My wife forced me at trowel-point to work in the lawn this morning. We’ve got a big patch that was torn up by a backhoe in order to replace a broken water line, and she bought a lot of topsoil that needed to be spread over it, and we got some prairie wild grass and flower seed that we sowed over it.

My boots were caked with mud, clay, and gravel. My back is aching. I’m sweaty and dirty. I think I’ll go walk a kilometer or two and hope I can scrape off some of the residue.

Awww. Some Trump apparatchiks are feeling uncomfortable.

I have a source inside the Trump regime who feels, in their own words, a little disillusioned. This person says they signed on to the Trump team because of DEI going too far and because woke culture was dividing the country, but is now concerned about the blatant criminal behavior of Donald Trump. Really? His last administration didn’t show you that? Well, OK.

DEI never went too far. If you think it did, that says more about you than it does about the policies, which were all about reasonable recognition of disparities. Everyone complaining about DEI are simply bigots who resent any awareness of their privilege.

Woke culture was not and is not dividing the country. If you want to be concerned about any attitudes, wake up to the culture of greed and so-called rugged individualism. What divides the country is that some people are incapable of sharing the wealth. We’re the richest country in the world with huge numbers of the poor, and a government that likes the idea of starving them to death as a tactic to end poverty.

The problem here, dear reporter, is that your source is a colossal asshole who cannot be trusted. They do not like the corruption, but the instant a trans person or a black person wanders into view they’ll go running into the arms of their orange Daddy. Screw ’em.

Back in December, there was a race for committee leadership in congress that exposed the flaws in our gerontocracy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (age 35) ran for the house Oversight Committee lead against Gerry Connolly (age 74), a guy most of us had never heard of, who looked his age and was particularly cadaverous since he had been suffering from esophageal cancer. If they had any plans for the future, Ocasio-Cortez was the obvious choice…but the equally old Democrats all voted for Connolly. This was insane, short-sighted, and stupid, and additionally was incredibly selfish of Connolly, but I guess power demands its perks. Democrats said he was “feisty”. “Feisty” is kind of a death sentence as far as I’m concerned.

Now Connolly has predictably died.

In addition, since Trump’s ascendancy to peak corruption in January, two other aged Democrats have flopped over dead of old age: Raul Grijalva (age 77) and Sylvester Turner (age 70), both of whom had been diagnosed with cancer. The Democrats are losing representation and votes to inescapable mortality. All of them may have been the very best liberal politicians, but good intentions do not impress the grim reaper.

We cannot make an unconstitutional decree that people above a certain age may not run for office, but the Democratic party could decide to purge the party leadership of all those ancient gomers at, for instance, the age of 65. They wouldn’t be kicked out of the building, but they would be required to make room for a younger generation. I think that would revitalize the party, and encourage people to retire at a reasonable age.

I’m 68. I can say this. I’d be accommodating if I were forced to step down from my position, IF the US provided for a livable retirement wage (retiring senators and representatives have no worries there) and IF the US supported the educational system well enough that they could maintain staffing (again, congress is never going to be left short-staffed).

Take the hint, Chuck Schumer (age 74).

I’ve posted a new video, but I’m making it complicated to see.

OK, I’ve put it on my Patreon account. If you’re a sponsor, you can watch it there right now, ad-free. I’m going to be doing that from now on, I think. Join and you get it before everyone else!

It’s going to go live on YouTube at 6pm Central time today, so if you’re patient, you can get it for free there. YouTube will stick a few ads in it, I’m sorry to say.

Or if you don’t want to wade through this video nonsense, I’ll post a transcript right here at 6pm, so you can just read the damned thing. That’s especially good if you don’t think my amateurish video abilities are worth a half hour of your time

The video is a dissection of Bret Weinstein’s conversation with Joe Rogan about Tucker Carlson’s idiotic denial of evolutionary biology, so it’s not as if this is essential stuff. I try to explain why Weinstein’s vague handwaving about mysterious “layers” of genetic information that no one knows about except him. Here’s some news: we do. We don’t know everything about information in the genome, but we know enough to be aware that it isn’t magic.

Anyway, check back in about 6 hours for my explanation.

[Note: where I’m quoting from the Rogan-Weinstein video, I’m directly copy-pasting from the video transcript…which kind of disregards capitalization/punctuation. You’ll just have to figure it out!]

