I just noticed that this tree in our front yard that usually drops boring brown leaves every fall has had an upgrade to brighter colors this year.

Sometimes it’s hard to count.

They’ll walk away from their molt and eventually it’ll be a less confusing tangle.

It was a good night for Democrats and social democrats, with a big blue sweep all across the country. Mamdani won, although I think it helped that a corrupt clown like Cuomo (who was endorsed by Trump) was his opponent. Virginia turned a vibrant shade of purple. The California referendum on legalized gerrymandering passed, which I have mixed feelings about. Trump is literally hated by a significant fraction of the population, and I think he’s dragging the Republican party down. The Democratic party is also down — let’s hope that the leadership learns to recognize that their tepid timidity is not exactly electrifying the electorate.

Here’s one good summary of yesterday’s outcome.

He’s not right about Omar Fateh, who is running against Jacob Frey for mayor of Minneapolis. Minneapolis has ranked choice voting, and while Frey is ahead in the first pass, he didn’t reach the threshold — it’s going to take a few more days to tally up all the votes. Also, Kaohly Her, a Hmong woman and DFL candidate, won the St Paul mayoral race.

This is a good start to retaking the country from fascists. It is not the bigger 2026 midterm elections, though, and most definitely not even close to a 2028 presidential election, but we’re going in the right direction. I’m sure Trump is already annoyed and might be scheming to commit even more radical crimes in the near future.

Begin your day with a glad heart, everyone! The monster has dropped dead, those lips will no longer lie, those hands will no longer pull a trigger, that heart (which wasn’t the one he was born with) will no longer pump poison. Now he gets to rot, just like the hundreds of thousands, at least, he was responsible for murdering.

We get to suffer for a little while with the long-winded excuses and praises the media will deliver in the next few days. Just look forward to the time when he will be forgotten. It won’t be long.

Fuck that guy.

He was a smart guy and gave the only good argument against education I’ve ever heard.

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools.
“Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked.
“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered.
“Do you not want churches?”
“No, we do not want churches.”
“Why do you not want churches?”
“They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”

I can respect that, but I think it would be better understood as an argument against dogma. Do not impose your unwarrantedly confident dogma on me!

All you have to do is go on YouTube and look at a few atheist channels, and it’s infuriating: most of them are dealing with the idiocy of religious certainty, explaining that the apologists have no evidence for their god, over and over, with occasional intrusions by thick-skulled dickwits who make stupid and extravagant claims while disregarding what atheists actually say. I wouldn’t want to attend a school led by William Lane Craig or John Lennox or Lee Strobel or Gary Habermas either.

Keep education secular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questionable practices, nonsense results

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

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

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

Flaws, fraud and fakery

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

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

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

Meta-researchers to the rescue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The open science movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The history of hypochondria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to deal with doubt

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

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

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

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

Cyberchondria and the dream of perfect knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Wow is it 2009 because I’m about to talk about the Texas State Board of Education using textbooks to violate the separation of Church and State. No, seriously, back in the late 2000s my …

Fire Exit (Tin House Books) by Morgan Talty

In William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the character Mariana claims, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Morgan Talty’s debut novel Fire Exit could well be written in direct response to that assertion. The author, who as well as being a professor in Native American literature is a quarter Penobscot, wrestles with the question of whether things can be true and untrue simultaneously, along with the myriad repercussions of honesty and truths unspoken.

The novel is narrated by a white man named Charles, and roves back and forth in time to explain how he wound up living in a house looking onto the home of his daughter: now a 20-something teacher who does not know she has spent her life being watched. Charles’s daughter is Native and he is not, forcing their separation: he is not permitted to live on the reservation across the river. In a cruel twist of fate, he was helped to build his house by his family, before his daughter was conceived, and the view has come to taunt him with an “untouchable past, present, future”.

Complex family dynamics and identities that are difficult to define are the primary themes of Fire Exit. We learn that Charles was raised by his mother and Native American stepfather on the reservation, but was forced to leave once he came of age. In turn, his girlfriend Mary – upon learning she is pregnant – makes the painful decision to leave him and raise the child with a Native man called Roger, thereby ensuring her daughter is eligible for tribal enrolment. What happens to one’s sense of self after such familial rifts, a result of strict tribal indigenous law (an area Talty studied), is the book’s dominating concern.

After two decades of watching his daughter Elizabeth from his back porch, Charles is itching to share his secret. While Elizabeth’s enlightenment about her paternity is the conclusion the novel steadily edges towards, much more time is spent with its cast of peripheral, deftly drawn characters: Charles’s mother Louise, who, following the death of her partner Frederick, is beset with dementia and begins to decline; Bobby, Charles’s erratic acquaintance from Alcoholics Anonymous, who yearns to flee the reservation; and Gizos, his childhood best friend whose father fractured their relationship after learning his son was gay. Like Charles, we too get to know Elizabeth from afar, in fragmented scenes spied from a distance.

