It’s been over a decade since I even thought about Thunderf00t AKA Phil Mason. He had a blog here on FtB for about 3 days before he flamed out spectacularly — he decided to use his opportunity here to screech about feminism, and rant about all us cucks and how contemptible the site was. He was an embarrassing disaster, and we kicked him out (although, unfortunately, he kept his password to the backchannel and copied all the private discussions we’d had about this mess, and dumped them to the denizens of the slymepit.) He was a truly awful, obsessive, immoral person, we discovered.

Now Rebecca Watson picks at the scab and tells us what Thunderf00t is obsessed with now. It’s Elon Musk. I can’t fault him for that, but I can fault him for being so bad in his arguments. He is objectively bad at making arguments about anything.

Would you believe Thunderf00t still has one million subscribers on YouTube? Getting booted off freethoughtblogs didn’t do him any harm at all.

Bryan Johnson, that weirdo millionaire who wants turn aging backwards, taking megadoses of supplements and transfusing himself with blood from his son, has another game he plays with his kids: plethysmography! Every night they strap a measuring device on to their penises, and then the next morning they compare the frequency and duration of their erections.

So far, the kid is winning.

How many of you would make this effort for your kids? And still aren’t in prison?

Yet another consequence of the election: scientific meetings are being shut down.

Several meetings of National Institutes of Health study sections, which review applications for fellowships and grants, were canceled without being rescheduled, according to agency notices reviewed by STAT. A Feb. 20-21 meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a panel that advises the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services on vaccine policy, was also canceled. So was a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria that was scheduled for Jan. 28 and 29.

The scope of the cancellations was unclear. It was also unclear whether they were related to the Trump administration’s freeze on external communications until Feb. 1.

Let’s stop all progress on research into vaccines and antibiotics. It’s not as if we’ll ever have another pandemic.

You know, this is going to get depressing fast. Every morning I’ll be getting up first thing in the morning to the latest horrible, evil act executed by this administration. I’m going to have to think of something to break this spiral of doom whirling away in my brain.

Here’s an appropriate comic.

Just change that last word from “January” to “United States of America.”

I’m bewildered. I’m an anti-theist, so it makes me uncomfortable when I see a priest acting charitably and kindly and proposing that people should follow a higher moral calling. I am forced to admit that there are good people in the priesthood. Like Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their spouses were in attendance for the church service at the progressive institution, and had to listen as the Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop at the cathedral, delivered a direct appeal to the president to conclude her sermon.

“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families—some who fear for their lives,” Budde said, but didn’t stop at LGBTQ rights, going on to address Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” Budde continued.

The bishop then called on Trump “to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.”

I did have some of my biases confirmed, because Trump and Vance squirmed and scowled and generally acted like demons listening to the Lord’s Prayer. The words burned! You can tell they’re already dreaming of their vengeance, because how dare an Episcopalian bishop suggest that citizens should not fear for their lives? Their little gang of followers sitting behind them look stupefied.

Of course, Trump went home and banged out a rant, demanding an apology. He’s not used to people criticizing him.

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!

Lies from beginning to end. “So-called Bishop”? How dare she bring politics into a prayer for the presidential inauguration? There has not been a giant crime wave caused by immigrants. The service couldn’t have been that boring, since she stirred up a few members of the crowd.

She is pretty good at her job, since she made this hard-core atheist feel some charity towards her faith.

Now, please, if only our media would stop pandering to the madman and publish sincere criticisms of him every time he plays the petty tyrant, that is, every day. Make him squirm all the time.

Absolution (Fourth Estate) by Jeff VanderMeer

Prequels often feel unnecessary; they indulge in gratuitous over-explication of things that never needed to be explained. Not so with Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution, a prequel to his Southern Reach trilogy which deliberately scrambles chronology and sequence to deny the possibility of origin, backstory and explication.

The Southern Reach trilogy was published simultaneously in 2014 and is now considered a pioneering work of what M. John Harrison has called “new weird” fiction, mixing elements of science fiction, fantasy and horror to create layered and deliberately alienating texts. The first of the novels was adapted for the screen by Alex Garland in the 2018 film Annihilation (the titles are alliterative: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance).

While describing a plot that seeks to erase its own narrative progress may seem a little futile, the novels are broadly about a mysterious event in the 1990s that transforms a section of swampy coastline, possibly in Florida or possibly in the Pacific Northwest, into something else: Area X. Teams of researchers from the mysterious government agency Central are sent in to cross the Border into Area X and are themselves transformed in obscure ways – changed into animals or monsters or doppelgangers of themselves. The expeditions learn little about this mysterious zone where the laws of nature don’t apply – an area which, over the course of the three novels, begins to grow.

