This is a photo of the gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy.

The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.

Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Meanwhile, here on the Planet of the Dumbasses, in a country renowned for its dumbassery, a dumbass religious fanatic has convened a conference featuring three dumbass astronaut-apologists to argue that the entire universe is only 6000 years old, and that only the Planet of Dumbasses is populated by dumbasses who are able to look up into the sky and appreciate astronomy. You can read a long and thorough review of this dumbass conference, but the comment that jumped out a me was this one:

Ham went on to discuss the cosmos, naming various constellations and nebulae and demonstrating his familiarity with astronomy. He explained his belief that God had created the universe to showcase His power to human beings; as Psalm 19 says, The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. The universe, Ham claimed, has no other purpose than to impress us here on Earth with God’s capacity for creation.

So, apparently, a god assembled this gigantic black hole, 36 billion solar masses in size, unobservable until now, in 2025, just to show off. You’d think he could have done a better job of this one planet full of his dumbass worshippers with all the energy and power he used to construct an impossibly distant sphere of death, that we can’t visit and most of us can’t even see. However, the narcissism of this Christian god is far greater than 36 billion stars, I guess, which is why we’re supposed to worship his bloated ego.

To treat science as merely one belief system among many is to misrepresent what science is and why it matters. Claims that science is merely a tool to promote a certain political perspective (whether accusing climate researchers of fabrication or reducing medical research to “Big Pharma” profiteering) are rhetorically powerful because they reframe empirical findings as mere opinion. But while no human endeavor is untouched by ideology, the strength of science lies precisely in its effort to weed ideology out. NASA’s science missions must be protected, not despite the fact that their findings may challenge deeply held beliefs or even particular political goals, but precisely because they do. In an era when the authority of evidence is often undermined or dismissed, defending the integrity of empirical discovery is essential – not only for the future of space science, but for the very idea that reality can be investigated and understood without fear of the consequences of challenging dogma, whether religious or political.

The reviewer is too nice to say it, but I’m not nice. Fuck Charlie Duke. Fuck Jeffrey N. Williams. Fuck Barry “Butch” Wilmore. They are people who have betrayed truth for a religious lie.

I didn’t know or even know of Transtifa — I’m not a Twin Cities person — but I have to admire the work mentioned in this testimonial:

Been meaning to make this post for a while and putting it off bc idk how to do it right, but here goes: earlier this summer I learned of the passing in April of the legendary Twin Cities tagger Transtifa, who tormented local nextdoor nerds and facebook fascists more than perhaps any single person over the past 5+ years.

Seeing a transtifa tag around town always made me and my homies smile – and you were bound to see them everywhere, because that bitch got AROUND. How did she do so much? I learned how one day after catching a glimpse of her roller skating down a dark street at lightning speed in a crop top and short shorts, bag of spray cans and paint pens slung over her shoulder.

I was hashtag blessed enough to meet her before Transtifa took off, thanks to (and this fits her perfectly) grindr. We didn’t totally hit if off at the time (mostly bc i figured she was totally out of my league, lol) but we did have a nice stroll around town sharing art tips. Later we worked together on some art in advance of an action and damn, her freehand lettering sucked but she blew me away by climbing out to paint the outside of a railroad bridge with zero hesitation. Tbh just the amount of haters she had was admirable.

She was one of the boldest and bravest people I knew, one of the few people I’ve ever remained in awe of after meeting them, and lived far more in her too-few years than most people do in a lifetime. I didn’t know her well but I miss her a lot–just knowing she was around tearing up the streets gave me something vaguely like hope.

I’d say be the transtifa you want to see in the world, but there won’t be another quite like her and I wish I’d told more how much I appreciated her when I could. Rest in power and paint, girl.

She sounds like a good person. I don’t know that I want to know what happened to her — too often the fate of trans women is shocking and depressing.

This is a pathetic, pitiful performance. Dershowitz is basically begging for a token pierogi to demonstrate that he isn’t despised and ostracized.

Former Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz was yelled out of a farmer’s market in Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday after he again tried to convince a food vendor into selling him pierogies.

One week after he threatened to sue a “bigoted vendor” for refusing to serve him, Dershowitz returned to the scene on Wednesday in a second failed attempt at securing Polish dumplings.

“I’m here in an effort to try to restore community and to ask you to sell me pierogi in the interest of keeping the island together so we don’t have to have two pierogi stands: one for anti-Zionists and one for people who will sell to anybody,” Dershowitz told the vendor. “So I’d ask you to please just sell me any one of your products to show that you’re prepared to sell to anybody and not allow your anti-Zionism to decide which people you’ll sell to.”

That’s a standard bigot approach: you’re not allowed to protest against the Israeli genocide in any way, or that makes you an anti-Zionist (which is OK) or an anti-Semite (gross disgusting bigotry). As it turns out, Dershowitz isn’t just anti-Palestinian and pro-genocide — it’s fine to turn their rhetoric right back at them) but is also pro-sexual assault and anti-LGBTQ.

After Dershowitz then tried to hand the pierogi vendor a signed copy of his book, which was politely refused, the vendor said, “I am very surprised that you’re here because of the things that you’ve been saying about us and the business online… I really do not appreciate what you’ve been sharing in the last week.”

Dershowitz interrupted, “It’s true,” to which the vendor replied, “Is it true? You have proof that I am an anti-Semite?”

The conversation devolved further after Dershowitz used the wrong pronoun in reference to the vendor.

“My pronouns are they/them, and you’ve continued to misgender me,” protested the vendor.

More irony: the vendor, Krem, that Dershowitz claims is anti-Semitic, is Jewish themselves.

No one likes you, Alan Dershowitz. You’re a sad desperate creep.

Speaking of incompetent clowns running major federal institutions, Linda McMahon was speaking at the National Conservative Student Conference. She was being interviewed by Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, a notorious anti-union conservative zombie, when students hacked the sound system and played insults, like that she was a corrupt billionaire, and pumped out calliope music over their conversation.

Very appropriate. The name of the tune is, ironically, “Entry of the Gladiators.” I think it ought to be played for the entire collection of bozos Trump has jumped up to high office.

McMahon isn’t at all qualified to head the department of education, which is why she got the job — she’s supposed to wreck it from within.

P.S. Sorry, WordPress doesn’t handle Twitter links very well anymore. Try clicking on this: https://x.com/atrupar/status/1953149542456574062.

Don’t you know? RFK jr is not anti-vax. He supports safe vaccines.

News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety, Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccines play a critical role in health care.

He lies! Those two words need to be written on his tombstone, preferably sooner than later.

We know he lies because he just slashed half a billion dollars from the budget of the department specifically tasked with developing and testing new vaccines.

The US Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would terminate 22 federal contracts for mRNA-based vaccines, questioning the safety of a technology credited with helping end the Covid pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and had provided billions of dollars for development of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, as previously reported in May.

He basically wants to kill mRNA vaccine development, the technology that saved millions of lives in the recent pandemic. His excuse? In addition to his usual claim that the vaccines contain fetal tissue and DNA fragments — all false, and even if it were true, what does he think is present in the roadkill he eats? — he claims that mRNA vaccines are ineffective against viruses that affect the upper respiratory tract.

Kennedy said the HHS is terminating these programs because data show these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”, but did not offer scientific evidence.

