You want to know where all these “health” cranks will take you?

Please don’t do any of that…except that I guess it’s OK to write whatever you want on a label. It just won’t do anything.

If you’re stranded on a desert island, drinking urine won’t keep you alive — it will make your situation worse.

The most common reason for drinking urine in movies and pop media is to stave off dehydration. If someone is lost at sea or deep in the desert, they are sometimes depicted as drinking their own urine to preserve moisture. This is highly unlikely to actually help.

The average adult’s urine contains a significant amount of salt, which gets much more concentrated if you become dehydrated. Dehydrated individuals can quickly reach excessive levels of sodium in their urine.

Consuming more sodium is linked to increasing your thirst. Higher levels of sodium in your body quickly lead to feeling thirstier. By drinking urine, which contains a high concentration of sodium, you can quickly develop a negative feedback loop in which you feel thirstier despite drinking liquids.

Sweating can increase the risks associated with drinking urine. Typically, sweating releases water and salts from your body. When you’re also losing salt in your urine, your electrolyte levels stay balanced. However, when you’re re-consuming the salts from your urine, you are concentrating salts inside your body and making your thirst worse. The field manual for the US Army explicitly recommends avoiding drinking urine as a form of hydration, even in emergency situations.

I think the US Army Field Manual is evidence-based, unlike anything Damien Michaels Extreme says. I predict that Damien Michaels Extreme stinks.

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late.

When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

Now is the time to talk about the evil being done by Trump and Steven Miller and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and RFK jr (I’m beginning to see some open detestation of that foul creature) and all the billionaires backing the current political moment. I’m done with Kirk. He’s dead, good.

I posted it to Patreon, but if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll have to wait until 5pm Monday to watch it on YouTube.

.

I’ll post a transcript here for those of you who hate videos.

A ground crab spider, genus Xysticus. Say hi!

I told you we’ve got multiple monarch chrysalides decorating our house right now.

They pig out on milkweed, and then they start wandering, and once they find a vertical wall they climb and climb until they find a nice overhang. And then they pupate.

On 20 January 2025 – the day of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration – US Border Patrol agent David Maland pulled over a car in Vermont, near the Canadian border, in what should have been a routine traffic stop. In the car were Teresa Youngblut and Ophelia Bauckholt, a high-flying quant trader. The pair had just visited a shooting range and were carrying tactical gear. Within minutes, Bauckholt and Maland were dead, and a wounded Youngblut had been detained by police.

To most of the world, reports of the incident seemed bizarre. Violence on the US-Canadian border is rare, as are shootouts involving highly educated financial professionals. But to those who had followed a particular subculture within the “rationalist” movement – now known to the world as “Zizians” – Maland and Bauckholt were just the latest casualties of an escalating spiral of violence.

Rationalism is a philosophical movement with a rich history dating back to Ancient Greece. It came to the fore during the Enlightenment, giving us our modern commitment to reason and logic as primary sources of knowledge. In recent years, a relatively niche but influential online community has also claimed the name “rationalist”. It also emphasises the primacy of logic, and is associated with effective altruism (a movement concerned with maximising the benefit from charitable giving). But an offshoot of the community has twisted this philosophy, taking it to extremes, guided by the writings of Jack LaSota, known by her moniker “Ziz”.

The Zizian grouping has never numbered more than a dozen individuals. Years before the killings began, there were reports that one follower had been driven to suicide by the group’s extreme ideas and practices, including sleep deprivation. After this, two members (including Ziz herself) faked their own deaths, and the group’s closest followers have experimented with alternative living, including on a flotilla of boats and then on trailers.

A series of violent incidents went on to claim the lives of several people in the Zizian orbit, though most cases are ongoing. In 2022, 80-year-old Curtis Lind – the landlord to Ziz and several of the group’s members – was allegedly attacked and ambushed, sustaining more than 50 stab wounds and a blow to the head, as well as being completely run through with a samurai sword. Astonishingly, he survived and shot and killed one of his attackers – only to be murdered on 17 January 2025, three days before the Canadian border standoff, and shortly before he was due to testify on the previous attempt to kill him. Elsewhere, early in 2023, the bodies of Richard and Rita Zajko, the parents of another Zizian, were discovered by police in their home, both with gunshot wounds. Their daughter was named as a person of interest in their killings.

