You may have noticed I left something out in that last post about Andreesen and Horowitz — their political vision is focused on crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better. I said nothing about AI! You may praise me for my restraint.

I shall now correct my omission. Here’s the breakdown of the money OpenAI is spending on this boondoggle:

Total revenue has been $283 million per month, or $3.5 to $4.5 billion a year. This would leave a $5 billion shortfall.

Training the AI models will cost OpenAI about $7 billion in 2024. For ChatGPT alone, the cost will be $4 billion. New models may add $3 billion to that cost — OpenAI has had to train new AI models faster than it had anticipated.

Microsoft’s OpenAI “funding” is largely in the form of Azure compute credits. OpenAI gets a heavily discounted rate of $1.30 per A100 server per hour. OpenAI has 350,000 such servers, with 290,000 of those used just for ChatGPT. This cloud estate is apparently running near full capacity.

Staffing costs for 2024 are likely to be $1.5 billion, up from $500 million for 2023. The median OpenAI engineer salary in 2023 was a $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. [Bay Area Inno, 2023; Levels.fyi]

They’re spending roughly twice what they’re making. Almost all their servers are chewing away on ChatGPT. And personally, the worst of all as far as I’m concerned is that software engineers are getting paid $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. If my employer paid me half that amount of base salary, rather than a quarter, and never mind the big stock bonus, I’d be coasting on easy street and could hire a live-in masseuse and, I don’t know, go crazy and buy a second car? I struggle to imagine that much money.

I suppose my daughter would have the qualifications to get into that kind of business, but I’d encourage her to keep her soul intact.

You’ll never believe why Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are supporting Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with the petty concerns of mere peasants.

The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.

These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce.

“Subsidiary issues” also include trivialities like abortion or Ukraine or Palestine or the rule of law or democracy. Only peons care about that stuff! Obscenely wealthy dumb-ass venture capitalists like those two have much grander concerns. Like…lowering their taxes and crypto.

We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.

For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”

Seriously, my dudes? You’re defining your political choices entirely on a foundation of cryptocurrency? They threw $4.5 billion down that rathole — speaking of a mega sunk cost fallacy — and now the primary concern for American citizens should be about salvaging your idiotic losses in a stupid scam?

Those two guys have totally lost the plot.

After Elon Musk declared his daughter dead because she was trans, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It has. Vivian Wilson has delivered an interview that is pure fire.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.

“He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.

“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she said. “It was cruel.”

I know how some of that felt — my father was a high school football jock, and he did accuse me of being weak and effeminate because I took after my mother, being bookish and quiet, but he grew as a person as he got older and he was also caring and supportive. Musk was a monster. He is still monstrous. He doubled down on Twitter.

And in a post on X, Musk said Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and that, at age 4, she fit certain gay stereotypes, such as loving musicals and using the exclamation “fabulous!” to describe certain clothing. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes aren’t true, though she said she did act stereotypically feminine in other ways as a child.

Wilson also addressed Musk’s recent comments in a series of posts Thursday on the social media app Threads.

“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.”

Jesus Christ. Using three-syllable words and liking Rodgers and Hammerstein are not diagnostic of sexual orientation. How shallow and inane can he get? And he used that as an excuse to abuse his hown child!

Fortunately, Vivian had one supportive parent.

Wilson said she came out twice in life: once as gay in eighth grade and a second time as transgender when she was 16. She said that she doesn’t recall Musk’s response the first time and that she wasn’t present when Musk heard from others that she was transgender, because by then the pandemic had started and she was living full-time with her mother.

“She’s very supportive. I love her a lot,” Wilson said of her mom.

Maybe, instead of working to cure the non-existent “woke mind virus,” Musk should refocus his efforts on treating the “bad dad virus.” He could be the first patient!

Today is the first day of Skepticon. I was supposed to be there. I wanted to be there. But instead, I’m at home.

What happened is that on Tuesday I had my second encounter with a transient ischemic attack — the first was about a year and a half ago. I was just sitting at the computer, typing away, when suddenly I couldn’t remember how to spell anything, and the letters and words were swimming about on the computer screen. It was disconcerting. After a short while, everything went back to normal, but I called my doctor anyway — I got a CT scan yesterday (alles klar, no gross observable bleeds or anything like that), and I feel perfectly fine now. I’ll be visiting a neurologist in the near future for a more thorough checkup.

I suspect it was recent grief and sleeplessness and exhaustion and too damn much travel recently that brought it on, so I’m treating it by getting enough sleep. I woke up at 4am this morning, and often I’d just get up and start my day, but this time I got up, walked to the bathroom, and came back to bed and got an additional 2 hours of sleep. No more absurdly early bird for me.

