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!

It’s as if America wasn’t the paradise the Right tries to tell us. A Gallup poll shows that a lot of young people want to escape our dystopia.

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women.

In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.

A lot of young women want out. It’s hard to blame them.

Young American men don’t feel the same degree of alienation. It also seems to be an American phenomenon — women in other countries aren’t as interested in fleeing their homeland for somewhere else.

The growing trend in younger women in the U.S. looking to leave their country is not evident in other advanced economies. Across 38 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the percentage of younger women who say they would like to migrate has held relatively steady for years, typically averaging between 20% and 30%.

For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, younger U.S. women were less likely than their peers abroad to want to move. That changed around 2016. Since then, they have been more likely than younger women in other wealthy countries to say they would leave their homeland for good. By contrast, U.S. men aged 15 to 44 continue to be less likely than average to want to migrate compared with their peers in the OECD.

It’s almost as if women have noticed that we’ve been denying them autonomy and rights.

I remember, over 20 years ago, there were furious online debates where some of the worst people in the world were making repulsive arguments about what children were old enough to fuck. They were claiming that you weren’t a pedophile if the children were adolescents — you were a “hebephile,” as if that made a difference. It doesn’t.

Now Megyn Kelly is echoing that same stupid claim. I thought we were done with that stupid nonsense.

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): As for Epstein, I’ve said this before, but just as a reminder, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. Not everything, but virtually everything. And this person has told me from the start years and years ago that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realized this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.

And that is what I believed, and that is what I reliably was told for many years. And it wasn’t until we heard from Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged — forgive me, they used to call it kiddie porn, now they call it child sexual abuse material — on his computer that for the first time, I thought, oh, no, he was an actual pedophile. I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. She’s never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON (GUEST): Or anything else.

KELLY: Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference. There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?

What is that difference, exactly? They’re both under the age of consent. They’re minors, you don’t suddenly become fair game for sexual abuse when your breasts begin to grow. For that matter, adults aren’t sexual objects either, but I don’t think the people who make these bad arguments really care about that, either. But then, Megyn Kelly has long been prone to making idiotic claims — remember when she was irate that Santa Claus could be anything but a white man?

It’s nice that she doesn’t trust Pam Bondi, but I don’t trust Megyn Kelly, either. She went on to say…

Kelly acknowledged Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, telling Ungar-Sargon, [Epstein] did like them young, and there were several young women who he did this to who were minors, who were underage. There’s just no question about that.

She then insisted that Trump was not involved, adding, That is a true fact about Jeffrey Epstein. But that is not a true fact about Donald Trump.

We’re learning all kinds of surprising things about Donald Trump lately.

That’s Epstein’s brother asking him about some compromising photos; there was a flurry of speculation that “Bubba” was Clinton, in a verified email, but the brother has come forward to say it wasn’t the former president. Interesting…a partial denial suggests that the rest might be true, that Putin has some blackmail material on Trump.

This whole affair has gotten unbelievably slimy. Now I’m worrying that we might be suffering under a President Vance in the near future.

They have new policies for their university.

Courses at Texas A&M University System schools that “advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” will only be allowed with pre-approval, following a policy change approved Thursday.

Editorial comment: they will never be pre-approved.

Speaking ahead of the committee vote Thursday, committee chair Sam Torn said a rigorous review of university courses will accompany the policy changes.

Editorial comment: they will enforce rigid ideological beliefs…but will deny that they are being ideological.

“The board agreed it was essential for the Texas A&M University System to refine existing policies and lead the way with an in-depth and repeatable review of our courses so that we can, simply put, make sure we are educating, not advocating, and that we are teaching what we say we are going to teach,” Torn said.

Editorial comment: see what I mean? They haven’t figured out yet that silencing a set of ideas is ideological, too.

The university system’s Civil Rights Protections and Compliance policy also has been revised to state that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO or designee.”

Editorial comment: they will erase race, gender, and sexual orientation from the curriculum, denying that such phenomena even exist.

Many faculty and outsiders are speaking out against this policy.

The new race and gender policy has garnered condemnation from educational rights advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which sent a letter to the regents earlier this week arguing the policy amounted to censorship.

“We urge the board to reject these proposals, which invite — indeed, practically guarantee — unconstitutional political interference with faculty teaching and academic freedom,” the letter reads. “Academic freedom requires that faculty, not administrators, determine whether, when, and how to teach material germane to the topic of their courses.”

Before the final vote, FIRE special counsel Robert Shibley told Houston Public Media the policy change would affect a wide swath of curriculum, from civil rights to the Civil War or even classical Greek plays.

“That would subject dozens or potentially hundreds of courses to the veto of high-level administrators,” Shibley said. “So, even if a faculty member just wants to assign one chapter of a book, and it has something to do with race or gender, that means that the college president is going to have to pre-approve that.”

My god, FIRE opposes it? An organization funded by Charles Koch favoring libertarian/conservative causes thinks that maybe Texas has gone too far dislikes the policy? You know it’s bad.

In addition, Texas A&M is going to enable a network of student snitches. It’s going to be so much fun!

As part of the review process, Hallmark said there would be a “24-7 reporting mechanism” for students to report what they consider “inaccurate or misleading course content.”

