Don’t blame Minnesota for the mess we’re in.

I’ve seen this game of Telephone played out in my cell biology class, but to a greater degree.

Square units? Far too easy. Our first lab in cell biology is about observing cells and then doing a bunch of unit conversions — but we’re working with volumes and cubic units. For instance, we look at a sample of microorganisms taken from a local lake, and they calculate the density and size of cells, and have to estimate how many cells are in the lake and the volume they take up. I hate to tell you this, but our lake either contains one gigantic cell that fills the entire thing, or is a thick soup containing 10^googolplex cells…mmmm, sounds tasty and nutritious.

The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.

It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.

We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.

The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.

After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.

I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.

Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.

That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.

That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.

They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.

The fellow to the right is Damion Surles, a little-known troll whose previous claim to fame was distributing a doctored, fake photo of Kamala Harris standing next to notorious pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

You all know exactly where this story is going, right?

Damion Surles, 40, was identified as the suspect who allegedly interacted inappropriately with a minor.

Surles was arrested on Aug. 15 and charged with first-degree rape and child sexual abuse.

He was booked into the Jackson County Jail.

Man, there’s such a strong correlation between MAGA Republicans and child rape. It’s almost as if you’d expect their president to also be guilty of sexual assault…oh, wait.

---

Another one! Ricci Wynne.

A MAGA influencer known for posting sensationalized videos of homeless people in San Francisco was indicted Tuesday on federal charges of producing child sex abuse material.

Ricci Wynne, 39, known as Raw Ricci to his more than 100,000 Instagram followers, was first arrested in November and charged with pimping and pandering by procuring, HuffPost previously reported. He was taken into custody alongside a woman shortly after arriving at San Francisco International Airport.

Vivian Wilson is interviewed in Teen Vogue. She is not a nepo baby — she’s been cut off from the sperm donor, Elon Musk, who contributed in a minimal way to her birth.

Wilson entered the public consciousness because of her father, but not for typical nepo baby reasons. (Before you ask, Wilson says she’s been financially independent from her father since she came out as trans in 2020, so you can stop sending her Venmo requests for thousands of dollars, something she says has happened before.) At the time, she was trying to disconnect herself from Musk, eventually writing in a 2022 petition to legally change her name that she doesn’t “wish to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form.” Though she’d never publicly spoken about Musk before then, her attempt to distance herself from him is what ultimately drew her into the public eye.

“I have a sharp tongue,” Wilson tells Teen Vogue in her second-ever published interview. “When you spend all of COVID [lockdown] in online communities of queer people who are constantly getting into drama and trying to read each other, [you] learn how to make a response very quickly, and you learn how to be funny and snap at someone else in a comedic way…. Getting into fights with other queer teenagers — that’s how you learn how to be quick and witty.” Much like her father, Wilson is extremely online; unlike her father, she’s really good at it.

In my personal experience, this holds up: the gay and trans people I’ve known are all great conversationalists with a wicked sense of humor. She definitely did not inherit that from her terrible father.

I’m sympatico with her politics, and not Musk’s.

TV: Isaacson described your politics as “radical Marxism” in the book. Do you consider yourself a Marxist?
VW: I’m a leftist, not a Marxist. I describe myself by the things that I personally believe in and the things that I feel are pretty common sense, if you think about it for more than two seconds. I believe in [universal basic income]. I believe in free health care. I believe food, shelter, and water are human rights. I believe that wealth inequality is one of the biggest problems of the United States right now, especially of our generation. I feel like workers should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, and I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.

I don’t think that’s an unusual perspective, and I think most Americans would agree with that, if they weren’t poisoned by the lie that those goals are being stolen from them by immigrants and gay/trans people. It’s the position that all Democrats should take, except for the unfortunate fact that that party is led by people seduced by money and power.

Britain’s Labour Party, finally back in power after 14 years of opposition, are now having to navigate their many internal divisions. Over the last decade, the issue of welfare has proven particularly fraught. Founded as the party of workers, Labour went on to create much of the modern welfare state. Given this history, the choice to support a more generous provision of benefits might seem uncontroversial. In practice, it has proven anything but. Soon after Keir Starmer became prime minister in July, disagreements on welfare were already tangling him up in knots.

What is going on here, and why is the issue such a difficult one for Labour? A deeper analysis of the debate suggests it’s about more than differing takes on policy. On a philosophical level, the conflict might actually be about the purpose of politics itself.

The current drama over welfare dates back to 2015. Jeremy Corbyn had been picked by Labour’s left flank as its sacrificial candidate (they stood a candidate as a matter of course, but never expected them to win). But this time was different. Harriet Harman was interim leader, and thus heir apparent to lead the party into the general election. Only, she had made a miscalculation. She had ordered her party to abstain on the second reading of a welfare bill brought by the Conservative government, which would institute a two-child cap on benefit payments, alongside other measures to restrict welfare provision.

The cap meant that families with more than two children would not be given any additional support. The vote was a procedural one – the MPs would have a chance to vote against the final bill. Harman believed she was avoiding a trap set to get Labour on the unpopular side of a prominent issue. She was playing to the general public, and thought she could keep her party onside.

But the move backfired. The cap went through and the decision to abstain was presented by supporters on the party’s left flank as a betrayal of everything Labour was supposed to stand for. This surge of anger fuelled interest in Corbyn – the only candidate who rebelled against the whip – and helped create the wave of interest that propelled him to the leadership.