Absolution is split into three sections taking place in three timelines: 20 years before the Border, 18 months before the Border, and during the first Border crossing. These specific chronological markers, though, exist mostly to be blurred and undermined. Rabbits wearing cameras, sent to study the Border, show up in Absolution decades before Area X is supposed to exist, but seemingly transformed by it – turned into meat-eaters, devouring crabmeat and then each other. Old Jim, a Central agent, discovers a diagram on a wall in an abandoned building which seems to outline the forthcoming “plot” of the rest of the books. Jim muses that the “future” is “colonising the past, as if every moment had a permeability that could neither be desired or controlled, like an outstretched hand with the water draining off the sides back into the river.”

The reference to colonisation is an important hint. In his 2008 study Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder pointed out that in science fiction narratives, colonising territory is often framed as colonising the past, since other cultures are supposedly further back along the Darwinian/evolutionary timeline. The notion of progress and linear advancements into the future becomes a way to distinguish between us (advanced, intelligent, worthy to rule) here and them (primitive, worthy of subjugation) over there.

In the first three Southern Reach novels, the distinction between here and over there is blurred and swallowed. People enter Area X and discover a doppelganger of themselves, already across and staring back. The borders collapse and move and seem to transpose themselves across great distances. In Absolution, not just space but time melts down. Cameras replay scenes that never happened; walkie-talkies turn themselves on and start speaking nonsense from nowhere.

The last section of the book is told from the point-of-view of Lowry, a drugged-out and narcissistic military specialist who is part of the first expedition. We know little about Lowry’s background; his main characteristic is that he says “fuck” so often that it turns into a kind of narrative chaff. You follow his exploration of Area X through a haze of sexual and perceptual frustration that mirrors and intensifies the expedition’s own perplexity, as when he laments the inadequacy of his colleague’s expertise: “Fuckable fucking fucked fuck future terminology for college degrees that fucking fell fuck apart in the fuck field like fucking paper bags filled with fuck water.”

Is Area X a mystery because of its own mysteriousness, or because of the scientists and spies attempting to investigate and categorise? Are the book’s readers agents like Old Jim, who along with him “Sift through thin lines of dead seaweed and barnacles to know your future, or maybe just your past”? Like the trilogy, Absolution creates layers of words and speculations that mock and infiltrate any attempt at interpretation.

The pleasure of the novel is precisely this sense of being overwhelmed, of “scrabbling” with the “panic of fifty spasming rabbits” at a cage of crabmeat and old memos. H.P. Lovecraft would infamously tell the reader that the nameless things out there were indescribable, but VanderMeer sets out to actually make the reader feel like their cognition is being leached away. The author could be referring to his own work when he describes some of the Central biologists’ journals as expressing “a descent into a vast internal void, a kind of babbling nothing”. That’s a description of horror. But in the freedom from borders in time and space, it also feels like a kind of absolution.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Answers in Genesis is thrilled at everything Trump promises to do. You know what else makes them happy? That Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have embraced a Biblical worldview, finally realizing that sex is binary and simple, just like the Bible says. Skip ahead to about 7:30 if you don’t want to hear them fawning over Trump, don’t bother listening at all if you don’t want to hear their appreciation of Dawkins and Coyne (also some guy named Pinky or Pink…they knew there was “pink” in the name).

It doesn’t mean much. These are creationists, they always pick and choose which words they’ll hear. But isn’t it interesting that some New Atheists are converging on a dogmatic religious view?

The hot, humid air greets me as I step out of Cuiaba’s airport, in Brazil’s western Mato Grosso state. I grapple to get my bearings in the sauna-like atmosphere and dive into the first taxi. Marcus Silva, the middle-aged, sturdy driver, wants to know what brings me to the area. “I’m assuming the Pantanal, am I right?” he asks. It’s a fair guess. The world’s largest tropical wetlands draw thousands of tourists every year to admire their flooded plains, home to toucans, macaws, ibis, caimans, capybaras and the region’s crown jewel: jaguars. Close, but not quite, I tell Marcus. “You’re reporting on the conflict between jaguars and cattle ranchers? Now that’s a polemical topic,” he chuckles, amused at the idea of a foreigner approaching locals to talk about such a sensitive issue. But his smile fades as he recalls the anger of ranchers when jaguars feast on their livestock. “It’s a problem,” he said.

The Pantanal, which means “great swamp” in Portuguese, is bigger than England. Most of its 42 million acres are in Brazil, but it also spills into Bolivia and Paraguay. Covered by dense, low-forested savannah and a grassland swamp fed by tributaries of the Paraguay River and seasonal floods, it is a biodiversity hotspot. The abundance of prey makes it the perfect habitat for jaguars. The Pantanal is also a hub of economic activity. Around 95 per cent is under private ownership, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Cattle roam freely in unfenced private ranches, sharing the same habitat as all the other animals, including jaguars. Coexistence between the latter and Pantaneiros, as cattle ranchers in the region are known, is tense.