Shibley, the FIRE special counsel, said the potential creation of such a reporting mechanism could have a “chilling” effect on faculty.

How will the students know if the course content is inaccurate? Because Fox News or TPUSA tells them so?

If you’re from Texas and attending college or planning to attend, get out now. The neighboring states aren’t particularly great, though, may I recommend applying to the University of Minnesota system?

This should have been posted on Truth Social rather than Bluesky.

In the latest example of insanity, congress wants to penalize scientists who dare to work with Chinese scientists.

Scientists and research advocates in the United States are mobilizing to fight a bill that would essentially prohibit researchers with any ties to China and other countries deemed hostile from receiving federal funding. Nearly 800 academics signed a 29 October letter opposing the ban, part of a bill passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives that sets spending priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD). A coalition of higher education and research advocacy groups has also urged Congress to strike the language as members reconcile the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what the Senate adopted last month. Final passage is expected by the end of the year.

The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.

You know, collaboration is an essential part of good science — both partners benefit from working together. There are many highly qualified, expert Chinese scientists we could profitably work with, and this kind of bill is only penalizing Americans, denying them research funding and restricting who they can partner with. The bill is sponsored by yet another short-sighted, ignorant MAGA Republican.

The act’s author, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), wants to “stop federal [science] funding from going to universities or researchers that collaborate with China’s military and intelligence services.” Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has produced a slew of reports in the past 2 years decrying what it sees as a rising tide of such harmful collaborations.

We have a whole committee on the Chinese Communist Party? Chaired by a jingoistic conservative fanatic? Do they also oppose the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace?

Well, at least it looks like constituents are getting disgusted with him.

We Are Still Here: An Anthology of Resilience, Grief, and Unshattered Hope from Gaza’s University Students (Daraja Press), edited by Zahid Pranjol & Jacob Norris

“Do you know what it’s like to live in a tent during Gaza’s summer?” Wissam Yousef is asking the world beyond Palestine’s scarred dunes. He is asking you. The world has yet to give a good enough answer. Instead, Wissam must answer himself:

Extreme heat. Limited water. Overflowing trash. Open sewage. Insects. Rodents. Stray dogs trying to enter the tent at night. Noise. Chaos. Drones buzzing overhead. Contagious diseases. Scabies. Meningitis.

Compiled from Gaza’s student writers and translators, We Are Still Here is an anthology, published during Gaza’s third ceasefire in two years, and while the West Bank is threatened with outright annexation. Many of these young authors once thought they knew the shape their life might take, all of them seeing in Gaza’s universities a route to something more than poverty or selling sweets in the street. The universities are gone now. These are records of loss: fervent, burning, desperate, rage-inducing.

“Why?” Batol Alkhaldy wants to know. “We’re not asking for luxury. We’re not searching for perfect lives … We want something simple—to wake up to the sound of birds instead of warplanes, to eat a meal without wondering if it will be our last.” Waad Hamdi Allaham stares through the fog of gunsmoke and pulverised concrete, and asks the most vital of all questions: “Why are you mute? Are you pleased with the genocide?”

Many pieces are plain, brief, steady narratives in a handful of paragraphs. Here I am, they say. These were my dreams. This is the scroll of my dead. Others are fragmented, formless, experiential – trying to make sense of the insensible. The collection’s final third is made up of poems – more moving still for the gift of their metaphors and emotional compression. If the poet Mariam Marwan Malaka should survive (there is no guarantee), I wish for her a career as fulsome as the promise of her work included here. For these lines alone, she deserves garlands:

A person is humiliated in proportion to their longing—
And I, by mine, am annihilated.

The anthology is edited by two academics from the University of Sussex: Dr Jacob Norris, historian of Palestine and co-director of the university’s Middle East and North Africa Centre, and Zahid Pranjol, associate dean for the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine. If there is a fault in this book, it is the editors’ and it comes from admirable motives. In getting out of the way of each student’s voice, they’ve also ensured that the contributions are slightly contextless. You wish, wading chin-height in this pain, for a small amount of detail for each author: a little biography of age, neighbourhood, present status. The anthology has no definite structure, either of chronology or theme.

But one theme dominates: the everyday, commonplace, inflicting of strife and violence. There are the night fears, the flare-lit terrors. No one knows from where the next bomb will come, or who will survive another shelling. As Hada Mohammed Homaid writes:

In Gaza, people die in the way the world fears most suddenly, senselessly, without warning ... No goodbyes. No time to prepare. And what then? No space in the morgue refrigerators. No coffins. Not even cars left to carry the bodies.

Gaza’s life is one of suspension. In that space of waiting, there is hunger. When you haven’t eaten, eating is all you can think about. These lines are by Obay Jouda:

We feast on memories,
chew on the brittle skins of dry onions,
boil wild herbs and whisper to our stomachs:
“This is soup.”

If we grant enough leeway to empathy, the lives of others can cut into ours every bit as sharply as our own experience. We Are Still Here is a testament: a plea that these stories should not become their authors’ own eulogies. But there is a limit. Gaza’s experience, for most of us, is far beyond the imaginable. “It is beyond belief,” writes Reem Alaa Khalel Al-Astal. “And yet—even if you believe—it will not make you feel what we feel…”

You will not lose your family one by one.
You will not scramble daily to feed your hungry children.
You will not be displaced from your home to a tent, from north to south.
You will not wait for a miracle to pull you out of this.
You will not understand what I’m living.