Unfortunately, one thing I cannot trust my brain to do is to hop into a car and drive for 11 hours to St Louis. Once upon a time, yes, no problem, but now I picture suddenly becoming disoriented and confused on I35 because I’d pushed myself too far. Of course, my other nightmare is that happening in the middle of a class, which would be a bit awkward. What good is a professor who loses the ability to read and write?

At least I’ve still got my fall-back profession of exotic dancer to rely on…unless there’s also motor involvement. I’d better take care of myself and stay rested for my own good.

Oh no. I just finished relocating all the baby black widows, and what happens? Another clutch emerges.

There have always been and will always be splits within society. For the most part, they make our lives richer. How dull would it be to live in a world where everyone agreed on everything and shared the same personality traits! Diversity is good. It makes it interesting to be alive.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to navigate. The pandemic came and went and it shone a light on a split most people probably hadn’t thought about all that much before then. Everyone knew there were introverts and extroverts, homebodies and socialites, but it had never really mattered. The two groups complemented each other and managed to peacefully cohabit.

This ended both when the world went into lockdown and when it came out of it. Suddenly those seemingly mundane differences began to define us. Some people thrived while stuck at home and others fell into pits of despair. When restrictions eased, some people leapt out of their houses as quickly as they could, and others secretly wished it could have lasted a bit longer.

Perhaps most interestingly, those differences did not fade with time, as the population got vaccinated and meeting up became safer. Most, but not all of us, rejoiced. In late 2023, campaign group More In Common polled British people on their attitudes towards pandemic life. According to their polling, just under a third of people aged between 18 and 40 reported feeling happier in lockdown than they did in normal times. This might help to explain why a third of 25 to 40-year-olds backed closing nightclubs again, 29 per cent were keen to bring back “the rule of six” and 28 per cent would have been comfortable with “only allowing people to leave their homes for essential shopping, 60 minutes of exercise, or work”.

This was more than a year after the last legal restrictions were lifted in the UK, in line with global health policy. (The World Health Organisation declared an end to the “global health emergency” in May 2023.) There are many reasons for people to be in favour of continued restrictions, some of them altruistic, but personal experience must surely play a large part.

While these findings seem shocking, perhaps they weren’t wholly surprising. In the years after restrictions were lifted, many naturally outgoing people – this writer included – have found it that bit harder to get their friends out of the house. Plans somehow require more effort than ever to get made, and are always at risk of getting cancelled at the last minute. A spontaneous pub trip, once a cornerstone of British social life, now takes work to organise.

One culprit could be changing work habits. Back in 2019, only 12 per cent of workers had, according to the Annual Population Survey, worked from home for at least one day in the past week. In 2023, that figure had risen to 44 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis means that fewer people can afford to buy endless rounds in pubs or choose to spontaneously pour themselves into a restaurant for dinner.

Still, according to French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, there are bigger problems afoot, and society is changing for both good and bad. The pandemic may have been a global catalyst, he argues, but the world had already started feeling less safe outside the home. There had been waves of terrorist attacks across Europe, and endless headlines about the climate emergency coming for us all. Our lives feel more dangerous than they once did, he says, and we have collectively decided to deal with it by hiding out in our living rooms, safe and cosy in our cocoons. He calls it “the triumph of the slippers” and, in a book of the same name, seeks to explain why we should resist those calls to shut ourselves in.

“The pandemic was a moment of simultaneous crystallisation and acceleration, one that consecrated a historical movement that long predated it: the triumph of fear and the paradoxical enjoyment of a fettered life,” Bruckner writes. Still, he argues, “life means excess and profligacy or it ceases to be life. But the pandemic gave a strategic advantage to the forces of stunting. Our future hinges on the tension between those two camps.”

Who will win the war? Bruckner is proudly fighting on the side of the extroverts, but he isn’t exactly optimistic about what’s to come. As he points out, wannabe hermits have a powerful weapon at their disposal: the internet.

Until a few decades ago, deciding to live the life of a recluse was a choice you had to make consciously, and there were consequences you could not avoid. Sure, you had the joy of staying home and living a mostly predictable existence, with few unpleasant surprises, but there were drawbacks.

You could not work from your couch, or speak face-to-face with people living elsewhere, or gain any real insights into whatever was happening outside your front door, aside from watching the news on television. It was a choice that had weight, and that you couldn’t make almost by mistake, or without thinking. The 21st century is different. As Bruckner puts it, “a new anthropological type is emerging: the shrivelled, hyperconnected being who no longer needs others or the outside world. All of today’s technologies encourage incarceration under the guise of openness.”