Bret Weinstein was on the Joe Rogan show a few months ago to talk about Tucker Carlson’s outright denial of evolution. Carlson had said there is no evidence at all for evolution, and further claimed that “we” had given up on evolution, and that evolution had been debunked, and that it simply is not true. Rogan brought on Weinstein to explain what Carlson meant, and to whitewash the nonsense for him.
This is a big mistake, because Weinstein is almost as stupid as Carlson on this topic, and further, he’s one of those wanna-be conservative grifters who is going to take great care to avoid criticizing Rogan, Carlson, or their whole right wing audience. I’m not going to rehash Carlson’s BS again, but right now am more interested in watching Weinstein twist himself in knots to justify anti-evolutionary dogma.

yeah um we have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said uh on the podcast was essentially that you can’t really prove evolution it’s not real and he doesn’t believe in evolution as it’s taught
yep
I’m I’m paraphrasing
yeah I went back and listened to it
what did he exactly say

That’s actually a good start. Rogan is ignorant of the science, so the first thing he does is ASK A QUESTION of someone with a degree in evolution. I approve; that’s exactly how a fool can become less of a fool, and I encourage all creationists to do likewise. Unfortunately, he’s asking a biologist who’s more interested in ducking and dodging than in answering the question.

say uh he said well he said a couple things it was a little confusing he said that you know we we see evidence of adaptation but we don’t see evidence of evolution and that we’ve really gotten beyond the darwinian model we’ve essentially come to understand that it’s not right that’s
is this essentially an argument for creationism?
uh it’s an it’s an argument for intelligent design?
intelligent design okay I think. first of all I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it’s interpretable
okay
I don’t really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not Evolution. that’s not coherent I think what he means is…

This is not an honest approach. He’s going to “clean up” what Carlson said — but Carlson’s words were simple and straightforward. He rejects evolution. What he wants to do is reword and rephrase everything to be something Weinstein finds more palatable. When he says, “What he means is…” we can be sure that he’s about to twist those words hard.
I won’t bother repeating his efforts to revise what Carlson said. Instead, he’s going to make excuses for why he doesn’t demonstrate that Carlson is an ignorant buffoon.

the correct response to Tucker, I do not believe involves what most people want me to do in response to something like what what Tucker has said
what do you think that is what do you think most people want
I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case very very very clear so that they can relax. Tucker’s concern isn’t based in science and they can go back to feeling comfortable that you know the Darwinists have it well in hand. that’s not where I am I could do that but I don’t feel honorable doing that

Wait, what? He isn’t going to present the evidence that shows Carlson is wrong, because he wouldn’t feel “honorable”? Telling the truth in a very very clear way is “dishonorable”? I want to hear the reasoning behind that!
Also, “Darwinists”? I can see trouble coming.

I think as a scientist I should not be in the business of persuading people. I want you to be persuaded. I want you to be persuaded by the facts I want them to persuade you but I don’t think I’m allowed to persuade you I think that it’s a um that it’s effectively PR when um I attempt to bring people over to team Darwin.

This is bizarre. By his definition, education is PR, and is bad. As a scientist, it is your responsibility to advocate for your position and to persuade others of the correctness of your argument. You do that by presenting the evidence and justifying your interpretation — just listing facts, as he suggests, is not very effective, and it’s especially ineffective if you don’t even present the facts, as he does here. Is he afraid his audiences reasoning will be overwhelmed by his charisma?
No chance of that, anyway.
So what is his real concern? It’s Darwinism.

further as I’m sure I’ve mentioned to you before I’m not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern darwinists. in fact I’m kind of annoyed by it and although Tucker, I do not believe is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025 and it has to do with the fact that in my opinion the mainstream darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood so by reporting that yes Darwinism is true and we know how it works and people who aren’t compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever they are pretending to know more than they do so all that being said let me say I think modern Darwinism is broken. yes I do think I know more or less how to fix it I’m annoyed at my colleagues for I think lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism I think they know I think I know why that happened I think they were concerned that uh a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself and so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was

Cool. He complains about Darwinism or Darwinists 7 times in that short segment.
To dissect his claims in a little more detail:
1. There aren’t any Darwinists around any more. Darwinism was a nineteenth century hypothesis suggested by people who didn’t know anything about genes or genetics; it was abandoned and replaced by better explanations in the 20th century, and is even now currently changing as new observations and theories evolve. “Darwinist” is a term used as part of a rhetorical strategy by creationists to pretend that evolutionary biology is old and obsolete.
2. No one is lying about how much we know. Science is pretty explicit about defining the boundaries of what is known and not known; when was the last time a grant proposal was submitted that said, “We already know the answer to this question, but we’d like some more money please?” Evolutionary theory is a general description of a framework for answering questions.
3. “Darwinism” was broken, he says . That’s a safe claim to make, but it relies on the audience not understanding that our modern ideas about evolution have moved well beyond Darwinian hypotheses of natural selection.
4. The idea that scientists are so concerned about a “creationist worldview” that they are pretending to a certainty they don’t have is absurd. Most scientists don’t pay any attention to creationists; creationism is laughable. In fact, the problem goes the other way, in that most scientists are so blithely unaware of creationism that it has been able to creep into our schools and government with little pushback.
5. The real pretense here is that Weinstein is pretending that Tucker Carlson was making an informed critique. He wasn’t.
What I found most interesting in Weinstein’s rant was the narcissistic idea that he knows what’s wrong with biology and that he knows how to fix it. OK. But he won’t be explicit in explaining any errors — that would be dishonorable — and he’s definitely not going to tell us what his replacement theory might be.
But we’ll get some strong hints.

