I think I’m trapped at home today — I tried walking to work, and didn’t get beyond my driveway, because we had a thaw and a refreeze and it’s slick as snot out there. Then we’re supposed to get more snow this morning, with temperatures plummeting down to -15°C with 50mph wind gusts, so I’m cowering at home today. The spiders will go hungry for a day (they are opportunistic feeders, they can handle it).

If you’re similarly stuck at home, here’s an hour long video that I thought was very good. It rips into a couple of self-styled “science” based influencers who are anything but.

The most shocking bit was seeing Joe Rogan getting furious at any push-back on his anti-vax views, and basically shutting down the conversation by claiming that the polio epidemic was co-incident with they years of heaviest DDT use. He also made the standard skeptical claim that vaccines were a late response to an already fading plague, which is sort of true. There are multiple approaches to a serious disease: behavioral shifts, like self-quarantine, and improved hygiene can reduce the incidence and severity of infections, but it takes efficacious medical responses to deliver the coup de grace. And Joe Rogan doesn’t understand science at all if he falls for the correlation equals causation canard. DDT does not cause polio.

The video also jumps on Bill Maher. He’s got this canned response to any claims, saying that we don’t know 100% of everything, more like 20% or 10%, so his weird fads might be true. It’s nonsense. Of course there is much left to learn, but we can say with 100% confidence that you shouldn’t eat cyanide, or that the earth is spherical, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, because smart, skeptical people have studied that stuff and have objective data to back up their arguments. We don’t even quantify knowledge as a percentage fraction of everything, so that’s a bogus metric anyway. I’m willing to go along with a claim that we only know 0.00001% of everything, but that the bits we know, we know pretty damn well, so please, Bill Maher, don’t jump off the roof of a New York skyscraper to test your ‘theory’ of gravity.

Another good topic was about what having a PhD means. It’s not a free pass to make everything you say valuable, important, and true. It just says you passed an apprenticeship. You presumably got some training in critical thinking which the Joe Rogans of the world lack, but you have to demonstrate your skills throughout your life. There are also some really bad theses out there — there is some pressure to get students out the door so you can get a new crop started, and some bad PIs who will let garbage pass as long as they get a publication out of it.

(By the way, I think my PhD thesis holds up. Not only did multiple researchers build on it afterwards, but it wasn’t even just mine — it was the product of a collaboration with several absolutely brilliant mentors and colleagues, which is how every thesis ought to be.)

I’ve been watching the trainwreck named Avi Loeb for a while now, and it’s become obvious that he’s shredding his own reputation, that of Harvard astronomy, and of good science in general. He really ought to step down and retire to pursue his weird hobby — maybe he could get a special on Netflix? Anyway, Rebecca Watson summarized his current record for triumphant farts, and that’s a good thing, because I’m too tired of him to do it myself.

Hey, while I was thinking of YouTube, I figured maybe I’d do a livestream on Saturday afternoon. Would anyone be interested?

When I become an evil overlord, that will be my catchphrase: “The spiders will feast tonight!”

I got to the bait shop this morning shortly after they got a bulk delivery, and just before they parceled them out into smaller batches, so I was able to buy a whole tub of 20 dozen (240) waxworms for $15.99. That’ll take care of feeding supplies for the next few weeks, right through Christmas, so mission accomplished.

Look at all that squirmy cold protein in thin casings! I was tempted to pop a few in my mouth, but that would be taking food from my babies, so I didn’t.

Naomi Alderman is a novelist, games writer, broadcaster and producer. Her debut novel “Disobedience”, which follows a rabbi’s bisexual daughter as she returns to her Orthodox Jewish community having lost her faith, has been translated into 10 languages, while her science-fiction novel “The Power” won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a television series. She is also a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her latest book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis), published by Penguin, is based on her Radio 4 essay series, in which she discusses how new technologies open up new ways of being. We sat down with her to discuss the book, as well as tips and tricks to help navigate our current tumultuous era.

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today draws on millennia of history to give us lessons for our own era. You propose that we’re living in the third information crisis. If the first and second crisis start with the invention of writing and then the printing press, does the third begin with the internet?

It’s the invention of the world wide web. So the internet is when all the computers are connected, and the world wide web is the [information system] where humans are talking to each other, reading each other’s words and getting annoyed by each other, which is one of the things that makes it an information crisis.

It started in the late 90s, but it’s a full-blown crisis now. But when you say “world wide web” enough, it does start to sound really silly, so we can just go back to saying “the internet”.

These crises are marked by a sudden leap in information access, which leads to new forms of conflict. Are these mainly conflicts of interpretation?

It’s so many different kinds of conflicts. In the book I talk about the ancient Sumerians, who had a legend around how writing was invented – because they were the first people to write in script. Their legend was that their king wanted to have an argument with another king, but the messengers kept forgetting the entire message that he wanted to send. So he invented writing in order to be able to accurately insult the lord of Aratta. And now we can all insult anybody we want at the drop of a hat.

It would be ridiculous to claim that conflict is caused by digital communications. You have only to watch birds in your garden fighting over a bird feeder to know that you can have conflict without human language. And you can have conflict without writing. But communications technology – writing and printing and now the web – introduces the possibility of conflict with somebody that you have never actually met. Maybe you have not even met anybody who has met them. You can just send them your anger – via a clay tablet or a tweet – and they can receive your anger.

So it introduces a really wide range of different kinds of possible conflict. A war of interpretation can only happen once there is writing. Anyone who spends time on the internet has had the experience of [being misinterpreted]. Take [the classic Twitter meme about] waffles, where Person A says, “Yes, I love pancakes”, and Person B jumps to the conclusion, “Oh, so you hate waffles.” We don’t have the social norms yet around how to make sure that we’re expressing what we want to be expressing.

You do write about actual stake burnings, during what you identify as the second information crisis and the religious wars that followed. But you’re also using burning at the stake to make a broader point, around dehumanisation.

It’s to do with treating another human being not as a person but as a symbol. It’s anything that would make you feel ashamed afterwards, where you subsequently go, “I didn’t live up to my values there.” It’s incredibly easy to throw a stone in a crowd full of people throwing stones, and yet that’s also a reason not to do it. There are several stories now, of people who’ve been driven to suicide by [online] public shaming. Would you feel brilliant to have taken part in that?

Controversially, I even believe we should probably think about politicians and the royal family as humans, and they are obviously people who are very much turned into symbols by the world.

This relates to your point about people seeking purity. We see this clearly in right-wing politics, around the call to return to “traditional” values, or to religious doctrine. But you think this is also a left-wing phenomenon, and you give the example of efforts to decolonise the curriculum.

I stole this from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. On their podcast The Rest Is History, they talk about how everyone involved in the education system now wants to go back to the “pure” root of education, to remove some kind of “taint” that they perceive. A right-winger might say, “We’ve got to go back to teaching Shakespeare and the Bible”, which is the root of the British culture and of the English language. And then a left-wing person might say, we need to get rid of the “taint” of colonisation. There’s a sense of wanting to remove, instead of contextualising.

