Ryan Walters, the superintendent of education who was trying to force Christianity on students — introducing PragerU trash into the curriculum, requiring Bibles (the Trump Bible, actually), etc. — resigned a short while ago. I assumed it was because he had been made a more lucrative offer by a conservative Christian organization, but it may have been a deeper problem than I thought.

Walters is being investigated by the state ethics commission! He had been abusing teacher licenses and firing people he didn’t like, among other fiscal irregularities. He had given high-paying positions to his friends, instead. Some of his actions are already being revoked.

Starting with the cases regarding teacher licenses. The board voted to dismiss several cases for revocations of teachers like Regan Killackey, the Edmond teacher who went somewhat viral last year after an Instagram post from five years prior came to light that showed his kid in a Trump mask and Killackey with a pirate sword, they were at a Halloween store around the holiday time.

The board also voted to dismiss the case of the teacher license revocation for Alison Scot, who also became a target under Walters when she commented on someone’s social media post regarding the assassination attempt of President Trump.

Also cool: the Oklahoma education website, which once promised all this crap about Bibles and PragerU, is already being revised, and his weird religious programming is already beginning to disappear.

As Sam Seder mentions above, this suggests that the Oklahoma citizenry aren’t as far gone as we feared — they’ve been quietly fighting back all along, and we’re starting to see the bad policies of the Walters era being rolled back. Maybe they’re getting tired of being the 50th worst education state in the country.

Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli captivity, and she talks about her capture. What’s surprising is just how childishly stupid and misogynistic the Israeli soldiers were.

She was not allowed to wear her T-shirt with “Free Palestine” on it and was ordered to change, she explains. She put on an orange one with the text “Decolonize” instead.

– And then I put on my frog hat. When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.

Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.

Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.

– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.

Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.

– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.

Greta laughs.

– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.

– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.

Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.

– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.

They’re like spoiled children. Unprofessional and eminently mockable. You might think it’s because these are young soldiers, with the mentality of a college freshman at best, but even the older, unwiser senior politicians are like that.

This smug asshole

Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.

– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.

They were humanitarians, who wanted to deliver aid to Palestinian children.

The US has given over $20 billion in aid to Israel in the last two years. It’s past time to turn off the faucet — no more aid to these immature thugs, ever. Force them to learn how to live with their neighbors in a civilized manner.

When I get back into the classroom in January, one thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to generate lessons with sophisticated computer graphics by simply clicking a button. So fancy! So informative!

The irony of teaching about water conservation with AI does not escape me.

I think this comic strip gets it right: we live in the Age of the Dumbass. After the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the age of iron, we find ourselves in this age of dumbassery.

By the way, my late brother used to occasionally send me Pearls Before Swine strips, just because we shared a sense of humor.

You’d think they’d learn. The Young Republicans had a signal chat where they thought everything was confidential among themselves, so they indulged themselves in profanity, misogyny, and racism while they were discussing their strategy for taking over the YR organization. Ha ha, it was leaked, and these unpleasant young men have been exposed. They were revealed to be repulsive people who hoped to be the future of the Republican party.

The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

Read the linked article if you really want to know what they had to say. I can say that at least the organizer has “apologized” for the disgusting conversation.

“I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said. “While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.”

Classic. He’s apologizing that people were offended, and further is suggesting that the logs were faked. He was just ridiculously bigoted, he’s been caught, and now he wants to conjure up some plausible denial.

Giunta was the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages — often encouraged or “liked” by other members.

When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f–s.”

They’ve all got the same old tired racist “jokes”. Cancel ’em all. Hendrix has already lost his position in Missouri, despite, hypothetically, Missourians not liking homosexuals.

Flush all their careers away for being racist, and the one thing that might condemn them in the eyes of their fellow Republicans, being tech-stupid. Future Republicans are expected to be racist and savvy about communications — fortunately, they all seem to be ignorant idiots.

In the far reaches of our solar system, over 10 billion miles from the small blue dot we call home, the Pioneer probes are soaring into the oblivion of deep space. However, these cosmic messages in a bottle carry with them a lie, purposely told, that incorrectly reflects the biology of half the human population.

Launched in 1972 and 1973 to send back data about Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer regions of the solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 lived up to their names. They were the first manmade objects to pass Mars, and the first to travel fast enough to escape the solar system. Whilst they have since been overtaken by the Voyager probes in the race into interstellar space, the Pioneer probes contained the very first messages that humankind had sent into the void, with each bearing an engraved gold-plated plaque.

These probes have long since lost contact with Nasa, with their last signal received back in 2003. Though they will each take millions of years to come close to any other star systems, there is still a microscopically small chance that, one day, somewhere, one of them might be picked up and studied by whoever or whatever is roaming space.

