Trump has run out of things to say. Two people fainted in his rally in Pennsylvania (this is probably an ongoing problem, when most of your fans are old people), and he used that as an excuse to stop answering questions…but he couldn’t let them leave. Instead, he told the organizers to play music from his playlist while he stood on the podium, swaying and making those hand gestures that he calls “dancing.” For almost 40 minutes. Jeez, let us escape!

Who needs policy when you’ve got a hodge-podge of random songs to play instead?

It was time to listen to Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye.” After listening to James Brown, Trump began to speak again, as if remembering that he was still at an event that was billed as a town hall.

“This is the most important election in the history of our country,” Trump said, once again accusing Democrats of weaponizing elections. But then he went back to his music.

“Those two people that went down are patriots, and we love them, and because of them we ended up with some good music, right?” he asked. “So play ‘YMCA!’ Go ahead. Let’s go nice and loud!”

“Here we go, everybody,” Noem interjected.

The crowd cheered and danced to the Village People song from the 1970s, which celebrates gay cruising culture. Noem put her hands up in the shape of a “Y.” As the song was ending, Trump mouthed the words, “Nobody’s leaving.”

“Nobody’s leaving. What’s going on? There’s nobody leaving. Keep going,” he said, as Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah” played next. “All right, turn that music up! Turn that up. Great song!”

Then it was “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O’Connor. “An American Trilogy” by Elvis Presley. “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony. Trump stood and swayed.

As “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses played, he walked off the stage. He spoke to attendees on his way out, as “Memory” from the musical “Cats” played in the background.

Hmmm. Imagine I walk into class to give a lecture, and instead whip out my iPhone and start playing random tunes from my playlist, while wobbling and grinning up there behind the lectern, and I do that for the whole hour. My students would be baffled, would complain, and my division chair would have words with me afterwards, and everyone would wonder if I was losing my mind and maybe ought to be shuffled off into retirement early. This performance by Trump is clear evidence that he ought to be wheeled off the stage and sent off to cheat at golf for the remainder of his life. He definitely shouldn’t be president.

I walked down the road to the mighty White River, a fast moving stream that descends from the Cascades carrying a load of glacial silt, which is how it gets its name. I had to stop and take a photo.

That lucky spider has that view 24-7.

To some people, today is Columbus Day. Those people have a cultish dedication to believing that a rapist, a thief, a slaver, and an oppressor was a hero — I guess nowadays we can believe there will be subset of the citizenry who ignore the facts to invent a cherished symbol. To be fair, here’s a bit from the Friends of Italian-Americans.

Even by today’s impossible utopian standards, Columbus was without a doubt the greatest hero of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. He was a capitalist in the age of Empires, and what he did began the downfall of imperialism. He was a scientist in the age of superstition. He was a civil rights activist in the age of oppression. And he was a pacifist in the age of war-mongering. Thus, Columbus was an icon and a paragon.

For a quick dismissal of their claims, consider that they condemn Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States by citing a PragerU video.

I think this is a better summary of Columbus’s character.

Everything.

I’m at my late mother’s house. My sisters have been working hard to sort out the years and years of stuff Mom had stashed away. They have dragged out boxes and boxes of stuff.

Would you believe she kept all of my report cards? Somehow she also got her hands on my university exams and put them in bags and boxes. Right now I’m looking at my exam from Genetics 453, The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, from Winter quarter 1979 at the University of Washington. I got a 7.3 out of 8.0 on it, with a 3.8 grade for the term. I’m kind of flabbergasted. My mother should have been a CIA operative.

There’s so much more. I was the assistant editor of the O’Brien Elementary newsletter in 5th grade. Mom had a copy. It’s silly.

In 3rd grade, I almost died of acute appendicitis (I survived, don’t worry), and missed a couple of weeks of school. My classmates wrote me “get well soon” letters. Mom saved them, of course. Among them is a letter from one Mary Gjerness, who about 15 years later was going to become Mary Myers. Weird. She is mildly upset now that she made several misspellings.

Throughout college and grad school, I was regularly writing letters home — you know Mom filed them all away. The mindblowing thing to me was how neat and tidy and well laid out my handwriting was, all written with a fountain pen. Partway into grad school I got a home computer and a dot matrix printer, and that was the beginning of the end of my penmanship. I should probably go buy a fountain pen and start practicing again.

It’s not just me, either. My brothers and sisters are all archived in this vast collection of personal documents.

I thought I was going to see a few old photographs, but no, I’m now deluged with ancient artifacts from my past. I have to stop looking at these things, because I’ve got a week of banking and probate law to deal with.

I traveled across country yesterday, from Morris to Seattle, and the first stop on the journey was a truck stop in Sauk Centre, where highway 28 merges onto I-94. I gassed up the car, and then wandered in awe-struck wonder through the display of stuff you could buy if you wanted more than a tankful of gas and a cup of coffee.

There were pewter crosses that you could buy with your name embossed in the middle. There were racks of flag-adorned knick-knacks. There were toy trucks and tractors you could buy for the kiddies. Was drawn to the wall of inspirational art, which all had a theme: farming and patriotism.

I could have got myself a metal wall hanging with two pistols, and the words, “In this home we don’t call 911,” which had me wondering…if Ralph nicked an artery on the hay baler, what are you going to do with those guns? If little Edna wandered off in a snowstorm, who you gonna call?

There were very colorful paintings/prints, all in a hyper-realistic style. There was one of a charming farmhouse with a green grassy yard, and five different tractors parked on it, dominating the scene. I guess in this world, prosperity is measured in how many tractors you own. There were so many pictures of eagles, with American flags worked artfully into the background.

But my eye was most strongly drawn to these two pictures.