At the time of writing, one small spinoff of the online “rationalist” community has been connected to at least seven deaths. How does a movement grounded in logic and altruism misfire so badly? The question may have significance beyond the Zizians: while the motives of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, remain unclear, he too was affiliated with the online rationalist movement.

A fixation with superintelligent AI

The gateway into the online rationalist world is often effective altruism, which is grounded in the genuinely reasonable idea that those who donate to charity should get the most bang for their buck. While measuring the effectiveness of charitable giving is complex, the aim is uncontroversial, firmly grounded in the logic of utilitarianism. But the rationalist community took it further, looking into the future: if we are interested in maximising the potential good we can do in the world, why would we only focus on people alive today? In the future, there could be trillions of people – meaning, from a purely numerical perspective, that making sure that those people can be born (and have good lives) outweighs any good we can do for the current population.

This approach might appear to be rational, given that it follows several logical steps. But these concepts are subject to overreach. The focus of the movement shifted to existential concerns around humanity’s survival, such as multi-planet living (so humanity could survive the end of Earth), and artificial intelligence – both to ensure it doesn’t wipe out humanity once it emerges, but also to make sure it does emerge, because of a belief in its massive potential to fix our societal issues.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of those in the movement work in or around big tech. Ziz had been offered a job by Google (which she never took up), and became fixated on the emergence of superintelligent AIs as she read herself into the rationalist movement. That included a piece of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, written by the controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, which deconstructs the contradictions of the wizarding world. Popular blogs like LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten imagined what benevolent but super-powerful AIs might be able to achieve – from solving the problems of modern medicine to making it possible for humans to upload their consciousness.

Ziz seems to have won her supporters through the strength of her blog’s writing and the esoteric arguments it made – and then, it seems, through sheer strength of
personality once they got to know each other in the real world. Much of her writing focuses on the idea of “timeless decisions”, which bears some resemblance to Kant’s categorical imperative. While Timeless Decision Theory differs from the Kantian perspective, both emphasise the importance of universalisability, and consider if the outcome would be positive if everyone were to make the same choice, regardless of context or individual circumstance.

For most in the rationalist movement, these ideas were merely thought experiments, useful for challenging assumptions and honing their logical skills. Some took a darker turn, for example when people started to consider what an AI might do to maximise the overall “good” for humanity. Perhaps it might punish people who tried to oppose its efforts, or even those who didn’t do enough to help create it sooner. But when Ziz and her associates were still welcome at mainstream rationalist gatherings, they started gaining a reputation for taking these ideas literally, and applying them in their own lives.

Many of those involved in the movement believe that killing animals for food is logically indefensible. But Ziz has made statements to suggest that she sees eating meat as not just immoral, but akin to murder. She is a militant vegan, as are most of her followers. Taking this further, she believes that any super-intelligent AI we might develop would agree, and would punish those who ate meat.

An intellectual exercise gone too far

Marginalisation, isolation and oppression can make people more vulnerable to the appeal of cults, and this may have affected the Zizians in various ways. For example, most members of the group are trans, and felt excluded somewhat from the rationalist mainstream because of that (though the community has accepted several trans influencers). Beliefs like militant veganism, embodied in practice, appear to have further isolated the group from the mainstream movement, and society in general, setting up an outsider dynamic.

Io Dodds, a journalist who considers herself adjacent to the rationalist movement, and who is trans herself, says these group dynamics are important considerations when looking at the violent radicalisation of Ziz and those around her. Dodds described her own intense experience of discovering the community’s ideas. “I remember the feeling of like delving and digging, and the kind of vertigo of it, the compulsion,” she said. “It’s a very intense, emotional process, like being called forward and forward and deeper and deeper and deeper into a set of bizarre ideas, like understanding was just around the corner … It felt so important. You know, it felt like the world was at stake.”

