Today, ICE shot a woman in the face. They have an explanation.

In a post to X, the homeland security department (DHS) insisted the person was a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted “to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them”.

The department claimed several ICE officers were hurt, but noted that they are expected to make full recoveries.

“An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers,” the DHS post said.

That’s their story. But…we have video of the event. Watch closely. Look for an attempt to kill officers, rather than get away. Look for ICE officers being hurt. Explain how someone trying to get away from the scene is threatening the lives of the officers. Tell me what “defensive shots” against an unarmed driver are.

The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, had a few words for ICE.

Frey even issued an emphatic statement to ICE directly: “I do have a message for our community for our city and I do have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Longterm Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized and now, somebody is dead.

Continued to address ICE, Frey said: “That’s on you. It’s also on you to leave. It’s on you to make sure that further damage, further loss of life and injury, is not done.”

The mayor also noted that DHS is “trying to spin this as an action of self defense. Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”

Yeah. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS, THE STATE, AND THE ENTIRE GODDAMN COUNTRY.

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In further accounts, she was shot in front of her wife as they were trying to record the ICE agents.

I remember when all the radical lefties were complaining that the university curriculum was too packed with tired old white men, which was true–the Western Canon is overstuffed with old guys. But I always thought the idea was to open the door to more diversity, to recognize more worthy women and brown people, and let the curriculum breathe a little more. It was less about culling Greek philosophers and to introduce more Great thinkers of different backgrounds.

Well, leave it to the conservatives to carry the idea to an extreme. Texas A&M wants to ban Plato.

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

As Daily Nous reports, the university has instructed a professor not to teach Plato’s work in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, an act that is both historically incoherent and politically revealing. Plato is not a contemporary provocateur. He is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, taught because his writing invites questioning, disagreement, and analysis. Treating Plato as expendable makes clear that the concern is not ideology, but cognition in the time of Trump.

Madness.

What else bothers me is that the Texas A&M administration is overstepping their bounds. Administrators do not typically have the background to dictate the curriculum in a university department; faculty must have the autonomy to determine the content of their courses.

For example, most of the courses I teach are established topics widely recognized by all universities. I teach cell biology and genetics using standard textbooks, and further, these were courses long approved on my campus, and I’m continuing a curriculum established by my predecessors. If an administrator tried to meddle in the content of those courses, not only would I be pissed off, my colleagues would join me in protesting.

We also have to be prepared to extend our teaching to include new material — does anyone think an administrator is more up to date on current advances in biology than I am? I’ve also introduced entirely new courses, like my eco-devo course, which wasn’t just a whim on my part. I had to show my sources, and document my teaching plan to my department. I had to get approval from my division. I had to write a proposal that was presented to all the faculty of my university. Administrators had to deliver the final stamp of approval, but that’s just a formality — course content is and should be entirely a product of qualified faculty and experts.

I hope Texas A&M faculty are ready to rise up in furious protest at administrators killing Plato in a philosophy course.

If you are anything like me, you are eagerly anticipating the day that either Trump drops dead (preferably slowly, and in agony), or that Congress grows a spine and asserts its constitutional authority to slap the old fart down. The former is probably much more likely. Unfortunately, just seeing Trump hog-tied or buried in a shallow grave on one of his golf courses does not solve our problems — JD Vance is waiting in the wings, and he might be even worse. While Trump is amoral and greedy, Vance has a terrifying ideology driving him. He’s an acolyte of Thiel, and Thiel is an acolyte of Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin is almost incomprehensibly popular among rich Silicon Valley libertarian/authoritarians, but I would guess one source of their esteem is Yarvin’s constant sucking up to the wealthy. They should rule the world, he thinks; democracy is bad, and we should let tech parasites be our overlords. Only problem with his perspective is that he’s a moron. Daniel Drezner sums him up.

My considered reaction: at least with the likes of, say, Marc Andreessen, some effort is required to parse out his true-but-not-new points from his new-but-not-true points.1 With Yarvin, it’s much simpler: pretty much everything he says in this interview is wrong. There is no kernel of an interesting idea gone bad; there is just a bunch of half-baked analogies that fall apart if you have a decent liberal-arts education. It’s like listening to a stoned, first-year MBA student who read his father’s outdated history books when he was a teenager and half-remembers them.