Fast forward to today, and Starmer’s commitment to keeping the cap is one of the ways in which he has distanced himself from Corbyn’s more radical politics. But now, as prime minister, he is under significant pressure from his party to remove it, raising the prospect that this policy issue may once again play an outsized role in shaping the fate of Labour.

Why can’t the issue be resolved? Firstly, it’s emotive: we’re talking about children, many of whom are living below the poverty line. But there seems to be another dynamic that is hampering communication. If you look more closely at the debate, the two sides appear to be speaking entirely different languages. One side – let’s call them the pragmatists – view politics purely in terms of policies enacted and material change on the ground. The other – let’s call them the idealists – see a role for demonstrating their principles and modelling them in public. It is a debate that has simmered for centuries, and yet seems to catch each new political generation unawares.

Idealism vs pragmatism

Applying this lens to the current welfare debate, the idealists in Labour objected to Harman’s pragmatic strategy. Even if the vote didn’t matter in practice, they believed that Labour should still stand up for its principles. (Later, this simple picture got more complicated, as Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto was in fact predicated on maintaining the benefit cap, which his supporters then seemed to accept.)

This is the history that Keir Starmer’s government was facing off against when it came into power and prepared its first King’s Speech and Budget. Not only did it have the weight of its own historical decisions on the two-child benefit cap to reckon with, but it faced significant pressure from almost every child poverty charity and policy expert, all of whom agreed that ending the cap would be by far the single most effective measure to reduce child poverty in the UK.

Many Labour MPs will privately admit that scrapping the cap is the policy they would most like to see the government enact, but in public there is no promise yet on the table. Labour has created a child poverty action group to present recommendations this year, but the issue is clearly a point of vulnerability for the government.

This created the opportunity for what was seen by many in Number 10 as mischief-making from opposition groups. When Labour presented its first legislative bill for 15 years in the King’s Speech, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Greens took the opportunity to present an opposition motion on the two-child benefit cap, regretting that it had not been included in Labour’s agenda for its first year. They knew the amendment wouldn’t pass (it was a “cosmetic vote”), but it was an effective way to drive a wedge between Labour’s idealists and its pragmatists.

The government argued that given the vote was intended to embarrass the party, it would take a hard line on any Labour MP voting for it, suspending the whip for a minimum of six months – not least because those MPs would be voting against Labour’s first King’s Speech. Eight MPs nonetheless voted for the amendment, and were punished accordingly.

For them, the logic of the “cosmetic vote” cut both ways: if Labour argues that it would like to end the benefit cap, but doesn’t think it can afford to do so yet, why can’t its MPs at least agree in principle with ending it? The vote didn’t commit to spending, after all, so why can’t parliamentarians show what they believe in? Is that not what they have been elected to parliament to do?

Max Weber's 'Politics as a Vocation'

Perhaps the definitive authority on these questions, at least when it comes to electoral politics, is the theorist Max Weber, and in particular his 1918 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”. Weber begins modestly, apologising to his audience that he is about to disappoint them by steering clear of the “actual problems of the day” – but the loftier and deeper problems he addressed instead made the lecture one to last through the ages.

At first, Weber’s sympathies seem to lean towards the idealists. He expresses irritation at the politicians who merely enact the will of their party bosses. “Nowadays the members of Parliament, with the exception of the few cabinet members (and a few insurgents), are normally nothing better than well-disciplined ‘yes’ men,” he complains. By contrast, “to take a stand, to be passionate – ira et studium – is the politician’s element, and above all the element of the political leader,” he argued. (Ira et studium is Latin for anger and enthusiasm, or passion.) “His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant.”

However, like orators through the ages, Weber is merely setting out the argument he intends to side against. He goes on to identify “vanity” as a fatal weakness in a politician, not least because it leads to what is in his view a cardinal sin: irresponsibility.

He contrasts the “ethic of responsibility” with “the ethic of ultimate ends”. The latter places the politician in the role as the keeper of the flame: “for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order”. From that perspective, handing on that flame to a next generation of politicians is victory enough, whereas compromising to deliver a lesser goal would be seen as a failure.

For Weber, that rendered the “ethic of ultimate ends” on its own untenable – but without some measure of it, the “ethic of responsibility” was similarly vacuous. The “politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends,” but ultimately “some kind of faith must always exist.”

With his conclusion that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” Weber lends a little credibility to both the passionate and the pragmatic, but tips his hand towards the latter.

Labour's pragmatic history

Labour is a party with a long tradition of – to borrow Weber’s analogy – making the effort to drill holes in hard boards. The party is decidedly anti-revolutionary but has nevertheless managed to enact transformational policy. Proof of this can be found throughout the party’s history. Clement Attlee was anything but an ideologue, despite the change his post-war government brought to Britain: the birth of the NHS, the modern welfare state, a huge homebuilding programme and more. Attlee is remembered as an almost milquetoast chairman-like figure, balancing off the huge egos and factional interests that surrounded him at the cabinet table. It was through his skill in buying off and mollifying the ideologues around him that their plans became reality.

Harold Wilson modelled himself after Attlee, who gave him his first cabinet position just days after he became an MP, and who became the godfather to one of his children. Wilson might have convinced some of the party’s idealogues that he was one of them when he stood down alongside Nye Bevan over prescription charges for the NHS, but his nuanced reasons for doing so belied the pragmatist within. Wilson did not oppose the principle of introducing charges for NHS dentures and glasses, but he did oppose doing it to fund a rearmament effort he believed (correctly) was doomed to failure – he was not willing to introduce charging for something that would deliver no benefit.