You may not know this, but on the church in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door, there is a carving in stone of rabbis suckling at the teats of a pig. So that’s some pretty extreme anti-Semitism, and there are calls now to remove that. And I would strongly argue, don’t remove it. Contextualise it. Put a statue next to it of a famous Jewish citizen of Wittenberg, or a plaque explaining why this is hateful.

Would you take the same approach for statues in the UK, around that debate?

I would accept moving a statue, maybe putting it into a museum with this context around it. But we have not reached the end of history. We need to be able to tolerate the presence of things that do not perfectly accord with our values. If we’re not able to do that, we will eventually end up doing some atrocities.

How does that perspective relate to your novel The Power, in which women develop the ability to electrocute men? Some of these women believe they have the right to exercise their new superpower because of their history of oppression.

The Power was an exploration for me of what would happen [if women suddenly became physically superior to men]. What do I think would be right? Do I think that women are somehow so much better [than men], that if every woman were able to electrocute people at will, we would usher in a world of peace and harmony? I took myself all the way through it, and at the end I was like, “Oh, you’ve got to have rules about how we behave that apply to everyone, no matter how just your causes.”

Look, I am Jewish. I support the right of the State of Israel to exist. I do not agree with many of the things that the government of Israel does. And I do not think that there is any level of having suffered that makes it impossible for a group to contain sadists and psychopaths. There can be no such thing as giving an entire group a free pass because of what they personally have suffered. I think we have to have the same rules applying for everybody. I don’t think the oppression of Jews justifies Jewish violence against innocent children. I don’t think the oppression of Palestinians justifies Hamas violence against innocent children.

Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today is a testament to the power of writing. What do you make of the decline in literacy and book reading, in favour of video and aural formats? Are we returning to a new kind of oral culture?

There’s a book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which makes this argument. It’s a very good survey of the field, but I would strongly argue that we are not going back to an oral culture. Listening to a podcast or YouTube video has some things in common with oral culture. But an oral culture world is a warm, flexible, human-scale world in which the only people you can talk to are the people that you are physically present with. And we are in such a different world to that. We’re not going back. We’re going forward into something.

On literacy, we can think about exercise. A hundred years ago, no one had to ask themselves, “Am I getting enough physical exercise?” Because most people’s daily lives were physically tough, they were getting plenty. And now we do have to think about it. So I suspect that [it will be the same now with] reading long pieces, that are more than 30,000 words long, say, keeping track of an argument, holding characters in your head. We never used to have to think about how much of that we were doing, because that was the way we got information. I think those of us who deliberately spend hours of our day reading are going to be in a similar position to people who deliberately spend hours of their day lifting heavy weights, which is to say we’re just going to be able to do more with our brains.

Also, it doesn’t harm me if I live in a world where a lot of people don’t get enough exercise, but it really does harm me if I live in a democracy where people are neglecting their brains and therefore voting for the most stupid, objectionable things.

It’s hard though isn’t it, to put down our smartphones. And you have a dumbphone, I think?

I have a smartphone which has all the apps on it, and I have a smartphone which only has a few things. It doesn’t have email, but it does have the maps and The New Yorker. And so I decide which one to take with me. I’m interested in a little device called a brick [an app and bluetooth device designed to set boundaries on phone use], which I can touch to the side of my phone, which will stop a lot of the apps from working.

You’ve said that it was through the process of writing your debut novel “Disobedience” that you “wrote yourself out” of believing in religion. Does writing do something unique, in encouraging us to think and change our minds?

I did. I wrote my way out of Orthodox Judaism. But I think the smartphone is more addictive than Orthodox Judaism. Long-lasting religions, of which there are a few in the world, have lasted because they have given some benefits to the people who hold to them. They may also be producing terrible problems – most of them are in some ways – but also most of them are time-tested through hundreds of generations of people.

I think most of us would not want to pass smartphones on to our children in the way that they currently exist. It’s a brand-new, weird, human mind-hacking cult. Much worse than religion.

In comparing our own era to the religious wars of the Reformation, we can see that there’s a lot of tribalism and dogmatism that’s happening today in a non-faith context.

I mean, this is the thing. In the late 1800s, when Darwin was publishing on evolution, it’s like a meteor hit religion. But it’s not that religion vanished, it just splattered on everything else. If you are a humanist, you have, I hope, the values of the Enlightenment, of Erasmus, of Petrus Ramos [the French humanist, logician and educational reformer], who’s a hero of mine. You value education and knowledge and truth and treating humans as equal. And today there are so many systems working against that. It’s not as simple as “Oh, the enemy is organised religion.” Surely, it’s also [the American political conspiracy theory] QAnon. It’s anti-vaxxers. Or at least not the people, but the systems that have caused people to believe in this really pernicious, dangerous nonsense. Humans are a storytelling species. We understand who we are through stories. And it’s very, very easy to hijack that system.

You believe that a new framework will emerge to help us navigate this third information crisis. In the Enlightenment, that framework was the scientific method. Can I challenge you by asking, do we need a brand new framework? Could it just be the scientific method again, but perhaps with new and different ways to tell stories that are connected to that?

I love this question. And I do think it’s very helpful that we’ve had an Enlightenment already. The scientific method, thus far, has not been improved upon in terms of ways to find out what’s going on in the physical world. So it’s still important. [What is new is that] today, we can see the world through so many different people’s eyes. We are challenging ourselves to live in a way that isn’t just tolerant of difference, but is able to look out via someone else’s eyes who is different. I mean, you can literally watch images from cameras that people are holding up as they’re going around in so many different places in the world.

If that doesn’t end up changing what we think about humanity, I would be quite surprised. For example, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to justify why some countries are wealthy and powerful and some countries are poor and have no power. We’re very close to achieving simultaneous translation. If I’m not looking out on a favela or a slum, it’s easy to not think about it, but once you start listening to people, watching other people’s lives?

Each information crisis, you say, eventually leads to us understanding one another more clearly. But is it also about expanding the number of people we’re able to understand or empathise with? How far can that reasonably extend?

We’ve been exploring the limits to that for a really long time. You would have thought that the limit for a species that did hunting and gathering was about 300 people, maybe up to 1,000 people, like the size of a secondary school. But humanity has gone much further than that. I find us very touching in some ways, human beings. Evolution tried out something with us. It was like, “What happens if I give a species an absolutely enormous brain – so big that the babies have to be born much, much too early, so they have to be raised for a minimum of 12 years?” And we’ve been quite a successful species, actually. We’re a bit concerned about what we’ve managed to do to the planet, but we’re also the first species that has ever managed to be concerned about what is done to the planet.

Were you conscious that your book, by using the technology of writing, could help us avert the worst aspects of this current information crisis? That’s quite meta.

I genuinely think that writing Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today might be the most useful thing I do with my life. It really does take the temperature down when you’re aware of [living through a historical crisis]. You might think: actually, I don’t need to break up with all of my friends and family [because of differences of opinion]. You might recognise the value of doing the taxing but not complicated work of being a sane adult on the internet. I am sending this message all the time on BlueSky: “You’re sounding quite aggressive. Is that what you intended?” I’m trying to keep remembering that everyone else is a person, not a symbol, and I’m going to sometimes mess it up, and I’m going to forgive myself and just carry on.

