I never worked in a fast food joint, but I had lots of friends who did; it’s a common, mundane job experience for a lot of people. It’s not an extraordinary claim at all for someone to say they worked at a McDonald’s in their youth, but to Donald Trump it is some kind of unlikely experience, like claiming to be a UFO abductee. He’s been raging about Kamala Harris claiming to have worked in fast food 40 years ago, and thinks it is a winning argument to deny her experience.

To make his strange point, Trump volunteered to work at a McDonald’s over the weekend.

As Trump put it reporters when he got off his plane: “I’m going for a job right now at McDonald’s,” before adding, “I really wanted to do this all my life.”

I wish he had, although it would be unfair to the customers — he’d suck as an employee. But OK, he charged off to pretend to experience the life of a fast food worker.

One catch: he didn’t. The McDonald’s was closed and the streets cordoned off, while he walked in, spent a few minutes shuffling fries, and then handed out a few containers. That was it. It was a photo-op, nothing more.

Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s he was visiting and cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.

It was a notable event to celebrate, the fact that Donald Trump did ten minutes of actual work.

You just know that in his future rambling babbles, he’s going to claim that Kamala Harris never worked in fast food, but he, the lazy phony, did.

I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.

As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.

She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.

Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.

Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!

He gives us four things that religion does.

But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.

Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.

Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.

Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”

Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.

I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.

But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?

That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.

You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!

But what about that claim of neuronal reserves that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.

Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.

They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!

That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.

I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.

I’m back! Yesterday was a long day of travel — I got up a 5am to go to the airport, and what with the flight, then waiting to take a shuttle to the western part of the state, sitting on the shuttle, waiting for Mary to get off work and pick me up, and then the drive to Morris, it was 1am when I finally got home. I slept in until 9:30 this morning.

I think it’s going to be my last trip back to the homeland. My mother’s house is going on the market in a few weeks, after it’s stripped down to bare walls, and there won’t be anything to come home to anymore. That’s sad.

I’ve brought home a few mementoes, but it’s mainly a few pictures and selections from the vast collection of stuff Mom had filed away. She was a doting mother, so she kept everything related to her kids, most of which is going to be trashed this week. It all has to go! I plucked a few small things out of the pile to bring home.

I brought home a letter I wrote in 1979, because it immediately took me back to my first year of graduate school. It was a different world then. Remember: no internet, no computers, no cell phones, long distance phone calls would cost you a few dollars a minute, so you only used it for emergencies. That meant we had to write letters to keep in touch — and literally write by hand, because typewriters were the only alternative. I was writing a letter every week to my parents, writing to my grandparents every few weeks, and several times a week to my girlfriend. That was common in my generation.

Here it is. Do not mock my handwriting, treat it as a glimpse of the distant past.

OK, I’ll translate and give a little context.

3 August (1979)
Dear Mom + Dad + Tomi + Mike + Lisa + everybody,

That’s everyone who was still at home. My brother Jim and sister Caryn had moved out, too.

I had just completed my BS in Zoology at the University of Washington, was accepted into the University of Oregon, and had even been offered a research assistantship for the summer. No gap year for me! I went through commencement and immediately moved into a summer research program. I was living in a bare, nearly empty dorm dorm for the summer, which was not great — days spent in the lab were great, but then I’d go home to this empty, unfurnished room and stare at the walls until I fell asleep. I was writing because I was finally moving out to my own place.

I’ve got my new apartment today. It’s a small studio with a private bathroom, and I share the kitchen with the apartment next door, so it’s not very impressive physically, but it has a good price and I figure room+board won’t cost me much more than it would in the dorm. August rent is $120, + fall rent is $170 a month, with all utilities paid for. It’s very close to campus — it’s located right behind the 7-11, near about 3 bookstores (wrong–5 bookstores), 2 markets, + a couple of cafes. The manager is also a grad student who is involved with the biology dept., + arranged to get me the keys tonight, so I can start moving in tomorrow. I still have a week to go in the dorms, so I get one more week of food service, which will give me an easy transition into life on my own–I can just eat in the dorms until I figure out how to cook, + get set up to do it.
My new address:
735 E. 14th St., Apt 6A
Eugene, OR 97403

Look at that rent! Things have changed a bit.

Living in a reasonably sized college town was paradise. All those bookstores in walking distance! I spent so much money in the Smith Family Bookstore.

Work is coming along fairly well — for about a week now, I’ve been tangled up in about 3 projects, + I had to give a presentation of my research to a lab meeting today, so I’ve been pretty busy, what with finding an apartment on top of that. My little fish haven’t been behaving very well, either. They’ve been giving me cock-eyed results so this next week will be spent refining my set-up to get rid of some extraneous noise that has been fouling up my data. I’m also learning a little photography, since Dr. Kimmel wants me to start making a complete record of my experiments. It’s not high art, but I can take magnificent portraits of oscilloscope screens.

My first project was trying to reliably record extracellular action potentials from the zebrafish hindbrain. Electrophysiologists will know the feeling — carefully grounding everything, housing everything in a faraday cage, starting off every day making fresh sharp electrodes, etc. This is also the moment that Chuck Kimmel sent me spiralling down the photography game.

Because this was a poor student writing home, of course I had to talk about money.

Since I won’t have to be out on the 31st now, I’ll probably be staying down here a little longer, so don’t expect me home until 7 September at least.

P.S. Thanks a lot for the loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can, but it will be a few months until my bank account will be full enough to make me confident. If you need it, though, I can pay back one hundred any time, + maybe two or three hundred next month, + still get by.

It’s still true that moving into a new place required first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, so even when the rent was that low it was a difficult financial decision to make the move. Fortunately, I had parents who could loan me a few hundred dollars to get set up. Yes, I paid them back over the next 6 months or so.

I salvaged a few letters like that, just because it was mind-blowing to remember what it was like to be 22 years old again.

We have committed to a real estate agent. He thinks my mother’s house will be on the market within a few weeks.

