Did you know that Dr Phil, that old fraud, had put together a media company called Merit Street Media to combat the “Woke Mind Virus”? And that he partnered with Trinity Broadcasting Network (there’s a combo formed in Hell) to set it up? And that they sunk somewhere between $100 and $500 million into the assets for this company?

No? I didn’t either. Completely missed it. The first I heard of it was this bit of news:

This week, Merit Street also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Variety reports. At the same time, the company has sued TBN, and accused it of sabotaging the business, the outlet notes. Merit Street claims that TBN has “abused its position as the controlling shareholder” and that, as a result, Merit Street was forced to “pay or incur obligations to third parties in excess of $100 million.”

Not only a failure, but an ugly lawsuit between some awful conservatives, it’s like Christmas in July. The company also says of TBN:

The company further states that TBN provided production services that were “comically dysfunctional. Although it promised the equivalent of the professional facilities and services that Dr. Phil had long relied on when producing his show in Los Angeles for CBS, the supposed ‘first class’ services TBN promised under the Joint Venture Agreement were nothing of the sort. TBN provided screens and teleprompters that blacked out during live shows, an incomplete control room operating out of a truck, an unusable cell phone app for viewers, and amateur video editing software.”

Go Christian, go broke.

After all, one of the virtues of bird is that they can be used to motivate research into insects. That’s nice. We couldn’t possibly get the general public interested in arthropods when there are charismatic warm-blooded flying things to save.

Juncos are known as seed-eating birds. They spend their days rummaging through the undergrowth searching for fallen seeds. At feeders, they prefer smaller grains, like millet. But seeds don’t provide the protein juncos, or any songbirds, need to grow a new set of feathers while they molt. And the protein this baby junco needs to molt its blotchy juvenile feathers and to grow sleek stone-gray feathers on top and white ones below would come only from bugs. In fact, 90 percent of the more than 10,700 known bird species rely on insects for food during at least part of their life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed-eating songbirds must eat insects and other arthropods, that many-legged group of creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to grow new feathers and to feed their young. Without insects, in other words, they wouldn’t survive.

So, yes, we should care about the health of insects because they are bird food, and birds are dependent on insects for protein. That’s why we should care about this next terrifying statistic.

Unfortunately, insects are disappearing at a rate of about 1 to 2 percent a year. And the decline is not limited to just one species nor just one group of insects. The data suggests that the decline is widespread, even global. These findings have been confirmed in hundreds of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, says David L. Wagner, a University of Connecticut entomologist and the lead scientist of a program known as the Status of Insects, which coordinates pertinent research on insect populations from around the world. “The weight of the evidence is clear,” Wagner says. “I feel like it would stand up in a court of law.”

That 1 to 2 percent is a mean. I think from what I’ve seen here, in this rural agricultural region, is that it is much higher — the population of visible, obvious insects is less than half of what it was when I moved here 25 years ago. Less dense clouds of insects clustered around street lights. Car grills that are no longer choked with splattered bugs. Fewer reports of clouds of mayflies rising off lakes.

I think it’s scary without even considering bird populations. We’re wiping out a key component of the food web here. Do we have to wait for birds to drop out of the sky or bird song to fade from the dawn symphony before we will care?

Besides, as we all know, insects are spider food. Getting the public to care about spiders is probably an even harder sell.

I’m starting to hear all about a major celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary next year, and it’s clear that the Trump administration is planning to use it for more propaganda. One ominous sign is that the White House is working with…<hack, spit> PragerU, which is not a university, to provide “educational” material for a major exhibit. PragerU is also not the Smithsonian Institution. But they’re the ones in charge of telling the nation’s history.

The Department of Education has tapped conservative media platform PragerU to tell the nation’s origin story in an “America 250” exhibit that opened in the White House complex this month.

The PragerU Founders Museum on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building features 82 historical paintings of people and events from the American Revolution to inspire patriotic fervor for the yearlong celebration of the July 4, 1776, signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Each painting includes a QR code linking to a short PragerU video or essay on the White House website. Online content includes artificial intelligence-generated talking figures coming to life from the paintings, such as the 56 men who signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776, and a written recap of the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781.