I’ve read some of Yarvin’s online work, but not much. It’s self-serving drivel, and anyone with any intelligence will recognize that within a few paragraphs. I think Elizabeth Spiers recognizes the problem.

The most appropriate treatment of Yarvin is one that recognizes his influence on Silicon Valley billionaires who don’t recognize him as a shallow thinker bc they’ve never taken a single class on political philosophy or history or philosophy

So yeah, kids, get a liberal arts education or you might end up as stupidly blinkered as a Yarvin or Andreesen or Thiel or Musk. Maybe my university ought to consider that for a slogan (our current advertising mantra is “More Is Morris,” which is short but not very deep. Don’t worry, they’ll probably change it next year.)

There’s a longer article on Yarvin in the New Yorker, but he’s hardly worth the extensive coverage — my feeling reading anything about him is that anyone pays attention to him. Here’s a short summary of his agenda.

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

It wouldn’t be of much concern if Yarvin was just a crank with a blog, but he has become a crank with influence on some very powerful people.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

If Trump were to die, Stephen Miller’s influence might diminish somewhat (a good thing), but he’d be replaced by Curtis Yarvin as advisor, with every Silicon Valley venture capitalist breathing over his shoulder, urging him on to empower mega-capitalism. Yarvin is a scary extremist dude.

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

How does this bozo get the attention of media and influence so many of the assholes in power? I’ve been doing it wrong. If I want to be rich and popular, I really need to start praising the rich and popular, telling them that they deserve to rule the world.

I’ll try that right now.

…

Any minute now.

…

Urk…

…

…

Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to be that stupid and craven. Sorry. I’d rather just fade away into obscurity.

Don’t be too shocked, but I think AI does have some utility, despite the occasional hallucination.

A Utah police department’s use of artificial intelligence led to a police report stating — falsely — that an officer had been transformed into a frog.

The Heber City Police Department started using a pair of AI programs, Draft One and Code Four, to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage in December.

A report generated by the Draft One program mistakenly reported that an officer had been turned into a frog.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,” Sgt. Rick Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

We use AI at my university for that purpose, too. Ever sit through a committee meting? Someone has to take notes, edit them, and post them to a repository of meeting minutes. It’s a tedious, boring job. Since COVID moved a lot of those meetings online, we’ve found it useful to have an AI make a summary of the conversation, sparing us some drudgery.

Of course, someone should review the output and clean up the inevitable errors. The Heber City police didn’t do that part. Or maybe they did, and someone found the hallucination so funny that they talked about it.

I am horrified by this incompetent man who is running the country.

We should not allow our country to be run by “STUPID” or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE!, which is why Trump should be impeached and his entire administration dismissed, ultimately to be arrested and tried. He is providing the evidence himself: you do not ask people to take a cognitive test unless you suspect there may be a cognitive problem, and asking them to take the test three times suggests that there is a deep problem here.

He is in cognitive decline. He’s also in poor health, to the point that he is tweaking his medication against all medical advice. He’s taking 4 times the recommended daily dose of aspirin.

They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?

I know a little bit about this, with my history of cardiac problems. Initially they had me taking baby aspirin, low dose aspirin, but then the doctors decided, on the basis of evidence, that this wouldn’t help. So guess what I did? I stopped taking it. I didn’t quadruple the dose.

He’s a stupid, ignorant old man.

Yet somehow this man holds unfettered power; he can, basically on a whim, without congressional approval, invade a foreign country and snatch up the elected leader of that country. Venezuela sets an ugly precedent. I guess we couldn’t complain if the EU swept in and scooped up our president (please do, we’ll welcome you with flags and parades).

Worse, he’s declaring that this sudden snatch-and-grab means we’re now in charge, that we “run” Venezuela, and he has admitted that the motive was simple greed, to steal their oil. We tried this in Iraq, at the cost of a million lives and trillions of dollars. Are we supposed to believe that this will work this time?

I need a stronger word than “worse,” because now Stephen Miller is talking about taking over Greenland.

One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Stephen Miller, questioned Denmark’s claim on Greenland and suggested the U.S. could seize it without pushback, stoking concern among European allies.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller sidestepped questions of whether the U.S. will use military force to take Greenland, a territory of Denmark, and said the president has been “clear for months” that the U.S. should have it.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said in the Jan. 5 interview.

