We now know a few things about the man killed by federal agents.

The man fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis this morning has been identified as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Pretti, 37, has an address listed in south Minneapolis.

At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed only some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.

O’Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.

So they’re killing law-abiding white people? This isn’t part of the white nationalist agenda, I thought.

Meanwhile, CBP, Republican Tom Emmer, and Donald Trump are blaming “rhetoric” for the death.

It’s definitely not over. Federal agents clubbed a demonstrator to the ground and shot him at point blank range this morning. They’re saturating the neighborhodd with tear gas now.

The federal agents are currently surrounded by protesters.

Deservedly. This was the scene in Minneapolis yesterday:

Donald Trump fantasizes about crowd sizes like that. This one turned out in opposition to him, and they did it on the coldest day of the year so far. You tell Minnesotans that it’s going to be -20°F, and they shrug and pull another layer out of the mud room closet.

And not just Minnesotans: here are my sisters in the balmy Pacific Northwest (and my brother, who isn’t in the photo), declaring what they think in solidarity with the entire nation.

There’s a good feeling that comes with doing the right thing, and people across the country should be feeling that right now. There’s also a feeling of righteousness that comes with being a victim of injustice, and that’s rising hard here in Minnesota. We don’t deserve to be harassed and beaten and searched and murdered because we had done something wrong — those things are being done to us because 1) we are a blue state that voted against Trump in every election, and he takes that personally, and 2) because we have been welcoming to immigrants, and he (and Stephen Miller) are bigots who are lashing out at our friends and colleagues and community members. Punished by professing Christians for being kind to our neighbors, imagine that. It’s what I’ve come to expect from any vocal Christian.

OK, to be fair…

The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in Lutheran churches seeding what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.

A word of warning: this isn’t over. We had a one day long general strike, and we can expect reprisals from the federal government. One day is not enough — we’re going to have to tighten our belts for a more prolonged effort, and this needs to spread beyond one state. I’m confident others will join in, because our enemy is a bully who doesn’t respond rationally, or in the best interest of the citizens.

Most importantly, know that what Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next.

Minnesota’s general strike should be our template for how we respond nationally.

I’m going to stock up on dried beans and canned vegetables. My father was a blue collar union man, and we knew how to prepare for a strike.

There is a planned walkout and protest statewide for 23 January, tomorrow. We want ICE out, and the hope is that a little poke in the pocketbook might send a message. The University of Minnesota sent out the message below to all students and employees.

Dear faculty, staff, and students,

The University is aware of the recently announced call for civic action on Friday, January 23, during which Minnesotans are being encouraged not to attend work, school, or participate in commercial activity in response to federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

We fully support the right of faculty, staff, and students to engage in lawful civic expression. We also must ensure continuity of operations and meet our responsibilities to students and the University community.

For all employees
Employees, including students with University jobs, who plan to be away on January 23 must use vacation or personal holiday time with the supervisor’s advance approval. Sick or Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) cannot be used for these absences. Unapproved absences, including walking off the job or failing to report to work as scheduled, may result in corrective action in accordance with University policies and collective bargaining agreements.
Course delivery and attendance
As was noted to instructors last week, classes are expected to proceed (UMD-specific policy) as scheduled. Instructors who are considering not holding January 23 class sessions must work with their dean’s office to make appropriate alternate arrangements, including notifying students of these changes.

Regarding excused absences (UMD-specific policy), students must notify instructors of the circumstances causing them to miss a scheduled class meeting in advance or as soon as possible. University policy describes circumstances for excused absences and the opportunity for makeup work. Instructors may grant excused absences for reasons not listed in University policy, but those decisions must be made in a viewpoint-neutral way and in concurrence with your academic unit. Students will not be penalized for excused absences.

We appreciate the professionalism, care, and respect our employees demonstrate during moments of heightened community concern. University leaders and supervisors should offer flexibility where feasible, while also ensuring appropriate arrangements to maintain vital services.

If you have questions about time away, attendance, or supervisory responsibilities, please contact your local HR lead. Please note that we are also tracking potential weather impacts on Friday, January 23. Should there be any operational changes, your campus will communicate. Please connect with your Dean’s office for further guidance on instruction.

In short, they support our right to engage in lawful civic expression, but you better not participate in this one unless you’ve consulted your dean and filled out all the paperwork and you have a good excuse!

Too bad. I’ve emailed all my students and told them to join in the protest. I haven’t consulted my dean or filled out any paperwork, but my excuse is that the entire country has been seized by an incompetent fascist cabal, and a brief work stoppage is the least we can do. We ought to have a nationwide general strike for a period of time sufficient to let the ruling junta know that we mean business.

I wish my university had the conviction and the moral courage to speak out, rather than sending out long weasely excuses for doing nothing.

But I reject it.

It’s a silly argument. All science is built on observation and hypothesis testing, or it isn’t science. Physicists and biologists don’t need to argue with each other.

In We, a dystopian fable written in 1921-22 and set in the 26th century, the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined a totalitarian regime called “OneState”. The buildings in this urban civilisation are uniformly constructed out of clear glass bricks, through which the sinister “Guardians”, its law enforcers, can monitor their subjects’ every move. As the automaton-like protagonist, D-503, puts it, “We live in broad daylight inside these walls that seem to have been fashioned out of bright air, always on view.” The use of glass is thus a key component of the state’s attempt to annihilate the individual personality in the machine-like collective. Zamyatin’s vision would influence George Orwell’s 1984.

At the turn of the 20th century, the introduction of machines that could manufacture large-scale flat glass led to the increasing use of glass in architecture – for better or worse. Among the vitro-optimists was Paul Scheerbart, an eccentric German writer and critic who produced both a treatise and a novel on the potential of glass architecture. The novel, entitled The Gray Cloth and Ten Per Cent White (1914), imagined a fantastical mid-20th-century society in which superstar architects travelled around the globe in airships, admiring their colossal buildings of coloured glass.

