I had to go shopping to replace my sad, tired, old winter coat, and I got this.

I see that “Carhartt” logo all over stuff here in the midwest. Did it work? Am I fashionable now?

---

Oh no! I am not one of the cool kids. The neighbors next door (a house full of college kids) is warming up for something — probably a big party tonight — and are out on their deck and throwing firecrackers and woo-hooing. That’s fine, but I noticed what they’re wearing.

That’s from a company called GameBibs, and I guess that’s how students show school spirit nowadays, wearing overalls with stripes in the school colors. I looked over there and my first thought was that it must be National Clown Day, or something, but no. It’s just that I’m not cool. Not cool at all.

Niall Gooch is a very Christian man. He writes for the Spectator, a conservative British news weekly, but he also publishes in the Catholic Herald and in Premier Christianity. He must be a good Christian, right?

Who needs evidence, trials, lawyers, and juries? Just break out the calipers.

But really, I haven’t seen anyone discussing physiognomy as an indicator of behavior in ages (I don’t read Quillette). OK, though, if it’s a simple science (not that Niall Gooch has any knowledge of science) and anyone can do it, let’s try it.

This is Niall Gooch.

Diagnosis, anyone?

I’m going to say…gormless dweeb, not very bright but with a lot of unfounded confidence, not to be trusted with information or the dissemination thereof, shouldn’t be allowed outside the border of a small village.

Honest, I inferred that entirely from his face, not all from the stupidity of what he writes.

Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.

Increasingly, I’m seeing stories about how Trump’s policies are going to actually hurt the people who voted for him.

I don’t care. We’re all feeling the pain now, and it’s not going to end soon, and it’s going to get worse. These people who voted for him deserve all the pain they experience, and I’m all for making them miserable about it for the rest of their lives. It looks like Rebecca Watson feels the same way.

I won’t forgive them. Every day of this horrific administration does greater damage to the country.

Did you know Trump is going to take over the US Postal Service? You know, the service many Americans use to vote? It’s going to be a wasteland here.

The Spring 2025 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! This issue is all about the fight to save democracy.

Subscribe now from just £10 or buy a single issue online and in all good newsagents. Read on for a peek inside the magazine.

Trump's second coming

To many evangelicals, the new US leader is not just a president but a messiah. How did he gain such mythic power, and where will it lead? Matthew D. Taylor, an expert in Christian nationalism, introduces us to the wild characters behind Trump's return who now have a hotline to the presidency.

"Eclectic groups of big-haired televangelists, self-described prophets, mega-church pastors and Messianic rabbis would gather with Trump in New York, listening to the real-estate mogul's agenda, laying hands on him and – crucially for what was to come – offering prophecies about him."

What's the point of politics?

Some of the questions about the future of democracy point to the fundamentals: What do we even want from our politicians? James Ball explores an age-old debate between idealism and pragmatism and how it's showing up in British politics today.

"After two decades of relentless financial shocks – the subprime loans crisis, austerity, Brexit, Trump, the pandemic and more – the public is tired of the art of the possible. It is looking to the dreamers, and historically, dreamers don't deliver, at least not within democratic systems."

The age of the narcissist

Narcissists seem to be all around us, but is this psychological disorder really on the rise – and are our politicians particularly prone? Journalist Bethany Elliott untangles the science from the pop psychology.

"Amateur diagnosing can have troubling consequences, and not only for the people who stand falsely accused."

The Spring 2025 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe or buy a copy here.