Strained relations between humans and wildlife are far from unique to the area. When human settlements encroach on wildlife habitat, issues such as livestock predation arise, as can competition for resources. Faced with a rapidly deteriorating natural world, calls for methods to lessen hostility have become more urgent. This is especially the case when the species are already under threat. The panthera onca is classified as a “near threatened” species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Killing them is a crime in Brazil. It can lead to hefty fines, and even prison. But despite its illegality, a quick Google search brings up dozens of stories of hunted jaguars, their bodies found maimed and decomposing.

Ecotourism is one way to lessen these tensions between humans and wildlife. It’s been growing in the Pantanal, reflecting a broader trend worldwide. As the climate crisis and biodiversity loss accelerate, travellers are increasingly seeking to minimise the negative impact of tourism by giving back to unique natural environments, and supporting threatened or near-threatened species like the jaguar. While Africa is the place to see lions, cheetahs and leopards, word is increasingly getting around that Brazil’s Pantanal is where one can spot a jaguar. A 2017 study from the Federal University of Mato Grosso and the University of East Anglia estimated that the jaguar tourism economy generated up to 56 times more income annually than the financial losses inflicted on livestock farmers when jaguars feed on cattle. And the industry has grown significantly in the last seven years.

Who benefits?

I go to meet João Losano Eubank Campos Júnior, whose blue eyes dart nervously around the room as we talk. He is 48 years old and one of the owners of the Piuval cattle ranch located near the town of Poconé. Like many in the region he has German heritage, his ancestors attracted to the country after it gained independence in the 19th century. Today, approximately 2,000 cows wander around Piuval’s 7,000 hectares of plains and forests. So do around half a dozen jaguars. New-born calves, in particular, are easy prey. “I grew up with the idea that you have to kill jaguars because they eat the cattle – our only source of income,” he said. But then his father started welcoming guests onto the family farm back in 1989. He was one of the first cattle ranchers to explore this new avenue of income. At the time, there was no infrastructure to put up visitors. Campos Júnior recalls being kicked out of his bedroom as a child to make room for the foreigners. “I thought they wanted to see birds. I didn’t know they wanted to see jaguars,” said Campos Júnior. Today, Piuval is known as one of the best places to spot jaguars in the region, and the profits are increasing each year.

Today there are many guesthouses and eco-lodges, with around a dozen along the Transpantaneira, one of the main roads that crosses the Pantanal. While some have been set up on cattle ranches as a side business, others were built specifically to cater for eco-tourists. Aymara Lodge is one of these, built in 2019. When I visit the lodge I meet a Canadian couple in their 70s. “We made a 12,000-kilometre trip to see jaguars,” Ela Piaseczny tells me, her eyes twinkling. Her husband tells me that on weekends they like to hike, canoe or kayak back home in Vancouver, Canada, and that this love of the outdoors is “what drives us to come to places like where we are now, hoping to see it preserved and available for next generations to come”.

Their enthusiasm is contagious and I awake the next morning brimming with excitement. The sun is yet to rise when I meet up with Benedito Almeida dos Santos, a 23-year-old guide with a face framed with dark curls. I climb into the open-topped jeep, wrapped in a raincoat in a fruitless effort to keep the mosquitoes at bay. As we ride down the dirt track in the early morning mist, dos Santos says to keep an eye out for El Patrón, a dominant male jaguar believed to weigh over 100 kg. I take the instruction to heart, scanning the surroundings relentlessly. Unfortunately, that morning El Patrón evades us. “I last saw him 10 days ago, he crossed right in front of us,” dos Santos tells me. The image of the jaguar has changed since he was a child, he says. “Before, if you were to speak with a local senhorzinho (elderly man) about jaguars, he would say you have to kill that animal. But now if you spoke with him, he would say gringos (foreigners) are coming to see them, we shouldn’t kill them.”

But while ecotourism can improve relations between jaguars and the ranchers who benefit, conservationists warn that it is not a silver bullet. The profits can often be unevenly distributed, with more of the income going to locals who own land in the right locations, or who possess the kinds of skills needed to work in the tourist economy. In the Pantanal, many cattle ranches are located too far from the few roads that cross the biodiversity hotspot and are limited by a lack of infrastructure. That disparity creates resentment. “I think a lot about my neighbours,” Campo Júnior tells me, his voice straining. “It’s not fair that I am earning lots of money whilst they are losing income to jaguars. That’s a problem, and I don’t want that. I’m seen in the village as a traitor.” Businesses that benefit from tourism have even been accused of breeding jaguars – an allegation that they strongly deny.

However, the behaviour of the animals does seem to have changed. Porto Jofre is one of the most popular places to spot jaguars, at the end of the Transpantaneira. Jeeps zoom up and down the potholed, muddy road, dotted with wooden bridges. Dozens of boats await upon arrival to take eager visitors to the riverbanks where jaguars can almost always be sighted. Aymara Lodge took 93 groups of tourists to Porto Jofre last year, and spotted jaguars on 92 of them. “Many of the adult jaguars today were cubs when boats and tourists began to arrive and are used to them,” said dos Santos, the guide. This may be good for the tourists, but wildlife experts warn of the dangers of jaguars getting too comfortable with the presence of humans. Although it’s illegal, some people still kill the animals, and fear is a natural reaction intended to keep them safe. Ecotourism more generally runs the risk of unsettling long-established relationships between animals and humankind, potentially creating unforeseen consequences.