A journalist named Eric Burgess initially came up with the idea of leaving some kind of message in Pioneer 10 and 11, detailing where they came from, and who sent them. He approached astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan with the idea, who in turn approached Nasa. “I’d seen that we’d put plaques about the president and Congress and all sorts of people on some of the other vehicles that had gone to the Moon,” said Burgess, as recounted by science writer Mark Wolverton in his 2004 book The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes. “I thought, that’s ridiculous, these people will be forgotten in a million years. We need a message that will last.”

Nasa agreed to the idea, but only allowed for a few weeks to prepare Earth’s first message intended for alien eyes. Sagan, his artist wife Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake (a pioneer in the field of SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), were then faced with the fairly significant task of composing the perfect first contact. Several important images were carved onto the plaque, including instructions on how to find our solar system using nearby pulsars, a map of the solar system indicating Planet Earth, and an image of a naked man and woman.

The choice to send nude images was made by Salzman Sagan, in order to avoid the problem of choosing a style of clothing. It would represent the human species as a whole, and also educate potential extraterrestrials about human reproductive anatomy. Salzman Sagan initially drew the humans holding hands, but then realised that an extraterrestrial might mistake the pair for one weird-looking creature rather than separate individuals. She also endeavoured to make the figures racially neutral, including a blend of traits from people around the world.

But this was the early 70s and there was significant public outcry over the nudity, with pundits denouncing the figures as pornographic, while media outlets censored them due to letters of complaint. “I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs on the front page of the Times,” one Los Angeles Times reader complained. “Surely this type of sexual exploitation is below the standards our community has come to expect from the Times ... Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?”

Anatomical inaccuracy

The irony was that these naked images had already gone through a process of censorship, before being shared with the public. While the male figure on the Pioneer plaque is anatomically correct, with a normal-looking penis hanging between his legs, the female is missing something minute but also crucial. Specifically, the female figure has no pudendal cleft – in other words, no “slit” at the front of the vulva where the labia majora separate. The pudendal cleft indicates the presence of an opening, into the vagina. But to a hypothetical alien observer, there is no visual sign that around half of Earth’s population have a whole organ tucked away between their legs.

The inaccurate female figure wasn’t the result of a mistake or accidental oversight. The detail was removed, due to fears it might be considered too obscene. In the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, Nasa’s former director of planetary exploration, he notes that the original design, created by Salzman Sagan, did indeed include the little upward line to indicate the labial opening. It was later censored, to avoid upsetting the public.

“When the plaque design was submitted to Nasa headquarters for approval I must confess that I was a bit nervous about it,” Kraemer writes. “Linda was a skilled artist and her naked human figures were very detailed and realistic, as they needed to be. It seems a bit silly today, but at the time I feared that some taxpayers, the true owners of the spacecraft, might label it pornographic.” It was removed, Kraemer writes, at the behest of John Naugle, the former head of Nasa’s Office of Space Science. “My boss, John Naugle, had no such fears and approved the design but with the one compromise of erasing the short line indicating the woman’s vulva. (The poor extraterrestrials are probably going to be puzzled by the functional differences in anatomy between the two figures.)”

It might not seem like a big deal to have censored this small detail on the Pioneer plaque, but there was a good reason why all of the design choices were agonised over at length. To our hypothetical alien, observing the image with no context, any omission increases the chance of incorrect conclusions. The male and female figures were otherwise carefully designed to clearly and accurately communicate the basics of human biology. On receiving complaints from feminist groups that the female figure was standing in a “submissive” posture, with both arms hanging at her sides, while the male waved, Salzman Sagan and Drake pointed out that if both figures were depicted with their arms raised, that might be mistaken for the default position of human limbs.

Given what was otherwise a project that benefited from great attention to detail, it seems bizarre to have removed any sign of the organ from which every single person alive emerged. Pallavi Pareek, founder and CEO of gender equality consultancy Ungender, also believes that the female’s pose could have been improved. “The censorship of the female body on the Pioneer plaque reflects a historical discomfort with female representation in science and public discourse, even in something as groundbreaking as interstellar communication,” she said. “While the male figure on the plaque was shown with clear anatomical detail, the female figure was noticeably lacking genital definition and was posed passively, which sends a subtle but powerful message about whose identity was being prioritised.”

Divided reactions

We have no idea how a hypothetical extraterrestrial species might react to the Pioneer plaque. They are likely to not resemble humankind in the slightest. However, there is a fairly consistent law of reproduction across most life on Earth known as anisogamy – where lots of small sex cells are released to fertilise one big sex cell – meaning that if these aliens had any knowledge of this kind of life, they might be able to speculate about the human reproductive system.

Without knowing that the vagina exists, however, they would have no idea how human sex works, how we have children, or if we can have offspring at all. This omission may be the key to an alien differentiating between humans being an asexual or sexually reproducing species, and would lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of our biology and culture.