Transcript: A bit of a change of pace today: usually on this channel my videos are relatively short and scripted, and today’s video is neither. I really wanted to share the story of my good friend, Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, and I realized that the absolute best way to do that is to have her tell …

The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell (Yale University Press) by Fritz Breithaupt

Our world is made of stories. From idle gossip with work colleagues to stories of political tribes and nation states, our brains weave threads of narrative that form the tapestry of experienced reality. We are so attuned to this narrative thinking that the stories we tell have huge power over us, allowing the weakest individual to stand up against impossible odds, or leading whole nations into darkness.

Yet these stories are so ubiquitous, so fundamental to what makes us human, that they can become invisible, leaving us vulnerable to their seductive power. It is only through analysing the stories that shape our world that we can control them and retain agency, which is exactly what Fritz Breithaupt sets out to do in his fascinating new book.

Breithaupt is professor of Germanic studies and cognitive sciences at the University of Indiana, and he takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation. The book explores political history, literary analysis, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Breithaupt uses these complementary strands of enquiry to build a methodical and coherent picture of the psychological mechanisms and evolutionary roots behind our narrative thinking.

The keystone of his argument is a storytelling experiment conducted in his lab that was based on a children’s parlour game. The “telephone” game (aka “Chinese whispers”) involves the retelling of a story within a group. As it changes considerably from person to person, there are often hilarious results. Breithaupt saw the unique value of games like this to investigate the dynamic process of story propagation, which in turn sheds light on what is truly important to us when we engage in narrative thinking. Participants were asked to read a short story and then retell it in their own words, which was then passed to someone else to repeat the process. The study involved 12,000 participants and around 19,000 retellings. His team then analysed the input and output for all stages, measuring the length of the story, as well as the degree of information retention and emotional valence.

In some ways, the results were unsurprising. There was a tendency to shorten stories, with a drop in length of around 30 per cent for each retelling. There was also a very poor level of information retention, with events, characters and perspectives changing dramatically. But what was striking was that there was an incredibly strong retention in emotional valence, in the intensity and type of emotion expressed, whether joy or fear or frustration. If characters, events and settings can change, but the emotions remain consistent, Breithaupt concludes that the thing most important to us when we engage in narrative thinking is the communication of emotions. The reason we tell stories, he suggests, is to utilise our “mobility of consciousness”. We project our minds into the place of others to share experiences and emotions. This allows us to simulate how we might feel and react in similar circumstances, leaving us better equipped to deal with our unpredictable environment.

Breithaupt saves some of the most fascinating material for the epilogue, where he discusses some of the cultural and political narratives that have shaped our world over the last few years. He questions the different ways we might respond to the video of George Floyd’s murder, depending on whether we identify with a bystander or with Floyd himself. He discusses how the narratives surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have changed over the course of the war. These are some of the strongest parts of the book, so their brevity seemed like a missed opportunity. However, his focus on the mechanisms that underpin our narrative brains might help equip the reader to interrogate our world of stories for themself.

The book closes with a discussion of whether we need to reject narrative thinking in light of the power these stories have to manipulate us. Breithaupt’s conclusion is that we need more, not less, narrative thinking. We need to reject the allure of simple narratives that close down our thinking and lock us into a limited worldview. Instead, we should embrace a plurality of narratives that enrich and broaden our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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

Transcript: Last week, I talked about how “nones” are the second fastest growing “religion” in the world. That’s N-O-N-E “nones,” not “N-U-N “nuns” – people who do not identify with any religion at all, whether they consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or otherwise. N-U-N “nuns” only get popular around, well, this time of year, where they …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: At the beginning of November, the Trump administration will be illegally ending payments to low-income families across the United States who participate in the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” also known as “SNAP” and previously …

Twenty years ago, John P. A. Ioannidis published an essay with the eye-catching title “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. It has since been accessed millions of times and accumulated almost 15,000 citations. Its publication was a singular moment in the developing field of metascience – the application of science to science itself. It’s a field that is attracting a great deal of interest, with the UK opening its first metascience unit last year. So what is metascience, and how can we grapple with the problems it presents?

Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, is a leading meta-researcher. For the last two decades, he has studied the methods, practices, reporting standards and incentives at work within the global scientific community. His findings on the integrity of science can be boiled down to some basic principles around the conditions likely to produce false results. Firstly, small studies and small effect sizes can be problematic as they lack the necessary scale. Second, and more controversially, the greater the flexibility in the study design the greater the chance of a false result. Then there’s a third major principle: the greater the financial interest or other prejudice, the greater the chance of erroneous results. Even in science, with the purest of intentions, we all bring our biases to the party.

These three principles alone add up to a heady brew. In his paper, Ioannidis asserted that, overall, there is a lot of research which should be handled with care. He wasn’t interested in kicking individual papers but recognising the room for error and working with the “totality of the evidence”. Metascience didn’t start with Ioannidis, but his essay threw some grit into the science gears. By the time the 2010s rolled around, criticism of the integrity of scientific research was gathering pace, and talk of a “replication” or “reproducibility” crisis was bubbling to the surface.