A century after Zamyatin and Scheerbart, glass has, to an extent unprecedented in human history, become ubiquitous not only in architecture but in technology, industry and daily life. Indeed, 2022 was the United Nations International Year of Glass. The official booklet proclaimed a new Glass Age and highlighted the material’s importance in areas including communications, biomaterials, energy generation, sustainability, healthcare and aerospace.

Despite its topicality, however, there is one field in which glass remains undervalued: contemporary art. Artists who work mainly in glass, especially if they actually handle the material themselves, have trouble getting their pieces accepted by the art world. “Glass is usually perceived as a traditional material for craft rather than for fine art galleries,” says Marieta Tedenac, a Prague-based conceptual artist who works in glass and other media.

This sort of attitude perhaps says more about the art world than it does about glass. Be that as it may, in the last few decades several artists, whether working alone or collaboratively, have laboured to demonstrate the potential of glass as an artistic medium – a means of free creative expression – and one which benefits from a combination of imaginative vision and inspiration, scientific and technical knowledge, and painstaking, skilful craftsmanship. Arguably, their achievements show that art in glass has a distinctive contribution to make to our uniquely glassy age.

Glass is certainly important for the digital world and Big Tech, most visibly through its use in computer and smartphone screens. This importance is reflected in the glass-heavy architecture adopted, for instance, in Apple stores. In 2013-14, Google even tried, unsuccessfully, to trademark the word “Glass” in a particular font for its “smart glasses”. It is thus surely significant that when Apple wanted to commission a public artwork for the Apple Park outside its headquarters in Cupertino, California, the proposal it selected in 2021, submitted by the Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson and the architectural studio Zeller & Moye, was made of glass.

Completed in 2023, Mirage is an installation of 448 glass columns, each standing two metres tall and weighing 90kg, and varying in colour from deep green to mineral blue to near-transparent. It represents a monumental collaboration involving artist, architects, Apple staff, scientists and glassmakers, as well as sand sourced from 70 deserts around the world. The columns are arranged in a pattern of three wavy lines, which, from a drone’s-eye view, suggest “desert dunes”, according to the creators – or, on a more subversive interpretation, a pixellated corporate logo.

Mirage is full of ambivalence, ostensibly being constructed for the benefit of Cupertino’s citizens, but redolent, beneath the glittering surface, of Apple’s apparent ambitions for technological supremacy – in which glass plays an essential role.

One specific type of glass that has been used effectively in art is optical glass. Made with a range of specialised chemical compositions, it was originally developed for lenses and prisms, including in a military context, which needed to refract light precisely. In the 1960s, Václav Cigler, a leading Czech artist and founder of the Glass in Architecture department at Bratislava University, began experimenting with optical glass. He designed sculptures that were precisely cut, ground and polished to achieve brilliantly reflective surfaces. His pure, minimalist forms – an egg, a pyramid, a cone – distil the essence of shapes found in nature and architecture, functioning as almost mathematical focal points which encourage detached contemplation.

One of the reasons that the art world is suspicious of glass art may be the technical challenges involved in its creation. Some contemporary artists have an awkward relationship with the act of “fabricating” (or making) artworks, following current wisdom that what matters is choosing the material that best suits what the artist wants to say, rather than one that he or she has the most skill in manipulating. Yet this attitude may itself owe something to advances in digital technologies such as graphics, 3D printing and generative AI, compared to which, these days, a human’s ability to make things can seem less impressive. Not only are machines better at fabricating, but the virtual world has become ever more sophisticated and enticing. Why bother to make anything that will be subject to the laws of nature, when you could conjure up impossible objects on the screen?

Last year, Luca Curci Architects, an Italian firm, published the “Floating Glass Museum” project on its website. This quixotic museum, designed with the aid of AI, takes the form of a curved white building with fluorescent panes of glass that floats on a swimming-pool-like sea. Inside are rooms filled with large numbers of huge glass spheres. Some of the spheres even seem to float above the ground, in defiance of gravity – which AI had apparently not quite grasped at the time. It is pretty to look at, and yet the very ease with which scenarios like this can be produced, once the limitations of the empirical world are removed, arguably makes them less interesting.

To return to “reality”, the paradox of glass is that on the one hand it is so elusive, but on the other so tactile, heavy and difficult to handle. Glass can be shattered, even on a smartphone, and be transformed instantly from something smooth and self-effacing into something sharp and destructive that also does violence to the image within it. No wonder the breaking of a mirror has traditionally been associated with bad luck.

An example of an evocative aesthetic effect derived from breaking glass occurs in the 2022 film The Glass Onion, in which, in a climactic scene, the collection of clear glass sculptures belonging to a villainous tech entrepreneur is smashed by his guests – as though the sculptures’ entire raison d’être was their destruction.

The brittleness of glass, the risk of chipping or breakage that could annihilate a work’s perfection in an instant, doubtless contributes to its perception as a challenging, even off-putting artistic medium. On the other hand, this same quality can be used as a metaphor to express contemporary concerns. One example is in Stampede, a collection of clear glass animal paws, hot-sculpted by the New York-based artist Deborah Czeresko. The sculptures are carefully modelled on real paws, both live and stuffed, and include a range of species – bat, camel, mole, ostrich, platypus, penguin. With silent eloquence, the fragility of the material, together with its phantom-like transparency, reminds us of the ease with which animal species may be destroyed. Once gone, it would be as impossible to bring them back to life as to reconstitute a shattered glass paw from its fragments – which, since glass is an amorphous solid, will always be irregular and chaotic.

The rich versatility of glass, both as material and as store of imagery, is further exemplified in the work of the American artist Jon Kuhn, who makes sculptures in the form of geometrical solids containing hundreds of facets of glass that refract the light from within like tiny prisms. He does this by a time-consuming process of cutting and polishing segments of optical glass and then laminating them together in a complex structure.

It is a piece by Kuhn, if I am not mistaken, that appears on a table just behind the eminent philosopher and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum, in a photograph taken in 2017 and published alongside an interview in the New York Review of Books in 2021. The positioning creates a connection between the jewel-like interior of the glass and the clarity and sparkle of the sitter’s mind.