“We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate,” Kennedy said.

COVID was an upper respiratory infection, and the mRNA vaccines seem to have helped protect millions of people against that, but RatFucker Jr is going to just ignore that. He lies, and is wrong.

KENNEDY: “As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

THE FACTS: His claim is contradicted by scientific evidence. Countless studies show that vaccinated individuals fare far better against COVID-19 infections than those who are unvaccinated, while others have estimated that COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of deaths during the global pandemic. The mRNA vaccines do not prevent respiratory diseases entirely, experts say. Rather, they can prevent more serious illness that leads to complications and death. For example, an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 may prevent an infection in the upper respiratory tract that feels like a bad cold from spreading to the lower respiratory tract, where it could affect one’s ability to breathe.

While he’s cutting the budget for specious reasons, he’s also telling the scientists he doesn’t want to pay to pursue a new/old line of research.

He has also ordered a sweeping new study on the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.

There is no link between vaccines and autism. There is a link between mRNA vaccines and preventing death.

He lies.

Greg Graffin co-founded the band Bad Religion in Los Angeles in 1980, when he was 17. Their 1994 album “Stranger Than Fiction” sold more than half a million copies in the US, popularising their potent mix of harmony, high-speed noise and articulate, provocative lyrics. Meanwhile, Graffin pursued his academic interests. In 2003, he earned a PhD in zoology from Cornell University.

Graffin received the Rushdie Award for Cultural Humanism from Harvard University’s Humanist Chaplaincy in 2008 for his work as a rock star and scientist, and for being an “ideal role model for the nation’s millions of non-religious youth”. He teaches evolution at Cornell, while remaining the only constant member of Bad Religion. The band still tours and released their last album, “Age of Unreason”, in 2019.

In your 2022 memoir, “Punk Paradox”, you say you consider Darwin to have a “punk” approach. That’s quite a startling way to describe a middle-class, English, Victorian scientist.

Yeah, I think what appealed to me was, it was at a time when I was going through my early punk transformation, and of course, when you’re a teenager, you’re kind of self-conscious about everything. I was very concerned by the fact that the classic “English punk” was, you know, from a working-class family and a street kid who didn’t have much – and that wasn’t my experience. In America, many of the punks were also street punks who were kicked out of their houses by their parents and had some serious problems – that was kind of the punk stereotype.

So I thought, wait a minute, here’s a guy in Victorian England, who basically overturned hundreds of years, thousands of years of dogma and dogmatic thinking.

I thought, that’s a different type of revolution that’s much more appealing to me – because here I am raised as an academic, my parents were both academics, I wasn’t kicked out of the house. So I thought that, actually, it’s just as valid.

You managed to immerse yourself in an authentic punk scene without sacrificing the academic side and your interests in birdwatching and geology and all the rest. How did you balance that?

Well, it’s called adaptation, you know – if I can borrow another term from evolution. As a kid, you don’t really set out to create a unique lifestyle. You know, you just sort of adapt to the conditions.

There were expectations of me, as a person. The expectations of your family create your environment. I knew that there were strong expectations, and I don’t think it is out of line for me to say that I was doing what I was told to do in a way that kept me on the straight and narrow, if you will.

You say that Monty Python was an influence, and you acted out sketches in your band rehearsals.

Monty even predates my punk years, because by the time my friends and I were 10 or 11 years old our parents, who were all professors, were teaching us to be good cynical observers of society. PBS showed Monty Python every week. And our parents, you know, they wanted us to stop watching those damn cartoons and watch something that’s satirical, or something that can teach you something, something that is critical of society. So Monty Python was a very big influence on our outlook.

Another influence that surprised me was “Jesus Christ, Superstar”, the musical. It’s a subversive take on religion but it’s also the work of Lord Lloyd-Webber and Sir Tim Rice, both establishment figures and known for their support of the Conservative party.

Yeah, maybe I attributed more significance to it because at certain times in your developmental life you’re introduced to something and it has a very deep, lasting impact on your thinking. But I love the music. First of all, it’s a beautifully recorded album – and I’m not talking about the Broadway version, my mother purchased the original studio recording, the two-album set, and really, even as a fourth grader, a kid, I could tell that this was great sounding music and I loved the lyrics.

I could identify with the main character in Jesus Christ Superstar. You know, here was a persecuted individual. And it’s exactly what Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted, right? He wanted us to identify with the main character. And even though I didn’t know it at the time, it was a great rock-and-roll singer who was playing Jesus, it was Ian Gillen from Deep Purple. And so here’s this great and persecuted individual. And just like Charles Darwin, he came to represent someone who went against the grain, and who was the hero of a story.

If you were starting a band today, would you still call it Bad Religion? Do you still consider religion to be your antithesis, this totemic thing you’re in opposition to?

Oh, yeah, I think so. I think religion in the broadest sense is all we’ve ever identified in Bad Religion. Particularly the dogmatic elements of it. And I think today dogma is just as prevalent. I even wrote a little couplet saying that here we are in a secular world now – you know, it gets more secular every decade. But secular dogma is bad religion too.

How do you see America’s future, in terms of free thought?

Everyone talks about the great divisions in America, but from my perspective those divisions have always been there: it’s ideology versus free and open inquiry. And unfortunately the Democrats didn’t do enough to popularise free and open inquiry, because America spoke loud and clear [when they elected Donald Trump as president]: they don’t want free and open inquiry. They want doctrine and ideology. I just think that that’s a very persistent problem in our country, but to be honest with you, it’s a persistent problem in western civilisation.

You don’t think it’s a uniquely dangerous time for rationalism?

I’m in jeopardy of looking naïve, but in terms of calling it uniquely dangerous, it’s like, one problem is that if we ignore history, then we can say whatever we want about the current era and the current situation. But as you know, there have been dangerous times in the past as well.

For some reason there’s a need to press upon the reading public that these are unprecedented times. Well, in one sense, that’s a tautology, of course: They are unprecedented, they’ve never happened before. But I don’t know, is it interesting to explore the dangers of the current political climate? It’s something I will leave to the political scientists, you know?

You use punk music to express some very complex ideas around individuality and ideology and society, which isn’t what we might typically expect from punk. Was that a reaction against what other people were doing?

Well, it was part of a scene in southern California. So, you know, when you’re part of a scene, you try to embody what you perceive to be the rudiments of that scene. And I think I was – maybe because my dad was an English professor – I maybe was able to identify some of those streams of consciousness that would resonate. I don’t think it was because I was trying to construct a philosophy or anything. I was too young for that.

But you know, I will say, you triggered a memory – because you [journalists] just love to talk about Donald Trump, which is fine, but you know, the only disappointing thing to me is that every single news outlet in the country is jumping for joy because they get to talk about him literally every day.

And I’d just point to one of the first songs I ever wrote – I was only a teenager, and I believe good old Jimmy Carter was in the Oval Office at that time, and here was a liberal president, a guy who did so much good in the world, and yet I still wrote Economy, technology doesn’t really work / The guy running the government is just another jerk [from the 1982 song “Politics”]. It sounds so simplistic and so teenage! But you know, I’m still using it today. So it must’ve had legs when I wrote it.

