Here’s a taste of what some apparently consider a persuasive argument.

One minute after you die you will be either elated or terrified…and it will be too late to reroute your travel plans. When you slip behind the parted curtain, your life will not be over. Rather, it will be just beginning—in a place of unimaginable bliss or indescribable horror.
— Erwin Lutzer

Ooh, false dichotomy. Also, I have to ask Erwin…how do you know? Have you died (he’s still alive and 84 years old)? Do you have reproducible observations of your two and only two possible afterlives? I think we can dismiss this argument on the basis of its fundamental illogic and its total lack of supporting evidence.

It’s nothing but threats and fear. Sorry, Erwin, you fail. Don’t feel too bad, though, it’s a universal property of all theologians.

I am so confused…but then science is often confusing. I was reading this article in Science magazine that went against my impressions and biases.

For years, scientists have been warning of a precipitous drop in insect numbers worldwide, driven largely by deforestation, pesticide use, and other human activities. But the first study to survey insect populations on a continental scale—based on radar data typically used to study weather patterns—finds no evidence of widespread decline, at least over a recent 10-year period. Instead, the research—published this week in Global Change Biology—suggests bug numbers tend to be sensitive to the severity of winter weather, with warmer winters posing a problem.

What, no decline? But I’ve seen a dramatic decline here in western Minnesota! Could I be wrong? Maybe. My perspective is narrow and local, and I’ve been looking at a small number of species, just spiders, that I’ve assumed would be a good proxy for overall insect number. I could be totally off, misled by a local variation that fit what I expected to see.

So I read the source paper. First surprise: the title doesn’t say there is no evidence of decline, but rather “Systematic Continental Scale Monitoring by Weather Surveillance Radar Shows Fewer Insects Above Warming Landscapes in the United States“. So there is evidence of decline in areas that show signs of warming. The abstract complicates matters further.

Anthropogenic change is predicted to result in widespread declines in insect abundance, but assessing long-term trends is challenging due to the scarcity of systematically collected time series measurements across large spatial scales. We develop a novel continental-scale dataset using a nationwide network of radars in the United States to generate a 10-year time series of daily aerial insect density and assess temporal trends. We do not find evidence of a continental-scale net decline in insect density over the 10-year period included in this study; instead we find a mosaic of increasing and declining trends at the landscape scale. This spatial variation in density trends is associated with climatic drivers, where areas with warmer winters experience greater declines in insect density and areas with cooling winter trends see increases in density. Winter warming has a stronger negative effect on density at higher latitudes. After assessing temporal trends, we also use the 10-year dataset and atmospheric variables to model insect aerial abundance, finding that on a typical summer day approximately a hundred trillion (10¹⁴) flying insects are present in the airspace, representing millions of tons of aerial biomass. Our results provide the first continental-scale quantification of insect density and its response to anthropogenic warming and demonstrate the utility of weather surveillance radar to provide large-scale monitoring of insect abundance.

Right away, I have reservations. If my observations are insufficient because I’m looking at too few species in one locale, this study is using one technique with low resolution on a continent wide scale and one could argue that it could be equally insufficient and misleading. It is data, though, and should be part of any analysis of the problem. Let’s not pretend that their sampling method doesn’t incorporate its own systematic biases. It’s only going to detect flying insects that exhibit swarming behavior, and they’re only looking at daytime numbers. It’s a correlational study that associates declines with only temperatures, but I’d suggest that those other factors (deforestation, pesticide use, and other human activities) are so ubiquitous and difficult to measure discretely that they’d disappear in the analysis.

Also, their own data does show evidence of a decline…in latitudes above 40°.

They also see some interesting variations, like the effect of land development on the sensitivity of populations to change.

Insect populations are actually increasing over developed areas? I’d like to know the baselines on that — this is a study over a short timescale of ten years, and who knows, minor fluctuations over areas where the population has already been decimated by development might appear as a larger percentage change. I also wonder if we might be seeing the effect of adaptation or invasive species on those areas.