When a researcher runs the same experiment twice, using the same data both times, they should get the same reproducible results. If someone else runs the same experiment, as described by the original researchers, that should also result in replication. But in the 2010s there was a growing realisation that a grievous number of published studies simply can’t be replicated. Some studies put the replication rates for psychological science, a field hard hit by the crisis, as low as 39 per cent.

These were difficult years, as the research community came to terms with Ioannidis being proven right. Given that science depends on reliable studies, the community was thrust into an existential crisis.

Questionable practices, nonsense results

The various ways in which the practice of science can be distorted cover a wide spectrum. Often they relate to the importance of the “probability value”, or p-value. Any researcher that crunches numbers will appreciate the tyranny of p-values. A low p-value indicates that a study is reliable, or what we scientists call “statistically significant”. In general, a p-value of 0.05 or smaller is regarded as being one indicator of an important finding. But this threshold is completely arbitrary – at some point, science just kind of settled on this figure. It has created a hard line that has given the p-value a dark alter-ego and led to distortions that undermine scientific integrity. One example is data dredging, where repeated statistical analyses are performed until a result with a statistically significant p-value is obtained. This and other techniques fall under the heading of “p-hacking” – a term coined in 2014 by three American researchers, Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn.

Some evidence suggests that p-hacking is, frankly, rife. The various problematic techniques have been captured in the notion of “questionable research practices”. One Danish study published last year in the open access journal PLOS One surveyed researchers across all major disciplines in Denmark, the US and several European countries. It found the self-reported use of some questionable research practices to be over 40 per cent. Almost half of researchers admitted to indulging in HARKing (hypothesising after the results are known). In good practice, a scientific study should set out to prove or disprove its original hypothesis, which remains unchanged. But when researchers find that the data does not sufficiently support their hypothesis, they might tweak it in retrospect, in order to produce those all-important “significant results”.

These distortions may seem mild, and they have to some extent been normalised – inducing nothing more than a shrug from even seasoned academics. Yet the cumulative impact on research is parlous. In a brutal critique entitled “False-Positive Psychology” and published in 2011, Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn deployed just a few questionable research practices to produce a nonsensical result: their research claimed to show that study participants became younger simply by listening to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four”. They sought to demonstrate how absurd and potentially dangerous results could be quite easily obtained. As they wrote in their paper: “Everyone knew it [the use of questionable research practices] was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it’s wrong to jaywalk. We decided to write ‘False-Positive Psychology’ when simulations revealed it was wrong the way it’s wrong to rob a bank.”

Flaws, fraud and fakery

So why aren’t these questionable practices being taken more seriously? This may be in part because the research community has plenty more problems to worry about, especially as higher education institutions are squeezed. Concerns around academic journals are not new and the charge sheet is long. The peer review process is flawed. There is publication bias, where only the most novel positive findings get published, which distorts the evidence base as papers that find “no effect” don’t make it into print. The funding model is a car crash and has been captured by corporate agendas, while conflicts of interest abound. Researchers sometimes feel as though they are trapped in an abusive relationship, as they are overly reliant on big, profit-making journals. One of these, Elsevier, made a profit of £1.17 billion in 2024, with an astonishing operating margin of 38.4 per cent. Numbers like these are particularly galling as researchers scrabble for grant funding and provide free peer review and editorial labour, only to find that key academic papers are marooned behind paywalls.

There has been some positive change of late with the expansion of open-access publication, where research papers are no longer paywalled and can be downloaded by anyone. Many research funders – such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research, UK Research and Innovation, Wellcome, and research charities such as Cancer Research UK – now mandate that research is openly available to all. Yet this hasn’t loosened the grip of the big publishing houses, or lessened their profits.

Meanwhile, new problems have emerged. One of these is the rise of paper mills. The Committee of Publication Ethics describes them as “profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organisations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research”. In the uber-competitive world of academia, it is unsurprising that some people will pay cash to illegally get into journals. In some countries, doctoral students cannot graduate unless they publish a paper, and clinicians in hospitals are also required to publish to get promotion. Up until 2020, Chinese academic institutions were offering cash rewards for publication. The paper mills write the paper – using manipulated or fake data – and even handle the submission to the journal. They’ve been operating for years, but the more recent advent of AI is making fraudulent papers easier to produce and harder for editors to detect. The word “pollution” now comes up regularly in discussions about the overall state of research literature.

Meta-researchers to the rescue?

Professor Ioannidis is one of the best-known meta-researchers, but many more have since joined the ranks. They are having some success in raising awareness and pushing back against the problems, although their influence is limited as they are often acting outside of the usual academic and regulatory structures.

Dorothy Bishop is one such science sleuth. A singular academic, Bishop was professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford until she retired in 2022, and continues to write a blog mostly dealing with distortions in scientific research and publishing. Her first post in 2010 considered academic misconduct in relation to a paper that was, improbably, about fellatio in fruit bats. Writing in Nature in 2019, at the end of a four-decade long career, she lamented the failure to address some of the weaknesses in the execution of the scientific method, pithily framing the problem as the “four horsemen of the irreproducibility apocalypse”: publication bias, low statistical power, p-value hacking and HARKing.

Bishop made headlines last year when she resigned from the Royal Society in response to the conduct of Elon Musk, a fellow since 2018, calling him “someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him…” Her name has become associated with scientific integrity.