That is perhaps the essence of Weber’s idealised politician: not abandoning principle, but moderating it through the lens of pragmatism.

Through shiftiness and a reputation for being “too clever by half”, Wilson achieved transformative change that remains under-appreciated to this day: the biggest programme of housebuilding ever achieved in Britain, massive expansion of access to higher education, the Equal Pay Act, the Race Relations Act, the end of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Of Tony Blair, little more need be said than that very few of even his closest friends would accuse him of being a man whose ideals were not tempered by pragmatism. What sign of compromise with the electorate could be clearer than a full rebrand of your party as “New Labour”?

And yet, in reality, Blair was a continuation of Labour’s tradition in government, not a repudiation of it. That did not happen until Corbyn came along, a man who had previously never served in any frontbench role, whether in government or opposition, and who had never given the party whip much regard: Corbyn voted according to his own conscience, come what may, and left the compromises of governing to others. He had never pretended otherwise – in fact, this drove much of his appeal.

Turning to the ideologues

The current allure of the idealists is perhaps understandable. The “centrists” or pragmatists have not had much to show for their work in the last decade – the financial crisis of 2008 was followed in the UK by austerity, Brexit and the pandemic. Public services are underfunded, and real wages are still lower than they were in 2007. If compromise doesn’t deliver, why should voters accept it? Around the world, they are turning to ideologues, whether on the left or the right – Donald Trump in the US, Javier Milei in Argentina, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Gustavo Petro in Colombia.

This changing calculus seems to be troubling the Conservative Party too, in recent years. Liz Truss’s disastrously short premiership showed the danger of rejecting the oft-repeated mantra that to govern is to compromise. By producing a Budget in which she included almost every tax cut she’d ever dreamed of delivering – with the hard work of reform pushed to a future date – she demonstrated what happens when ideology wins, and it looked a lot like the “irresponsibility” of which Weber warned.

Truss herself seems determined not to take that lesson from her tenure, insisting instead that she was brought down by the incompetence of her officials and the malign efforts of her political enemies – many of them outside the ambit of parliamentary politics, such as the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. It is clear which course the Conservative Party wants to take next, having chosen another ideologue, Kemi Badenoch, as its current leader.

If pragmatic compromise, albeit underlined by principle, is the true purpose of politics, then someone needs to make that case afresh to the public. Joe Biden’s presidency was marked by quiet delivery for the working people of America: he was pro-union, funded billions in investment, delivered the best economic growth in the western world (by some margin), and had record employment numbers.

None of it mattered and almost no-one believed it when Democrats tried to highlight that record. America looked instead to Trump, a man who doesn’t compromise and who doesn’t worry about delivery. Trump’s promises might often be dark – deportation in the millions followed by a global trade war – but they are not tempered by caution.

Politicking, done well, is the act of finding the right blend of principle and pragmatism to create positive change. But after two decades of relentless financial shocks – the subprime loans crisis, austerity, Brexit, Trump, the pandemic and more – the public is tired of the art of the possible. It is looking to the dreamers, and historically, dreamers don’t deliver, at least not within democratic systems.

Someone has to make the case to reclaim pragmatism from the political graveyard. The only way to do that is to show that it can actually get results. With incumbents round the world falling and populists taking their place, the pressure is on for Starmer and his 170-seat majority to do that.

But Starmer risks his brand of pragmatism being associated with the politics of “no”: no, you can’t have a pay rise; no, we can’t fix the NHS; no, we can’t do anything about the leaking roof of your school. If he wants to try to redeem pragmatism, he would do well to take lessons from Weber and from Wilson, and remember that pragmatism is there to deliver on the promise of principle. Wilson might have been known as shifty, but when he left Number 10 he could look back on a set of accomplishments that would be the envy of any of his party’s purists – his clever-clever approach got stuff done.

Starmer spent his election campaign, and now his first months in government, telling us what isn’t possible. We will have to compromise, he said, with the difficult circumstances of reality. That message is safely received. But even Weber or Wilson would tell him that it’s possible to take pragmatism and compromise too far, and that at some point you have to try and deliver something you really believe in. Does Starmer have anything he can point to that he’s getting done as a result of his hard, unpopular slog? If he looks around and decides the answer is “no”, then it’s time to step up. Perhaps ending the two-child benefit cap would be a good place to start.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: It’s tough to find good news these days, so I’m very excited to bring you some today, and it’s all about our trans friends! First, 26 medical and psychotherapeutic organizations from across Germany, Austria, …

Is there a narcissist in your life? It’s the question posed time and again across countless books, websites and social media posts. How to spot a narcissist, how to handle them, what they want – the internet is suddenly full of such discussions. Even outside the online sphere, it can feel like we are living in an age dominated by this psychological spectre. Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb once branded US President Donald Trump a “deeply wounded narcissist”, claiming that this shaped his decision-making during his first administration. (Trump, for his part, has described himself as “a very stable genius”, not exactly disproving Cobb’s theory.) Numerous commentators now double up as part-time psychologists, accusing politicians, celebrities and reality TV stars of being narcissists lurking in our midst.

So what actually is a narcissist? Let’s turn to the real experts (avoiding the many who claim to be). The term derives from the ancient Greek myth of the vain young man Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and died as a result – or rather, lost his humanity, transforming into the drooping daffodil that bears his name.