Charles’s time is divided between these figures, caring for his mother and doling out favours to Bobby. Meanwhile, he muses on the significance of family and heritage. “There’s nothing strange about a white person wishing to be Indian,” he reflects after Bobby refers to the Penobscot as “our Indians” rather than, as he would have preferred, “your Indians”. “It’s comical, if anything. And white people saying they’re Indian happens all the time, and it’s laughed at by Native people.” He later reflects that, while he has no Native American blood, it was the love of his stepdad that made him feel Native.

Fire Exit is a raw but pensive investigation into what family means in spite of estrangement. Around the lives of our main characters, Talty probes identity, asking whether it is tied to place, biology, “spirit” or the people who raise us. Both Louise and Elizabeth are impacted by strained mental health and receive electroconvulsive treatment in the same clinic. “The blood she did not know about that ran through her body was tainted, flawed,” frets Charles. “This was why it was so important she know all of this.” Later, he contemplates whether Elizabeth’s troubles have arisen as “maybe her body and mind know something is missing”.

Talty’s writing unfolds with a light-touched, fable-like quality. He is deeply attuned to the nuances of language and behaviour. (“Is there a word that means something is both true and false?” Charles asks. “I’ve looked, and I’ve yet to find one… ‘I am your father’ is one that comes to mind.”) Although there is a mournfulness to this novel of broken connections, Fire Exit is also rich and rewarding – a story that is ultimately anchored in hope.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: If you live in California, I need you to vote “yes” on Proposition 50, the special election that is currently happening right now and which ends on November 4th. If you live in any …

On 15 November 1969, the legendary bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs sent shockwaves through the Nashville music establishment by playing at a half-million strong protest to end the Vietnam War. Country music was a conservative stronghold, and Earl was one of its few stars to speak out publicly against the conflict.

His decision to take part in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam would not have been taken lightly. But Earl – a shy, unassuming guy from rural North Carolina – was no traditionalist. An unlikely musical visionary, he’d pushed the boundaries of the banjo in the late 1940s, transforming it from a rhythm to a lead instrument, and essentially inventing the rapid-fire and highly technical style we now know as bluegrass. As the US culture wars of the 1960s and 70s raged through Nashville, Earl never stopped innovating. He embraced the counter-culture and collaborated with the hippies, rockers and “longhairs” so derided by his peers. For him, the banjo was a tool of communication and progress.

But despite the best efforts of Earl and others since, the stereotype of bluegrass as “redneck” music remains. It’s an image problem that stems from its roots in the conservative south and the moralising Christian hymnals of rural gospel churches.

The reputation was further cemented by the 1972 movie Deliverance. The moment when the city slickers on their back-country canoe trip first come into contact with the locals – including a mentally deficient but virtuoso banjo player – represents the impending culture clash that defines the film, culminating in a terrifying campaign of violence, sodomy and death. This is probably the biggest PR disaster any musical instrument has ever experienced (please, no more “Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjos” memes).

In reality, bluegrass has spread over the decades to encompass the entire political and cultural spectrum of the United States, with strong scenes cropping up in traditionally liberal enclaves, a growing awareness of black bluegrass musicians, and an annual Bluegrass Pride event in San Francisco. But today, America’s increasing divisions pose a new challenge. I worry that it will undermine the unique ability of bluegrass to bring people together.

None of this was on my mind when I bought my first Flatt & Scruggs album as a teenager in Bristol (the English city, rather than the one in Tennessee, to my dismay). I had no cultural connection to the genre, but was captivated by its incongruous mix of hard-driving energy and plaintive close harmonies, singing stories of homesteads and heartbreak in faraway mountains. It was only when I ventured to my first bluegrass festival that I discovered the unique feature of this music – almost everyone who is into it, plays it. I bought myself a banjo.

Soon, I was joining in with my fellow festival-goers, who were there just as much for the jam sessions and workshops as for the bands. Weekend or week-long bluegrass “camps”, where hundreds of players come together to learn from the masters, are an American phenomenon that has spread across Europe and the globe in the last couple of decades. The simple chord structures and the repertoire of standards mean you can show up at a session anywhere in the world and join in. Established scenes exist from France, Spain and Portugal to Japan, Thailand and Australia.

As the culture wars intensify, maybe playing music with people we might otherwise never encounter is exactly what we should be doing – bluegrass as a kind of soft diplomacy.
Ben Wright, a banjo player in the Chicago bluegrass band The Henhouse Prowlers, certainly thinks so. The band’s side project, The Bluegrass Ambassadors, travel across the US and the world – from Uganda to Saudi Arabia – collaborating with local musicians, running school workshops, and always learning a local folk song to include in their set.

Following Donald Trump’s reelection, Wright is concerned for the future of the Ambassadors, and not only for their funding (they were given a grant by the State Department during the Biden administration). But he’s cautiously optimistic that bluegrass can continue to play a part in working against polarisation. “Despite what you see on the news, there’s a huge swathe of Americans in support of coming together and understanding,” he says. “Music binds us all together as a species.”