I’d also be concerned that native grasslands are hurting.

They do argue that anthropogenic stressors are having a serious effect.

Although we do not observe continental scale declines, the spatial patterns of abundance trends identified in this study can pinpoint potential stressors or drivers of insect declines. Declines in aerial insect density were stronger in regions that experienced increasing winter temperatures. During overwintering, warming can decrease fitness by releasing organisms from cold-induced dormancy, thereby increasing metabolic rates, and depleting energy reserves. Winter warming may also result in increased mortality due to phenological mismatches with resources, and may extend the activity period for natural enemies and reduce pathogen die-off during the winter season. Negative effects of winter warming on insect abundance in temperate regions have been shown in local surveys of beetles, butterflies, and arthropods generally, indicating that winter is a particularly sensitive season for temperate ectotherms.

Sensitivity to winter warming varies across populations and is likely more common in cooler climates where thermal seasonality is strong. Our results show a negative effect of winter warming at high latitudes, with no effect at latitudes below 40°. This latitudinal interaction between winter warming and aerial insect density aligns with theory suggesting that climate warming will have the strongest effect on cool-adapted arthropods. For example, metabolic costs are greater at high latitudes, affecting organisms’ cold tolerance and resulting in greater risks of energy depletion if winters become warmer under global change. Experimental warming has shown that high elevation gall wasp species experience greater decreases in survival and fecundity than those from lower latitudes. These stronger responses from high latitude insects to winter warming are particularly concerning because the magnitude of warming under climate change also increases with latitude.

I definitely live in an area with harsh winters, which would explain how I have a strong impression of declines on the basis of local observations. I don’t understand, though, how the work in this paper can be used to minimize the changes in insect populations. I’m also a little concerned that it’s being used to endorse a hands-off analysis of relatively coarse radar data over expecting entomologists to get their hands dirty and get up close with the organisms.

Mary and I saw Wicked: For Good last night at the local theater. It was OK; we both thought it dragged a bit in parts, and the songs weren’t as good as the ones in part 1. We generally enjoyed it. But there was a weird moment. We were seated in the front row, and throughout the last half, there was an annoying sniffling sound rising from behind us. At the end when the lights came up and we stood up to leave, I discovered that the theater was packed, I was the only man in attendance, and most of the women were in tears or dabbing at their eyes.

I guess that wasn’t too surprising: it was a movie about two women building a close friendship in opposition to a very bad man, a con man and liar, a real cad, who was wrecking the country of Oz and banishing a whole class of people, who happened to be talking animals. He also didn’t like Munchkins. So yeah, it’s a movie for women.

One thing I didn’t like was, spoiler alert: they tacked on a happy ending for the Wicked Witch. It’s like they read Gregory Maguire’s book, that they claimed the musical was based on, and said, “This is way too dark and complicated and confusing,” so they threw it all out and kept the part about the relationship between two protagonists. That’s OK; I think Maguire’s book was a mess and wouldn’t have made a good movie anyway, and particularly wasn’t suited for a musical.

It was a fun movie, but if you go, be prepared to be enveloped in a cloud of estrogen vapors by the end.

Strange news: analyzing the top MAGA users on Twitter reveals that many of them are not American.

The account MAGANationX, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”, is actually operated from eastern Europe, according to the Daily Beast. Another popular profile, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump fan account with around one million followers that frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.

Another user also uncovered several additional cases. Dark Maga, a smaller account with roughly 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand. MAGA Scope, which has more than 51,000 followers, operates out of Nigeria, while MAGA Beacon is based in south Asia.

Users on Reddit also joined the exposé effort, posting examples of accounts that appeared to misrepresent their origins. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but instead appeared to be located in Russia, though as of Sunday, the user named in the post appears to have a US location. Many in the comments posted other examples they found.

Bots spreading misinformation and propaganda has been a long-running problem on Twitter, a problem that has been significantly exacerbated since Musk bought it in October 2022 and then renamed it X. Its AI chatbot, Grok, has also been found to frequently make and amplify false claims.