For Dodds, that need to dedicate her life to the cause ebbed as her gender transition progressed and she was able to ground herself in other ways. But the Zizians’ isolation would have added to the intensity – not least because it left them financially vulnerable. Unable to pay for housing around the Bay Area, for example, they ended up living in close quarters together in houseboats and then in trailer trucks.

But how far was it the ideas themselves, rather than the particular circumstances of the group, that produced the intense and eventually deadly culture of the Zizians? The rationalist community actively encourages people to break taboos, push thought experiments to their extremes, and more generally challenge their heuristics (social norms, or basic rules for living). This is fine as an intellectual exercise – it is an essential part of obtaining a degree in philosophy, for example – but can be damaging if it cuts through into everyday life. Dodds speaks of the “little alarm” most of us have if, after following apparently logical steps, we arrive at a conclusion that is morally unacceptable – such as that someone no longer qualifies as a person because of their moral deficiencies – which would stop us pursuing that chain of thought. It seems that some Zizians may have learned to silence that alarm – meaning that when life circumstances pushed them into situations where violence seemed like the right answer, many of their internal moral safeguards failed.

The case of Luigi Mangione

We might dismiss the Zizians as a bizarre phenomenon involving a handful of people who largely knew one another and lived in close proximity, and so deem them irrelevant to the wider rationalist movement. But the influence of this online community on others is apparent, too – not least Luigi Mangione, who is awaiting trial for what might be the most high-profile US assassination of the 21st century to date.

Mangione’s online activity shows he shared a fascination with artificial intelligence and what it meant for decision theory. He followed accounts connected to the community, and was a contributor to another subgroup of online rationalists known as TPOT, or “This Part Of Twitter”. He does not fit in with conventional US political tribes – on his 27th birthday, which he celebrated in prison, he released a list of 27 things for which he is grateful, which included both “liberals” and “conservatives”.

Like many within the community, Mangione is a gifted mathematician who worked in tech. He posted about “the singularity” – a hypothetical breakthrough in which an AI will be capable of improving itself repeatedly and iteratively, so as to reach super intelligence at a stroke – and its consequences on society. A note found in his possession when he was arrested set out logical reasonings for the apparent crime, including his hopes that it would bring public attention to the greed of the health insurance industry and influence the decision making of executives and investors alike. Mangione has pleaded not guilty, so his full actions and motives may never truly be revealed, but the killing can be seen as the result of moral reasoning, taken too far.

Stepping back, what does this mean for this small but apparently influential rationalist subculture? And how might the broader movement respond – a movement that believes in secular reason and its ability to improve the world? These are isolated incidents, and there is certainly no equivalence between these criminal acts and religious violence across the globe. Some may even look at it as little more than individual cases of radicalisation, which is possible in any group.

But there are aspects of this distorted version of rationalism that seem to be dangerous in themselves. There is the idea of “decoupling”, of judging moral claims in the abstract, removed from their social context. Followers are encouraged to push against cultural taboos, ignoring their own gut reactions. Elaborate thought experiments are applied to debates on race and IQ, eugenics, disability and other sensitive topics in ways that seem distasteful or outright abhorrent to those outside the movement.

The community as a whole cannot entirely absolve itself from the consequences of encouraging people to overcome natural heuristics against certain patterns of thought – or against violence and criminality. This way of thinking – these extreme thought experiments – might be fine for the vast majority of people, but that still leaves a minority who could go on to cause harm because of it.

A technological cult?

If this way of thinking is dangerous, we might ask how it emerged. The idea of committing “rational” murder is hardly a new one. Numerous perpetrators of assassinations have sought to justify their crime through the idea of weighing up the life of one individual, the victim, against the many lives predicted to be saved as a consequence of that person’s death. Dodds recalls the case of the German nationalist Friedrich Staps, an 18-year-old who tried to assassinate Napoleon to “render the highest service to my country and to Europe”. Napoleon, admiring Staps’s bravery and patriotism, if not his goals, tried to grant him a pardon. (Staps refused, saying that if he went free, he would only give it another go.) We might see the same kind of admiration in the public’s reaction to Mangione, with some regarding him as a folk hero, who has sacrificed his freedom for a noble cause.