While senior figures at Nasa worried about causing offence, some members of the public took a different view and criticised the plaque for its notable omission. One letter, sent to the Washington Daily News, suggested that if we were censoring the genitals of the woman then we may as well paint their noses blue.

Other members of the public also took issue with the apparent race of the pair, with some saying they appeared too white to be truly representative of humanity as a whole. “We made a conscious attempt to have the man and woman panracial,” Carl Sagan explained, in his book The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. “The woman was given epicanthian folds and in other ways a partially Asian appearance. The man was given a broad nose, thick lips, and a short ‘Afro’ haircut. Caucasian features were also present in both. We had hoped to represent at least three of the major races of mankind. The epicanthian folds, the lips, and the nose have survived into the final engraving.”

Despite the figures possessing a mish-mash of features from around the world, people tended to perceive them as looking like themselves – apparently reflecting our natural inclination to see our own resemblance in an image of a human being. “Whites tended to see the figures as white; blacks saw them as black; Asians saw them with Asian features,” Wolverton explained in his book. “Some took pride in the belief that their race had been chosen to represent all humanity, while others considered the apparently blatant exclusion of others to be terribly racist.”

Most of the criticisms, however, were around sex and gender. The deletion of the pudendal cleft exemplifies a problem Earthlings suffer from even today: the sexualisation of women’s naked bodies. This continues to manifest in today’s moral panics around public breastfeeding and in the continued reluctance to properly teach the anatomy of the vagina in sex education classes – to the extent that even those who have vaginas are often unfamiliar with them.

A reflection of life on Earth

Nasa’s apparent aversion to naked women reared its head again when they launched the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. The Voyager probes, which are the only two manmade objects to have reached interstellar space so far, also contain information about Earth and humanity in the form of the famous Golden Records.

These records contain various sounds and clips of music from across the world, and 116 images of people and nature, also organised by Carl Sagan. While there are various images of clothed people, one picture was originally going to be of a naked man and a naked pregnant woman. But due to the public fervour caused by the Pioneer plaque design, Nasa elected to change that image to a silhouette of the couple with the baby inside the womb. While the records do contain close-up diagrams detailing the anatomy of the sex organs, they are not shown located on the human body.

Only five objects we have crafted here on Earth are now drifting towards infinity, and four of them tell a lie about half of humankind. The fifth, New Horizons, contained no message for extraterrestrial civilisations. You could say that these records of humankind are uniquely honest – at least about the inequalities that existed on Earth in the 1970s, and which continue to exist today. But we also need to take any opportunity to set the record straight.

Nasa hopes to send another probe into interstellar space in 2036, which might give us this chance. Nicknamed “Voyager on steroids”, the Interstellar Probe would fly by Jupiter before reaching interstellar space 16 years after its launch – twice as fast as the Voyager probes. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory team, currently in the early stages of planning the mission, hopes to gather important data about the heliosphere – the zone encompassing our Sun’s influence – at the distant edge of our solar system.

According to an article in Science, the Interstellar Probe would likely follow in its predecessors’ footsteps and include some form of message to extraterrestrials representing humankind, “offering a flavor of life on Earth for aliens”. It might contain an updated, digital collection of material like the Golden Records, perhaps in thumbdrive form.

Our next message to aliens

The contents of any potential time capsule of humanity are a long way down the list of things to plan in the coming decade. As Michael Buckley, senior communications manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, explains: “The decision on whether and what kind of message to put on an Interstellar Probe, and what that message would include, would be up to Nasa and whatever institutions implement an actual mission.” But members of the public influenced Nasa in the 70s. There is no reason why we shouldn’t put pressure on them today, in order to ensure that when the sixth relic of humankind eventually soars alone through the vast abyss of space, it will be more representative of the people who live on our planet.

These probes are the only physical evidence of our existence outside of our solar system, our tiny “we were here” scratched on the fabric of the universe. We should want these eternal records of our species to show who we are, both past and future, unmarred by the politics and prejudices of the era in which they are launched. One day, after the Earth is engulfed by the Sun, they may be all that remains of our pale blue dot and the people that lived on it.

“For messages intended to represent humanity on a universal scale, accuracy and honesty matter deeply. These ‘interstellar time capsules’ aren’t just technical data – they’re cultural artifacts. If we omit, distort, or soften the truth, especially when it comes to gender, we carry our biases into space and erase the fullness of who we are as a species,” Pareek said.

Even though the possibility of an alien species finding one of our far-flung probes millions of years in the future has an infinitesimally small chance of actually happening – hinging on extraterrestrial intelligence existing at all, living in a relatively close part of our galaxy, having the requisite technology to travel between stars, and simply being in the right place at the right time as the probe passes – we should want our first interplanetary communication to be true to who we are and where we came from.