There on the left was Donald Trump, riding his flag bedecked motorcycle into town, with Melania, and spectators in red MAGA hats cheering him on. On the right, Donald Trump crossing the swamp, in a boat full of poses stolen from a better known painting. We know it’s Donald Trump, not because the figure actually looks anything like the fat old man, but because of the weird candy-floss hair or the bright red tie.

My eye was drawn to these absurd pictures only because I was so repelled that I wanted to slash them. I resisted.

Anyway, this is the Trump cult in full flower out here in the rural midwest. It’s all tangled up in agrarian fantasies, religion, and trucks, tractors, guns, and motorcycles. Good luck rooting it out.

It’s the start of the rainy season in Sierra Leone, the west African country known for its beautiful beaches and tropical rainforests. The coming of the rains brings relief from the heat, but also something else: mosquitoes. While Sierra Leone suffers all through the year, the rainy seasons are the worst for mosquito-borne diseases.

The mosquito is responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other animal – more than snake bites or even homicides. The winged insect carries diseases like Dengue fever, Zika virus and, of course, malaria. There were 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Africa shoulders by far the heaviest burden, with 94 per cent of cases and 95 per cent of all deaths.

Throughout Africa, malaria is a serious threat to older people, pregnant women, children, and those with weakened immune systems. In Sierra Leone, it accounts for a quarter of all child deaths. But this year, the president gave the country hope that the disease would finally be contained. On World Malaria Day in April, President Julius Maada Bio launched a landmark malaria vaccination campaign, initially targeting babies. Since then, the Ministry of Health, working alongside the United Nations body Unicef, has been busy rolling out the first 550,000 doses to the furthest corners of Sierra Leone.

The vaccine, RTS,S (commercially named Mosquirix), is made by the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo-SmithKline. As part of pilot programs in 2019, it was delivered to more than two million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi and subsequently became the world’s first malaria vaccine to receive prequalification from WHO, meaning it has been assessed for quality, safety and efficacy. It was found to prevent around 75 per cent of all malaria cases in high-transmission areas where children were also given seasonal anti-malarial medicine when the risk was highest. This prompted WHO to recommend widespread use of the vaccine among children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sierra Leone is one of the first countries to begin a nationwide rollout, alongside Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi are also due to get more doses following the pilot programs, along with Benin and Liberia. While this is cause for celebration, the vaccine still has its limitations. Unlike other routine immunisations, this malaria vaccine requires four doses to achieve long-term protection. The shots must be stored at certain temperatures – a challenge for areas with regular power outages or no electricity at all.

Sierra Leone is planning to deliver the vaccine to 15 of its 16 districts. It’s an ambitious plan for a coastal country with remote and island communities, some of which can only be reached by motorbike or boat. But if the rollout is successful, it may provide a model for other African countries. It is not only a tragedy that so many children and vulnerable people die each year from this preventable disease; malaria has also held these countries back from crucial economic development. An effective, scalable vaccine would be a huge boon for the future of the continent.

Decades in the making

Given the large-scale and devastating effects of the disease, why has a malaria vaccine taken so long to develop? Malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, which infects female mosquitoes after they have fed on the blood of an infected human. Malaria parasites enter the human bloodstream and in serious cases can cause irreparable damage to the liver, kidneys and other organs. After maturing, the parasite infects red blood cells, destroying the body’s ability to supply oxygen to its tissues, leading to anaemia. Infected blood cells can clog up the circulation leading to organ failure and death.

Development of a vaccine began in 1987 through a partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, run by the US Department of Defense. But there were multiple challenges in developing a vaccine with effective, long-lasting immunity. The mosquito has a complex life cycle and high genetic diversity, with over 3,000 species currently recorded, varying in their capacity to transmit different strains of the malaria parasite. This led to difficulties in creating a vaccine that would be effective across different countries and regions. It was not until 2019 that Mosquirix was deemed ready for major clinical trials.

Dr Desmond Kangbai is one of the civil servants leading the vaccine rollout in Sierra Leone. In a gloomy government office in the bustling capital of Freetown, he takes calls from several phones on his desk, while aides shuffle in and out. It’s hot and humid, and several fans flutter the corners of papers stacked into wobbly towers on his desk. Dr Kangbai leads the Ministry of Health’s Expanded Program of Immunisation. He’s stressed, but also hopeful about the rollout’s prospects. “It could be a silver bullet,” he says, wiping his brow. “But we do need more resources.”

The government is initially focusing on delivering the vaccine to young children. All babies and small children are more vulnerable to malaria, with their immune systems still developing, but in Sierra Leone there is the added challenge of malnutrition. Meanwhile, keeping children free of mosquito bites can be an impossible task. This means that the constant threat of death hangs over families with babies and young children. Sierra Leone’s under-five mortality rate is one of the highest in the world.

The program has identified around 1.5 million children under the age of five who need the vaccine, but only currently has enough doses to give the jab to one-third of them. Distribution is also an issue, particularly reaching far-flung rural areas. Dr Kanbai explains that the program needs more funding and resources for everything “from coaching [of medical staff and unpaid volunteers] to refrigerators, boats to reach river and island communities, and to cover the costs of delivery.”

Next door, in a separate building, refrigeration units house the precious vaccine. Using solar powered generators, thousands of doses are loaded into mobile refrigeration units that drive to the furthest corners of the country, where malaria hits hardest. Sierra Leone is roughly the size of Ireland or the US state of South Carolina. But its geography, and lack of roads and medical infrastructure, means delivering vaccines across the country isn’t easy. From 1991, the country was pummeled by an 11-year civil war that killed over 50,000 people, decimating its hospitals and wiping out many of its medical personnel. In the decade or so it took to begin rebuilding the country, it fell victim to an Ebola outbreak – a fatal virus that took 4,000 lives in just two years at its peak, many of whom were healthcare workers.