But there is another, more novel idea, which is worth extra attention – and that’s superintelligent AI. Many of the movement’s thought experiments are less interesting than they first appear: utilitarianism long ago considered the matter of countless future lives (and thus utility) and addressed it in their mathematical models. These ideas can be found in mainstream economics, and don’t justify the movement’s fixation on AI. It is as if their worldview is working backwards from its intended conclusion, which is actually more akin to supernatural beliefs.

There is evidence to suggest that artificial intelligence is advancing exponentially, but not to justify the beliefs common to the online rationalist movement. Many of its followers believe that we will someday be able to upload ourselves into the cloud – essentially creating digital heavens and hells (where the AI may one day reward or punish us). We can transcend our bodies and extend our lives – promises that previously belonged firmly in the realm of religion. There is no hard data to suggest that this “singularity” moment will occur. It is a speculative belief, essentially in a digital god that we are building ourselves.

Such beliefs are worryingly widespread in the tech sector, and seem to have found an expression in the rationalist movement. For someone absorbed in the movement, they would have a seismic impact on their thinking, morality and priorities. It’s doubtful whether this community should be calling themselves rationalists, let alone claiming to represent the modern iteration of this centuries-long philosophical movement. They might be better described as belonging to a technological cult – one that, through its links to Silicon Valley, has an outsized influenced on our world.

With many of the Zizians, including LaSota, facing charges, the group may be losing steam. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that these extreme views haven’t caused more social upheaval – or at least, they haven’t yet.

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

Drone, c. 4000 BCE: male bee

It’s ironic that what has become the most modern form of warfare owes its name to some of the earliest pieces of writing in English. At that time, as now, it was the word for a male bee. Given that similar words exist in many other languages for the insect and the noise it makes, the suggestion is that the noun, and its verb “to drone”, has been around for a very long time, as far back as the Indo-European language spoken some 6000 years ago.

It seems to be very susceptible to metaphor and simile. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1125), the author compared the actions of an acquaintance to the voracious behaviour of the drone, eating everything that it pulls into the hive. By 1400, in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War, the drone had become a metaphor for someone who grows fat from the work of others. The first poet laureate John Skelton used the word to make disparaging comments about the Scots: “The rude rank Scottes, lyke dronken dranes” (c.1529). This theme runs through the centuries, even into official documents. The Registration for Employment Order, published after the Second World War, compiled a list of citizens the government wished to get back into work, describing them poetically as “spivs, drones, eels and butterflies”.

The first recorded mention of “drone” to describe some kind of remote-controlled aircraft is in the US in 1936. Since then, a wide variety of pilotless flying devices have been devised. They can be used for creative and recreational purposes. But they are also increasingly being deployed for reconnaissance and lethal attack – at no risk to the operators.

When we recall Wernher von Braun’s long-range guided missiles, used in the Second World War, this form of warfare from afar is nothing new. But the terrifying destructive precision of the modern drone stands in stark contrast to the benevolent honeybee. Or perhaps it is not so different – we might think of the bee hovering over his flower of choice, before diving in and achieving his goal.

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

Mark Hilborne leads the space security group at King’s College London. He is co-editor of the book “War 4.0”.

Why is Russia-Ukraine being called a “space war”?

Space has a number of military functions that go back to the Cold War. In the Gulf War, [the use of space] became a bit more tactical. But space is now supporting virtually everything the Ukrainians are doing. Satellites allow the high command to communicate, but they also allow Ukraine to pilot its UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and its USVs (uncrewed surface vehicles), which have been responsible for all those very dramatic attacks, both on Russia’s bombers and on their Black Sea Fleet. Despite Ukraine not actually owning any infrastructure in space, it can do all this using Starlink [the satellite constellation operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.]