Kostas Papageorgiou, associate professor at Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology, tells me that “Modern descriptions of narcissism stem from the works of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic writers like Sigmund Freud, who highlighted traits like grandiosity, attention-seeking, egocentricity, entitlement and a domineering interpersonal style.” These traits appear in the general population on a spectrum, meaning that everybody has a score on narcissism. “If this score is too high,” Papageorgiou tells me, “we suspect Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).”

Discussion of the disorder was usually confined to a mental health context until 2002, he says, when psychologists Kevin Williams and Delroy Paulhus coined the term “Dark Triad” to describe a particularly dangerous group of people who exhibited tendencies towards narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Psychopathy is distinguished by impulsivity and thrill-seeking, while Machiavellianism is marked by manipulation and calculated self-interest. Both align nicely with narcissism, which is also a socially malevolent tendency associated with self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity and aggression. “There was an explosion of publications on the topic [of narcissism] after around 2008-2009,” Papageorgiou says. He considers it no coincidence that this was the time of the global financial crisis: “‘Dark’ personalities emerge in conditions of adversity where lack of control and unpredictability are key characteristics,” he says.

The growth in academic interest accompanied a surge in public concern that shows no sign of abating. Armchair diagnosing has become a kind of sport. It’s tempting for those who have been mistreated by a partner, friend or family member to recognise a few signs and “identify” a narcissist. There are 1.4 million posts tagged #narcissist on TikTok alone, with celebrities and influencers teaching their social media followers how to spot and handle these people – “Narc 101” in pop psychology parlance. But amateur diagnosing can have troubling consequences, and not only for the people who stand falsely accused.

The origin story

First, let’s look at the official definition of NPD. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists nine criteria, of which an individual must have at least five to be diagnosed: a grandiose sense of self-importance; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power and the like; seeing themselves as special and only understood by similar or high-status people; requiring excessive admiration; entitlement; exploitation of others for their own ends; lack of empathy; jealousy or the belief that others are envious of them; arrogance. Yet no two narcissists are entirely alike, as Papageorgiou points out. There are different recognisable types, including the domineering “grandiose narcissists” who “generally exhibit antagonism in their attempt to gain status” yet tend to have more positive mental health outcomes and performance in different domains, as well as the insecure, hypersensitive “vulnerable narcissists” who also exhibit antagonism but because they believe “everybody is out to get them”.

So how did they get that way? According to pop psychology, narcissists usually have a similar background. Here’s how the story goes. Responding to trauma or a lack of love or stability in early life, the narcissist suppresses his or her authentic self as shameful and instead develops a protective false self, an attractive facade. Perhaps a great poet. A beauty. A scholar. The individual may have been rewarded for playing this role in childhood and it may change over time. Yet, no matter the exact specifics, this enhanced version is likely to be charming and charismatic, designed to lure people in. Anything – or anyone – that punctures this facade and reminds the narcissist of their true self will provoke pain and rage.

Does the science support this? “We do not know much about the development of narcissism,” Papageorgiou says. “We know that just like every other psychological trait or disorder, narcissism is heritable and influenced to some degree by genetic differences. We have findings to show that excessive praising from parents in childhood can contribute to grandiose narcissism later, while inconsistent and harsh parenting can contribute to vulnerable narcissism.”

Returning to our Narc Class, the narcissist now faces a problem. How to bridge the gap between the real and false selves? The answer comes in the concept of “supply”. Lacking inherent worth, the narcissist becomes dependent on external validation to prop up the false image. The sources can be, for instance, status symbols, prizes, publicity, money, sex, and hobnobbing with the crème de la crème of society. He or she also feels compelled to seek out individuals who are content to play along with their delusions of grandeur. Yet, that “source” of supply must be reliable. The deceptive, manipulative narcissist will therefore take certain steps to control their source and so keep the praise coming, enjoying power over another.

The narcissist's 'playbook'

This idea of being a “source” or “supply” and how to avoid it, or recover from it, fuels much of the current content on narcissism – including more than 50 podcasts devoted exclusively to the subject on Apple Podcasts alone, with names like “Navigating Narcissism”, “Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse” or “You’re Not Crazy”. People share similar stories of encounters with narcissists, through romantic relationships, family or work. Through these stories and projects, a perceived “playbook” of narcissistic strategies and techniques has emerged. So do sufferers of the disorder share common patterns of behaviour, or is the public discourse encouraging people to find patterns where they don’t exist?

Psychotherapist and professor Alfried Längle explains that, while no two individuals are the same, there are behaviours that constitute “fixed coping-reactions” in those suffering from NPD. “Coping-reactions are psychodynamic behaviours which happen automatically (ie are not decided) in situations when a person is overwhelmed by problems or pain which they cannot resolve in the moment.” One of these, Längle says, is colloquially known as “love bombing”, where a person with NPD initially showers a romantic interest with attention and affection, only to later withhold it. “They want to possess the ‘beloved’ object because it provides more esteem. They are [love] bombing because they need it urgently and/or they must always win. These feelings when they fight for their prey are real. The processes are not so conscious.”

Various aspects of the discourse around narcissism do align with respected academic theories and research. In the 1960s, British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott posited ideas of the true and false self, the latter a defensive facade developed due to the primary caregiver not meeting a child’s emotional needs. Meanwhile, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel discussed “supply” in 1938 and some academic papers continue to use the notion.

But it is questionable how many social media influencers or popular podcast hosts have actually read such research. The content is often not only simplistic, but can verge on panicked hysteria. “Eating with a Narcissist” is one popular topic on TikTok, with influencers describing “how narcissists control you with food”. Another topic, “Narcissist Eyes Filmed”, advises on how to recognise “the narcissist’s stare”.