I actually find that quite inspiring. We’ve all got a little job. We’re living through this really tumultuous epoch, and each one of us can decide whether we are going to be fighting for the civil public space, and how long our “wars of reformation” are going to go on for. We’re not going to be able to stop them all, but if we can remove ourselves from the crowd around the stake burning, that is a good start. Then we can hasten the moment where we get to the good parts.

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

You can use AI to spy out AI!

GPTZero, the startup behind an artificial intelligence (AI) detector that checks for large language model (LLM)-generated content, has found that 50 peer-reviewed submissions to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) contain at least one obvious hallucinated citation—meaning a citation that was dreamed up by AI. ICLR is the leading academic conference that focuses on the deep-learning branch of AI.

The three authors behind the investigation, all based in Toronto, used their Hallucination Check tool on 300 papers submitted to the conference. According to the report, they found that 50 submissions included at least one “obvious” hallucination. Each submission had been reviewed by three to five peer experts, “most of whom missed the fake citations.” Some of these citations were written by non-existent authors, incorrectly attributed to journals, or had no equivalent match at all.

The report notes that without intervention, the papers were rated highly enough that they “would almost certainly have been published.”

It’s worse than it may sound at first. One sixth of the papers in this sample had citations invented by an AI…but the citations are the foundation of the work described in those papers. The authors of those papers apparently didn’t do the background reading for their research, and just slapped on a list of invented work to make it look like they were serious scholars. They clearly aren’t.

The good news is that GPTZero got a legitimate citation out of it!

I keep seeing lies about biology like this on social media. This is all wrong.

I have embryology textbooks all over the place, and this is what they have to say.

Sperm can survive in a man’s testicles for a few months. That’s a pleasant environment for a sperm cell, but even there they’re undergoing a slow process of maturation, and are eventually going to be broken down and resorbed. That’s the maximum longevity for these cells.

A woman’s reproductive tract is warm and moist and allows for limited survival, but is adapted to protect her from infections by maintaining a mildly acidic environment. It’s a somewhat hostile place that has to tolerate foreign cells, but not for long — sperm will last for 3-5 days, not years.

You may have heard of a phenomenon called microchimerism, in which fetal cells, shed during pregnancy, persist for years. These are somatic cells, not sperm cells. Sperm cells are highly specialized and have minimized their cytoplasm and cannot survive for that long.

The textbooks usually mention that sperm can survive for about an hour outside of a human body. That’s optimistic (or pessimistic, if you want to avoid pregnancy). Evaporation or absorption of the surrounding fluid is going to kill the little fuckers pretty fast.

It’s clear how these bad ideas get around — the hint is in the text. The “ancients” or “religion” are terrible sources of information, since none of them had anything but the vaguest notion of how reproduction or inheritance work, and didn’t even know about the existence of cells until, at best, three hundred years ago. Another obvious source is a cultural bias favoring virginity (a bogus concept already), and this is an attempt to rationalize that belief with made-up “facts”.

Condemn, c. 1400: Sentence to a punishment, express complete disapproval of

In the world of politics, “condemn” is a very popular word. We might draw several different conclusions from this. Perhaps politicians are principled people who denounce inappropriate behaviour, breaches of the law and evil transgressions. Or cynics, only too willing to condemn others for sins that they themselves commit. Or some might say that the act of condemning serves as a useful distraction.

The word comes from Old French condemner (or condamner), which came from the Latin condemnare. The prefix “con” can be regarded as an intensifier to the word demnare/damnare (to damn), and “condemn” was used in English as early as the mid-14th century in its sense of being found guilty of a crime. By 1400 though, the word was used in the broader sense, as with lines like this: “The clergy, which some of the common people … judge and condemn to be evil” (c. 1449).

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “condemn” is one of the 5,000 most common words in modern written English. It appears in the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, as with the scene in Twelfth Night in which Sir Toby Belch tricks Malvolio into thinking that the lady of the house is in love with him. The servant Fabian says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

One of its most famous usages is from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while the American writer and teacher Dale Carnegie is credited with the acerbic line: “Any fool can criticize, complain and condemn – and most fools do.”

Though Carnegie’s saying is popular, it hasn’t stemmed the flow of condemnations coming from our politicians – an outpouring that is in no way matched by the equivalent level of action. It could almost be a principle: “condemn and do nothing.”

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! Back in April of this year, I talked a bit about a truly ridiculous case that was being heard by the Supreme Court: in Mahmoud v. Taylor, religious fundamentalists objected to the mere existence of …

Admit it. You’re glued to your smartphone, outsourcing more of your brainpower to the machine. Literacy is plummeting, and universities are under attack. Are we all getting dumber? Or is society transforming, discovering new ways to be smart?

We asked five experts for their thoughts on the future of human intelligence.

Despite decades of research since the inception of the discipline known as artificial intelligence, it was November 2022 that marked the point at which people the world over began to pay attention. That moment – the push of a button that sent ChatGPT live and available for public use – has led to profound changes in how we access and process information. We are now living in the age of AI.

The headlines promise transformative powers: personalised education, tailored healthcare, seamless services, economic growth. But despite breathless proclamations from Silicon Valley that more funding will ensure the next big breakthrough, the tech is not delivering. There are marginal gains but no actual return on investments, and the large language models that drive these tools seem to be stalling. That doesn’t stop the hype, and it doesn’t stop an increasing social reliance on software that “hallucinates” – the term used when a large language model confidently asserts something that is untrue.

Generative AI hallucinations are a feature, not a bug. Large language models fabricate sources that don’t exist, provide information that is wrong, and return searches that veer wildly off course from what was requested. As users, we could factor this in, if we hadn’t been steered towards the idea of the computer as factual, correct and fair. Automation bias – our tendency to favour suggestions from machines and believe them to be objective – is rife.

AI is inherently biased. That’s unavoidable. The models that generate text and images for us are trained on human input: billions and billions of pages from sources that have been written by humans. But these systems aren’t built on the values that we possess. They don’t know what it is to be human. They have no cultural or social understanding beyond the patterns of data they can discern. In fact, despite their intended global use, AI tools predominantly generate outputs that are reflective of a very narrow social segment: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (or WEIRD, as it’s termed in social science research). That’s not a huge surprise when the technology is predominantly coming out of the US West Coast.

This gap – this mismatch between a system’s output and its users’ views – is known as the alignment problem. The big question is how to make AI systems behave in line with human values. Is it even possible to make a machine act in accordance with human norms? For starters, who defines what those norms are? Ethics aren’t universal: they are culturally and socially defined. Can we really come up with AI that represents us all?

In July 2025, the global humanist community passed The Luxembourg Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values at the general assembly of Humanists International. Such declarations are binding statements of organisational policy with a unanimous humanist voice on the world stage. This one was drafted by Humanists UK, and is built on 10 shared ethical principles for the development, deployment and regulation of AI systems. The core message of this humanist stance is that AI should serve humanity broadly rather than concentrate power among a few, and that decisions affecting people’s lives should remain under human control.

The principles of the declaration include democratic accountability and transparency in AI systems, protection from algorithmic harm and discrimination, fair compensation for creators whose work is used to train AI, and robust safeguards against misinformation. All of this emphasises that AI development must prioritise dignity, environmental responsibility and long-term human flourishing over pure technological advancement.