The point is, I was not willing in those days to get into a political discussion because I didn’t see it as bearing any fruit. So I went in a different direction.

Can you tell me about your academic work?

I teach one class a year at Cornell. I teach evolution for non-majors [university students who aren’t studying evolution as their main subject], which I find a very rewarding way to exercise my intellect. It’s a challenge in the sense that, because it’s for non-majors, I really enjoy having them come in with, maybe, some of their own biases, but completely open to the foundational principles of evolution. And it’s an important science to understand.

I think every student who graduates should have certain fundamental understandings of basic science, and even though it’s a struggle to get evolution recognised as a basic science, there’s no arguing against the fact that Charles Darwin ushered in a revolutionary way of thinking that affected more than just science – it affected all of the sciences, and many of the social sciences as well.

How has science informed your music? I’m thinking about the ecological crisis, and wondering why environmental science doesn’t feed more into the songs.

Well, first of all you have to remember there are two principal songwriters in Bad Religion. And the answer I give you is not at all reflective of my partner, Brett [Gurewitz, the band’s guitarist and co-founder] – he’s got his own thoughts on the topic.

But more personally, there’s nothing in the current environmental milieu, if you will, that is particularly good or bad for songwriting. Does the rapid increase in CO2 make for a good topic? No, it doesn’t, that’s not interesting at all to me. The fact that there is CO2 in the atmosphere and that there’s a historical component to it, maybe that’s something that’s allegorical that could be seen as an element in a good song – but I just don’t think that focusing on [news] headlines has ever made for great songs.

You know, the [2003] fires in LA inspired Brett to write “Los Angeles Is Burning” [When the hills of Los Angeles are burning / Palm trees are candles in the murder wind / So many lives are on the breeze / Even the stars are ill at ease / And Los Angeles is burning]. But even though that was an actual fire, I think the best thing about the song is that it can be seen as an allegory as well.

So you tend to take the long view.

Well, yeah, in an evolutionist that’s fairly natural! But here’s the thing that’s important to remember: you call it a long view, but I’m talking about what is purely a goal of good writing, which is you look for universals. And even when you teach science, you look for things that are universal truths that you can try to teach people.

And whether you like it or not, calling the current environmental situation a “crisis” is not a universal truth. That’s doctrine, and that’s something that we try to steer clear of and let people come to their own conclusion. That’s what Bad Religion has always done.

Can we talk about your solo work? “Millport” came out in 2017, and that was your third album of country rock. What prompted you to use that style?

You probably got to know me by now – I let other people put that in the category of their choosing. But I think the word over here is “Americana”.

[These solo albums] are oriented more towards the way that I was raised, in American folk music. It was always playing in our house and it’s had an influence on me musically and I enjoy exploring it. And I was lucky enough to have the opportunities to make records in that genre with very accomplished musicians.

And meanwhile Bad Religion carries on. Do you think you’ll do it for ever?

Yeah, you know, up to a certain point. If you look at it as an opportunity, as I do, then you don’t question how long it’s going to last. You’re just grateful for the opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godwin (4th Estate) by Joseph O’Neill

Joseph O’Neill remains best known for Netherland (2008). Hailed as a Great American Novel, this story of New York’s thriving immigrant cricket community drew comparisons with John Updike, Don DeLillo and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His last two books did not achieve the same heights of acclaim – but Godwin, being also about sport, actively invites comparison to the book that made his name.

At the centre of the novel is Mark Wolfe, a thirty-something technical writer living in Pittsburgh. When we meet him in January 2015, he is depressed by “modern stupidity” and “fantasizing about the time … when our kind no longer roams Earth”. Then his half-brother Geoff gets in touch. Geoff is a soccer agent who, having seen a video of an African boy called Godwin, is convinced he’s found the next Messi. Only, he doesn’t know where in Africa the footage was taken. And, conveniently for the plot, he’s broken his leg. He wonders if Mark might investigate.

The implausibility of Mark accepting the assignment is more than excused by the mad brilliance of what follows. Dispatched to France, he is tasked with getting the footage verified by another agent, who refuses to help. Mark undertakes to locate Godwin himself, which, after a sleepless, caffeinated night on Google Maps, he does – to Benin in West Africa. Exhilarated by his discovery, he reconnects with the agent to ask if he’ll join the expedition. The agent then steals Mark’s money and goes to Benin alone. Mark is shaken and ashamed.

He returns to Pittsburgh a changed man. Where before he “didn’t have his heart in his work”, now he wants “to grab hold of ordinary life like a normal human being” and “make a greater contribution”. To this end he stands for a senior role in the co-operative he works for, miraculously winning the election. But no one has confidence in him, and very soon the co-operative’s African-American founder Lakesha, to whose perspective the novel now shifts, has an insurrection on her hands.

The parallels with the work of another Joseph – Conrad – are clear throughout. There is the French agent’s description of Godwin as a “Black Diamond”, language that could have come straight out of Heart of Darkness. There is his notion that African soccer players are more authentic than white ones, little different from the idea of the noble savage. And then there is the men’s belief in their own nobility, their conviction that they’re doing Godwin, and later Lakesha, a good turn by involving themselves. The colonial instinct dies hard in the west.

The Conrad influence is also felt in Godwin’s architecture. Most novelists, when they switch perspective, do so to advance the plot. But O’Neill, like Conrad in Victory, lets his voices overlap, so that we experience certain sequences from multiple angles. It is an ingenious way of increasing our sympathy, as characters bravely respond on the outside to events that we have seen cause them pain on the inside.

As for the voices themselves, Mark’s will be familiar to readers of O’Neill’s other novels. Prolix, nerdy and digressive, he is a man who can leave no avenue of thought unexplored, expounding on everything from the “exquisite pleasure to be had in drafting a good invoice” to “J.R.R. Tolkien’s concocted land of Mordor”. The Lakesha sections are better behaved; like their narrator, their prose is unfussy and to the point.

This does not make for the most coherent reading experience, especially when the novel is asked to awkwardly accommodate a third voice: the French agent, returned from Africa. But it doesn’t matter. On a sentence level, O’Neill is unequalled among contemporary novelists. And few are more thoughtful about the legacies of colonialism. Godwin is a one-of-a-kind book by a one-of-a-kind writer.

This article is from New Humanist's Summer 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: Hey, did you guys hear? The guy who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City checked the boxes for “African” and “Asian” on one of his applications to a college he …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Every now and then, whenever I talk about political conspiracies, a commenter will say something about “Russiagate.” I’ve never made a video about “Russiagate,” but there are some people who I think are just …

I’ve recently noticed a resurgence in the online debate over debates. This was a major topic of conversation in the early 2000s amongst scientists, who worried over whether it was worthwhile to debate “the other side” on issues like climate change and evolution. Was an evolutionary biologist able to meaningfully educate and persuade an audience …

As Giuliana Furci picks her way through the dense, dripping greenery of Chile’s Patagonian forest, her keen eyes are seeking out one thing: mushrooms. Her gaze soon falls on a small white mushroom, its cap barely wider than its tall body. It’s in an unusual place, entangled with mosses in a peat bog. It may have never been seen before by human eyes.