You have to wonder what the incentives are for these influencers. Is it just the account/advertising revenue? Are they subidized by foreign governments, or by American billionaires? Or perhaps they’re just patriotic Eastern Europeans or Nigerians or SE Asians who hate America?

It does say something that these popular MAGA jerks, who have managed to fool a great many Americans, aren’t actually interested in making America great.

We have preprofessional programs here at UMM, which, if we gave a good goddamn about the opinions ot the Trump administration, we’d have to revise, because they’ve deleted one of our popular majors from the category.

Nursing has been excluded as a “professional degree” by the Trump administration as the Department of Education prepares to make massive cuts to providing student loans.

That’s a surprising absence. If you go to the doctor, you’re most likely first going to encounter a nurse. Nurses get all the grunt work in health care, and are an indispensable part of the medical system, yet somehow the Trump Department of Education (I thought he was going to get rid of that?) has decided it’s less worthy, and is reducing nursing students’ eligibility for loans. Maybe this is a first step in making nursing training free? Somehow I doubt that.

Even worse, they have designated certain other fields of study as “professional” and worthy of encouragement. Notice anything peculiar in this list?

• Medicine
• Pharmacy
• Dentistry
• Optometry
• Law
• Veterinary medicine
• Osteopathic medicine
• Podiatry
• Chiropractic
• Theology
• Clinical psychology

I will admit that after the destruction wrought by RFK’s Health and Human Services, many people might feel a need to call on a priest.

Admit it – you're glued to your phone, like everybody else. Literacy is plummeting, and universities are under attack. Are we all getting dumber? Or is society transforming, discovering new ways to be smart?

The Winter 2025 edition of New Humanist is out now, and it's all about intelligence in the modern world. To dig into this topic, we've enlisted the brainpower of award-winning writer Naomi Alderman, renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum, law and tech pioneer Richard Susskind and many more thinkers and experts.

Keep reading for a peek inside!

How to stay smart in a changing world

Our "Voices" section brings together expert perspectives on the big question: How can we keep our minds sharp as the world changes around us?

Kate Devlin, professor of AI, argues that we can't leave all the decisions to the machines, author Ziyad Marar offers advice on keeping an open mind, neurobiologist Moheb Costandi digs into the science of what AI will do to our brains, Martha Nussbaum of Chicago University advocates for saving the humanities, and tech guru Richard Susskind says professionals need to get ahead of the AI revolution.

"We are going through tumultuous times and the need to be open-minded ... is more and more vital if we are to adapt well. False certainty is often the bread and butter of autocrats and dictators."

Tips for surviving the Third Information Crisis

Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, talks to us about her forthcoming book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis). She argues that – much like the invention of writing and the printing press – the rise of the internet has created new challenges for communication and understanding, which we are still struggling to navigate today.

"Those of us who deliberately spend hours of our day reading are going to be in a similar position to people who deliberately spend hours of their day lifting heavy weights, which is to say we’re just going to be able to do more with our brains."

Teaching when to trust

As fake news accelerates, we need to teach our children how to think critically. Writer Zion Lights explores the Finnish schools teaching students to spot fake news – and how the UK can catch up with them.

"The Finns are ahead of the curve in large part due to their proximity to Russia, a country known for its disinformation campaigns ... In response, Finland treats resistance to disinformation almost as a form of civil defence."

The Winter 2025 edition of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe or buy a copy today.

Also in the Winter 2025 edition:

• Katherine Stewart on the US anti-abortion activists turning their attention to Britain
• Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones on how fear-driven overregulation of AI could present its own kind of danger
• Marcus Chown on why we must fight Trump's cuts to black hole research
• Jamaima Afridi on how, without access to healthcare, the Taliban is leaving Afghan women to die
• Peter Salmon on why you can't keep blaming your choices on "unconscious" desires
• Christopher Dorrell asks why so many atheists are going on pilgrimage
• Journalist and author Sophie Gilbert on porn and pop culture
• Michael Rosen on the history and meaning of the word "condemn"
• Peter Ward explores the wild world of conspiracy theories about the internet
• Ralph Jones on the myth of the "genius"
• George Fallon finds out how glow-in-the-dark plants could help farmers fight the effects of climate change
• Shaparak Khorsandi in defence of gossip
• Samira Ahmed joins a glam-rock goodbye to Marc Bolan
• Christopher Shrimpton reviews a bold new take on Ibsen, featuring a black, queer Hedda
• Emma Park on art and architecture in our new Glass Age

