I’ve got all these spiders getting to a size where fruit flies don’t cut it anymore, and unfortunately, my mealworm colony crashed, I tried buying live critters online but they’re expensive and half of them died en route thanks to the bitter cold, so I was panicking that this new generation of black widows might go hungry. This is not good. I was planning to start breeding in the next week or so, and hungry females are more likely to feed than to…ummm, mate.

Ice fishing season to the rescue, just in the nick of time! This time of year a popular bait is the lowly wax worm, so I was able to get a few dozen quite cheaply at the local bait shoppe.

Spiders love these things, but I can only get them during ice-fishing season. Fortunately, that lasts until April/May, so by then my mealworms should be back on track.

Admit it. You’re glued to your smartphone, outsourcing more of your brainpower to the machine. Literacy is plummeting, and universities are under attack. Are we all getting dumber? Or is society transforming, discovering new ways to be smart?

We asked five experts for their thoughts on the future of human intelligence.

Despite decades of research since the inception of the discipline known as artificial intelligence, it was November 2022 that marked the point at which people the world over began to pay attention. That moment – the push of a button that sent ChatGPT live and available for public use – has led to profound changes in how we access and process information. We are now living in the age of AI.

The headlines promise transformative powers: personalised education, tailored healthcare, seamless services, economic growth. But despite breathless proclamations from Silicon Valley that more funding will ensure the next big breakthrough, the tech is not delivering. There are marginal gains but no actual return on investments, and the large language models that drive these tools seem to be stalling. That doesn’t stop the hype, and it doesn’t stop an increasing social reliance on software that “hallucinates” – the term used when a large language model confidently asserts something that is untrue.

Generative AI hallucinations are a feature, not a bug. Large language models fabricate sources that don’t exist, provide information that is wrong, and return searches that veer wildly off course from what was requested. As users, we could factor this in, if we hadn’t been steered towards the idea of the computer as factual, correct and fair. Automation bias – our tendency to favour suggestions from machines and believe them to be objective – is rife.

AI is inherently biased. That’s unavoidable. The models that generate text and images for us are trained on human input: billions and billions of pages from sources that have been written by humans. But these systems aren’t built on the values that we possess. They don’t know what it is to be human. They have no cultural or social understanding beyond the patterns of data they can discern. In fact, despite their intended global use, AI tools predominantly generate outputs that are reflective of a very narrow social segment: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (or WEIRD, as it’s termed in social science research). That’s not a huge surprise when the technology is predominantly coming out of the US West Coast.

This gap – this mismatch between a system’s output and its users’ views – is known as the alignment problem. The big question is how to make AI systems behave in line with human values. Is it even possible to make a machine act in accordance with human norms? For starters, who defines what those norms are? Ethics aren’t universal: they are culturally and socially defined. Can we really come up with AI that represents us all?

In July 2025, the global humanist community passed The Luxembourg Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values at the general assembly of Humanists International. Such declarations are binding statements of organisational policy with a unanimous humanist voice on the world stage. This one was drafted by Humanists UK, and is built on 10 shared ethical principles for the development, deployment and regulation of AI systems. The core message of this humanist stance is that AI should serve humanity broadly rather than concentrate power among a few, and that decisions affecting people’s lives should remain under human control.

The principles of the declaration include democratic accountability and transparency in AI systems, protection from algorithmic harm and discrimination, fair compensation for creators whose work is used to train AI, and robust safeguards against misinformation. All of this emphasises that AI development must prioritise dignity, environmental responsibility and long-term human flourishing over pure technological advancement.

These are unsettled times. Right now, neither the UK nor the US have any specific regulation around AI in place. A quick glance at Silicon Valley shows they’re unlikely to face any type of governance any time soon, unless forced to by lawsuits or consumer power. It’s hard to escape the creep of AI – it’s being integrated into all the software we use, whether we want it or not – so now is the time to take a stand and use our voices to say that human lives come first.

I cannot emphasise enough the fact that liberal arts education is for everybody, not just for those who choose a humanities subject as their major. All students will be citizens, and all need to be equipped to participate in public debates with a concern for truth, training in critical argument, an understanding of history and a developed ability to imagine another person’s way of life. All students are also human beings who have an interest in understanding the meaning of their lives; literature, history, philosophy and the arts are central to that goal. Finally, business leaders seek employees who can think critically and use their imaginations; the rest can be done, and is increasingly done, by robots and AI chatbots.

Incorporating the liberal arts into systems that have long been established on a single-subject model is not easy. Liberal arts teaching, to be done well, must be done in small classes – or, at the very least, in classes with small discussion sections and a common lecture. By “small” I mean no more than 20 students. Those who favour the humanities must study how good teaching is done and how good teachers are trained, before they craft proposals, and they must be prepared to argue for spending the money it will take to do things well.

Success in this enterprise will be difficult, so those who care about it need to arm themselves for the battle. In the United States, both public and private institutions face increased political pressures. Tenured faculty still seem safe from actual firing, except where entire departments and programs are eliminated (as happened at West Virginia University), although they can be pressured into leaving if the entire institution changes its mission.

Such was the case with New College, a highly ranked liberal arts college in the Florida state system. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, decided to alter its mission very substantially through appointing prominent political allies to the Board of Trustees, who recruited student athletes and, while claiming to be adhering to a “classical” model of the liberal arts, essentially abandoned the freedom of research and teaching that is the core mission of the liberal arts. More than a third of the faculty left. That is an extreme case, but political pressures hostile to academic values are present across the country.

In today’s world we see three ominous developments that threaten freedom of thought and democratic self-government. First is the increasing polarisation of political factions and debate. People appear to be stuck in fixed ideological postures, unwilling and even unable to listen to one another and to have a constructive, cooperative dialogue. Closely linked to these changes is the slide toward authoritarianism.

A third ominous development is a multifaceted assault on truth, as people, succumbing to the lure of social media and disinformation of many kinds, attach themselves to outlandish conspiracy theories and fail to test claims for their evidentiary basis or arguments for logical validity and definitional clarity.

These pernicious tendencies seep into liberal arts education itself, of course. I find some of the rhetoric of current campus protests, on the part of both students and faculty, lacking in critical rigour and ignorant of history (though probably no more so than rhetoric during the Vietnam War, when I was a student).

I find it more difficult than it used to be to attract a politically diverse group of students to my classes, since I teach no required courses. My elective courses used to attract a highly diverse group of students, including both libertarians and religious conservatives, who now more often make their selections along ideological lines.

This is a great loss, because well practised – and the standards of humanities teaching I observe are typically high – a liberal arts education is a powerful antidote to all three bad tendencies, teaching people how to conduct a respectful dialogue with one another in a truly Socratic spirit and freeing them to take charge of their own minds, while stimulating them to understand what others think and feel.

In our frightening and frightened time we need liberal arts education more than ever, and if we don’t insist on its value we will all too easily lose it.