Furci is among the world’s leading mycologists, and founder of the Fungi Foundation, where, she says, she “works for the fungi”. She has spent the last 25 years exploring the world’s least understood and often most uninhabitable regions to spot and map the fungal life she finds. The appearance of fungi’s fruiting bodies – mushrooms – is often brief. Some appear for just a couple of days, some for only half an hour. “My mission is to coincide [with them], to be in that place at the same time,” Furci says.

The history of fungal mapping stretches back decades, but the picture this data paints has a lot of gaps. Today, a surge in mapping efforts and technologies is accelerating what we know, by exploring new frontiers above and below the ground. Fungi are essential to the ecosystems they live in, and are helping to slow climate change. By revealing which fungi live where, these maps offer up data that can be used to protect them – and in turn, all life on Earth.

When Furci discovers a mushroom, a process kicks in: technical photography, notes about colour, smell, sometimes taste. Does it bruise? Was an animal living inside it? Is it sturdy, crumbly, gelatinous? She relates to each fungus as a fellow being: “You’re getting all these hints of who it might be,” she says. But as important as any of these details – perhaps more so – is the fungi’s location. We cannot understand a fungus without knowing where it grows. “The location is really important specifically for fungi,” Furci says. “Because fungi aren’t separate from the animal or plant that they live with, their symbiotes.”

Dr Greg Mueller is chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Fungal Conservation Committee. He emphasises the importance of knowing where a fungus lives if we are to protect it. “The different criteria for assessing [a fungal species’] threat status are all based on understanding where they are,” he says. The assessment looks at whether their habitat is imperilled, how widespread they are in an area, and how big their population is – all of which depend on location data.

Furci has travelled to more than 20 countries to find mushrooms growing in the unlikeliest of places – from freezing snow to hot desert sand. Still, the nature of her research means that she can only map the fleeting fruiting bodies she can see. There’s much more to the world’s fungal life that’s hidden from view. Some fungi thread themselves through the soil, and never produce a fruiting body. These are called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and they interact with the roots of 70-90 per cent of land plant species to help them access the nutrients they need to survive. Like other types of fungi, they help lock huge amounts of carbon in the soil. In other words, they help slow climate change and keep much of Earth’s green life alive – but are all but invisible to humans.

Invisible, that is, until we look more closely at the soil. Scientists are now able to identify the presence of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi by analysing soil samples to find the environmental DNA (eDNA) of the beings living in it. This method is showing them a world of underground life.

Building maps, layer by layer

The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) is a scientific research organisation that partners with the Fungi Foundation and is using eDNA to understand the underground. But as Dr Bethan Manley, SPUN’s lead computational biologist, explains: “you can’t punch a hole in the ground on every square kilometre of the planet – that’s a lot of holes to dig.”

Instead, SPUN builds maps using artificial intelligence to extrapolate data from places that have already been sampled to make predictions about areas that haven’t. They use machine learning models to input “lots and lots of layers of data”, Manley says – such as temperature, types of vegetation, precipitation and land use – and look for relationships between these variables that can then predict which fungi would grow in unexplored parts of the world.

It’s important to then check that the predictions are accurate by analysing real-life samples. In 2023, Manley travelled to Kazakhstan to do this, in collaboration with local partners. There were previously no samples taken from Kazakhstan’s soil, so the model’s predictions were based only on data from other comparable eco-regions. “Because there are no samples, we wanted to cover as much ground as we could,” she says. The team travelled through Kazakhstan’s varied landscapes – from dry, cinnamon-coloured desert to buzzing feather grass meadows and forest steppe – to collect soil samples from a total of 56 sites. They chose the location of each collection site based on the computer-generated mapping predictions, always at least a kilometre apart. “We actually ended up in a VW camper van, which was not the ideal transport system for going across the steppe,” she says. Temperatures soared to 38°C in the day, and dropped dramatically at night.

As important as the soil sampling at each point is the collection of observational data. “There’s a lot to describe,” Manley says. Although GPS points are “the most important aspect of the data”, the team also recorded detailed information about the surrounding vegetation with the help of a local steppe expert, as well as information about nearby water sources, and notes on the land’s use, such as grazing. “It was just all of these beautiful herbs, long grasses,” she recalls. “You’d walk through the grass and there would be crickets and insects jumping away from your feet and spider webs everywhere. It’s a really rich system and we know it’s very special because a lot of that is underpinned by really high biodiversity below ground.” The data collected on the ground in Kazakhstan aligned with the map’s predictions: “It was accurate,” she says.

The SPUN team analysed the soil samples in the lab, where they extracted the DNA of the beings living in each sample. To do this, a machine vigorously shakes the soil to break the cell walls, and chemical processes separate the DNA. They then use a procedure to amplify the fungal DNA so they can see it over that of the many bacteria and nematodes that accompany it in the soil. That is sent off for sequencing, and the results reveal exactly which fungi are living in that spot. Manley’s findings show that Kazakhstan’s soils are home to approximately 290 different mycorrhizal species, around 200 of which are believed to have been previously unknown to science.

Above and below ground

The data from Manley’s Kazakhstan samples have gone on to feed the machine learning model, so it can generate further predictions about less-understood fungal ecosystems. Grasslands in particular “tend to be a little bit overlooked,” Manley says, “because if you haven’t been there it does look like it’s just grass. But it’s such a rich system.” Grasslands are particularly important carbon sinks, and many are at risk of desertification. They are also places where underground arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi tend to thrive, quietly helping grasses’ roots to take up nutrients.

Even in their extensive travels across Kazakhstan, the team didn’t once spot a mushroom. It is a reminder that life-supporting fungal biodiversity is no less rich for being invisible to humans. This difference – between what we can see above ground and what can be detected underground – suggests that we need maps of both worlds. As Greg Mueller says, “the below ground data are telling us so much more than we knew before. But it’s still important to get the above ground data because they are going to tell us different stories.”

There’s a risk, Mueller says, that underground detection methods pick up on fungi that aren’t fully established in an area, giving a false positive. “Is it transient? We don’t know if it will be able to persist, to be able to complete its life cycle. So we have to take some extra caveats with [this kind of] data,” he says.

There’s also a risk of false negatives. Chanterelles are a popular edible mushroom, but Mueller says their below ground cells are difficult to pick up through eDNA sampling methods – so they’re easily missed. It’s more reliable to spot their fruiting bodies using the naked eye. For this reason, “we need a holistic approach using both above ground and below ground data,” he says.

Protecting ecosystems

SPUN’s first global map of mycorrhizal biodiversity will be released later this year. It’s relatively early days for underground mapping, but it is already beginning to unlock understanding that could protect some of the world’s most unusual and valuable ecosystems.

Palmyra, south of Hawaii, is one of the most remote clusters of islands on Earth – home to huge, tree-climbing coconut crabs and surrounded by an unusually high number of sharks. Out of the coral rubble grows Pisonia grandis, a threatened tree species whose high branches are a critical nesting site for seabirds. The SPUN team are analysing soil samples to help them understand how Pisonia grandis survives, and how it could be supported. One theory is that mycorrhizal fungi help the trees to access nutrients in the bird guano – or accumulated excrement – that collects in their roots.