Connected to that, there’s imagery. The Ukrainians are using very clever platforms – they can take video streams from drones, satellite imagery, and open source data like from your mobile phone, and they can compile all this information, and redraw the tactical map in about 30 seconds. Find where Russian targets are, and then find the closest firing solution. So these capabilities match the Russians. With a much smaller military force, they’re able to level the playing field.

It’s worth noting that almost the first strike in the war was Russia conducting a cyber-attack on all the infrastructure that supported Ukraine’s older satellite communications. Ukraine was no longer able to communicate. That was on day one. So space is of primary importance in this particular conflict.

What about the involvement of private companies? Does Elon Musk’s SpaceX have too much influence?

The commercial sector in space has brought a lot of innovation and cost reductions extremely quickly, in a way that state projects would never have managed to do. At the moment, Musk has such a big chunk of space, and he’s a highly volatile individual. But that will change, as more companies get involved. So the situation will become more balanced.

Of course, commercial companies have been involved in warfare for a long time. Primarily defence contractors like Lockheed Martin or, say, private companies building satellites for the US government. But now we have commercial companies working in a commercial cycle. There is information flowing from US intelligence agencies to Ukraine, but there’s also all the services that we just discussed, coming to the Ukrainians commercially without any state intervention. Some of it is goodwill, provided for free, but some of it isn’t. Ukraine’s Starlink bill, for example, is being covered by the Polish government.

What are counter-space weapons?

Firstly, there’s kinetic weapons, which explode or hit things. There’s direct ascent anti-satellite missiles, which launch from Earth’s surface. And a number of countries have tested those. We know Russia has them. But it creates a lot of debris, flying around at 17,000 miles an hour – it could take out your own satellites as well. And while those systems are good for taking out a single satellite, when we’re talking about Starlink, that’s thousands of them. There are also co-orbital weapons, where one satellite sneaks up on another and bashes into it.

Then there’s remote rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) where a satellite might hover for a long time a bit too close to another one, and it’s difficult to know what they’re up to. Listening? Just trying to irritate you? There was a case in 2020, where Russia had a satellite sitting very close to a US spy satellite. Then it spat out a second, smaller one, like James Bond, and that spat out something that looked like a projectile. But that’s the trouble with space. It’s very hard to see with accuracy.

Weapons can also be used to just knock out data streams. So we have things like “dazzling”, where you blind the sensors of a satellite. You have jamming of GPS signals, or manipulation of data. Russia did this to ships in the Black Sea in 2017, so the GPS systems started telling all the ships slightly wrong information, sending them off course.

What are the implications of jamming?

Many, many functions in modern life rely on GPS systems – like the bank and the stock market. Even if you want your pizza delivered, or you want to drive somewhere. That’s been disrupted locally many, many times in the Russia–Ukraine conflict. What happens if these systems are disrupted in a significant way? What’s the backup? The economic impact if all GPS is jammed is calculated to be at least a billion [pounds] per day in the UK alone.

It seems that nations are testing space warfare capabilities, but are wary of deploying them?

All the big players have these latent counter-space weapons capacities, although the US made a statement in 2022 that they will cease testing direct ascent anti-satellite missiles. So that’s an attempt to stabilise the situation. Increasingly, though, as tensions seem to rise, we find most nations starting to talk about space as a domain of warfare.

Then there’s President Trump’s talk of a Golden Dome, and there are real risks to that. Even though that would be designed to be used against missiles, it would introduce interceptors in space [since intercontinental ballistic missiles travel through space]. And if you can hit a missile, you can hit a satellite. There’s very little way of distinguishing whether a space weapon is defensive or offensive. Critics are saying the Golden Dome could take a decade, maybe two decades, and cost $1 trillion or maybe even $2 trillion – so it won’t happen in Trump’s time, if it does happen at all. But there will be movement in that direction – even if it doesn’t happen at the scale imagined.

How can we discourage space warfare?