It is quite coarse language, but he isn’t entirely wrong. As Deloitte found in a study last year, 50 per cent of millennials and Gen Zers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, and 48 per cent of them say that they engage with others on social media more than in the real world. Were these attitudes informed by the fact that hanging out online is cheaper than seeing people outside, or is the choice partly or entirely a personal preference? It is impossible to tell, as Britain hasn’t thrived economically for some time, so correlation and causation cannot be satisfyingly disentangled from one another.

In any case, in 2024 it is possible to eat delicious food you didn’t make yourself, watch movies that have recently come out in the cinema, buy all manner of clothes, tools and fripperies, do the food shopping, speak to friends and family and earn a wage – all without ever leaving the house. Why should we, then? What’s in it for us?

There are a number of ways to answer those questions, not all of which will appeal to everyone, but it is worth setting them out. Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle. Glide effortlessly through life and, when something bad does happen, because it always will, you won’t know how to react.

On a similar note, forcing ourselves to go out even when we’d rather stay on the couch can remind us that good, surprising things usually tend to take place when we least expect them. You may bump into an old acquaintance while out buying a pair of shoes or a carton of milk, or see someone you’d forgotten even existed. You may get to pet a very cute dog, or have a nice laugh with an old lady who struck up a conversation with you, or help someone else who got knocked off their bike and feel good about it, or, or, or – the possibilities are endless. That’s the entire point.

The outside is where the unknowable can and will take place, and that’s what makes it so wonderful. A life without any serendipity is hardly worth living and yes, chance is precious enough that it is worth its cost.

These are the most popular reasons why people ought to resist the siren calls of the blanket and the slippers. This next one is arguably the most important, but the hardest to make a case for. We should all make an effort to leave the house more often not solely because it may benefit us, but because the world needs us to. Small business owners need customers to browse in their shops. Little local restaurants brighten every neighbourhood, but the competition of delivery apps is making many unsustainable.

We like knowing that life is out there waiting for us, just in case we do decide to venture out, but it won’t remain there for much longer if everyone relies on everyone else to do the sometimes tedious everyday living. This doesn’t mean that even the most introverted among us ought to be rounded up and forced to go to their local pub three times a week. Instead, everyone should attempt to leave their comfort zone once in a while.

Bruckner was right to point out that today’s world isn’t especially welcoming, but retreating from it is an ultimately selfish choice, as it ensures that things are unlikely to ever get better. Future generations will then shun each other even more, and things will get even worse. In order to function, a society needs its inhabitants to reach out to one another. If they collectively choose to retreat, it will stop existing.

The only way out of the spiral is to remember that no man is an island, and we all eventually left the womb for a reason. Slippers may be comfortable but will you, on your deathbed, really wish you’d spent more time in them?

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

If the figures are to be believed, there has never been a better time to be a publisher. In 2022, British publishers sold 669 million physical books, the highest number ever recorded. Last year was tougher for many, with the post-Covid bump in book sales finally coming to an end. Even so, according to Nielsen BookScan, in the week up to Christmas alone £92.3 million was spent on books, the highest such figure for 16 years.

Yet these buoyant numbers can hide more than they reveal. The Bookseller, the publishing industry’s trade magazine, is regularly filled with publishers lamenting the state of the industry. In its pages we hear tales of woe about the number of books published each year (too many), the sales of individual titles (too few) and the ability to compete for space on the bookshelves (too hard). Staff, we are told, are leaving the industry in droves, forced out by overwork, stress, low pay and an over-emphasis on the bottom line.

The age when publishing was a gentleman’s pursuit, of long boozy lunches and strolls with authors around well-appointed Bloomsbury offices, when the undisputed kings of the trade (and kings they were in this male-dominated world) were the editors, is well and truly over. The hold on the industry of the big houses (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan; plus Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK) has grown hugely since a wave of mergers and acquisitions that began in the 1960s, consolidating what were formerly small family-run boutique houses into publishing behemoths.

As the academic Dan Sinykin argues in his revealing new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomerates Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, so deep has been the effect of this new corporate world that it constitutes its own epoch: the conglomerate era.