We are so fucked. The whole world is fucked.

The world wide web is the most prolific incubator of conspiracy theories in human history. For the last few decades, it’s enabled users to spread their wildest, most inflammatory ideas across the globe in seconds. But it seems we are now entering a new phase of distrust. As artificial intelligence increases its dominance online, our fear and suspicion is being directed onto the medium itself. Who is really behind the screen? What is the internet doing to us?

New Humanist has donned its tinfoil hat and sifted through countless memes, message boards and metaverses to bring you a comprehensive guide to all things conspiratorial about the internet, from the slop to the pseudo-sciences. And even some theories that ring a little too true for comfort.

5G is Frying Your Brain

The idea that our phones are making us ill has been around since the days of playing Snake on brick-sized Nokias. With each iteration of mobile networks, these theories have grown stronger, and the Covid-19 pandemic boosted their reach even further. During lockdown, rumours spread that the Covid-19 vaccines contained microchips which were controlled by 5G towers. In 2020, British conspiracy theorists undertook an arson campaign on 5G towers around the country – but they weren’t the only ones giving credence to this incredibly far-fetched idea. One-third of Brits who answered a 2020 survey by the polling firm Focaldata said they couldn’t rule out a link between 5G and coronavirus.

Meanwhile, in the United States, where conspiracy theories inform government policy, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that mobile phones can cause cancer in children, despite the National Cancer Institute stating that there is not enough scientific evidence to associate mobile phone use with cancer. (Of course, RFK Jr. still uses his phone.)

The Global Kill Switch

We know that governments can turn off internet access in specific regions and even entire countries. Oppressive regimes in Egypt and China have already done so in response to citizen uprisings. In the United Kingdom, the law permits the secretary of state for culture, media and sport to restrict internet access in certain extreme circumstances, such as a large-scale cyberattack. But conspiracy theorists claim that shadowy global rulers can go a step further, and shut off the internet for the entire planet at the touch of a single button.

This type of conspiracy mixes the old with the new, combining a very modern technology with the age-old fiction that hidden forces secretly control us. Switching off the world’s internet would cause economic markets to crash, logistical chaos and a catastrophic loss of data. But anyone who’s scrolled through an AI-boosted comment thread on LinkedIn might consider it worth the hassle.

Trump’s Waiting Line

In August, a host of European leaders attended peace talks at Donald Trump’s newly gold-plated White House, supporting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to end the war with Russia. As talks got underway, an image emerged apparently showing several dignitaries waiting outside the Oval Office looking glum. “Trump has the Presidents of Germany, France, the UK, Finland, the leader of NATO and the leader of the European Union waiting outside the Oval Office in chairs like they’re at the dentist office,” barked a right-wing commentator on X. However, the image was AI-generated, presumably as part of a campaign to make Europe look weak and the Trump administration strong. The photo spread quickly across multiple platforms and in several languages, despite clear signs it was fake. There was an extra leg hovering under a chair, an unclaimed shoe, and none of those pictured were wearing the same outfits as in official photos from the event.

Conspiracy peddlers can now create high-quality images and videos almost instantly through generative AI and control an army of bots to distribute them. This phenomenon has led to the resurgence of an old theory on the state of the internet known as…

The Dead Internet Theory

Originating around 2021, the Dead Internet Theory suggests that the internet as we know it stopped existing several years ago, and the vast majority of activity is now generated by automated bots to placate a series of algorithms. More extreme versions of the theory claim that a larger purpose exists behind the transformation – either to manipulate consumers into buying more products or to control the population in even more nefarious ways. But the core statement rings true for many modern internet users as the sense of connection has waned and ads, scams and exploitative practices bombard us relentlessly.

It’s true that significant space on the internet is now taken up by bots engaging with bots. The emergence of generative AI and the introduction of tools like ChatGPT have supercharged this eerie phenomenon. On X, since Elon Musk offered verified users a percentage of ad revenue from their comment threads, opportunists have hooked up large language models to paid verified accounts, directing them to generate engagement through viral content. Bots are interacting with other bots, beneath artificially generated content.