Also in the Spring 2025 issue of New Humanist:

• Keith Kahn-Harris on how to keep the anti-racist movement united
• Danny Sriskandarajah on what citizens' assemblies can do for democracy
• Sam Meadows on Javier Milei's gamble with the lives of Argentinians
• Michael Rosen on the history and meaning of the word "coup"
• Andrew Mueller on how to topple tyrants
• Nicola Cutcher speaks to Syrian human rights defender Mansour Omari about the search for justice after Assad
• Zoe Holman on the death of a Palestinian poet
• Stephen Fry on doubt, masculinity and why it's hard to be a woolly liberal
• Alex Niven on the dead malls of the north
• Durdana Bhat and Kamran Yousuf meet India's revolutionary gender fluid dance troupe
• David McAllister on digital art through the ages
• Martin Cohen on the growing evidence that animals enjoy a good laugh, and what we can learn from it
• Why Shaparak Khorsandi is proud to be friends with her ex-husband's new wife
• Marcus Chown on the greatest astronomy PhD ever written

Plus more fascinating features on the biggest topics shaping our world today, and all our regular science columns, book reviews, original poetry, the cryptic crossword and brainteaser.

Subscribe to the print edition now to get a beautiful copy of the magazine delivered to your door, or choose a digital subscription to read it on the app.

New Humanist, a quarterly magazine of culture, ideas, science and philosophy, is published by Humanists UK.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Last month, Donald Trump was once again sworn in as President of the United States. That same day, the head of the organization responsible for the standards and safety of planes and air traffic control …

Democracy observers were dismayed in January when Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – announced that it would be ditching its fact-checking system. The company had previously worked with third-party fact-checkers to detect misinformation circulating on its platforms. This content was not removed but had warnings added to it.

The system is now being replaced with “community notes”, where users of the platform monitor content voluntarily. Posts are flagged and a warning label appears once a majority consensus has been reached among the volunteers. However, it’s not yet clear how or whether these people will be vetted.

The “community notes” approach was pioneered by X (formerly Twitter) and research into their system by the Washington Post found that only around 10 per cent of proposed notes end up being shown. The notes were found to be effective at tackling misinformation in some cases, but the bigger concern is the rationale that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used to justify the change. He accused fact-checkers of being politically biased and said the change was necessary to prioritise free speech. He also said he’d be moving the company’s content moderation teams out of California – a Democratic stronghold with a liberal reputation – to Texas, a majority Republican state “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”.

The move looks like part of Meta’s attempts to appease President Donald Trump, who has previously accused social media platforms of censorship, threatening intervention. Trump himself said he believed the changes were in response to his warnings against the company.

With social media an increasingly important source of news and information, the announcement sparked serious concerns about the potential impact on public discourse and democracy – especially because it’s not just Meta making these concessions. Along with the community notes system, X has also reinstated previously banned accounts since Elon Musk took over in 2022, and research suggests that hate speech on the platform has significantly increased since then.

The consequences are not to be underestimated. We saw in the UK last summer how misinformation online can lead to real world violence, when false allegations on social media that an immigrant was responsible for the Southport attacks led to riots and anti-immigrant assaults. More broadly, it is impossible to hold the powerful to account without access to accurate information.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

The Church of England is in crisis once again, following the recent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. As the search begins for a successor, the latest developments show its continued failure to tackle the abuse scandals that have dogged the Church for decades, and the unlikelihood that its next leader will enact real reform.

Justin Welby stepped down in January after an independent review found that although he had been informed about horrific and extensive abuse allegations against a Church volunteer in 2013, soon after he became archbishop, he failed to inform the police (Welby says he erroneously believed that the police had already been notified). That decision enabled the man – John Smyth – to evade justice until his death in 2018. A media investigation finally brought the case to light.

Then in December, just weeks after Welby announced his decision to resign, his predecessor George Carey quit the priesthood over his handling of a separate abuse scandal. An investigation found that during his tenure as archbishop in the 1990s, Carey allowed a man named David Tudor to return to the priesthood after a multi-year suspension due to sexual abuse allegations. Tudor remained in post until 2019, when police opened a new investigation into him.

Welby was seen as a moderniser within the Church. His tenure saw the introduction of women bishops and blessings for same-sex couples. He was outspoken on issues of poverty and economic inequality. And yet his failure to tackle the abuse scandals shows the limits of that reform. What’s more, his farewell speech in the House of Lords – where he held an automatic seat due to his position in the Church – demonstrated a severe lack of empathy for victims and failure to accept responsibility. He appeared to crack jokes during the speech and told the Lords that a head had to roll over the scandal – “whether one is personally responsible or not”.