SPUN’s fungal data is also being used to support campaigning efforts to protect valuable species and ecosystems. In Poland, for example, SPUN has funded local researchers who are collecting data on underground fungi to provide evidence around “monumental trees” that are being logged in the Carpathian primeval forests. Manley hopes that underground fungal maps will be used more broadly to support conservation efforts. “We want conservation organisations to use this type of data because it’s just very important,” she says. “Plants are the key organisms in systems, they basically run the whole show, but underlying them are mycorrhizal fungi that support them and stabilise them. If you’re trying to encourage back vegetation and you’re not factoring in the fungal layers, you might be missing a really key factor in restoring the health of an ecosystem as a whole.”

SPUN also aims to support the conservation of fungi themselves by highlighting where they’re most vulnerable. They are overlaying “threat maps” on their underground fungal maps, to highlight areas of important fungal biodiversity that are also at risk of threats like wildfires, soil erosion and intensive agriculture.

Geographic imbalances

The GlobalFungi database has created a valuable resource, but also revealed just how patchy global research is. Just 2 per cent of the fungal samples studied come from Africa, compared to 33 per cent from Europe. “Due to historic, more colonial scientific practices and biases against funding in some regions, there are sampling biases,” Manley says. To fill in these gaps, SPUN has funded nearly 100 researchers based in parts of the world where fungal sampling data is sparse. “They’re generating data in areas that they really understand,” she says.

There are also opportunities to expand our understanding of fungi by learning from the people who live alongside them. The Fungi Foundation is working with Indigenous communities to learn about ancestral knowledge of fungi, known as ethnomycology. They have set out strict ethical guidelines for conducting this work in a way that ensures respect, consent and appropriate compensation. Ethnomycological research has previously led to the discovery that the spores of certain puffball mushrooms found in drier areas of the planet – parts of Australia, Africa and the Americas – have been used by herders to heal their animals’ wounds. “The peoples that have lived in those areas have evolved independently to have the same relationship with that fungus,” Furci says. Learning more about these relationships tells us more about each fungus, and how it exists in its ecosystem.

The more we understand fungi, the better we can protect them. Butyriboletus loyo, for example, is a huge, heavy, edible mushroom that grows in Chile. In 2014, data revealed that it had become an endangered species. This led to government funding which the Fungi Foundation and their collaborators used to create a guide to sustainably harvesting these popular mushrooms.

As recently as 2013, there were just three species of fungi on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; today, there are 1,300. This is due in large part to the Global Fungal Red List Initiative, a project spearheaded by Mueller in 2013 and supported by mycologists around the world. “We still have a lot more to do,” Mueller says. “But having a number of species on the Red List now shows there are significant numbers of fungi that are threatened with extinction, and that the threats for the main part are similar to what plants and animals have.”

Destigmatising fungi

The gaps in our understanding of the world’s fungi are not only the result of sampling biases, or the fact that many fungi are hidden from view. It is also because their strange, many-shaped mushrooms have historically been considered suspect. “In many places, especially in western science, mushrooms have been associated with the three Ds: death, decay and disease,” Furci says. “Fungi have been overlooked and neglected and stigmatised.” Mueller agrees – “there was bad press. We didn’t do a good job talking about how important fungi are.”

But today, fungi’s beauty and value are beginning to be recognised. “All of a sudden fungi are having their moment,” he says. There is growing recognition of the useful role fungi can play in tackling environmental problems, helped by Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, which recently became an international bestseller.

It seems that the more we know about fungi, the more fond we are becoming of them. Instead of undesirable, we are realising they are indispensable – a shift that Furci’s research and campaigning aims to accelerate. “My life’s work has been to move the perception of fungi away from ‘the three Ds’ to instead be about the value in decomposition,” she says. “In a cycle of life, there isn’t a beginning and end.”

In their unusual ability to break down what is dead so it can feed new life, fungi symbolise the cyclical nature of all things. Put them on the map, and we can learn not only about them, but also about the ecosystems they are part of – about where and how life works as it does. Understand this, and perhaps we will let more living things move through their unending cycle.

Hopeful Pessimism (Princeton University Press 2025) by Mara van der Lugt

Greta Thunberg famously told an audience at Davos, “I don’t want your hope.” What made more sense, she suggested, was for people to panic. Thunberg, it’s fair to say, is a pessimist about the climate crisis, having seen failure after failure on environmental issues by her supposedly wiser elders. Her bleak outlook might seem to allow little room for hope. But philosopher Mara van der Lugt, in this brilliant book, argues that the activist in fact embodies the virtue of “hopeful pessimism”.

Pessimism, according to van der Lugt, has had a bad press. What particularly bothers her is the association with giving up. Yes, a pessimistic attitude can lead to defeatism, but she thinks the fragility of optimism is the greater cause for concern. After all, in a dark and difficult world, it’s upbeat expectations that are most vulnerable to being upset, which may cause the optimist to move too quickly from disappointment to defeat. The pessimist has a greater capacity for withstanding the hardness of life.

Van der Lugt is particularly concerned about this in the context of activism. If optimistic campaigning depends too much on things going well, then it is “quick to burn up, quick to burn out”. Pessimism, by contrast, can provide the resilience that battling for a cause like climate justice requires, not needing to be “fuelled by either the expectation or gratification of successes”. It also encourages a more honest assessment of what’s working and what isn’t. This makes “pessimistic activism” more “sustainable”, according to van der Lugt. The case for the glass half empty is also supported via discussion of fellow pessimistic travellers such as French writer and philosopher Albert Camus.

What, then, of hope? Here, as with pessimism, van der Lugt focuses on the importance of conceiving of hope in the right way. Much as pessimism shouldn’t be equated with defeatism, hope shouldn’t be equated with sunny optimism. You don’t need to believe, in order to hope, that you are likely to prevail. The chances of success might be extraordinarily slim. You can, for all that, retain the conviction that positive change is possible. Van der Lugt puts it memorably: “with eyes full of … darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life.”

Some scenarios seem beyond hope. However, van der Lugt emphasises that her preferred conception of hope is more about meaning and morality than favourable outcomes. She writes movingly about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. The situation might have been hopeless in terms of the likelihood of success. Nonetheless, to fight itself was an act of hope, and the uprising stands out in history for its heroic resistance. The revolt was justified, to use van der Lugt’s words, “for reasons of justice, dignity, and solidarity, if not victory.” Even if a desired result can’t be achieved, there is meaning in having stood for the right thing.

To be a hopeful pessimist, then, is to believe in “a dark view of the present as well as the future”, but to hope anyway – in part because one can never be certain what may come to pass, but most of all because there is hope already in committing to an ethical life, come what may. This is a kind of hope that, as van der Lugt indicates, is not “future-oriented” but “value-oriented”.

Van der Lugt is not saying, of course, that activism doesn’t have a goal (which is, inevitably, forward-looking). Her point is that when the goal is worthy, the effort is always worthwhile, regardless of the future outcome. Moreover, in the case of climate breakdown, “even after points of no return are passed, we will still have reason to continue to do what we can” as there will still be “our duty to prevent what suffering we can.” It always makes sense, even in despair, to act ethically. In this, van der Lugt’s approach feels like a counterpoint to nihilism, which is now commonly associated with the climate crisis.