Beginning in the 1960s, in response to antitrust laws, corporations like the electronics giant RCA (which bought Random House in 1965) and Time Inc. (which bought Little, Brown in 1968) began looking for new worlds to conquer, a process that accelerated during the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s. The resulting waves of mergers and acquisitions led to new corporate demands on publishers. As Sinykin writes, “marketing, publicity and sales departments grew and gained influence. Editors spent more time in meetings and filling out profit-and-loss forms. Literary agents became essential intermediaries, as publishing houses no longer rifled through submissions to find emerging talents.” Today, Penguin Random House, by far the largest publisher in the Anglophone world and constituting a vast thicket of different imprints and presses, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann; HarperCollins is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

With this shift, the purpose of the publishing house changed too. As Richard Snyder, then CEO of Simon & Schuster, said rather ominously in 1991, “we are not a publisher, we are now a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”

The scourge of the "comparable title"

The divide between popularity and prestige was always present in publishing but, Sinykin argues, the conglomerate era has seen it grow wider. Where once a novel like
E. L. Doctorow’s formally innovative Ragtime could hold its own as the year’s biggest title, as it did in 1975, those who came out on top in this new world were a different kind of name brand author. The 1980s and 1990s saw authors like Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton gain ascendency, expected to churn out a blockbuster a year with work that tended to incorporate the conventions of genre fiction.

Today’s biggest sellers are no different. Recent years have seen the dominance of young adult romance writer Colleen Hoover (six of the UK’s 50 top-selling books of 2023), Richard Osman’s gentle crime books (four of the top 50), and J. K. Rowling (whose Harry Potter series has provided the best-selling book of the year nine times since 1998). Alongside these commercial giants are big sellers from those famous in other fields: 2023’s overall highest seller was Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.

In the editorial meetings where what is published is decided and why, the most enduring effect has been the dominance of the “comparable title”. Comps, as they are known, are the system whereby newly acquired titles are judged by reference to the sales of older, similar books. Although a long-standing practice, it wasn’t until the introduction of BookScan in 2001, and with it the ready availability of accurate industry-wide sales figures, that they gained a new kind of dominance.

For an editor to acquire a book today, a list of comps will need to be drawn up, their sales figures high enough for a book to break even. The book will then be scrutinised by the marketing, publicity and sales departments, where the author’s ability to discuss their work on TV or podcasts is evaluated, their social media followings judged and the chances of review coverage assessed.

This situation has been greatly accelerated by changes beyond the publishing houses. It is Sinykin’s great merit that he looks at the wider economic conditions, including the rise of retail chains, the growth of wholesalers, and with them more complex and reactive distribution chains, along with the diminishing influence of book reviews and the rise of Amazon.

Now more than ever, the journey of a book from the writer’s desk to the reader’s hands is a complex one. Joining the acquiring editor in shaping it is the agent, the publicist, the marketer, the subsidiary rights specialist, the social media manager, as well as booksellers, book buyers, wholesalers – and, somewhere behind all of this, the shareholder. Each of these has different, sometimes competing, interests and expectations.

The homogenisation of books

What this system has led to, at its worst, is a homogenisation of the industry and the kind of books that are published, in the larger publishing houses more than most. It would take a truly determined or exceptionally risky editor to force through a book that is wholly new in form or content, or whose only comps are books that have flopped. Instead, one success is followed by a string of imitators – think of the post-Richard Osman boom in “cosy crime”, or the endless run of similar blobby multicoloured book covers on the shelves of WH Smith. The result is the dominance of sterile, trend-following middlebrow fiction, and identikit and insipid nonfiction.

Innovative works of fiction that have gone on to find a wider readership do exist. Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, written in a dense hybrid of Old and Modern English, was originally published by the crowdfunder-backed publisher Unbound before being longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014. The American writer Percival Everett wrote more than 20 novels for small presses before being nominated for the Booker in 2022 with The Trees, and his 2001 novel Erasure was recently made into the Hollywood film American Fiction.

But these examples merely prove the rule. As the poet and editor Rachael Allen has written, there is “a deep-seated, complex, and classist anti-intellectualism that pervades the UK that fears difference, difficulty, and experimentation”. In few places is this clearer than the editorial meetings of that most middle-class of worlds, London publishing.

If, as the editor Daniel Menaker once said, publishing books is like a bad day at the casino, in which “you put your money down and most of the time you lose,” then the goal of this long process of evaluation is to lower the odds of backing a win – or, at least, the chances of losing the house on a dud. But success in publishing will always have some element of randomness to it. No one, no matter how good their comps, can guarantee a book will sell enough to break even, let alone storm into the bestseller charts. Last year, just four per cent of Penguin Random House titles earned 60 per cent of its profits. For much of the rest, publishers rely on the continuing sales of their backlist.