Many of the other science sleuths are younger researchers, highly motivated, or as Bishop put it, “they’re pretty obsessive and they care passionately about it.” Their activities are often reported on websites such as Retraction Watch and Data Colada, though the risks are not insignificant. Data Colada, run by none other than Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn, was sued by the researcher Francesca Gino after allegations of misconduct at Harvard. Individuals, particularly early-career researchers who already face academic precarity, have to contend with formidable, potentially career-ending consequences when they choose to expose research that falls short.

As Bishop said, “we are going to need to have something more formalised.” There are some early signs of progress. Retraction Watch has appointed “sleuths in residence” and recently announced a new project, the Medical Evidence Project, funded by their parent non-profit, The Center for Scientific Integrity. Using a $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy, it plans to use forensic metascience to identify problems in articles that could affect human health.

The new UK Metascience Unit, run by UK Research and Innovation and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is the first metascience unit in the world to be embedded in government. It has been given an initial budget of £10 million, in acknowledgement that there are billions of pounds of public money invested in science research and it therefore deserves rigorous study.

The sleuths are often interested in identifying and exposing research fraud at the more egregious end of the spectrum, but there are many more mundane changes that could improve scientific integrity. Much of the structural change proposed hinges around a move towards “open science” and has created a global movement, led by organisations such as the Center for Open Science in the United States. This is more than the simple expedient of publishing open access papers, important as that is, but reflects a much deeper cultural change to be fully open and transparent throughout the research process. For instance, datasets should, where possible, be made available to all so that claims can be checked and they are then available to facilitate additional research.

The open science movement

Many proponents advocate for “open scholarship” and the need to embed these practices in early career training. As part of this approach, there are calls for much greater use of pre-registration, where proposed research is set out in detail before it is conducted. This addresses some of the problems of post-hoc tweaking and twiddling to get positive results. Professor Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at Melbourne University with a specialism in meta-research, has described the open science movement as a “credibility revolution”.

These calls for change have been framed as part of a broader “slow science” movement, with aims to subvert the “publish or perish” culture in academia. Many would argue this is long overdue – it is difficult to understate how hyper-competitive academia is in some places, with inevitable unintended consequences. However, despite the efforts of sleuths and activists, not everyone is pushing for change, as Bishop pointed out: “There’s rather few really senior people that have embraced all the open science reproducibility sort of stuff.”

There are also anxieties that being seen to criticise science plays into the hands of bad actors. In May, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. It set out a series of largely uncontroversial principles about the conduct of science, familiar to meta-researchers. However it was criticised by many, including the Center for Open Science, for attempting to politicise science. They pointed out that “improving openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research is an iterative, never-ending process for the scientific community” and argued that the order opened a path for evidence to be suppressed according to political ideology. Carl Bergstrom, a metascientist and professor of biology at Washington State, posted on Bluesky: “I’ve worried for years that by promoting a science-in-crisis narrative, the meta-science/science reform movement runs the risk of playing useful idiot to those who would like to reduce the influence of science in policy and regulation.”

Then there is the highly polarising figure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, known for his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories. Not long after Trump’s executive order, RFK Jr suggested to American government scientists that they should refrain from publishing in three of the world’s leading medical journals, branding them “corrupt”.

Say it quietly, but some meta-researchers might be inclined to agree on some level, though for very different reasons and from a very different ideological position. Those meta-researchers are more likely to side with Ioannidis, who, when asked about the potential denigration of science for political ends, said: “Political noise is sad, and I feel strongly about protecting the independence of science from political interference, no matter where that comes from.”

One of the difficulties with the 2005 Ioannidis paper is that the distance from it to the cynical view that “all science is rubbish” seems, on first blush, to be small. Yet there is a gulf between them. Ioannidis pointed out that certain design features increase the risk of research being incorrect, but at no point has he suggested we abandon the scientific method. There is a need for corrective action and this will need to be done in the glare of some hostile politics. But as Bishop put it: “It’s not that science is in crisis so much as science is being not properly done, and that is creating a crisis.”

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

Recently I was watching Fox News, because I was incredibly high and I thought I was in the middle of a rewatch of Succession, and I saw this fascinating segment. Bible sales are up! Christian app downloads are up, the ones where you have to match three things to make them disappear but instead of …

Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (Harvard University Press) by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman

Who really runs Britain? It’s the question hiding in plain sight, always in the background when politics, culture or business are discussed. Who are the real decision-makers, the behind-the-scenes influencers, the ones pulling the strings, generation after generation?

The left likes to call them “the establishment”. Over the past few years, the right has grown fond of complaining about “metropolitan liberal elites”. Still, there is one thing they never quite do, and it is to define this shadowy, seemingly all-powerful group. Who counts and who doesn’t?

Academics Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman believe they have finally arrived at an answer. In Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, the two sociology professors sought to define the “elites”, tracking their evolution over the past 125 years and attempting to find out what and how they think.

In order to delineate those elites, the writers turned to Who’s Who – a collection of notable people once seen as so important that Winston Churchill personally intervened during the Second World War to ensure that its publication wasn’t impacted by paper shortages. The directory has included around 125,000 people since 1897, and the current edition has 33,000 entries. From these, Reeves and Friedman identified roughly 6,000 people who also belong to the top 1 per cent when it comes to national wealth distribution. These people, they argue, essentially rule Britain.

