Everything Trump says is, at best, a half-truth. He’s been claiming that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago because he was poaching his employees, which is partly true. What he doesn’t mention is that this was after years of privileged access to resort employees. We have more details published in the Wall Street Journal.

Per the report published on Tuesday, Trump sent young women who worked for the Palm Beach resort to Epstein’s home for massage sessions, a perk afforded to some members of the Florida club. The resort kept up this practice for years, even though Epstein was not a member of the club.

The outlet reported that “the house calls went on… even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein.” Employees told the paper that Epstein “known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments.”

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is known to have used the resort to recruit women and girls for the late sex trafficker. One of Epstein’s most vocal accusers, Virginia Giuffre, was pulled into Epstein’s orbit while working at Mar-a-Lago. Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, had refuted accusations that Trump was involved in Epstein’s sex crimes.

The president said earlier this year that Epstein’s poaching of employees like Giuffre was part of the reason their friendship came to an end. The report dug into the much-discussed falling out between Trump and Epstein in 2003. Per employees who spoke to the outlet, Trump barred Maxwell and Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after an 18-year-old employee returned from a house call and said that Epstein “pressured her for sex.”

Mar-A-Lago was a pedophile hunting ground for years and years, and even if Trump didn’t directly rape any young women, he was an enabler who turned a blind eye to Epstein/Maxwell calling up and asking to have women delivered for “massages”.

I rediscovered an old poster with a few of my words on it, so I figured I’d throw together a quick video with a few words of inspiration.

Transcript below the fold.

Happy 2026, I hope. I was doing some New Years cleaning, and was organizing my bedroom closet. I own 60 or 70 t-shirts, and they were in a sloppy pile, so sorted them out and folded them and tucked them away, and then folded up all my pants and stacked them neatly. Please clap.

While I was uncluttering, I discovered a few things buried in the neglected mess, including a mailing tube from someone named Quentin Long. It was dated February of 2010.

I guess that tells you how long its been since I cleaned that closet. It was like finding an index fossil.

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to rediscover on New Years Day. Quentin had made a poster of my own words and sent me a copy. It reminded me of something I’d written years ago, and more or less forgotten — it was my atheist creed. I’d written it as a response to a common Christian canard, that atheists don’t believe in anything. I am not some kind of radical nihilist!

Here’s what I’d written. It’s a good way to start the new year.

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

It may be many years old, but it’s still valid…for me. That’s the foundation of what I believe, but it may not be the same for every atheist.

Maybe there’s something you’d subtract from my creed, and that’s fine. I think it’s too long, myself, and consider it in need of some editing.

Maybe there’s something you’d like to add, that’s also fine. I think I’d add something about the centrality of change — we’re all riding the winds of flux all the time, and grasping that is important for understanding biology and evolution, for instance…also physics and chemistry. But I already said it’s too long, and adding a whole ‘nother concept while keeping the length down would be more work than I feel like putting in to it now.

I do think it’s a good exercise for every atheist to write down the positive beliefs that they hold. We might see some common aspects and some significant differences!

OK, that’s all I wanted to say. Also thanks to Quentin for reaching up out of the past to remind me what I stand for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s New Year’s Eve. Goddamn, this has been an awful year.

There is nothing magical about this date, it’s just another day in a long series of them, we’re just going to change the number of the year, but there are things I’ll be wishing to happen (while having low expectations that anything will happen.)

For 2026, I would like to see the rule of law creep back. I want white nationalism to be repudiated. I want vengeance: I want the fascists in government arrested and locked away.

Is that too much to ask?

If not, throw in the end of capitalism, the collapse of the AI bubble, and the death of Trump.

The blizzard is over. Talk amongst yourselves.

Previous Thread

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Are you familiar with Stephen Miller? He’s Donald Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff in title, but in reality a lot of people have good reason to believe that he’s the source of Trump’s fascist …

I’ve been hearing about corruption in Minnesota for many years. The short summary, since I’ve been regularly seeing articles about it in our newspapers since at least the start of the COVID pandemic, is that the state exercised poor regulatory oversight of charitable foundations, and some bad actors moved in to exploit that. The problem exploded during COVID as state and federal services were expanded to cope with the social disruption caused by the disease, and a few people figured out that founding phony charities was a good strategy for siphoning off tax dollars…a lot of tax dollars.

Honestly, I was tuning out all the news about the Feeding Our Future scam back in 2020, because it was all about the state slowly stamping out all the scammers. We’ve had a steady throb of stories in this state about crooks getting arrested for lying about these fake charities, slowly getting prosecuted, and typically getting convicted — the justice system grinds slowly, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved, and while many have been convicted, even today most of them haven’t been sentenced. When your local news is a steady drip of incremental stories about infamous con artists getting court dates, it’s hard to sustain focus. It’s been a slow cleanup of a ghastly mess, where frauds were claiming to set up meal delivery for schools, getting paid by the state, and then not actually delivering anything.