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

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Look. I know that on this channel, I often criticize prominent people for actions that I find detestable: accepting dark money and failing to disclose it, producing propaganda for Big Oil, silencing critics with …

We have recently witnessed a spectacular cosmological event. Two black holes – both more massive than the Sun – have collided to make an even larger massive black hole, in a merger so big that it was, by our current models, theoretically impossible. The event has been observed by an array of gravitational wave detectors in the US, Europe and Japan. It is a perfect example of why we do science: in the hope that nature will surprise us. Donald Trump, however, is threatening to cut the funding of one of the two US detectors that contributed to the discovery, putting further breakthroughs at risk.

Gravitational waves are “ripples” in the fabric of space-time, caused by such violent and energetic events as two black holes spiralling together. They were predicted by Einstein in 1916, but were first directly observed from Earth on 14 September 2015. Think of them as cosmic sound waves. For all of history we have been able to see the Universe, with our eyes and latterly with our telescopes. Now we can hear it. Gravitational waves are the voice of space, and the loudest voices come from the mergers of black holes.

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. They form when a massive star explodes as a supernova. Paradoxically, it is the catastrophic implosion of the star’s core that drives the explosion. And it is in the super-dense conditions of that implosion that a black hole is born.

The gravitational waves picked up on 14 September 2015 were from two monster black holes that whirled around each other one last time, kissed, then coalesced – creating a tsunami of tortured space-time that spread outwards at the speed of light. Briefly the power in the waves was 50 times greater than the power emitted by all the stars in the Universe combined.

The gravitational waves from this event became ever more diluted as they spread through an ever-greater volume of space, until, after a 1.3-billion-year journey, they arrived on Earth. There they encountered gravitational wave detectors in Washington State and Louisiana. At each site, the passage of the wave caused a four-kilometre “ruler” made of laser light to periodically stretch and squeeze by one-billionth the diameter of an atom. No wonder the detection earned three Nobel prizes.

Now two more detectors have been added: in Italy and Japan. And it is this enhanced array that has detected the “impossibly” big black holes.

So why do – or did – we think that such black holes were impossible? If a star is too massive and goes supernova, the imploding core becomes so hot that it triggers a “pair-instability catastrophe”. Don’t worry about the details – the key thing is that the core blows itself to smithereens without leaving a black hole relic. According to theorists, there should be no black holes with masses from 60 to 130 times the mass of the Sun. However, the black holes in the recently witnessed merger are estimated to weigh in at 100 and 140 solar masses, challenging our understanding of black hole formation.

There’s a possibility that each of the black holes was formed by an earlier merger. But that would mean these mergers are more common than anyone thought. A more remote possibility is that the two black holes were spawned by some unknown “exotic” process in the inferno of the Big Bang fireball and therefore had survived from the first split-second of the Universe’s existence.

One thing is for sure: with gravitational waves now detected from about 300 black hole mergers, a new window has been opened up on the Universe. But this crucial source of astronomical knowledge is now under threat from the US administration’s mania for cuts.

Trump’s decision to slash the federal science budget is hitting hard in the US. There are worries that the cuts to LIGO – the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory – will result in the loss of the expertise of hundreds of researchers, built up over decades.

The weird thing is that someone in Trump’s government seems to realise that LIGO is important and should not be shut down entirely. They apparently think that shutting down one of the two detectors is making an efficiency. Perhaps they think it’s simply replicating work. But this makes little sense. The gravitational waves picked up by the detectors are so impossibly weak that someone riding past one of the sites on a bicycle would jiggle the giant laser rulers more than any cosmic event. With two identical detectors in the US, we can rule out such false alarms: If they both see the same signal, it is considered real. With only one detector, the results will be in doubt.