The next question is: who are they? Perhaps disappointingly, pretty much who you’d expect. In the chapter looking at ancestry, they conclude that this elite within the elite can trace its history back through the generations. People who featured in Who’s Who at the beginning of the 20th century were 120 times more likely to have descendants with an entry in the directory.

This inherited wealth and influence has everything to do with education and upbringing. Someone born in 1977 who attended a Clarendon school – including Eton and Charterhouse – is just under 50 times more likely to be in Who’s Who than someone educated elsewhere. Similarly, a British person born in the 60s or 70s who went to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge was over 250 times more likely to enter this prestigious elite than someone who didn’t go to university – and so on, and so forth.

This matters because, as Reeves and Friedman find when they turn to more qualitative research, these people think differently from the rest of the country. Though 40 per cent of the population at large believes that healthcare spending should be the government’s top priority, a paltry 20 per cent of the “wealth elite” think the same. Meanwhile, only 46 per cent of that group want taxes increased for the rich, compared to 80 per cent of everyone else.

More broadly, this elite within the elite tends to lean towards an ideology the authors describe as the “establishment right”, which is significant as these people have the means, both literally and figuratively, to influence what happens in politics. ‘Twas ever thus, you might say, and it’s tempting to disregard this book as an exercise in stating the obvious. Still, seeing the data drawn together does have a powerful impact, and the increased public knowledge of Britain’s dynastic power structures makes the slow pace of change feel especially frustrating.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the elite has stagnated over the past century. For a start, it is getting slowly but steadily less male and stale. There’s also been a significant change in how they see themselves. “I’ve never considered myself to be one of the elite,” said one of the interviewees, despite being clearly of their ranks, while another complained that they were not “in any way whatsoever … in a position of influence in British society.” Reeves and Friedman posit that increased wealth inequality in recent years has, consciously or unconsciously, resulted in these people downplaying their own power.

The authors believe that said inequality must be tackled by targeting, among other things, private schools, elite universities and tax systems. Otherwise we will “be consigned to the pernicious cosplay of an elite masquerading as common people”. Or, in other words: better read this book and know thine enemy, so we can finally bring them down.

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

Odd as it may sound – for the pandemic played strange tricks on our experience of time – it has been more than five years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Unsurprisingly, given legitimate fears of the virus and its potentially long-term consequences, the following years saw increased anxiety around disease and protecting our bodies, and a general increase in mental health disorders. WHO reported a whopping 25 per cent rise in rates of anxiety and depression worldwide in 2020 alone.

The pandemic years reminded us that anxiety can be adaptive – that is, it can lead to appropriate and positive responses to danger. Evolutionary theory suggests that, in the history of human development, anxiety was naturally selected as a useful trait for an individual to possess. A 2022 study by Mike J. Crawford and colleagues found that fear of Covid-19 resulted in people better adhering to public health measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus. But for some people, the authors noted, this anxiety became excessive and maladaptive, negatively affecting their mental health and impeding their social functioning. These effects, a 2024 study by Lara K. Autenrieth and colleagues suggests, may have had long-term consequences on people’s health anxiety post-pandemic.

But there is also a third category of people, who are usually less discussed: those who were already anxious about their health pre-pandemic. As two new books explore, for the so-called “hypochondriacs”, the worldwide proliferation of health anxiety during Covid-19 brought with it an unexpected comfort. “We were no longer the outliers,” journalist Caroline Crampton writes in A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria, for “that boundary between what is reasonable, justifiable fear and what is hypochondria had suddenly moved. Suddenly, we were normal.” After all, as writer Will Rees notes in Hypochondria, a world where everybody worries about illness and disinfects their hands and various surfaces multiple times a day very much looks like a world where everybody is a hypochondriac.

Both Crampton and Rees know hypochondria intimately; their books are grounded in memoiristic accounts of how the condition has shaped their lives. Going beyond the personal, both Hypochondria and A Body Made of Glass also suggest that hypochondria is, in Crampton’s words, the “marquee condition of our age”, something that the pandemic brought to everyone’s attention.

The history of hypochondria

When I type “hypochondria” in to my search engine, many of the results it regurgitates are about “health anxiety”. As Crampton and Rees make clear in their books, the history of hypochondria is meandering, while the words we use to talk about it are still slippery and in flux. Indeed, the term “hypochondria” is no longer widely accepted by the medical establishment, steeped as it is in centuries of stigma.

The memory of the word is kept alive in WHO’s 2019 International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) through its featuring of “hypochondriasis”, where the suffix “-asis” affords the old word the more official aura of a medical condition. But the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has entirely done away with it. In 2013, the APA removed “hypochondriasis” from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) – the handbook used worldwide for diagnosing and treating mental disorders – replacing the term with two separate diagnoses, “somatic symptom disorder” and “illness anxiety disorder”. Both denote excessive anxieties and worries around health and illness, but the former is characterised by the presence of physical symptoms, albeit medically unexplained, while the latter by the absence of these symptoms. However, many medical professionals are dissatisfied with what they see as two overlapping and confusing diagnoses, instead preferring “health anxiety”.