As the work of artists like Cigler, Czeresko or Paterson shows, in our new Glass Age, this material can no longer be dismissed as old-fashioned or suitable merely for craft. Instead, it can be an eloquent means of imaginative creation and self-expression.

In a world where our attention is increasingly occupied by images and events behind the glass screen, the material from which that screen is made, with its combination of smoothness and sharpness, liquidity and solidity, depth and surface, can remind us of how dependent we are, despite ourselves, on physical things.

It can thus function as an empirical and metaphorical barrier – the modern equivalent of a looking-glass – between the digital realm and our own. Finally, a key function of art in our image-conscious age is as status symbol and personality extension. In this respect, while some artists may still dismiss it as a medium, glass can surely give bananas, Lego bricks or even paintings a run for their money.

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

In February 2024, people across the US began placing orders for a plant that glows at night. The Firefly Petunia, sold by the synthetic biology startup Light Bio, looks like a regular white petunia by day – but in darkness it transforms, emitting a soft light, most visible in its flower buds. The first glowing plant was created in 1986, but it has taken 38 years for the technology to be enjoyed in people’s homes and offices.

Most people are interested in the beauty and novelty of the flower. But while the glowing petunias are aesthetically remarkable, they also demonstrate that “living light”, as it’s often called, can move beyond the lab into everyday environments. Most promisingly, bioluminescent and fluorescent plants have practical uses in agriculture. The light the plants emit can help us understand and combat complex threats to crops – including rot, pests and fungal disease – which are likely to deepen with the ongoing climate crisis.

Most of us have seen some instance of bioluminescence, which is defined as light made by living things, and occurs naturally in fungi and animals. Fireflies are the most obvious example, as well as deep-sea creatures and a handful of glowing fungi. The chemistry is straightforward enough: enzymes called luciferases act on small molecules called luciferins (sometimes with cofactors like ATP, an energy-carrying molecule), in the presence of oxygen. The reaction then releases energy as photons.

Fungi and animals have evolved to glow naturally for a variety of reasons. Fireflies emit light to attract mates and warn predators that they’re an unpleasant meal. It’s thought that the deep-sea lanternfish glows in order to blend in with the blue of the sea and avoid predators. In the case of fungi, however, scientists are still speculating. The leading theory is that the glow attracts insects, aiding reproduction and dispersal, which might be especially helpful in dark forest environments.

But plants don’t glow naturally; they never had to evolve that way. We humans have intervened. So how did we engineer these plants, and why?

The science of bioluminescence

The first glowing plants in the 1980s were only suitable for lab environments, and were mostly designed to study genetic processes. Bioluminescence can be used to provide a real-time indicator of plant development and stress response – all without harming the organism. Keith Wood, now chief executive of Light Bio, worked with the team that created the first glowing plant, by inserting a firefly bioluminescent system into a tobacco plant.

Bioluminescent systems from various insects, marine life and fungi can be inserted into plants, but there are important differences in how this is done and how it affects the glow. In some cases, scientists insert just the genes for luciferase, the enzyme that produces light when it reacts with luciferin, or introduce the luciferin chemically along with luciferase. This approach can make the plants glow, but the light usually lasts for a limited time, since luciferin is not produced inside the plant and must be replenished externally.

The next step, then, was to engineer plants to glow throughout their life. This involved designing plants to produce both luciferase and luciferin themselves by inserting the full set of fungal bioluminescent genes. Because these fungal systems use caffeic acid, which plants naturally produce, the engineered plants can run this light-producing reaction autonomously without needing outside chemicals, creating a sustainable, self-sufficient bioluminescent system. But the light emitted was still too weak and unstable for conditions outside the lab.

More recent work has adapted the mushroom genes so that they function better in plant cells and tissues, boosting brightness by up to a hundredfold.

Today, Light Bio focuses primarily on producing ornamental plants. “People are not only excited and surprised when they see a living plant glow in the dark, they’re often deeply moved,” Wood tells me. But the same technology has practical applications outside the lab.

It is being used, for example, in food safety contexts. Quality-control tests use enzymes and chemicals to help detect contamination in milk and meat. These tests measure the presence of ATP, which reacts with the luciferase added to the food products, triggering the chemical reaction that produces light. The amount of light generated is proportional to the level of ATP, which then shows the extent of contamination.

What about using glowing plants in agriculture? One avenue of exploration relates to pollination. Some researchers speculate that glowing cues might affect insect behaviour. For example, a faint bioluminescent cue at dusk might help nocturnal insects such as moths, which rely on colour and shape, to find flowers. Even adult fireflies, themselves pollinators, could be drawn to these flowers at night. If pollination can be encouraged, then this benefits farmers because it can lead to better fruit and seed development, resulting in improved crop yields. But this idea needs more testing outside the labs, with real crops and in real weather, with attention to the ecological side-effects.

The power of fluorescent plants

For now, another kind of light-emission is yielding more concrete benefits for farmers: fluorescent plants. Like bioluminescence, fluorescence also makes living things emit light, but it can’t operate in the dark. A molecule absorbs incoming light and then re‑emits it at a specific wavelength. With the right illumination and filters, the signal answers back. In practice, this usually means using artificial light sources and optical sensors, since ambient sunlight alone is rarely enough to give a clear reading. In short, bioluminescence shines by itself, while fluorescence shines when asked.

The Californian biotechnology company InnerPlant engineers crops to fluoresce in patterns designed to be read with specialised optics, from the ground and from aircraft. Their commercial product is focused on fungal infections in soybeans. Sensors are planted in plots across a region, acting somewhat like towers in a mobile network. Farmers do not host or manage the hardware, rather they subscribe to the network. InnerPlant’s agronomists send weekly scouting reports during high-risk periods and send alerts by text and email when sensors confirm infection.

“It helps take the guesswork out of fungicide decisions,” said Sean Yokomizo of InnerPlant. “[Farmers] only have to take action when and where it’s needed, rather than spraying entire fields.” Farmers are pragmatic and want clear benefits, he said. Technology has to be low-risk and consistent to win trust.