These are unsettled times. Right now, neither the UK nor the US have any specific regulation around AI in place. A quick glance at Silicon Valley shows they’re unlikely to face any type of governance any time soon, unless forced to by lawsuits or consumer power. It’s hard to escape the creep of AI – it’s being integrated into all the software we use, whether we want it or not – so now is the time to take a stand and use our voices to say that human lives come first.

I cannot emphasise enough the fact that liberal arts education is for everybody, not just for those who choose a humanities subject as their major. All students will be citizens, and all need to be equipped to participate in public debates with a concern for truth, training in critical argument, an understanding of history and a developed ability to imagine another person’s way of life. All students are also human beings who have an interest in understanding the meaning of their lives; literature, history, philosophy and the arts are central to that goal. Finally, business leaders seek employees who can think critically and use their imaginations; the rest can be done, and is increasingly done, by robots and AI chatbots.

Incorporating the liberal arts into systems that have long been established on a single-subject model is not easy. Liberal arts teaching, to be done well, must be done in small classes – or, at the very least, in classes with small discussion sections and a common lecture. By “small” I mean no more than 20 students. Those who favour the humanities must study how good teaching is done and how good teachers are trained, before they craft proposals, and they must be prepared to argue for spending the money it will take to do things well.

Success in this enterprise will be difficult, so those who care about it need to arm themselves for the battle. In the United States, both public and private institutions face increased political pressures. Tenured faculty still seem safe from actual firing, except where entire departments and programs are eliminated (as happened at West Virginia University), although they can be pressured into leaving if the entire institution changes its mission.

Such was the case with New College, a highly ranked liberal arts college in the Florida state system. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, decided to alter its mission very substantially through appointing prominent political allies to the Board of Trustees, who recruited student athletes and, while claiming to be adhering to a “classical” model of the liberal arts, essentially abandoned the freedom of research and teaching that is the core mission of the liberal arts. More than a third of the faculty left. That is an extreme case, but political pressures hostile to academic values are present across the country.

In today’s world we see three ominous developments that threaten freedom of thought and democratic self-government. First is the increasing polarisation of political factions and debate. People appear to be stuck in fixed ideological postures, unwilling and even unable to listen to one another and to have a constructive, cooperative dialogue. Closely linked to these changes is the slide toward authoritarianism.

A third ominous development is a multifaceted assault on truth, as people, succumbing to the lure of social media and disinformation of many kinds, attach themselves to outlandish conspiracy theories and fail to test claims for their evidentiary basis or arguments for logical validity and definitional clarity.

These pernicious tendencies seep into liberal arts education itself, of course. I find some of the rhetoric of current campus protests, on the part of both students and faculty, lacking in critical rigour and ignorant of history (though probably no more so than rhetoric during the Vietnam War, when I was a student).

I find it more difficult than it used to be to attract a politically diverse group of students to my classes, since I teach no required courses. My elective courses used to attract a highly diverse group of students, including both libertarians and religious conservatives, who now more often make their selections along ideological lines.

This is a great loss, because well practised – and the standards of humanities teaching I observe are typically high – a liberal arts education is a powerful antidote to all three bad tendencies, teaching people how to conduct a respectful dialogue with one another in a truly Socratic spirit and freeing them to take charge of their own minds, while stimulating them to understand what others think and feel.

In our frightening and frightened time we need liberal arts education more than ever, and if we don’t insist on its value we will all too easily lose it.

This is an edited extract from the new preface to Martha Nussbaum's book "Not for Profit: Why Democracies Need the Humanities", reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press

What’s one plus one? Before you answer too quickly (you’ll have thought of the answer automatically, no doubt) ask yourself what happens when you add one pile of sand to another. How many piles of sand do you have now? This is the kind of example the psychologist Ellen Langer likes to use to illustrate the value of conditional thinking, even when the answer appears obvious.

The psychological benefits of certainty are fairly easy to see. It creates a sense of safety, clarity, direction and relief even when a particular discovery is painful – like learning of a disappointing exam result, or the outcome of a job interview after waiting anxiously. Whether overcoming “analysis paralysis” to take a decision or the satisfaction that comes from a pet theory confirmed, we often demonstrate what the psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls a craving for “cognitive closure”. He says we seize on clear, simple answers and “freeze” them, by locking them in and ignoring contradictory evidence.

In this way, certainty limits our ability to notice things and thereby to learn. Langer says that if you are certain of the next thing I’m going to say you’ll stop listening. And it’s bigger than that now. We are going through tumultuous times and the need to be open-minded and provisional in our thinking is more and more vital if we are to adapt well. False certainty is often the bread and butter of autocrats and dictators.

Alison Gopnik, the philosopher and developmental psychologist, offers a helpful distinction, between spotlight and lantern-like consciousness. The former, which is typical of adults, is goal-oriented, focused noticing, motivated by a preoccupation, and it tends to ignore what falls outside of that area of attention. The latter is typical of young children who are, in her words, “explorers” rather than “exploiters”, and are truly open-minded. They are diffusely aware, and have more peripheral vision than adults.

What can we do to be more lantern and less spotlight in our noticings? One interesting answer comes from recent research into magic mushrooms, DMT and other psychedelic substances, which shows how the ego is dialled down from the spotlight mode into the more lantern-like mode. Simon Carhart-Harris, who has developed the REBUS model (relaxed beliefs under psychedelics), shows how these drugs loosen the grip of our rigid, higher-level prior assumptions. In this way, the recipients (often battling depression and other mental illness) achieve, as Gopnik sees it, a more child-like state, less stuck in the habitual ruts and patterns that adults can fall into. Meditation is often suggested as a way to achieve similar effects.

But before we settle into the thought that we simply need to be more lantern-like and less spotlight in our noticings, I need to complicate the picture a bit further. It would be weirdly certain to say, “We just need to be less certain”. Economists obsess about trade-offs and tensions and I think it is instructive to think about why. The spotlight and the lantern are in tension with each other, and to elevate the one inevitably trades off against the virtues of the other. Yes, spotlight noticing makes us prey to “inattentional blindness”, but we can’t just swing to the other pole and cling to that. While child-like wonder is a capacity worth cultivating, young children aren’t able to get anything done, and need a lot of looking after! Too much lantern invites opting out of having even a provisional opinion and can lead to passivity.

In my day job as a manager in a publishing company, I have recently hit on a bit of advice that I find helps in both directions, whether dialling down from the spotlight or dialling up from the lantern – and it takes us back in a way to Ellen Langer’s conditional thinking. The advice is, when invited to offer an opinion, to insert the word “currently” into the phrase “I think”. While we are in spotlight mode and need to be more provisional, to say “I currently think” invites possible revision in light of new evidence and argument that might emerge. But sometimes, people can be in a lantern-like state to such an extent they can’t venture an opinion at all. In this case the very same phrase “I currently think” can help move from an unclear ambiguous state to something more concrete, even if provisional.

It’s not even about a Goldilocks happy medium between the two. Rather than be too certain of the limits of certainty I’d advocate a capacity to handle trade-offs and tensions. I’d rather think of us needing a dimmer switch whereby we can move from one mode to another as needed. Yes, it may be true that adults use the spotlight too often, but that doesn’t mean we can live well without it. After all, we mustn’t be so open-minded that our brains fall out.