“I think there’s an interesting co-mingling of conspiracism and the actual shifting reality of the internet here,” says Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and author of The Storm is Upon Us. “We are increasingly seeing large-scale fakery and bot activity, combined with the hollowing out of search engine results and the failure of more and more links.”

“Link rot” refers to the many broken hyperlinks on the internet. A 2024 study showed that at least 66.5 per cent of links to sites in the last nine years are dead. The study attributed these deaths primarily to webpages being removed, updated or redirected by their owners. As AI-generated images and video deep fakes become easier to generate, the balance is likely to shift further, undermining trust in content and creating the perfect conditions for this conspiracy theory to thrive.

AI is Already Sentient

Conscious machines have filled the pages and screens of science fiction for many years, but GenAI has made the concept much more believable. Programmes like ChatGPT are not sentient; they’re essentially automation tools that are extremely good at guessing what you want to hear. But they can mimic conscious behaviour so well that people are increasingly using them for tasks they are woefully ill-equipped for, such as using a chatbot for life advice, or even as a personal therapist.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that we’ve already reached the dawn of sentient AI and that a Skynet-like entity is controlling the internet, and by extension, everyone using it. Were this true, our AI overlord is currently trying to dumb us down with a flood of artificially generated slop like “Shrimp Jesus” – an AI meme depicting Jesus Christ as a crustacean, widely shared by boomers on Facebook. If it works, we might deserve our future of servitude to silicon tyrants.

Joe Biden is a Robot

In May, Donald Trump reposted a conspiracy theory claiming his predecessor, Joe Biden, died in 2020 and was replaced by either a robot or a clone. In this fantasy, Biden is not the only world leader switched with a robot, although little thought is given to why this might be advantageous. But the “leader of the free world” often endorses conspiracies – from the wild beliefs of QAnon to the delusions of the “manosphere”, where podcasters and influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate promote misogyny, racism and toxic masculinity though disinformation.

Media psychologist Dr Tunisha Singleton credits much of the success of these online MAGA voices to inadequate education for males in the US. “The number of white young males that are applying to college is the lowest it’s ever been,” she explains. “If you’re not getting your education in college, then where are you?”

And, as Roko shows, we’re all implicated...

In 2010, a user on LessWrong, a techno-philosophy web forum, wrote a lengthy theory about the inevitable rise of AI superintelligence. The author argued that anyone aware of this all-powerful machine’s ascent would be severely punished if they didn’t facilitate its creation. Unfortunately, this meant anyone who read the theory was immediately forced to make a choice: risk doing nothing and be obliterated by a super-AI, or help bring it to life. Therefore, according to “Roko’s theory”, by reading the last paragraph, you’ve also put yourself directly in the crosshairs of a particularly mean basilisk’s stare.

The theory was banned from the message board, adding to its legend. Slate magazine called it “the most terrifying thought experiment of all time”, and it even featured in a recent episode of Black Mirror. The hypothesis follows similar logic to Pascal’s Wager, which argues you may as well worship a god just in case it turns out to be real. And, like Pascal’s Wager, it falls apart at the merest hint of logic.

Aside from making you complicit in the rise of an AI death machine, this article has also armed you with the knowledge to identify these conspiracy theories for what they are. Unfortunately, some of your friends, family members and co-workers may have already fallen prey to them. So how do we debunk them? Given the lack of trust in the internet these days, perhaps a face-to-face conversation would be best.

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

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What Is Humanism For? (Bristol University Press) by Richard Norman

Humanism once evoked the image of a Renaissance scholar hunched over a bookwheel, scribbling in the margins of some ancient manuscript. Though devout believers, these scholars were pioneers in loosening Christianity’s grip on European thought, reviving ancient ideas alien to the medieval mind and, paradoxically, nurturing a more modern sense of “humanism”. Richard Norman’s elegant new book is less about cataloguing definitions than asking what humanism is for: what role it plays in people’s lives and in the societies they inhabit.

Nevertheless, definitions still matter. Norman is a philosopher – an emeritus professor at the University of Kent – and his approach is revealing. Humanism, Norman insists, is “not a set of doctrines … a creed … a prescribed body of practices or a code of moral rules,” but a “frame of orientation and devotion”, in Erich Fromm’s phrase, enabling individuals and communities to make sense of existence without appeal to the supernatural. As a “frame”, humanism offers “an overall perspective, a way of seeing our world and our place in it”, one that is “broad and general” yet neither “vague nor empty”.