Rees and Crampton, though, stick with “hypochondria”. This is because they are interested in tracing the condition’s medical, intellectual and literary history from antiquity to the present day, which they do in erudite and compelling detail, shedding light on the hypochondriacal tendencies of many famous figures, from Molière to Marcel Proust and from Franz Kafka to Virginia Woolf. As Crampton avows, there is something comforting about a word that connects sufferers across centuries and even millennia. To her, the old term “hypochondria” “offers companionship while in the grip of a fear that can be completely isolating”.

While today we tend to think about hypochondria as a psychological condition, something that is entirely in one’s head, through Rees’s and Crampton’s books we discover how the word’s etymology very much has to do with the physical body – specifically, the abdominal region, which was known as hypochondrium, from “hypo-” (below) and “-chondrium” (the cartilage of the ribs). The history of how our understanding of hypochondria moved from this bodily location to the mind is one of the most fascinating aspects of both Hypochondria and A Body Made of Glass.

We learn that the first time the word “hypochondria” appeared – in the Hippocratic Corpus, attributed to the founder of western medicine, Hippocrates of Kos – it simply identified a disease of the abdomen, connected to an excess of black bile. Black bile was one of the four humors that constituted the body in the Hippocratic tradition, which dominated western medicine well into the 19th century. According to humoral theory, health consisted in the balance between these humors, which mapped onto different personalities. As the Ancient Greek words for “black bile” (melaina chole) suggest, this humor was connected with what became known as a melancholic temperament.

The association between hypochondria and melancholia proved enduring, as did the one between hypochondria and gastrointestinal complaints. As we read in Rees’s book, many hypochondriacs throughout the centuries, such as Charles Darwin, kept detailed records of their melancholia flatuosa, what we would now call flatulence. And, Crampton notes, digestion and stomach issues – both in terms of symptoms and as sites of fears – recur in those who suffer from health anxiety even today, reminding us of hypochondria’s ancient, and largely forgotten, abdominal roots.

As humoral theory was slowly dismantled and new theories of the human body began to emerge in its wake, so our understanding of hypochondria evolved. By the Victorian age, the condition was firmly associated with the mind. Hypochondria became “the intellectual’s condition”, as Rees puts it, the product of overactive brains that paid too much attention to everything, including their bodies. And, as hypochondria morphed into a condition of the mind, the figure of the hypochondriac came to be intertwined with class and gender hierarchies. Nervous ailments like hypochondria and melancholia were seen as almost aspirational maladies for the lower classes, fashionable diseases that were symbols of status and refinement.

Hypochondria was also framed in the Victorian age as a male condition – the counterpart of hysteria, which was regarded as a female malady given the belief that it was caused by a wandering womb (just as with hypochondria and melancholia, the etymology of the word “hysteria” – from hystera, uterus – is revealing). This distinction between hypochondria and hysteria, Rees argues, was a product of gendered stereotypes that saw the mind as male and superior and the body as female and inferior.

While the association of hypochondria with a certain gender or class may seem like a quirky historical fact, it remains a live issue today. As Crampton illustrates in detail, the health concerns of women, non-white people, and other marginalised communities are more likely to be dismissed by the medical establishment, and the diagnosis of health anxiety often works to entrench this dismissal further. This is confirmed by Rees, who reports that half of the people who are eventually diagnosed with autoimmune disorders, which mainly affect women and are typically under-researched, are initially labelled as hypochondriacs (or, these days, sufferers of “somatic symptom disorder” or “illness anxiety disorder”). This makes research into these disorders even less likely to be funded, creating a vicious circle.

How to deal with doubt

But hypochondria doesn’t just invite us to consider issues of prejudice and privilege that are still intrinsic to medicine today. Instead, the condition foregrounds a truly unsettling idea: while “the illusion of certainty is vital to the smooth operation of modern medicine”, Crampton writes, “there is no such thing as certainty when it comes to our health, nor will there ever be.” Hypochondria, after all, evolves as medicine evolves, suggesting that no medical knowledge of the body is ever final. Indeed, as Rees maintains, hypochondria “is a diagnosis that puts into question how certain we can ever be about any diagnosis – including, needless to say, a diagnosis of hypochondria”.

This is not to say that the authors of Hypochondria and A Body Made of Glass propound anything even remotely close to medical scepticism. Far from it: for both Crampton and Rees, medicine is always about the best available option at the time. But through complementary explorations of hypochondria’s history, both authors come to the conclusion that what defines the condition is the experience of doubt.

Hypochondria forces us to face a question we work very hard to ignore: to what extent can we ever be fully sure of our health? The answer is, of course, not much; hence the hypochondriac’s fundamental doubt, as well as their repeated, but ultimately always failing, attempts at banishing this doubt. The condition throws medical knowledge and science into question, along with the neat stories we try to construct about our lives, our health, and illness. And no matter the time period, there is money to be made off the desire for certainty and reassurance. In the past, it was the so-called quacks who profited from our health anxieties. Their name, we read in Crampton’s book, signals how, before the advent of the printing press, quacks needed to be noisy in order to sell their remedies. Today, it’s the turn of the wellness industry, with its influencers, supplements and devices. Rees convincingly writes about the rise of self-tracking wearables as gadgets that sell us the illusory fantasy of being able to fill in, once and for all, gaps in our self-knowledge, illuminating every aspect of our body and making it fully transparent and knowable to us.