Organisations that plan to bring about radical change through AI must confront the challenge embedded in the metaphorical question, “How do you change the wheel on a moving car?” Few will be able simply to press pause on their daily operations while they conceive and execute root-and-branch upheaval.

But what they can do, to force the metaphor, is build and run new vehicles that embody and introduce innovative and eliminative technology – that is, technology that transforms organisations and even does away with much of their historical work. They can then run the old and the new in parallel, and, over time, transfer work from the outmoded to the newly established set-up.

Some leading professional firms – lawyers, accountants and consultants, for example – are now recognising what this will mean for them in the long run. To survive, the more enlightened firms have grasped the notion that they themselves will have to build the systems, mainly AI systems, that will replace their old ways of working. Dispute resolution, audit and tax planning, for example, will not be delivered indefinitely by flesh-and-blood experts. Massively capable systems will displace humans here and elsewhere.

Astute leaders can see that this self-disruption cannot be brought about from within. They need to develop systems and services with entirely different structures that are nimbler, that are heavily populated by technologists, that are managed and capitalised quite differently from traditional firms and that are focused on licensing products and solutions, rather than charging for human service in six-minute units.

This is not a gentle hand on the tiller, suggesting a mild alteration of course. Rather, it is systemic, foundational and radical change.

The same is true on a larger scale when you look at institutions such as court systems, universities and health services. Much is currently being said about the ways that AI will transform our traditional public bodies, but the prevailing mindset and planning remain steadfastly focused on automation and task substitution rather than innovation, elimination and radical change.

We need to be vision-based. Extrapolating from the remarkable technologies we have today and bearing in mind dramatic likely advances in the years ahead, we have to envision a very different world: in law, for example, one of AI-based dispute resolution and AI-enabled self-representation supported by systems that can help people to understand and enforce their entitlements for themselves; in education, rich virtual learning environments combining the insights of the finest of teachers and delivered through personalised learning that is customised for each student or scholar; and in medicine, AI-based diagnostics and treatment planning and AI-enabled self-care.

To imagine this new world, we need a different mindset. I’m reminded of a conference where I was asked, “What is the future of neurosurgeons?” I concluded that they had asked me the wrong question. To ask any “What is the future of X?” type of question, it is assumed that X has a future. I don’t say this facetiously. It’s a leading question. It’s a legacy-based inquiry, insisting that X should figure in the response. If you inquire about the future of physicians, surgeons, teachers, professors, judges and lawyers, for example, you are generally expecting that a modernised and automated version of the people in these professions will be central to the response.

But, as I argued at the event, the future of healthcare lies not in an AI version of what we have today but in entirely new approaches, such as preventative medicine and non-invasive therapy. This led me to conclude that a better question would have been “How in the future will we solve the problems to which neurosurgeons are our current best answer?”

When we are thinking in an open-minded way about the long-term future of our justice, education and health services, we should not be starting with today’s arrangements. We should be asking ourselves – assuming the likely capabilities of our machines – how in the future we might tackle the problems to which these institutions and people are our current best answer. This is the heart of vision-based thinking. Not reversing into the future, constrained and contained by how we do things today, but inspired and empowered by the outcomes we can expect from emerging AI techniques and technologies.

Only once we have the vision, should we ask how we get there from here. We will not reach there by improving the current vehicles as they trundle along. We will need to build new vehicles for the development and delivery of the systems, services and visions to which we aspire.

This is an edited extract from Richard Susskind's book "How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed" (Oxford University Press)

Is technology making us smarter or dumber? While outsourcing some of our memory may be obviously beneficial (like storing contact numbers in our phones, for example), some worry that replacing too many of our cognitive functions may be harmful in the long-term.

The rise of AI, and particularly large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, adds yet another dimension to the debate. In early 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab published a study comparing brain activity in three groups of participants while they wrote essays, which showed that “LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity”, “struggled to accurately quote their own work” and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels” up to four months later, compared to those who used a search engine and the “brain-only” group.

The results, according to the authors, “raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning”. They add to a growing body of evidence that using AI may be eroding our creativity, memory and critical thinking abilities, and to an ever-increasing number of news stories asserting that “AI is making us dumb”.

And what about our increasing reliance on global navigation satellite systems? “Some studies have reported worse navigation performance in participants that report more reliance on GPS,” says neuroscientist professor Hugo Spiers, who studies spatial navigation at University College London.

Spiers was involved in a series of well-known brain scanning studies of London’s cabbies, who spend up to four years poring over maps and riding mopeds around the city to acquire “the knowledge” of the city’s streets. Those that successfully complete this streetology PhD exhibit significant enlargement of a deep brain structure called the hippocampus, which is crucial for spatial memory and navigation, compared to non-cabbies and those who drop out of the training.

These studies are a remarkable demonstration of neuroplasticity, which refers to the various ways in which the brain can alter its structure and function in response to experience. They further highlight an aspect of neuroplasticity referred to as the “use it or lose it” principle, according to which learning can stimulate the growth of new synaptic connections, whereas rarely used connections are eliminated.

The implications for the rest of us are clear. As we increasingly rely on our phones to navigate our way through life, using sat nav, Google Maps and other travel apps, we may be at risk of losing key skills.

We might think this is a fair trade-off, if the machines can do so much better. To return to the cabbie example, according to one of Spiers’ latest studies, cab drivers today still outperform sat nav devices, with flexible route-planning strategies, which prioritise the most difficult sections of the journey and fill in the rest around these points. However, AI-based navigational technologies may soon catch up, by learning from these drivers and the way they plot their routes.

But it isn’t just a question of comparing the skills and performance of humans and machines. We humans get added benefits from developing and improving our mental skills. Honing skills such as map-reading – or learning to speak a foreign language or playing a musical instrument – may help to protect the brain against the ravages of ageing. “I’d like to see more engagement in navigation as I do suspect it may help avoid Alzheimer’s Disease and improve [cognitive] capacity,” says Spiers. “It also makes people more resilient to shocks, and more connected to the world around them.”

The long-term effects of technology will likely depend on exactly how, and how much, an individual uses it. Using AI for creative pursuits such as essay-writing may hinder certain cognitive functions, but playing video games can improve hand-eye coordination, as well as problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Rather than being detrimental, technology may instead augment and change the ways in which we engage with our biological cognitive abilities. We may discover that some of these abilities are becoming weaker, as we use them less, while others develop or strengthen. And that is the joy of neuroplasticity.

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! A few weeks ago, I reported on a successful rightwing social media campaign to get a “woke” professor fired. To recap, an incredibly stupid woman who somehow made it into a college class recorded herself …

No major country has suffered a greater reversal of speech rights than the United States over the past year. The federal government is using economic coercion and weaponising the legal system to restrict viewpoints in universities, law firms, museums, media and corporations. Critics of the administration are targets of federal investigation. Reactionary activists are banning books from public libraries. So the recent report from the US State Department criticising the UK for “restrictions on freedom of expression” looks, at first glance, like an exercise in hypocrisy and projection.

In fact it’s much worse than that. The Trump administration is exporting its culture wars, and it is using the rhetoric of “free speech” to extend to other countries the very same assault on democracy that is taking place within the United States.