“President Trump is championing the spirit of patriotism in our country,” said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman. “The Founders Museum is an innovative way for schools and community centers to encourage Americans to reflect on the pivotal moments and people that shaped our nation into one that values courage, hard work, and freedom.”

For a different perspective…

Social justice advocates, however, said the inclusion of PragerU reflects a Trump administration agenda to whitewash history. They say the exhibit fails to acknowledge the experiences of marginalized racial minorities, women and gay people during the revolution.

“This [exhibit] promotes a limited view of all that America is, was, and will be,” said Robert Kesten, executive director of Stonewall National Museum, Archives, & Library, an LGBTQ historical preservation group. “It shortchanges us and ignores all the progress we have made historically and academically.”

Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, said PragerU videos aim to make White people “not feel guilty about history.”

“PragerU’s videos are ignorant and disrespectful,” Mr. Dibinga said. “The goal of this partnership is to accelerate the erasure of non-White male history and use PragerU’s 3.37 million followers to spread their propaganda.”

And also to promote a Christian Nationalist view. Here’s a video that discusses Trump’s, and PragerU’s, atrocious slopaganda.

Hey, y’all remember when Game of Thrones was a hot show? It had dragons, and zombies, and bloody destructive wars, and gratuitous nudity, and engaging characters, and multiple plot lines that were plummeting forward. Must-see TV, with gigantic budgets!

And then the last season comes along, it’s hot garbage, it betrays all the premises of the previous seasons, closes plot lines with idiot finality and illogical resolutions, and everyone realizes…maybe it was all shallow pretense all along, a series of excuses to justify the next slam-bang event in a long chain of them, and all interest in repeat viewing dissipates, and the show is only remembered as an embarrassment, because of that horrible conclusion.

I am reminded today of another long-running serial that started with grand ideals (FREEDOM!), had heroic battles, vivid, memorable characters, a vast landscape of spectacular scenery, beautiful dreams of a progressive society, and then it ends with a squalid little fart. We discover it was all a lie. We should have known. We started with a fantasy of equality and freedom composed by a team of rich landowners who made sure that the little people would never break their grip on power. We announced that the central theme of this great endeavor was liberty, while postponing emancipation of the horde of slaves we held, and taking over all that beautiful land by genocide of the people already living there.

And now, on the verge of our 250th anniversary, we have put the reins of power in the hands of a babbling loon who wants to deport anyone with a skin color less pasty than his own, who has just passed a bill that slashes the social safety net and enriches millionaires even more, all while his allies shred education and science in this country.

The “one big, beautiful bill”, as Trump calls it, won final approval by the House of Representatives on Thursday, in time for his signature on 4 July, the US Independence Day holiday. In addition to the tax cuts, it will also channel tens of billions in dollars towards immigration enforcement and building a wall along the Mexican border.

To cut costs, Republicans included provisions to end green energy incentives created under Joe Biden, but the bulk of the savings will come from changes to two programs: Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps low-income Americans afford food.

Both programs will face new and stricter work requirements, and states will be forced to share part of the cost of Snap for the first time ever. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill’s Medicaid changes could cost as many as 11.8 million people their healthcare, and the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts about 8 million people, or one in five recipients, may lose their Snap benefits.

And of course Trump capped it all off with an anti-semitic slur in his victory speech.

TRUMP: No estate tax, no going through the banks and borrowing from—in some cases a fine banker— and in some cases a shylocks and bad people. pic.twitter.com/VHQt3k1U6u

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 4, 2025

I’m sorry, but the finale of this series really sucks. Can I cancel my subscription? Get my money back? I would never have started watching if I’d known how badly the writers and show-runners were going to botch it in the conclusion.

Yay! I have an appointment for an MRI next Tuesday! My insurance company finally approved it.

Cool. This means that it only takes two weeks to get an informed diagnosis of a catastrophically debilitating injury, before we can get around to actually treating it. Not looking forward to growing old in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inequality and distrust

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

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

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

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

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

The rise of community energy

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

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

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

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

Participation for positive change

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

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

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

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

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

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

Income for the community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: When I was a little kid, I was a spy. I was super into it, mostly thanks to a book called The KnowHow Book of SpyCraft, which gave detailed instructions on how to be …

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.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: The US government has empowered a secret police force to round up people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants and disappearing them off the streets, out of schools, and even away from their scheduled …

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.

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 […]