This knee gets worse and worse — now swollen and very painful. It is agony to get up out of bed, and once out, it’s painful to get up again, so I’m spending most of my time taking the path of least resistance and staying in bed, which is incredibly boring. I have to get up to use the bathroom, but then my wife got me a bed pan, so even that incentive has been lost. She’s hovering over me all day long because we both know how catastrophic it would be if I were to fall.

I have an orthopedics appointment on Monday morning. I fear my travails will not end at that point.

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 …

I have seen a doctor. I was x-rayed. I was informed that I have lovely knees, with no signs of arthritic degeneration. I got a blood test for my uric acid levels — they’re normal. I got a pressure bandage. I have an appointment for the orthopedic doctor for next week or the week after. But there are no quick fixes.

I hobbled out in just as much pain as when I went in.

I guess I’m just supposed to cross my fingers and hope it gets better, and if it gets worse, see an orthopedist for more tests.

Right now that means I just sit and wait for a week or more, and walk as little as possible. I’m dreading having to get up to walk 10 meters to use the bathroom.

I was doing so well this summer! Regular light exercise, joints working smoothly, no aches or pains…and then last night, something went bad in my right knee, with no warning, no sudden snap, nothin’. I have a very specific, localized pain on the lateral aspect of my right knee, just one spot smaller than the palm of my hand.

I tried to figure out what’s going on, but have you ever looked at knee anatomy? It’s madness.

As I sit here, it doesn’t hurt, and there’s no obvious swelling, but if I try to stand on it, it’s a sharp, tearing pain, and worst of all, the joint has lost some stability, and I keep feeling like it’s going to buckle and send me to the floor.

My non-medical diagnosis is that one of the many rubber bands that Nature has strapped around 3 bones and a kneecap to hold them together has snapped. Intelligent design, my ass. It’s like a 5-year old tried to put some sticks together by wrapping them up with lots of duct tape.

You wouldn’t want to take a bath in 70°C water. That would be painful. That’s the temperature of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. We had a dramatic demonstration of how awful it would when a bison stumbled into the spring and was cooked to death.

That’s horrific, but unsurprising. We last visited Yellowstone several decades ago, after a major fire had swept through the place. It wasn’t exactly wholesome for the kids — black charred snags everywhere, heaps of bones where some animal had died in place, and the hot springs were surrounded with skeletons in the muck. It would have made the visit even better if the kids could have watched a massive animal die a horrible painful death. Yellowstone isn’t Disneyland.

I’d rather spare them this sort of thing, though.

Yellowstone’s thermal pools might not be capable of dissolving organic matter, but bodies tend to disappear quickly once they fall in. When Il Hun Ro, 70, fell into the Abyss Pool in the West Thumb Geyser Basin around July 7, the only evidence at the scene was several “dark clumps” and Ro’s shoe-clad foot, which was recovered from the water.

Nature isn’t kind.

A person named Elise has compiled a spreadsheet of responses from neurodivergent people about their jobs and careers. I learned something from browsing through it. Most of the respondents seen to favor jobs that don’t require extensive interactions with people, but there was on grade school teacher there — they liked the strict schedule. There was a PhD researcher in the mix, but they seem to have lucked into a position with no teaching, just field and lab work. One paramedic says, “Dopamine dump in intense situations feels normal to people with ADHD.”

It seems neurodivergent people are diverse. Who knew?

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.”

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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.

My daughter was recently getting ready for a “2010s” themed party at university. For Gen Zs, this is the decade of their teenagehood, clearly distinct from the years either side. (She wore skinny jeans, by the way, and there were lots of plaid shirts.) I realised I’d have trouble distinguishing between the first two decades of the current century – the memories of my early years are, of course, imprinted much more deeply than the blur of post-parental adulthood. But it also got me thinking about how the past is telescoped down into a few images.

My own teenage years are having a “moment” right now, with an overlapping run of 80s themed art exhibitions. Two were inspired by performance artist and wild dresser Leigh Bowery. While Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at the Fashion and Textile Museum centred on his legendary nightclub Taboo, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a larger celebration of his boundary-breaking life and career. A third exhibition, The Face: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery, is dedicated to the art of the first youth culture magazine, which blazed a highly influential trail from 1981.