As of 2025, InnerPlant’s network covers 50,000 acres across the Midwest US, including in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. They plan to increase the network to cover more than half a million acres in 2026, and to add insect detection in soybeans in 2027, followed by a corn fungal sensor. The company is also looking into satellite use, with the aim of improving their large‑scale visibility.

Whether or not InnerPlant succeed in their plans, other companies are likely to take advantage of these new technologies. Fluorescent technologies may be particularly helpful in coping with climate change, which is already leading to unpredictable weather patterns. These include raised temperatures and humidity – conditions in which fungal disease can escalate rapidly. An early fluorescent signal lets a grower treat the right block before spores spread further across crops. Blanket “just in case” sprays can become the exception, targeted passes can become the norm, and costs fall – as does the chemical load that runs into streams.

Fluorescence can also help to guide watering practices – which is especially important in times of drought, or where water is expensive or scarce. Plants shift their fluorescent signatures when stressed, often before leaves wilt. If you can see that change early, irrigation moves from routine to need, which saves energy and helps prevent salt build-up in soils. It’s useful for monitoring nutrients, too. If low nitrogen shows up as a clear map rather than a hunch, variable-rate equipment can treat poor zones and skip healthy ones. Yields hold and, again, excess fertiliser stays out of rivers.

Challenges ahead

While fluorescent plants offer a powerful tool for monitoring plant health, they come with significant limitations that justify continued interest in bioluminescent systems. Fluorescence relies on external light sources to excite the fluorescent proteins, meaning it requires specific field conditions, special optics and a clear line of sight to detect the signal accurately. These requirements can make it challenging to implement widespread, real-time monitoring in open agricultural fields.

In contrast, bioluminescent plants produce their own light through biochemical reactions, offering the potential for continuous, autonomous signalling of plant health or stress without external illumination. This intrinsic glow could enable easier, more flexible monitoring in diverse environments and at night, providing a unique approach that fluorescence alone cannot currently offer.

Daniel Voytas, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a leader in plant genome editing, says we shouldn’t give up on bioluminescence as a developing field that could have future applications in agriculture.

Along with engineering plants using the fungal bioluminescent system, researchers are also making good progress with insect systems. “The use of insect luciferases as reporters has been enormously valuable for plant biotechnology research, and I expect their role will continue, if not expand,” Voytas told me. “These are primarily research tools rather than traits in themselves, so their direct impact on agriculture and food security is likely to remain limited compared to other biotechnological approaches,” he acknowledged. But while achieving consistently high levels of luminescence has proven a significant challenge, the science is advancing.

There are many hurdles to overcome, for both bioluminescent and fluorescent technologies. Farms are dirty and unpredictable places. Light signals have to be bright and specific. Models need to be able to tell the difference, for example, between light emitted due to heat stress and light that indicates infection. The challenge is producing a sufficient number of plants that are bright enough to be useful. And even if luminescence improves, the trait still has to deliver under sun and heat, and earn its keep across a season. Some farms can also be reluctant to try new technologies. Mistakes in agriculture can be costly. A false positive, for example signalling disease, could be a huge waste of time and money.

Regulators will continue to ask hard questions, too. There’s no sign yet that the trait that causes plants to glow can spread by pollen, but these questions about gene flow are sensitive, and must be carefully tested and monitored. If the ability to glow draws on more of a plant’s metabolism (in other words, the energy available to them) then it may slow their growth, or ability to produce seeds or fruit.

Public acceptance is important too, given many people have negative attitudes towards genetically engineered crops. Light Bio believes that their ornamental plants can play an important role in shifting public perception. “Crop development through genetic manipulation is vital to global food security,” Wood said. “By giving the public a tangible, positive experience with a glowing plant, we believe we can help build familiarity and trust.”

When I asked him about the future, he said he expects brighter and more varied glowing plants to be developed over the next decade. “We’re improving the genetics, and we’re improving the methods of production,” he said. “I expect we’ll get brighter plants, more robust plants.”

A farming revolution?

Meanwhile, bioluminescence and fluorescence will continue to allow scientists to study plant physiology, with discoveries feeding back into knowledge around how to develop better and stronger bioluminescent traits, creating a positive cycle of learning and development.

Yokomizo of InnerPlant believes that advances in the study of the genetic processes of plants, combined with the use of bioluminescent and fluorescent traits in crops out on the field, represents a revolutionary opportunity in farming. “Data from plants has always been the missing component all the way back to the beginning of agriculture,” he said. “Finally having that critical data will change farming practices in a very fundamental way, just as the Green Revolution did.”

He’s referring to rapid changes that took place in farming in the mid-20th century, including the development of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. There was also progress in breeding plants in order to create hybrid seeds, known as high-yielding varieties, which are more responsive to fertilisers, and better at adapting and resisting disease. All of this triggered major economic growth in agricultural regions worldwide.

It’s a bold comparison, and it should be treated as speculative. We don’t yet know whether bioluminescence and fluorescence will have revolutionary effects on the future of agriculture. It is more cautious to say that clear, early signals can help reduce waste and protect yields.

For now, bioluminescence and fluorescence will remain a powerful research tool, and field deployment should expand as engineering advances. In the meantime, ornamental plants serve a quieter purpose. They show biotechnology as something beautiful, not only as a risk. It’s a shift in perception that can help us imagine what could come next…

In late summer, a soybean grower gets a text: four fields crossed a fungal threshold overnight. The sprayer rolls that day, but only across those blocks. Time, money and effort are saved, and environmental impacts are reduced.

At a nearby farm, nitrogen goes only where the signal shows deficiency. The field map turns patchy and precise, which is how real land behaves.

At the packhouse, a bioluminescent signal flags contamination before a pallet of bananas is loaded onto a ship. The win is invisible but crucial, as prevention usually is.

Most of the time, we won’t see the light with the naked eye. But some day in the future, it may be a common occurrence to drive past a farmer’s field at night and notice a faint but magical glow.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: As many of you know if you’ve been watching for long enough, I live in the beautiful Bay Area, and I am something of an outdoorsy person. I mean, I guess you’d know that …

It’s time for some obscure magic and music hall history.