what is wrong with Darwinism like what do you think that Darwinism is doing itself at disservice by saying
there are several different things that are wrong with it the key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect. this is a very hard thing to convey and I want to point out that

Oh. This is a standard issue creationist argument: they all hate mutations. I’ve lost track of how many creationist excuses I’ve heard along these lines: mutations only delete things, mutations only lead to a loss of information, or here, the Weinstein variant, mutations can’t produce new morphological features.
His misconceptions are not at all hard to convey. He’s just a poor communicator who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
And oh man, he’s going to start by making excuses.

if the explanation for creatures is darwinian that does not depend on anybody understanding it and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it’s intuitive okay I think could probably do a decent job on those fronts but if you happened onto the earth 100 million years ago you would have found lots of animals running around lots of plants growing you would have recognized where you were and more or less what was going on there’s not a single creature on the planet that would have any idea what an abstract thoughtwas there would be no creature that had any inkling that there was even a question about where all this had come from and Darwinism would still be the answer so somehow whether Darwinism is the answer does not depend on anybody knowing it or being able to explain it

He’s pandering to the Joe Rogan audience! It’s OK if you don’t understand what he’s talking about, because creatures did not need to understand Darwinism in order to evolve.
Yeah, Bret, but you need to understand evolutionary theory to explain it.
You also need to understand a little biology to see how badly flawed his argument by metaphor is.
Oh god, brace yourselves.

okay here here’s the problem let’s say that we went into the parking lot and in one parking space there’s an excavator and in the next parking space over is a Maserati now let’s say we took those two machines and we tore them apart so that we just had a stack of the compounds that they were made out of right the rubber the vinyl the various Metals all that stuff there would be differences between the excavator and the Maserati right they would just be made of some different stuff and then there’d be a lot of stuff that they had in common now you could look at the differences in the materials that they’re made out out of and you could say well the excavator is really good at you know lifting materials and moving them around and the Maserati is really good at going fast on a paved surface and those differences are due to the differences in materials that they’re made out of that would be wrong probably you could take the list of materials that an excavator is made out of and you could give it to a bunch of Engineers and you could say I want you to make a Maserati but you’re limited to these materials and they could do it wouldn’t be quite as good because there’d be some places where the ideal material wasn’t available to them anymore but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a Maserati out of the stuff
or a sports car
right yeah so what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car but they’re not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do the chemistry differences are incidental

Aaargh. This is a terrible metaphor. I have to mention two words familiar to all evolutionary biologists: PATTERN and PROCESS. They completely invalidate Weinstein’s thought experiment, and he ought to know it.
As stated by Chapleau, Johansen and Williamson,

The distinction between pattern and process is a central issue in evolutionary biology. The study of patterns deals with the detection of order in nature while the study of processes deals with the mechanisms generating and maintaining this order. Patterns result from processes. Consequently, the study of patterns must be free from any assumptions about processes, if they are to be used to test hypotheses dealing with the mechanisms of evolution. This simple observation was one of the important issues at the heart of the controversy that has been raging in systematics over the last 23 years (see Eldredge and Cracraft 1950, Wiley 1981). Although the debate has been restricted to systematics, it has ramifications throughout the other disciplines of evolutionary biology (ethology, evolutionary ecology, etc.).
François Chapleau, Peter H. Johansen and Mark Williamson, 1988

Weinstein’s example doesn’t work. If you completely pulverize two cars, you have destroyed the pattern, and you also have lost any information about the process that assembled them. You would not be able to reconstruct any one car from the debris, let alone use the materials to build a different car. You would have to obtain blueprints, molds, casting information, machinery for forming the parts and tools for assembling them, and you have just obliterated even indirect hints about how the cars were made.
He has just recited an extremely reductionist view of biology, one that no one, other than possibly some creationists and Bret Weinstein, believe. There have been legitimate scientists who argued that all we need is the DNA sequence of the genome to understand an organism, but I think they’ve all gone crawling back into their holes and are trying to convince everyone that they never really said that.
If he thinks the problem is that modern biologists, or even Darwinists, think that species properties are determined only by their chemical constituents, well, he’s full of shit.
But he’s not done. He’s going to try to fit his metaphor to real organisms.

now when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew like ancestor and that shrew like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons those three-letter codons specify amino acids of which there are 20 and that the difference between the bat and the Shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by The genome we are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the Shrew is a chemical difference it’s not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars but nonetheless it’s a biochemical difference right the difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff I don’t believe that mechanism is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew like ancestor became a bat