Trust in health workers

Now it’s the rainy season, which lasts for six months between June and December, producing torrential rainfall, deadly floods and mudslides throughout the country. Although malaria prevention is especially important in this season, the weather means that a six-hour trip to remote rural areas can easily double. When vaccines lose their refrigeration, it decreases their potency, meaning that rural populations risk getting a weaker dose if the solar-powered fridges in the vehicles run out of battery, or if they are improperly refrigerated in the last stretch of a journey, which can be by boat or motorbike. The growing volatility of the climate is set to add to these challenges.

Raising more funding will be crucial to the ultimate goal of nationwide immunisation. Alongside Sierra Leone’s government, the rollout is being funded by a nexus of global health organisations. Gavi, an international organisation that works on vaccine access, is a major contributor, while Unicef provides both technical and financial assistance. The UK government provides some aid, as does the United States, alongside other national governments and international NGOs.

But even if the funding is secured for comprehensive supply and distribution, there will be additional challenges. Uptake still relies on the people of Sierra Leone, the majority of whom live in isolated areas with little access to televisions or internet. People might venture to a nearby shop to hear news on the radio, but mass media communication programs have limited reach. Instead, the government must send its own people or rely on NGOs to travel out to villages and rural areas, working alongside local religious, tribal-ethnic and civic leaders to raise awareness. This could take the form of announcements in church, or the distribution of pamphlets and newsletters.

Thankfully, Sierra Leone has comparably high rates of trust in healthcare workers and low rates of vaccine hesitancy, partly due to having gone through the 2014 Ebola outbreak and experiencing first-hand the positive effects of vaccination programmes. The Ebola outbreak also exposed weaknesses in Sierra Leone’s healthcare facilities, supplies, storage and training. To survive, the whole healthcare system was in many ways forced to revamp itself, and today there is a much keener awareness of how to handle major public health issues.

A silver bullet?

Given this recent history, and the urgent need to reduce infant mortality, the vaccination rollout could be transformative for Sierra Leone, making it one of the models that could provide important lessons to other African countries. However, it is still hard to tell how effective the rollout will be. Post-vaccination figures on malaria infection rates will only start to become available next year and may not be reliable until four or five years’ time. Some are not as optimistic about the program as Dr Kangbai.

“I don’t know if this is a silver bullet. I would call it ‘life-saving intervention’,” says Baboucarr Bouy, an immunisation specialist for Unicef in Sierra Leone. The UN body has been active in the country ever since Sierra Leone gained its independence in 1961. In contrast to Dr Kangbai’s office, to visit Bouy at Unicef you have to pass through security and the room is air-conditioned – an indicator of the balance of funding between government and international organisations.

He addresses the efficacy of the vaccine, which is complex. “There are different numbers for different trials, different regions, and in different periods,” he notes. But overall, “the efficacy is probably about 50 per cent.”

Bouy points out that the vaccine has to be used with other existing anti-malarial measures, like antimalarial medicine, mosquito nets, insect repellent and larval control. Unicef has also been working on improving transport lines and healthcare facilities. “Over the past two or three years, we have been able to procure over 800 sets of new solar refrigerators, installed successfully in various health facilities for the storage of vaccines,” he said. “We’ve also been able to procure and deliver over 900 motorbikes.” Working with large NGOs and international organisations like Unicef has its benefits for the government. But Dr Kangbai is keen to point out that they need different types of support from various kinds of partners. “We want innovative solutions like drones for last-mile delivery, especially to our riverine communities during the rainy season,” he said.

The road ahead

There is no panacea for these complex issues, which are also bound up with broader problems faced by Sierra Leone. “We need more trained personnel, we need more drugs to treat illnesses in general,” says Fatim Jabbie, a clinic nurse at Njala University Hospital in the southern town of Mokonde. “We need more lab diagnostics equipment, we need more malaria test kits. We need a better healthcare infrastructure overall.”

Jabbie notes that the country needs to strengthen its economy in general, which would better equip it to deal with public health crises. However, this is a chicken-and-egg situation, as malaria is detrimental to Sierra Leone’s economy and weakens its workforce. Estimates suggest that malaria-related issues cost Sierra Leone nearly $30 million per year, a significant amount for a nation with a GDP of $4 billion.

“Sierra Leone is a beautiful country and its people are peace-loving,” Jabbie says, “but we have a poor road network, we have financial challenges, we have poor environmental sanitation, and inadequate drugs in most health facilities.” She therefore emphasises the need for a holistic approach to supporting public health initiatives. The good news is that Sierra Leone’s history of health-related crises makes it a case study for recognising the importance of community engagement and trust. This is one of the factors that has enabled the country to adopt the malaria vaccine and integrate it into its national immunisation programmes far quicker than many other African countries. However, it does not have an easy road ahead.

In the meantime, another vaccine may soon be rolled out in Africa, which looks set to be more affordable than Mosquirix. The vaccine, R21, known as Matrix-M, was developed by the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, with technology from the American biotechnology company Novavax. At the end of 2023, it became the second malaria vaccine to receive WHO prequalification. In May, 43,000 doses were delivered to the Central African Republic, while Chad, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan and Uganda are all preparing to receive shipments.

So far, Matrix-M has shown comparable efficacy rates to Mosquirix, although further studies are needed to confirm this. It also could be more affordable. At present each dose costs between $2 and $4, while four doses are needed per person. That is about half the current price of the RTS,S vaccine.

“Having two safe and effective vaccines means we have greater supply security and can be more confident about meeting countries’ needs,” Dr Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, said in a press release. “That is what matters most – that countries where our vaccines can be most impactful are able to access them, saving thousands of lives each year and offering relief to families, communities and entire health systems.”