I signed up a cleaning service who will sweep in on Wednesday, and reduce all the rooms to bare walls.

All bank accounts closed.

Hey, remember, I’m a college professor teaching a couple of courses? I got a lot of grading done today, too.

Now I get to go home. My flight leaves at 8am, so I’ve got to be out of here at 5. My flight is nonstop, but once I get to MSP I’ll have to wait a few hours for a shuttle, then sit in a van for longer than I was on the flight. I won’t be home until midnight.

I might just sleep all day on Sunday.

AiG owns a private jet.

That jet frequently darts down to the Cayman Islands for one-day visits. I guess they don’t have time to visit the beautiful sunny beaches of the Caribbean.

Strange. What are they doing down there? Why do they frequently fly there and then come straight back? You can track N190JK and try to puzzle out what they’re doing.

Wild guess:

The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven because the Caymans do not impose a corporate tax, making it an ideal place for multinational corporations to base subsidiary entities to shield some or all of their incomes from taxation. The Cayman Islands do not impose taxes on residents. They have no income tax, no property taxes, no capital gains taxes, no payroll taxes, and no withholding tax.

But that makes no sense! AiG has been working so hard to get all kinds of tax breaks here in America, why would they need to evade taxes even more than that?

Michaela Community School prides itself on its approach to discipline. At this free school in Wembley, north-west London, children walk the corridors in silence and retrieve books from their bags within an allocated 10 seconds. Teachers hand out demerits to pupils for looking out of the window. When it opened a decade ago, with former home secretary Suella Braverman as its chair of governors, Michaela was an outlier. Now the ultra-disciplined approach – often referred to as championing “high behavioural standards,” “strong leadership” and a “no excuses” mantra – is spreading throughout schools in England. Yet many pupils, parents and teachers feel it comes with heavy costs to children’s mental health, wellbeing and educational outcomes. And they are speaking out.

The ultra-disciplined approach to schooling attempts to answer a real problem. Physical assault, threatening behaviour and verbal abuse towards teachers in England have all increased since the pandemic, according to a 2023 Ofsted survey. Students turn up to school but don’t attend classes, and even primary students are becoming noticeably more defiant. Teachers at Oasis Academy on the Isle of Sheppey went on strike in December last year, demanding action over pupils’ threatening behaviour. “Tens of thousands of teachers [have been] pushed prematurely out of their careers,” due to “soaring apathy and aggression among students,” according to Public First’s Commission on Teacher Retention. The government’s national behaviour survey found that only 39 per cent of children in England feel safe in their classroom every day.

Firm discipline, schools like Michaela argue, helps to tackle bad behaviour and provide the optimum learning environment. Michaela has a Progress 8 score (which measures the academic progress of a child) of 2.37. That’s the best in the country. Other free schools, as well as multi-academy trusts (MATs), have attempted to replicate this academic success with a similar approach. Like free schools, academies are state schools run by charitable trusts rather than by the local council – so they have more flexibility in deciding how they operate. MATs are chains of academies, which are free and taxpayer funded. A number of these groups made headlines recently due to policies described as authoritarian, including South Bank MAT in York, Outwood Grange Academy Trust in the East Midlands and north of England, and Athena Learning Trust, which runs eight schools across Devon and Cornwall.

“They say the aim is [to ensure] disruption-free learning,” says Lucy Jenkins*, whose two teenage sons attend a school within the Athena Learning Trust. “[They say] that most children just ‘get it’ – they only need to be sent to ‘reflection’ a few times and then they know what’s expected,” she says. “Reflection” involves two and a half hours sat in a silent former sports hall where desks have been separated by screens and windows covered up. It’s a popular form of “sanction” (i.e. punishment) across ultra-disciplined schools, albeit under varying labels such as “reset”, “consequence booths” and, paradoxically, “inclusion units”.

But while Jenkins says her sons are both well behaved, sanctions have become “so ridiculous ... they don’t stand a chance in hell of getting it right,” with the youngest recently being sent to reflection for wiping glue from his hand onto a table. Not maintaining eye contact with a teacher could also result in sanction, as could fidgeting. That’s one reason why these methods have been said to discriminate against children with special educational needs – children who, regardless of how well-behaved or dedicated they are, says Jenkins, “cannot just sit still, can’t keep quiet from one lesson to the next. Some of them get sent to reflection twice in a day and are left thinking, ‘Why did I bother coming in?’”

Mental health challenges

Thomas Mann, a teacher for 35 years and vice chair of the Campaign for State Education, agrees that this approach to discipline, in which a school will repeatedly sanction a child before “pulling parents in, demonising their child and eventually externally excluding them”, belies a wider issue: that many schools simply do not want to engage with children with behavioural issues and/or special educational needs, “because they generally pull your data down, they’re more intensive as a group and they’re more expensive to educate.”

So, while Michaela Community School is rated outstanding by Ofsted, Mann cautions against only looking at schools’ results on paper, having witnessed first-hand the “trail of kids who failed, to allow success for the others”. For example, parents can be pressured to remove a child from school, in order to avoid the worse fate of a permanent exclusion on their record. “My last job was at a school in Brent and we ended up with an autistic boy with poor behaviours,” Mann says. The boy was previously at Michaela and was told “that it wasn’t his autism but his behaviour [that was the problem]”. This was despite the fact that the boy had an education, health and care plan in place. “If you dealt with the autistic part of his behaviours, you could engage him,” Mann says. “But they didn’t seem prepared to do that.” (When asked about the case, Michaela declined to comment.)

Mann says that during his three and a half decades of teaching, behaviour has changed, rather than declined. After the pandemic, for instance, certain behaviours have had to be relearned – such as lining up properly, or how to interact with classmates. Meanwhile, societal factors such as poverty and knife crime have “impacted how students experience school and authority”. He says the real problem is a decline in school resources to deal with these issues. “It’s easier to have a disciplinarian shouting and screaming and excluding pupils than it is to spend money on people going in and actually remediating poor behaviour to a level where children can re-engage,” says Mann. This approach has long-term consequences. “If you don’t have relationships with the students, particularly the vulnerable ones, you’re never going to crack behaviour.”