This formulation highlights both the promise and the difficulty of defining humanism. Too often, it risks being defined negatively, by what it rejects – religion, God, metaphysics, the supernatural – rather than by its positive content. Norman acknowledges this tension, and much of his work is to show humanism’s positive content in terms of how it functions in the modern world. He does so in two ways: one conceptual, and one historical.

The ground of his conceptual analysis is naturalism. Naturalism, for him, is the conviction that “this world is the only world there is. And by ‘this world’ is meant, equally simply, the world in which we live and with which we interact through sensory experience and physical action.” Such a claim may appear stark, but Norman argues that it provides the foundation for building a worldview from the inside out. We need not import meaning from an external realm; it can be created within human life itself.

The historical approach is necessarily concise in this short 116-page book, with nods to the naturalism of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, as well as contemporaneous critiques of the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the great polemicist of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire. The account also brings in Indian schools of atheistic and materialist thought.

The aim is not to provide a comprehensive history but to demonstrate that humanism is neither a novelty nor a purely western invention, but rather a recurring current in human thought, re-emerging in different forms as human beings wrestle with questions of meaning and morality without appealing to the divine. The latter point is especially important if humanism is to spread significantly beyond the already secular west.

One of Norman’s strengths is his refusal to caricature religion. He insists on taking it at its most intellectually and morally serious, rather than dismissing it as mere superstition. He is less indulgent towards contemporary forms of scientific reductionism, eg the attempt to say that the human being is simply a series of neurons or chemical reactions in the brain, or the idea that our existence can be explained entirely in the language of mathematical physics. This, he suggests, is a real threat: the risk of reducing human life to what religious critics have long feared, a barren desert of mechanism and emptiness.

Norman resists this tendency, insisting that the richness of human experience – emotion, imagination, culture, art – cannot be collapsed into physics or biology without remainder. Humanism, as he presents it, is not a reductive scientism but a broad framework that values science without allowing it to swallow all other forms of understanding.

The question of community is more difficult. Religions have historically thrived by meeting human needs for belonging, ritual and solidarity. Humanism, by comparison, is young and often appears to be playing catch-up. Norman acknowledges that ethical societies, humanist groups and secular ceremonies struggle to replicate the accumulated emotional weight of centuries that gives religious communities their strength.

Where humanism may appear to have the upper hand is in its political implications. Norman traces a line from figures such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, who linked their secular philosophy with political struggles for liberty, democracy and equality, all the way through to contemporary humanist commitments to human rights, free expression, sexual equality and environmental responsibility.

I found the book most interesting when Norman confronts not only the “old gods” of religion but the “new idols” of transhumanism and posthumanism, with their vision of using science and technology to move beyond our current mental and physical limits. Against such ideas of immortality, digital transcendence or engineered perfection, he argues that finitude is essential to meaning. The emphasis on finitude is the most compelling aspect of the book because it is an answer both to traditional religion and to posthumanism. Responding to the familiar charge that rejecting religion makes life meaningless, Norman argues the opposite: mortality is what lends life its urgency and preciousness. Human life is valuable not because it is potentially infinite but because it is necessarily finite.

If naturalism is the theoretical basis of humanism, finitude is its ethical ground. Finitude is the condition of the meaningful possibilities we encounter in our lives, individual fragility and the ground of collective solidarity, creativity and joy. The emphasis on the goodness of finitude constitutes the positive core of humanism, and Norman goes on to identify several sources of meaning available within a humanist framework, including:

• Authenticity (the determination to live one’s own life rather than one dictated by tradition or dogma)
• Creativity (the impulse to shape the world through art)
• Work
• Imagination
• Continuity with past and future generations, which situates each life in a larger story
• Connection with the natural world
• And lastly, the power of narrative (the ability to tell stories that give shape and coherence to a finite existence)

Through this framework, he shows how humanism today can offer something of the ceremony and symbolic depth of traditional religion. Humanist funerals are one example, with their attention to individual life stories and their rejection of supernatural consolations.