Set up by a small cohort of former music journalists, The Face celebrated multi-racial urban culture, rather than the traditional glamorous Anglo-centric fashion brands. Set up in those golden decades before the internet destroyed the economic model for magazine journalism, its beautiful pages were a visual and cerebral feast of handmade fonts and cutting-edge design, with feature spreads on what real teenagers were doing on the streets and in clubs.

A compilation of newsreel footage at the start of the exhibition tried to give you a condensed sense of the era, which I found unsettling. The 1990 poll tax riot was captured alongside the mid-80s protests against Section 28 – the legislation that made it unlawful to “intentionally promote homosexuality”. Everything felt mashed together.

It seemed that the huge number of young visitors drawn to the exhibition weren’t that interested in the politics. Rather, it was the handmade fashion that really appealed – with designers such as BodyMap stitching boutique outfits from new stretch fabrics like viscose Lycra.

The focus of some visitors on the retro fashion is sweet (like the rise of Bridgerton/Jane Austen cosplay in the era of streaming and Etsy), but looking solely at the clothes risks missing the broader context – the remarkable political and economic dissonance at the heart of The Face. Here was a glossy magazine which flourished, despite launching just before a terrible industrial recession in Britain, the like of which has not been matched since. If you looked closely at the captions on the joyous and sometimes provocative photos, you learned that many of its talented young photographers, writers and art directors were paid little.

Instead, they took up a new grant programme – the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, launched in 1983 by Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government – which guaranteed a state income of £40 a week for up to a year to young people setting up small enterprises. There is now a convincing case that this scheme essentially funded an entire generation of British creatives, including photographers, Young British Artists and Britpop musicians, who mostly turned out to be hostile to Conservativism. At a time when culture war battles are raging, the lesson being forgotten about the 80s, at least in Britain, is the strange symbiosis of a government deemed hostile to young and gay people with some of those very same creative young citizens.

We are also seeing a reassessment of the Ronald Reagan presidency. Back in 1980 there was much satire around the shock of his election. Now he’s talked of with almost reverence compared to President Trump. But many of the battles being fought today over supposed “woke” culture in arts institutions and the media were first raised back then.

In selectively remembering the 80s, we are perhaps seeking a nostalgic escape from the darker cultural future we see ahead.

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My noise-cancelling headphones are one of my favourite possessions. I wear them almost constantly – to listen to podcasts while squeezed next to strangers on the bus, to audiobooks when I’m cooking, or to music when I need a little boost to get my steps in. My headphones let me escape boredom. But if I spend all my alone time with content piped in through my ears, what am I doing to my brain?

I was struck by this question one day, when I forgot my headphones. It was just a little errand, 20 minutes or so, but the experience of being out there in the world with no visual or audio entertainment, no buffer of any kind, was so jarring that I had to find a bench and sit down to contemplate for a moment.

I was suddenly extremely aware that my brain was receiving no input. I remembered how I’d mocked the social media trend of “raw-dogging” long-haul flights, where people refuse any form of entertainment – sometimes including food and sleep – and instead sit in silence for hours as a kind of mental challenge. Even the more benign and well-meaning #monkmode – where people isolate themselves from distractions in order to focus on a task – and #silentwalk trends on TikTok seemed a little absurd to me. Did we really need to invent new terms for the simple act of putting away our electronic devices?

But sitting on that bench, I felt genuinely flummoxed. For a long time, I realised, the only activity I’d experienced absent of any kind of input was sleep, and maybe showering. I pictured my brain as the spinning beachball of doom, like an old computer straining under too many commands. As I went about my day, the thought stayed with me.

I decided to look into it and, it turns out, we might want to think twice about our headphone habits. Boredom, I discovered, has a very specific function. You don’t have to do nothing for very long before your brain realises it’s been given an opportunity. Let’s daydream! Let’s mull over yesterday, and ponder about the future! Scientists call this the Default Mode Network, which is the brain state that activates when we’re awake but not focused on anything. As we idle, our minds drift and make unexpected connections – a little boredom may be a key ingredient in creativity.