This is an edited extract from the new preface to Martha Nussbaum's book "Not for Profit: Why Democracies Need the Humanities", reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press

What’s one plus one? Before you answer too quickly (you’ll have thought of the answer automatically, no doubt) ask yourself what happens when you add one pile of sand to another. How many piles of sand do you have now? This is the kind of example the psychologist Ellen Langer likes to use to illustrate the value of conditional thinking, even when the answer appears obvious.

The psychological benefits of certainty are fairly easy to see. It creates a sense of safety, clarity, direction and relief even when a particular discovery is painful – like learning of a disappointing exam result, or the outcome of a job interview after waiting anxiously. Whether overcoming “analysis paralysis” to take a decision or the satisfaction that comes from a pet theory confirmed, we often demonstrate what the psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls a craving for “cognitive closure”. He says we seize on clear, simple answers and “freeze” them, by locking them in and ignoring contradictory evidence.

In this way, certainty limits our ability to notice things and thereby to learn. Langer says that if you are certain of the next thing I’m going to say you’ll stop listening. And it’s bigger than that now. We are going through tumultuous times and the need to be open-minded and provisional in our thinking is more and more vital if we are to adapt well. False certainty is often the bread and butter of autocrats and dictators.

Alison Gopnik, the philosopher and developmental psychologist, offers a helpful distinction, between spotlight and lantern-like consciousness. The former, which is typical of adults, is goal-oriented, focused noticing, motivated by a preoccupation, and it tends to ignore what falls outside of that area of attention. The latter is typical of young children who are, in her words, “explorers” rather than “exploiters”, and are truly open-minded. They are diffusely aware, and have more peripheral vision than adults.

What can we do to be more lantern and less spotlight in our noticings? One interesting answer comes from recent research into magic mushrooms, DMT and other psychedelic substances, which shows how the ego is dialled down from the spotlight mode into the more lantern-like mode. Simon Carhart-Harris, who has developed the REBUS model (relaxed beliefs under psychedelics), shows how these drugs loosen the grip of our rigid, higher-level prior assumptions. In this way, the recipients (often battling depression and other mental illness) achieve, as Gopnik sees it, a more child-like state, less stuck in the habitual ruts and patterns that adults can fall into. Meditation is often suggested as a way to achieve similar effects.

But before we settle into the thought that we simply need to be more lantern-like and less spotlight in our noticings, I need to complicate the picture a bit further. It would be weirdly certain to say, “We just need to be less certain”. Economists obsess about trade-offs and tensions and I think it is instructive to think about why. The spotlight and the lantern are in tension with each other, and to elevate the one inevitably trades off against the virtues of the other. Yes, spotlight noticing makes us prey to “inattentional blindness”, but we can’t just swing to the other pole and cling to that. While child-like wonder is a capacity worth cultivating, young children aren’t able to get anything done, and need a lot of looking after! Too much lantern invites opting out of having even a provisional opinion and can lead to passivity.

In my day job as a manager in a publishing company, I have recently hit on a bit of advice that I find helps in both directions, whether dialling down from the spotlight or dialling up from the lantern – and it takes us back in a way to Ellen Langer’s conditional thinking. The advice is, when invited to offer an opinion, to insert the word “currently” into the phrase “I think”. While we are in spotlight mode and need to be more provisional, to say “I currently think” invites possible revision in light of new evidence and argument that might emerge. But sometimes, people can be in a lantern-like state to such an extent they can’t venture an opinion at all. In this case the very same phrase “I currently think” can help move from an unclear ambiguous state to something more concrete, even if provisional.

It’s not even about a Goldilocks happy medium between the two. Rather than be too certain of the limits of certainty I’d advocate a capacity to handle trade-offs and tensions. I’d rather think of us needing a dimmer switch whereby we can move from one mode to another as needed. Yes, it may be true that adults use the spotlight too often, but that doesn’t mean we can live well without it. After all, we mustn’t be so open-minded that our brains fall out.

Organisations that plan to bring about radical change through AI must confront the challenge embedded in the metaphorical question, “How do you change the wheel on a moving car?” Few will be able simply to press pause on their daily operations while they conceive and execute root-and-branch upheaval.

But what they can do, to force the metaphor, is build and run new vehicles that embody and introduce innovative and eliminative technology – that is, technology that transforms organisations and even does away with much of their historical work. They can then run the old and the new in parallel, and, over time, transfer work from the outmoded to the newly established set-up.

Some leading professional firms – lawyers, accountants and consultants, for example – are now recognising what this will mean for them in the long run. To survive, the more enlightened firms have grasped the notion that they themselves will have to build the systems, mainly AI systems, that will replace their old ways of working. Dispute resolution, audit and tax planning, for example, will not be delivered indefinitely by flesh-and-blood experts. Massively capable systems will displace humans here and elsewhere.

Astute leaders can see that this self-disruption cannot be brought about from within. They need to develop systems and services with entirely different structures that are nimbler, that are heavily populated by technologists, that are managed and capitalised quite differently from traditional firms and that are focused on licensing products and solutions, rather than charging for human service in six-minute units.

This is not a gentle hand on the tiller, suggesting a mild alteration of course. Rather, it is systemic, foundational and radical change.

The same is true on a larger scale when you look at institutions such as court systems, universities and health services. Much is currently being said about the ways that AI will transform our traditional public bodies, but the prevailing mindset and planning remain steadfastly focused on automation and task substitution rather than innovation, elimination and radical change.

We need to be vision-based. Extrapolating from the remarkable technologies we have today and bearing in mind dramatic likely advances in the years ahead, we have to envision a very different world: in law, for example, one of AI-based dispute resolution and AI-enabled self-representation supported by systems that can help people to understand and enforce their entitlements for themselves; in education, rich virtual learning environments combining the insights of the finest of teachers and delivered through personalised learning that is customised for each student or scholar; and in medicine, AI-based diagnostics and treatment planning and AI-enabled self-care.

To imagine this new world, we need a different mindset. I’m reminded of a conference where I was asked, “What is the future of neurosurgeons?” I concluded that they had asked me the wrong question. To ask any “What is the future of X?” type of question, it is assumed that X has a future. I don’t say this facetiously. It’s a leading question. It’s a legacy-based inquiry, insisting that X should figure in the response. If you inquire about the future of physicians, surgeons, teachers, professors, judges and lawyers, for example, you are generally expecting that a modernised and automated version of the people in these professions will be central to the response.

But, as I argued at the event, the future of healthcare lies not in an AI version of what we have today but in entirely new approaches, such as preventative medicine and non-invasive therapy. This led me to conclude that a better question would have been “How in the future will we solve the problems to which neurosurgeons are our current best answer?”