“For any future interstellar probes, I hope we include representations that reflect the diversity of human life, not only across gender, but race, ability and identity,” Pareek said. “Humanity’s story should be told in its most authentic, inclusive form. After all, we’re not just broadcasting what we know. We’re broadcasting who we are. And that deserves to be seen fully and truthfully.”

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 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: Let’s talk about statues of famous racists. If you’re outside the US, this may seem like a trivial worry: who cares if there’s a statue of a “problematic” guy in the park somewhere? I’ve …

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.  

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last week, English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 91, and so while sad, this news offers me a unique opportunity: to make a second video …

Changing My Mind (Notting Hill Editions) by Julian Barnes

Shortly after the last US election – of whose outcome I had felt so certain, and had been so wrong – came a moment of personal crisis. I had thought the obvious next step of progress would be backward, away from the brink of chaos. Instead, it seemed the opposite was happening, that we were edging closer to existential oblivion: fire, flood, mass oppression, economic ruin, the dissolution of public structures, nuclear war.

There seemed to be a global consensus that change was needed – the haves and have-nots both yearning for a different life, sometimes aligning their principles, sometimes not. I had felt certain that it was through my personal tenets – a commitment to democracy, liberal values and fundamental rights – that the better life was to be had for all. Yet it seemed that the majority of voters in the US, and in many other countries around the world, held beliefs to the contrary that may have been just as strong.

Then came a second, even more destabilising thought: what if, under the auspices of our current, dissatisfying, trickle-down meritocracy, things did actually get better? What if, under President Trump, we did not inexorably slide into a more dreadful world, but a better one? What if the values I held as elemental were actually, in some way that I could not divine, preventing the society I envisioned from coming to fruition? What if I was wrong about everything? Was I prepared to change my mind?

Julian Barnes’ new essay, Changing My Mind, tackles this dilemma in a short intellectual memoir. He examines his own changing mind through the themes of memory (he decides it’s not like a lost-luggage department, but a feat of imagination), language (it’s not a set of rules, but a loose framework for being understood) and politics (he’s not become more left-wing, he tells us, but the centre has moved to the right). These more abstract discussions are followed by a chapter on books, detailing a positive about-turn on Belgian writer of detective novels Georges Simenon (“I do now believe he should have won the Nobel Prize”); and – from a writer who will be turning 80 in January of next year – a reflection on time and ageing, in which Barnes concedes that adults, “whatever those are”, never have known and never will know what they’re doing.

In all cases, these shifted opinions involve a great deal of rethinking, rereading, reconsidering. Barnes’s mind never changes in a vacuum, but is aided by his willingness to return again and again to matters that displease him. He is as eloquent and self-questioning as ever in the dissection of his ideological journey. His internal struggle reveals a moderate liberal certain only of eternal oblivion after death, and the benefits of sport and literature.

Changing My Mind reminds us that humility, like a muscle, atrophies without use. For the moment, with the state of global affairs being what they are – no less existentially perilous than before November 2024 – rethinking my own ideology doesn’t seem necessary. But then, changing one’s mind rarely does. Political turmoil and evolution aren’t quite on a par with most instances of mental reassessment: the fact that I once detested olives, and now love them, for example, even if the process at work is the same. Despite the inevitability of being wrong, it’s customary to employ a kind of mental gymnastics to re-reason our already held beliefs to suit the circumstances: I didn’t hate olives, I was just eating the wrong kind! We preserve our self-respect through such contortions.

And so, changing one’s mind is almost always a private event, done in secret, with the lights out, and half taken up with finding reasons and excuses to convince ourselves that deep down we’ve really always been aligned with this new idea. “What if I’m wrong?” is not a thought one can keep up all day; it would send anyone to the loony bin. But, as Barnes has the courage to show in his latest book, it must be tested regularly, and kept accessible enough to be employed at the ready, lest we find ourselves inexplicably, but undeniably, mistaken.

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

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War (Seven Stories) by Artem Chapeye

The Accidental Soldier: Dispatches from Quite Near the Front Line (Hodder & Stoughton) by Owain Mulligan

As Artem Chapeye well understands, the title of his book is wholly inaccurate. Ordinary people absolutely do carry machine guns: indeed, ordinary people carrying machine guns is pretty much the story of modern warfare. It is safe to assume that Owain Mulligan would concur with this view, just as Chapeye would recognise the concept of the accidental soldier: he is one himself.

These are two very different war memoirs, which nevertheless have a great deal in common. Chapeye is a prominent Ukrainian author and journalist who joined the Ukrainian army in the days immediately following Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country in February 2022. Mulligan is a British schoolteacher and Territorial Army reservist who does a stint as a troop commander in Basra, Iraq in 2006. Chapeye is serious, ruminative and serving in an existential war for his country’s survival. Mulligan is self-deprecating, funny – a genuinely gifted comic writer – and participating in a misbegotten occupation.