Nor is Welby’s resignation the end of it. Some victims want to see the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell – who has taken over Welby’s duties until a successor is appointed – resign as well. In a former role as Bishop of Chelmsford, Cottrell allowed Tudor to remain in his post within the diocese, despite knowing about the abuse allegations. Cottrell has resisted those calls to resign, saying he “inherited” the situation and had no legal grounds to do anything about it because the allegations had already been dealt with by both police and a Church tribunal (Tudor was convicted of indecent assault in 1988 but the conviction was quashed on technical grounds).

Only one senior Church leader has put their neck on the line over the issue. Helen-Ann Hartley, the Bishop of Newcastle, was the only bishop to publicly call for Welby’s resignation. She has also been highly critical of Cottrell’s handling of the Tudor case. For her troubles, she says she has been “frozen out” by her Church of England colleagues.
It is expected to take many months to choose Welby’s successor, but with Hartley likely out of the picture, the next Archbishop of Canterbury will undoubtedly come from the ranks of those who stayed silent, at least publicly. We can only hope that once installed they will truly stand up for victims, prioritising human wellbeing and justice over the institution they serve.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

My country, the United States, is quite religious, making it an outlier within the developed world. Generally, in nations where wealth and prosperity increase, piety decreases, but we Americans dramatically buck this trend. We are more likely to pray daily, to attend worship services and to say that faith is important to our lives compared to our economic peers throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and so forth.

This American strangeness around religion is attributable, at least in part, to the way the First Amendment to the US Constitution bars the “establishment” of any religion as a state-sponsored entity while protecting the “free exercise” of all religions. Combined, these two principles have helped create a two-and-a-half-century, free-wheeling culture of religious entrepreneurship and a seedbed for religious innovators, including Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam; L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement; and Billy Graham, global Christian evangelist.

To this list, we must now add one Donald J. Trump, reanimated president of the United States, who – though he is not personally overtly pious – has become an icon of many US Christians’ religious hopes and devotion. He has as much ridden the present-day wave of US Christian anger and fear as he has created it. But Trump is a singular figure in US history. Never before have Americans had a national political leader who was the subject of so many prophecies, elicited so many religious comparisons and inspired such fervent adoration. So what is the context around Trump’s religious appeal, and how did he come to revolutionise and radicalise a huge swathe of Christians in America?

Failed political goals

Historically, Christians have made up such a large segment of the US population that most political coalitions have contained believers of numerous stripes. However, this began to change with the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, when evangelical Christians coalesced as a voting bloc to bolster Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party to victory in 1980. Reagan’s presidency inaugurated a new era of conservative Christian activism around opposing abortion, curtailing LGBTQ rights, banning pornography and encouraging the teaching of the Bible and Christian morality in public schools.

But, by 2015, despite supplying incalculable support to the Republican Party, the leaders of the US religious right had accomplished few of their major policy objectives. The internet has made pornography more prevalent than ever. Abortion rights had some new state-by-state limitations by 2015, but the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade decision – protecting women’s right to abortion until the foetus reached a point of viability outside of the womb – was still the overarching national policy. Government-funded schools were as secular and divorced from religious instruction as at any period in US history. And the icing on the cake came in June 2015 when the Supreme Court enshrined the legal protection of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

Compounding this sense of disgruntlement was the fact that, beginning around 1990, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian began to decline precipitously. Before 1990, surveys consistently found 90 per cent or more of Americans claiming the Christian label. By 2015 that had dropped to around 70 per cent, and it has continued to fall to around 66 per cent today. That kind of rapid secularisation in a population has huge cultural effects because every percentage point represents millions of individual Americans. From the perspective of conservative, politically active US Christians, 2015 was a nadir, a moment of frustration and even despair, as they surveyed decades of intense political investment with few notable achievements.