When we are thinking in an open-minded way about the long-term future of our justice, education and health services, we should not be starting with today’s arrangements. We should be asking ourselves – assuming the likely capabilities of our machines – how in the future we might tackle the problems to which these institutions and people are our current best answer. This is the heart of vision-based thinking. Not reversing into the future, constrained and contained by how we do things today, but inspired and empowered by the outcomes we can expect from emerging AI techniques and technologies.

Only once we have the vision, should we ask how we get there from here. We will not reach there by improving the current vehicles as they trundle along. We will need to build new vehicles for the development and delivery of the systems, services and visions to which we aspire.

This is an edited extract from Richard Susskind's book "How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed" (Oxford University Press)

Is technology making us smarter or dumber? While outsourcing some of our memory may be obviously beneficial (like storing contact numbers in our phones, for example), some worry that replacing too many of our cognitive functions may be harmful in the long-term.

The rise of AI, and particularly large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, adds yet another dimension to the debate. In early 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab published a study comparing brain activity in three groups of participants while they wrote essays, which showed that “LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity”, “struggled to accurately quote their own work” and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels” up to four months later, compared to those who used a search engine and the “brain-only” group.

The results, according to the authors, “raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning”. They add to a growing body of evidence that using AI may be eroding our creativity, memory and critical thinking abilities, and to an ever-increasing number of news stories asserting that “AI is making us dumb”.

And what about our increasing reliance on global navigation satellite systems? “Some studies have reported worse navigation performance in participants that report more reliance on GPS,” says neuroscientist professor Hugo Spiers, who studies spatial navigation at University College London.

Spiers was involved in a series of well-known brain scanning studies of London’s cabbies, who spend up to four years poring over maps and riding mopeds around the city to acquire “the knowledge” of the city’s streets. Those that successfully complete this streetology PhD exhibit significant enlargement of a deep brain structure called the hippocampus, which is crucial for spatial memory and navigation, compared to non-cabbies and those who drop out of the training.

These studies are a remarkable demonstration of neuroplasticity, which refers to the various ways in which the brain can alter its structure and function in response to experience. They further highlight an aspect of neuroplasticity referred to as the “use it or lose it” principle, according to which learning can stimulate the growth of new synaptic connections, whereas rarely used connections are eliminated.

The implications for the rest of us are clear. As we increasingly rely on our phones to navigate our way through life, using sat nav, Google Maps and other travel apps, we may be at risk of losing key skills.

We might think this is a fair trade-off, if the machines can do so much better. To return to the cabbie example, according to one of Spiers’ latest studies, cab drivers today still outperform sat nav devices, with flexible route-planning strategies, which prioritise the most difficult sections of the journey and fill in the rest around these points. However, AI-based navigational technologies may soon catch up, by learning from these drivers and the way they plot their routes.

But it isn’t just a question of comparing the skills and performance of humans and machines. We humans get added benefits from developing and improving our mental skills. Honing skills such as map-reading – or learning to speak a foreign language or playing a musical instrument – may help to protect the brain against the ravages of ageing. “I’d like to see more engagement in navigation as I do suspect it may help avoid Alzheimer’s Disease and improve [cognitive] capacity,” says Spiers. “It also makes people more resilient to shocks, and more connected to the world around them.”

The long-term effects of technology will likely depend on exactly how, and how much, an individual uses it. Using AI for creative pursuits such as essay-writing may hinder certain cognitive functions, but playing video games can improve hand-eye coordination, as well as problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Rather than being detrimental, technology may instead augment and change the ways in which we engage with our biological cognitive abilities. We may discover that some of these abilities are becoming weaker, as we use them less, while others develop or strengthen. And that is the joy of neuroplasticity.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

The colony has expanded just a little bit: all new, roomier containers for the largest of the black widows.

The smaller ones still have some growin’ to do in the incubator, but these I think are just about ripe for breeding.

Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
…
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.

Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!

Worst president ever.

Mr. President, thank you. Um, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is saying that he’s actually proud to have the largest Somali community in the country. And his police chief,
he’s a fool.
Well, his police chief is also saying,
I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian. Look at their nation. Look how bad their nation is. It’s not even a nation. It’s just a people walking around killing each other. Look, uh, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. [Not true]It’s a fraud. She tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because, you know, just happened. She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.[Why? Because she’s black and a member of the opposition party?] And I’m sure people are looking at that. And she should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, man, they have destroyed Minnesota.[Cool. I’m looking out my window at the snow coming down. Doesn’t seem to be destroyed] Okay, Minnesota, you have an incompetent governor. You have a crooked governor. He’s crooked as hell, but he’s incompetent. [no evidence given]
Uh Waltz is he’s should be ashamed. That beautiful land, that beautiful state, it’s a hell hole right now. [I don’t know about that. I kind of like it here] And the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain. [Isn’t that what Donald is doing here?] You have her. She’s always talking about the Constitution provides me with uh go back to your own country and figure out your constitution. [She’s an American citizen, she is talking about her constitution. Donald just doesn’t like the American constitution] All she does is complain about this country and without this country she would not be in very good shape. She probably wouldn’t be alive right now. So Somalia is considered by many [When a student hands in an essay with this kind of vague handwaving and evidence free claim, I fail them] to be the worst country on earth. I don’t know. I’ve I haven’t been there. I won’t be there anytime soon. I hope. But uh what Somalia what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota is is not even believable. It’s not even believable. [Correct. What the president says about Minnesota is not believable] And a lot of it starts with the governor. A lot of it starts with Barack Hussein and Obama because that’s when people started coming in. And you have to have people come in that are going to love our country, cherish our country. They want to kiss our country good night. They talk about our country. We want them to pray for our country. This is not the people living in Minnesota. And she’s a disaster. She should not be and her friends shouldn’t be allowed. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people. Okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people because they don’t represent the interests of our country. [She represents my interests well. Trump? Not so much] Anybody else? There you are.

That’s just appalling. He just rambles on lying, and dumbass people accept it.

Are the Washington press corps going to just stand there and take it? Trump needs to be deposed and leave office immediately.

No major country has suffered a greater reversal of speech rights than the United States over the past year. The federal government is using economic coercion and weaponising the legal system to restrict viewpoints in universities, law firms, museums, media and corporations. Critics of the administration are targets of federal investigation. Reactionary activists are banning books from public libraries. So the recent report from the US State Department criticising the UK for “restrictions on freedom of expression” looks, at first glance, like an exercise in hypocrisy and projection.

In fact it’s much worse than that. The Trump administration is exporting its culture wars, and it is using the rhetoric of “free speech” to extend to other countries the very same assault on democracy that is taking place within the United States.

In early 2025, well before the release of the new “report”, Vice President JD Vance made the agenda transparent. He attacked the UK for allegedly suppressing “freedom of speech” and putting the “basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs”. He went on to meet leaders with connections to Reform UK, after having given a shout-out to the hard-right AfD in Germany.