Intrigued, I decided to see what would happen if I spent more time in my Default Mode Network. That weekend, I went for a long walk in the park, my headphones in my bag like a security blanket. Yes, I was doing a #silentwalk, feeling pleased with myself. As the novelty wore off and I made an effort to wear my headphones less in the months that followed, I felt my brain protesting, begging for some light entertainment. But soon, something truly remarkable occurred: I realised I was feeling less tense, my mood lifted, and I was less irritated by interruptions. I’m pretty sure my memory improved, too.

Was this actually happening because I was giving my brain more time to process information, lay down memories and make connections? Or was it just a coincidence?

To find out, I called Matti Vuorre, an assistant professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Vuorre studies human nature in the context of how we use digital technologies, and how it impacts our wellbeing and cognitive functioning. Asked why it can be so difficult to just let our phones be, Vuorre says it’s early days for research in this field: “Humans have a natural tendency towards curiosity. We need to learn in a similar vein as how we have to eat. Once we have the so-called information superhighway in our pockets, resisting may be difficult.” That’s good news, I guess – I’m not jonesing for entertainment because I lack discipline, but because information and novelty are simply irresistible.

What about the impact on our attention spans, though? Vuorre cautions that attention span is very difficult to measure scientifically. “It’s too complicated to quantify at the neural level,” he says. But what we do know is that an increasing number of us are reporting difficulties with sustaining our attention. In a study by the Policy Institute and Centre for Attention Studies at King’s College London in 2022, half of respondents said they sometimes struggled leaving their phones alone when they were supposed to focus. About half also believed that their attention span was poorer than it used to be.

Moreover, respondents were underestimating the problem. They thought they checked their phones 25 times a day, but it was more like 80. And while we might think we’re being more efficient by multi-tasking, research suggests the opposite. What we’re really doing when we think we’re “multi-tasking” is very rapidly switching between tasks, which has a cognitive cost. The myth of multi-tasking was first busted as far back as 1927 by the psychologist Arthur Jersild, and his findings have been repeatedly corroborated by studies showing that it tends to make us a little slower, more prone to error and quicker to tire.

What else might be happening to my brain as it’s constantly flooded by endless content and information? Vuorre says that studying a brain that’s bombarded with stimuli is “not a common experimental setup”, apart from the particular history of military experiments. Loud, repetitive music, for example, has been deployed by the US military to “break” detainees in places like Guantanamo Bay. While it’s absurd to compare the effects of torture to the brain rot that sets in after too much infinite scroll, it’s revealing to learn what happens in this extreme case of sensory overload.

According to New York University research into the use of music in a range of detention camps, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008, loud, repetitive music stops the psychological process of orientation. The brain is constantly working on detecting patterns and making order out of chaos. Being forced to endure hours of “I Love You” by Barney the Dinosaur – a commonly used torture song by the US military – prevents the brain from organising itself. Eventually, it breaks down your ability to make sense of the world.

But I have control over whether, and for how long, I choose to bombard my brain with audio stimuli. Putting things in perspective, we know that every generation freaks out about new media. Not long ago we were extremely worried about video games, and before that, what would happen to kids who watched a lot of television. The initial proliferation of newspapers was maligned for stopping people from talking to each other, and in the 1800s, novels were considered harmful for young women – too many books could inflame passions, spread radical ideas and make the ladies uppity.

Smartphones may be just the newest version of this panic – at least Vuorre seems to think so. “A hundred years from now, some other version of you and me will be having this exact same discussion about some technology that we can’t yet imagine,” he says. “This [conversation] will keep happening.”