The book may not convince some of its more cynical readers. It does little to engage with those who are sceptical about moral values or who seek pleasure ahead of meaning. At the same time, van der Lugt does recognise some difficult questions around morality in our times. In a wonderful chapter on the philosopher Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope, she considers the possibility that we might be living through the collapse of our most basic moral categories.

Lear focuses on the fate of the Native American Crow tribe, whose world was devastated by colonial expansion westward, and for whom, Lear argues, the basis of meaningful action disintegrated. Yet van der Lugt concludes that, in contrast, our current ethical situation is abundantly clear: “we know what we have to do.”

This is a work filled with fascinating discussion that includes not only philosophy and politics but art criticism and literary analysis. It’s particularly helpful in showing how to integrate hope and pessimism, but van der Lugt also writes wisely about melancholy and grief. The style is accessible, touching on such diverse figures as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, China Miéville, Roxane Gay, J.R.R. Tolkien and Cornel West.

Many will find it a therapeutic read, and not only those involved in climate activism. Hopeful Pessimism is shaped by the needs of life, and in that sense it’s practical philosophy at its best. Again, it’s worth quoting Thunberg: “Hope is taking action.” These four words could be van der Lugt’s motto, and the message resonates throughout this deeply impressive offering.

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

Two years ago, I made a video about lead and crime, reviewing the research that suggests lead may very well have been the cause of a spike in crime in the 1990s. I also touched on the common refrain that high levels of lead are the reason why Boomers seem so gullible and bigoted, and …

Three years ago I made a video warning about the dangers of a law that was about to be passed here in California: the “Age-Appropriate Design Code Act” would force most, if not all websites on the internet to verify the age of users with a “reasonable level of certainty” in order to protect children …

Almost 40 years ago, I was looking into the ordinary phenomenon of worry. Midway through the materialist decade of the 80s, this was an unusual research subject. But worry, I reasoned, was the cardinal symptom of generalised anxiety disorder – a potentially debilitating condition that affects around 3 to 8 per cent of the population. I discovered that the entire academic literature on worry amounted to about six or seven papers. Curiously, no one had bothered to ask people what they worried about. I promptly conducted some surveys and sent my numbers off to be crunched by a big university mainframe.

The results were mostly unsurprising. Worries “clustered” thematically. People worried about intimate relationships, not having confidence in social situations, making mistakes at work, running out of money, and bad things happening in the world. But there was also a cluster I wasn’t expecting. It was a group of worries about having no direction or prospects and the key item was “I worry that life has no purpose”. About half my community sample fell into this unexpected cluster, which I labelled “Aimless Future”. It was something of an anomaly, more like a collection of depressive ruminations – and I was supposed to be researching anxiety, not depression.

Looking back now, I wish I’d paid more attention to these meaning-related worries. For the preceding two decades, mainstream clinical psychology, in a bid to achieve scientific legitimacy, focused almost exclusively on observable behaviour and neglected subjective phenomena. Things have moved on: today, all forms of mental activity are considered fit for study. Even so, I think many health professionals are still overlooking an interesting relationship between worry and our need to live meaningfully.

What is the meaning of life?

We tend to worry when we feel threatened. Worry is a cognitive facet of anxiety; anxiety being a much broader concept that also includes physiological responses such as an accelerated heart rate and hyperventilation. A moderate amount of worry is probably beneficial because it prompts us to prepare and problem solve. However, if we doubt our ability to cope, worry can easily become untethered from reality and spiral in repetitive loops towards imagined disasters. Because mental health statistics show that people are currently very anxious, we can be reasonably confident that levels of worry are also high.

This might suggest that we are feeling increasingly threatened and unable to influence outcomes. The worries in my “Aimless Future” cluster were also triggered by a threat: the threat of meaninglessness.

As big questions go, you can’t get much bigger than “What is the meaning of life?” It is a question that is often modified slightly, becoming “Does life have a purpose?” One can quibble over the semantics, but for most people, meaning and purpose overlap significantly. If you are looking for a purpose, you are probably also looking for meaning. During the 80s, questions concerning the purpose and meaning of life gradually lost currency. Oversized suits, padded shoulders and brick-sized mobile phones became emblematic of an emphasis on money and material success. Although power dressing dialled down, the mindset persisted, and, for a long time, western society has been more interested in acquiring “things” than “purposes”.

Today, however, “meaning” seems to be making a comeback. It is frequently chosen as a topic of conversation in podcasts and panel discussions. Commentators suggest that we are living through a “meaning crisis”. For example, John Vervaeke – a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Toronto University – has reached a large audience through his 50-episode YouTube series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”. His fundamental assertion is that our mental health would improve if we were more willing to consult philosophical and spiritual traditions for guidance.

Recent studies show that young people are especially distressed by meaninglessness. In December 2022, American teenagers and young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 were questioned for a Harvard Graduate School of Education report titled “On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges”. Fifty-eight per cent of young adults said that they had experienced little or no meaning in their lives over the course of the preceding month, and half said that their mental health had been negatively affected by not knowing what to do with their lives. Forty-five per cent were troubled by a “sense that things are falling apart”. A quotation from one of the participants gives a flavour of their mental state: “I have no purpose or meaning in life. I just go to work, do my mundane job, go home, prepare for the next day, scroll on my phone, and repeat.”

Meaning is important, because meaninglessness might be one of the main factors driving our “mental illness” statistics ever upwards. The meaning of life doesn’t feature very much in popular treatments like mindfulness, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and supportive counselling. Perhaps we need to rethink the therapeutic landscape. A shift of emphasis in the direction of meaning could be helpful.

Could therapy help?

Of course, there is nothing stopping any therapist – practising in any modality – from discussing meaning, although in reality, they are likely to have other priorities. The majority of CBT referrals, for example, are for clearly circumscribed problems, such as panic attacks or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Long waiting lists mean that there is little time available for leisurely explorations of vaguely articulated forms of existential discomfort. Yet there have always been two ways of approaching symptoms. The first supposes that symptoms can be treated in isolation, whereas the second supposes that symptoms are related to more fundamental aspects of being. A corollary of this second approach is that therapy should be as much about personal development as it is about treatment – a notion that invariably involves at least some consideration of purpose and meaning. Symptoms can be “outgrown”.

A similar relationship probably underlies the extraordinary efficacy of psychedelic medication across multiple diagnoses. Individuals suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder and addictive problems all respond well. An experience of altered consciousness (usually involving temporary ego-dissolution) changes the person’s perspective – their philosophical outlook – and symptoms become less troubling or disappear.

There are many reasons why we might be living through a meaning crisis: the decline of religion in western democracies, hyper-capitalism, social fragmentation and the pernicious effects of social media, to name but a few. A less obvious contender is bullshit. It was in the 80s that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt prophetically identified the disproportionate social danger concealed within an ostensibly amusing pejorative. While a liar is still responding to truth when he or she misrepresents it, the bullshitter operates completely beyond falsity and truth – two essential orientation points that guide us towards what is meaningful.

Far too many politicians and public figures now spout bullshit as a matter of course. Growing up in a culture mired in bullshit is confusing. There are now several studies published in psychiatry and psychology journals that have demonstrated a link between lack of meaning and suicidal ideation. Bullshit can be deadly – especially when fed to young minds through smartphones. In his recent book The Anxious Generation, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written that young people – particularly after the introduction of the smartphone – are “drowning in anomie and despair”. It is very difficult, he suggests, “to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks”.