While this year’s rollouts in Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Burkina Faso are promising, we also won’t know how successful they are until at least next year, when post-vaccine data becomes available. Sierra Leone is a country to watch for many reasons. They had lessons for the world when the nation came together to confront the devastating challenge of Ebola. The high level of trust in healthcare workers bodes well for the success of vaccination rollouts. Now they are once again on the frontline when it comes to the fight against malaria. Time will tell whether this is a first step towards the eradication of a disease that has ravaged the continent for centuries.

This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

James (Pan Macmillan) by Percival Everett

As Ernest Hemingway famously claimed, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” In his latest novel, James, Percival Everett reimagines Twain’s classic (first published in 1884), switching the perspective from the eponymous daring rascal to that of Jim, who becomes a slave on the run when he flees Huck’s guardian.

Initially, Everett follows Twain’s plot: Jim runs away to escape being sold and separated from his family. Huck joins him to get away from an abusive father. They travel down the Mississippi together on a raft enduring various mishaps along the way including several encounters with two fraudsters, the Duke and the King. But when the pair are separated, the novel follows what happens to Jim, who Everett now refers to by his full name, James.

A professor of English literature at the University of Southern California and author of more than 30 books, Everett is gaining welcome prominence in the UK. His satirical novel The Trees, about the historic lynching of Black Americans and modern-day racism, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. An earlier novel, Erasure (2001), featuring a Black humanities professor who, pandering to the white-dominated publishing industry, writes a deliberately cliched “ghetto” tale, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (2023).

Although a grim account of the pernicious and brutal treatment of slaves, James is full of wry humour. We discover that James can read and write. He only employs a slave dialect around white people. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he tells his daughter Lizzie and other children during a language lesson on using a slave filter. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’.” The children are instructed what to say if they notice a white person’s house is on fire: “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,” is correct. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

In a recent interview, Everett observed that he employs comedy in order to engage the reader’s trust. His lively prose and caustic wit – “All white men looked alike in a way, like bears, like bees, especially when dead” – are compelling and he interweaves horror and comedy to terrific effect. During his journey down the Mississippi, James is repeatedly enslaved and sold by the unscrupulous white people he meets. He is forced to join a blackface minstrel troupe when its manager, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who claims to be opposed to slavery, buys him from another white man. Based on a real person, Emmett and his minstrels profit from the music of Black people, using it to mock them. Everett includes a darkly comic passage when, after their show, James wakes to find a white man stroking his hair in awe: “I just had to touch that wig.”

But James’s journey is also an intellectual one: he responds to violence with art. He has imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke “about slavery, race and ... albinism”. By writing about the injustices he endures, James owns what happens to him, and rejects being objectified. He insists on referring to white people as the “enemy” (Everett’s italics), observing that “oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.”

It’s a personal story, but also a reckoning with enslavement and injustice. Although James sets out to rescue his wife and children by earning enough to buy them, this evolves into a fierce desire for all his fellow slaves to be free. As he says to one: “You can die with me trying to find freedom or you can stay here and be dead anyway.”

Huckleberry Finn and its prequel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, have been elevated as classics, staples of children’s literature for generations. In recent years, Mark Twain has come under criticism for his use of racial stereotypes and slurs. However, Everett has made it clear that he did not write James as a corrective to the original. Rather, the two books have been set up in conversation, with Everett employing a clever final twist. James is a layered, compassionate book with a rich supporting cast, full of anger, humour and – ultimately – hope.

This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

‘‘I hadn’t thought much about testicles before” is a typical line from Richard Herring’s latest stand-up show. In one of the comedian’s many comments on balls, he likens them to backing singers in a band. But unlike many a male comic, Herring has a bona fide excuse to talk about his family jewels: he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2021 and his recent show Can I Have My Ball Back? is based on the experience.

I went to see the show at Leicester Square Theatre, where Herring had fun comparing the half-full room with the sold-out shows that ex-double-act-partner Stewart Lee schedules for the same venue. At this point I should give the spoiler: Herring has fully recovered. And lucky for him, a brush with testicular cancer is one of the funnier dances with death, providing him with ample comic material. As he says, the design of the testicles is hopeless: “proof that, if there is a God, he hates us”.

Now 56, Herring giggles his way through a tale of embarrassment, exams and existentialism. When his testicles were the size of a tennis ball and a Ferrero Rocher respectively, he thought he might need a trip to the doctor. Even back then, as he tells me after, he had the thought that if there was something wrong with him, he might turn it into a show. A comic might idly wonder about what jokes they’d do if they lost a leg, for example, or suffered a family tragedy (the “dead dad show” is now a somewhat clichéd Edinburgh Fringe staple), and Herring felt a little annoyed when the GP initially told him it was probably nothing serious. A massive health scare like that, he thought, could have been a gift.

For decades Herring has been a prolific performer, cannibalising his past and his peccadilloes for the amusement of strangers. In Hitler Moustache he grew facial hair in the style of Adolf Hitler as a unique excuse to hold forth on the politics of racism; in Christ on a Bike he compared his life journey to that of Jesus Christ. But his worry about not having a serious health problem turned out to be jumping the gun. After that first conversation there were further appointments and a follow-up call. Fortunately for Herring the comedian, but not for Herring the mortal man, the first GP was wrong: he did, in fact, have testicular cancer.

When Herring got The Call, he remembers registering that he was facing death. Jokes did not come to him in the moment. “I did not want to die,” he tells the audience. He thought of his family first (he has a girl and a boy with fellow comedian Catie Wilkins) but then – selfishly, he said – he began to think about himself and his legacy on this Earth. He was worried, he jokes, that when he died his children might not be old enough to be properly psychologically scarred. He has great fun imagining the man whom Catie would date after his death, enjoying the fancy whisky that he had been foolishly saving for a special occasion.