It is important to understand that when Vance and the apparatchiks at the Trump State Department say “free speech” they aren’t referring to a universal right. They are concerned only with the rights of religious, nationalist and racist conservatives. And they are not interested in the rights of conservatives so much as their special privileges. They believe that conservatives are uniquely entitled to have their views platformed – and then imposed – at the expense of the rights of other people.

Exporting US strategies to the UK

Reproductive rights is a key battleground. In their report on alleged restrictions on free speech in the UK, the loyalists at the State Department followed JD Vance in offering the example of anti-abortion activists arrested merely for “praying”. In fact, they are typically referring to situations in which conservative activists stage intentional violations of the law that protects women from harassment as they seek reproductive healthcare – and then claim that they are victims of the suppression of speech.

This dynamic started well before the current Trump administration. In the aftermath of the pandemic, a new wave of America-based activism took aim at the UK. I’ve been tracking these developments, including attending events aimed at training anti-abortion activists.

Back in 2023, I attended ReThink Abortion Day, a day-long conference that took place at a Catholic seminary in Birmingham. I discovered a concerted effort to export US strategies into the UK. In a wood-panelled conference room, 50 or 60 participants settled into their seats to take in the presentations. Much of the training was focused on how to mount demonstrations outside women’s health centres – long a feature of abortion politics in the United States.

The presenters included Ben Thatcher, then co-director of the UK satellite of the US-based March for Life – the organisation behind the annual anti-abortion demonstration that draws tens of thousands of participants to Washington, DC. Another speaker, Dave Brennan, is the director of Brephos, which claims to help “churches respond to abortion” and is a British spinoff of the US-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR). Apart from the Catholic groups co-hosting the event, the key speakers were all working with UK affiliates of US-based organisations, representing a broader trend of growing connections between the UK and America’s Christian nationalist movement.

Leading the discussion on demonstrations and anti-abortion messaging were representatives of 40 Days for Life UK, an affiliate of the US-based organisation. Founded in 2004 in Bryan, Texas – a small city that anti-abortion activists have described as “the most anti-choice place in the nation” – 40 Days for Life specialises in training and organising protests in front of abortion clinics and other providers. The stated aim is to dissuade women from going through with an abortion, though the usual effect is simply to bully and shame them for doing so.

40 Days for Life claims to operate in more than a thousand cities in 63 countries. The UK branch kicked off with campaigns in Northern Ireland in 2009 and now boasts at least 15 chapters across the United Kingdom.

Targeting reproductive rights

At the anti-abortion recruitment gatherings that I have attended in the US, there is invariably the moment when speakers treat the audience to a slideshow involving gory images of aborted foetuses. Birmingham did not disappoint. Taking the podium in a navy sweater and jeans and cheery attitude, Dave Brennan of the UK branch of CBR delivered the goods. CBR is known in the US for its use of such graphic images, which are often enlarged and displayed as placards and billboards near playgrounds, schools and other places where children congregate.

But it’s not just abortion that they’re coming after. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, as its name might suggest, has a much broader and more radical agenda. In line with its sister organisation, Brennan’s UK affiliate opposes the most effective forms of contraception, including birth control pills and mini pills, implants, IUDs and vaginal rings. Any method that prevents a united sperm and egg from implanting into the vaginal wall, Brennan’s group maintains, would “end human life”. We must acknowledge, he told the gathering, that “our enemy is more powerful than we are, factually speaking, and he” – that is, Satan –“is determined”. He sketched a theology according to which saving diploid zygotes, blastocysts and foetuses is the greatest moral issue of our time.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life UK and the Birmingham chapter of 40 Days for Life, introduced a handout on the “ABC of Abortion”, which amounted to a series of rebuttals of counter-arguments one is likely to hear while harassing patients at health centres. “We need to take back control,” Vaughan-Spruce said, her voice animated with a can-do lilt. “We want them to acknowledge it’s a baby, it’s a human, it’s a child.” She nodded and smiled. “We’re not trying to bring our religious values in at this point. We’re not talking about anything political. We’re just talking about the scientific.”

There was a detailed discussion of “rights” – though, again, it was all about the rights of abortion opponents. In December 2022, police charged Vaughan-Spruce with four counts of breaching an exclusion zone, or buffer zone, at a maternal healthcare centre – these zones are intended to protect patients from interference while accessing clinics. Vaughan-Spruce promptly appeared in a YouTube video in which, wearing a pastel coat, her hair neatly pinned, she softly complained that she had been indicted for nothing more than “silently praying in my head”.

Her case was taken up by the UK branch of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the US-headquartered right-wing legal advocacy juggernaut. In a well-coordinated PR campaign, conservative Christian media outlets joined Vaughan-Spruce in characterising her alleged crime as “standing silently near an abortion clinic” or a “silent prayer crime”. The incident received widespread media coverage in Britain, and the charges were soon dropped. None of the mainstream media outlets covering the story identified Vaughan-Spruce as a leader of 40 Days for Life UK. Several months later she got herself rearrested and repeated the same talking points. (The police later released her without charges.)

When I encountered her, several months later, she seemed defiant, alleging that anti-abortion demonstrations are all about “free speech”. The praying was presumably never silent after all.

'A feigned interest in free speech'

Despite these efforts, the UK remains far behind the United States in the vigour of its culture war over women’s healthcare. Indeed, the growing anti-abortion activity around reproductive health facilities in the UK has sparked a backlash that appears to be limiting the movement’s policy gains for now. In late 2022, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that setting up buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland did not “disproportionately interfere” with protesters’ rights. This ruling from the country’s highest court also paved the way for legislation in Scotland, England and Wales. The buffer zones, in force in England from October 2024, are recognised as a means of protecting women from harassment, and therefore protecting their right to healthcare.

Even so, ritualised harassment and humiliation of women seeking medical care is hardly the only American contribution to the budding culture war over reproductive services in the UK. American organisations are also contributing to the establishment of anti-abortion counselling centres. Billed as “crisis pregnancy centres”, these organisations attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions, often by giving misleading or unethical advice.

It’s important to understand that the motivation behind the feigned interest in free speech is to promote a narrative of grievance. Conservative Christians in the US have convinced themselves that they and they alone are the real victims of discrimination in modern society. The investment in the UK is part of a broader global strategy, with representatives of America’s religious right pushing their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is crucial to this drive. Greg Scott, vice-president of communications for ADF, confirmed to me that the organisation’s budget exceeded $102 million in the fiscal year 2021-2022. Between 2015 and 2020, according to ADF’s publicly-available tax data, overseas expenditures rose from $3 million to almost $10 million. [According to a recent article in The New York Times, since then it has quadrupled the money it sends to its British arm to more than $1 million.]

“We are dedicated to the promotion of fundamental freedoms for all, and ADF International’s efforts are focused on areas where human rights are under threat,” ADF International’s legal communications director, Elyssa Koren, told me.