The Outer Space Treaty states that space must be maintained for peaceful purposes, but lawyers differ in their interpretation of what that actually means. A more binding arms control treaty in space has been a goal since the 1980s, but these discussions just go round and round. For example, how do we define what is a weapon in space?

More hopefully, the UN has adopted a UK proposal that is the basis for the new Responsible Behaviours in Space initiative – to try to agree on norms of behaviour. For example, it’s considered irresponsible if a satellite is closer than a certain distance to another. This could become the basis of soft law, which hopefully then becomes the basis of binding law. But there’s a lack of trust between the major players and space is a very sensitive environment. We’ve talked about Russia, but probably the biggest competitor is China, which has a very opaque way of doing business. They have a broader policy of what they call “military civil fusion”, where you can never really distinguish between a commercial or civilian or military system. The US is particularly worried about China.

Would you say that the lack of public awareness around warfare in space is a democratic issue?

The public doesn’t understand how much we rely on space as a domain of warfare. But it’s not just the general public. The UK government only really talked about space as a strategic area of warfare in the Integrated Review [a comprehensive articulation of the UK’s national security and international policy] in 2020. In the United States it’s better understood. When we talk about our domains of war the three traditional ones are air, land and sea. Then we have cyber. Space, like cyber, is kind of “out of sight, out of mind”. But the UK is an interesting country because of this strong diplomatic initiative in the UN. There’s also a lot of entrepreneurial thinking about space. But I would agree it’s a democratic issue. We need more awareness.

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: In the past year, there have been a few notable bombshells revealing the dark money that funds online discourse. In September of last year, a federal indictment revealed that rightwing influencers like Tim Pool …

Donald Trump is suing his niece, Mary, for $100 million for helping the New York Times with its investigation into his finances. “Good luck with that,” she said to enthusiastic applause when I interviewed her at the Hay Festival in May. A few months into the US president’s chaotic and disruptive second term, I found her calm remarkable.

Mary Trump, daughter of the president’s late elder brother Fred, has a PhD in clinical psychology. In her latest memoir about growing up in the Trump dynasty she writes scathingly about her uncle who, she claims, was always cruel and selfish. Reflecting on his return to power she told me: “One of the reasons I took 2016 personally is because it felt like millions had voted to turn America into my family – which is a terrible idea.”

Now entirely estranged from the Trump family and its patriarchal dysfunction, Mary’s bravery in publicly mocking the most powerful man on the planet has seen her become a figurehead. But not of any recognisable movement. Rather, her opposition is a literal example of that old feminist mantra: “the personal is political.”

The phrase was coined as a title for activist Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay, assessing the emerging challenges for the Second Wave women’s liberation movement. Key was rejecting the normalisation of male supremacy: “Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them,” she wrote. How to change the objective conditions remains the challenge.

Two other women at the Hay Festival this year had their own approaches. Laura Bates is best known for founding the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012, which records crowdsourced experiences of daily sexism. She has also published carefully researched books on misogyny and the horrifying potential of cyber abuse through AI – “the new age of sexism”, as she calls it.

However, Bates also seeks to inspire joy in a generation of young girls with her series of young adult novels about a community of Arthurian female knights. Even these fantasy novels are fact-based (the knights, not King Arthur). Bates told me of historic records describing “a group of unruly and rowdy women, who turned up at jousting tournaments on horseback, without the right equipment and refused to go away unless they were allowed to join in”.

If Mary Trump, born in 1965, and Laura Bates, born in 1986, represented Gen X and millennial thinking around gender, then British actress Alison Steadman – born 1946 – was the festival’s feminist baby boomer. She is loved for her long career from Pride and Prejudice to Gavin and Stacey, and her often darkly comic performances (she was the original Beverley in Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party). Steadman was there to talk about her new memoir – a book that contains plenty of joy but also, unexpectedly, a powerful frankness about her encounters with predatory men.