The best parts of the show are both funny and poignant, as Herring mines his existential experience for material. Wanting to seize what might have been his final moments, he tries to create picture-perfect memories with his kids. They make a snowman in the garden that collects a large amount of cat poo: a truly abysmal sight. He flies a kite with his daughter – the beautiful moment he had been hoping for. He watches the wind picking up and dropping off exactly as it would if he had not been facing the prospect of his death. The world, he realises in a moment of acceptance, doesn’t care about him.

This view is consistent with Herring’s outlook on life. He has been an atheist for a long time, and having a testicle removed did not put the comedian on a path to spirituality. He was brought up in a Christian household but never enjoyed going to church even when he was a believer, he tells me over Zoom from his home in Hertfordshire. When he was seven or eight, while having the Bible read to him, he realised that it didn’t make sense to trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, if Joseph wasn’t really Jesus’s dad. When he raised this with his grandma, she couldn’t answer the question. That was the day, he said, that he realised something was off. “In every other branch of study you’re told to question things,” he says. “Why should Christianity be any different?”

Like a lot of atheists, Herring has been preoccupied by religion over the years. If he is wrong about God and ever meets him or her, he says he will make it clear that it was ridiculous for the deity to make people be born with the sin for which he would then judge them. As a humanist he believes that “human beings have the potential to be good to each other and should try to be good to each other without any external force forcing them to do that”. It is laughable, he thinks, to ask people to be good to avoid being burned in a pit.

But almost everything is laughable to Herring, who has been performing comedy since he was a student in the Oxford Revue. For a long time he has believed that humour is the way to treat the things that life hurls at you. When he was a child, people would get annoyed at him for not taking things seriously enough. But if life itself is “intrinsically ridiculous” – partly because of the astronomical odds against any of us even being here – Herring thinks that to treat things seriously isn’t the right way to respond.

“I think humour’s a great way to make points and make people listen,” he says. “If people are laughing, then they’re listening.” In Can I Have My Ball Back? this is more pertinent than ever: Herring is keen to encourage men, usually bad at talking about health problems, to act faster than he did and see a medical professional if they notice any potential symptoms. He thinks that in this regard a comedy show is more effective than a po-faced sexual health campaign.

Herring’s cancer was treated successfully by a national health service for which he is hugely grateful. Unsurprisingly, his brush with mortality changed him. He realised that his family was the most important thing to him. “I’d rather be a good dad than a famous comedian,” he says. “I obviously want to work, and I will ... but they [my children] are the priority.” He thinks it is good for everyone involved that he became a dad later in life – he was 47 when his first child was born. Though he knows this means he won’t have as much time with them, he doesn’t think he would have been capable of raising them when he was younger.

The love for a child comes attached to a certain kind of horror, he admits, because you’re constantly terrified that something is going to go wrong. “That fear is what makes it amazing as well,” he says. “It’s such a bizarre kind of love, because it is about that selflessness; it’s a life you’re gonna have to let go. That person you love has to pull away from you, at least for a little while.”

Endings like this are excruciating but important, Herring says. Two things he finds unappetising about the Christian proposition are that in Heaven everyone will live for ever, and the occupants won’t have physical bodies. This doesn’t sound fun, says Herring – as much as his mind entertains him, “most of the fun of being alive is the body.” But more importantly, eternal life makes everything hollow, he thinks. “If you don’t have death there, then everything sort of loses its meaning. The only reason we love anyone or get any joy out of anything is the fact that it’s not gonna go on for ever.”

It’s hard not to be convinced by Herring’s philosophy, which, given how many knob gags are in the show, is deceptively grown-up. We’re not here for long, and we’ll be away for much longer. So why not fly a kite and laugh till you cry? You’ll have a ball.

Visit richardherring.com for details of upcoming shows. This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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This year is the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics for “aperture synthesis”. This is the technique of using several radio dishes in concert to mimic, or “synthesise”, the capability of a much larger radio dish.

To understand why anyone would want to do this, it is necessary to know a little background. The fine detail that a telescope can “see” in the sky depends on two things. The first is the wavelength of the light it is collecting. Radio waves are typically about a million times bigger than waves of visible light, which means that the vision of a radio telescope is about a million times blurrier than an optical telescope of the same size. The obvious way to compensate for this deficiency is to use a bigger telescope. This is because the second factor that determines the fine detail a telescope can discern is its size: the larger the telescope, the more it is able to zoom in on its celestial quarry.

Unfortunately, if you build a radio dish much more than 100 metres across, it collapses under its own weight. And this is why astronomers have gone down the rather complicated route of harnessing together relatively small dishes to simulate a single giant dish.

The first to attempt this, shortly after the Second World War, were radar engineers turned radio astronomers in Australia. They put a Yagi antenna (similar to an old-style TV aerial) on an 85-metre-high clifftop just south of the entrance to Sydney Harbour, not far from where Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. Its reflection in the sea below the cliffs created a second, “virtual”, antenna – the ultimate astronomical Buy One Get One Free. Later, astronomers in Australia and England assembled real, rather than virtual, arrays of radio dishes, each of which could be moved along railway tracks.

It was for the construction of two such arrays in Cambridge – the One-Mile Telescope and its successor, the 5-Kilometre Telescope – that Martin Ryle and Anthony Hewish were awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize. Incidentally, this was the same prize that many astronomers think Jocelyn Bell should have shared, since Hewish was also cited by the Nobel committee for his role in the discovery of pulsars, which Bell, as a graduate student, had first spotted. Still, Hewish’s contribution to the development of the technology of radio telescopes did prove to be important.

In aperture synthesis, the individual dishes move one step at a time along railway tracks, registering radio waves from the sky as they go, until they have effectively filled in a larger dish. Think of a chessboard with just two pieces, in which they are moved about until they have occupied every one of the 64 squares on the board.