There was also outsized fear among many evangelicals that persecution was imminent in an increasingly secular and pluralistic society. A feeling began to rise throughout the right-wing Christian coalition that they needed a fighter, a bare-knuckled brawler, who would bring them back from the looming cultural periphery. And it was in the early summer of 2015 that Trump jumped into the US presidential race.

Compared to the crowd of more conventionally Republican and straightforwardly evangelical candidates in the primary, Trump was an oddity: thrice-married, a braggadocious New York real-estate developer and reality TV star with no experience holding public office. Moreover, in many of his early attempts to appeal to religious voters, Trump was buffoonish and silly. He told one interviewer that he could not recall ever asking God for forgiveness (something that is definitional to Christian identity). He infamously invoked “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians” when speaking at an evangelical university. He even mistakenly dropped some money in the communion plate that was being passed at a church, believing it was the offering plate.

So how did this ham-fisted, foul-mouthed, areligious (if not irreligious) one-time political neophyte become today’s icon of American evangelicalism? For that part of the story, we must look to Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, and her coterie.

'A spiritual assignment'

White-Cain is a charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor in Florida. “Charismatic” here refers to the miracle-seeking, speaking-in-tongues kind of Christian; think Pentecostal but less inhibited. In 2002, she received a phone call out of the blue from Trump, and at first thought it was a joke. Trump had seen her preaching on TV, and he called her up to say, “You have the ‘it’ factor.” Her half-tongue-in-cheek response: “Sir, we call that the anointing.” They hit it off. She invited him as an occasional guest on her televangelism show, met with him when she was in New York, and eventually bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower. She felt that God was showing her that Trump was “a spiritual assignment” for her.

So when he entered the presidential race years later, Trump turned to White-Cain for help with one of the most vital aspects of his campaign, asking her to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals”.

This presented an interesting quandary. White-Cain was part of the nondenominational, charismatic sector of evangelicalism. This energetic, immersive, technologically savvy but diffuse world was up and coming. Both in the US and globally, it’s the fastest growing segment of Christianity. About half of all self-identified evangelicals in the US participate in this charismatic spirituality. But like Trump at the time, charismatic leaders like White-Cain were the scrappy, populist outsiders on the American right. Some of them don’t even have brick-and-mortar churches but have built itinerant, online ministries with podcasts, YouTube channels and prophecy conference circuits. These preachers might have millions of followers, but much of the American public viewed them as the wild-eyed, tongue-talking, televangelist-fraud part of the church – the lunatic fringe. And more conventional evangelicals treated them at the time as embarrassing country cousins – distantly part of evangelical culture, but of the low-brow variety.

But Trump likes people who like him, and these people liked him. By the fall of 2015, White-Cain was arranging meetings between the would-be president and charismatic religious leaders. These were strange events. Eclectic groups of big-haired televangelists, self-described prophets, megachurch pastors and Messianic rabbis would gather with Trump in New York, listening to the real-estate mogul’s agenda, laying hands on him and – crucially for what was to come – offering prophecies about him. Many of these leaders embraced “dominion theology”, an assertive theological framework that Christians are supposed to “take dominion” as quickly as possible over every nation, ruling in Christ’s name and restructuring societies around their reading of the Bible. Others were extreme Christian Zionists, believing the modern state of Israel (alongside the US, of course) to be God’s ordained vehicle for initiating the end-times return of Jesus. Many in these meetings also practise intense forms of what they call “spiritual warfare”, praying and prophesying against elaborate hierarchies of demons they believe hold the US in spiritual bondage.

A central figure in these early meetings was a pastor and business consultant named Lance Wallnau. He is one of the chief proponents of this “dominion” idea, with millions of followers globally tracking his prophecies and teachings. Wallnau declared to Trump in their second meeting that he had received a new prophecy: Trump had a “Cyrus anointing” and was God’s choice to be president of the US. In case the reference is lost on you, Cyrus was an ancient Persian emperor who, in the sixth century BCE, sent the Jews back from their exile in Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem. In Isaiah 45, God speaks of Cyrus as a mashiach (messiah, anointed one) for Israel. So Wallnau was proclaiming Trump a sort of secular messiah for US Christians. He might not be a good man, but he’s God’s anointed for the purpose of delivering us from cultural exile.