Steadman had never spoken about most of the near escapes before. The first was as a teenager, when a schoolteacher offered her a lift after drama club, only to try to force himself on her, laughing as he warned that no one would believe her word over his. That he could kill her and dump her body and nobody would know. She managed to stop him, but her anxiety about why he’d targeted her was reinforced when she found herself trapped with such a man again, years later. I recognised that instinct of anger mixed with guilt. The dread that grew as our female social training to be polite turned to fear.

By choosing to open up about those traumatic memories from the past, Steadman was doing a service to the present. She reminded us how, though abusers still prey on the young this way, the “objective conditions” have changed. A girl would be much more likely to be believed today, and to have help and support to challenge such a man. The battle is ongoing, but as these three women show, there is power in knowing that we are not alone.

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

On the side of a road that winds its way through the steep mountains, a plume of steam rises from a battered pot. Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, 42, strains boiling chai into small glass tumblers, sheltered by a faded tarpaulin. His hands move automatically – pour, strain, serve. He’s been doing this for a decade here in Indian-administered Kashmir, serving locals and tourists, many of them heading to and from Gurez, one of the most beautiful valleys in the Himalayas. Business used to be thriving. But then, on 22 April, a terror attack killed 25 tourists and a local pony rider in a Kashmiri resort, sending the tourism industry into meltdown. “Ever since the Pahalgam attack, tourists have stopped coming to Gurez,” Khan tells us, adding that he is the sole breadwinner in his family. “Before, I would earn about 1000 rupees a day [£8.50]. Now, it’s barely anything, just 50 rs [£0.40].”

It’s not only established businesses like Khan’s that have been affected. Many new ventures had opened up along the disputed border between India and Pakistan, encouraged by a government tourism campaign launched in 2023. Spearheaded by the Indian Army and local authorities, the initiative offered financial incentives and infrastructure upgrades to promote tourism in the areas along the “Line of Control”, which winds its way through the mountainous region of Kashmir. These scenic borderlands, previously only mentioned in discussions around security, were recast as sites of hospitality and resilience. Tourists were drawn by the snow-capped mountains, pristine lakes and apple orchards. In 2024, over 400,000 tourists came, primarily from across India and some from abroad.

But in Kashmir, walking the borderlands is not merely tracing lines on a map – it is stepping into a landscape shaped by decades of tension, teetering between the fragile hush of morning and the distant echo of war. The region has been a flashpoint since 1947, when British India was partitioned. Both India and Pakistan now claim full sovereignty over Kashmir, but control different portions, separated by the heavily militarised de facto border. Armed insurgencies, military crackdowns and shelling have defined life along this divide for generations, with families often forced to flee or rebuild in the shadow of conflict.

In the summer of 2019, the balance in the region shifted, as the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the constitution – a provision that had granted India’s portion of the region, the state of Jammu and Kashmir, special autonomous status. The move was controversial, not least because the special status of this Muslim-majority region had helped to balance its fraught relationship with the government, especially amid the rise of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In anticipation of unrest, the revocation was followed by a crackdown involving thousands of detentions and a communications blackout.

The government, for its part, presented the move as a step toward national integration and development, with tourism used as a key strategy. After the crackdown, residents were keen for economic recovery. And so those living in villages near the Line of Control began to repurpose their homes to accommodate guests. Many took out substantial loans. They hoped that the region, long defined by conflict, would soon be known for its hospitality and breathtaking landscapes.

For a time, it seemed to be working. But that fragile vision shattered on 22 April, when the hill station of Pahalgam – a jewel of the upper Himalayas – was hit by the deadliest attack on civilians in the region for decades. India blamed Pakistan-based militants and swiftly launched “Operation Sindoor,” targeting alleged militant sites in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. A familiar and devastating cycle began, as Pakistan retaliated with mortar fire and drone strikes. The shelling finally stopped on 10 May, after a ceasefire. But normal life has been slow to return. After the attack, Jammu and Kashmir shut down nearly half of its 87 tourist sites, mostly parks and gardens, and enhanced security at others. Some opened their doors again in June as part of a staged reopening plan – but there was no mention of tourist spots along the Line of Control. Families who had poured everything into the promise of peace now find themselves back in the same homes they had renovated for guests.