But…but…but no one thinks that the differences between bats and shrews are solely due to chemical differences!
It’s about PATTERN!
Bats and shrews are made of mostly the same stuff, having the same genes and proteins. The difference between a bat and a shrew is not a simple chemical difference, it’s a change in the timing and strength of chemical signals. For instance, bats express the molecules BMP2 and BMP4 more strongly in their forelimbs than mice do, which prolongs the growth of forelimb bones to make wings.
If you think that all that is involved in evolution is changing the amino acid sequence of proteins, you’re missing out. A larger percentage of the genome is dedicated to regulation, that is, bits that are not necessarily transcribed, but are controlling the timing and strength of the expression of other genes.
So yeah, he’s right that the “spelling of its proteins” is not an adequate description of how changes in the genome translate into changes in form. But he’s not the one who figured that out. All those people he ignorantly calls “Darwinists” called it 75 to a hundred years ago.
Where did he learn biology, anyway?
Warning: he’s going to become increasingly incoherent as he tries to describe his novel idea.

so what do you think is missing
there’s a whole layer that is missing that allows Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke
and the mechanism we invoke is natural selection adaptation
the mechanism it that’s the one
okay the mechanism that we invoke is
random mutation
random mutation which I believe in random mutation happens selection which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give the creature an advantage there’s nothing wrong with that story that story is true okay random mutations happen selection collects the ones that are good and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome all of that is true what I’m arguing against is the idea that that transform forms a shrew into a bat

OK, a “layer”. What layer? How does Weinstein identify a “layer”? I’d say that the layer he wants to define into existence is simply the structure of the genome and the molecules it interacts with; that the sequence of the genome, beyond coding for amino acids, is a dynamic structure that binds to regulatory molecules, proteins and RNA, that are present in the cytoplasm in concentrations that vary over time and that can change patterns of growth and the strength of their contacts with other cells that have consequences for the morphology of the organism.
It’s nothing mysterious or unknown. We’ve been studying it for decades. What he thinks is a missing piece of evolutionary biology is the stuff that molecular biology has been studying since at least Jacob and Monod in the 1950s, and that is the primary subject of interest in evo-devo since the 1980s.
He doesn’t think the accumulation of mutations is what transforms a shrew into a bat. Then what is he thinking of?

what you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism whereby selection which is ancient at the point that you have shrews explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance
and what would be that
well
what is that Force
it’s not a force
what is that desire that what is that
I believe there’s a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer either of machines or a programmer

It’s not a force, or a desire — note that he has already confused Joe Rogan, which admittedly not that hard to do — and it’s not in triplet codon form. But he can’t or won’t say what it is, probably because he’s just as confused as Joe.
But I’m not confused. The secret to a clear mind is to simply ignore all the nonsense coming out of Weinstein’s mouth. I know that there are a lot of different kinds of information in the cell: there’s the structure of the genome, which contains many regulatory sequences; there’s the contingent properties of the other molecules in the cell that can interact with DNA; there are signaling pathways that involve lipids, proteins and nucleotides; there are factors in the external environment that can modulate gene expression. I’m not some kind of super-genius savant to know these things, they are basic principles that every serious student of biology should have figured out in year one of their training. Every credible biologist knows that there is far more to cellular information than the triplet code.
This was a 2 and a half hour interview between Rogan and Weinstein, and I’ve only dug into 15 minutes of it. I don’t need to go further to the point where he claims his mechanism has to be able to look forward in time, or that human cognition is somehow part of it, or the bit where he praises Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, saying he’s a quite good scientist (he’s not, he’s a quite poor philosopher), I already know that Weinstein is an idiot.
I am embarrassed and have to confess something, though. Weinstein was a certified professor of evolutionary biology from 2002 until 2017 at Evergreen State College. I applied for a biology position at Evergreen in 2000. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t good enough. But Bret Weinstein was.
I must admit that I sometimes wonder how that happened. Any Evergreen faculty/administrators out there who can tell me how I failed while Weinstein succeeded? Maybe you can also let me know if you regret your choices now.
Anyway, if you can stand to listen to a failed Evergreen applicant, you’ve found my YouTube channel. My blog is at freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula, and I have a Patreon account at patreon.com/pzmyers. I use the donations I get through Patreon to feed my spiders, and also to fund freethoughtblogs, where many other progressive godless folk have blogs. Check it out!

I live in a small town, a town where very little changes from day to day. I walk downtown almost every day, and almost a week ago I noticed something in a parking lot.

They’re still there. They are becoming part of the unchanging substrate of small town life.

I had to look more closely. After all, maybe they contained feet and I would become part of a rural murder mystery! Television and novels tell me that happens all the time.

They don’t contain feet. They seem to be stuffed with damp, moldering leaves, which is a little odd, but not sufficient to warrant calling in a small town sheriff.