The climate threat

Wildlife, however, is being endangered by a much more existential threat. Incentivising locals to preserve the environment is one tool in the broader fight against climate change and one means with which to manage its consequences. Climate change has already made the Pantanal hotter and drier. Wildfires are a common natural phenomenon in the area, but in recent years these have increased. In 2020, flames ravaged around a third of the Pantanal and affected 45 per cent of the estimated jaguar population, according to a 2022 study. Those fires were considered the worst in the region’s history and killed 17 million vertebrates. Jaguars perished in the flames, while others faced displacement, hunger and dehydration.

This year, the number of blazes also broke records. The fires started early, following prolonged drought, combined with high temperatures and low rainfall. They didn’t let up, and social media has been flooded with images of skies reddened by fire or grayed by smoke, flames encroaching roads, and charred jaguar cubs.

In the next few decades, Brazil’s centre-west region, where the Pantanal is located, is expected to become hotter while its southern region turns rainier. Júlio Cesar de Souza, a biology professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, believes that the lack of rain and increase in fires are leading to greater awareness of the need to preserve the Pantanal. “People are realising that if we don’t do our homework, if we don’t conserve the fauna and flora, in the future we may no longer have water in the Pantanal,” he says. “Without water, the farmer will eat sand.” In December, Mato Grosso do Sul’s state parliament sanctioned the “Pantanal law”, which obliges rural properties to protect 50 per cent of areas covered with forest or with tropical savannah. Environmentalists hope it will help tackle soaring deforestation rates, which grew by 25 per cent in Mato Grosso between 2016–2022 compared to 2009–2015, according to Brazil’s space research institute. A drier and hotter Pantanal makes the production of beef even more challenging, adding to traditional Pantaneiros’ woes and leading some farmers to abandon their ranches.

For many, cattle farming is synonymous with destruction of the environment, particularly in the Amazon rainforest, where trees are felled to make way for cows. About a third of human-caused methane emissions come from livestock, mostly from the bovine burps of beef and dairy cattle. Illegal deforestation resulting from cattle farming is also a problem in the Pantanal, where large cattle farms have been slapped with fines for hacking away at the biome’s unique vegetation. But while fewer cattle ranches would be better for the environment, some say it is a less harmful form of industry for the Pantanal than others. A 2021 study published in the Natural Sciences journal of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, a Brazilian research institute, showed that, as long as the native vegetation is maintained on a large scale, cattle ranching more closely aligns with the objectives of conserving the biome than mining, charcoal production or the construction of hydroelectric dams, all which have all increased in past decades. This is partly because without cattle grazing on the grass and keeping it trimmed, fires spread even faster.

“We need public policies that create an integrated production system for wildlife conservation and livestock production,” says Souza, the biology professor. One solution he proposes is the creation of large reserves linked by ecological corridors where jaguars and others can move around freely. Roberto Klabin agrees that integration is the best approach. He’s an environmentalist and owner of Caiman, a site that combines cattle ranching with ecotourism and conservation activities. Of its 53,000 hectares, 18,000 are dedicated to rewilding projects. “We have influence in an area that is very, very large and we have created a model that can be implemented in other areas of the Pantanal, or even in other areas of Brazil,” he said.

Finding solutions

In April, Brazil’s Congress put forward a bill intended to further discourage farmers from killing the predators, while also lessening the damage caused when they lose their livestock. If approved by parliament, it would make the killing of jaguars a “serious” environmental crime. The current penalty is a significant fine and jail time up to a year, but changing the definition might involve increasing the penalty. Ranchers meanwhile would be compensated at the market value of their animal.

Other organisations are taking the matter into their own hands. Paul Raad, a 34-year-old originally from Uruguay, oversees the Human-Wildlife Coexistence project, run by the animal welfare NGO Ampara in partnership with the São Paulo State University. Its aim is to protect the livestock in the Pantanal. “If I protect the cattle, I’m protecting the jaguar,” the freckled, curly-haired veterinarian explains, as we drive past fields where herons mix with white cattle with horns. A storm is brewing overhead and the partly flooded plains reflect the darkening sky.

We jump out of the jeep, just as the rain gathers pace. “This area is called the maternity ward, it’s where we bring cows that are about to give birth,” Raad says, pointing to a delimited area of around half a hectare. Jaguars had worked out that they could easily pick up calves here, so Raad equipped it with fences. At night-time when pregnant cows and calves are locked in, an electric current runs through two cables 25cm and 75cm off the ground. “Electrical confinement is a way of saying – ‘OK, you’ve got a solution, so you don’t kill the jaguar any more,’” Raad tells me. No jaguar has ever eaten a calf when the electric fence was working: the system has a 100 per cent success rate.