Two practical outcomes of these 2015 meetings are still impacting US politics today. First, many of these previously fringe leaders became the inner core of Trump’s Christian advocates, with White-Cain acting as gatekeeper for their access to Trump. Under her watchful eye, every one of Trump’s various Christian advisory councils (always chaired by White-Cain herself) has been stacked with half or more nondenominational charismatics. This has created a new power centre on the American religious right, bringing a potent, albeit eccentric, group of outsiders into positions of prominence. In the space of a decade, a growing cascade of local charismatic evangelical activists – pastors, prophets, Christian parents angry over pro-LGBTQ school curricula – has rapidly taken over the landscape of the religious right. They have targeted state legislatures, local school boards and city councils, getting their candidates elected, and are now attempting to infuse more Christianity into every institution over which they can gain control.

Second, the new prophecies about Trump that began in these circles have continued to proliferate, giving rise to a spiritual mythos around Trump as an instrument of God. When he unexpectedly won the presidential race in 2016, it gave rocket fuel to this narrative, because the prophets and their followers saw his ascension to office as a miraculous fulfillment of their revelations. Millions of US evangelicals who 10 years ago would have disavowed belief in modern-day prophecy have now embraced the Trump prophecies. In fact, a series of surveys I helped conduct with the political scientist Paul Djupe of Denison University in 2023 and 2024 found more than 40 percent of American Christians (roughly a quarter of all Americans!) at least tentatively affirming a cluster of these previously marginal charismatic “dominion” concepts, including modern prophecy.

Prophets, pastors and Messianic rabbis

By the time of the 2020 election, there were hundreds of these Trump prophecies being posted daily on charismatic social media, discussed on televangelism shows and picked up at political rallies. When Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, his cohort of charismatic advisers began promoting a revolutionary and deeply anti-democratic message: Trump is still God’s choice, and Christians must persevere, protest and do spiritual warfare to see him reinstated. Some claimed to have visions of Satan orchestrating elaborate election frauds. This narrative of demonic sabotage dovetailed with the more mundane conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, fraudulent votes and other lies that Trump and his allies fed to the US populace after the 2020 election: the demons and the Demoncrats (one of their favourite word plays) were in league together.

There were many forces that fed into the 6 January insurrection, but Trump’s legion of charismatic supporters were a major factor. They did more than supply a theological rationale. Dozens of prophets, pastors, Messianic rabbis and “spiritual warriors” – including White-Cain and Wallnau – travelled to Washington DC to join the rally in person. At least six of these leaders have even been prosecuted for joining the physical invasion of the Capitol building.

Crucially, following Trump’s removal from office, when the Republican establishment was doing their best to distance themselves from him and the failed insurrection, many of the charismatic leaders stayed loyal, along with an increasingly radicalised evangelical base. If any doubt started creeping in, one event greatly helped lock in their fealty: in June 2022, the Supreme Court – to which Trump had appointed three arch-conservative justices – reversed Roe vs Wade and devolved abortion policy-making back to the individual states. This was, credibly, the most tangible and unmitigated success of the American religious right in the course of more than 40 years.

Trump went on to bulldoze through the 2024 Republican presidential primary, just as he had done in 2016. The choir of prophets and pastors, conducted by White-Cain, proved to be his most effective propagandists. They dismissed the criminal prosecutions against Trump as persecution, casting him as a righteous victim of sham trials and diabolical schemes, just as Jesus was. They presented the election as an apocalyptic showdown between God’s anointed and the united forces of demon-inspired secular and “woke” politicians who would ruin US Christianity if they remained in power (even though Biden is a devout Catholic and Kamala Harris was herself raised in a Black Pentecostal church and now attends a Baptist church). They prophesied that Trump would sweep back into power like the vengeful biblical king Jehu. Wallnau even stood up his own voter mobilisation effort, in league with the Trump campaign, to drive voter turnout in swing states.