Except now it’s blowing up again because Republicans have discovered a racist angle to it. A lot of the schools not-served by these services were in poor Somali communities, with the complicity of Somali con artists, because as usual poor people are ripe for the picking with promises of free money. So now there’s a story Republicans can seize upon: poor black people were stealing our money! Never mind that state officials were aware of the problem and have been trying to do cleanup and improve regulatory oversight for over a decade and that it’s not just a Somali problem.

For instance, here’s the organizer of the scheme, Aimee Bock:

Whoops. I guess we’re going to have to round up all the white women and deport them. Just can’t trust ’em.

Keep in mind that Minnesota has a population of 80,000 people of Somali descent. Something like 80 were involved in the crime, so sure, indicting over 3 million white women in the state because Aimee Bock stole millions of dollars seems fair.

For a more thorough overview of the scheme, here’s a fast-talking white woman to compress the whole convoluted mess into 24 minutes.

One of the more crazy accusations coming out of the demented Right is the claim that the Minnesota state flag, which is blue and has a star on it, was designed to resemble the Somali flag, which is blue and has a star on it. You be the judge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: “Curing cancer” has long been a go-to phrase for what a better future looks like, up there with flying cars. It’s like, why is Jeff Bezos spending billions of dollars to send Katie Perry …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good break!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still looking for Christmas gifts? New Humanist is offering annual subscriptions for just £21 until the end of December. Sign up now using code FESTIVE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Teaching When To Trust
By Zion Lights

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

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

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

4. The Afghan women left to die
By Jamaima Afridi

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

5. The greatest astronomy PhD ever written
By Marcus Chown

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

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

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

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

7. Five voices on space and society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Minds in search of meaning
By Frank Tallis

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

12. Rise of the science sleuths
By Euan Lawson

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

13. Nuclear choices
By Dominic Hinde

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

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

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

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

15. An atheist goes on pilgrimage
By Christopher Dorrell

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

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

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Mons Gaudium, the mountain of joy, was the name given by pilgrims to the hill from which they could spot Jerusalem for the first time. It marked the final stage of a dangerous journey, which would have taken months, if not years, to complete.

Every major medieval pilgrimage route had its version of Mons Gaudium. My own journey – a five-day trek through the rolling hills of the Scottish borders – could not compare to a medieval voyage to Jerusalem, but I still felt genuine joy on the Kyloe Hills in Northumberland looking out over the sea. There, shimmering on the horizon of a bright September day, was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

Sheep scattered as I bounded down the grassy slopes, forgetting for a moment the pain in my knees. My journey was nearly at an end, but I still faced a nagging question: was I really a pilgrim?

Pilgrimage is more popular in the west than it has been for centuries. Nearly half a million people completed the Camino (Spanish for “path”) to Santiago de Compostela in 2024, historically one of Europe’s most important pilgrimage routes. In 1972, the records show just 67 pilgrims.

In Britain, a 2024 YouGov survey commissioned by the British Pilgrimage Trust, a charity launched in 2014, found that 9.2 per cent of adults in Britain had already made a pilgrimage. A further 19 per cent – nearly 8 million people – were considering it.

The revival has coincided with the continuing decline of Christianity in the west. Why are people going? And are they actually pilgrims?

Pilgrimage is a slippery concept. The word comes from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “being away from your own land or home”. At its core, it involves going on a physical journey to a designated site. But there is also a deeper aspect. The hope is that the act of travelling becomes a spur to self-realisation and inner growth.

Historically, these ritual journeys have been firmly tied to religion. In the high Middle Ages, pilgrimage was big business. If you include local saints’ shrines alongside the major routes to Jerusalem or Rome, then it is likely that the vast majority of medieval Christians performed some form of pilgrimage in their lives. The naked exploitation of pilgrims, and the superstitious aspects, made the practice a target for reformers. “All pilgrimages should be done away with; for there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments,” Martin Luther wrote in 1520.

The modern variant is proudly agnostic. For example, the British Pilgrimage Trust says it wants “to make pilgrimage accessible to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or background”. The practice helps to “nurture our relationship with the land” and adds “meaning and purpose to our lives”, the charity says. The 250 routes listed on their website include a wide variety of destinations. The majority are centred on churches or cathedrals, but there’s a healthy smattering of springs, stone circles and river mouths on the website too.

I am an atheist but my “pilgrimage” route, St Cuthbert’s Way, was clearly Christian themed: connecting Melrose Abbey, where Cuthbert first joined the monastery in 651AD, to Lindisfarne, where he served as bishop and was canonised shortly after his death in 687AD. The Holy Island itself has been a site of Christian worship since the early seventh century.

That said, the geography of Holy Island gives it a charisma that even the most convinced materialist can feel. Twice a day the island is cut off from the mainland by the North Sea. At low tide, you can walk across the mudflats to the island. Out on the flats, the sea, land and sky do not just meet, they merge. Each seems to reflect the other. The wooden sticks that guide you from shore to shore provide the only sense of fixed definition, a line through the haze.