But smartphones do appear to represent a seismic shift in our use of technology. They’re the first devices to give us access to nearly limitless content, anywhere and at any time. To have the same experience during my 90s childhood I would have had to carry a Discman, CDs and audiobooks, a pocket radio, a portable TV, newspapers, comic books and art books, a calendar and alarm clock, a set of stationery, a walkie talkie, and I still wouldn’t have half the functions of my smartphone. All of these things existed in the 90s, but because they weren’t in my pocket, there wasn’t the same urge to make use of every moment for productivity and entertainment.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone when it launched in 2007 – we’d had the BlackBerry for five years already – but when the App Store saw the light of day only a year later, the game was changed for ever.

Now, nearly two decades on, people are starting to resist the lure of constant connectivity, going far beyond the #monkmode and #silentwalk lifestyle trends. Increasing numbers are going back to dumbphones, in a deliberate attempt to wean themselves off constant stimuli – so much so that Nokia has started releasing updated versions of its classic brick phones: a new version of the 6310 model came out in 2021, and there’s lots more to choose from. And if you can’t imagine life without map apps and texting, don’t worry – most modern dumbphones have those features. This makes them a good option for kids, and a few early experiments with dumbphone-only policies in schools have shown promise.

It’s an alluring idea, for sure. But whenever I look into getting a dumbphone to free me from temptation, I’m deterred by a desire to retain access to all manner of boring but useful apps, for things like checking train times and accessing event tickets, and the one that plays a gong sound when my meditation time is up. So, for now, I’ve kept my smartphone and my beloved headphones, but I’ve done a cull of my apps and keep a tight grip on the notifications.

Most importantly, I keep my phone out of sight when I want to give my brain a chance to chill. It’s not enough to turn it over on the table and steel yourself. Research published by the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 found that simply seeing your phone can be distracting, even if the sound is turned off. As test subjects tried to work with their phones next to them, researchers concluded that the effort of not engaging with something as tempting as your phone became its own source of “brain drain”.

To take advantage of some good recent weather, I started walking the Jubilee Greenway around London, while deliberately keeping my headphones in my bag until I’m back on the train. It’s just me on those walks, and hours of placing one foot in front of another. I have to say, it’s been some of the best time I’ve spent with my brain lately – or should I say, with myself.

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In a war-ravaged street in Mosul, Iraq, a dozen boys are filmed playing football. They run, scramble, shoot, dive in the dust, and occasionally hug when scoring a goal. Yet there is something heart-breaking about this football game – it is played with an imaginary ball. This is haram football, haram meaning forbidden, banned by Islamic State. In 2015, two years before the film was made, 13 boys had been publicly executed by a firing squad for watching a football game on television. The young players here are taking no chances; gunfire is heard in the background as the film ends.

Made in 2017 by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, it is one of a series of short films of children’s street games from around the world made over the past two decades, now part of an international travelling exhibition which stopped off at London’s Barbican in 2024. Impressively, the Children’s Games series is in the public domain and free to watch online, where it has become, according to Alÿs, “something completely and gloriously uncontrollable”. Having racked up thousands of viewings worldwide, it is now being used in refugee camps and child therapy practices.

Some games will be familiar to New Humanist readers – skipping, kite-flying, rock-paper-scissors, hopscotch, leapfrog, freeze (“grandmother’s footsteps”), “It” or chase tag – but others have emerged during war, civil disruption and in conditions of bitter poverty. In Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2023, Alÿs filmed a group of young boys dressed in mock army fatigues, carrying handmade wooden assault rifles and waving down vehicles passing through their village. The cars are stopped and searched and drivers asked to pronounce a password, palyanitsya (a Ukrainian bread but also now the name of a military drone) – a shibboleth that Russians find hard to pronounce. This is serious play.

Children’s Games records both imaginative play and more rule-governed games. Alÿs cites the crucial distinction made by French philosopher Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1961) between paideia (“play”, ancient Greek) and ludi (“games”, Latin). Play evokes more informal and spontaneous forms of recreation, indoors or outdoors, ranging from a single child talking to an imaginary friend to a group of children building a sandcastle, or adults kicking a ball around in a park. In contrast, games are profoundly rule-governed, as psychologist Jean Piaget argued in his pioneering study The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932), where he concluded that even a game of marbles contains “an extremely complex system of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own”.

