For the sector to expand, there’s a need for more accurate and representative data. Repowering London has published a toolkit for building more inclusive community energy cooperatives, for other groups to use. Applying a participatory research approach, the project recruited two well-known and trusted community members from North Kensington and Newham. These women conducted engagement activities using co-design techniques, which aimed to encourage participants to shape solutions around their desires and needs. Findings from the research were integrated into the launch of Community Energy Newham’s first share offer in March.

Another project, also organised through CSE and run in partnership with community energy co-ops across south-west England, targets a different demographic.

Future Energy Landscapes focuses on semi-rural populations where larger renewable energy projects could be built. At workshops, participants are divided into groups and asked to decide where they would like to see different projects built. CSE then calculate how much of the local area’s energy needs these would meet and how much could be sold to the grid. The process is designed to give participants as much agency as possible and give them the chance to imagine what a local energy project could do for them.

The workshops work best when there are different opinions in the room so that the organisers are not simply “preaching to the converted”, as Neil Best, a senior planner at CSE said. “One of the reasons that FEL [Future Energy Landscapes] was created in the first place was because there had been, in the mid-2010s, a rising amount of conflict between communities and the development of renewables, especially wind turbines,” he continued. So far, no projects have been built as a direct result of the workshops, but with more taking place this year, that could change soon.

Income for the community

On the other side of Bristol, another community is reaping the rewards from a project that was over a decade in the making. Last year, the resident-led energy project Ambition Lawrence Weston made history when construction finished on their community-owned onshore wind turbine – the largest in England. Lawrence Weston is a post-war housing estate on the north-west outskirts of the city. Mark Pepper is one of the co-founders of the project. I met him at an impressive new community building that opened last autumn, paid for, in part, through community-owned energy.

The story started in around 2010, when a group of residents got fed up of seeing services dry up in their local area, and started to feel that they had become “the forgotten estate in Bristol”. Through door-knocking and holding workshops, they compiled a community plan, which gained legal clout via the Localism Act.

Unlike other consultations and surveys that residents had come across in the past – where people “parachuted in with their own agenda”, Mark says – this time it was neighbours asking neighbours. “That’s the beauty of training up our local residents; we all have a vested interest in doing what we were doing,” he adds. People are also more likely to respond when they’re approached by their neighbours, he adds.

These efforts led them to get involved with the construction of a community-owned solar farm, which in turn inspired them to explore the possibility of wind energy. It took four more years of hard work to build support to get around the highly prohibitive planning restrictions, but in 2023, the turbine was completed. The first annual payment of around £100,000 came through in February, from the energy company Ovo. The residents decide where the money goes, through regular consultations.

Mark says he has seen a change in the way people in Lawrence Weston feel about how their voices are heard. “People are not only engaged with us more now, they’re engaged with the political system,” he says. “We’ve seen the figures for election turnouts increase. I think that’s a combination of them feeling more empowered and having a better understanding of their rights. For example, the Neighbourhood Development Plan needed to go through a local referendum. We had more people turn out for that than for the local by-elections or national elections. They relate to it a lot more.” He adds: “We can’t even afford to turn our gas boilers on, let alone rip them out and put in an air source heat pump,” which the government is promoting. “Climate action and community development are exactly the same thing. It took us a long time to realise this. So for example, climate action groups want to see a reduction in carbon to save the planet. We want to see a reduction in carbon to save money in our pocket. A really well insulated home is going to save on the bills. It’s the same goal.”

A lot of people on the estate don’t even know about the wind turbine, which is located some distance away, he says. What matters most is that they’re seeing positive change in their area, whether it’s through the new community hub and playgrounds being built or the work being done to improve the energy efficiency of homes.

It’s a lesson that the government would do well to listen to as it tries to keep public opinion on side. As the cost-of-living crisis bites ever harder, the window of trust to deliver on GB Energy and the net zero goal is closing.

Back in Barton Hill, Fadumo is feeling positive about how the community engagement work for Barton Heat has been going. She describes one workshop, where university students discussed innovative ways of positioning solar panels. “But what really stood out was how beautiful it looked,” she said. “It was clear they weren’t just thinking about technology, but about pride, place and people.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Delighted to say that tonight at 8pm I will be presenting a 60 min BBC Radio 4 programme on mind magic, focusing on the amazing David Berglas. After being broadcast, it will be available on BBC Sounds.

Here is the full description:

Join psychologist and magician Professor Richard Wiseman on a journey into the strange world of mentalism or mind magic, and meet a group of entertainers who produce the seemingly impossible on demand. Discover “The Amazing” Joseph Dunninger, Britain’s Maurice Fogel (“the World’s Greatest Mind Reader”), husband and wife telepathic duo The Piddingtons, and the self-styled “Psycho-Magician”, Chan Canasta.

These entertainers all set the scene for one man who redefined the genre – the extraordinary David Berglas. This International Man of Mystery astonished the world with incredible stunts – hurtling blindfold down the famous Cresta toboggan run in Switzerland, levitating a table on the streets of Nairobi, and making a piano vanish before hundreds of live concert goers. Berglas was a pioneer of mass media magic, constantly appeared on the BBC radio and TV, captivated audiences the world over and inspired many modern-day marvels, including Derren Brown.

For six decades, Berglas entertained audiences worldwide on stage and television, mentoring hundreds of young acts and helping to establish mentalism or mind magic as one of the most popular forms of magical entertainment, helping to inspire the likes of Derren Brown, Dynamo and David Blaine. The originator of dozens of illusions still performed by celebrated performers worldwide, Berglas is renowned for his version of a classic illusion known as Any Card at Any Number or ACAAN, regarded by many as the ‘holy grail’ of magic tricks and something that still defies explanation.

With the help of some recently unearthed archive recordings, Richard Wiseman, a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and a friend of David Berglas, explores the surreal history of mentalism, its enduring popularity and the life and legacy of the man many regard as Master of the Impossible.

Featuring interviews with Andy Nyman, Derren Brown, Stephen Frayne, Laura London, Teller, Chris Woodward, Martin T Hart and Marvin Berglas.

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

I have lots of talks and shows coming up soon. Meanwhile, here are two podcast interviews that I did recently. ….

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

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

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