The tradition of existential psychotherapy

The phrase “the meaning of life” sounds like a deeply embedded idea. But it doesn’t appear in English until the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle used it for the first time in 1834 (although human beings must have been reflecting on existence and purpose as soon as brain development made this kind of thinking possible). The date is significant, because in the 1830s the intelligentsia were still reeling from three revolutions: the scientific, the industrial and the French. People were looking for new ways of answering old questions.

“The meaning of life” (as used today) has two interpretations: one universal, the other particular. Firstly, we can suppose that life has a single, over-arching purpose, which eventually connects with the insoluble conundrum of why there is something rather than nothing. But apart from people of faith, few people today believe in, let alone seek, ultimate meaning. Secondly, we can suppose a plurality of personal purposes – idiosyncratic objectives that make being in the world “bearable”. As Dostoevsky asserted, human existence isn’t just about staying alive, but finding something to live for.

This is where consulting the psychotherapeutic tradition could prove useful. Existential psychotherapy rises to the challenge of finding something to live for, and it emerged from a dialogue between philosophy and psychiatry. The first significant existential psychiatrist was Ludwig Binswanger, a colleague of both Jung and Freud. His largely theoretical writings were later developed clinically by his acolyte Medard Boss.

Only two existential psychotherapists have achieved global renown. These are Viktor Frankl – who lived until 1997 – and the iconic 60s counter-culture psychiatrist R.D. Laing (although not everyone agrees that Laing was a true existential psychotherapist). Existential psychotherapy is a broad church, but it was Frankl who developed the first “meaning-based” existential psychotherapy. In his best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1946, Frankl described the genesis of “logotherapy” during his time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. In fact, he had already formulated the tenets of logotherapy before he was incarcerated in Dachau and Terezin. Concentration camps were not so much where Frankl constructed his theories, but where he tested them. Logotherapists frequently adopt a didactic method, and patients are “taught” the importance of living meaningfully before potential sources of meaning are explored.

There are now around 30 meaning-based psychotherapies, and they are all predicated on a basic assumption: meaning is so fundamental to the human animal that if we do not find meaning we will experience distress. It can be argued that psychiatrists have habitually misclassified this kind of distress as “mental illness”.

Beyond meaning

The idea that meaning is fundamental to being human is supported by neuroscience. Our most recently evolved brain areas are the frontal lobes. They mediate the functions
that distinguish us most clearly from our animal relatives – reasoning, judgement, problem solving and impulse control, for example. One of the main functions associated with the frontal lobes is setting goals. When we set a goal and achieve it, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, and we experience pleasure – or, more accurately, increased motivation to seek pleasure. The influential neuroscientist and polymath Iain McGilchrist maintains that the essential underlying function of the right hemisphere of the brain is to understand the world and invest it with meaning. We are comprehensively wired to look for meaning in much the same way as we are wired to look for food. When we are deprived of food, we experience hunger, and when we are deprived of meaning, we experience distress.

However, not everyone agrees that we should privilege meaning. Eastern philosophies like Taoism are much more about harmony than purpose. Yet in the west, many eastern philosophies and practices are popularly considered to be good for mental health. There might be some overlap. When people take up meditation, yoga or tai chi, for example, they could also be hoping to enrich their lives in a meaningful way.

In fact, the most vociferous criticism of meaningful living hasn’t come from the east. Some western philosophers complain that searching for meaning is the ultimate act of bad faith – a denial of life’s inherent randomness and absurdity. This is an important point because shying away from reality is generally thought to be damaging to psychological health.

Even if one accepts that the pursuit of personal meaning is important for well-being, there is still the question of whether narrowing one’s focus on meaning alone is optimally therapeutic. Meaning is discovered through living and a person must be ready to find it – so perhaps other psychotherapeutic goals must be met first. Millions have read Man’s Search for Meaning – it can still be found in high street bookshops after 80 years – but few go on to read about how logotherapy evolved and of the differences of opinion that arose in Frankl’s circle.

Frankl’s close associate Alfried Längle eventually disagreed with his mentor and by the 90s he was advocating for substantive modifications to logotherapy. Längle – who lives in Vienna and has established his own school of “existential analysis” – suggested that meaning is preceded by more fundamental existential goals. We need to feel safe in the world; we need to experience life as valuable; we must have some notion of self-worth. If we pursue meaning prior to completing the necessary existential groundwork, we will be less likely to experience the beneficial psychological outcomes that Frankl promised.

Personal purpose

Meaning-based psychotherapies – past and present – urge us not to find the meaning of life, but a meaning. The replacement of the definite article with the indefinite article is problematic, because it implies that any meaning will do. Can this be right? What if your chosen purpose in life is to collect Rolex watches, or Louis Vuitton handbags? To what extent can you expect purposes of this kind to reduce your existential angst? Talking to patients, one gets a strong impression that different purposes are associated with different degrees of benefit.

Frank Martela, a popular philosopher of meaning, claims that the finding of meaning in life can be expressed in a single sentence: “Meaning in life is about doing things that are meaningful to you, in a way that makes yourself meaningful to other people.” It is a definition that emphasises connectivity. The most satisfying personal meanings combine inner connectivity, that is, self-knowledge, with external connectivity – in other words, points of human contact. Martela’s account of meaningfulness creates an area of overlap with transpersonal psychology, which suggests that well-being is closely linked to reflective self-inquiry and pro-social values.

It is unlikely that collecting Louis Vuitton handbags will reveal unsuspected aspects of the self and bring you into closer relationship with others. Not impossible, of course, just not likely. Purposes have hinterlands of meaning, some narrow, some wide. Some offer few opportunities for enrichment, while others offer many. The practice of psychotherapy suggests that for most people, purposes with wide hinterlands of connectivity are more likely to be associated with improved mental health than purposes with narrow hinterlands of connectivity.

The most famous living existential psychotherapist is Irvin Yalom, a psychiatrist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Yalom has gained a large mainstream readership with titles such as Love’s Executioner, which drew on the lives of ten of his patients, and Staring at the Sun, on our ideas about mortality. Yalom isn’t usually classified as a meaning-based therapist, but meaning still features in his work. He is identified with the existential-humanist school, which has its roots in late-50s America.

For Yalom, living is a challenge because full engagement with reality makes us anxious. Consequently, we erect defences that warp and distort experience. In this respect, he is a close relative of Freud. Human beings must negotiate what Yalom calls the “existential givens” – of which there are four: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. We must accept that we are mortal, exercise choices and accept responsibility for our actions, understand that we are ultimately alone, and acknowledge that there is no cosmic purpose. Yalom – like Frankl – believes that finding personal meaning is good for us. But at the same time, he insists that we must never lose sight of the void in our metaphorical rear-view mirror. The void adds urgency to life.

Physical and mental health benefits

So much for the theory, what about the evidence? There have been many controlled outcome studies of meaning-based psychotherapies and the results have been – on the whole – positive. They seem to be particularly suitable for people suffering from depression, and more generally, successful completion of therapy is associated with reduced stress and improved quality of life. They are also notably helpful for people suffering from chronic or life-threatening conditions. This shouldn’t be too surprising, perhaps, as the existential tradition engages with the big questions of life and death more than any other.