In the Gurez valley, the fallout has been especially severe. “Tourism had become the backbone of Gurez’s economy – almost every household was somehow connected to it,” says Ghulam Nabi Lone, who heads the local hotelier association. “Even young people who previously had no jobs had found work in this growing industry.” Gurez had seen nearly 20 hotels and over 50 homestays spring up in recent years – when we visited in June, all stood empty.

After Gurez, we visited Uri. Surrounded by rice fields, this tranquil town attracted tourists for its beauty, as well as to visit the Pandav Mandir, an ancient Hindu temple, and the Aman Setu, or “Bridge of Peace”. Once a strategic military outpost, the bridge was transformed into a symbol of reconciliation when it reopened as a crossing point between India and Pakistan in 2007. “In peak summer, over 5,000 people would visit daily,” says Tanveer Chalkoo, general secretary of Civil Society Uri. “Now shops are closed. Drivers, guides, everyone is sitting idle.”

Tourism is especially important for remote places like Tangdhar, a windswept border village in the Karnah Valley. Before the recent influx of tourists, Tangdhar was only ever in the news when guns began to thunder. But for locals like Nadeem Akbar, 42, it’s simply home. In 2021, Akbar poured two million rupees – half from a government loan and the rest from his personal savings – into building a hotel and restaurant. Before April, business boomed. “We’d serve nearly 250 meals [a day],” he recalls. “The rooms were almost always booked.” He was caught in the shelling on 6 May. Thankfully, all the guests had vacated the hotel so there were only two young staffers left. “They ran to my house next door,” he says. “Pakistan began firing around 2:30am. Not long after, a mortar hit the building – tearing a hole through the centre and cracking the surrounding walls, which later collapsed completely.”

Was border tourism a genuine attempt to revive life on the frontier – or a political showpiece for Modi’s government, one that recklessly ignored the region’s deep instability? A terror attack, or some other escalation of cross-border tensions, might have been predicted, given that the territory is still under dispute. The shelling has now reversed much of the progress made – through destruction of property, and also damage to the region’s reputation as a safe holiday destination.

Just days after the ceasefire was brokered, in a bid to restore confidence, the Indian government and the Travel Agents Association of India launched the “Chalo [Let’s go] Kashmir” campaign to revive tourism. But rebuilding businesses will plunge locals further into debt, and many are afraid that this is not the end of hostilities. In fact, it is not just tourists vacating the area. Many residents have fled the territory along the Line of Control and relocated further away from the de facto border.

When we visited, the region was preparing for an uncertain summer and autumn. In villages like Uri and Tangdhar, years of living with the fear of shelling have left people drained. Every time there’s talk of peace, they say, it’s followed by violence. Children miss school, families lose their homes and incomes, and the uncertainty seems to never end. While reporting this story, we felt that exhaustion firsthand – in the quiet pauses between conversations, in the way people looked away when asked about the future. There’s a heaviness in these villages that no politician’s visit can lift. But with little other option, some are considering whether to rebuild, come what may. Akbar tells us of his deep affection and pride for the hotel and restaurant, which had supported his family, as well as six employees. “This place wasn’t just a business,” he says. “It was our shared livelihood.”

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: Remember the year 2015? Technically it was only ten years ago, but because CERN accidentally created a very small black hole using the Large Hadron Collider in 2016, time dilation means that we have …

Last month, I posted a video about how online age verification laws are not protecting children from dangerous material, but instead are just a way for the Religious Right to censor content they don’t like. I mostly focused on the “not protecting children at all” part, but at the end I pointed out that these …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: You may have recently heard some news about Costco and the abortion medication mifepristone. Today I want to address some misinformation about that, AND some misinformation ABOUT the misinformation. It’s like mifepristone misinforception. That’s …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last month, I talked about an MIT preprint published on arXiv about AI. It’s a little early for an update on that, but there is some interesting news about another MIT preprint published on …

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.

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

Here is the full description:

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

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

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 […]