But protecting human rights has a particular meaning, according to this mindset. It not only involves taking on defendants like Vaughan-Spruce but also, for example, defending anti-sodomy laws around the world – including a law in Belize that, before it was overturned, made same-sex intimacy punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment.

JD Vance's 'British Sherpa'

In this context, the protection of “human rights” and “free speech” is part of an effort to build a global political movement targeting liberal democracy. These supposed concerns are intended to mobilise a nationalist base to support far-right political parties and politicians who wish to follow the model of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has replaced the country’s democracy with a cronyistic, demagogic oligarchy.

This is the reality detailed in an important report from the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) titled “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism is Reclaiming Power”, published in June. The report, the third in a series, follows the money in detail as it moves from private wealth and public sources into reactionary groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies. It covers the impact in 27 European countries as well as funding sources in Europe, Russia and the US. Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, $1.18 billion flowed into frontline groups in the effort to elevate conservative religion in culture and governance in the UK – an increase from the 2009 to 2018 period, when the amount was just $81.3 million.

But “We can’t just blame Americans,” in the words of Neil Datta, founder and executive director of the EPF and the author of the report. “A lot of money is coming from European sources.”

In the UK, a figure around whom this movement towards religious nationalism is coalescing is James Orr, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University, and now a senior advisor to Nigel Farage. Running through much of Orr’s social media presence is a persecution narrative – specifically, persecution of conservative Christians at the hands of a malignant liberal elite. Orr, whom JD Vance reportedly once called his “British Sherpa”, defended Vance’s fatuous claims about free speech losses in the UK as “brilliant”. Like Vance, Orr has boosted the profile of the nativist, anti-democratic Hungarian regime – a regime that suppresses speech as a matter of routine.

Orr attended last summer’s Matthias Corvinas Collegium (MCC) festival in northern Hungary, where he accused the UK of adopting a “naïve” and “dangerous” approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also described politicians sympathetic with the struggle for Ukraine’s independence as having a “peculiar psychological condition” called “Ukraine brain”, and instead praised Hungary’s approach, in which it has systematically blocked sanctions of Russian oligarchs and delayed EU military aid packages.

The MCC is a private college and educational network with close ties to Orbán, whose events draw together hard-right thinkers from across the world. These kinds of networks help the movement share ideas and strategies.

The victims of this global political movement will by no means be limited to women seeking reproductive care or same-sex couples who wish to join together in marriage. Religious nationalist countries are often “theocratic” in a certain fake sense – that is, they are regimes that endorse a particular religion and attempt to impose that religion and its values on society. But they are best described as cronyistic kleptocracies with strong militaristic features and absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.

One of the most insidious things about the current iteration of authoritarianism is that it has coopted and perverted the language of liberal democracy. When it speaks about individual rights, it is really just pushing for ever greater power over individuals. When it speaks about “speech rights”, it aims to suppress those with whom it disagrees. Many in the UK and Europe might not be aware of what’s coming at them from America. If they wish to resist the slide into authoritarianism, they would do well to understand it better.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

When a powerful earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan in August, 30-year-old Shakeeba survived – but most of her family did not. In the remote, mountainous Nurgal district of Kunar province, she described how the terrifying quake killed 13 of her family members, including her three children. Her husband is still missing; she doesn’t know whether he is dead or alive.

Shakeeba was rescued the next morning, after spending the night trapped beneath the debris of her house. The danger she faced was compounded by the fact that she was pregnant and suffering from severe bleeding. “Under the debris, I could hear my kids screaming till the morning,” she said, her voice trembling. “When their cries stopped, I realised that they had passed away. Now I can’t sleep at night because the sounds of my children are still in my mind.”

Several provinces in eastern Afghanistan were affected by the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that left more than 2,200 people dead and thousands more injured. Among those who survived, many of their homes were destroyed or seriously damaged, leaving them with nowhere to live. The United Nations says half a million people were affected. Hilly and remote areas were hit particularly hard, as landslides and damaged roads left some villages unreachable. This significantly hindered rescue and relief efforts and made it extremely difficult for emergency responders to reach those in need with supplies.

The earthquake received news coverage around the world. But the particularly devastating impact on women received less attention. The Taliban governs Afghanistan, having returned to power when US-led forces withdrew in 2021 after two decades of military presence. When the earthquake hit, the Taliban government was overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. But their policies, based on their interpretation of religious law, also meant that women caught up in the humanitarian disaster were in many cases abandoned – left without support or medical care to a disproportionate degree.

That’s because severe restrictions on women’s education have led to a shortage of female medics, as well as female rescuers and aid workers – particularly in the remote areas that were worst affected by the earthquake. Women who were already qualified as medics before the Taliban’s return to power are also subject to restrictions on their work. On top of that, the Taliban’s “no-touch” rule prohibits women from having skin contact with unrelated males. In many cases, this prevented male rescuers, doctors and health workers from physically assisting women – even in order to save their lives or the lives of their babies.

When Shakeeba was found underneath the rubble, there were no female doctors to help her. As soon as the male rescuers saw that she was pregnant, and badly injured, they hurried her to a nearby helicopter and took her to the Nangrahar regional hospital. There, she was treated by female doctors who gave her a blood transfusion. But she has been told that because of the complications from her injuries, the chance of her baby surviving the pregnancy is lower.

Shakeeba survived. Other pregnant women did not. When the earthquake hit, she was entertaining three guests at her home. They were all also pregnant, and she says that they died because of the lack of healthcare. “I believe that many women would have been saved if there had been female doctors and [proper healthcare] accessible on time,” she told me. Shakeeba herself is experiencing severe emotional stress, according to the medical staff looking after her, and she frequently breaks down in tears. She remains in hospital.

Dwindling numbers of female medics

The earthquake has drawn attention to the massive challenges that female doctors confront when attempting to treat women in traditional and rural areas in Afghanistan. “The biggest challenge is that the number of patients is quite large, but female healthcare professionals, [as well as] medical supplies, medicines, and equipment are very limited,” says Dr Nadia Ghazal, a female doctor working as part of the rescue effort in Dewagal and the remote Mazar Valley of Kunar. She says there are about 20 female health workers operating in these two areas, but only half of them are qualified medical professionals – in most cases, either nurses or partially qualified doctors who have only been able to complete part of their studies. Across the earthquake-affected area of Afghanistan, roughly 90 per cent of medical staff are male, according to an estimate from Dr Mukta Sharma, deputy representative of the World Health Organization’s country office.

The burden on the small number of female doctors in these areas is resulting in physical and mental burnout, said Ghazal. “Sometimes there are so many patients that I am unable to see them all at once. For women with internal bleeding, complex fractures or pregnancy-related crises, this wait may be deadly.”