It would be easy to be pessimistic about such a situation, even nostalgic for a better, less commercial age. But no matter what the memoirs from the last of the gentleman-publishers say, there never was a golden age. The bestsellers list, as even a cursory glance at Claud Cockburn’s 1972 study of popular fiction Bestseller will attest, has always been filled with pap. The trade-off between the concerns of the marketplace and those of taste has long existed.

And, as Sinykin notes, one of the reactions to the conglomerate takeover of publishing was the flourishing of independent presses, many of which continue to publish innovative work beyond the reach of the corporate giants. London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, founded by Jacques Testard, the former publisher of literary magazine The White Review, in 2014, has published four of the past eight recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other publishers, including Verso Books, where I am one of the editors, have opted for greater vertical integration, cutting out the middlemen by selling directly to their readers via their websites.

The fear remains though that, as the journalist Louis Cheslaw recently reported, “more than ever, people are only buying the same few titles, if they’re buying books at all.” The cautious nature of contemporary publishing, a factor often stemming from and heightened by its conglomerate owners, although still capable of selling millions of books, pushes readers towards a diminishing number of similar titles.

In the past half century, the publishing industry has changed almost beyond recognition, often for the worse. Where once stood an editor’s taste, or mere intuition, now stands the dominance of the comp and its flattening influence on what makes it onto the bookshelves. But taste and a book’s content still matter. It is up to those of us who care about art, those who think critically about the world, to continue to fight against the worst effects of the conglomerate era. Because if one thing is certain, there will always be the need for good books.

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

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Pushkin Press) by Giuliano da Empoli, translated by Willard Wood

Giuliano da Empoli’s assured debut novel, winner of the Grand Prix de L’Academie Francaise, dares to get under the skin of Vladimir Putin, offering a compelling portrait of the Russian leader and his inner circle. Originally published in French in 2022, The Wizard of the Kremlin charts Putin’s rise to political power, and the main events that have helped consolidate his position. It is told from the perspective of a fictional political strategist, Vadim Baranov, clearly inspired by Putin’s real-life adviser Vladislav Surkov.

Like Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, da Empoli uses a double narrator. Putin’s machinations are relayed through the transcription of a nameless narrator who listens to the account of Baranov, a former television producer who served as Putin’s chief spin doctor and nicknamed him “the tsar”. The narrator is invited to visit Baranov when it transpires that they both have an interest in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We, which critiqued the Soviet system as it was being erected. Just as Zamyatin’s depiction of “a society governed by logic, where ... each person’s life is regulated down to the tiniest detail for maximum efficiency” spoke “directly to our era”, The Wizard of the Kremlin plays at being similarly visionary, and predicts a dark future.

Over one long night Baranov tells his tale, sticking close to historical facts, regarding the conflicts that have helped shape Putin. The novel takes in the second Chechen war; the K-141 Kursk submarine disaster in 2000; the 2004 Beslan school massacre; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Baranov describes the tumultuous world Putin entered after “the collapse of the Soviet dream”, and the political vacuum left by Boris Yeltsin: “The new heroes, the financiers and the supermodels took over, and the guiding principles of three hundred million inhabitants of the USSR were overthrown. They had grown up in a nation and now found themselves in a supermarket.” He observes the moment, following the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, that Putin, “the ascetic official”, was transformed into “the angel of death”. When Putin threatened to kill the “terrorists” in the “shit house”, Russians recognised “the voice of command and control”, Baranov suggests. “It was the voice their fathers and grandfathers had grown up with ... there was again someone at the top who could guarantee order.”

Baranov took on the mantle of the tsar’s right-hand man and served him for 15 years. Unlike the real-life Surkov, who was removed as personal adviser in February 2020, da Empoli’s protagonist recognised when he was no longer needed, tendering his resignation and fading into the background.

Although based on true events, The Wizard of the Kremlin, seamlessly translated from the French by Willard Wood, reads like a thriller. A political scientist as well as a novelist, da Empoli clearly knows the world – he was senior adviser to former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi – and builds a vivid sense of the exhilaration of being close to the seat of power. Writing a novel clearly freed him in a way non-fiction could not.

Da Empoli has been criticised for painting Putin’s strongman approach too sympathetically. According to the New York Times, “Several Russia experts have expressed dismay at the novel’s enthusiastic reception. They say the book is mostly indulgent about Mr. Putin, portraying him as fighting oligarchs for the good of the people and ‘putting Russia back on its feet’ in the face of Western contempt.”

You will have to read da Empoli’s book to decide, but I was swept up by this propulsive account of Putin’s reign and its terrifying vision of what may follow.