The two failed assassination attempts on Trump helped to cement the narrative that he was specially protected by God. Many evangelical leaders who had previously been tepid in their support came forward to declare that God’s hand was obviously on the man. Trump even posted AI-generated images on social media of himself sitting alongside Jesus, asserting that God had spared his life to save the country. He also made repeated promises on his campaign trail to end “Christian persecution” in America.

Over a long decade in American politics, Trump has mutated from debauched reality TV star to evangelicals’ dark messiah. In his first term, he clearly prioritised the demands of his Christian base, appointing their preferred judges and foregrounding their culture war issues. If he concedes to even some of their demands this time around, it could profoundly undermine US democratic systems and realign the tenuous balance of church and state.

He also proved in his first presidency that he is mercurial, easily distracted and magnetised to self-enrichment above all. In his second administration, very little is predictable, but one thing is clear: Donald Trump has hitched his wagon to Christian rage and is remaking American politics. Whether that ends up finally initiating conservative Christians’ desired utopia, dissolving US democracy, or becoming another strange but passing moment in US religious history, none of us can truly foresee.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Coup, 19th century: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow of an existing government

There are times when people feel that their native tongue lacks a word, so they grab it from another language. One such is “coup”, which is a shortening of “coup d’état”: word for word, a “blow of state”. Most of us know that it’s French because we pronounce it as “coo”, and as we might expect from French words, it has Latin origins: colpus, meaning a blow or hit.

Today the meaning is a blow against the state, but it was first used – in 1646, according to the Oxford English Dictionary – to mean an act of state. Its first insurrectionary usage may be in the London Morning Chronicle in 1804, referring to Napoleon crowning himself as emperor of the French.

“There was a report in circulation yesterday of a sort of coup d’état having taken place in France, in consequence of some formidable conspiracy against the existing government.”

Since then, world history has been full of coups – some failed, some successful, and some denied. Famously, President Trump denies that the attack on the Capitol Building following the election of Joe Biden in 2020 was an attempted coup. Given that Trump was still in office at the time, any efforts to stop the transfer of power would actually be termed a “self-coup”, or “autogolpe”, which derives from Spanish. It refers to an illegal action against others in a regime – for example, the courts or parliament – with the goal of extending the leader’s stay in office or expanding their power.

A more recent example comes from South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol declared emergency martial law in December. Weeks later, he was suspended from office and is now undergoing trial. He has been charged with leading an insurrection.

The number of coups d’état around the world has increased in the last several years, especially in the so-called “Coup Belt” in Africa, covering parts of the Sahel and west and central Africa. So, it’s hardly cynical to say that that the word and its derivatives will be needed for a long time to come.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's spring 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! Hey guys, a new death cult just dropped and I absolutely must insist that you NOT join it. “Me, join a death cult?” you ask. But look, I know my audience and I can tell …

Last year I saw a super cheap mistake fare from the Bay Area, where I live, to Costa Rica, a country I’ve always wanted to visit. So I booked it without really thinking about the timing. Anyway, I just got back from eight days of surfing and reading on the beach with minimal internet. Here’s …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for the outrageous act of … teaching the theory of human evolution. Out of the state’s own authorized textbook! Still, this violated the Butler …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Just a warning, this is one of those videos that’s a bit more personal and not really about any new, interesting science or debunking any bad science or anything like that. I’m letting you …

I’m filming this video a few days after Trump’s inauguration and I’m watching my news and social media feeds filling up with information about all the executive orders he’s signing and what they mean and which parts of Project 2025 these things check off and wow is it stressful! Because yeah, I made that video …

This is the 2025 follow-on from the 2024 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2025 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

The Edinburgh Magic Festival takes place soon, and I am staging a few events, including a talk on the magical history of Edinburgh, a magic workshop (joint with slight of hand expert Will Houstoun), and my ‘Invention of Magic’ show. For details, please click here. 