But neither man dons his country’s uniform out of any great martial ardour. For Chapeye, who had previously thought himself a left-wing pacifist, his new vocation descends in a moment of clarity. On 22 February 2022, as Russian forces pour over Ukraine’s borders, he flees Kyiv with his wife and children. Within 48 hours, he decides that he has greater responsibilities elsewhere. He initially feels uncomfortable at the thought that Ukraine will be defended by the people he has spent his career writing about – the poor, the rural, the less educated – while folk like himself, people with options, wait the war out elsewhere. Then the instinct becomes more primal: a question of what a man is, and what kind of man he is. “If I run away now,” he tells his nine-year-old son, “later I won’t be able to look you in the eye, or myself in the mirror when I shave.”

I have not seen Chapeye’s war up close, but I was in Basra about a year before Mulligan, as a journalist embedded with a Welsh Guards company stationed at a disused regional airport. By the time Mulligan deploys, things had gotten a great deal worse. The closest I came to combat in Basra was being woken by gunfire exchanged between two local tribes, the Geramsha and the Halaf, Basra’s answer to the Hatfields and the McCoys. The company commander explained to me that “The Scots Guards went up there once and asked them to put a sock in it, which worked for a bit. Now, we just take the view that as long as nothing comes over the fence, it isn’t really our problem.”

Plenty does come over the fence during Mulligan’s tour. He has a narrow escape from a mortar barrage, while outside the perimeters there are mines, militants and – at least as hazardous – the kind of mishap that can occur anywhere, but which can have much more serious consequences in a warzone. One of the best-told sequences in The Accidental Soldier is one of the least amusing, as Mulligan leads his troop’s vehicles on an ill-advised shortcut into a minefield, and then has to reverse them, slowly and sweatily. “No one wants to go so much as an inch onto the verge, so it’s like playing a hideous game of Land Rover Tetris.”

Crucially, there is little cruelty to Mulligan’s humour, even when he vents exasperation at the ineptitude and corruption of Iraq’s own police and military (of an inspection of one police outpost, he writes, “It’s the usual story. Half the workforce are at their cousin’s funeral in Baghdad, the keys to the evidence locker are with Mahmoud, who’s visiting the outermost ice-water rings of Saturn, and the station itself would make the Marie Celeste look lively”). His attitude to Iraq’s bewildered and brutalised people is altogether sympathetic, his jokes much more often on himself. The Accidental Soldier is a worthy heir to Spike Milligan’s memoirs of the Second World War, or George MacDonald Fraser’s “McAuslan” series – the Flashman author’s lightly fictionalised account of his post-Second World War service with the Gordon Highlanders in the Middle East.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns has perhaps more in common with Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here – his account of his time in Burma during the Second World War – or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, even if Orwell was fighting to save someone else’s country rather than his own. Chapeye – who as of this writing is still in the army – is an acute and astute observer of his fellow citizens in uniform, and not the first to discover that, counter-intuitively, soldiers at war can be the most unabashedly tender and compassionate of people. “Initially,” he writes, “with an impression of war based on anti-war books, I was scared that people would quickly turn feral ... I haven’t seen this at all. In my opinion, soldiers are becoming, I don’t know, somehow gentler or something.”

Though both these authors have displayed considerable physical courage in going to wars they could have avoided, both are at pains to communicate that they do not see themselves, or wish to be seen by others, as remotely heroic. Like most soldiers in most conflicts, they did – or are doing – their best in circumstances all at once wretched and elevated. Chapeye speaks for every ordinary person who has carried a machine gun – or a rifle, a sword, or a spear. “You’re a small part of something greater ... you feel that greatness, as well as the desire at every single moment for all this ‘greatness’ to come to an end right now.”

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

I’ve been covering and correcting misinformation for several decades now, and in that time I’ve definitely had to deal with false statements from high level politicians. I’ve also had to deal with faked media, whether through Photoshop or video editing or “AI.” I have never, ever seen something as ludicrous as what happened this weekend …

Abortion: A History (Hurst Publishers) by Mary Fissell

There is a common perception that abortion in pre-modern times was dangerous, difficult and illegal. Yet, as the American academic Mary Fissell argues in this timely volume, the story of abortion is neither simple nor linear, with both attitudes and levels of repression varying considerably over the centuries. Take the Catholic Church, for example. In the 15th century, it viewed early termination as a relatively minor sin. Attitudes hardened during the Reformation, and in 1588 Pope Sixtus V ordered anyone who had or provided an abortion to be excommunicated. But this policy was partially overturned by his successor. Only in 1869 did the Catholic Church adopt its current stance that abortion is never justified.