They seem to have been worked hard — the leather is stretched and scuffed, the seams are loose but still holding everything together. They’re in the kind of shape where, if they were my boots, I’d start thinking I definitely need new shoes, but I’d tell myself I could keep using them for one more year. Which I’d tell myself again every year for a couple of years.

I checked. They wouldn’t fit me. They were much too large and very wide. In fact, I was surprised by how big they are. Whoever owned them had to be at least 300 pounds, and I could tell these boots had a hard life every day. Maybe they’re relieved to be resting in an empty lot, soothed by the rain, communing with the bugs that come around to visit.

It’s weird. Somedays I’m intensely curious about where they come from, who left them there, why they abandoned them here, what kinds of interesting things their owner did while wearing them…other days I’m like “Hello, boots. I wouldn’t mind joining you sometime. Tell me about the life of an old boot decaying on the pavement.”

This post has no significance, I’m just contemplating some soggy old boots.

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer, based in London. Her fiction is mainly set in the contemporary Middle East and has been nominated for major awards.

There’s a lot of reportage on Palestine, but why is it important for fiction to centre Palestinian voices?

One of the things with a novel is the length of it and the proximity of the reader to the emotional state of the characters. You are able to live within their skin before a moment of crisis, for example – whereas in terms of reportage, it’s probably only going to cover the moment of the crisis. If you only see Palestinians as enduring occupation, house demolition, settler attacks, you kind of think that’s what they are, they must be used to it. There’s nothing shocking. Whereas fiction allows the reader to feel with them – in terms of their aspirations, emotional needs, connection to family, the choices that they have to make. There is this pitting of the societal good against the personal good – you know something might not be in your interests, it’s high risk, but you know that it’s your duty. So those kinds of moral choices I find really fascinating, and fiction allows you more space to explore them.

Is fiction a way to resist dehumanisation?

There’s been a lot of discussion about this idea. I’ve heard some Palestinians say, “Writing so that we can be humanised? Why do we have to plead to be human?” But as a shorthand, I’m happy to use that vocabulary [around dehumanisation], because it is a way of understanding the process, which has been so systematic since the early days of Zionist thinking: that the Palestinians don’t exist, and even if they do, their lives aren’t worth anything; that even if they live on the land, they can be easily moved off the land. They’re exportable, disposable, etc.

There has been a disproportionate amount of Palestinian literature and film [being produced] compared to other Arab countries, despite the difficulties that the artists are working in. Some of the earlier works were perhaps a little more didactic. And then it was quickly realised that these weren’t landing well, particularly with western audiences. So it’s changed. Now you have anything from poems being written on Facebook, books based on diary entries, theatrical productions such as the Gaza Monologues [created in 2010 when Ashtar Theatre brought together testimonies from young people after the bombing campaign of 2008-09]. You have personal, domestic or love stories. You have an investigation into one historic killing, as in Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. You get dark humour, like Mazen Maarouf’s short story collection Jokes for the Gunmen. A whole range of styles and approaches.

Tell us about the anthology We Wrote In Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.

This was a collection of writing I edited, by women of Arab heritage from the pre-Islamic era to the current day. It includes work in translation from French and Arabic, as well as work written in English – poetry and prose. I’ve always been interested by the concept of bravery and what makes people able to stand up to oppression – from being able to challenge their personal relationships to confronting state authority by protesting on the streets. And so these women really inspired me, because they all were navigating ways of expressing these primordial human longings of sexual desire or romance (which could be prohibited, but not always), and trying to communicate these emotions as well, to inspire other people’s desire, to navigate themselves into a place of greater happiness.

There was one prose piece I thought was really extraordinary, set in a refugee camp, centred around a couple who can only meet in the latrines of the camp, and they’re communicating to each other through a wall. In a couple of pages, the writer Samia Issa is able to portray the depravity of the conditions, the lack of privacy, and also how human desire doesn’t end with a certain set of circumstances or political oppression. The heart still beats strong, and she’s very creative in forming a place of beauty amid the horror.

How is Palestinian literature under attack today?

The erasure of Palestinian literature is happening on a number of levels. The Educational Bookshop [in East Jerusalem, which specialises in books on the history of Israel and Palestine] being attacked by Israeli authorities in February, the books being removed and the owners being arrested, that’s the most visual example of of how literature is being targeted. The attack is more than just on the material itself: it’s closing down the sense of community and culture. Now that’s quite literal when it comes to a bookshop, because people come in and out, they drink coffee, they make friendships.

But also, I see literature and film as a way that Palestinians all over the world – and there are 14 million, if you include the diaspora in the refugee camps – form a dialogue across languages and geographical spaces. The destruction of cultural heritage is seen to be important when you’re trying to annihilate a population, because it dislocates them from their own history.

What about challenges faced by Palestinian writers here in Britain?