As part of the event, I have teamed up with Festival co-founder Svetlana McMahon and the amazing Young Carers charity to produce a fun optical illusion exhibition. Together, we created some mind-bending illusions, and then photographed the carers staging the images around the city. Each photograph features young carers doing what they do every day – making the seemingly impossible possible. 

If you are in Edinburgh, please pop into the Storytelling Center on the High Street, enjoy the free exhibition and watch our behind-the-scenes video. Here are a few of my favourite images….

 

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! 2024 has been an eventful and uneven year, one marked by important steps forward and more than a few difficult setbacks. Progress, much like history, does not move in a straight line. No matter what the path, however, the intended destination remains (as Richard Dawkins himself says …

I recently received a lovely email from a pal of mine, Ian Franklin. We met when I investigated alleged ghostly phenomena at Hampton Court Palace, and so I thought that it would be a good time to re-visit the work.

As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

This historic Palace has been home to many British monarchs and is now a popular tourist attraction. It also has a reputation for being haunted, with many people experiencing unusual phenomena in an area now known as ‘The Haunted Gallery’. The letter invited me to carry out an investigation (the first at a Royal Palace).

I put together a team of researchers (Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe) for a five-day investigation. It proved to be lots of fun. For instance, before we started, the Palace staged a press conference to announce my study. During a break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and some teenagers drove past. Weirdly, one of them threw an egg at me and it smashed on my shirt, leaving a large stain.  I returned to the press conference, said that the stain was actually ghostly ectoplasm and that this is going to be a tough investigation. 

At the time, Ian Franklin was working as a palace warder. He was kind enough to go through the historic records and figure out where people had reported unusual phenomena in the Haunted Gallery.   

Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

So, what was going on? We discovered that some of the experiences were caused by natural phenomena (e.g., subtle draughts), and speculated that others might be due to areas looking dark and scary. But who knows, maybe there actually are ghosts at the Palace! Importantly, the work showed that it was possible to carry out a rational and open-minded investigation into an alleged haunting, and it paved the way for my later ghost work (more about that in another blog post). Alas, little did I know that there would soon be lots of people (including those on TV) carrying out somewhat less scientific investigations into alleged ghostly phenomena!

Anyway, it was wonderful working with Ian, and the journal article about the study is here, and it also described in Paranormality. 

This week we will take a detailed look at an optical illusion that I created to shrink people.

There are a few ways of making someone look small. One approach involves making everything else big! Here is a great example of that from a Trick Eye exhibition in Japan. The picture is huge and the glass is painted on the back walls (I pressed my hands against the ground beforehand, so that they looked like they were being pushed against the glass).

Another approach involves forced perspective (making a far-away object appear much closer to the camera) – a technique used in the famous Beuchet Chair illusion….

It’s wonderful but is still a big build. I wanted to create something that was far more portable, and had the idea of moving the chair very close to the camera. Here is how this new illusion looks and works.

All of the details and templates were published in the journal iPerception and I was especially happy with the article because that’s my mum in the photos! I have used the idea lots over the years, ….

….including in this quirky video……

Next week I will reveal a brand new optical illusion! Oh, and if you are in Edinburgh, I will be giving a talk on the 28^th December at MagicFest about the strange intertwined lives of three master magicians from the city. One was the most famous illusionist in the world, another perfected a trick that revolutionised magic, and the third was frequently asked to appear in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Do come along, fun will be had. Details here.

Welcome to another Thursday post celebrating curious mind stuff. This week, we enter the world of illusion! 

I have created many optical illusions over the years, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with some of the smartest and most inventive folks in the field. Olivier Redon is certainly one of those people. Working with his daughter Chloe, Olivier creates new illusions and wonderful twists to existing ideas. A generous soul, his pieces are as playful as they are fooling.

Here is his Oh La La Box, which won the Best Illusion of the Year in 2021. Simple but brilliant….. 