Before embarking on their journey, medieval pilgrims would often write a will in case anything should happen to them on the route, an indication of how dangerous travel could be back then. There’s been no recorded deaths on the sands to Lindisfarne, but I thought there’s a first time for everything. I quickly drew up a will and left it on the fridge for my flatmates. “In the event of my demise, the cat gets everything,” I scrawled. (The cat has been looking at me funny ever since.)

Having got my affairs in order, I started the journey north. The weather forecast for the week ahead was bleak: rainy and windy every day. I was staying overnight with friends in Edinburgh before heading to the start of the path in Melrose, a small town in the Scottish Borders. “If at any point you want to come back, then just let us know,” they said. It was all starting to feel a bit ominous.

Nevertheless, I dutifully traipsed off to Melrose on Monday morning. I didn’t get off to a good start. Out of the town, the trail quickly climbs up the side of the Eildon Hills, three peaks which dominate the border lands. The rain was nowhere to be seen. Instead it was warm, and I was overdressed. I slowly climbed the hill, sweat starting to sting my eyes. Pausing at the top for water, I struggled to catch my breath. My head hurt, my bag felt too heavy and my eyes strained through the sweat. Maybe it had been a good decision to write my will after all.

But from there the path got easier, leading down to the banks of the River Tweed. I stopped at a church which had a prayer for passing pilgrims. It urged the walker to find “the imprint of the infinite in all that you see”, a sentiment I tried to carry with me over the following days.

This romantic appreciation of nature is an important inspiration for modern pilgrimage, and is part of the reason I had picked St Cuthbert’s Way. The route takes you along riverbanks, through forests and over hills before the dramatic walk across the sands to Lindisfarne.

The desire to authentically connect to the past felt like another crucial pillar of my pilgrimage. Through walking, I hoped to understand the landscape in the way that Cuthbert might have. Both of these goals could be understood as “spiritual”. They were attempts to anchor my life in a wider architecture of meaning.

But having done a bit of homework before my journey, I knew that I had to be careful about my grand aims. Modern pilgrims like me may be tracing the footsteps of our ancestors, but our attitudes are very different.

Dr Anne Bailey at the University of Oxford argues that for medieval pilgrims, the trip was often about the destination, not the journey. “For many, the journey to a saint’s shrine seems to have had little or no spiritual value, and it was only when their destination was reached that penitential exercises were performed,” she writes.

She cites the example of Margery Kempe, a prolific 15th-century pilgrim who managed to complete a round trip to Santiago in 25 days, less time than it takes modern pilgrims to walk the Camino through France. Her outbound journey lasted just seven days, because she took the boat from Bristol directly to the northwestern tip of Spain. She clearly wanted the journey to end as soon as possible.

Another pilgrim, Abbot Daniel, admitted to “doing every kind of unworthy deed” on his route to Jerusalem, sins which would be atoned upon arrival at the holy sites. The transfer of meaning from destination to journey reflects our modern discomfort with the idea that certain places are genuinely imbued with special powers.

Of course, Christians in medieval Europe do not have a monopoly on the idea of pilgrimage, and there were many different experiences of pilgrimage even in medieval times. But we should be cautious: just because we are walking the same trails and using the same language, it does not mean we are in some way continuing an unbroken tradition of spiritual wandering. If I was a pilgrim, I was a distinctively modern pilgrim, guided by modern sensibilities.

And it was not just the inner journey that had changed, so too had the physical landscape. The village of Morebattle, which marked the halfway point of my journey, had once been a lakeside town. But the lake had gradually shrunk, before finally being drained in the 19th century. The village church still stood on a hill overlooking the site of the lake, only now it looked across rows of neat fields.

Making my way between the towns and villages, I often saw no one in the fields or the hills. But in pre-modern Britain, the countryside would have been much more densely populated given the importance of agriculture, and the need for many more labourers. The deserted landscapes in which I found it easiest to connect to the past were, in many ways, modern creations.

As I started my final descent to the shoreline, I stopped at a bench with fantastic views across to Lindisfarne. Two sisters were sitting there, and they invited me to join them. What brought them to these hills? They had walked the first half last year, and were now completing the route. Theirs was a different kind of pilgrimage, a personal act of remembrance. “Our mother died three years ago and our father died sometime before, but they were both keen walkers. Every year we try to go on a walking trip around one of their birthdays to remember them. It’s a kind of little pilgrimage,” they said.

We walked together for the rest of the day, swapping notes on the walk and giving thanks for the miraculously good weather – it had barely rained all week!

The sisters would finish their pilgrimage the day after me, so I crossed the sands the next morning alone. Following the wooden sticks that guided the way, I found myself thinking less about my grand spiritual ambitions, which seemed as spectral as the early morning light. Instead, I thought about the people I love, the people I’ve lost, and the people I fear I’m on the cusp of losing. I tried to carry them all with me as I approached the end of my walk. Only then did I feel comfortable describing myself as a pilgrim.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Two years ago I made a video about Avi Loeb, a man who achieved some degree of prominence in his chosen field of physics and managed to become the Director of the Institute for …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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