Jaguars face a myriad of threats resulting from humans, including angry cattle ranchers and an accelerating climate crisis which threatens their habitat. Ultimately protecting every species in the Pantanal is essential, but jaguars play a particularly crucial ecological role at the top of the food chain. Preserving the Pantanal requires collaboration with cattle ranchers, offering them opportunities that align with conservation goals. Ecotourism, despite its limits, is an important way forward – not only for the Pantanal, but for the future of our wildlife, and for some of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People (Princeton University Press) by Paul Seabright

Not long ago, religion seemed to be in terminal decline. But, as Paul Seabright points out in his impressive new book, it is now going from strength to strength. Local cults or “ethno-religions” may have dwindled, but the big brands are doing well: Christianity still commands the loyalty of about a third of the world’s population, while Islam has climbed to a quarter, and the proportion identifying as atheists and agnostics has dropped slightly in recent years.

What can explain the persistence of religion? Seabright’s starting point is simple but smart: that religion is not really a matter of belief. Religious creeds are, he argues, “the result of belonging to a religion, and not the reason why people belong to a religion in the first place”; on top of that, they tend to be vague, ambiguous and “incompletely worked out”. For most religionists, in short, “believing is optional”.

Much of The Divine Economy is devoted to exploring the part played by religion in half a million years of human evolution. Religions confer benefits on communities, Seabright claims, by promoting “grand and ambitious stories” which offer dignity and hope, making their adherents bolder than they would otherwise be and thus promoting material prosperity. Religions also give stability to social structures, generating discipline not from some centralised authority but – at minimal political cost – from “the vigilance of their members”. Without religions, he concludes, we would never have become the “cooperative, talkative, narratively minded, entrepreneurial animals that we are”.

Seabright is an economist by profession, and the most original passages in The Divine Economy are those in which he argues that religions are essentially “businesses”, competing with one another for “wealth, power and people”. But religions are businesses of a special kind: they are “platforms”, according to Seabright, which means that they function like enormous clubs. Instead of supplying their clients with discrete products such as tomatoes, bicycles, or haircuts, they put them in touch with each other and facilitate their interactions, so that, as the saying goes, “their customers are their product”.

Most of us are familiar with platforms in digital incarnations such as social media, online marketplaces and crowdfunding sites; but they existed long before the internet, and the old-time religions are, according to Seabright, a prime example. He begins his book with a straightforward question: why do desperately poor people give away their money to very rich churches? The easy answer would be that they have been gulled into paying for goods that will never be delivered, but Seabright maintains that they are making a sensible bargain: buying access to a boundless community which will supply them with fellowship and security, along with connections to potential friends – including people of wealth, influence and privilege, and eligible marriage partners. That is why religions have weathered the storms of modernity – repeated confrontations with scientific rationality together with inter-religious rivalries – without shedding popular support.

Seabright has done something very unusual in The Divine Economy: he has found something new to say about religion. We owe him thanks, but we may also wish he had gone a bit further. He says very little about the personal significance of religious experiences, which makes his book rather like an account of the movie business that fails to mention any films. But in a way that is exactly his point: religions, like other businesses, are woven out of many strands, every one of which – from artistic exhilaration to platitudinous tedium, from serious inquiries to silly rituals, from loving kindness to cruelty, exploitation and sexual abuse – can also be found in non-religious institutions. There is, it would seem, nothing special about religion.

Religion still enjoys distinctive prestige, however, and Seabright notes that political operators like Erdoğan, Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi and Netanyahu have bolstered their popularity by wrapping themselves in cloaks of piety. But he also points out that religions which align themselves with politicians may put off potential followers. That is, however, a rather narrow way of viewing the links between religions and politics.

When mass progressive parties came into being in the 19th century, they had a lot in common with religions, often consciously so (think of “the religion of socialism” and “the religion of humanity”). Like religions, they functioned as platforms, offering their members infinite comradeship based on strong narratives of collective hope, but without requiring much in the way of detailed beliefs. (The same applies to their wicked young siblings: mass parties of the right.)

Those of us who look forward to a future without religion are left with a tricky question: when is a religion not a religion? If the world ever falls into line with our wishes, and everyone comes together to support humanism, socialism, science, peace and environmental salvation, will that mean the world-historical defeat of religion, or its ultimate triumph?

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

In March 1928, in Moscow, 53-year-old philosopher and scientist Alexander Bogdanov performed a blood transfusion. He transferred his own blood into a 21-year-old student, Lev Koldomasov, and that of the young man into himself. Initially the transfusion went well, but that evening Bogdanov began to suffer aches and pains throughout his body, as well as fever and vomiting. This was not surprising. Bogdanov had chosen the student because he was suffering from tuberculosis and malaria. For several years Bogdanov had been experimenting in transferring blood between people, including his wife, various students – and even Lenin’s sister.