John Wirtz, founder of the leading UK bluegrass camp, agrees. Sore Fingers Summer School is an intense, immersive week that takes place at Kingham School in the Cotswolds and attracts over 300 pickers of all ages and abilities. Many of the tutors and musicians are Americans come to teach us Brits. ‘There’s a cross-section from left to right,” Wirtz says, referring to both tutors and students, “and in some cases, rather extreme views. But one thing is for sure, music transcends these things – politics, religion, language, culture.”

And bluegrass continues to evolve. Young stars Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, both dazzling virtuoso guitarists with a liberal sensibility, from Michigan and California respectively, have found stratospheric fame over the last decade with original material on topics including abortion rights, gentrification and the pleasures of smoking weed. Meanwhile, black banjo player and music historian Rhiannon Giddens, who came to fame with the Carolina

Chocolate Drops, has worked tirelessly to set history straight, shining a light on the black southern musicians who inspired and played with the early bluegrassers. Recordings back then were designated as either “race music” or “hillbilly”, thereby cementing bluegrass as music by and for white people. For a long time this created a scene which felt hostile to black musicians, but the 21st century has seen black American artists such as Tray Wellington, Amythyst Kiah and Gangstagrass reclaiming its origins.

All this suggests that bluegrass’s political needle is swinging to the left. But it’s never really been that simple. Music doesn’t follow a set of prescribed political beliefs, and neither do humans. And when pickers do try to proselytise, it may not be what you expect. In 2008, for example, 81-year-old Virginian banjo legend and Baptist Ralph Stanley surprised his fellow players and fans by campaigning for Barack Obama. On the other hand, in 2019, at the ostensibly liberal Delfest in Maryland, bluegrass superstar Ricky Skaggs provoked a chorus of disgusted boos when he gave a fire-and-brimstone style sermon during his Sunday morning set. A Reddit thread on politics in bluegrass makes for an entertaining read on mixed identities, with people posting as “gun-toting, banjo-pickin’ liberals” and “gospel-loving atheists”.

New factions, new listeners and new players will continue to shape the future of bluegrass. But the basic instrumentation remains the same, as do its musical touchstones – the seminal recordings and awe-inspiring performances that drew us all to it in the first place, no matter our background. It remains to be seen if a more open and diverse bluegrass world can survive in a brutally polarised United States, or if it will split apart and divide into different strands.

Personally, I believe it will hold together. Making music with others is one of the most life-affirming, connective experiences available to human beings. This was something that Earl Scruggs instinctively understood, as do Ben Wright and his Bluegrass Ambassadors half a century later. As President Trump continues to fuel divisions in society, these shared experiences of making music with others – all kinds of others – feels more important than ever. Bluegrass has managed to bring disparate humans together for over 75 years. I believe that those of us who play and love the music will make sure it continues to do so.

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

A few months ago, I was invited to present a series of events at FISM — often referred to as the Olympics of Magic. It’s a gathering of over 2,500 magicians from around the world, featuring days of intense magic competitions alongside workshops, lectures, and performances. This year, the event was organised by my friend Walter Rolfo, who kindly asked me to deliver a lecture, interview several well-known performers — including quick-change artist Arturo Brachetti, Luis de Matos, Mac King, and Steven Frayne — and also stage my show Experimental.

It was an incredible week. Magic is a small, strange, and tightly-knit community, and it was a joy to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in years. One highlight was a great workshop on acting and magic by actor Steve Valentine. Steve and I first crossed paths back in 1983 when we were both competing in The Magic Circle’s Young Magician of the Year. Neither of us won; that honour (quite rightly) went to Richard Cadell—now a regular performer alongside Sooty and Sweep.

My show Experimental is somewhat unusual because there’s no performer. Instead, the audience takes part in a series of illusions and psychological experiments by following prompts on a large screen at the front of the room. Each show is different and shaped entirely by the people in the room. I sit quietly at the back, guiding the experience by choosing the order of the material.

The idea for Experimental came to me years ago, as I was thinking about why magicians perform. It struck me that if a performer genuinely wants to entertain their audience, their words and actions tend to come from a place of generosity. As I like to say, their feet will be pointing in the right direction and so any steps that they take will tend to be positive. But if they come on stage purely to feed their own ego, the audience take second place and the show usually suffers. Removing the performer entirely forced me to design an experience that prioritises the audience from start to finish.

After each performance at FISM, we held a Q&A with the audience. Time and again, I was reminded of something the legendary illusionist David Berglas once told me. One night we were flipping through an old photo album when we came across a picture of him, aged about eight, putting on some kind of show. I asked if it was his first performance. He paused and said, “No. That wasn’t a performance—that was me showing off.”

Curious, I asked him what the difference was. His answer has always stuck in my mind: “Performing is for the good of the audience. Showing off is for the good of the performer.”

I have always thought that there was an interesting life lesson there for everyone, and it was nice to spend many a happy hour chatting about the idea at the amazing and unique event that is FISM.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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 […]