In elaborating and finessing such rules, children start by accepting them as “divine laws” but later realise they can be amended by common agreement. In this, they have gone beyond the foothills of moral reasoning in developing powerful sentiments of fairness and justice. In Piaget’s view, this is how “moral realities” are handed down from one generation to the next. It is how in some kind of strange alchemy, the morality of duty and obedience to rules allow “for the appearance of the morality of goodness”.

Children’s play rarely leaves a trace in the historical record, as a result remaining something of a blank page in cultural history. For Caillois, developing ideas first proposed by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s now classic study Homo Ludus in 1938, “Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia. The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignificant.” Both assume that throughout history, and in all cultures, children have gathered together, agreed rules, played and dispersed, leaving little evidence behind, with the everyday world reinstating itself, becoming once again “an empty theatre”. Yet while they last, games are a form of bewitchment, a way of temporarily forgetting the difficulties of life and escaping into another world, sometimes within a magic circle or consecrated space which games such as “It” require.

If social history tells us little about children’s games, art history helps fill in the gaps. Pieter Bruegel’s famous “Children’s Games”, cited by Alÿs as a painting he “saw as a child and which really made an impression on me”, not only depicts 90 games played in the Netherlands in the 16th century, but is the most famous example of what became a genre of Dutch painting: the kinderspelen. Common to many of these paintings was the setting of such games in a public square, often against the background of a town hall or other civic building, suggesting a link between play and good citizenship. Alÿs cautions us against too much idealism however, reminding readers that “in most cultures, games are also the first moment of gender separation”. He notes that the games the girls in his films play are more collectively choreographed – for example “Nzango”, a set of synchronised dance movements accompanied by clapping which is now a national sport in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also more likely to involve singing, much as girls sing more often than boys in British playgrounds.

"The playground agenda"

The dangers of seeing games as a rehearsal for adult life – which George Orwell satirised in suggesting that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton – gained a new lease of life in post-war reconstruction, particularly in Europe. Civic leaders and town planners extended their remit to include managing and monitoring play as a discrete area of child development, requiring dedicated play areas where activities could be safely managed through design and even time-tabling. The end result was the “fixed equipment” playground, often subject to notice-board rules. In my childhood, municipal playgrounds were often closed on Sundays, the swings chained up, in respect for the sabbath. These spaces took no account of the fact that most children seem to prefer playing out of sight of the adult world, on back lots or waste ground, places which the planning professionals formalise as SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

“The playground agenda was compelled above all by the imperative of taking children away from the street,” argues architect Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, in a collection of essays, The Nature of the Game, published by Alÿs. He thinks that the world of street games and imaginative play outside the home – particularly in the cities of the global north – is a world already lost. By the 1960s Britain’s traffic planners had won the battle on the ground, with street play now remembered principally in the photographic archives, where local and regional documentary photographers such as Roger Mayne in Notting Hill, Chris Killip and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in the North-East and Nigel Henderson in London’s East End left behind a remarkable legacy, often featured in the social affairs weekly New Society.

Meanwhile, sporting games for children are now more likely to be professionalised and managed by adults. The under-fives attending paid football training in my local park on Saturday mornings are not by any definition of the word “at play”. Bemused, desperate to please their parents, the children are being trained to accomplish outcomes not of their own initiative, but set by others. This is why most definitions of play start by pointing out that it is quintessentially a voluntary, unproductive activity, “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind … ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game”, according to Caillois. Anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it another way, responding to the Alÿs films, defining play as a “way in which, in a collective, everyone raises each other up.”

The acclaim greeting Children’s Games caused critics to compare it with an earlier project concerned with protecting childhood experience as a global social cause: The Family of Man exhibition mounted by Edward Steichen in 1955 at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Containing over 500 photographs by 273 photographers from 69 countries, including Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, it was widely trumpeted as a vision of hope for a better world to come. Opening soon after the end of the Second World War, it seemed to brilliantly capture the mood of the times, and as critic Winfried Fluck wrote of the exhibition, “photography has a special potential for transforming everyday life into a special moment.”