So, why aren’t more people offered meaning-based therapies? Answer: there aren’t that many meaning-based psychotherapists. CBT has become the dominant therapeutic modality in the UK and the US. This is largely because CBT practitioners were among the first to conduct successful and well-designed outcome studies. Moreover, CBT developed primarily as a treatment for problems that have observable symptoms. If after ten sessions of CBT a former agoraphobic can leave his or her home, then this is a decisive and irrefutable indication of improvement. Proving that a vague sense of aimlessness has lifted and that life has become more meaningful isn’t quite so straightforward.

Some have also suggested that the ascent of CBT in the 80s was assisted by the prevailing cultural headwinds. A cheap, efficient therapy was viewed favourably, especially when compared with the interminable labour of psychoanalysis, which can take years.

However, given the current state of the nation’s mental health, I can’t help wondering whether mainstream clinical psychology was wrong to restrict its scope in this way. Perhaps we should have been more willing to consider the bigger picture.

Meaning is undoubtedly important, and it is perplexing that – until very recently – it hasn’t featured very much in public conversations about mental health. After all, most of us will have experienced periods in our lives when meaning has become elusive. We are familiar with the consequences: the feeling of being adrift; the obfuscating fog of a vaguely depressive malaise; the hollowness that we try to fill with ineffective substitute gratifications. Frankl identified a pernicious mental state that he called “Sunday neurosis”. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, time to kill; the void gaining confidence and pressing against the windows as twilight falls.

Living meaningfully isn’t only good for our mental health; it seems that it also improves our physical health. In 2023, Frank Martela and colleagues analysed a large US medical data set that was collected over a period of 23 years. The results, published in the journal Psychology and Ageing, found that both satisfaction and purpose predict physical health and longevity; however, people who lived purposeful lives lived longest. This was the first time that a study comparing purpose and satisfaction as competing variables had been conducted.

'The meaning crisis'

As a culture, we pursue happiness, but the effects of happiness on longevity are in fact weaker than the effects of meaning. It is interesting that the Brain Care Score – a measure developed recently at the McCance Center for Brain Health in the US to motivate patients to reduce their risk of developing age-related brain disorders – contains a section devoted to the assessment of “Meaning in Life”. Meaning is acknowledged as a factor relevant to brain health and longevity, along with more obvious candidates such as blood pressure, cholesterol, exercise, diet, sleep and smoking.

When I reflect on my old worry research, I can see now that the annoying “Aimless Future” cluster that I ignored was a real missed opportunity. It might even have been the seedbed of what has since become the florid malignancy of the meaning crisis. As Albert Camus pointed out, meaning is a serious business. When human beings can’t find a reason to live, they tend to decide not to live. Someone in the world decides not to live every 40 seconds.

“What is the meaning of life?” It is a question that we have become accustomed to encountering in humorous contexts where it is usually linked with the number 42. If we stop taking it seriously, perhaps the joke will be on us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have recently carried out some detective work into one of my favourite paranormal studies.

It all began with an article that I co-wrote for The Psychologist about how research into the paranormal is sometimes ahead of psychology. In the article, we describe a groundbreaking study into eyewitness testimony that was conducted in the late 1880s by a paranormal researcher and magician named S. J. Davey (1887).

This work involved inviting people to fake séances and then asking them to describe their experience. Davey showed that these accounts were often riddled with errors and so couldn’t be trusted. Modern-day researchers still cite this pioneering work (e.g., Tompkins, 2019) and it was the springboard for my own studies in the area (Wiseman et al., 1999, 2003).

Three years after conducting his study, Davey died from typhoid fever aged just 27. Despite the pioneering and influential nature of Davey’s work, surprisingly little is known about his tragically short life or appearance. I thought that that was a shame and so decided to find out more about Davey.

I started by searching several academic and magic databases but discovered nothing. However, Censuses from 1871 and 1881 proved more informative. His full name was Samuel John Davey, he was born in Bayswater in 1864, and his father was called Samuel Davey. His father published two books, one of which is a huge reference text for autograph collectors that runs to over 400 pages.

I managed to get hold of a copy and discovered that it contained an In Memoriam account of Samuel John Davey’s personality, interests, and life. Perhaps most important of all, it also had a wonderful woodcut of the man himself along with his signature.

I also discovered that Davey was buried in St John the Evangelist in Shirley. I contacted the church, and they kindly send me a photograph of his grave.

Researchers always stand on the shoulders of previous generations and I think it’s important that we celebrate those who conducted this work. Over one hundred years ago, Davey carried out a pioneering study that still inspires modern-day psychologists. Unfortunately, he had become lost to time. Now, we know more information about him and can finally put a face to the name.

I have written up the entire episode, with lots more information, in the latest volume of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If anyone has more details about Davey then please feel free to contact me!

My thanks to Caroline Watt, David Britland, Wendy Wall and Anne Goulden for their assistance.

References

Davey, S. J. (1887). The possibilities of malobservation, &c., from a practical point of view. JSPR, 36(3), 8-44.

Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The spectacle of illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. Thames & Hudson.

Wiseman, R., Jeffreys, C., Smith, M. & Nyman, A. (1999). The psychology of the seance, from experiment to drama. Skeptical Inquirer, 23(2), 30-32.

Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the seance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297.

Delighted to say that tonight at 8pm I will be presenting a 60 min BBC Radio 4 programme on mind magic, focusing on the amazing David Berglas. After being broadcast, it will be available on BBC Sounds.

Here is the full description:

Join psychologist and magician Professor Richard Wiseman on a journey into the strange world of mentalism or mind magic, and meet a group of entertainers who produce the seemingly impossible on demand. Discover “The Amazing” Joseph Dunninger, Britain’s Maurice Fogel (“the World’s Greatest Mind Reader”), husband and wife telepathic duo The Piddingtons, and the self-styled “Psycho-Magician”, Chan Canasta.

These entertainers all set the scene for one man who redefined the genre – the extraordinary David Berglas. This International Man of Mystery astonished the world with incredible stunts – hurtling blindfold down the famous Cresta toboggan run in Switzerland, levitating a table on the streets of Nairobi, and making a piano vanish before hundreds of live concert goers. Berglas was a pioneer of mass media magic, constantly appeared on the BBC radio and TV, captivated audiences the world over and inspired many modern-day marvels, including Derren Brown.

For six decades, Berglas entertained audiences worldwide on stage and television, mentoring hundreds of young acts and helping to establish mentalism or mind magic as one of the most popular forms of magical entertainment, helping to inspire the likes of Derren Brown, Dynamo and David Blaine. The originator of dozens of illusions still performed by celebrated performers worldwide, Berglas is renowned for his version of a classic illusion known as Any Card at Any Number or ACAAN, regarded by many as the ‘holy grail’ of magic tricks and something that still defies explanation.

With the help of some recently unearthed archive recordings, Richard Wiseman, a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and a friend of David Berglas, explores the surreal history of mentalism, its enduring popularity and the life and legacy of the man many regard as Master of the Impossible.

Featuring interviews with Andy Nyman, Derren Brown, Stephen Frayne, Laura London, Teller, Chris Woodward, Martin T Hart and Marvin Berglas.

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

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

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