Norman’s What Is Humanism For? is a winningly undogmatic book. It is lucid and accessible, avoiding jargon without oversimplifying, and identifies the central problem of showing how and why humanism is more than the absence of religion. It provides modest and practical arguments about how humanism allows us to live finite lives with clarity and compassion, to face global challenges without illusions, and to find significance in the one world we share.

Finally, what the book is able to achieve is to put forward a persuasive case that humanism is not simply about rejecting religion, but about how we might live.

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

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A few decades ago, I stopped gossiping and it changed my life. It was something I used to be good at. “Gossip,” the playwright Sholem Aleichem is credited with saying, “is nature’s telephone.” I thought it made people like me. But I learned that while people love gossip, they don’t respect the person transmitting it. Giving up was liberating. My friendships became more meaningful and people trusted me with far more of their secrets.

By then, I also understood how damaging it could be. When I started on the comedy circuit, a rumour spread that I’d had an affair with a very famous comedian, a man I hadn’t even met at the time. Years later, when I finally did, I had a laugh at the absurdity. But it wasn’t funny in the 90s when “slag” was still used liberally to denigrate women.

Recently, I have let gossiping back into my life. But warily, like a controlled substance. I understand that the high of sharing can be followed by a crash of shame and regret. And I’ve also discovered that the way that people gossip now has changed. In my youth, you might scrawl it on a toilet door, or hear it whispered second or third hand … it moved more slowly, shifting as it went.

My daughter, who is 12, inhabits a different world. For her generation, gossip doesn’t need bathroom walls. It moves at the speed of Wi-Fi, via WhatsApp and Snapchat. She isn’t allowed her own phone, so she has to peer over friends’ shoulders to keep up. But the basic patterns haven’t changed. In her class, there’s still the one girl “who can’t be trusted”, because the minute you tell her something, she runs straight off to repeat it. She is, in her way, a living link to the old days, when gossip required energy and nerve, rather than an easy click.

Is it a skill, in its own way? Could there be something good about it? Anthropologists point out that gossip is not just trivial chatter but a mechanism of social order, a way of reinforcing who belongs and who doesn’t. It is as much about morality as about amusement.

I used to live in an area of London where appearances seemed very important. One day, I popped over to a neighbour’s house in my socks. Two years after I moved out, I bumped into someone who had just moved into my old street. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “You’re the one who used to run around barefoot!” I’d done far more shocking things while I was living there, but it was my shoelessness which became neighbourhood lore.

But while it can bind us together, gossip can just as easily divide us. And for my daughter’s generation, the stakes are even higher. The digital trail means that gossip is now permanent, searchable and infinitely shareable. A whisper that might once have died out in a week can be resurrected years later with a screenshot.

How will my daughter look back on all this? Will she remember the frustration of not having her own phone, always relying on friends? Or will she remember the feeling of being part of something larger than herself, even when it stung?

For me, gossip was a rite of passage. I learned that it was the illusion of a cure for envy, as the fleeting power it brings slips through your fingers. I was very hurt by gossip when I was an emerging comedian, but eventually came to understand that it was nothing to do with me, and everything to do with envious folk obsessed with bringing others down.

And yet, for all its dangers, gossip isn’t entirely corrosive. There is a warmth in it too, a sense of intimacy and mischief. When my daughter comes home and tells me the latest playground dramas – “spilling the tea”, as the young ones call it – I pop the kettle on and get out the biscuits.

Nature’s telephone is still ringing. We pick it up, we whisper, we laugh … as long as we know our limits.

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: “Curing cancer” has long been a go-to phrase for what a better future looks like, up there with flying cars. It’s like, why is Jeff Bezos spending billions of dollars to send Katie Perry …

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!

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Okay, so a huge content warning: this video is going to start out with depressing news, and it’s not going to get any happier by the end. Well, until the obligatory clip of my …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Teaching When To Trust
By Zion Lights

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

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

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

4. The Afghan women left to die
By Jamaima Afridi

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

5. The greatest astronomy PhD ever written
By Marcus Chown

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

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

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

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

7. Five voices on space and society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Minds in search of meaning
By Frank Tallis

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

12. Rise of the science sleuths
By Euan Lawson

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

13. Nuclear choices
By Dominic Hinde

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

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

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

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

15. An atheist goes on pilgrimage
By Christopher Dorrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 […]