Elsewhere in the world of black holes, astronomers are answering fundamental questions about them. The black holes in question are not stellar-mass ones but “supermassive” ones. These weigh in at millions to tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun. There is one in the heart of essentially every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Supermassive black holes are one of the outstanding mysteries of our Universe. We do not know how they form. We do not even know the answer to the chicken-and-egg question: “Which came first: supermassive black holes or galaxies?” In other words, were supermassive black holes the “seeds” about which galaxies of stars later gathered? Or did galaxies come first and supermassive black holes form later, perhaps from the catastrophic shrinkage of a dense star cluster?

Enter Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, this 6.5-metre telescope with a mirror made out of 18 hexagonal gold segments, is hanging in space 1.5 million kilometres beyond the Earth on the extension of the line from our planet to the Sun. The JWST peers back to the dawn of time when the Universe was only about 5 per cent its current age of 13.82 billion years. It can do this because it “sees” infrared, which has a longer wavelength than visible light. The enormous expansion of the Universe since its earliest moments has stretched the visible light of its galaxies and stars, so it arrives at the JWST as infrared light.

This newborn universe is filled with so many baffling objects – underlining yet again why we do science – that the excellent Quanta Magazine last year described it poetically as “the beautiful confusion of the first billion years”. Among the objects are ultra-compact galaxies, dubbed Little Red Dots because of their distinctive colour.

The light from these – hundreds or thousands of times smaller than our Milky Way – reveals the existence of both stars and supermassive black holes. Usually, matter swirls down onto a supermassive black hole like water down a plug hole and friction in the gas heats it to millions of degrees. It is the prodigious light from such “accretion” disks that powers the most violent galaxies such as quasars. However, in the case of Little Red Dots, dense dust is cloaking the supermassive black hole, and the light from the accretion disk is being absorbed by the dust and re-radiated as red light, just as dust over a polluted city turns the Sun red.

Here is the point. In today’s Universe, supermassive black holes are 0.1 per cent of the mass of their parent galaxy’s stars. But the JWST finds that in the Little Red Dots the supermassive black holes are 1 per cent or even 10 per cent of the total mass. This is strong evidence that supermassive black holes came first. Then, as time went by and galaxies spawned ever more stars, the fraction of total mass they made up dwindled.

We still do not know the origin of the Universe’s supermassive black holes. But we now know it is probable that they seeded galaxies. In other words, you would not be reading these words were it not for a black hole.

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

First, a quick announcement – I will be presenting a special, one-off, performance of The World’s Most Boring Card Trick at the Edinburgh MagiFest this year. At a time when everyone is trying to get your attention, this unusual show is designed to be dull. Have you got what it takes to sit through the most tedious show ever and receive a certificate verifying your extraordinary willpower? You can leave anytime, and success is an empty auditorium.  I rarely perform this show, and so an excited and delighted to be presenting it at the festival. Details here.

Now for the story. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a magazine called World of Wonder (WoW). Each week it contained a great mix of history, science, geography and much more, and all the stories were illustrated with wonderful images. I was especially delighted when WoW ran a multi-part series on magicians, featuring some of the biggest names in the business. My favourite story by far was based around the great Danish-American illusionist Dante, and the huge, colourful, double page spread became etched into my mind.

A few years ago, I wrote to the owners of WoW, asking if they had the original artwork from the Dante article. They kindly replied, explaining that the piece had been lost in the mists of time. And that was that.

Then, in July I attended the huge magic convention in Italy called FISM. I was walking past one of the stalls that had magic stuff for sale, and noticed an old Dutch edition of WoW containing the Dante spread. I explained how the piece played a key role in my childhood, and was astonished when the seller reached under his table and pulled out the original artwork! Apparently, he had picked it up in a Parisian flea market many, many, years ago! The chances!