Bogdanov was no crank. He was one of the great philosophers of Soviet Russia, and a close ally of Lenin’s at the beginning of the Bolshevik movement; there is a possible alternative history in which he would have been their leader. But it was to the question of blood that he was to devote the last years of his life. His basic aim was simple: he wanted to slow down and possibly even stop the ageing process. He thought he had worked out a way to turn back the human clock. Mutual blood transfusion. It was altruistic. It was collective. It was, he thought, Marxist.

On 7 April, it killed him. But the idea did not die with Bogdanov. From its socialist roots, we are seeing the same effort pursued today at the extreme end of capitalism, by tech billionaires and longevity enthusiasts, whose aims are not always quite so altruistic.

A very special substance

Blood. A baby contains a cup of it, an average human around five litres. Throughout human existence it has been loaded with social, cultural and religious significance. It gives us strength. We spill it for our country. We use it for sacrifices and ritual. We drink the blood of Christ. It invokes elemental fears – ticks, leeches and mosquitos are “blood suckers”. Not to mention vampires.

It was the English physician William Harvey who gave the first full description of the circulation of blood in 1628. Previously it had been believed that blood was produced in the body, the liver being the usual candidate, while being consumed at the same rate as a form of nutrient. Harvey found it improbable that the liver could produce so much blood – five litres per minute – so consistently. His insight was that no new blood was being produced. It was the same blood over and over again. Or, as Harvey put it in the self-effacing language of the academic, “There must be a motion, as it were, in a circle.” This meant that the heart could now be regarded as simply a pump for moving liquid around – a piece of machinery, albeit an ingenious one.

If this was a type of demystification, it wasn’t long before new mysticisms were rushing in to fill the space. If blood was simply a liquid, could it not be replaced with another substance, for instance in the case of massive blood loss? Or might a better liquid be found, which would lead to a longer life? The craze for answering such questions swept through the scientific community, and the non-scientific too. Attempts to replace blood with other substances proved unpromising. Blood seemed to need to be replaced with blood. So the next question was, could it be transferred – from person to person, animal to animal, or even from species to species?

Soon after Harvey’s publication, transfusion became a proper object of scientific study. The first animal-to-animal transfusion, between two dogs, was carried out by Richard Lower in 1665. Two years later in France, the physician of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Denys, seeking a viable source of blood for those who had lost it, performed the first animal-to-human transfusion, transferring the blood of a sheep to a 15-year-old boy, who survived. Although the quantity of blood transferred was tiny (thus preventing the sorts of complication familiar to us now), Denys was encouraged to continue. Unfortunately his next two subjects, into whom he transferred calf’s blood, both died.

Seeking transformation

Back in Britain and undeterred by Denys’s failure, Lower transferred lamb’s blood into a man named Arthur Coga, a 32-year-old graduate of Cambridge University, who was “the subject of a harmless form of insanity”. It was felt that the gentleness of the lamb would be transferred to Coga, whose insanity manifested in a “tempestuous character”. For the first time in the medical domain, the idea of transfusion was coupled with the possibility of supra-sanguine effects. (Coga himself later wrote to the Royal Society to complain that he had in fact been transformed into a sheep and, now unemployable, had begun pawning his clothes, or “Golden Fleece”. He signed the letter “Agnus Coga” – Coga the Sheep.)

This new way of seeing the body as mechanical in design coincided with philosophical ideas concerning the transformation of humans – “upgrades”, as it were. No less a thinker than René Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637), posited a future where humans would remain vigorous and healthy for ever, while in his 1793 text Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, the English philosopher William Godwin – father of Mary Shelley – argued for the possibility of “earthly immortality”.

But it wasn’t until 1818 that the first human-to-human transfusion was carried out. British obstetrician James Blundell wished to help his patients, many of whom were dying of postpartum haemorrhage. Using one patient’s husband as a donor, he was able to save a woman’s life, and would carry out 10 more such operations over the next few years, making himself a millionaire in the process.

Throughout the 19th century, the experiments continued, with varying degrees of success. Most ended in failure, and the failures were mysterious – they seemed to follow no discernible pattern. It was only the discovery of “blood types” by the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner in 1900 that solved the mystery, although it would be another 28 years before our current classification system (O, A, B, negatives and positives, and so on) was adopted.

Everything was in place. Enter Alexander Bogdanov and the Soviet Cosmists.

Blood, betrayal and the Bolsheviks

Born Alexander Malinovsky in 1873, he had, as was the trend in early Bolshevik circles, changed his name to something more exotic. Bogdanov read Marx young, Lenin in his early 20s, and with the latter co-founded the Bolsheviks in 1903. For the next six years his influence in the party was second only to Lenin’s, and they worked side by side, producing pamphlets, giving speeches – even planning bank robberies together.