I’m a fan of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello. He was performing during the early 1900s and built a theatre in Edinburgh that is now an amusement arcade. I have a previous post on Marvello here and have just written a long article about him for a magic history magazine called Gibecière (the issue is out soon).

The Genius Myth (Jonathan Cape) by Helen Lewis

In the 1980s, when high-IQ societies like Mensa were surveyed about the term they thought best applied to their members, they didn’t gravitate to the term “geniuses”. More than any other, they liked the word “outsiders”.

This is one of many revealing facts from Helen Lewis’s new book on the concept of “geniuses”, whose subtitle warns us of “the dangerous allure of rebels, monsters and rule-breakers”. For a genius to linger in the public consciousness, says Lewis, it is best if they are perceived as abnormal and therefore special in some way. Disgraced psychologist Hans Eysenck, who specialised in the area, said geniuses have to be mad, psychopathic or at least a bit odd to live up to the stereotype.

The word “genius” conjures up a whole host of connotations, from Einstein through Hawking to Picasso. (Historically, most recognised geniuses are men, although Lewis devotes a chapter to the overlooked women who supported some of them to do their best work.) You could make an argument for the term being more of a hindrance than a help; that we would be better off disposing of it entirely. Lewis doesn’t go that far. “We need the idea of genius – the demigod, the superhero, the shaman,” she writes. “We need stories to make sense of the world.”

What is the story of genius, then? The way Lewis frames it, it is close to the study of fame. Some people are brilliant and may deserve to be recognised as geniuses. But the term, in popular culture at least, isn’t limited to an objective definition, nor can it possibly conform to the rigid measurements of an IQ test. A genius isn’t a technical benchmark; it is a constellation of factors, which together scratch the itch of their particular age. “Societies anoint exceptional people as geniuses to demonstrate what they value,” Lewis writes.

Through various case studies (The Beatles, Tolstoy, Edison, Musk), Lewis applies her microscope to the patchwork of factors that created the tapestry of genius. She tells us that one of the reasons that California became the technology centre of the universe was that the eastern states in the US had employment contracts that let bosses sue their employees for defecting to a rival company. “But California did not, so its companies benefited from a constant exchange of skills as the best engineers moved around more freely.” This is a perfect example of “scenius”, a phrase coined by Brian Eno – that it is impossible to separate an individual’s genius from the environment in which they operated.

There are twin, almost contradictory, impulses in us when it comes to genius: one is that we let geniuses get away with terrible behaviour; the other, which Lewis calls the “deficit model of genius”, is that we expect and may in fact want them to suffer. Lewis may not be able to answer the question of why and how we cling to these convictions – here perhaps the book could have benefited from more insight from psychologists – but the question has profound implications, and is certainly worth asking.

The book is also a fun read, with plenty of meat to chew on. Lewis has a refreshing willingness to call out the pretentious and the pseudo-scientific, and ridicules the embarrassing attempts by people like Francis Galton, a 19th-century polymath and eugenics pioneer, to tie genius to genetics. (Commenting on Galton’s insistence that he could see no reason why a man born with great intellect could ever be “repressed”, she inserts “a small reminder that this was a man who had seen human beings bought and sold at a market.”)

She is also sharp and witty. While exploring why Elon Musk is fervently discussed as a genius but Tim Berners-Lee, whose achievements are even more considerable, being credited with the invention of the world wide web, is not, she points out: “Elon Musk has more than a dozen children, with names like X A E A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. Tim Berners-Lee’s children are called Alice and Ben.”

By the time we finish The Genius Myth, Lewis has made her case compellingly: that calling people geniuses gives them licence to misbehave; that we vastly overestimate talent and underestimate environment when evaluating people’s success; and that the myth of the genius persists because it makes for a far more compelling story than the alternative. One of the most fascinating paragraphs in the book examines why we may want genius to be more about mysterious inspiration than hard work. Perhaps we are so invested in the notion because it lets the rest of us off the hook for not achieving more. “After all, if Cézanne’s genius was to devote decades of his life to a single idea, what’s stopping us from doing the same?”

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last week, I posted a video about anti-trans bias at the British Broadcasting Corporation, who pushed a 16-year veteran presenter to resign due in part to the support he’s shown trans people in his …

Sophie Gilbert is a journalist at The Atlantic, a cultural critic and author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

In Girl on Girl, you argue that porn became an increasingly prominent cultural force from the 1990s onwards. How did that happen?

In some ways it was just because there was this really unprecedented increase in the number of people watching it. Before VHS people had to go to a movie theatre to watch porn and that was a huge deterrent. Then suddenly you had this technology that allowed them to watch it in their homes. Between the mid-80s and the mid-90s, there was something like a tenfold increase in the number of people renting porn on VHS in the US. And then obviously the internet increased access further.

Because porn is seen as shameful, no one is really talking about it, but it does have a massive influence on popular culture. You see it first in art in the 70s and 80s, then in fashion, then it creeps into music and TV and movies. If you look at the porn movies of the 70s now, people really thought they were making art. The reason why people like [American writer and journalist] Joan Didion were going to watch porn movies in the 70s was because there was this interest in whether or not sex could become an art form.

But as porn became more ubiquitous online, and at the same time mainstream culture became more sexualised, porn had to do something to stand out. It had to persuade people to keep paying for it, which is hard to do when you’ve got sex on TV and in movies, so it became more extreme, more violent – and more degrading, especially to women.

And that had a knock-on effect on broader culture?

You can definitely see culture mimicking porn’s extremity in the 2000s. But porn has also influenced the ways in which people have sex. There are studies that show an increase in the number of women who’ve been choked during sex without consent, and who’ve encountered violent sexual acts like spitting, gagging, hitting. [The depiction of choking in porn is due to be banned in the UK.]

Under the Online Safety Act, platforms hosting pornographic content must now verify that users are over the age of 18. Is this a positive step?