Concern about the rights of the unborn child is another recent development; historically, the rights of men were acknowledged to be the real priority. Roman wives who had abortions were condemned for denying their husbands heirs, and centuries later, enslaved women were accused of deliberately depriving their owners of labour and profit. Opposition was also fuelled by a desire to make women behave, with 19th-century anti-abortion campaigners fretting that feminism would encourage middle-class wives to restrict their families, leading to an America populated by “the ignorant, the low lived, and the alien”.

Yet even the strictest restrictions have not eradicated abortion. For more than two millennia, women have used effective, though potentially lethal, herbs such as penny-royal. Early modern women read about reproductive health in respectable publications such as The Ladies Dispensatory (1651), and Victorian newspapers printed discreet adverts for medicines such as “Dr Bond’s Spanish Female Monthly Pills”, which promised “immediate removal of obstructions”. Such knowledge, along with the ministrations of skilled practitioners, allowed unknowable numbers of women to terminate unwanted or unviable pregnancies.

But Fissell is careful not to romanticise pre-modern female solidarity and skill, instead foregrounding the distressing experiences of real women – including an ancient Greek sex slave made to jump until a tiny fragment fell from her vagina; a 17th-century emigrant whose married lover forced a foul-smelling pill down her throat; and an early 20th-century US teenager raped by her own father, who was denied an abortion because her life was not at risk.

In the US, matters came to a head in the mid-20th century, when moral panic made both providers and their patients fair targets for the police. Though some brave medics continued to perform abortions, Fissell describes how many women resorted to backstreet practitioners such as Beatrice J., a Baltimore housewife whose only training was the two procedures she had successfully performed on herself. Consequently, in 1950s New York, over 40 per cent of pregnancy-related deaths resulted from abortion.

By the mid-60s, public opinion was shifting, and in 1973 the Supreme Court’s verdict in Roe vs Wade legalised abortion nationwide. For several decades, it seemed that the battle for reproductive freedom had been won. But since 2022, when the Dobbs ruling overturned this landmark judgement, many states have banned or restricted access to abortion – and the subject has become increasingly politically charged in many other countries, including the UK.

History, Fissell argues, offers hope: attitudes to abortion have changed in the past, and they will surely change again. In the meantime, Abortion: A History offers not just an engaging and thoroughly researched study of a much-contested medical procedure, but a powerful case for the importance of safe, effective and legal abortion.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 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: I know things are pretty depressing right now in the United States, so I’m going to open today’s video with some good news: Jimmy Kimmel is back! His show was taken off the air …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: About 3,000 news cycles ago, by which I mean about two weeks ago, a video hit social media, showing a college student at Texas A&M challenging her professor. (Plays video) When I first saw …

The oft-repeated observation that the Labour Party owes “more to Methodism than Marxism” annoys Neil Kinnock, who served as the party’s leader for much of the 1980s and now sits in the House of Lords. “Harold Wilson used it as a way of reassuring the general public that we hadn’t come directly from the work of Soviets, that we were in the British mainstream, and so on,” he says. “And I don’t blame him for doing that at all … But it is a very lazy understanding of where the British Labour Party came from, and crucially the fact that we’ve never been afflicted by religious sectarianism. In the Labour movement we’ve had Marxists and Christian Socialists and liberals and a lot of humanists, right from the beginning.”

Kinnock’s frustration with this historical oversimplification is a perfect starting point for our conversation, which coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Trades Union Congress Conference that led to the formation of today’s Labour Party. And it’s music to my ears. For too long, the story of the Labour movement’s organisational, intellectual and ethical origins has over-emphasised the religious contribution, sidelining a powerful and persistent current of secular, rationalist and humanist thought. And today, when religious propagandists are increasingly putting out the idea that everything in our culture – from democracy to justice to freedom itself – has a Christian origin, that narrative matters.

Of course, Christian and humanist elements often combine, and Kinnock’s own life illustrates this. Growing up in a working-class south Wales community, the chapel was a part of life. “I did quite enjoy going to Sunday school,” he says, recalling a time around the age of 15 when he was “probably more religiously inclined than at any other time in my whole life”, inspired by a “terrific young Methodist minister and his lovely wife, both of whom were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and fully paid-up Christian Socialists”.

But it was precisely at this moment of potential conversion that his rationalism kicked in. “It was at that time, I thought: wait a minute, what the hell is all this about? And can I really accept … the foundations of faith … And I realised, of course, that simply wasn’t possible for me.” His own family, while embodying values of “honesty, care for others, hard work”, was largely secular. His father wasn’t religious. “He dismissed the whole notion, though not in any strident way.” And his mother, though Christian, hardly ever went to chapel. His uncles, all staunch trade unionists and socialists, “totally dismissed any idea of religion or conformity to religious requirements”.