But relationships have been stripped back, along with school funding. Record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession (40,000 during 2021–22), meaning classrooms are often run by cover staff. Pupils spend an increasing amount of time studying and less socialising with their peers (break times in English schools have on average reduced by up to an hour over the past 20 years) while human interaction has been deprioritised, if not banned entirely. “Some children at my sons’ school [were] late to [a] lesson because they’d helped a Year 7 child who was crying because they were lost,” says Jenkins. “And they were sent to reflection for it. Obviously those children aren’t going to help next time.”

Robert Matthews*, also an Athena Learning Trust parent, noticed that “tutor time” (one-on-one time with a teacher) was one of the first things to go when the trust took over his daughters’ school in 2022, to be replaced with “morning inspection” where the student body stands in the hall while their pencil cases are checked. As with Jenkins’ sons, Matthews’ daughters weren’t the ones regularly receiving sanctions. “But something schools don’t understand is that it has a massive effect on the ones who like to follow rules because they don’t want to be in trouble.”

At first, both children would come home from school exhausted. The older daughter, then in Year 10, “had a breakdown one night, saying she was finding it hard to cope,” says Matthews, but his younger daugher Ella*, who was then in Year 8, “was more quiet around it.” Shortly afterwards, she was found self-harming at school. “We spoke to doctors and CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) who said they didn’t have any immediate concerns, then one day she came home from school and was violently sick.” Ella had taken a serious overdose, and while it had happened on school grounds, says Matthews, teachers “were completely unaware. I can’t imagine that she wasn’t acting strange, but they hadn’t noticed.”

Ella was “pretty close to needing a liver transplant,” says Matthews, but she recovered, and now goes to a new school where the discipline approach is rooted in common sense. “They do have an ‘isolation room’ but it’s rarely used,” he says, “and they use detentions for people that are actually misbehaving. You can’t argue with that.” Ella now has to travel 13 miles each way to school (there was only one other school in their town, but it is also part of the Athena Learning Trust) but “she’s thriving, she’s back to herself, and happy when she comes home.” Her older sister remains at the Athena Learning school in order not to disrupt her GCSEs. “The school said they were going to speak to her, to make sure she was OK [following Ella’s suicide attempt],” says Matthews, “[but she says] they never did.”

A freedom of information request made by Matthews revealed that between the period September 2022–October 2023, there were 118 instances of self-harm and five suicide attempts on the school grounds. A spokesperson for the Trust said, “We take our responsibility for any students experiencing poor mental health for any reason extremely seriously. We use a range of internal and external services to support our families and schools. We ensure these services are properly vetted [and] that they put the well-being of all our school community at the heart of their strategy ... Across our schools, there is positive recognition from Ofsted that student wellbeing is prioritised and supported.”

Controlling behaviour

It can be hard to point to any one factor when it comes to the reasons for suicide. Across the UK, the suicide rate of young people has increased in the years since the pandemic. In 2020-21, women and girls under 24 saw the steepest rise since records began. Yet some would say that this general trend provides an even stronger case for prioritising pupils’ mental health. After two pupils attending schools within the Westcountry Trust – another MAT that has adopted an extreme approach to discipline – took their own lives within a week of one other, Penny Logsdail, director of Summerhouse Services, a humanist organisation that promotes mental wellbeing in young people, was moved to speak out in the regional press, suggesting that “toxic, controlling, harsh, frightening and dystopic environments” may have played a part.

While teachers aren’t mental health professionals and “can’t pick up the slack in the government’s lack of funding across society,” as Mann puts it, the school environment should be conducive to encouraging emotional stability in children, while respecting their basic rights. “People have the right to exercise control over their own bodily functions,” says Logsdail, who has worked in the field of mental health for 25 years as a counsellor, therapist and further education trainer. When school rules dictate that you must sit in a certain position and look in a certain direction, while banning toilet breaks during class, that basic right has been removed, she says.

Jenkins agrees that the need for control is one of the most disturbing aspects of the “high behavioural standards” approach. “We had a letter home saying if children want to take off their jumper they have to ask permission,” she says. On complaining to the school, she was told that they are always allowed, as long as they ask. “But I said, ‘That’s not the issue. The issue is you do not trust a child to decide for themselves whether they are too hot or not.’” Similarly, children in Year 11 were told it was compulsory to attend “sixth period” (an extra hour after school) in order to prepare for their GCSEs. When parents highlighted that this was illegal, the stance changed; it was not compulsory, but if they didn’t attend, they would not be permitted to go to their leavers’ ball.

The school, Jenkins argues, is creating an environment where children “learn that their voice doesn’t matter,” and where ultimately “they hate learning.” Her eldest son, for instance, had an interest in pursuing A-levels up until last year, when he decided to pursue an agricultural course instead. “He’s curious and was always interested in lots of things, but now he’s literally counting the days until the end of school and says, ‘I never ever want to set foot in a classroom again.’ And that’s dangerous.”

It’s also ironic, given that the main argument from supporters of this approach is that it better enables children to achieve academic success. “The evidence is clear,” argues Robert Colvile, editor of the conservative online newspaper CapX, “stricter schools get better results” and have “demonstrable success in helping the disadvantaged”. It’s true that Michaela and a handful of MATs that employ this approach do accept children from disadvantaged backgrounds and do have impressive GSCE results and Progress 8 scores. But does the end justify the means?

What really matters

“I’ve always argued that you’re better off measuring your school on what the kids do a few years after they leave, than you are measuring their GCSE results,” says Mann. “Because the next move [university] is incredibly difficult and there’s a high dropout rate of working-class kids in our country.” In Canada, it was recognised a decade ago that “students need competencies beyond literacy and numeracy”. The “measuring what matters” initiative worked to ensure that health, creativity, citizenship and social-emotional learning were considered as important as grades, in order to “provide students with the skills they need to live happy, healthy, economically secure, civically engaged lives.”