There are people who are a lot more versed on the internet than I am who argue that it will not have any impact. That said, I’m just amazed that it’s taken so long for people to try to have any kind of filtering at all. We have had extreme porn on the internet now for almost 30 years. We have a generation – [the singer] Billie Eilish has talked a lot about this – who grew up seeing extreme pornographic content before they’re of an age where they can make sense of it. There’s no perfect way to manage exposure to porn, but I’m still staggered that people think there’s no point in trying when we can see quite clearly the negative impact that porn is having on sex and sexuality.

To some people, including to some feminists, this is a kind of moral panic – just another step in the long history of attempting to censor sexual content.

I’m not opposed to porn and I say that in Girl on Girl. I’ve been criticised from the left for being “scoldy” about porn and I’ve been criticised from the right for not being scoldy enough. And I think that’s because I’m sort of pragmatic. People have always sought out imagery of sex using new technologies. The minute the printing press was introduced people were using it to make sexual imagery; there are cave paintings of sexual imagery. People love watching sex and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

The problem is that the imagery that has been fed to us for at least the last three decades – and honestly much longer than that – has really catered to a male gaze. It depicts sex as something that is all about pleasing men and that women just have to submit to. There’s a reason why we’ve seen this massive surge of interest in romantic fiction among women. It’s because women are drawn to sexual content too, but they want the kind of content that centres their pleasure, their desire and agency, and sees them as fully human rather than passive sex objects that just have things done to them.

The subscription service OnlyFans hosts pornographic content by full-time sex workers, but also by pop stars, actors and others, who use it as gig work or to subsidise their artistic careers. Is that the end point of the “pornification” of pop culture you’re describing?

I don’t know if it’s an end point; it’s just another form of technology. I do think OnlyFans is really interesting because it’s not driven by mass clicks. There’s an intimacy to the relationship between creators and their fans that in some ways makes space for a much wider sense of what’s desirable. A lot of the OnlyFans celebrities are women over 50, such as actresses Denise Richards and Carmen Electra. There are creators who don’t have the same kind of bodies that traditional porn stars have had. There’s a lot more space for the complexity of what we as human beings are attracted to.

At the same time, there’s a generation of men who are being taught to think of women as people who are sycophantic to them. You can’t see the person as your equal, because they’re catering to you for money.

You’re interested in how these dynamics filter into the wider world. What’s your take on the cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album Man’s Best Friend? It sparked controversy by showing the singer-songwriter kneeling down at the feet of a man who is pulling her by the hair.

What’s interesting to me is that if that album had come out in the 2000s, we wouldn’t have been having the same conversations that are being had now. I saw women debating that on Instagram with enormous wisdom and insight and complexity, and a real openness to sexuality from women in a way that was not shaming, but was also aware that stars don’t exist in a vacuum, that the ways in which they want to portray themselves always have an impact on the rest of us. I think women and girls today are so much better educated about these issues. They have better language to talk about them and a much better understanding of the dynamics of sex and power.

You describe a kind of cultural correction that started in the 2010s, with more complex representations of women on screen. Are you positive about the future?

Yeah, it’s been really incredible to see. In the Golden Globes in 2025 there were so many more women behind the camera, women directors, there were actresses in their 50, 60s, 70s doing some of the most interesting work of their lives, in stories about the transition into motherhood or beauty culture in Hollywood. None of this was happening in the 2000s. So there’s a willingness in mainstream culture now to reckon with women and their interiority and their lives and their stories that is incredibly heartening to me.

At the same time, most people now go to see one movie a year. For most people now, culture is the content on their phones. And so in some ways, I think that’s the next frontier. There is just a wild west of different platforms and technologies that people my age [Gilbert is 42] have not got any clue what to do with. The mainstream culture, the culture that I still write about – the books and the television and the art – has changed for the better in so many ways and there’s such incredible storytelling out there. But I do think we’re also facing a new world of social media and phone use and we have to confront the question of what to do about it.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Over the holidays, there was some news out of the UK that I wanted to highlight, lest it be lost in the news black hole that is Christmas and New Year: the British Broadcasting …

A new spectre is haunting our imagination – that of an artificial superintelligence, which some fear will kill us all. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, computer scientists garlanded with awards; Eliezer Yudkowsky, the internet’s prophet of AI doom; even some CEOs of billion-dollar AI companies are calling for urgent global action. And slowly, their fears of AI destroying humanity are seeping into the public imagination.

If they’re wrong, Roosevelt may be right: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But that’s no small concern. Fear is a dangerous companion. It can shatter the rule of law. More insidiously, fear can harden law into tyranny, as democracies reach for emergency powers and suspend freedoms. And when the fear fades, as it often does, we’re left surveying the wreckage, wondering how we let ourselves be so thoroughly spooked, again.

Peter Thiel, the US tech investor, was among the first to warn that fear-driven overregulation of AI could do more harm than good. This was easy to dismiss: Thiel has invested in a range of AI companies, from Palantir to OpenAI, so naturally he’d rail against regulation. Even so, we’d be wise to ask whether, in dreading the machine, we risk becoming worse than that which we fear. He who fights monsters, Nietzsche cautioned, must take care lest he become one himself.

p(doom)

Today’s AI, such as the chatbots that churn out emails or passable poetry, is useful in narrow areas. But many tech firms want something more: artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could match or exceed human reasoning in most areas. Beyond that lies the spectre of artificial superintelligence (ASI), a system that keeps improving itself until we become mere dust in its wake.

Fears about ASI stem from two ideas. First, misalignment: ASI’s goals may diverge from ours. Second, instrumental convergence: whatever its goal, ASI will seek more resources and remove obstacles to help it achieve that goal, and humans could be both.