Their split was both arcane in its subject matter and magnificent in revealing how much was at stake in early Soviet thinking. Bogdanov’s philosophical work attempted to resolve the notoriously tortuous question of the relationship between subject (the human) and object (the outside world). He called his solution empirio-criticism, and it argued that the world can only be apprehended by experience. We cannot posit a world outside our own subjectivity, so the objects of the world can only be approached as objects of consciousness. It was a denial of duality, an embrace of unity.

This was an anathema to Lenin, for whom the material world – objects outside the mind – was fundamental. It is, he argued, material conditions that form the human. Marx said so. His response to Bogdanov’s position was the long and very shouty Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) in which he accused Bogdanov of the ultimate thought-crime: falling prey to metaphysical idealism. Bogdanov was expelled from the party he had helped to create.

But Bogdanov was not to be dissuaded from his ideas, and went deeper into them, attempting to formulate a universal science by seeking the organisational principles that underly all systems. He called it tektology. His work Tektology: Universal Organisation Science, published in three volumes from 1912 to 1917, proposed a sort of proto-structuralism, anticipating many of the ideas in what is now known as systems theory. For all the differentiation in parts of a system, there was a basic structure which held it together, and a change in one part affected the whole.

It is in his later Essays in Tektology (1922) that Bogdanov first explored the relationship between his ideas and the question of ageing. All previous attempts to tackle this “disease” had treated it as any other illness – analysing the symptoms, and prescribing various cures for each one. But tackling each symptom separately was only a partial intervention. Old age was a totality.

What was needed was, as we would say now – and Bogdanov in fact said then – a “holistic” approach. Only in blood transfusion, he argued, is the whole self intertwined with that of another; and then only if the transfusion is two-way, a “simultaneous interchanging transfusion, from individual A to individual B, and from B to A”. Two bloods exchanged will have their own strengths and weaknesses, developed over the course of each of their lives, which will then be gifted to the other person.

For Bogdanov, the ne plus ultra of such an exchange was that between older and younger individuals. The young blood would help the older individual “with their struggles”. But wouldn’t the old blood age the young? No, because “the strength of youth consists in its enormous ability of assimilation and transformation” – it would fight off the detrimental effects. And the gift for the young would be all the immunity that the older subject had built up.

Not only that but “from an organisational point of view” this would cause “a positive increase in the sum of elements for evolution”. Over time, the whole human race would gain an advantage. Bogdanov did grudgingly acknowledge that there might be problems. “It is clear,” he wrote at the end of the essay, “that the indicated path is full of difficulties and even dangers”, including “the possibility of transmission of illnesses”. As we have seen, in this he was prophetic.

Transhumanism, then and now

As Michel Eltchaninoff describes in his recent Lenin Walked on the Moon: The Mad History of Russian Cosmism, Bogdanov’s experiments were part of a particularly Soviet form of utopianism. Cosmism, a cultural and philosophical movement, proposed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to heal the sick, but to vanquish death. This interest in the transformation of the physical self encompassed interplanetary travel, as this might facilitate eternal life, or even the resurrection of the dead. Eltchaninoff argues that these Soviet thinkers can be seen as precursors of transhumanism.

Transhumanists seek to modify humans through technology. It is a growing field in both medicine – where advances in genetics, robotics and AI have led to major breakthroughs in tackling disease and injury – and philosophy, where the implications of “modified humans” are explored in terms of epistemology (what it means to be human) and ethics. For example, is the use of brain-computer interfaces (see page 42) ethically justifiable?

Some philosophers have embraced transhumanism wholeheartedly. The German philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, in his 2021 book We Have Always Been Cyborgs, speaks of humans as “carbon-based transhuman technologies” which fit his definition of cyborgs – “a governed, a steered organism”.

The British philosopher Max More calls transhumanism the “continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values”. But these ideas have not just found sympathy in philosophical circles. They have gained huge traction among the super-rich (see page 18). Elon Musk and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are just two of the better-known tech moguls interested in transhumanist thought, which positions the domination of space and the pursuit of longevity as expressions of human uniqueness and liberty. More’s philosophy of extropianism, which focuses on self-improvement while espousing small government, individual rights and the protection of “people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress”, dovetails with many of the goals of these entrepreneurs of the transhuman.

One common goal of transhumanists is, unsurprisingly, to defy death. Tech billionaire Bryan Johnson estimated in a 2024 interview that he spent $2 million a year on attempting to halt and reverse the ageing process. He takes 80 vitamins and minerals a day, eats 70 pounds of pureed vegetables a month, has taken 33,000 images of his bowels and has 30 doctors at his beck and call. He also recently transferred a litre of blood from his 17-year-old son into his own body, and donated a litre of his own blood to his 80-year-old father. He seems to believe, as Bogdanov had a century earlier, that younger blood would be beneficial. The project was scrapped as “no benefits were detected” but Johnson hasn’t ruled out further attempts.