A movement with many tributaries

This personal history reflects the overlooked secular stream in the Labour Party’s story. The early movement was a confluence of many tributaries: the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the Fabian socialists, and the humanist ethical societies. The party drew inspiration from the Welsh political philosopher and reformer Robert Owen and the socialist communities he founded, as well as from the rationalist presses that provided cheap, enlightening literature to a newly literate working class. This was, as Kinnock puts it, a “generous open house on the left”, and its greatest strength was its determinedly “anti-sectarian” character. He recalls with admiration the trade unionists in Northern Ireland who, “in the dark times” of the Troubles, refused to segregate their branches by religion. “They were very gutsy people,” he says, and their principled stand helped preserve the movement’s integrity. This openness prevented the religious divisions that afflicted other European socialist movements and allowed Labour to build a broad coalition based on a shared commitment to improving the human condition in the here and now.

The glib “Methodism not Marxism” line obscures this richer and more complex reality. Of course there were tactical reasons, historically, to peddle this line – and not just in the Cold War. The pages of this magazine played host in the early 20th century to more than one unsuccessful Labour general election candidate writing that they felt the charge against them of “atheism” had been decisive. Kinnock himself acknowledges attending the party conference Sunday service during his time as leader, “in order to reassure people that Christians were welcome in the Labour Party … to show neighbourliness, comradeship, reassurance”.

But there is another reason for this public amnesia: the influence of humanism in the movement has seldom been explicit. The humanist current is best understood not as an abstract philosophy, but through the lives of individual Labour humanists who embodied it. When you survey them, you find they were often those who drove the party’s most transformative achievements.

Take the late Roy Jenkins, whom Kinnock describes as having “a very strong ethical vein, a definite moral compass … both a child of and a prophet of enlightenment”. While Jenkins’s later career took him away from Labour, his period as home secretary in the 1960s was a high-water mark for humanist-inspired reform. He oversaw or secured the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship, the liberalisation of divorce law, and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons. This was a revolution in personal freedom, dismantling a legal framework built on religious dogma and replacing it with one based on compassion, reason and individual autonomy. Jenkins’s contribution, Kinnock reflects, was to understand that a “tide in the affairs of men” was flowing. The “seismic change in national sentiment” wrought by two world wars, the rise of the welfare state, and a growing public appetite for reform created a moment “ripe for change”. But, he adds crucially, “without people like Jenkins … the change wouldn’t have come … not maybe as early as the 1960s without the commitment and courage.”

Labour's humanist giants

This courage was prefigured by an earlier generation. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, was a humanist and president of the Ethical Union (as Humanists UK then was). And then there was Clement Attlee, the quiet architect of the 1945 government. Kinnock delights in recalling Attlee’s famous sentiment, written in a letter to his devout brother, that he didn’t mind the ethics of Christianity but couldn’t “stand the mumbo jumbo”. It was, he laughs, “such a down-to-earth dismissal of this gigantic edifice of religion”. Attlee’s humanism was expressed not in speeches but in deeds: the creation of the NHS, the establishment of the welfare state, the beginning of decolonisation. His socialism was a practical creed for improving human life, rooted in his experiences as a social worker in London’s East End, not in any scripture.

Attlee’s minister for health, the man who brought the NHS into existence, was the Welsh orator Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – another humanist. He was, in Kinnock’s analysis, part of a generation of “socialist rationalists” whose political convictions were forged in the crucible of post-war disillusionment with old certainties. “The slaughter and stupidity of [the First World War],” he explains, “devastated a generation’s belief in religious engagement.” For Bevan’s generation in the Welsh valleys, which saw congregations collapse in the face of such senseless violence, political action through the Labour movement replaced chapel-going as the primary vehicle for community and social change. His vision for the NHS was a profoundly humanist one: that healthcare should be a universal right, available to all based on need, not wealth. It was a declaration of the intrinsic value of every human life.

Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, was a humanist and a political force in her own right. As Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, she fought to establish The Open University – a project derided by her opponents but one that perfectly encapsulated the humanist belief in the transformative power of education and the importance of lifelong learning for all. And then there was Michael Foot, Bevan’s successor in Ebbw Vale and a future Labour leader. Kinnock, who knew him well, describes Foot’s humanism as deeply intellectual, rooted in a scholarly understanding of “political and social free thinking in Britain from the Revolutionary War”. He was, Kinnock says, “intellectually as well as spiritually totally against religion, but not in any draconian way. He was ‘live and let live’.” It was a liberal tolerance so complete that Kinnock could joke, “Some of his best friends were
Christians.”