In early 2025, well before the release of the new “report”, Vice President JD Vance made the agenda transparent. He attacked the UK for allegedly suppressing “freedom of speech” and putting the “basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs”. He went on to meet leaders with connections to Reform UK, after having given a shout-out to the hard-right AfD in Germany.

It is important to understand that when Vance and the apparatchiks at the Trump State Department say “free speech” they aren’t referring to a universal right. They are concerned only with the rights of religious, nationalist and racist conservatives. And they are not interested in the rights of conservatives so much as their special privileges. They believe that conservatives are uniquely entitled to have their views platformed – and then imposed – at the expense of the rights of other people.

Exporting US strategies to the UK

Reproductive rights is a key battleground. In their report on alleged restrictions on free speech in the UK, the loyalists at the State Department followed JD Vance in offering the example of anti-abortion activists arrested merely for “praying”. In fact, they are typically referring to situations in which conservative activists stage intentional violations of the law that protects women from harassment as they seek reproductive healthcare – and then claim that they are victims of the suppression of speech.

This dynamic started well before the current Trump administration. In the aftermath of the pandemic, a new wave of America-based activism took aim at the UK. I’ve been tracking these developments, including attending events aimed at training anti-abortion activists.

Back in 2023, I attended ReThink Abortion Day, a day-long conference that took place at a Catholic seminary in Birmingham. I discovered a concerted effort to export US strategies into the UK. In a wood-panelled conference room, 50 or 60 participants settled into their seats to take in the presentations. Much of the training was focused on how to mount demonstrations outside women’s health centres – long a feature of abortion politics in the United States.

The presenters included Ben Thatcher, then co-director of the UK satellite of the US-based March for Life – the organisation behind the annual anti-abortion demonstration that draws tens of thousands of participants to Washington, DC. Another speaker, Dave Brennan, is the director of Brephos, which claims to help “churches respond to abortion” and is a British spinoff of the US-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR). Apart from the Catholic groups co-hosting the event, the key speakers were all working with UK affiliates of US-based organisations, representing a broader trend of growing connections between the UK and America’s Christian nationalist movement.

Leading the discussion on demonstrations and anti-abortion messaging were representatives of 40 Days for Life UK, an affiliate of the US-based organisation. Founded in 2004 in Bryan, Texas – a small city that anti-abortion activists have described as “the most anti-choice place in the nation” – 40 Days for Life specialises in training and organising protests in front of abortion clinics and other providers. The stated aim is to dissuade women from going through with an abortion, though the usual effect is simply to bully and shame them for doing so.

40 Days for Life claims to operate in more than a thousand cities in 63 countries. The UK branch kicked off with campaigns in Northern Ireland in 2009 and now boasts at least 15 chapters across the United Kingdom.

Targeting reproductive rights

At the anti-abortion recruitment gatherings that I have attended in the US, there is invariably the moment when speakers treat the audience to a slideshow involving gory images of aborted foetuses. Birmingham did not disappoint. Taking the podium in a navy sweater and jeans and cheery attitude, Dave Brennan of the UK branch of CBR delivered the goods. CBR is known in the US for its use of such graphic images, which are often enlarged and displayed as placards and billboards near playgrounds, schools and other places where children congregate.

But it’s not just abortion that they’re coming after. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, as its name might suggest, has a much broader and more radical agenda. In line with its sister organisation, Brennan’s UK affiliate opposes the most effective forms of contraception, including birth control pills and mini pills, implants, IUDs and vaginal rings. Any method that prevents a united sperm and egg from implanting into the vaginal wall, Brennan’s group maintains, would “end human life”. We must acknowledge, he told the gathering, that “our enemy is more powerful than we are, factually speaking, and he” – that is, Satan –“is determined”. He sketched a theology according to which saving diploid zygotes, blastocysts and foetuses is the greatest moral issue of our time.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life UK and the Birmingham chapter of 40 Days for Life, introduced a handout on the “ABC of Abortion”, which amounted to a series of rebuttals of counter-arguments one is likely to hear while harassing patients at health centres. “We need to take back control,” Vaughan-Spruce said, her voice animated with a can-do lilt. “We want them to acknowledge it’s a baby, it’s a human, it’s a child.” She nodded and smiled. “We’re not trying to bring our religious values in at this point. We’re not talking about anything political. We’re just talking about the scientific.”

There was a detailed discussion of “rights” – though, again, it was all about the rights of abortion opponents. In December 2022, police charged Vaughan-Spruce with four counts of breaching an exclusion zone, or buffer zone, at a maternal healthcare centre – these zones are intended to protect patients from interference while accessing clinics. Vaughan-Spruce promptly appeared in a YouTube video in which, wearing a pastel coat, her hair neatly pinned, she softly complained that she had been indicted for nothing more than “silently praying in my head”.

Her case was taken up by the UK branch of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the US-headquartered right-wing legal advocacy juggernaut. In a well-coordinated PR campaign, conservative Christian media outlets joined Vaughan-Spruce in characterising her alleged crime as “standing silently near an abortion clinic” or a “silent prayer crime”. The incident received widespread media coverage in Britain, and the charges were soon dropped. None of the mainstream media outlets covering the story identified Vaughan-Spruce as a leader of 40 Days for Life UK. Several months later she got herself rearrested and repeated the same talking points. (The police later released her without charges.)

When I encountered her, several months later, she seemed defiant, alleging that anti-abortion demonstrations are all about “free speech”. The praying was presumably never silent after all.

'A feigned interest in free speech'

Despite these efforts, the UK remains far behind the United States in the vigour of its culture war over women’s healthcare. Indeed, the growing anti-abortion activity around reproductive health facilities in the UK has sparked a backlash that appears to be limiting the movement’s policy gains for now. In late 2022, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that setting up buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland did not “disproportionately interfere” with protesters’ rights. This ruling from the country’s highest court also paved the way for legislation in Scotland, England and Wales. The buffer zones, in force in England from October 2024, are recognised as a means of protecting women from harassment, and therefore protecting their right to healthcare.

Even so, ritualised harassment and humiliation of women seeking medical care is hardly the only American contribution to the budding culture war over reproductive services in the UK. American organisations are also contributing to the establishment of anti-abortion counselling centres. Billed as “crisis pregnancy centres”, these organisations attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions, often by giving misleading or unethical advice.

It’s important to understand that the motivation behind the feigned interest in free speech is to promote a narrative of grievance. Conservative Christians in the US have convinced themselves that they and they alone are the real victims of discrimination in modern society. The investment in the UK is part of a broader global strategy, with representatives of America’s religious right pushing their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is crucial to this drive. Greg Scott, vice-president of communications for ADF, confirmed to me that the organisation’s budget exceeded $102 million in the fiscal year 2021-2022. Between 2015 and 2020, according to ADF’s publicly-available tax data, overseas expenditures rose from $3 million to almost $10 million. [According to a recent article in The New York Times, since then it has quadrupled the money it sends to its British arm to more than $1 million.]

“We are dedicated to the promotion of fundamental freedoms for all, and ADF International’s efforts are focused on areas where human rights are under threat,” ADF International’s legal communications director, Elyssa Koren, told me.