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

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! What a difference a few weeks can make. Last month in this space, I noted a warning from California Representative Jared Huffman of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, who wrote that the United States is “sleepwalking into theocracy.” Since then, the sleepwalk has turned into a full sprint …

It’s familiar cocktail party trivia by now: you have more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. Gross and fascinating, it’s a perfect conversation bomb, a welcome diversion from work chat or the cultural importance of Taylor Swift. What, actually, is a human body, one is left to wonder? Are these microorganisms simply fellow travellers – given that they are separate from the cells carrying our DNA? Or are they, more fundamentally, us?

Prepare to peel off another layer of that philosophical onion. Not only do we carry around a veritable Serengeti of bacteria and protozoa and fungi, we also each have a personalised set of viruses that interact with them and with our own cells.

You might think about it like this: if bacteria and other single-celled organisms are the lions and the wildebeest, romping over our carefully moisturised hides, stalking their way through nearly all our organs, viruses are the diseases that infect them, keeping populations in check or in some cases simply hitching a ride. It is an imperfect metaphor – particularly given the fact that some of these viruses also infect our own cells – but it gives you a general idea.

This is the virome: a suite of mysterious entities that appears to be equally as crucial to the cascading processes that keep us alive as the microbial component we are just
beginning to understand. The perfect metaphor to describe the virome remains elusive because we know so little about it. In fact, depending on who you ask, we don’t even know if viruses are truly alive. Perhaps in this alien, microscopic version of the Serengeti, viruses are something closer to robot hyenas. Like robots, they operate mindlessly, with one goal in mind – in this case, replicating their code. And like hyenas, they mercilessly gang up on their prey, which may itself be a predator.

Of course, we are all too familiar with the nearly 300 pathogenic (disease-causing) viruses that give us, for example, the common cold or Covid-19. But not many people know about the tens of thousands of other species that inhabit our bodies without causing apparent harm, at least most of the time. Some viruses lie in wait, only becoming pathogenic under certain circumstances. Others never cause disease at all. A large proportion are bacteriophages – phages for short – that infect the bacteria that colonise us as well.

Like the explorers of yore who catalogued the species inhabiting distant lands, virologists are now attempting to discern how exactly they affect our health – and our evolution. “We’ve been co-evolving with viruses for so long,” says Eric Delwart, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “Probably since the very beginning of life itself.”

Forensic potential

Imagine it’s the near future. You are a jewel thief and are executing your latest heist. You’ve hacked the CCTV, secured a stolen vehicle for your escape and zipped yourself into a latex suit to contain the DNA your body is sure to shed. But, in a moment of carelessness, a sliver of skin grazes the safe. It’s not enough to leave behind an appreciable amount of DNA (you’ve depilated your entire body, of course) but you nonetheless give the detectives something to work with: a tiny smear containing millions of bacteria and viruses. And that cocktail of invisible creatures is just as unique as a fingerprint. How, exactly, the prosecutor later asks, did your little crew of hitchhikers end up on the handle of the safe at Tiffany’s?

Viruses may soon be a useful secondary option when DNA is not available at a crime scene. While far from being a commonly used investigative tool, the early results of research are promising. There are going to be more viruses in any given sample than there are bacterial or human cells. And there will also be more variety, allowing for the establishment of a unique fingerprint with greater certitude.

The forensic value of the virome relies in part on the stability of its composition. One study that looked at the viromes of 42 people over a six-month period found them to be relatively constant. The researchers collected samples from both hands and from the scalp. “In every single person, there was some amount of variability,” says co-author Michael Adamowicz, director of the forensic science program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. But the array of species was still distinctive. “The most important question is: do you put enough of those viruses on the object to be able to tell you from somebody else?” And the second: “How long does it last?”

Still, the authors point out that identification of more viral families is required to improve the accuracy of these tests. “An awful lot of our skin virome is not defined,” Adamowicz says. “The species of viruses are not characterised. Nobody has any idea what they are.”

One of the main distinguishing factors was the presence of viral particles associated with domestic animals. “That’s not surprising,” Adamowicz says. “Some of our participants worked with animals, and therefore they had unique viral particles that the rest of us didn’t have. We found that there was a strong ability to identify people who owned cats.”

While virome analysis may be used in future for scenarios like that of the jewellery theft, it will likely be even more useful in cases where humans contact each other. Viral contamination could provide evidence in such challenging cases as sexual assaults in which human DNA is difficult to differentiate – for example, when penetration has been digital. Because the traces of human DNA will be faint and mixed with the victim’s in these cases, the virome could be a clearer means of linking the attack to the perpetrator.