Not all of the photographs portrayed children. Others were of family life, work, war, the ill-treatment of refugees, racism and civil rights activism, but visitors claimed to have been most moved by the images of childhood around the world, and these soon became symbolic of the project as a whole. With record-breaking attendances at MOMA, replica versions of the exhibition then travelled the world for the next seven years, seen by more than nine million visitors in 48 countries. My wife and I saw a scaled-down version of the exhibition in London in the late 1960s, and bought two prints which we dry-mounted and kept until they faded.

Like many others we were also inspired by the exhibition’s proclamation of “the essential oneness of mankind”, announcing a new humanist world order. In their 2018 collection of essays revisiting the story of The Family of Man, Shamoon Zamir and Gerd Hurm, both American academics, claimed it was “the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography” producing “the most successful photography book of all time”.

They went on to describe the international success of the exhibition as “a near universal acceptance of the show’s particular articulation of humanism and a confirmation of its faith in photography as a medium uniquely able to communicate across culture and time”.

The ability to play is at risk

They weren’t entirely correct, as the enthusiasm they described was not shared by everybody. French critic Roland Barthes damned the exhibition soon after its Paris opening in 1956. In an eight-paragraph essay, “The Great Family of Man”, published in Les Lettres nouvelles in 1957, and later to become a chapter in his best-selling book, Mythologies, Barthes decried the idea of a “universal human nature” as privileging nature over history, a view he described as “classical humanism”. Instead, he argued for a “progressive humanism” that looks for the injustices that underwrite the different life experiences of people across the world, bringing these to the surface as a stepping stone to political action.

Some queried whether Barthes had actually seen the exhibition, or simply based his critique on the surrounding publicity, claiming that his essay hadn’t detailed a single photograph by name, subject or photographer, even though the exhibition contained several by his favourite photographer, August Sander. Nor did he mention, let alone discuss, the one photograph that upended the presumed optimistic storyline. All the photographs in the exhibition had been black and white – except one. This final image, which every visitor saw on leaving the gallery, was an enlarged colour transparency of an H Bomb cloud blotting out the sky. In this way the exhibition’s rich evocation of a diverse world of peoples and cultures was end-stopped with a graphic warning of a potential global catastrophe.

The damage had been done, however, and in Gerd Hurm’s words, “Barthes’s review kept its position as a key reference point for The Family of Man in both the academic and the popular field.” This short essay effectively derailed much of the supportive early response to the exhibition, and other intellectuals fell into line. The initial enthusiasm was forgotten.

In their book, Zamir and Hurm examined why the hopes raised by the exhibition failed to be realised. It seemed timely again in the 21st century, they argued, since “the claims of humanism and universalism are open to new debates today, not only in ethical philosophy, but also in anthropology and biology.” Such claims are more urgent than ever, they said, given the rise in ethno-nationalism and the fracturing of inter-personal solidarities resulting from identity politics, both potentially undermining the “one world, one humanity” ambitions that the exhibition sought to foster.

What has occurred in the 70 years since The Family of Man first opened? It’s clear that the post-war project of a humanist universalism has been out-manoeuvred by international power politics, and the lessons of the Second World War forgotten. Furthermore, the battlefields today – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine or Gaza – now encompass densely populated urban areas, where schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure are most at risk, and where women and children make up the majority of casualties. According to the UN, children aged 14 and under made up the biggest share of casualties in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024.

Modern warfare is becoming crueller and there are many signs that “one world” humanism is in a parlous state. As Alÿs reveals, children still want to play, and will go to great lengths to do so, using the considerable power of their energy and imagination. But their ability to play is at risk – not only from actual physical danger to their health and lives, but from the psychological constraints put upon them, from society and conditions of fear and anxiety, much of which is exacerbated by social media.