'Cartoon villains'

There is another problem. Once “diagnosed”, the supposed narc can expect little sympathy. They appear to struggle with feelings of love and empathy, so it’s natural that people might avoid them. However, the popular discourse often seems to suggest that they are less than human, or as close to a cartoon villain as it’s possible to be, and that they “cannot change”.

The current medical consensus is that NPD is indeed a difficult disorder to treat – even when a sufferer is persuaded to seek help. But treatment is still possible. Through psychotherapy, “they can gain insight and learn to control themselves better; their pain and distorted experience can be restructured,” Längle says, adding that “The personality tendency remains but impulses can be corrected.”

Sufferers of NPD may not seek treatment, however, since they may not perceive their behaviour as morally wrong. The manipulation of others, and the seeking of wealth and status, can also yield real-world benefits. But there are exceptions. Ben Taylor describes himself as a “self-aware narcissist turned abuse recovery coach”, now working with women who have been victims of narcissistic abuse to restore their confidence.

“Finding out that I was a narcissist was a gradual process like turning on the dimmer switch,” he says. “A lot of my traits were there early on, as in some of my childhood development there was not a lot of emotional safety in what I could share and talk through so I started to lie and hide who I was.” While commendable, it should be noted that Taylor has built a successful career and garnered public attention from outing himself as a sufferer of NPD. Others would likely suffer loss of relationships, friends, wealth and status – which may not be considered worth the risk.

Social media and narcissism

The reluctance of someone suffering from NPD to seek help, or acknowledge the disorder, poses problems when estimating its prevalence. There are other difficulties too. Chanki Moon, assistant professor in social psychology and criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, tells me that personality disorders are classified into three clusters. A 2020 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry estimated the global prevalence of personality disorders in the “dramatic-erratic” cluster – which includes NPD as well as histrionic, borderline and anti-social disorders – at 2.8 per cent. But that only gives us data on the cluster of disorders, not specifically on narcissism.

So is narcissistic personality disorder rising? “Answering this question is challenging due to the lack of research on the topic,” Moon tells me. Comparing the 2020 data to World Health Organisation Mental Health Surveys in 2009, he says that “we can tentatively suggest a slight upward trend in the prevalence of personality disorders, although the increase is minimal and further research is needed.” What the data does suggest is that NPD is more prevalent in men than women, he added.

Could social media be accelerating the development of narcissistic traits? Platforms allow users to project an idealised, crafted version of themselves that is then confirmed by the dopamine hit of adoring followers’ likes and shares. “People with higher levels of narcissism tend to enjoy social media more, as they seek attention and admiration,” says Moon.

However, there are distinctions. A study published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour in 2020 found that grandiose narcissists are more likely to present a version aligned with their true self on social media, whereas vulnerable narcissists project a false self.

Trump and Macron

What about particular professions? In their 2023 book Dark Politics: The Personality of Politicians and the Future of Democracy, Alessandro Nai, associate professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam, and Jürgen Maier, professor of political communication at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, conducted psychological profiling of around 200 world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro and our very own Boris Johnson.

Nai says that “across all those world leaders, a politician stands out for his extreme level of narcissism: Donald Trump.” No prizes for guessing that. However, other entries may be more surprising. According to their analysis, “French President Emmanuel Macron scores quite high on narcissism,” Nai explains. “He has given his own initials to the party he founded, a typical narcissistic move.”

Nai notes that narcissism can correlate with political ambition and a belief in one’s own capabilities. Meanwhile, voters can be drawn to the confidence and charisma, associating it with strong leadership.

But is our age particularly prone? “We have no good historical data, at least not in a comparative perspective, able to answer such a question,” Nai explains. “My gut feeling is that the advent of social media – and, specifically, the possibility of setting up immediate and direct communication from the politician to the voter – exacerbates the visibility of narcissistic traits in the political arena. Those traits might well have been there before, but are now out there for everybody to see.”

Are there any positive aspects in this growth of awareness? Brian Comstock is a personal coach who has over 70,000 Instagram followers and offers sessions which he says can help clients heal from narcissistic abuse. The majority of his online engagement comes from women. Comstock says he recognises the problems of excessive or misplaced diagnoses, but that his online reach can also help people in need of support and advice.

“It’s crucial to approach this topic responsibly, avoiding the trap of labelling every challenging relationship as narcissistic,” he says. “My focus is primarily on guiding victims toward healing and fostering healthy relationship practices, rather than on formal diagnoses.”

But while personal coaches may stop short of dishing out diagnoses, their content might nevertheless encourage viewers to “spot” narcissistic traits, while they then profit from helping clients “heal” from the impact of dealing with those freshly identified “narcs”.

Papageorgiou warns that online content can create “simplistic dichotomies between good and evil characters”, taking the focus away from supporting those with NPD to understand and restrain their behaviour. “Reproducing stereotypes and marginalising are never good strategies for dealing with problematic behaviour,” he says.

Increased awareness may be effective at directing those with NPD, and those who encounter them – as romantic partners, relatives, friends or work colleagues – to appropriate forms of help and support. But it’s critical that this is informed by academic and clinical expertise – and it’s time we return the task of diagnosis to the experts.

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

I have lots of talks and shows coming up soon. Meanwhile, here are two podcast interviews that I did recently. ….

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

Now that I am in my late eighties, I have sadly become used to losing good friends of a similar age. But the news of the death of Caspar Melville tragically fails to fit that pattern. For Caspar died a few weeks ago at the tender age of 58, after spending a total of twenty-two months lying in hospital and nursing home beds following a serious cycling accident.