It just happened with the Royal Television Society Awards in March. They created a special award for Palestinian journalists, but then they announced they would withdraw it [citing concerns about controversy overshadowing the award]. It was reinstated after a protest but it was really shameful. There are multiple examples of similar censoriousness when it comes to hearing, promoting and celebrating Palestinian voices.

This suppression works at every level, from the chill factor in terms of your concerns about anything you say being taken out of context, to the idea that there are these very policed and criminalised definitions. So you can’t talk about “fighters”, for example, because they’re all deemed to be terrorists. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamist or leftist – anyone who takes up arms on behalf of the Palestinians is probably within a proscribed group. So as a people whose history is very much defined by expulsion, repression, and resistance to that process, that whole thing is very hard to navigate, because you could end up being arrested, quite literally, under the Terrorism Act.

Your novel Out of It was set in Gaza in the early 2000s. What is it like looking back on that now?

When I wrote that novel, I moved the worst situations of the Palestinian reality into a fictional Gaza. I thought I was writing about something so dark it was unimaginable. But what we’re facing now is an unquantifiable number of times worse than anything in that book. In terms of capturing the frustration of youth and the loss of potential and the lack of choices provided to them, [the novel] still stands, and I was pleased that it was able to take a readership into the lives of my main characters; to experience how difficult it is to engage in a meaningful way to change the situation, but also how difficult it is to disengage.

What are your hopes for Palestinian literature?

Palestinian literature is going through a very exciting juncture. There are so many new voices coming out. It’s like a dam is breaking in terms of the urgency of the voices, the variety of them, the experimentality of it.

Palestinian cultural heritage binds people together – not just in terms of a sense of loss, but also an idea of the richnesses that they were capable of experiencing, the variety of social and intellectual experiences, which can form a way of being able to project into a better future. We have to really bear in mind [as artists] not just documenting the cruelty of the reality on the ground, but also saying we’re more than this. And that’s why the interior life and the relationships with people are so important to document in a meaningful way, and to convey to each other and to broader audiences.

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Protecting American freedoms

As Trump and his army of Christian nationalists trample on rights and freedoms in the US, we speak to Nick Fish, head of American Atheists, about the masses of people volunteering for the fight back.

"We are tracking almost 700 bills right now that impact church-state separation, and many of them are attacks on public education, trans people and abortion."

Meaning in the modern world

At times of instability, the big questions of life are brought into sharp relief. But in an increasingly secular world, some claim we've lost our sense of meaning and purpose.

Is 2025 a year of existential crisis, or is this idea being overblown by the prophets and pundits who benefit?

In our new "Voices" section, we bring together five diverse perspectives on the search for meaning in the modern world.

"The loudest voices warning of our existential vacuum are those who have something to sell – literally or metaphorically."

The joy and politics of play

Can art remind us of what we have in common? Ken Worpole explores two exhibitions that give us a glimpse of daily life around the world – and highlight how children build community through play, even as their right to do so is threatened.

"Throughout history, and in all cultures, children have gathered together, agreed rules, played and dispersed, leaving little evidence behind ... Yet while they last, games are a form of bewitchment, a way of temporarily forgetting the difficulties of life and escaping into another world."

Diaspora dialogue

We speak to writer Selma Dabbagh about how Palestine's literary scene is thriving, despite – or because of – the horrors of war.

"Palestinian literature is going through a very exciting juncture. There are so many new voices coming out. It’s like a dam is breaking in terms of the urgency of the voices, the variety of them, the experimentality of it."

The Summer 2025 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe or buy a copy here.

Also in the Spring 2025 issue of New Humanist:

• Journalist Ahmer Khan reports on Bangladesh as its democracy hits a bloody crossroad
• Legendary writer Michael Rosen explores the history and meaning of the word "ceasefire"
• Clinical psychologist Frank Tallis argues that therapy is failing to help us with the big questions
• Marianne Brown visits the Bristol estates generating their own energy
• Ralph Jones talks to Alex O'Connor about his journey from atheist YouTube star to praying for divine revelation
• Becca Warner meets the mushroom mappers as they unearth a hidden kingdom
• Greg Graffin, evolutionist and lead singer of pioneering band Bad Religion, makes the case that Darwin was punk
• Simon McCarthy-Jones analyses Elon Musk's misguided love for The Hitchhiker's Guide
• Jessica Furseth discovers what we lose when we're plugged in to constant entertainment
• Marcus Chown explains the latest efforts to uncover the shape of the Universe
• Samira Ahmed talks Lycra, Reagan and our new love for the 80s
• Marie Le Conte hails Lady Gaga, the weird sister of pop!
• Shaparak Khorsandi regales us with bonkers tales from the ski slopes
• Daniel Callcut explores the upside of pessimism