Huizinga began Homo Ludens asserting: “we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom.” What happens when this freedom is threatened by new forms of urban warfare and fundamentalist religion? “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is a phrase originating with Aristotle, though usually attributed to the Catholic priest Ignatius Loyola. All powerful ideologies, whether political or religious, have designs on children, seeing the necessity to inculcate them with their values from an early age. No wonder children seek somewhere safe and far from the eyes of adults to play and exercise their freedom, often choosing waste ground where they are “oblivious to the depressing background because of play’s enchanting ability to configure a world apart”, as Rodrigo Pérez de Arce argues.

Immersing oneself in Children’s Games and its footage from across the globe recalls a principle enshrined in the post-war exhibition The Family of Man, that protecting children must be at the core of humanist values. This means protecting their right to life, care, education and freedom from harm. But it also means protecting their freedom of expression in all its forms, central to which is the right to play. It is what makes us fully human.

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

The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law (Profile Books) by Jonathan Sumption

The theme of Jonathan Sumption’s new book is a weighty one. Across this collection of 12 essays, previously delivered as lectures or published elsewhere, he addresses nothing less than the future of western democracy. Sumption is an intellectual powerhouse: a former academic historian, he became a high-flying barrister and was, from 2012 until 2018, a member of the UK Supreme Court.

This is a sweeping set of pieces, which canter over subjects from the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong to the contested character of British colonial history. Two themes bind the collection together. The first is the rule of law, where Sumption, drawing on copious amounts of case law, has mastery of his terrain. These essays ask what role law should play in a democracy and how the decisions of judges should interact with those of elected politicians. The second theme is broader and subtler. Laced into Sumption’s essays are reflections on the culture of democracy: the combination of institutions and attitudes that fortify our societies against democratic backsliding.

Notwithstanding its timeless themes, this is a timely book, particularly given Donald Trump’s return to the White House. “The United States is one of the world’s oldest democracies,” Sumption writes, “but its recent history shows how easy it is for even a sophisticated modern state to slide into autocracy.” The UK has experienced its own political turbulence: Boris Johnson was a populist adventurer who, Sumption argues, “showed a cavalier disregard for basic standards of decency and political integrity.”

But Sumption’s true concern is not the personalities involved but the deeper forces at play and the constitutional landmarks that reveal something about the current state of democracy. In a powerful essay titled “The President’s Crimes”, he examines the recent decision of the US Supreme Court to grant presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the course of their duties, a judgement he describes as “absurd”. The president is already immune from civil litigation, on the grounds that the risk of it may encourage overcautious decision-making. The court’s move to extend this to criminal litigation – threatening democratic principles “of an altogether higher order” – is, to Sumption, inexplicable.

It’s a mark of Sumption’s independent-mindedness that the criticism he levels against the European Court of Human Rights is essentially the opposite: rather than erasing legal accountability, he believes it is stretching the law’s reach into every corner of public life. In one essay titled “Mission Creep” he zooms in on Article 6 of the European Convention, which protects the right to a fair trial. He lambasts the judgement last year in the so-called “Swiss Grannies” case, in which the applicants argued that Swiss law was not sufficiently alive to the risk of climate disaster. Their claim was heard by three Swiss courts but failed because they were judged to have no personal stake in the issue beyond that of the public at large. But the ECHR disagreed, concluding that climate disaster was a direct concern for them. They were entitled to bring the case, and they won. The verdict outraged Sumption, who calls it an “abuse of Article 6”: a right created to protect access to justice was, in his view, used to overrule the fair proceedings of national courts.

The same judgement observed that “democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law” – a remark almost tailored to infuriate Sumption, and one which speaks directly to the arguments of this book. The rule of law is a necessary condition for democracy to exist, but it is not a sufficient one. Sumption knows that, and the true purpose of this collection is to explore the different components – legal, institutional and cultural – that allow democracy to flourish.

Sumption never loses sight of the big picture. Amid detailed legal analysis, he zooms out to remind us that “the world is full of countries with impeccable constitutions and courts to enforce them, which have been subverted perfectly legally by governments.” In these places, which serve as a warning to democracies everywhere, “the democratic label remains on the bottle but the substance has been poured out of it by governments” – “often”, he adds grimly, “with public support”.

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

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.

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 […]