The most urgent needs for women following the earthquake involve the treatment of injuries, including fractures and internal bleeding. But another significant issue is maternal and child health, since expectant mothers need postnatal care, safe delivery facilities and timely examinations. A UN report published in September found that 11,600 pregnant women required immediate assistance in the wake of the earthquake. And many women, like Shakeeba, are now experiencing psychological issues as a result of having lost loved ones, and having undergone severe trauma.

Even without the Taliban’s discriminatory approach, treating these women would have been a challenge. The earthquake devastated a large number of healthcare facilities and roadways. But the government’s policies are worsening the catastrophe. After the earthquake hit, the World Health Organization urged the Taliban to remove restrictions on female aid workers, so they could travel without male guardians and assist women who are having difficulty accessing care. Aid from outside Afghanistan was also hampered, as there are also restrictions on women working with the UN. But the restrictions weren’t lifted, nor was the “no touch” rule. The rule is deeply embedded in the Taliban’s policies because it is based on an interpretation of sharia law, where men are forbidden from touching women who aren’t part of their family, even in life-and-death situations.

“This restriction, combined with the Taliban’s strict ban on gender mixing, has directly resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many women who could have been saved,” said Habib Khan Totakhil, a journalist and researcher formerly based in Kabul. “According to people interviewed in affected areas, some women had very basic [or easy to treat] medical needs, but because of the lack of female medical workers, they lost their lives.”

Silencing criticism

The earthquake shone a light on the extent of preventable suffering under the Taliban’s gender restrictions. The scale of the problem was confirmed by former Afghan parliamentarian Mariam Solaimankhil. She left Afghanistan in 2021 after the Taliban takeover but is in touch with women in need of support through activist networks. “A woman in Zabul had a miscarriage recently,” in the aftermath of the earthquake, she told me. “She has nowhere to go and is in pain. Terrified to even share her story at home, she shared it with me in terror. We are currently working to bring her to India for treatment after I got in touch with her family.” India is one of the few nearby countries that is still offering medical and humanitarian visas for Afghans.

This is just one case of neglect among countless others, said Solaimankhil, including survivors of sexual assault who have been left without care, women dealing with heart issues and pregnancy concerns, and thousands of women dealing with psychological trauma, all of whom are silenced by the Taliban. Women who speak out risk beatings, imprisonment, public flogging or forced disappearance. In some provinces, women have been dragged from their homes for posting on social media or for participating in peaceful protests. Families are pressured to silence women out of fear of collective punishment.

But the earthquake has shown that the Taliban can no longer avoid addressing the issue of women’s healthcare, said Ghazal. Untreated illness may end up as chronic syndromes, and neglected injuries may cause lasting disability. “Investing immediately in the education and training of female physicians and healthcare professionals is the only way to solve the problem. To encourage girls to serve in remote and disaster-affected areas, safe working conditions and opportunities for medical studies must be established,” she said.

But for the shortage of female medical professionals to be addressed, the Taliban would have to change its gender exclusion policies. Since they returned to power in August 2021, women’s rights have been drastically restricted, and they have been largely shut out from public life. Their freedom of movement and employment has also been severely limited.

The ban on women’s education was supposed to be temporary. When the Taliban returned to power, they assured the world that they would be setting up a gender-segregated system, where women would receive their own specialised education, taught exclusively by women. The approach was justified on the grounds of a rigid interpretation of Islamic law requiring “suitable environments” for women’s education.

But no deadline was set for when this women’s education system would begin operating. A women’s rights activist who asked not to be named said: “The Taliban claim that, as a Muslim country, they will create Islamic-based systems and educate women. But they don’t intend to do so. They have no policies to back up their claim, and it’s been almost five years; if they were sincere, they would have done it by now.”

No access to education

According to data shared by former Ministry of Education spokeswoman Najeeba Arian, there were 3.7 million girls enrolled in schools prior to the Taliban’s return, making up 40 per cent of pupils. There were also 36,500 female students at public universities, accounting for 21 per cent. But all of these women and girls have had to drop out of education – and every year, thousands more girls are denied a chance to even begin to receive schooling.

As a result of the limitations, no women have graduated from medical school since the Taliban returned to power. The pipeline of new professionals has been destroyed. And many of the female doctors and nurses who had already qualified left the country when the Taliban returned, since they were unable or unwilling to work under the restrictions. Those who stayed, like Ghazal, will not be practising for ever, and no one will take the place of today’s exhausted professionals when they retire. “Most of the women doctors who were already practising have left Afghanistan, because it is nearly impossible to work under Taliban rule,” said Totakhil. “With no new female graduates, this is creating a healthcare disaster for Afghan women that will only worsen as the population grows.”

If the education ban had not been in place, women who were already at university when the Taliban returned – including some who had nearly reached graduation – would have been working in essential sectors by now, giving their communities much-needed support. “In the next five to 10 years, there will be no women in any profession if the Taliban sticks to the same policies,” Arian told me. “The humanitarian crisis will likely worsen further, forcing people to look for assistance from neighbouring countries even for their most basic requirements”.

Afghan women and activists continue their efforts to educate girls online or in secret classes, but it is difficult and dangerous. In September, a female teacher was detained in Herat by agents from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for secretly teaching scientific subjects to girls. In January 2025, the Taliban sentenced six teachers in Daikundi for teaching computer skills and English to women. There have been countless other cases where activists who were working covertly to educate women have been arrested by the Taliban. Meanwhile, women who had been pursuing their own education online were hampered by an internet shutdown in September, which the Taliban said was necessary to prevent “immorality”, and there are concerns that internet connectivity could be lost again.

Arian draws attention to the government’s double standards, pointing out that women are permitted to attend madrasas for religious education. “Why can’t women attend schools with the same rules and attire as madrasas?” she asked, suggesting this raises questions about the true motivations behind the ban on women’s education.

Disaster looms

But if women cannot work in or access healthcare, Solaimankhil pointed out, it will affect the nation as a whole. “This is more than just a women’s issue; it will collapse Afghan society. Without female healthcare professionals, maternal and infant mortality rates, already among the highest globally, will increase even further.” Education, she added, helps mothers raise children who are healthier and more literate, while keeping women out of the workforce will adversely impact Afghanistan’s economy. “When half the population is illiterate, poverty grows, child marriages increase and preventable deaths become common.”

Numerous activists and politicians have voiced their disappointment with the international community for the lack of tangible action. They are calling for the Taliban to be held responsible for crimes against humanity, and for their systematic effort to exclude Afghan women from public life. Some activists are calling on global funders to find ways to get around Taliban systems and permissions and instead ensure that funding is provided directly to Afghan women, doctors and educators. “This is gender apartheid,” Solaimankhil said. “It is a systematic campaign to remove Afghan women from education, healthcare and society at large.”

Meanwhile, for those still in Afghanistan, the devastating impact of the earthquake has intensified feelings of anger and defiance that have been boiling under the surface for nearly five years. “We need to come together,” said the women’s rights activist. “We shouldn’t permit the Taliban to use religion to deny us our fundamental rights.”