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

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

New Humanist, a quarterly magazine of culture, ideas, science and philosophy, is published by Humanists UK.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: A lot of people think they’re too smart to fall for advertising tricks, but I think it’s important to recognize that some techniques work on a person no matter how savvy they are. As …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Hey, remember “Adam Ruins Everything?” It was a show starring Adam Conover. Personally, I never watched it because I’m bigoted against this entire look–all of it. The hair, the smirk, the suit, I’m sorry, …

Ceasefire, 20th century: a temporary suspension of fighting, usually between two armies

One of the peculiarities of wars is that at some point they come to an end. Before a peace agreement is signed, there is usually a ceasefire. As you can see, it’s a compound noun, combining the two major sources of modern English – French and Old English – with “cease” coming from French (and before that, Latin) and “fire” from Old English. It’s a delight to see the roots of the language so symmetrically married in the one word.

Originally it was a command: “Cease fire!”, that is, “stop firing your guns”. The first written example of this comes from the Caledonian Mercury of 1844: “I was obliged to sound the ‘Halt’ and ‘Cease fire’.” The first written use of the term to mean an end to hostilities is in the Times on 12 November 1918: “The cease fire of yesterday must be universal and final.” As we know, that was the end of the “war to end all wars” – although it turned out not to be.

But “ceasefires” are often fragile, and do not necessarily announce the intended end of a conflict, unlike an armistice. Ceasefires are usually meant to be temporary but binding, in contrast to a truce or a cessation of hostilities – although these terms are often used interchangeably.

Of course, they are not possible if either or both sides will not stop. It seems clear that the Nazis (or Hitler in particular) would not have been prepared to agree to a ceasefire to bring an end to hostilities in Europe during the Second World War. Hitler’s position was no surrender to anyone, ever. Many millions of lives were lost in the process. Instead of a “ceasefire” there was an “armistice”, once the Nazi side had been thoroughly broken.

However, the claim that the other side would never agree to a ceasefire (or wouldn’t honour one even if they agreed to it) is all part of how political the word can be. In that sense, power play around the term can be a pretext for the continuation of war.

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

“Truth’s a menace, science is a public danger,” says Mustapha Mond, the “Controller” in Aldous Huxley’s iconic dystopian novel Brave New World. “That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches.”

If you want to constrain free and rational inquiry, at some point you have to go after the sciences. And that’s what seems to be happening in Trump’s America, from putting vaccine critic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr in charge of the country’s health policy to deleting datasets from government websites to mass layoffs at scientific agencies.

Meanwhile, staff at federal science agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have been scrambling to comply with directives that end federal funding for work involving “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion. Climate research is also being targeted.

While each agency has taken its own approach, most have purged their websites of certain terms, removed some academic papers and circulated lists of words that can get work deleted or sent for review.

The words displayed above, for example, would all get research projects flagged and possibly modified – in a bid to protect them from termination – at the National Science Foundation, which supports $9 billion worth of scientific research and education annually.

Most refer in some way to diversity and marginalised groups. It is telling, for example, that “women” and “female” are on the list, but not “man” or “male”. Others are ridiculously broad-brush – see “historically” and “systemic”, words that seem to target the identification of trends, although whether this would be enough to get research banned depends entirely on the trend being identified and whether it displeases the administration.

In the US, many scientists have been afraid to speak out publicly for fear of losing funding for their teams, or in some cases even their visas. And so others must step up. As the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities said in a statement: “The research ecosystem is global in nature, and what’s happening in the US threatens scientific endeavour everywhere.”

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last week I talked about a new study that showed that conservative Americans now distrust science so much that they even hate the fields of study that support their worldview. Today, I want to …

I have recently carried out some detective work into one of my favourite paranormal studies.

It all began with an article that I co-wrote for The Psychologist about how research into the paranormal is sometimes ahead of psychology. In the article, we describe a groundbreaking study into eyewitness testimony that was conducted in the late 1880s by a paranormal researcher and magician named S. J. Davey (1887).

This work involved inviting people to fake séances and then asking them to describe their experience. Davey showed that these accounts were often riddled with errors and so couldn’t be trusted. Modern-day researchers still cite this pioneering work (e.g., Tompkins, 2019) and it was the springboard for my own studies in the area (Wiseman et al., 1999, 2003).

Three years after conducting his study, Davey died from typhoid fever aged just 27. Despite the pioneering and influential nature of Davey’s work, surprisingly little is known about his tragically short life or appearance. I thought that that was a shame and so decided to find out more about Davey.

I started by searching several academic and magic databases but discovered nothing. However, Censuses from 1871 and 1881 proved more informative. His full name was Samuel John Davey, he was born in Bayswater in 1864, and his father was called Samuel Davey. His father published two books, one of which is a huge reference text for autograph collectors that runs to over 400 pages.