But protecting human rights has a particular meaning, according to this mindset. It not only involves taking on defendants like Vaughan-Spruce but also, for example, defending anti-sodomy laws around the world – including a law in Belize that, before it was overturned, made same-sex intimacy punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment.

JD Vance's 'British Sherpa'

In this context, the protection of “human rights” and “free speech” is part of an effort to build a global political movement targeting liberal democracy. These supposed concerns are intended to mobilise a nationalist base to support far-right political parties and politicians who wish to follow the model of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has replaced the country’s democracy with a cronyistic, demagogic oligarchy.

This is the reality detailed in an important report from the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) titled “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism is Reclaiming Power”, published in June. The report, the third in a series, follows the money in detail as it moves from private wealth and public sources into reactionary groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies. It covers the impact in 27 European countries as well as funding sources in Europe, Russia and the US. Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, $1.18 billion flowed into frontline groups in the effort to elevate conservative religion in culture and governance in the UK – an increase from the 2009 to 2018 period, when the amount was just $81.3 million.

But “We can’t just blame Americans,” in the words of Neil Datta, founder and executive director of the EPF and the author of the report. “A lot of money is coming from European sources.”

In the UK, a figure around whom this movement towards religious nationalism is coalescing is James Orr, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University, and now a senior advisor to Nigel Farage. Running through much of Orr’s social media presence is a persecution narrative – specifically, persecution of conservative Christians at the hands of a malignant liberal elite. Orr, whom JD Vance reportedly once called his “British Sherpa”, defended Vance’s fatuous claims about free speech losses in the UK as “brilliant”. Like Vance, Orr has boosted the profile of the nativist, anti-democratic Hungarian regime – a regime that suppresses speech as a matter of routine.

Orr attended last summer’s Matthias Corvinas Collegium (MCC) festival in northern Hungary, where he accused the UK of adopting a “naïve” and “dangerous” approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also described politicians sympathetic with the struggle for Ukraine’s independence as having a “peculiar psychological condition” called “Ukraine brain”, and instead praised Hungary’s approach, in which it has systematically blocked sanctions of Russian oligarchs and delayed EU military aid packages.

The MCC is a private college and educational network with close ties to Orbán, whose events draw together hard-right thinkers from across the world. These kinds of networks help the movement share ideas and strategies.

The victims of this global political movement will by no means be limited to women seeking reproductive care or same-sex couples who wish to join together in marriage. Religious nationalist countries are often “theocratic” in a certain fake sense – that is, they are regimes that endorse a particular religion and attempt to impose that religion and its values on society. But they are best described as cronyistic kleptocracies with strong militaristic features and absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.

One of the most insidious things about the current iteration of authoritarianism is that it has coopted and perverted the language of liberal democracy. When it speaks about individual rights, it is really just pushing for ever greater power over individuals. When it speaks about “speech rights”, it aims to suppress those with whom it disagrees. Many in the UK and Europe might not be aware of what’s coming at them from America. If they wish to resist the slide into authoritarianism, they would do well to understand it better.

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: I’ve talked about this before, but I swear it’s relevant and some of you are new here, so: 8 years ago, I found Indy as a homeless 3-month old puppy. He looked like this. …

When a powerful earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan in August, 30-year-old Shakeeba survived – but most of her family did not. In the remote, mountainous Nurgal district of Kunar province, she described how the terrifying quake killed 13 of her family members, including her three children. Her husband is still missing; she doesn’t know whether he is dead or alive.

Shakeeba was rescued the next morning, after spending the night trapped beneath the debris of her house. The danger she faced was compounded by the fact that she was pregnant and suffering from severe bleeding. “Under the debris, I could hear my kids screaming till the morning,” she said, her voice trembling. “When their cries stopped, I realised that they had passed away. Now I can’t sleep at night because the sounds of my children are still in my mind.”

Several provinces in eastern Afghanistan were affected by the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that left more than 2,200 people dead and thousands more injured. Among those who survived, many of their homes were destroyed or seriously damaged, leaving them with nowhere to live. The United Nations says half a million people were affected. Hilly and remote areas were hit particularly hard, as landslides and damaged roads left some villages unreachable. This significantly hindered rescue and relief efforts and made it extremely difficult for emergency responders to reach those in need with supplies.

The earthquake received news coverage around the world. But the particularly devastating impact on women received less attention. The Taliban governs Afghanistan, having returned to power when US-led forces withdrew in 2021 after two decades of military presence. When the earthquake hit, the Taliban government was overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. But their policies, based on their interpretation of religious law, also meant that women caught up in the humanitarian disaster were in many cases abandoned – left without support or medical care to a disproportionate degree.

That’s because severe restrictions on women’s education have led to a shortage of female medics, as well as female rescuers and aid workers – particularly in the remote areas that were worst affected by the earthquake. Women who were already qualified as medics before the Taliban’s return to power are also subject to restrictions on their work. On top of that, the Taliban’s “no-touch” rule prohibits women from having skin contact with unrelated males. In many cases, this prevented male rescuers, doctors and health workers from physically assisting women – even in order to save their lives or the lives of their babies.

When Shakeeba was found underneath the rubble, there were no female doctors to help her. As soon as the male rescuers saw that she was pregnant, and badly injured, they hurried her to a nearby helicopter and took her to the Nangrahar regional hospital. There, she was treated by female doctors who gave her a blood transfusion. But she has been told that because of the complications from her injuries, the chance of her baby surviving the pregnancy is lower.

Shakeeba survived. Other pregnant women did not. When the earthquake hit, she was entertaining three guests at her home. They were all also pregnant, and she says that they died because of the lack of healthcare. “I believe that many women would have been saved if there had been female doctors and [proper healthcare] accessible on time,” she told me. Shakeeba herself is experiencing severe emotional stress, according to the medical staff looking after her, and she frequently breaks down in tears. She remains in hospital.

Dwindling numbers of female medics

The earthquake has drawn attention to the massive challenges that female doctors confront when attempting to treat women in traditional and rural areas in Afghanistan. “The biggest challenge is that the number of patients is quite large, but female healthcare professionals, [as well as] medical supplies, medicines, and equipment are very limited,” says Dr Nadia Ghazal, a female doctor working as part of the rescue effort in Dewagal and the remote Mazar Valley of Kunar. She says there are about 20 female health workers operating in these two areas, but only half of them are qualified medical professionals – in most cases, either nurses or partially qualified doctors who have only been able to complete part of their studies. Across the earthquake-affected area of Afghanistan, roughly 90 per cent of medical staff are male, according to an estimate from Dr Mukta Sharma, deputy representative of the World Health Organization’s country office.

The burden on the small number of female doctors in these areas is resulting in physical and mental burnout, said Ghazal. “Sometimes there are so many patients that I am unable to see them all at once. For women with internal bleeding, complex fractures or pregnancy-related crises, this wait may be deadly.”

The most urgent needs for women following the earthquake involve the treatment of injuries, including fractures and internal bleeding. But another significant issue is maternal and child health, since expectant mothers need postnatal care, safe delivery facilities and timely examinations. A UN report published in September found that 11,600 pregnant women required immediate assistance in the wake of the earthquake. And many women, like Shakeeba, are now experiencing psychological issues as a result of having lost loved ones, and having undergone severe trauma.