I snapped it up and it now has pride of place on my wall (special thanks to illusion builder Thomas Moore for helping to make it all happen!). My pal Chris Power made some enquirers and thinks that the art was drawn by Eustaquio Segrelles, but any additional information about the illustration is more than welcome.

So there you go – some real magic from a magic convention!

Last month, I talked about “cointelpro,” the secret US government plan to infiltrate leftist groups in order to discredit and disrupt them. I specifically brought it up in reference to the Trump administration’s recent open admission that the FBI and other intelligence services should focus their efforts on countering individuals and groups who display what …

We Are Still Here: An Anthology of Resilience, Grief, and Unshattered Hope from Gaza’s University Students (Daraja Press), edited by Zahid Pranjol & Jacob Norris

“Do you know what it’s like to live in a tent during Gaza’s summer?” Wissam Yousef is asking the world beyond Palestine’s scarred dunes. He is asking you. The world has yet to give a good enough answer. Instead, Wissam must answer himself:

Extreme heat. Limited water. Overflowing trash. Open sewage. Insects. Rodents. Stray dogs trying to enter the tent at night. Noise. Chaos. Drones buzzing overhead. Contagious diseases. Scabies. Meningitis.

Compiled from Gaza’s student writers and translators, We Are Still Here is an anthology, published during Gaza’s third ceasefire in two years, and while the West Bank is threatened with outright annexation. Many of these young authors once thought they knew the shape their life might take, all of them seeing in Gaza’s universities a route to something more than poverty or selling sweets in the street. The universities are gone now. These are records of loss: fervent, burning, desperate, rage-inducing.

“Why?” Batol Alkhaldy wants to know. “We’re not asking for luxury. We’re not searching for perfect lives … We want something simple—to wake up to the sound of birds instead of warplanes, to eat a meal without wondering if it will be our last.” Waad Hamdi Allaham stares through the fog of gunsmoke and pulverised concrete, and asks the most vital of all questions: “Why are you mute? Are you pleased with the genocide?”

Many pieces are plain, brief, steady narratives in a handful of paragraphs. Here I am, they say. These were my dreams. This is the scroll of my dead. Others are fragmented, formless, experiential – trying to make sense of the insensible. The collection’s final third is made up of poems – more moving still for the gift of their metaphors and emotional compression. If the poet Mariam Marwan Malaka should survive (there is no guarantee), I wish for her a career as fulsome as the promise of her work included here. For these lines alone, she deserves garlands:

A person is humiliated in proportion to their longing—
And I, by mine, am annihilated.

The anthology is edited by two academics from the University of Sussex: Dr Jacob Norris, historian of Palestine and co-director of the university’s Middle East and North Africa Centre, and Zahid Pranjol, associate dean for the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine. If there is a fault in this book, it is the editors’ and it comes from admirable motives. In getting out of the way of each student’s voice, they’ve also ensured that the contributions are slightly contextless. You wish, wading chin-height in this pain, for a small amount of detail for each author: a little biography of age, neighbourhood, present status. The anthology has no definite structure, either of chronology or theme.

But one theme dominates: the everyday, commonplace, inflicting of strife and violence. There are the night fears, the flare-lit terrors. No one knows from where the next bomb will come, or who will survive another shelling. As Hada Mohammed Homaid writes:

In Gaza, people die in the way the world fears most suddenly, senselessly, without warning ... No goodbyes. No time to prepare. And what then? No space in the morgue refrigerators. No coffins. Not even cars left to carry the bodies.

Gaza’s life is one of suspension. In that space of waiting, there is hunger. When you haven’t eaten, eating is all you can think about. These lines are by Obay Jouda:

We feast on memories,
chew on the brittle skins of dry onions,
boil wild herbs and whisper to our stomachs:
“This is soup.”