The wild child of aperture synthesis is Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, in which radio dishes, located at sites scattered across the world, synthesise a radio telescope the size of the Earth. Clearly, the individual dishes in such a global array fill in only a minuscule portion of an Earth-sized chess board. They create a severely moth-eaten telescope. But, even with this shortcoming, VLBI has revolutionised astronomy. It has helped us to learn about extraordinary cosmic phenomena – for instance, the titanic jets of matter that stab outwards for millions of light years from the poles of the supermassive black holes that lurk in the hearts of galaxies.

In 2022, one such VLBI array, known as the Event Horizon Telescope, obtained the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way that has 4.2 million times the mass of the Sun. And this year, it turns out, is also the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Sagittarius A*.

Inside a black hole like Sagittarius A*, space and time shatter into something more fundamental. We don’t know what that thing is because our theories of physics break down. But the Event Horizon Telescope image could help us to learn more about this mysterious cosmic object, bringing us closer to uncovering the secrets of black holes and of our own galaxy. We beat ourselves up for things like global warming and the damage our species has done to the environment. But, sometimes, perhaps we should sit back and consider our successes for a moment. We are a puny species of ape that came down from the trees onto an African plain only a few million years ago. We have a 1.5-kilogram brain that is made mostly of jelly and water. But we have seen to the edge of space and time.

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From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! America is becoming less religious, particularly younger segments of the population. But that doesn’t mean fundamentalists have given up. A recent court case out of Indiana demonstrates that the teaching of evolution is still under assault by those who reject science in favor of the biblical account …

Feliciana Herrera, Indigenous leader of the Ixil people in Guatemala, will always remember spending weeks – both day and night, through sunshine and pouring rain – protesting outside the headquarters of the Guatemalan Public Ministry. This was the end of 2023, and she was there with thousands of others to demand the peaceful transfer of power to the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, and the resignation of the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, who was seeking to block it. Porras’s efforts sparked three months of peaceful demonstrations. Day after day, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, blocking key roads across the country and causing fuel and food shortages in some areas. Thousands of workers, including teachers and market vendors, went on strike, sending the country into a partial shutdown. But this was a pivotal moment for Guatemala’s democracy. “He [Arévalo] was the [only] hope that we had left after so much impunity and inequality,” Herrera explained.

A 65-year-old sociologist, diplomat and former congressman, Bernardo is the son of Juan José Arévalo, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, who led the country after it emerged from dictatorship in 1944. Bernardo’s social democratic Semilla party – which translates as “Seed” – won the election in August 2023 on an outsider’s campaign focused on communicating directly with voters through social media and promising to fight corruption.

It’s an ambitious goal. The last three presidents of Guatemala have all been linked to corruption – from nepotism to bribery and diversion of public funds. Last year, former president Otto Pérez Molina was sentenced to eight years in prison for running a smuggling scheme through customs. His successor, Jimmy Morales, led the dismantling of the office that investigated corruption. Arévalo’s predecessor, Alejandro Giammattei, along with Attorney General Porras, was sanctioned by the US, which added them to its list of “Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors” in Central America. Despite this, in 2022 Porras was re-elected to serve as attorney general until 2026.

It was a shock when Arévalo won the elections. But the political establishment isn’t taking this challenge lying down. In Guatemala, the transition between governments lasts five months. During this time Arévalo was fiercely attacked by Porras, who requested the arrests of members of Semilla, raided the offices of the electoral tribunal and tried to get the elections declared null. Powerful evangelical churches allied with the former government also campaigned against Arévalo’s candidacy, spreading false rumours that he intended to liberalise abortion and introduce same-sex marriage.

Arévalo has pulled through, surviving his first six months. But without a majority in Congress and with vast challenges against him, it has not been easy. While the world’s eyes were on him after the vote, the attention has now moved away, and his popularity is declining among the people. Is he making the progress he promised, or has he already made too many compromises? And will he ever be able to dismiss Porras – the woman behind so much oppression, and so many backhand deals – who remains attorney general even under a presidency she tried to block? The stakes are high for Guatemala. If Arévalo fails, the country’s democracy may not survive.

A victory against the odds

Guatemala is Central America’s most populous country, with 18 million inhabitants, rich in history and environment. It’s the region’s largest economy, built on agricultural exports like coffee and sugar. Yet it continues to struggle with poverty and violence, which have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to migrate to the US.

The first thing Arévalo has to deal with is the challenge of the corrupt political class. From their perspective, he was never supposed to win office in the first place. During the election campaign, Guatemala’s electoral tribunal eliminated three candidates who were popular with the public to make room for politicians who they knew weren’t going to rock the boat. However, this had the consequence of boosting Arévalo from seventh place in the polls into prime position as the alternative to democratic regression.

The attacks began immediately after the election. First off, Porras asked the Supreme Court to remove immunity from Arévalo and his vice president Karin Herrera so they could be charged with sedition over historic social media posts expressing support for a protest at Guatemala’s public university. The request was denied, this time, but Porras will keep trying if she remains in her position.

At present, Arévalo needs 107 votes out of 160 in Congress to dismiss her. There was a vote in May, but he only obtained 50. “The government’s big medium-term problem will be to survive these anti-democratic attacks,” said Edgar Ortíz, a professor at the University of the Isthmus of Guatemala. “The survival of democracy and Arévalo are the same.” Yet dismissing Porras will take a lot of work. “The state apparatus is captured,” he said. “There is no political capacity to negotiate with the current actors.”

The politicians who operated alongside the former president were so heavily linked to dark interests that the population baptised them the “Pact of the Corrupt”. Giammattei was quick to persecute anyone fighting to clean up the state. Judges and human rights defenders, opposition politicians and journalists were regularly imprisoned, while others were forced into exile. The Pact of the Corrupt was also linked to key evangelical Christian figures, such as Sergio Enríquez, leader of the Ebenezer Ministries – one of the country’s most popular churches. Guatemala is deeply religious, split roughly equally between the evangelical and Catholic Churches, but it is the former that holds much political sway, having forged ties with consecutive conservative governments. During the campaign, Enriquez asked his followers to pray against Arévalo’s success. He called him a communist and a horseman of the Apocalypse.