Even without the Taliban’s discriminatory approach, treating these women would have been a challenge. The earthquake devastated a large number of healthcare facilities and roadways. But the government’s policies are worsening the catastrophe. After the earthquake hit, the World Health Organization urged the Taliban to remove restrictions on female aid workers, so they could travel without male guardians and assist women who are having difficulty accessing care. Aid from outside Afghanistan was also hampered, as there are also restrictions on women working with the UN. But the restrictions weren’t lifted, nor was the “no touch” rule. The rule is deeply embedded in the Taliban’s policies because it is based on an interpretation of sharia law, where men are forbidden from touching women who aren’t part of their family, even in life-and-death situations.

“This restriction, combined with the Taliban’s strict ban on gender mixing, has directly resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many women who could have been saved,” said Habib Khan Totakhil, a journalist and researcher formerly based in Kabul. “According to people interviewed in affected areas, some women had very basic [or easy to treat] medical needs, but because of the lack of female medical workers, they lost their lives.”

Silencing criticism

The earthquake shone a light on the extent of preventable suffering under the Taliban’s gender restrictions. The scale of the problem was confirmed by former Afghan parliamentarian Mariam Solaimankhil. She left Afghanistan in 2021 after the Taliban takeover but is in touch with women in need of support through activist networks. “A woman in Zabul had a miscarriage recently,” in the aftermath of the earthquake, she told me. “She has nowhere to go and is in pain. Terrified to even share her story at home, she shared it with me in terror. We are currently working to bring her to India for treatment after I got in touch with her family.” India is one of the few nearby countries that is still offering medical and humanitarian visas for Afghans.

This is just one case of neglect among countless others, said Solaimankhil, including survivors of sexual assault who have been left without care, women dealing with heart issues and pregnancy concerns, and thousands of women dealing with psychological trauma, all of whom are silenced by the Taliban. Women who speak out risk beatings, imprisonment, public flogging or forced disappearance. In some provinces, women have been dragged from their homes for posting on social media or for participating in peaceful protests. Families are pressured to silence women out of fear of collective punishment.

But the earthquake has shown that the Taliban can no longer avoid addressing the issue of women’s healthcare, said Ghazal. Untreated illness may end up as chronic syndromes, and neglected injuries may cause lasting disability. “Investing immediately in the education and training of female physicians and healthcare professionals is the only way to solve the problem. To encourage girls to serve in remote and disaster-affected areas, safe working conditions and opportunities for medical studies must be established,” she said.

But for the shortage of female medical professionals to be addressed, the Taliban would have to change its gender exclusion policies. Since they returned to power in August 2021, women’s rights have been drastically restricted, and they have been largely shut out from public life. Their freedom of movement and employment has also been severely limited.

The ban on women’s education was supposed to be temporary. When the Taliban returned to power, they assured the world that they would be setting up a gender-segregated system, where women would receive their own specialised education, taught exclusively by women. The approach was justified on the grounds of a rigid interpretation of Islamic law requiring “suitable environments” for women’s education.

But no deadline was set for when this women’s education system would begin operating. A women’s rights activist who asked not to be named said: “The Taliban claim that, as a Muslim country, they will create Islamic-based systems and educate women. But they don’t intend to do so. They have no policies to back up their claim, and it’s been almost five years; if they were sincere, they would have done it by now.”

No access to education

According to data shared by former Ministry of Education spokeswoman Najeeba Arian, there were 3.7 million girls enrolled in schools prior to the Taliban’s return, making up 40 per cent of pupils. There were also 36,500 female students at public universities, accounting for 21 per cent. But all of these women and girls have had to drop out of education – and every year, thousands more girls are denied a chance to even begin to receive schooling.

As a result of the limitations, no women have graduated from medical school since the Taliban returned to power. The pipeline of new professionals has been destroyed. And many of the female doctors and nurses who had already qualified left the country when the Taliban returned, since they were unable or unwilling to work under the restrictions. Those who stayed, like Ghazal, will not be practising for ever, and no one will take the place of today’s exhausted professionals when they retire. “Most of the women doctors who were already practising have left Afghanistan, because it is nearly impossible to work under Taliban rule,” said Totakhil. “With no new female graduates, this is creating a healthcare disaster for Afghan women that will only worsen as the population grows.”

If the education ban had not been in place, women who were already at university when the Taliban returned – including some who had nearly reached graduation – would have been working in essential sectors by now, giving their communities much-needed support. “In the next five to 10 years, there will be no women in any profession if the Taliban sticks to the same policies,” Arian told me. “The humanitarian crisis will likely worsen further, forcing people to look for assistance from neighbouring countries even for their most basic requirements”.

Afghan women and activists continue their efforts to educate girls online or in secret classes, but it is difficult and dangerous. In September, a female teacher was detained in Herat by agents from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for secretly teaching scientific subjects to girls. In January 2025, the Taliban sentenced six teachers in Daikundi for teaching computer skills and English to women. There have been countless other cases where activists who were working covertly to educate women have been arrested by the Taliban. Meanwhile, women who had been pursuing their own education online were hampered by an internet shutdown in September, which the Taliban said was necessary to prevent “immorality”, and there are concerns that internet connectivity could be lost again.

Arian draws attention to the government’s double standards, pointing out that women are permitted to attend madrasas for religious education. “Why can’t women attend schools with the same rules and attire as madrasas?” she asked, suggesting this raises questions about the true motivations behind the ban on women’s education.

Disaster looms

But if women cannot work in or access healthcare, Solaimankhil pointed out, it will affect the nation as a whole. “This is more than just a women’s issue; it will collapse Afghan society. Without female healthcare professionals, maternal and infant mortality rates, already among the highest globally, will increase even further.” Education, she added, helps mothers raise children who are healthier and more literate, while keeping women out of the workforce will adversely impact Afghanistan’s economy. “When half the population is illiterate, poverty grows, child marriages increase and preventable deaths become common.”

Numerous activists and politicians have voiced their disappointment with the international community for the lack of tangible action. They are calling for the Taliban to be held responsible for crimes against humanity, and for their systematic effort to exclude Afghan women from public life. Some activists are calling on global funders to find ways to get around Taliban systems and permissions and instead ensure that funding is provided directly to Afghan women, doctors and educators. “This is gender apartheid,” Solaimankhil said. “It is a systematic campaign to remove Afghan women from education, healthcare and society at large.”

Meanwhile, for those still in Afghanistan, the devastating impact of the earthquake has intensified feelings of anger and defiance that have been boiling under the surface for nearly five years. “We need to come together,” said the women’s rights activist. “We shouldn’t permit the Taliban to use religion to deny us our fundamental rights.”

Research for this article was supported by a reporter within Afghanistan who has chosen to remain anonymous for security reasons.

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: There are two memes currently fighting it out in my head as I think of how to introduce this video’s topic: one is “the Simpsons predict the future.” Because the Simpsons has now been …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: The other day I happened upon a science news headline I found very interesting: We’re evolving too slowly for the world we’ve built, according to science, published November 19th for New Atlas. I found …

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.

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 […]

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