The human polyomavirus 2 (also called the John Cunningham virus) is present in up to 90 per cent of the population and is found in the gut, the kidneys and even the brain. Forensic scientists in Japan are already using the different strains of the virus to identify human remains. Analysing the geographically distinct and stable genotypes helps narrow down the origin of the cadaver in question.

Health benefits

But we still don’t know what the virome is exactly, or how it’s developed. We do know that all of us emerge from the womb virtually sterile, although some viruses are likely transmitted during passage through the birth canal (babies born by Caesarean section have lower viral diversity). After that, we quickly pick up our microbiomes – including our viromes – through our diets, from the people we come into contact with, and from the environment.

Mother’s milk appears to be particularly important. Viruses begin showing up in infant faeces mere days after they are born. They seem to ride in, on or inside bacteria that are transmitted through breastfeeding. Indeed, viruses that have the potential to become pathogenic are less numerous in infants who are breastfed, suggesting that the beneficial viruses transmitted by the mother have a mediating effect.

Geography appears to play a role as well – John Cunningham virus is not the only one to exhibit distinct geographical signatures. Studies of people living in different regions of the same country have demonstrated that the environment in which people live, even if separated by a few hundred miles, can result in appreciable differences in virome composition.

And though viromes appear to be relatively stable over long periods, discernible differences have been observed even during short stretches of contact. People who have lived together for only a few days were shown to have picked up components of each other’s viromes.

These hitchhiking entities grow in number and diversity as we age. They have even shaped how we operate as organisms. Perhaps most famously, the gene that codes for the protein required for the formation of the placenta was derived from a virus that inserted itself into the genetic code of a mammalian ancestor. Such viruses are known as retroviruses – they insert a DNA copy of their RNA genome, altering the host genome from that point forward. Mammals, it can thus be inferred, would not have evolved were it not for the mindless intervention of a virus at some point in our prehistory. Your birth and mine were the long tail of an ancient genetic accident.

This is hardly an anomaly, though the additional effects of viral entry into the genome are poorly understood. Some 8 per cent of the human genome is thought to be viral in origin. “These retroviruses have become us or we’ve become them,” Delwart suggests. “We couldn’t live without them. We wouldn’t be alive.”

Even some frighteningly recognisable viruses can play a beneficial role. Hepatitis G, which infects around 16 per cent of the population without apparent effect, appears to slow the progress of HIV, for example. Other types of hepatitis are highly pathogenic.

The same is true of herpes viruses, which are strongly associated with a range of different cancers, but also appear to protect against such diseases as bubonic plague (in mice, at least).

“Once you have them, you never really get rid of them. They just go dormant. And whenever you are stressing out or you’re starving, they will pop back out of the reservoirs and could make you sick,” Delwart warns.

From hero to villain

Other viruses that lurk in the system suddenly become harmful given the right conditions. The Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is present in 90 per cent of people but is linked to severe disease in only a small number. In inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients, a particular suite of viruses correlates to the disorder, while a different complement of viruses is found in healthy patients.

Viruses even regulate immune system responses – which, when they misfire, are responsible for a whole host of pathologies. Of course, when these responses are operating as they should, they keep us healthy. Imbalances in the virome increased susceptibility to Covid-19 infection. Strangely, low levels of pepper mild mottle virus, which is obtained through eating peppers and likely does not actually permanently integrate into the human virome, correlated to a greater chance of Covid-related illness.

The factors that tip the balance in such situations are not well understood. What changes a seemingly benign virus into an entity that threatens our lives or disables us? In the gut, dietary factors play a role. Studies indicate that certain compounds in food lead to an increase in phage populations and thus inhibit the growth of the bacteria they infect. The opposite must be true as well. “You may have a great microbiome and one day you’ll be eating something that contains a phage that is going to wipe out some of those good bacteria,” Delwart says.

In all likelihood, the correlations between viral populations and disease are reflective of highly complex, delicate relationships between those viruses, the microbes they infect, the environment the person inhabits, what they ingest, their inherent genetic makeup and a host of other factors that have yet to be identified. Correlation is one thing, causality another.

You’ve completed your sentence for the jewel heist: 10 long years in jail. Finally, tasting freedom, you feel a cramping in your gut. Prison food didn’t agree with you, but this is something more concerning. You may have some form of IBD – you see blood in the toilet. But all is not lost. The same technology that put you behind bars may be able to help your guts.

The therapeutic application of viruses dates back more than a century. Felix d’Hérelle first began administering phage therapy in 1919, curing people of dysentery caused by Shigella bacteria. Phages were at the centre of the 1925 Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith, in which the protagonist uses them to cure an outbreak of bubonic plague. Leveraging viruses native to the human body has received increased attention in recent years as a potential pathway to curing disease without the use of harsh, chemical-based therapies.