Some of the country’s key evangelical leaders also accused Semilla of seeking to promote abortion and same-sex marriage – even though these policies were not part of their manifesto – in what many saw as a bid to scare their followers into voting against Arévalo. These issues became a key part of the campaign for his main opponent, Sandra Torres, the wife of a former president. “I want to run this country with the fear of God,” said Torres, who picked an evangelical pastor as her running mate. Guatemala’s constitution bars religious ministers from running for the office of president or vice president, but the country’s top court permitted it. Luis Mack, a political scientist at Guatemala’s San Carlos University, told AP that Torres’s campaign could be seen as part of a regional trend of capitalising on religion for political campaigns. “It is an open manipulation of politics and faith,” he said.

What can Arévalo achieve?

But these tactics did not prove to be enough. Arévalo has also found powerful allies in the Indigenous leaders who led the national strike for democracy and expressed their desire to support him. The majority of the population in Guatemala is Indigenous, primarily of Mayan descent. Many such communities live in poverty, lacking access to basic health and education services. According to the UN, the poverty rate among Indigenous populations in Guatemala is 79 per cent – almost 30 per cent higher than the national average. While the majority are farmers, their right to live and work on the land is often precarious. They hope that Arévalo will stand up for poor and Indigenous people against the political elite and the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

But with Arévalo hamstrung by Guatemala’s politics, the anti-corruption crackdown that people were hoping for hasn’t yet arrived. Some feel that Arévalo has already failed the electorate in his first six months by not fulfilling his promises – including his failure to dismiss Porras. However, as of May, 54 per cent of the population still approved of his presidential management, perhaps because he has demonstrated the will to clean up politics. One of his administration’s first actions was to create a National Commission against Corruption, which developed a code of ethics for public officials and encouraged ministers to file complaints about anomalies in the management of public funds by previous governments. However, none of these complaints have been advanced at the time of writing – because they have all been blocked by Porras. Arévalo will need time to build allies in parliament and deploy an effective strategy, Ortíz said: “If you have undemocratic actors in power, what you have to do is negotiate with those who are democratic to marginalise the others.”

Rodrigo Véliz, an anthropologist from Guatemala and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, points out that Arévalo is working under different circumstances to his father. “In 1944 they overthrew a dictatorship completely. There was nothing left: It was an armed revolution, the constitution was completely changed, new institutions were created and there were no people from the old structures,” he said. In comparison, Bernardo faces institutions that are co-opted by people favourable to the last two governments, not only in the Prosecutor’s Office run by Porras but also in the Courts of Justice. “If the government lasts four years without a coup d’état and without massive corruption, the people will be grateful for that,” he said.

But the president is hoping to do more. One of his biggest opportunities is happening right now. In August, as this magazine goes to press, the process is ongoing to renew the entire Supreme Court of Justice and Courts of Appeal. “This will be the most important battle for the executive,” said Ortíz. These courts, along with the Constitutional Court, are the highest judicial authorities in Guatemala. Every criminal, civil, labour or family case is resolved by these judges. They also have the power to remove the president’s immunity. If Arévalo’s allies can replace some of the old guard with sympathetic people, they could block Porras’s ability to prosecute him in the future. “The country’s repressive and antidemocratic apparatus has three legs: the Public Ministry [run by Porras], the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Justice. If they lose one, they will limp,” Ortíz said.

US influence

One unpredictable factor is the forthcomng US presidential election. Joe Biden has been a key ally of Arévalo. In March, US vice president Kamala Harris met Arévalo in Washington, promising support for his administration and more investment in Guatemala. However, Donald Trump is likely to back the political status quo in Guatemala, if he wins again this year, as their political goals are more closely aligned – including on abortion, religion and Israel-Palestine (former president Morales was the only Latin American leader who agreed to move their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after Trump officially recognised the city as the capital of Israel). So the future of the country also relies in part on which way Americans choose to vote in November.

Arévalo will also have to retain the goodwill of the people, including the Indigenous communities who form the backbone of his support. Now that the first six months of his government have passed, Indigenous leaders like Herrera say they feel listened to by the president, but that they are still waiting to see a response to their most urgent needs. “We are not asking for radical changes,” Herrera said. “We believe that the needs will not be resolved in one or two years. Structural changes are required and that will occur when the justice system is no longer taken over [by corrupt people].”

However, the lack of action around rights to the land has caused anger among the Indigenous community. In May, 48 Indigenous families were evicted from the land where they lived and farmed in the north-east of the country. The police and the army arrived without warning, burning down their wooden houses and their crops. The eviction provoked resentment against Arévalo and his interior minister, who is in charge of the police, since it represents a continuation of the repressive policies used against Indigenous peoples. The Arévalo government said it had to respect the eviction order because the people were living on land owned by the state. But given that many Indigenous people went out on the streets to defend his presidency at the end of 2023, there is a feeling of betrayal. “There has been a rapprochement between Indigenous authorities and President Arévalo. Yes [the government is] listening to them, but it is complex because people are upset by the evictions,” Aj Ral Ch’och’, an Indigenous journalist, said.

The government has proposed some economic reforms that if implemented would benefit the Indigenous community. In the very same week as the evictions, Arévalo announced a one-off bonus of $128 for poor families in rural areas and a monthly $32 bonus for those in urban areas. The aid is projected to reach 300,000 families, although it is not known exactly how they will be selected. “Arévalo should take advantage of the fact that the communities still have hope of changing the repression, evictions and [forced] migration … The communities say that if they are called [upon], they are there to support the president,” Ch’och’ said.