Matthews agrees that while he wants his daughters to do well academically – “and they will as they’re bright kids” – he couldn’t care less about his school’s Progress 8 result. “I care about my daughters’ wellbeing. I want them to be good kids, and free thinkers.”

The scale of the challenges facing the education system in England is vast and centres on a lack of funding. When it comes to academies, the first step must be to introduce democratic control. As these schools operate independently of local authorities, while parents’ complaints may be escalated to CEO level, from there, there is often nowhere else to go. Parents may simply be told to find another school, as there are usually plenty of others on the waiting list. In December, Labour MP Rachael Maskell raised concerns in parliament about the running of South Bank MAT, asking for an urgent debate around holding MAT leaders to account. These are state schools, run with public funding, and while there is a dominant narrative – peddled by supporters such as Colvile – that only those on “the left” are raising concerns, this isn’t true. Maskell’s involvement in South Bank MAT, for instance, was instigated by parent protests and governor resignations, while teachers at St Ivo Academy, part of Astrea MAT, went on strike in November 2023 over “draconian” policies.

The problem of extreme behavioural issues in England is real and should not be downplayed. But this newly popular, ultra-disciplinary approach to education undervalues substance, integrity and care, in favour of speed, performance and status. These schools are not the answer. Our children deserve more.

*Names have been changed to protect children’s identities.

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

Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (Picador) by Catherine Nixey

Many of us suffer from the cognitive bias known as the “just world fallacy”. The sense that the world should be a fair place can easily slide into the belief that it is a fair place and that people generally get what they deserve. When it is applied to the victorious history of our own people or tribe, it implies that the events of the past were meant to be and were for the best.

One example of this is the Christian exceptionalism that seems to be thriving, as evidenced by recent popular works such as Tom Holland’s 2019 Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Broadly, this is the idea that Christianity in ancient times came as a unique blessing into a world that knew little kindness or compassion, being ignorant of universal notions of humanity. The suffering people of that time embraced the religion of Jesus Christ, with its promise of justice and equality, as an alternative to the chaotic polytheism under which they had previously laboured. From these roots in due course flowered all the values of the west: a unique and Christianity-dependent harvest.

In Heresy, Catherine Nixey strips these pretensions away with a complete (but scholarly) lack of mercy. Her focus is on Christianity’s first few centuries and she brings together three facts that are well known in the niche fields of ancient history and biblical studies, but not by the general reader, and rarely considered together.

The first is that the figure of Jesus, far from being unique, was just one of many strikingly similar god-men and magicians around in the Roman Mediterranean, with some claiming to perform miracles that are near-identical to those described in the Bible. Walking on water, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding vast crowds with food conjured out of thin air, exorcising demons out of men – these were their staples. We have many texts now that show this. We also have multiple images of Jesus holding what appears to be a magic wand in early Christian art.

Second, the tales that have ended up in the modern Bible are just a small portion of the stories that early Christians believed – from the one about God’s breast being milked for the Holy Spirit, to the time the infant Jesus struck his school friends dead when they annoyed him. Today, we don’t know these stories because they were branded as the “heresies” that give Nixey’s book its powerful title.

The third is that many educated and virtuous people of the Roman world objected to the rise of Christianity as an irrational and immoral belief system. Nixey gives us fascinating quotes from the works of the philosophers Celsus and Porphyry and from the emperor Julian. Many of their points are similar to those made by non-Christian critics today: the nonsense of resurrection, the question of why God waited so long to send his son to Earth, the relative banality of Christianity’s moral precepts, even dressed up as radical ethics (“Is there any society that doesn’t have a law against murder?”, asks Julian.)

These three facts, taken together, highlight how incredibly contingent the emergence of Christianity was, and even more so the specific version that survived. Even if a similar monotheistic religion was always bound to have dominated the west for those centuries – which is not a given by any means – it still could have been the Jesus with a magic wand who prevailed, or one of the other god-men.

Classicists have long known that the Mediterranean world was full of miracles and magic, so why does Heresy still stand out as a shocking intervention? A lot is down to the conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a “gentlemen’s agreement”) between theologians on one side and classicists and ancient historians on the other. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. “That’s myth – not history.” But you wouldn’t hear him saying that in his public lectures. Nixey’s book, therefore, breaks an important taboo. It’s a gripping and well-crafted mix of scholarship and polemic, and a challenge to any who still believe – whether they are religious or not – that Christianity was somehow fated to emerge and shape the west.

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

It’s the start of the rainy season in Sierra Leone, the west African country known for its beautiful beaches and tropical rainforests. The coming of the rains brings relief from the heat, but also something else: mosquitoes. While Sierra Leone suffers all through the year, the rainy seasons are the worst for mosquito-borne diseases.

The mosquito is responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other animal – more than snake bites or even homicides. The winged insect carries diseases like Dengue fever, Zika virus and, of course, malaria. There were 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Africa shoulders by far the heaviest burden, with 94 per cent of cases and 95 per cent of all deaths.

Throughout Africa, malaria is a serious threat to older people, pregnant women, children, and those with weakened immune systems. In Sierra Leone, it accounts for a quarter of all child deaths. But this year, the president gave the country hope that the disease would finally be contained. On World Malaria Day in April, President Julius Maada Bio launched a landmark malaria vaccination campaign, initially targeting babies. Since then, the Ministry of Health, working alongside the United Nations body Unicef, has been busy rolling out the first 550,000 doses to the furthest corners of Sierra Leone.