My periodic visits to his bedside during all that time were punctuated by modest signs of recovery but more often by news of his further deterioration. He finally succumbed to a combination of pneumonia and kidney failure. His wife, Sarah, as she had assiduously been throughout his long illness, was by his bedside.

Such an early death is always tragic, but in Caspar’s case there is the additional pain of knowing that we have lost someone who was not only a brilliant scholar but also a devoted supporter of humanism.

In interviews, Caspar admitted that his principal research area, the detailed study of existing and emergent forms of popular music “never fell fully within an academic discipline” and therefore made him particularly pleased to have been offered an academic post in the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where his lectures and seminars quickly made him one of the school’s most popular and entertaining lecturers.

Caspar always relished the task of persuading his students and academia in general of the significance of such forms of popular music as acid house, rare groove, reggae, jungle and jazz funk. His knowledge of these specialisms and of music in general was profound.

I still vividly recall the occasion when we went together to a jazz event at the Vortex Club in Gillet Square in Dalston. We were early to arrive and so strolled around the various eating outlets that populated the square. We opted for the Afghan outlet and were busy collecting our take-aways, when Caspar was attracted by the background music. To the stall-holder’s amazement, he not only proceeded to recognise the Afghan group but also named the song they were playing.

Several of the SOAS students expressed their admiration for his teaching skills by visiting him during his long illness and it is to be hoped that a similar degree of recognition will soon be offered by SOAS.

Readers of this magazine will, however, be particularly shaken by news of his early death because of the significant contributions to humanism which he made in these pages. He edited New Humanist between 2005 and 2013 and wrote with verve and wit on such topics as the significance of reason, the folly of creationism, and the need to disestablish the Church of England.

During this time there were frequent debates within the Rationalist Association about the future of the charity, and sometimes testy arguments between those who favoured an alliance with the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) and those who did not. That argument has now been settled by an agreement on a merger but it was largely due to Caspar’s skill and patience that the earlier debate rarely descended into acrimony.

Caspar wore his skills lightly. He never paraded his deep knowledge or patronised those with less well-informed views. He was a wonderful, funny, clever companion to everyone who knew him. His tragically early death has deprived the world of a learned musicologist, a committed humanist, a fine and honourable human being – and someone who, for me, will forever be an irreplaceable friend.

Dhananjayan “Danny” Sriskandarajah has extensive experience of leading civil society organisations. He is CEO of the New Economics Foundation and has been chief executive of Oxfam GB and secretary general of the global civil society alliance CIVICUS. His latest book is “Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World”.

In “Power to the People”, you use the analogy of a fungal root network beneath the forest floor to describe civil society. What do you mean by that?

Civil society is an ambiguous term. It is an arena in which people come together for collective action to do things together, outside the market, outside the family and outside the state. It’s the space in which we come together to solve everything from local challenges – getting a pothole fixed, making sure there’s football training on a Saturday morning that’s affordable – all the way to campaigning for big, global change.

Sometimes we end up focusing too much on the formal bits of civil society, like NGOs. Or the pressure points – so where there are protests, or where civic freedoms are under threat. But those flash points are really the mushrooms of a fungal network, the visible manifestations of citizen action. In order for a protest to happen, it needs to be supported and nurtured by a whole bunch of other things, and that’s the mycelial network, or the undergrowth.

How is that undergrowth doing these days?

I worry that it’s being chipped away by a whole bunch of things. It’s the amount of time we’re spending in front of our screens, it’s the fact that so many of us are in precarious work, that we’re living such mobile lives. I am a migrant, many times over, and I know first-hand that you can’t necessarily strike roots and connect with your community as easily. So these social trends are, particularly in the west, undermining our ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. And the undergrowth is also being attacked politically by those who want to disempower or dismantle civil society.

Do you mean legislation like the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, and the Public Order Act, which placed new restrictions on protest? Do you think it’s important for Labour to repeal them?

I think it’s important for a whole bunch of reasons. Civic freedoms are an important part of the human rights framework. As tempting as it might be to come down hard on protesters who are inconveniencing us, society should really resist that temptation. How we treat dissenters is arguably one of the best tests of rule of law, right? Look at how climate protesters have been given such draconian sentences for peacefully protesting about something that clearly should be worrying humanity. I also think that sometimes civil society is the escape valve, or the safety valve, for societal grievances or anger. I don’t like some of the things that people protest about, but I’m happy that they’re doing it.

On Labour, I’m afraid I haven’t seen much in the last six months, either in policy terms or in discursive terms, to celebrate those civic freedoms. It seems like it’s going to just be more of the same. There’s a small glimmer of hope that the prime minister launched something called a covenant with civil society [a new agreement between the government and charity sector to improve relationships and understanding, set to launch this year] – but that’s more about formal relationships between the state and the organised parts of civil society.

You’re an advocate of new and deliberative forms of democracy. Could you give us an example?

I would replace the House of Lords with the House of the People. I would fill that chamber with a few hundred citizens who’ve been selected by sortition to serve a few years and fulfil an oversight function. It doesn’t need to function exactly like the House of Lords today – it might be that the House of Commons puts certain thorny issues to the House of the People.

I think that’s ultimately the sort of modernisation that needs to happen. Can we mash up those participatory mechanisms with something that is rooted in principles of equality and which will help rebuild trust in politics? This would make more people feel like they’ve got more of a voice and therefore more of a stake in society.