Meanwhile, the startup company Ambrosia, created by Jesse Karmazin, a medical school graduate without a licence to practise medicine, began selling “young blood transfusions” for $8,000 in 2016. Banned in 2019, it is still a hot topic on such sites as lifespan.io (“crowdsourcing the cure for aging”), while other private providers are seeking to have the practice legalised. As with Johnson’s experiments, while benefits for humankind are touted, it is generally an extreme form of individualism that is front and centre.

Morals and motivations

To Bogdanov, his experiments with blood transfusions were a form of socialism. As much as he wished to gain an advantage by young blood being transferred into him, it was his hope that Lev Koldomasov’s ailing body would utilise the immunity he had developed over his longer life. In fact, Koldomasov made a full recovery – he lived until the mid-1980s, shortly before the end of the USSR. He would go on to spend his own life tackling the future – as a climatologist.

The sort of utilitarian motivation of Bogdanov seems radically absent from many of the would-be immortals of today. Transhumanists seem not to dream of a future in which all of humankind benefits equally from the advances they imagine making and being made. Theirs is a world, it seems, of perfected individualism, along recognisably capitalist lines, and with recognisably capitalist fissures that separate the worthy from the unworthy – or, to use blunter words, the rich from the poor.

Insofar as these are fantasies, they are, in a sense, exactly what one would predict from the sort of culture in which these people continue to acquire more and more command over life and death. But it can only be hoped – and with some confidence – that their final victory will remain just that: a fantasy.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

“Why late love is so much better than young love”; “The midlifers who found love on a dating show”; “The truth about dating in your 50s”. These are a sample of recent headlines from just one British newspaper, The Times, which seems to be mining endless clickbait on the topic of midlife dating. Some readers might sneer, but I marvel at the victory they represent.

Amid all the horror of the US Supreme Court overturning abortion rights, and the broader backlash globally against women’s rights, it’s easy to forget that one of the world’s biggest and most undervalued progressive victories – especially for women – has been divorce.

Divorced women of my parents’ pre-war generation, and the baby boomers that followed them, felt the burden of shame and isolation, whatever their cultural or faith background. Their children did too. And it was always a gendered shame. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland in 1996. State control of women’s bodies and behaviour was so entrenched that the Irish state made it possible for men to marry each other three years before it allowed women any right to abortion in 2018.

In a way, the subject of divorce has been on my mind for decades. Partly because, aged 21, I wrote my degree thesis on Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the politics of Victorian marriage law – a few months, as it turned out, before my own parents separated.

The novel was a sensation on its publication in 1848, because it dared to challenge the long-established legal principle that on marriage, a woman’s possessions and her children became the sole property of the husband. Brontë’s account of a woman defying the law to flee a violent husband with their young son and seek independence was an important landmark on the road to the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act – a law that gave English women the earliest limited rights to their own earnings.

I thought about Anne Brontë again when my own divorce was finalised in 2023, after 27 years of marriage. I felt so grateful to the many women who’d fought for the rights we now enjoy, and who enabled me to be unafraid. I saw how often women born before me had been
pressured to give up paid work to raise children, often making it difficult to strike out alone. And, until 2000, there was the double unfairness of having no right to a share of their husband’s pension.

Having witnessed my parents’ divorce at close hand, I now see I planned from a young age never to be dependent on a man. A privileged choice, I know. Too many women must battle either poverty as single mothers, or in some cases the patriarchal biases of foreign court systems for access to their own children abducted by ex-husbands.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust famously chronicled the cruel farce of an innocent husband staging an adulterous weekend away to give grounds for divorce from his unfaithful wife. Despite some legal reform in 1969, no-fault divorce was only definitively introduced in England in 2021, ending the humiliating requirement to produce a morally tinged “reason”, such as adultery or unreasonable behaviour, and removing the possibility of one party disputing the decision to divorce.

The Office for National Statistics reported a huge leap in divorces that year – over 113,000 in England and Wales, mostly petitioned by women, and suggesting a dam-burst of couples waiting for the legal change. The divorce rate dropped by nearly 30 per cent the following year, unsurprisingly, but has since begun to settle down again.

Other evidence on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that women with their own wealth, once free from unhappy marriages, are in no rush to marry again. The Washington Post earlier this year cited the figure of over seven million households in the US with a net worth of $1 million or more headed by women, most of whom reach that milestone by age 58.

Given the legal principle of a 50-50 split of assets on divorce in British law, many older women here too are choosing to maintain new relationships out of wedlock, and sometimes in separate homes, if they’re wealthy enough. Once bitten, not twice shy – but practical and unburdened by societal shame.

So I grin at the endless articles about dating in your 50s, or about happy single women, or whether “partner” is a terrible term for the person you love. And I thank the many women (and men!) who fought for my freedom for centuries. I promise never to take it for granted.

This article is from New Humanist's winter 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

This is the 2025 follow-on from the 2023 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 …

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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.

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 …

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.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! It is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., and I could not be more grateful to be part of such an active and wonderful global community of people dedicated to advocating on behalf of science and secular policy. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science is …

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 […]