The vaccine, RTS,S (commercially named Mosquirix), is made by the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo-SmithKline. As part of pilot programs in 2019, it was delivered to more than two million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi and subsequently became the world’s first malaria vaccine to receive prequalification from WHO, meaning it has been assessed for quality, safety and efficacy. It was found to prevent around 75 per cent of all malaria cases in high-transmission areas where children were also given seasonal anti-malarial medicine when the risk was highest. This prompted WHO to recommend widespread use of the vaccine among children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sierra Leone is one of the first countries to begin a nationwide rollout, alongside Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi are also due to get more doses following the pilot programs, along with Benin and Liberia. While this is cause for celebration, the vaccine still has its limitations. Unlike other routine immunisations, this malaria vaccine requires four doses to achieve long-term protection. The shots must be stored at certain temperatures – a challenge for areas with regular power outages or no electricity at all.

Sierra Leone is planning to deliver the vaccine to 15 of its 16 districts. It’s an ambitious plan for a coastal country with remote and island communities, some of which can only be reached by motorbike or boat. But if the rollout is successful, it may provide a model for other African countries. It is not only a tragedy that so many children and vulnerable people die each year from this preventable disease; malaria has also held these countries back from crucial economic development. An effective, scalable vaccine would be a huge boon for the future of the continent.

Decades in the making

Given the large-scale and devastating effects of the disease, why has a malaria vaccine taken so long to develop? Malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium, which infects female mosquitoes after they have fed on the blood of an infected human. Malaria parasites enter the human bloodstream and in serious cases can cause irreparable damage to the liver, kidneys and other organs. After maturing, the parasite infects red blood cells, destroying the body’s ability to supply oxygen to its tissues, leading to anaemia. Infected blood cells can clog up the circulation leading to organ failure and death.

Development of a vaccine began in 1987 through a partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, run by the US Department of Defense. But there were multiple challenges in developing a vaccine with effective, long-lasting immunity. The mosquito has a complex life cycle and high genetic diversity, with over 3,000 species currently recorded, varying in their capacity to transmit different strains of the malaria parasite. This led to difficulties in creating a vaccine that would be effective across different countries and regions. It was not until 2019 that Mosquirix was deemed ready for major clinical trials.

Dr Desmond Kangbai is one of the civil servants leading the vaccine rollout in Sierra Leone. In a gloomy government office in the bustling capital of Freetown, he takes calls from several phones on his desk, while aides shuffle in and out. It’s hot and humid, and several fans flutter the corners of papers stacked into wobbly towers on his desk. Dr Kangbai leads the Ministry of Health’s Expanded Program of Immunisation. He’s stressed, but also hopeful about the rollout’s prospects. “It could be a silver bullet,” he says, wiping his brow. “But we do need more resources.”

The government is initially focusing on delivering the vaccine to young children. All babies and small children are more vulnerable to malaria, with their immune systems still developing, but in Sierra Leone there is the added challenge of malnutrition. Meanwhile, keeping children free of mosquito bites can be an impossible task. This means that the constant threat of death hangs over families with babies and young children. Sierra Leone’s under-five mortality rate is one of the highest in the world.

The program has identified around 1.5 million children under the age of five who need the vaccine, but only currently has enough doses to give the jab to one-third of them. Distribution is also an issue, particularly reaching far-flung rural areas. Dr Kanbai explains that the program needs more funding and resources for everything “from coaching [of medical staff and unpaid volunteers] to refrigerators, boats to reach river and island communities, and to cover the costs of delivery.”

Next door, in a separate building, refrigeration units house the precious vaccine. Using solar powered generators, thousands of doses are loaded into mobile refrigeration units that drive to the furthest corners of the country, where malaria hits hardest. Sierra Leone is roughly the size of Ireland or the US state of South Carolina. But its geography, and lack of roads and medical infrastructure, means delivering vaccines across the country isn’t easy. From 1991, the country was pummeled by an 11-year civil war that killed over 50,000 people, decimating its hospitals and wiping out many of its medical personnel. In the decade or so it took to begin rebuilding the country, it fell victim to an Ebola outbreak – a fatal virus that took 4,000 lives in just two years at its peak, many of whom were healthcare workers.

Trust in health workers

Now it’s the rainy season, which lasts for six months between June and December, producing torrential rainfall, deadly floods and mudslides throughout the country. Although malaria prevention is especially important in this season, the weather means that a six-hour trip to remote rural areas can easily double. When vaccines lose their refrigeration, it decreases their potency, meaning that rural populations risk getting a weaker dose if the solar-powered fridges in the vehicles run out of battery, or if they are improperly refrigerated in the last stretch of a journey, which can be by boat or motorbike. The growing volatility of the climate is set to add to these challenges.

Raising more funding will be crucial to the ultimate goal of nationwide immunisation. Alongside Sierra Leone’s government, the rollout is being funded by a nexus of global health organisations. Gavi, an international organisation that works on vaccine access, is a major contributor, while Unicef provides both technical and financial assistance. The UK government provides some aid, as does the United States, alongside other national governments and international NGOs.

But even if the funding is secured for comprehensive supply and distribution, there will be additional challenges. Uptake still relies on the people of Sierra Leone, the majority of whom live in isolated areas with little access to televisions or internet. People might venture to a nearby shop to hear news on the radio, but mass media communication programs have limited reach. Instead, the government must send its own people or rely on NGOs to travel out to villages and rural areas, working alongside local religious, tribal-ethnic and civic leaders to raise awareness. This could take the form of announcements in church, or the distribution of pamphlets and newsletters.

Thankfully, Sierra Leone has comparably high rates of trust in healthcare workers and low rates of vaccine hesitancy, partly due to having gone through the 2014 Ebola outbreak and experiencing first-hand the positive effects of vaccination programmes. The Ebola outbreak also exposed weaknesses in Sierra Leone’s healthcare facilities, supplies, storage and training. To survive, the whole healthcare system was in many ways forced to revamp itself, and today there is a much keener awareness of how to handle major public health issues.

A silver bullet?