Do you think the majority of people would want to do this service for two or three years?

I don’t know. It wouldn’t be compulsory, but it’s the possibility to do it that’s really important. And it would need to be remunerated. If you were in employment, your employer, just like in jury service, would have to keep your job open. We’d have to test different models and learn some things. But this isn’t that difficult. There is a region in Belgium that’s effectively doing it. The German-speaking area of Belgium has a standing citizens’ assembly.

If the UK had a citizens’ assembly, what issues would you like to see it deliberating on?

Assisted dying would have to be one. The first Commons debate on assisted dying was fascinating. All the political commentators said it was an interesting and unusual day in Parliament, because MPs didn’t shout at each other. They talked from the heart about what they thought was important. That’s what I think a citizens’ assembly or a House of the People would bring, because it wouldn’t be people dividing along party lines and being whipped to vote in this or that way.

I definitely wish that a question like Brexit had been considered through some form of citizens’ assembly, rather than the very reductive referendum that left us more divided, arguably, than when we started. What else? Immigration or aspects of it – that’s another debate that’s ended up being very toxic. But the polling, and particularly the focus group and public engagement work, suggests that actually, when people have a chance to really get into a question, we have more in common than certainly the political debate would have us believe.

You write about Ireland’s 2016 citizens’ assembly, which led to significant change in abortion law. But there’s always the risk that the results of these assemblies can be disregarded.

That’s why we need to create some sort of mechanism to incorporate citizens’ assemblies into the legislative process. I’m confident that it’s only a matter of time before we’ll see more of that happening – states or parliamentary systems needing or wanting to use citizens or deliberative mechanisms to augment their decision-making – but doing that, hopefully, in a more formal way. You can’t just do it as a performative thing.

What is your message to people who might say you have some good ideas, but they’re too hopeful or ambitious?

We’ve settled on this version, or these versions, of representative democracy, which themselves were compromises, then assumed that this is as good as it gets. I don’t think that’s right. They’re relatively recent creations, right? This settlement of having the bicameral parliament is a few hundred years old in most parts of the world. And here we are still debating whether there should be hereditary peers in our legislature. It’s just crazy. Not least because trust in all of those institutions is falling almost everywhere in the world. And then we’ve got the disruption from technology and digital tools that, unless we manage them, will wreak havoc on some of these mechanisms. I think we’re heading into an era of democratic evolution or disruption, whichever you want to call it. I think we’re yet to realise the potential of being citizens, and that’s what I hope the next era of human life is going to be about.

Interview by Niki Seth-Smith. This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Hey welcome back to my new channel, Documenting the Collapse of US Democracy! I know this must be strange for those of you who preferred the old format of discussing science and critical thinking but those don’t exist here anymore so this is all I’ve got left. Okay, just kidding, I swear I’m going to …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I’ve been talking about measles for about the last 20 years, banging this drum so often that I really debated whether or not I should bother making this video. I went back and looked …

Many of us are still reeling from Trump’s decisive election victory. One of the most difficult aspects to come to terms with is how this most divisive and bigoted of men managed to create a kind of “rainbow coalition”. Not only did he bring together Christian nationalists and libertarian tech oligarchs, Trump won a majority of the Hispanic male vote and even managed to pull in one in three of the black vote. Apparently, both racists and their victims found a place under the umbrella of the new president.

Whereas the Republicans managed to build and sustain a diverse coalition, it was evident throughout Kamala Harris’s campaign that the Democrats were finding it much more difficult to bring together those groups that, on paper, would seem to have a common interest in opposing Trumpian racism. While it wasn’t the only factor that put the voting bloc under strain, irreconcilable differences over Israel and antisemitism were the most visible sign that something had broken. While the traditional Jewish Democratic majority stayed together (about 80 per cent of Jewish voters supported Harris), others who opposed Harris’s perceived support for the war in Gaza found the prospect of voting for her a bitter pill to swallow. For example, much of the Arab-American population in Dearborn, Michigan (the only Arab majority city in the US) voted for Trump or third-party candidates in disgust at Harris.

It’s been evident for some time that coalition-building across the “progressive” liberal-left spectrum has become more and more difficult to achieve. Some of that difficulty concerns the flood of information we are subjected to in the online age. It’s harder now to ignore differences with one’s potential allies, particularly when it comes to hot-button issues such as Israel-Palestine and gender politics. At stake here are questions of solidarity, a term much used in progressive politics. Do we need a “strong” kind of solidarity based on empathy and friendship within a movement founded on shared values? Or is it better to rely on a “weaker” or more fluid version of solidarity – the concept as it is traditionally understood – in which diverse groups work together towards a set of specific goals?

British journalist Rachel Shabi implicitly leans towards a stronger solidarity, rooted in shared understanding. Her new book Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism explores how differences over antisemitism and Israel are fracturing anti-racist solidarity.

She is right to identify the issue as a key source of division. The UK, like the US, has seen its own conflicts on the left over such issues, most notoriously during 2015-2020, when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party. Shabi was one of the few voices on the left who both supported the attempt to swing the party leftwards and acknowledged that there was something to the accusations of antisemitism beyond bad-faith attempts to destroy the leader.