To some, the threat could not be larger. In 2023, hundreds of scientists and tech leaders signed an open letter urging that AI-driven extinction be treated as seriously as nuclear war or pandemics. AI safety specialists even have a term for the probability of ASI wiping us out: p(doom). A 2023 survey of AI experts found that their median estimate of the likelihood of ASI, if achieved, causing either human extinction or our permanent disempowerment in the next 100 years was 5 per cent. And yet a vocal minority are far more pessimistic. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate and AI pioneer, puts the risk of AI wiping out humanity at 10 per cent within just 30 years, if it is not strongly regulated. Eliezer Yudkowsky – an influential AI researcher and cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute – dispenses with percentage ranges altogether. “If anyone builds it,” he claims, “everyone dies.”

Some of the biggest AI companies echo these anxieties. Dario Amodei, CEO of the $170-billion AI company Anthropic, puts the chance of AI going “catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” at 10-25 per cent. His company’s official line is starker: until proven otherwise, assume future AI systems are extremely dangerous. Sam Altman, CEO of $500-billion OpenAI, struck a similar note in 2015, calling ASI “the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity”. Altman has since adopted a more optimistic tone, but his apocalyptic warnings still resonate.

Altman also illustrates a new trend among AI leaders: an apparent faith that their own ASI will save humanity, coupled with certainty that their rivals’ ASI will destroy it. In 2016, for example, Elon Musk accused Google DeepMind of harbouring a “one mind to rule the world philosophy”, warning it could create an AI dictatorship. Yet Musk now asserts that his own company, xAI, can be trusted to develop ASI.

Others dismiss this all as melodrama. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, thinks p(doom) is lower than the odds of an asteroid strike (well below 1 per cent) and has called “BS” on the whole debate. Critics argue that doomsday talk distracts from harms already here, including job losses through automation and environmental impact.

Public fears of an existential threat

What’s striking is how certain everyone sounds, even as they disagree entirely. Nevertheless, what remains is a serious, credentialed and vocal minority convinced that ASI could soon terminate humanity. This attitude leads to a belief that we need to act quickly and decisively. Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the field of deep learning and a Turing Award winner, told me: “While we had decades to respond to climate change, there’s no guarantee we’ll have the same window of opportunity to address the potentially catastrophic risks of AI.” He points to early signs that today’s models can already deceive and act to preserve themselves.

Many AI pessimists are working to shift public perception of ASI’s dangers, using media appearances – often on podcasts, debate shows and YouTube channels – to make the apparent “sci-fi risks” they warn about feel more tangible and credible. Indeed, Bengio tells me that public awareness is “one of the most important factors” for humanity to manage catastrophic AI risk.

Signs of a shift in public perception are emerging. Between 2022 and 2023, the share of Britons who ranked AI as a top-three likely cause of human extinction leapt from 7 per cent to 17 per cent, according to YouGov. And in 2024, the pollster found that 39 per cent of Americans were concerned about AI possibly ending the human race.

So far, however, we haven’t seen much public protest related to the threat of ASI, even from a committed minority. Other perceived existential threats, like climate change and nuclear war, have prompted mass demonstrations as well as violent action by protest groups. The term “ecoterrorism” was coined in the 1960s, and environmental activist groups have been using tactics such as property damage and economic sabotage for decades. Similarly, the Plowshares group in the 80s damaged military property and weapons, including nuclear warheads. Yet, aside from a possible link with the “Zizians,” a cult-adjacent offshoot allegedly linked to violence and a few small pavement protests, AI safety activism remains almost monastic, mostly carried out from behind computer screens.

One factor that could be holding protest at bay is that – unlike climate change or nuclear war – ASI promises extraordinary benefits alongside its risks. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is known for his work on existential risk, and is the author of the influential 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies – often cited as an early wake-up call about the dangers of ASI. Nevertheless, because society is now paying more attention to managing such risks, Bostrom has become more optimistic about the potential for ASI to benefit humanity. He tells me that ASI is “the big unlock” and a portal through which “any path to really great futures for humanity must sooner or later passage.” ASI could accelerate clean energy transitions, create sustainable materials, extend lifespans and cure diseases. It’s hard to rally people to smash the machine that might cure a loved one’s cancer.

Battles fought behind closed doors

For now, the battles are quiet, legal ones – fought not in the streets but in drafting rooms and regulatory hearings in Brussels, Washington and Beijing. These efforts, behind closed doors, present their own particular challenges to democracy. It’s still early days for AI, and the law is struggling to catch up. For new laws to be democratic, they should be built carefully, debated in public, open to challenge, limited in scope and reversible. But the temptation with ASI is to forge ahead, seeking shortcuts and making swift decisions based on discussions behind the scenes.

The UK and US have established government-backed AI safety institutes that probe advanced models, run evaluations and publish their verdicts. Both have drawn fire for a lack of transparency – such as not being clear why certain AI risks are focused on rather than others – and neither was created by an act of parliament or congress. For now, their outputs are only recommendations and not binding. But as the technology accelerates, these institutes are likely to grow in reach and consequence. Meanwhile, the groups and individuals raising their voices and applying pressure to these institutes are also likely to grow in strength and number, as the threat is perceived to grow.

Efforts are being made to follow a more democratic process. Across the Channel, the European Union’s AI Act made history as the world’s first comprehensive piece of AI regulation. One can quibble about the EU’s democratic deficit, but the Act itself ticks many boxes: consent and representation (Parliament and Council voted for it), due process (clear rules, the right to complain) and proportionality (focus on high-risk uses). What it lacks is strong reversibility. It requires periodic reviews, but there are no hard sunset clauses to force a proper rethink.

While progress is being made, many still believe that regulation is happening too slowly and is too limited. Just three days after the EU Council approved its AI Act, Bengio, Hinton and colleagues published a paper in Science that, while welcoming the Act as a positive step, warned that global AI regulation remained hampered by its often voluntary nature, limited geographic scope and the exclusion of military systems.

What’s needed, they argued, are “governance mechanisms matched to the magnitude of the risks”, which they judge to be existential. While low-risk uses and research should be protected, “The most pressing scrutiny should be on AI systems at the frontier: the few most powerful systems – trained on billion-dollar supercomputers – which will have the most hazardous and unpredictable capabilities,” they wrote, calling for expert, fast-moving agencies “with the authority to act swiftly”. The appeal of this approach is clear, but so is the cost, for speed rarely leaves space for public debate or the slow grind of proper democratic process.