Given this recent history, and the urgent need to reduce infant mortality, the vaccination rollout could be transformative for Sierra Leone, making it one of the models that could provide important lessons to other African countries. However, it is still hard to tell how effective the rollout will be. Post-vaccination figures on malaria infection rates will only start to become available next year and may not be reliable until four or five years’ time. Some are not as optimistic about the program as Dr Kangbai.

“I don’t know if this is a silver bullet. I would call it ‘life-saving intervention’,” says Baboucarr Bouy, an immunisation specialist for Unicef in Sierra Leone. The UN body has been active in the country ever since Sierra Leone gained its independence in 1961. In contrast to Dr Kangbai’s office, to visit Bouy at Unicef you have to pass through security and the room is air-conditioned – an indicator of the balance of funding between government and international organisations.

He addresses the efficacy of the vaccine, which is complex. “There are different numbers for different trials, different regions, and in different periods,” he notes. But overall, “the efficacy is probably about 50 per cent.”

Bouy points out that the vaccine has to be used with other existing anti-malarial measures, like antimalarial medicine, mosquito nets, insect repellent and larval control. Unicef has also been working on improving transport lines and healthcare facilities. “Over the past two or three years, we have been able to procure over 800 sets of new solar refrigerators, installed successfully in various health facilities for the storage of vaccines,” he said. “We’ve also been able to procure and deliver over 900 motorbikes.” Working with large NGOs and international organisations like Unicef has its benefits for the government. But Dr Kangbai is keen to point out that they need different types of support from various kinds of partners. “We want innovative solutions like drones for last-mile delivery, especially to our riverine communities during the rainy season,” he said.

The road ahead

There is no panacea for these complex issues, which are also bound up with broader problems faced by Sierra Leone. “We need more trained personnel, we need more drugs to treat illnesses in general,” says Fatim Jabbie, a clinic nurse at Njala University Hospital in the southern town of Mokonde. “We need more lab diagnostics equipment, we need more malaria test kits. We need a better healthcare infrastructure overall.”

Jabbie notes that the country needs to strengthen its economy in general, which would better equip it to deal with public health crises. However, this is a chicken-and-egg situation, as malaria is detrimental to Sierra Leone’s economy and weakens its workforce. Estimates suggest that malaria-related issues cost Sierra Leone nearly $30 million per year, a significant amount for a nation with a GDP of $4 billion.

“Sierra Leone is a beautiful country and its people are peace-loving,” Jabbie says, “but we have a poor road network, we have financial challenges, we have poor environmental sanitation, and inadequate drugs in most health facilities.” She therefore emphasises the need for a holistic approach to supporting public health initiatives. The good news is that Sierra Leone’s history of health-related crises makes it a case study for recognising the importance of community engagement and trust. This is one of the factors that has enabled the country to adopt the malaria vaccine and integrate it into its national immunisation programmes far quicker than many other African countries. However, it does not have an easy road ahead.

In the meantime, another vaccine may soon be rolled out in Africa, which looks set to be more affordable than Mosquirix. The vaccine, R21, known as Matrix-M, was developed by the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, with technology from the American biotechnology company Novavax. At the end of 2023, it became the second malaria vaccine to receive WHO prequalification. In May, 43,000 doses were delivered to the Central African Republic, while Chad, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan and Uganda are all preparing to receive shipments.

So far, Matrix-M has shown comparable efficacy rates to Mosquirix, although further studies are needed to confirm this. It also could be more affordable. At present each dose costs between $2 and $4, while four doses are needed per person. That is about half the current price of the RTS,S vaccine.

“Having two safe and effective vaccines means we have greater supply security and can be more confident about meeting countries’ needs,” Dr Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, said in a press release. “That is what matters most – that countries where our vaccines can be most impactful are able to access them, saving thousands of lives each year and offering relief to families, communities and entire health systems.”

While this year’s rollouts in Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Burkina Faso are promising, we also won’t know how successful they are until at least next year, when post-vaccine data becomes available. Sierra Leone is a country to watch for many reasons. They had lessons for the world when the nation came together to confront the devastating challenge of Ebola. The high level of trust in healthcare workers bodes well for the success of vaccination rollouts. Now they are once again on the frontline when it comes to the fight against malaria. Time will tell whether this is a first step towards the eradication of a disease that has ravaged the continent for centuries.

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

James (Pan Macmillan) by Percival Everett

As Ernest Hemingway famously claimed, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” In his latest novel, James, Percival Everett reimagines Twain’s classic (first published in 1884), switching the perspective from the eponymous daring rascal to that of Jim, who becomes a slave on the run when he flees Huck’s guardian.

Initially, Everett follows Twain’s plot: Jim runs away to escape being sold and separated from his family. Huck joins him to get away from an abusive father. They travel down the Mississippi together on a raft enduring various mishaps along the way including several encounters with two fraudsters, the Duke and the King. But when the pair are separated, the novel follows what happens to Jim, who Everett now refers to by his full name, James.

A professor of English literature at the University of Southern California and author of more than 30 books, Everett is gaining welcome prominence in the UK. His satirical novel The Trees, about the historic lynching of Black Americans and modern-day racism, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. An earlier novel, Erasure (2001), featuring a Black humanities professor who, pandering to the white-dominated publishing industry, writes a deliberately cliched “ghetto” tale, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (2023).

Although a grim account of the pernicious and brutal treatment of slaves, James is full of wry humour. We discover that James can read and write. He only employs a slave dialect around white people. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he tells his daughter Lizzie and other children during a language lesson on using a slave filter. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’.” The children are instructed what to say if they notice a white person’s house is on fire: “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,” is correct. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

In a recent interview, Everett observed that he employs comedy in order to engage the reader’s trust. His lively prose and caustic wit – “All white men looked alike in a way, like bears, like bees, especially when dead” – are compelling and he interweaves horror and comedy to terrific effect. During his journey down the Mississippi, James is repeatedly enslaved and sold by the unscrupulous white people he meets. He is forced to join a blackface minstrel troupe when its manager, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who claims to be opposed to slavery, buys him from another white man. Based on a real person, Emmett and his minstrels profit from the music of Black people, using it to mock them. Everett includes a darkly comic passage when, after their show, James wakes to find a white man stroking his hair in awe: “I just had to touch that wig.”