Research for this article was supported by a reporter within Afghanistan who has chosen to remain anonymous for security reasons.

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This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: There are two memes currently fighting it out in my head as I think of how to introduce this video’s topic: one is “the Simpsons predict the future.” Because the Simpsons has now been …

It is one of the great markers of English achievement and recognition: having an official English Heritage or (outside London) Historic England blue plaque unveiled to your memory on a building where you once lived or worked. A key consideration is having contributed to the country’s happiness. Some of those honoured are obvious – revered writers and thinkers such as Jane Austen and Sir Isaac Newton. A person must have been dead for at least 20 years, to ensure the plaque is not just about passing fame. And as time goes by, the selection reveals the changing values of the nation.

And so it was that outside 31 Clarendon Gardens, in the quiet London neighbourhood of Maida Vale, on a golden autumn afternoon, a crowd recently gathered to celebrate a man once derided by mainstream society as a decadent and attention-seeking dandy. The rock star Marc Bolan, who was killed in a car crash in 1977, shortly before his 30th birthday, had lived in a first-floor flat in this elegant Georgian town house from 1970 to 1972. It was a short but crucial period, during which he made some of his most famous records with his band T. Rex.

Most of those attending the unveiling were grey-haired now; many had come in velvet and glittery outfits. Two women in their sixties had travelled down from Liverpool; they showed me their cherished photo with Bolan, taken on that very doorstep. He was a distinctive sight in those days, driving around town in his white Rolls-Royce.

Any member of the public can make a nomination and Martin Barden, a fan since his teenage years, had chosen Bolan. As he read his speech, I could see the young Martin in the suited, elegant arts consultant. “Marc was the first technicolour rock god,” he told the crowd. “His Alkasura threads, corkscrew curls, glitter-brushed cheeks, his posing and pouting, combined with those distinctive guitar chops and mystical lyrics, were an irresistible seductive brew.”

Alongside dignitaries from English Heritage, speeches came from two smiling white-haired gentlemen, who turned out to be members of the punk rock band The Damned. Rat Scabies, as he’s still called, recounted how Bolan invited the band to join his T. Rex tour in 1977 after they were fired from the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy tour (how do you get fired from an anarchy tour, I wondered?). At a time when many older rock stars feared or sneered at punk, Bolan, Scabies happily recalled, covered up his equipment with plastic sheeting to protect it from “gobbing” (punks liked to spit). I loved the insight into an older pop “uncle” quietly finding a way to get along with the kids.

Rick Wakeman – keyboard player extraordinaire – welled up as he recounted Bolan asking him to play the glissandos on the hit track “Get It On”. He knew Wakeman needed the £9 fee to pay his rent. In the crowd I recognised Richard Young, a veteran British celebrity photographer, himself wiping away a tear at times. What had brought him to the unveiling? “We were best friends at school,” he explained, smiling. “And we both got expelled on the same day. For truancy.”

T. Rex songs were played and at last the speeches were done. Wakeman tugged a rope, and a little curtain was pulled aside to reveal the elegantly-lettered blue plaque on the wall, as we all applauded: Marc Bolan (Mark Feld) 1947-1977 Songwriter and Musician lived here.

The name in brackets was a poignant reminder of his family’s Jewish heritage. I marvelled at how time had turned a cultural disruptor into a cherished national treasure. A 20th-century boy – not just loved by his fans, but respected for his artistry at last by the “great and the good” who sit on blue plaque panels. Because, to misquote fellow blue plaquer Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Marc Bolan made Britain a richer nation in the way that matters most. By contributing to the sum of human happiness.

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This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: The other day I happened upon a science news headline I found very interesting: We’re evolving too slowly for the world we’ve built, according to science, published November 19th for New Atlas. I found …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I don’t have children. Human children, that is. I do not want human children, and at this age, I will certainly never give birth to a human child. Because of this, I do not …

In an era defined by “fake news”, public trust in institutions is increasingly under threat, along with our ability to discern fact from fiction. In the UK, 94 per cent of people say they have encountered misinformation online, while only 3 per cent have taken a media literacy course, to help them spot falsehoods and develop critical thinking.

In the European Media Literacy Index 2023, the UK ranked at number 13, below many of our neighbours. The country that topped the list was Finland – emerging as a global leader in countering “fake news”, including misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (misinformation that is spread with the intention to deceive). This small Nordic country is making strides to equip its citizens with the tools to navigate an increasingly complex information landscape. I set out to discover what Britain could learn from Finland’s success.

The Finns are ahead of the curve in large part due to their proximity to a country known for its disinformation campaigns. Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917, and is on the front lines of an intensifying online information war. Many of Russia’s campaigns – often amplified by far-right, nationalist and so-called “alternative” Finnish news outlets and social media accounts – aim to undermine the EU, stir controversy over immigration and shape the debate around Finland’s Nato membership. In response, Finland treats resistance to disinformation almost as a form of civil defence: an integral part of its broader security strategy.

In 2014, before the European Parliament election, the Finnish government launched anti-fake news initiatives aimed at politicians and journalists, and established the fact-checking and digital literacy service Faktabaari (“Fact Bar”), run by a volunteer staff of journalists and researchers. More recently, Finnish NGOs have begun to run programmes for vulnerable groups, such as senior citizens and newly-arrived immigrants, to help them recognise disinformation.

But perhaps most importantly, Finland has privileged early intervention, through focusing on its schools. Media education in Finland begins as early as primary school, with media and science literacy integrated into the curriculum. Students learn how to spot deception across subjects: in maths, they see how statistics can be manipulated; in art, they explore how images can convey misleading messages; in history, they study famous propaganda campaigns; and in Finnish, they examine the many ways in which words can be used to confuse or mislead. Training in scepticism and the development of critical thinking skills are not seen as purely academic matters, but as essential to daily life.

This is in sharp contrast to the UK’s approach, where access to science and media literacy varies across the country – and between individual schools – creating an uneven patchwork. England’s school curriculum includes only minimal training in scientific method and scepticism, while even the once mandatory media studies component within English has weakened in recent years. Scotland’s focus has largely been on digital literacy, rather than media literacy, with the “technologies” strand of its curriculum asking pupils to think critically about how technology shapes society.

Wales has taken a more holistic, integrated approach, based around three mandatory cross-curricular skills: literacy, numeracy and digital competence. Media literacy falls under “digital competence”, and is intended to be embedded across all subjects – although in practice it depends on how schools design their curricula. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, “English with media education” is a statutory part of the curriculum in Key Stage 3, when students are typically 11-14 years old. However, the depth and emphasis can vary by school and teacher, and beyond KS3 media literacy ceases to be compulsory.

Rather than treating media literacy as a civic defence priority, the UK has allowed it to evolve piecemeal. Yet the direction of travel is clear: training young people to spot misinformation and disinformation is crucial to the health of our societies. We could see it as form of psychological inoculation.