This is the fantasy of a body made of glass, which gives Crampton’s book its title and which captures at once the hypochondriac’s wildest hopes (that is, complete bodily knowledge) and their deep-seated fears (the body’s intrinsic and inevitable vulnerability). The delusion of a body made of glass was widespread in the early modern age: some people felt like their entire body was made of glass; for others, it was just some of their limbs. What was at stake in all cases was the frightening prospect of shattering, which the people who suffered from the glass delusion tried to avert in ingenious ways, such as the Parisian glassmaker who would go everywhere with a cushion on his buttocks to prevent himself from breaking upon seating. As Crampton explains, early modern people were latching onto the symbolic properties of glass to express fears around the vulnerability of human bodies. But a glass body is also transparent and, therefore, fully knowable. That is why, Rees notes, in Cervantes’s 1613 novella The Glass Graduate, the protagonist’s glass delusion has its benefits, since the sufferer becomes incredibly knowledgeable and wise.

Cyberchondria and the dream of perfect knowledge

Today, we’re as close as we’ve ever been to realising the fantasy of a thoroughly transparent body, thanks to imaging techniques, scans, tests, as well as medical knowledge widely available at our fingertips. Yet, just like anything else that has been repressed, hypochondria is never too far away. The more we know about our bodies, the more anxious we appear to be. This apparent contradiction is not exactly unique to our time. Rees notes that, as early as the 19th century, physicians were worried that increased medical literacy amongst the masses would create a rise in hypochondria. However, there is no question that the internet – in Crampton’s words, “the most expansive and spacious playground that hypochondria has ever had” – is making matters worse.

One of the latest permutations of the old condition is what is now being called “cyberchondria”, which occurs in part as a result of searching for information online. It’s compounded by how algorithms work. The more we search for rare diagnoses or terminal conditions, the more we are likely to see these results fed back to us in future. Due to the nature of the internet, therefore, hypochondriacal fears risk turning into self-confirming beliefs.

Crampton reports of a strange and fascinating phenomenon that occurred as TikTok was expanding in popularity at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Young people began to develop tics en masse, and exposure to social media videos about Tourette’s syndrome, a condition characterised by motor and vocal tics, seems to have played a crucial role in producing this “pandemic within a pandemic”. Responding to concerns around health anxiety, WHO repeatedly emphasised the importance of “flattening the infodemic curve”, advising us to seek information about the virus from trusted sources only, and limit our consumption of news to once or twice a day. The rising rates of health anxiety at the time were undoubtedly exacerbated by the constant barrage of frightening headlines and online rabbit holes that were tempting to many of us, especially those with time to kill.

Hypochondria is the “dream of perfect knowledge”, Rees argues. But the condition also warns us of the drawbacks of this dream, for our knowledge of our bodies will never be complete, and pursuing it can keep us trapped in our phobias. I am reminded here of the tech entrepreneur and biohacker Bryan Johnson, whose quest to slow down his ageing has led him to ingest more than 100 pills a day, constantly monitor his body, and live what the vast majority of us would see as a very limiting life: dinner by 11am, bedtime by 8:30pm, no sunny vacations, always sleeping alone.

Rees’s book thus closes on something of which we would do well to remind ourselves in our health-anxious times: health isn’t found by excavating and tracking our every waking and sleeping moment. Instead, he writes, health is “encountered in those fleeting moments when ordinariness is experienced as a sort of miracle, when the background conditions that support life become manifest as a source of pleasure”. This is the lesson hypochondria has taught Rees. Whether or not you read his and Crampton’s excellent books, it’s an important takeaway for us all.

“A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria” by Caroline Crampton is published by Granta.

“Hypochondria” by Will Rees is published by Coach House.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: A little less than two months ago, the Trump administration’s Administration for Children and Families sent a letter to the health departments of 46 states and territories ordering them to “remove all references to …

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.

I am a big fan of magic history and a few years ago I started to investigate the life and work of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello.

Harry enjoyed an amazing career during the early nineteen hundreds. He staged pioneering seaside shows in Edinburgh’s Portobello and even built a theatre on the promenade (the building survives and now houses a great amusement arcade). Harry then toured Britain with an act called The Silver Hat, which involved him producing a seemingly endless stream of objects from an empty top hat.

The act relied on a novel principle that has since been used by lots of famous magicians. I recently arranged for one of Harry’s old Silver Hat posters to be restored and it looks stunning.

The Porty Light Box is a wonderful art space based in Portobello. Housed in a classic British telephone box, it hosts exhibitions and even lights up at night to illuminate the images. Last week I gave a talk on Harry at Portobello Library and The Porty Light Box staged a special exhibition based around the Silver Hat poster.

Here are some images of the poster the Porty Light Box. Enjoy! The project was a fun way of getting magic history out there and hopefully it will encourage others to create similar events in their own local communities.

My thanks to Peter Lane for the lovely Marvello image and poster, Stephen Wheatley from Porty Light Box for designing and creating the installation, Portobello Library for inviting me to speak and Mark Noble for being a great custodian of Marvello’s old theatre and hotel (he has done wonderful work restoring an historic part of The Tower).

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

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]