But James’s journey is also an intellectual one: he responds to violence with art. He has imagined conversations with Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke “about slavery, race and ... albinism”. By writing about the injustices he endures, James owns what happens to him, and rejects being objectified. He insists on referring to white people as the “enemy” (Everett’s italics), observing that “oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.”

It’s a personal story, but also a reckoning with enslavement and injustice. Although James sets out to rescue his wife and children by earning enough to buy them, this evolves into a fierce desire for all his fellow slaves to be free. As he says to one: “You can die with me trying to find freedom or you can stay here and be dead anyway.”

Huckleberry Finn and its prequel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, have been elevated as classics, staples of children’s literature for generations. In recent years, Mark Twain has come under criticism for his use of racial stereotypes and slurs. However, Everett has made it clear that he did not write James as a corrective to the original. Rather, the two books have been set up in conversation, with Everett employing a clever final twist. James is a layered, compassionate book with a rich supporting cast, full of anger, humour and – ultimately – hope.

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

‘‘I hadn’t thought much about testicles before” is a typical line from Richard Herring’s latest stand-up show. In one of the comedian’s many comments on balls, he likens them to backing singers in a band. But unlike many a male comic, Herring has a bona fide excuse to talk about his family jewels: he was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2021 and his recent show Can I Have My Ball Back? is based on the experience.

I went to see the show at Leicester Square Theatre, where Herring had fun comparing the half-full room with the sold-out shows that ex-double-act-partner Stewart Lee schedules for the same venue. At this point I should give the spoiler: Herring has fully recovered. And lucky for him, a brush with testicular cancer is one of the funnier dances with death, providing him with ample comic material. As he says, the design of the testicles is hopeless: “proof that, if there is a God, he hates us”.

Now 56, Herring giggles his way through a tale of embarrassment, exams and existentialism. When his testicles were the size of a tennis ball and a Ferrero Rocher respectively, he thought he might need a trip to the doctor. Even back then, as he tells me after, he had the thought that if there was something wrong with him, he might turn it into a show. A comic might idly wonder about what jokes they’d do if they lost a leg, for example, or suffered a family tragedy (the “dead dad show” is now a somewhat clichéd Edinburgh Fringe staple), and Herring felt a little annoyed when the GP initially told him it was probably nothing serious. A massive health scare like that, he thought, could have been a gift.

For decades Herring has been a prolific performer, cannibalising his past and his peccadilloes for the amusement of strangers. In Hitler Moustache he grew facial hair in the style of Adolf Hitler as a unique excuse to hold forth on the politics of racism; in Christ on a Bike he compared his life journey to that of Jesus Christ. But his worry about not having a serious health problem turned out to be jumping the gun. After that first conversation there were further appointments and a follow-up call. Fortunately for Herring the comedian, but not for Herring the mortal man, the first GP was wrong: he did, in fact, have testicular cancer.

When Herring got The Call, he remembers registering that he was facing death. Jokes did not come to him in the moment. “I did not want to die,” he tells the audience. He thought of his family first (he has a girl and a boy with fellow comedian Catie Wilkins) but then – selfishly, he said – he began to think about himself and his legacy on this Earth. He was worried, he jokes, that when he died his children might not be old enough to be properly psychologically scarred. He has great fun imagining the man whom Catie would date after his death, enjoying the fancy whisky that he had been foolishly saving for a special occasion.

The best parts of the show are both funny and poignant, as Herring mines his existential experience for material. Wanting to seize what might have been his final moments, he tries to create picture-perfect memories with his kids. They make a snowman in the garden that collects a large amount of cat poo: a truly abysmal sight. He flies a kite with his daughter – the beautiful moment he had been hoping for. He watches the wind picking up and dropping off exactly as it would if he had not been facing the prospect of his death. The world, he realises in a moment of acceptance, doesn’t care about him.

This view is consistent with Herring’s outlook on life. He has been an atheist for a long time, and having a testicle removed did not put the comedian on a path to spirituality. He was brought up in a Christian household but never enjoyed going to church even when he was a believer, he tells me over Zoom from his home in Hertfordshire. When he was seven or eight, while having the Bible read to him, he realised that it didn’t make sense to trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, if Joseph wasn’t really Jesus’s dad. When he raised this with his grandma, she couldn’t answer the question. That was the day, he said, that he realised something was off. “In every other branch of study you’re told to question things,” he says. “Why should Christianity be any different?”

Like a lot of atheists, Herring has been preoccupied by religion over the years. If he is wrong about God and ever meets him or her, he says he will make it clear that it was ridiculous for the deity to make people be born with the sin for which he would then judge them. As a humanist he believes that “human beings have the potential to be good to each other and should try to be good to each other without any external force forcing them to do that”. It is laughable, he thinks, to ask people to be good to avoid being burned in a pit.

But almost everything is laughable to Herring, who has been performing comedy since he was a student in the Oxford Revue. For a long time he has believed that humour is the way to treat the things that life hurls at you. When he was a child, people would get annoyed at him for not taking things seriously enough. But if life itself is “intrinsically ridiculous” – partly because of the astronomical odds against any of us even being here – Herring thinks that to treat things seriously isn’t the right way to respond.

“I think humour’s a great way to make points and make people listen,” he says. “If people are laughing, then they’re listening.” In Can I Have My Ball Back? this is more pertinent than ever: Herring is keen to encourage men, usually bad at talking about health problems, to act faster than he did and see a medical professional if they notice any potential symptoms. He thinks that in this regard a comedy show is more effective than a po-faced sexual health campaign.