This same practical, compassionate and secular outlook was shared by so many others, including the former first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan, who had the first government-sponsored humanist funeral in the UK, and who it turns out was Kinnock’s flatmate in the 1960s. When I asked Morgan, years ago and in a rather chippy manner, what he planned to do about religious influence in Welsh schools, he told me he would simply “let it wither on the vine”. I asked Kinnock why so many Labour politicians, even the keen humanists, have been rather diffident secularists in practice (although they have often achieved significant changes without fanfare). His response was that it’s pragmatism – trusting in social progress rather than confrontation to solve the structural problem of religious privilege. Wales, he points out, is now the least religious nation in the UK. A testament, perhaps, to the quiet success of that approach?

The next generation

This brings us to the future. If the great humanist and socialist achievements of the past were rooted in the living memory of war on the home front, genocide in Europe, mass unemployment and extreme poverty, how do we sustain them now that memory is fading? How do we inspire new generations to extend those freedoms?

Kinnock believes the answer lies in education and civic engagement. He doesn’t lament the loss of chapels as such, but he does believe one “casualty” is the experience of democratic participation that they and the trade unions gave to people. The Nonconformist chapels in particular, he says, “gave people a real rehearsal in representation, organisation, conducting meetings, chairmanship … having honest [financial] accounts and all the things that maybe would have taken much longer to develop if they had initially been political … That made a hell of a contribution.” He worries that this training ground for democracy has vanished. “Where would people get that now?” he asks. He sees today’s young people as having “all the right instincts about sharing and caring and endurance and responsibility”, but feels they have “not got a clue how to organise.” His advice is characteristically direct: “You find somebody who agrees with you, and one of you becomes chair, and the other one becomes secretary. And you get on with it.”

His proposed solution is a robust and properly resourced citizenship education, a cause championed by another great humanist about whom we reminisce: Bernard Crick. Such education, Kinnock argues, is essential for fostering a “discerning society”. He is furious at the austerity-driven scrapping of initiatives intended to foster greater citizenship and engagement, such as projects designed to teach inner-city children to organise politically for change, and the downgrading of the citizenship curriculum in English schools. “It was such stupidity and counter to any kind of economic sense or productiveness or efficiency,” he says, arguing that sustained citizenship education would have “saved a hell of a lot of money” by creating a more engaged and resilient populace. A proper civic education, woven throughout the curriculum, would give citizens a “sense of agency”, countering the powerlessness and apathy that plague our politics.

What about the political and economic challenges facing a future Labour government? Kinnock speaks with deep concern about the “capture of the government by the Treasury” with its “small ‘c’ conservative… conformity”. He worries this mindset will stifle the change the country needs. “I regret to say that our highly intelligent ministers, and they’re all wonderful people, in the Treasury … have accepted the Treasury nostrums,” he says. His solution is radical: split the Treasury into a department of finance focused on fiscal discipline, and a department for economic development and progress, free to think about investment and growth.

Unmoored from history

This leads him to the great, unresolved issue of our time: Brexit. After leaving frontline politics in Westminster, Kinnock served in the European Commission for a decade, including as vice president. Now, he sees Brexit as the primary obstacle to the nation’s prosperity and influence. The great nightmare, he believes, is being trapped in anaemic growth outside the single market, with the one policy that could genuinely lift the economy remaining a political taboo.

His defence of the European project is passionate and rooted in that same historical consciousness he urges on others. He laments how the recent VE Day commemorations, for all their importance, failed to celebrate the “extraordinary miracle” that followed: the creation of institutions that made war between European neighbours impossible. “They did it with Nato, and they did it with the European Union,” he states with force. “In the part of Europe that is in the European Union … War is unthinkable. Unfightable. And that’s great.” I ask if he thinks Britain will ever rejoin. His reply is a mixture of realism and hope. “Not in my lifetime. I’m 83 … but in my children’s lifetime, hopefully and definitely in my grandchildren’s lifetime.”

Ultimately, Kinnock’s humanist message is one of historical consciousness as a spur to future action. He is alarmed by the sense that “we are unmoored in our times from so much of what has occurred before, to give us the conditions in which we live.” The antidote is not the backward-looking nostalgia of the populists (“they’re a bloody waste of time”) but a clear-eyed understanding of how our freedoms were won. “We are the products, not just of the present time, but of the past … and our self-interest and our duty is to be helping to construct the future,” he says. His final call is for a sustained political and cultural effort to help people be “confidently aware of why they’ve got what they’ve got, and how it could be improved, and then improve it, by being good citizens, discerning citizens making rational judgments.”

That, in essence, is the humanist project. It is the thread that connects the rationalist pioneers of the 19th century to Attlee’s welfare state, from Jenkins’s liberalising reforms to the ongoing struggle for a more just, compassionate and reasonable world. As the Labour Party looks to its future, it should remember and reclaim this vital part of its heritage. The conscience of the party has always been, and must continue to be, profoundly humanist, in the most inclusive meaning of the phrase.

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

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.

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.

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 […]