The dangers of 'moral panic'

For some, using regulation to protect civilization from the dangers of AI is less a subject for debate and more of a sacred duty. As tech journalist Karen Hao notes, visceral emotion and quasi-religious fervour colour some advocates’ warnings. Their need to prevent ASI from – as they see it – destroying humanity looks like what psychologists call a “sacred value”. These are non-negotiable commitments that override cost–benefit reasoning. When sacred values are activated, the brain’s cost–benefit circuitry effectively goes quiet, leaving a “just do it” imperative.

There’s also the related danger of moral panic. In such panics, “moral regulators” enlist the law to make their private fears everyone’s problem. Members of an elite (in this case, some AI safety experts) construct “folk devils”, whether this be the unknowable monster of ASI itself or the companies building it. They then stoke hostility, pluck statistics from the ether, like the ones around the highly speculative p(doom) debate, and prompt legislators, eager to be seen to act, to pass laws that risk being rushed, ill-conceived and hard to undo.

Panics fade, but laws linger. When a 2024 report by researchers from academia, civil society and industry proposed worldwide “computer governance” – an international system to monitor and manage the computing power used to train advanced models – Peter Thiel derided it as a blueprint for totalitarianism that could potentially monitor every keystroke on every computer. This sounds hyperbolic, but the report itself warned that such governance could “infringe on civil liberties, prop up the powerful, and entrench authoritarian regimes”.

In a future panic, AI experts could dismiss ordinary safeguards – such as public input, judicial review and expiry clauses – as luxuries, insisting that extinction has no appeals process and that only extraordinary measures will suffice. The point isn’t that we shouldn’t act, but that action must be anchored in law that is transparent, proportionate and challengeable.

The other reason regulatory responses could become problematic is if they under step, failing to address a plausible ASI threat. One obvious cause of this would be regulatory capture. While some big tech companies, like Anthropic, are in favour of more regulation, many others have poured resources into lobbying against regulation worldwide. A 2025 investigation by Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl found that industry pressure had weakened the EU’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI, noting that some tech firms have fought “tooth and nail” against regulating the development of frontier AI models.

Such fierce fighting has also occurred in California – home to the headquarters of Google, Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI. In 2024, the state tried to pass the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. This aimed to “mitigate the risk of catastrophic harms from AI models so advanced that they are not yet known to exist” by regulating large AI firms. Four in five Americans supported it, but intense lobbying by industry groups and companies such as OpenAI helped kill the bill.

When law fails, history suggests the fight moves to the streets. To paraphrase JFK, those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. Eliezer Yudkowsky has already floated the idea that, if international regulation fails, the US should consider airstrikes on rogue data centres. While this seems like an outlandish idea, we may see more like it if frustration, and fear, is allowed to build.

Act – but with guardrails

Some will dismiss any discussion of ASI as a distraction from the tangible harms AI is already inflicting on society. Others will see any resistance to harshly regulating ASI development as little more than useful idiocy in service of libertarian profit-seeking. Yet insisting on democratic principles in the face of ASI fears allows us to draw a clear through-line: the same commitment to democratic oversight and control is needed both for tomorrow’s hypothetical ASI and for today’s very real “empire of AI”, as Karen Hao has called it.

Our challenge is not just to survive whatever clever machine humanity builds next. Instead, we must survive ourselves: our appetite for control, our willingness to burn freedoms for safety, and our tendency to view due process and transparency as unnecessary friction. The task is to act, but with guardrails, remembering that democratic processes aren’t luxuries to be discarded but lifelines to be clung to. Democracies are infuriatingly slow, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

Whatever the future of AI, and however fast its development, our goal is simple: no catastrophe, no tyranny. The hard part, the deeply human part, will be remembering that the threat of the second is every bit as dangerous as that of the first.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: In my previous video, I talked about how I’ve decided to return for my third Climate Ride. My first ride was five days through Joshua Tree National Park in 2023, which I was able …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Oh no, a new danger is terrorizing my community! According to a local paper, the Bay Area Telegraph, “Local Trauma Medics Share Concerning Update on Serious E-Bike Injuries.” This is doubly concerning to me …

I am staging a one-off performance of the World’s Most Boring Card Trick at Magic Fest in Edinburgh on the 27^th December. Tickets here. Anyway, I digress. I have long been fascinated by the psychology of humour and once carried out a project called LaughLab. Billed as the search for the world’s funniest joke, over 350,000 people submitted their top gags to our website and rated the jokes sent in by others. We ended up with around 40,000 jokes and you can read the winning entry here (there is also a free download of 1000 jokes from the project).

It was a great project and is still quoted by media around the world. I ended up dressing as a giant chicken, interviewing a clown on Freud’s couch, and brain scanning someone listening to jokes.

A few years ago, I came up with a theory about Christmas cracker jokes. They tend to be short and not very funny, and it occurred to me that this is a brilliant idea. Why? Because if the joke’s good but you don’t get a laugh, then it’s your problem. However, if the joke’s bad and you don’t get a laugh, then you can blame your material! So, cracker jokes don’t embarrass anyone. Not only that, but the resulting groan binds people together. I love it when the psychology of everyday life turns out to be more complex and interesting than it first appears! As comedian and musician Victor Borge once said, humour is often the shortest distance between people.

I recently went through the LaughLab database and pulled out some cracker jokes to make your groan and bond:

– What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer.

– What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.

– What lies on the bottom of the ocean and shakes? A nervous wreck.

– Two cows are in a field. One cow: “moo”. Other cow: “I was going to say that”

– What did the landlord say as he threw Shakespeare out of his pub? “You’re Bard!”

– Two aerials got married. The ceremony was rubbish but the reception was brilliant.

– What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick.

– A skeleton walks into a pub and orders a pint of beer and a mop.

The BBC have just produced an article about it all and were kind enough to interview me about my theory here.

Does the theory resonate with you? What’s your favourite cracker joke?

Have a good break!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 […]