I managed to get hold of a copy and discovered that it contained an In Memoriam account of Samuel John Davey’s personality, interests, and life. Perhaps most important of all, it also had a wonderful woodcut of the man himself along with his signature.

I also discovered that Davey was buried in St John the Evangelist in Shirley. I contacted the church, and they kindly send me a photograph of his grave.

Researchers always stand on the shoulders of previous generations and I think it’s important that we celebrate those who conducted this work. Over one hundred years ago, Davey carried out a pioneering study that still inspires modern-day psychologists. Unfortunately, he had become lost to time. Now, we know more information about him and can finally put a face to the name.

I have written up the entire episode, with lots more information, in the latest volume of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If anyone has more details about Davey then please feel free to contact me!

My thanks to Caroline Watt, David Britland, Wendy Wall and Anne Goulden for their assistance.

References

Davey, S. J. (1887). The possibilities of malobservation, &c., from a practical point of view. JSPR, 36(3), 8-44.

Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The spectacle of illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. Thames & Hudson.

Wiseman, R., Jeffreys, C., Smith, M. & Nyman, A. (1999). The psychology of the seance, from experiment to drama. Skeptical Inquirer, 23(2), 30-32.

Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the seance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297.

Henry Blodget, the co-founder of Business Insider, recently made headlines because he used ChatGPT to create a digital assistant, made it a woman, had it generate a headshot, and then immediately sexually harassed it. And the most unbelievable part of all of this is that he POSTED ABOUT IT ON HIS SUBSTACK. He admitted it. …

People are often surprised that I spend so much time with Corry, my ex-husband’s second wife, and that I speak so fondly of her. I love the woman, so do my children, and she loves them. Obviously, she comes as a package with my ex-husband, so he always comes too when we hang out, but I enjoy our time together nonetheless.

Traditionally, women who have bonked the same man are not expected to be friends with one another – definitely not if marriage is involved. If the second wife is younger, the first is assumed to be bitter and jealous, as though all that had attracted the husband to this new woman was the elasticity of her skin. The “newer model” is then often accused of having “second wife syndrome”’; insecure and resentful that her beloved had built a whole life with someone else that she will never live up to, even though it all went tits up.

The expectation that we must hate each other has forced both Corry and me to defend each other many times over the years, when friends and acquaintances presumed that they can make disparaging remarks about one of us to the other. But I am not envious of her, and she has never tried to get my ex-husband to lure our children into the forest and leave them there with only a husk of bread to eat.

Before Corry, when my ex and I were still deep in the agony of divorce, he began seeing a woman who did have a more Grimms Fairytales approach to blended families. I suppose a romantic meal with a new beau is slightly marred when he notices his ex-wife has left him 20 messages alternating between screaming rants and sobbing contrition. But so what if we need to spend a little time fantasising about blasting the “other woman” into outer space, while we process our fear or hurt? Women in particular are shamed for feeling jealous. But the more we can talk about this emotion, the quicker it will pass.

Years ago, when I was a student, I was furiously jealous when a very pretty woman in my local pub flirted with my then boyfriend, who flirted back. At one point she was on his lap. After trying to act like I didn’t care for a while, I flounced home in tears. The next afternoon, the girl turned up at my door. I was taken aback. She had bags full of grocery shopping. “I was horrible last night, I’m a bit jealous of you and, I dunno, I was a cow. I’ve come to cook you lunch to say sorry,” she said. We spent a happy afternoon drinking wine, giggling and scoffing food straight from the pan.

Everything is fixable if you own how you feel. Sometimes you can admit you are a boyfriend-stealing fiend and be forgiven. Especially if you are bearing food and booze. I broke up with the boyfriend but remain friends with The Cow to this day.

So are Corry and I really unusual? Or do we only notice when women are hurt and not coping well with being pitted against each other? We are constantly given the message that other women are either friends or foes, either we trust each other with our lives or we freeze each other out. We are expected to define our relationship with each other, good or bad. It’s not the same for men. I can’t think of a time when a first and second husband have been splashed on the covers of magazines and newspapers inviting us to compare them and decide who is better.

The first time Corry, my ex and I all went out for a pub lunch with the children, she and I had an arm-wrestle to determine which of us was the best wife. We all laughed ourselves silly, putting aside any notion that we would ever be seriously competitive with each other. (That said, it’s important for me to tell you that I won the arm-wrestle. Fairly easily, if I am honest, which is possibly why I mentioned it at all.) I quite enjoy the kudos I get when people know that I do not wish to boot my ex-husband’s second wife into a lake of fire. I casually drop it into conversations: “Flat white, please, no sugar, and did you know my ex-husband’s second wife knitted me this shawl?”

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Well, it’s a day that ends in “Y” so I guess it’s time to talk about RFK, Jr. again! We’ve already gone over his history of being an anti-vaccine psycho, and if you know …

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

Here is the full description:

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

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

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]