If we grant enough leeway to empathy, the lives of others can cut into ours every bit as sharply as our own experience. We Are Still Here is a testament: a plea that these stories should not become their authors’ own eulogies. But there is a limit. Gaza’s experience, for most of us, is far beyond the imaginable. “It is beyond belief,” writes Reem Alaa Khalel Al-Astal. “And yet—even if you believe—it will not make you feel what we feel…”

You will not lose your family one by one.
You will not scramble daily to feed your hungry children.
You will not be displaced from your home to a tent, from north to south.
You will not wait for a miracle to pull you out of this.
You will not understand what I’m living.

Transcript: A bit of a change of pace today: usually on this channel my videos are relatively short and scripted, and today’s video is neither. I really wanted to share the story of my good friend, Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, and I realized that the absolute best way to do that is to have her tell …

The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell (Yale University Press) by Fritz Breithaupt

Our world is made of stories. From idle gossip with work colleagues to stories of political tribes and nation states, our brains weave threads of narrative that form the tapestry of experienced reality. We are so attuned to this narrative thinking that the stories we tell have huge power over us, allowing the weakest individual to stand up against impossible odds, or leading whole nations into darkness.

Yet these stories are so ubiquitous, so fundamental to what makes us human, that they can become invisible, leaving us vulnerable to their seductive power. It is only through analysing the stories that shape our world that we can control them and retain agency, which is exactly what Fritz Breithaupt sets out to do in his fascinating new book.

Breithaupt is professor of Germanic studies and cognitive sciences at the University of Indiana, and he takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation. The book explores political history, literary analysis, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Breithaupt uses these complementary strands of enquiry to build a methodical and coherent picture of the psychological mechanisms and evolutionary roots behind our narrative thinking.

The keystone of his argument is a storytelling experiment conducted in his lab that was based on a children’s parlour game. The “telephone” game (aka “Chinese whispers”) involves the retelling of a story within a group. As it changes considerably from person to person, there are often hilarious results. Breithaupt saw the unique value of games like this to investigate the dynamic process of story propagation, which in turn sheds light on what is truly important to us when we engage in narrative thinking. Participants were asked to read a short story and then retell it in their own words, which was then passed to someone else to repeat the process. The study involved 12,000 participants and around 19,000 retellings. His team then analysed the input and output for all stages, measuring the length of the story, as well as the degree of information retention and emotional valence.

In some ways, the results were unsurprising. There was a tendency to shorten stories, with a drop in length of around 30 per cent for each retelling. There was also a very poor level of information retention, with events, characters and perspectives changing dramatically. But what was striking was that there was an incredibly strong retention in emotional valence, in the intensity and type of emotion expressed, whether joy or fear or frustration. If characters, events and settings can change, but the emotions remain consistent, Breithaupt concludes that the thing most important to us when we engage in narrative thinking is the communication of emotions. The reason we tell stories, he suggests, is to utilise our “mobility of consciousness”. We project our minds into the place of others to share experiences and emotions. This allows us to simulate how we might feel and react in similar circumstances, leaving us better equipped to deal with our unpredictable environment.

Breithaupt saves some of the most fascinating material for the epilogue, where he discusses some of the cultural and political narratives that have shaped our world over the last few years. He questions the different ways we might respond to the video of George Floyd’s murder, depending on whether we identify with a bystander or with Floyd himself. He discusses how the narratives surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have changed over the course of the war. These are some of the strongest parts of the book, so their brevity seemed like a missed opportunity. However, his focus on the mechanisms that underpin our narrative brains might help equip the reader to interrogate our world of stories for themself.

The book closes with a discussion of whether we need to reject narrative thinking in light of the power these stories have to manipulate us. Breithaupt’s conclusion is that we need more, not less, narrative thinking. We need to reject the allure of simple narratives that close down our thinking and lock us into a limited worldview. Instead, we should embrace a plurality of narratives that enrich and broaden our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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

Transcript: Last week, I talked about how “nones” are the second fastest growing “religion” in the world. That’s N-O-N-E “nones,” not “N-U-N “nuns” – people who do not identify with any religion at all, whether they consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or otherwise. N-U-N “nuns” only get popular around, well, this time of year, where they …

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 […]