The fate of Guatemala could have a positive ripple effect on other countries in Latin America. It’s not the only country in the region teetering between democracy and authoritarianism. In Nicaragua, international organisations have denounced systematic violations of human rights committed by the government of Daniel Ortega, accused of leading a dictatorship. In El Salvador, in June, President Nayib Bukele began a second term in office, despite the constitution prohibiting it. In March, Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking charges in the US, with prosecutors saying he ran the country like a “narco-state”.

Latin America, said Ortíz, is divided into three types of countries: those that live under dictatorships such as Nicaragua; those considered solid democracies such as Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica; and countries that are in a state of democratic decline, such as Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador. Guatemala was in the latter group until it took its unexpected leap last year. “The country democratically turned the helm and managed to overcome an attempt at authoritarian consolidation without the need for repression or violence,” said Ortíz.

But staying in that lane will not be easy for Arévalo. And with the evangelical church rapidly growing in Guatemala, reforms might become even harder if popular ministries start to direct more of their influence to support anti-democratic forces. According to Herrera, two things will be a significant help: first, if the government manages to elect independent judges by the time the process ends in September; and second, if they are able to stay close to the Indigenous communities, who could be powerful allies. This will mean taking steps to support poor rural families, who can’t wait for politics to be cleaned up in order to get the resources that many so desperately need. “We still have tons of needs around health, education, food and electricity,” she said. “This is justice too.”

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From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! As they say, “there are only so many hours in a day.” Modern life makes it very difficult to keep up with our own to-do lists, much less everything else going on in the world. We need to prioritize to maintain our sanity from day to day. …

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Two quick bits of news from me.

First, my new book on how learning magic promotes wellbeing is out very soon. It’s called Magic Your Mind Happy, and I am very excited because it provides a new perspective on magic. I will be doing lots of events to promote the book and it’s available to pre-order here.

Second, I have invented a new optical illusion! Well, to be more accurate, a new variant on a known illusion. The Beuchet Chair is one of my favourite illusions and involves a person appearing to be much smaller than they are. Invented by Jean Beuchet in the 1960s, it relies upon forced perspective created by chair legs that are close to the observer, and a large chair seat further away.

I have come up with a variant. This one centres around a plinth rather than a chair. The legs of the original chair are replaced by two pieces of hinged cardboard (these can easily be cut from foamboard and hinged with tape), and the large seat and back of the chair are replaced with a piece of cloth.

The hinged screen forms the base of the plinth and is positioned in front of the photographer, and the cloth appears to form the top of the plinth and is placed on the floor behind the screen. To help to create a sense of continuity between the large cloth and the plinth, two small pieces of matching cloth are draped along the top of the screens. The front and side panels of the screen help to conceal the front and left edge of the cloth, and make lining up the photograph much easier than in the original illusion.

This entire set up can be constructed in a short space of time, is quick to set up, and folds flat after use. Because of this, it’s ideal for those wanting to create a convincing version of this classic illusion that is easy and cost effective to build, assemble, move, and store. I hope that you like it.

UPDATE: So, it turns out that illusion creator Olivier Redon had exactly the same idea  a few years ago. You can see his great version here and watch his other illusion videos here.

Hi there,

I am delighted to say that I am back performing at the Edinburgh Magic Festival this year.

First, on the 28th December I will be exploring the strange world of illusion, mystery and magic in a show called MIND MAGIC. This will involve showing some of the best optical illusions in the world, revealing whether paranormal phenomena really exist, showing how we can all achieve the impossible, explaining how to transform a tea towel into a chicken, and much more. All the info is here.

Then, on the 28th and 29th December, I am presenting a new and experimental show about the invention of magic. This will be an intimate affair for a small number of people. It will examine how magicians create magic, and explore the mind and work of a magical genius who created the world’s greatest card trick. Info here.

So, if you are around, please come along, and fun will be had!

Some exciting news from me! I have just written my first book for children.

It uses magic to teach youngsters a range of essential life skills, including social skills, confidence, creativity, lateral thinking and much much more. Readers will learn how to perform lots of seemingly impossible feats, including how to defy gravity, read minds, pluck coins from thin air, and predict the future. Most important of all, these tricks have been carefully chosen to help boost mental wellbeing and resilience. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s magic!

I am delighted to say that Magic Your Mind Happy will be published by Wren and Rook in May 2024, and is available to preorder now here.

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Two quick bits of news.

First, The Royal Society have kindly given me the prestigious David Attenborough Award. This is a lifetime achievement award for my work promoting psychology and critical thinking, and focuses on my research combatting pseudo-science and examining the psychology of magic. Previous recipients include Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Professor Alice Roberts, and I will give an award lecture about my work in August 2024.

Second, I have a new academic magic book out! It is part of the well-known Arts For Health series and reviews work examining how watching and learning magic is good for your wellbeing, including how it boosts confidence, social skills, dexterity, curiosity and much more. It was lots of fun to write and also includes interviews key practitioners, including Richard McDougall (Breathe Magic), Julie Eng (Magicana), Mario the Maker Magician (USA), David Brookhouse (UK), David Gore and Marian Williamson (College of Magic), and Tom Verner (Magicians Without Borders).  More details here.

I am delighted to say that the second series of our On Your Mind podcast has launched today!!

Each week, science journalist Marnie Chesterton and I will explore aspects of the human psyche, including astrology, how the clothes we wear influence our thoughts, attraction, friendship, dreaming, mind control and much much more.  We will also be joined by some special guests as we attempt to answer all of your questions about psychology. The first series reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts, and so we hope that you can join us. 

Our first episode looks at creativity and explores how to have good ideas and whether children are more creative than adults. You can listen here.

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 […]