Herring’s cancer was treated successfully by a national health service for which he is hugely grateful. Unsurprisingly, his brush with mortality changed him. He realised that his family was the most important thing to him. “I’d rather be a good dad than a famous comedian,” he says. “I obviously want to work, and I will ... but they [my children] are the priority.” He thinks it is good for everyone involved that he became a dad later in life – he was 47 when his first child was born. Though he knows this means he won’t have as much time with them, he doesn’t think he would have been capable of raising them when he was younger.

The love for a child comes attached to a certain kind of horror, he admits, because you’re constantly terrified that something is going to go wrong. “That fear is what makes it amazing as well,” he says. “It’s such a bizarre kind of love, because it is about that selflessness; it’s a life you’re gonna have to let go. That person you love has to pull away from you, at least for a little while.”

Endings like this are excruciating but important, Herring says. Two things he finds unappetising about the Christian proposition are that in Heaven everyone will live for ever, and the occupants won’t have physical bodies. This doesn’t sound fun, says Herring – as much as his mind entertains him, “most of the fun of being alive is the body.” But more importantly, eternal life makes everything hollow, he thinks. “If you don’t have death there, then everything sort of loses its meaning. The only reason we love anyone or get any joy out of anything is the fact that it’s not gonna go on for ever.”

It’s hard not to be convinced by Herring’s philosophy, which, given how many knob gags are in the show, is deceptively grown-up. We’re not here for long, and we’ll be away for much longer. So why not fly a kite and laugh till you cry? You’ll have a ball.

Visit richardherring.com for details of upcoming shows. This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! America is becoming less religious, particularly younger segments of the population. But that doesn’t mean fundamentalists have given up. A recent court case out of Indiana demonstrates that the teaching of evolution is still under assault by those who reject science in favor of the biblical account …

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From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! As they say, “there are only so many hours in a day.” Modern life makes it very difficult to keep up with our own to-do lists, much less everything else going on in the world. We need to prioritize to maintain our sanity from day to day. …

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Two quick bits of news from me.

First, my new book on how learning magic promotes wellbeing is out very soon. It’s called Magic Your Mind Happy, and I am very excited because it provides a new perspective on magic. I will be doing lots of events to promote the book and it’s available to pre-order here.

Second, I have invented a new optical illusion! Well, to be more accurate, a new variant on a known illusion. The Beuchet Chair is one of my favourite illusions and involves a person appearing to be much smaller than they are. Invented by Jean Beuchet in the 1960s, it relies upon forced perspective created by chair legs that are close to the observer, and a large chair seat further away.

I have come up with a variant. This one centres around a plinth rather than a chair. The legs of the original chair are replaced by two pieces of hinged cardboard (these can easily be cut from foamboard and hinged with tape), and the large seat and back of the chair are replaced with a piece of cloth.

The hinged screen forms the base of the plinth and is positioned in front of the photographer, and the cloth appears to form the top of the plinth and is placed on the floor behind the screen. To help to create a sense of continuity between the large cloth and the plinth, two small pieces of matching cloth are draped along the top of the screens. The front and side panels of the screen help to conceal the front and left edge of the cloth, and make lining up the photograph much easier than in the original illusion.

This entire set up can be constructed in a short space of time, is quick to set up, and folds flat after use. Because of this, it’s ideal for those wanting to create a convincing version of this classic illusion that is easy and cost effective to build, assemble, move, and store. I hope that you like it.

UPDATE: So, it turns out that illusion creator Olivier Redon had exactly the same idea  a few years ago. You can see his great version here and watch his other illusion videos here.

Hi there,

I am delighted to say that I am back performing at the Edinburgh Magic Festival this year.

First, on the 28th December I will be exploring the strange world of illusion, mystery and magic in a show called MIND MAGIC. This will involve showing some of the best optical illusions in the world, revealing whether paranormal phenomena really exist, showing how we can all achieve the impossible, explaining how to transform a tea towel into a chicken, and much more. All the info is here.

Then, on the 28th and 29th December, I am presenting a new and experimental show about the invention of magic. This will be an intimate affair for a small number of people. It will examine how magicians create magic, and explore the mind and work of a magical genius who created the world’s greatest card trick. Info here.

So, if you are around, please come along, and fun will be had!

Some exciting news from me! I have just written my first book for children.

It uses magic to teach youngsters a range of essential life skills, including social skills, confidence, creativity, lateral thinking and much much more. Readers will learn how to perform lots of seemingly impossible feats, including how to defy gravity, read minds, pluck coins from thin air, and predict the future. Most important of all, these tricks have been carefully chosen to help boost mental wellbeing and resilience. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s magic!

I am delighted to say that Magic Your Mind Happy will be published by Wren and Rook in May 2024, and is available to preorder now here.

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

Two quick bits of news.

First, The Royal Society have kindly given me the prestigious David Attenborough Award. This is a lifetime achievement award for my work promoting psychology and critical thinking, and focuses on my research combatting pseudo-science and examining the psychology of magic. Previous recipients include Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Professor Alice Roberts, and I will give an award lecture about my work in August 2024.

Second, I have a new academic magic book out! It is part of the well-known Arts For Health series and reviews work examining how watching and learning magic is good for your wellbeing, including how it boosts confidence, social skills, dexterity, curiosity and much more. It was lots of fun to write and also includes interviews key practitioners, including Richard McDougall (Breathe Magic), Julie Eng (Magicana), Mario the Maker Magician (USA), David Brookhouse (UK), David Gore and Marian Williamson (College of Magic), and Tom Verner (Magicians Without Borders).  More details here.

I am delighted to say that the second series of our On Your Mind podcast has launched today!!

Each week, science journalist Marnie Chesterton and I will explore aspects of the human psyche, including astrology, how the clothes we wear influence our thoughts, attraction, friendship, dreaming, mind control and much much more.  We will also be joined by some special guests as we attempt to answer all of your questions about psychology. The first series reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts, and so we hope that you can join us. 

Our first episode looks at creativity and explores how to have good ideas and whether children are more creative than adults. You can listen here.

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 […]