Studies in mice have shown increased inflammation when certain intestinal viruses are depleted, while the reintroduction of viral compounds alleviated the disease. Phages that target E. coli have shown promise in treating Crohn’s disease – a form of IBD. And in patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can cause disease of the digestive system, faecal transplants have proven effective, even when the bacterial components were filtered from the faeces, leaving only viral particles. The viruses contained in a stranger’s turd could have life-saving potential.

So, this horde of strange things marching up and down our spines, skittering over our skin and waging war in our intestines may make or break us. They may even be the key to understanding life itself. In the meantime, know that each time you open a door, or swipe your credit card or use the toilet, you leave a phalanx of your own personal viral army behind.

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

‘‘Darling, what’s happened? Are you OK?” My friend gently guided me to a chair at her kitchen table and sat me down. “I’m fine,” I chirped. She did not look convinced. I had, after all, just refused a glass of wine.

I have been sober now for 94 days. This might not seem like a long time to some people, but for me, it’s something of a miracle. I’m a lifelong drinker. Pretty much every day. Some might call this “alcohol dependency”, most just call it “British”. In our culture it’s perfectly acceptable to have your first pint at four in the morning, provided you’re in an airport, on the way to a holiday.

So it can unnerve people if you stop drinking. Particularly if you are of my generation, who came of age in the boozy, ladette culture of the 90s, and you are not an obvious alcoholic, on antibiotics or pregnant. I am none of those things. “But I really am fine,” I repeated as my friend poured herself a huge glass of wine. She then began to talk about her own drinking habits, explaining why it wasn’t a habit at all, she just happened to do it every day. “It’s okay, I’m not trying to convert you,” I said, “I’m not judging you.”

That’s what it can feel like, though. I’ve felt judged myself sometimes, in my decades of being a boozer. When one of my circle kicked the booze, it shone a light on my own habits, how any social situation – work drinks, a theatre trip, volunteering at the school disco – were all unthinkable without a glass in my hand.

“I never drink on my own!” I would say, to confirm it wasn’t a problem. But then, I was never alone.

Sometimes I would watch my 10-year-old running around with her friends – chattering, laughing their heads off – all without needing a glass of prosecco to make each other more interesting. Why couldn’t we adults do that? Will these brilliant children of mine also end up anaesthetising themselves in order to have a good time?

My 16-year-old son assures me, “No, because we like ourselves.” An admirable level of passive aggression, I think, and quite right.

Their culture is different. I notice the change in the comedy circuit. The younger comedians don’t see total oblivion post-show as part of the job. When they come offstage they might drink juice and wander off into the night – to meditate under some trees, I assume. Younger people are surrounded by conversations on how to take care of their mental health. My generation were either “mental” or “not mental”. Alcohol dependency was so acceptable that it seemed a little dramatic to show concern that I needed a drink in order to hang out with other humans.

But what my son said affected me. I realised that I felt enormous pressure when I was sober. I felt that if I kicked the booze, I would have to become better all round. The Wise Old Woman of the Mountains with fabulous insights. I would have to suddenly acquire incredible self-awareness – and never say to someone backstage, “Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Shappi,” only to have them reply, “I know who you are, I’m your agent.” When this happened at a festival one summer, I blamed the beer. The truth is, I have a problem with remembering faces.

I’ve accepted now that even when sober, I am bound to do or say foolish things, like accidentally trying to chat up my own agent. Since then, not drinking is a cinch. That’s what I try to explain to my friend. I’m not having a crisis. I just want to live a life with no hangovers, for once. I also want to actually know if I have a real connection with someone, or if we just both love drinking.

The word “sobriety” is off-putting. It’s far too sober for what is actually an exciting voyage of self-discovery. The longer I stay sober, the more of “me” comes back. Self-acceptance has replaced self-medication. I still love parties, but I know when home-time is. I still overshare and still dance like a baboon, but I don’t need to blame it on the booze.

It’s just me, in this one tiny snippet of life I have been given, finally being present and conscious for every part of it.

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

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! Fundamental human rights—especially our right to free expression—don’t typically flourish under theocratic regimes. Science is a powerful tool for stripping theocrats of their power; when people understand the evidence-based explanations for how the world works, they no longer need the religious version. And when they see concrete …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! The UK’s National Health Service recently released The Cass Review, an independent report intended “to make recommendations on how to improve NHS gender identity services, and ensure that children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of …

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 […]