In Off White, Shabi has no illusions as to the scale of the task ahead. She refers to the subject of antisemitism on the left as “a horrible, divisive battleground, an ugly, distorted mess of claims and counterclaims”, one that has torn progressive movements apart. “What we have been struggling with is a jumble of contradictory, but separate and identifiable problems: a comprehension gap in understanding antisemitism as a live structure of racism; divisions over the way claims of antisemitism get deployed in our politics; confusions caused by the way we understand Israel, or the way different elements of the far right use both Israel and antisemitism.” This comprehension gap can breed an attitude of complacency – the sense that it is yesterday’s issue or one confined to neo-Nazis. More generally, Shabi points out, antisemitism doesn’t seem to fit the story of racism today as it is often told on the left: of persistent structural disadvantage and bigotries premised on skin colour.

Off White goes on to argue that an understanding of antisemitism actually serves to enrich our understanding of racism. Shabi is certainly the right person to pen such a book. Her own background situates her on the faultlines of anti-racist understanding. Her Iraqi-Jewish origins are far from the Ashkenazi (German/Eastern European) Jewish stereotype. At the same time, as she acknowledges, her skin colour and appearance mean she can “pass” as white. While she also shows how Ashkenazi Jews often resist whiteness and the assumed white privilege, telling the story of the Jews of the Middle East can help to disturb simplistic views of Jews and of Israelis.

For Shabi, the story of Jews in the Arab world was a largely positive one and it is certainly true that Jewish populations had, on the whole, a much less torrid time of it than Jews in Christian Europe did. Still, there were also periods of persecution, and the position of Jews in Muslim lands was ultimately predicated on a structured hierarchy that was a long way from equality. In any case, it all fell apart in the end. From 1948, the year of Israeli independence, a process of expulsion, riots and official pressure to leave led most Jews to quit Arab countries for good, many flocking to Israel.

A particular understanding of this process is crucial to Shabi’s argument. For her, the turmoil that followed the foundation of the state of Israel was the result of a wider process of imperialist racism that divided and ruled the Middle East, destroying any possibility of diverse co-existence. At the same time, the deep history of European antisemitism and its expression in the Holocaust led to the Ashkenazi Zionist settlement of Israel. Here then, is where the histories of racism and antisemitism meet.

In telling this story, Shabi uses the term “Arab-Jews” to describe her ancestors. This is an identity that many Jews of her background would fiercely resist, instead telling a bitter story of Arab-Jewish relations, one of separate lives and discrimination.

Shabi does not avoid these awkward realities. As a critic of Zionism she is unusually empathetic to the motivations of Jews who settled Israel and continue to live there and does not dismiss the attachments that diaspora Jews have to the state (she herself has family there). She also calls out the use of antisemitic tropes within pro-Palestinian solidarity activism. Off White calls for leftists to go the extra mile in embracing these complex histories and entangled narratives with honesty and courage.

Yet implicit in the book is a kind of faith that the crooked anti-racist timber can somehow be straightened. That leads Shabi to avoid some difficult issues even as she tackles others. She doesn’t really engage with Muslim antisemitism as a specific tradition. And however much she takes antisemitism on the left seriously, she also reassures her readers that the most virulent form of Jew-hatred continues to be on the right (which may be correct in some contexts, but is hard to evidence as a general truth).

There is much riding on reckoning with the tangled histories of antisemitism and racism. On the left, an awful lot of hope has been invested in the power of solidarity to bind together movements that will change the world. The enormous growth of pro-Palestinian solidarity movements since 7 October 2023 is a source of inspiration to many radicals. Alongside Shabi’s book, 2024 also saw the publication of Rebecca Vilkomerson and Alissa Wise’s Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love and Shane Burley and Ben Lorber’s Safety Through Solidarity – both of them books by American Jews involved in Palestine activism. While neither book denies that solidarity-based activism can be difficult, both of them demonstrate an ultimate faith that earnest struggle in a spirit of goodwill can lead us to join arms with each other against the “real enemy”.

Yet even if a harmonious spirit of understanding can be built within progressive social movements, what is the place of those who are not activists? There are many Jews who are horrified at Netanyahu and the excesses of the Gaza war, but are also wary of the agenda and the rhetoric of some within the pro-Palestinian movement. Much can be lost when potential allies are alienated. It’s becoming increasingly clear that opposing the discrimination, authoritarianism and sheer cruelty of the ascendant global right exemplified by Trump, Netanyahu, Orbán, Putin et al is going to require a monumental collective effort. Not only are broad coalitions going to need to be formed across ideological lines, everyday life itself also needs to be a front in this struggle. Anti-racism can be a matter of how we treat others in everyday life, how we quietly resist attempts to turn people against each other.

If such efforts are to succeed, it may be that accepting, rather than seeking to solve, the contradictions and tensions within anti-racist activism is the right way to go. The Trumpian coalition is bound together by a potent cocktail of self-interest, cynicism, delusion, lies and hate. Progressive resistance does not need to be this toxic, but it’s essential to recognise the limits of solidarity as a binding force.Perhaps the efforts that Shabi and others have made to reconcile different tensions in progressive movements are not as necessary as they think. Perhaps a grim cynicism that would tolerate strange bedfellows (at least temporarily) is a better way forward. Solidarity can be powerful, as Off White explores. But if it’s what we need right now, it needs to be the “weakest” version possible.

“Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism” by Rachel Shabi is published by Oneworld.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Last week, the New York Times published one of the dumbest, most insulting graphics I’ve ever seen in my life, in an article titled “10 Columnists and Writers Rate What Mattered in Trump’s First Full …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! As my patrons know, each month I do a special livestream where we chat and I answer any questions they have. Last month, one of the Michaels asked about the game Werewolf, linking to a …

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….including in this quirky video……

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

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

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

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

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

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

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 […]