A man after my own heart, most of Olivier’s creations are built from cardboard and paper, and show how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another instance, the dynamic duo have joined books and boxes together in impossible ways….

Our paths first crossed when I created a version of the Beuchet Chair, only to discover that Olivier had had pretty much the same idea several years ago (mine involves an addition of a fake cloth to help with the illusion of continuity)!  
Olivier has also used the same idea to make objects shrink and grow in desktop version. Genius. Olivier is based in San Francisco and creates for the fun of making something new and the joy of sharing it with younger minds. Who knows, perhaps there will be a museum dedicated to his work. 

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

How do you find your creative ideas? 
Very interesting question. At first, I paid attention to what was around me. But then, over time, I noticed that there were no big changes in the world of optical illusions, and so I decided to do something about it and create something new myself. Now I have more than 50 optical illusions that fill 3 rooms in my house!

Who are your heroes of the world of optical illusions?
Jerry Andrus, because he invented so much, yet had no computer or printer! He just worked with metal, cardboard, or wood. I found Jerry Andrus via the internet in 2022, but I didn’t know him before that because I wanted to create my illusions without knowing about what already existed.

Should all the classrooms in the world have optical illusions? 
Of course! It is so much fun to play with your brain and especially for adults, children, teachers and students.     

You can find out about Olivier’s great work here and read more about it in this article.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

Another Thursday, another dose of curious stuff. Here is a strange tale combining magic, a trip to Paris, and some remarkable photographs.

In the early 1890s, French scientist Alfred Binet teamed up with several magicians (including sleight of hand expert Edouard-Joseph Raynaly) and photographer Georges Demeny to discover how magic fooled the mind. Demeny had helped to create an early type of film camera and was using it to analyse fast movements by reducing them to a series of rapidly taken still photographs. His clockwork camera could move 24 frames past a lens at the rate of one every tenth of a second. Publishing the results in an 1894 article, Binet describes how the images removed the magician’s patter and speed of movement, and so exposed the illusions. The photographs were not reproduced in Binet’s article, but it did contain a curious note explaining that they were ‘stored in laboratory records.’

I came across Binet’s article when I was writing my PhD on magic. A few years later, I decided to search for the missing images. I first contacted an expert on early film, Professor Marta Braun (Toronto Metropolitan University).  Marta wasn’t aware of the images, but suggested that I reach out to an archivist at the French National Library named Laurent Mannoni. After several weeks of discussions and searching, Laurent discovered 3 sets of Binet’s images in the archive. I headed to Paris!

Once in the archive, Laurent led me into a darkened room filled with amazing objects, including Demeny’s camera, apparatus from the famous French magician Robert-Houdin and the 3 sets of images! These images were breath-taking and involved Raynaly springing cards between his hands (11 images), changing one playing card into another (11 images) and making a ball vanish (24 images). Laurent kindly allowed me to make digital copies of the photographs. On the train back to the UK, a thought occurred to me. If I were to present each set of images in rapid succession, I could recreate Raynaly’s performance from over a century ago! So that’s what I did and here is one of the films.

The film shows Raynaly dropping the ball from one hand to another, passing back into his upper hand and then the ball vanishing. Don’t blink or you will miss it! Historians often cite 1896 footage of British magician David Devant as the earliest film of a conjurer, but Demeny’s film predates Devant’s footage by at least two years. I have shown the Raynaly film at many conferences and conventions, and he always receives a much-deserved round of applause!

So, there you have it. A magical detective story borne of curiosity and luck, that ended up uncovering the world’s earliest film of a magician.  What do you think? It’s easy to imagine none of this happening. What if the article hadn’t stuck in my mind. Or Maria hadn’t been as helpful? Or Laurent hadn’t been as generous? But I am glad that it did.

Further reading:

Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Lachapelle S. (2008). From the stage to the laboratory: magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 44(4), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20327

Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016). Scientific Study of Magic: Binet’s Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography. The American journal of psychology, 129, 313–326. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.3.0313

All images except Binet, copyright Richard Wiseman

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

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

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

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

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