Sander van der Linden is a professor at Cambridge University and author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. He explains: “Debunking can reduce people’s reliance on misinformation but often fails to eliminate it. You can’t un-ring a bell. For that reason, I’ve spent most of my career focusing on the notion of prebunking, or psychological inoculation, which is all about helping people prevent encoding [or absorbing] misinformation in the first place.”

Prebunking works by exposing people to the techniques used to create misleading arguments before they encounter them in the wild. “Just as vaccines help the body build immunity to future infection, so too can the mind be inoculated. This is not about telling people what to believe, but rather empowering people to think critically, free from manipulation,” he explains.

So, how can the UK improve its teaching of critical thinking? The Finnish approach has been successful in part because of their flexible approach to education. The Finnish system values teacher autonomy and agency, which allows educators to respond creatively to real-world events. For instance, in response to the global climate crisis, Finnish educators have implemented phenomenon-based learning, where students engage in interdisciplinary projects that explore real-world instances of climate change. This approach allows students to investigate these phenomena through the perspective of science, social studies and literature, fostering a deeper and more nuanced understanding. This integrated approach is possible in Finland because there is less of a strict divide between the sciences and the humanities, which means that science can be integrated with ethics, media studies and civic education, enabling students to better link classroom knowledge to practical issues.

The Finnish system is also less orientated around exam performance. The first major national exam is the ylioppilastutkinto, or baccalaureate exam, typically taken at the end of upper secondary school, when students are around 18 or 19 years old. Assessment in earlier grades is mostly based on teacher evaluations.

In contrast, children in England take Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) starting in Year 6, when they are usually 10 or 11 years old. The OCR, one of the five main exam boards, conducted a review in 2024 which found that GCSE students in England spent more time than almost any other cohort in the world taking exams, roughly 31.5 hours. They recommended cutting back, saying, “A more relevant and enriched curriculum would give more space for deeper learning, better preparing our children for an incredibly complex world.”

It seems that children in the UK are spending too much time being taught how to memorise information and pass exams within subjects siloed from one another. This can leave them exposed to misinformation and fake news. Research has shown that young people in this country are increasingly influenced by social media platforms, while often struggling to assess the credibility of digital sources. A 2024 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified a rise in climate disinformation online, particularly on YouTube, and included the finding that nearly a third of UK teenagers believe that climate change and its effects are being “purposefully overexaggerated”. Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of AI is only going to increase the need for children and young people to sharpen their skills in spotting misinformation and disinformation.

It’s often assumed that England’s state schools need more funding to improve. But the Finnish education system is often regarded as one of the best in the world, despite relatively modest spending. Per-student government expenditure at the secondary level falls below the OECD average and below that of the UK. Even so, about 93 per cent of students graduate from secondary education, and roughly two-thirds go on to attend university. Finland also has one of the most equitable education systems in the world, with the smallest difference of any country between the highest and lowest performing students.

Would the UK be able to replicate the Finnish model of media literacy? I asked Dr Kari Kivinen, a Finnish educator with over 30 years’ experience working in teaching and management, and leader of the Faktabaari project. Kivinen has played a pivotal role in adapting the project’s fact-checking methodologies for educational purposes, and has edited various publications, including the Digital Information Literacy Guide (2022) and the AI Guide for Teachers (2025). Kivinen noted the importance of educational equality in Finland, as well as the high level of teacher training – with most teachers required to have a Master’s degree. He told me that the agency given to schools, with less focus on passing rigid exams, gave them more opportunity to focus on developing critical thinking skills. To really follow the Finnish model, he concluded, the UK educational system would need a complete overhaul.

But some measures, Kivinen reassured me, could be incorporated into our British systems. “There is a plan [in Finland] of who does what with digital education at every level, and how to build critical thinking and digital skills into the curriculum from the primary level. This is doable everywhere.” English schools could also do more to teach all students about journalistic skills and ethics. “We invite journalists into the schools and they teach students how they create their stories, how they verify information, what the ethical guidelines are for journalists, and so on,” he says. “When students understand that, they can think [for example] about how to evaluate information from anonymous sources.”

He advised that the UK take critical thinking skills seriously, as the information terrain is shifting rapidly. Even starting from the best position in the world, Finland is struggling to keep pace with the evolving technological landscape. “The need to update digital theory has been really rapid,” he tells me. “We have difficulties updating the professional development of the teachers with AI skills. A few days of training before school begins is not enough, so we are looking at how to address this now.”

Some progress is already being made in the UK. Van der Linden has been working on creating novel tools to expand media literacy skills, collaborating with academics, media institutions and the UK and US governments. His team at the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab also worked with Google to create educational videos addressing misinformation. “We’ve created novel games, animated videos, quizzes and other content that can be deployed in ad campaigns on social media, reaching hundreds of millions of people,” he says. “We’re now looking to implement these in schools.”

But such work by individuals isn’t enough. The government needs to step in, with new policy and proper funding. Van der Linden believes that social media providers should face stricter regulation, making use of the 2023 Online Safety Act, a UK law designed to protect users from harmful online content by requiring platforms to take action against illegal material and ensure user safety, particularly for children and vulnerable groups. “Independent regulators such as Ofcom need to step up and enforce the Act to the full extent by holding social media companies accountable,” he said.

Current OSA provisions focus primarily on illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material and terrorist propaganda. Van der Linden is one of many experts and lawmakers calling for broader provisions to address misinformation. There is also a push for the establishment of clearer guidelines and enforcement mechanisms to hold digital platforms accountable, especially during crises or events when misinformation leads to harm, or to public disorder.

Better legal protection for children and young people could help with the problem of online misinformation. But schooling is still key. Last year, the UK government announced a new approach to the English curriculum, with aims to include digital literacy, critical thinking and comprehensive media awareness, such as identifying extremist content and misinformation, in English and computing classes. The central questions now are how deeply this education will be embedded across the curriculum and whether it will become mandatory feature of schooling. A report by the House of Lords has raised the profile of this issue by proposing that media literacy, digital skills and safe online behaviour are integrated across a range of subjects, not confined to a few isolated areas. The recent curriculum and assessment review, led by Professor Becky Francis, CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, aims to provide recommendations on this basis. [Shortly after this article went to press, the government announced that – in response to Francis's recommendations – it planned to make citizenship classes, including a media literacy component, compulsory at primary school level.]

We are yet to see whether this growing momentum for change will bear real fruit. We need to review where media and science literacy can best be embedded, how teachers can be supported through professional training, and how schools might be held accountable for delivery. Proposals include issuing statutory guidance, creating a national media literacy framework similar to the one that exists for reading, and linking outcomes to Ofsted inspections. For now, the commitment is clear, but the details of implementation remain to be fully realised.

If Finland can teach us anything, it’s that media literacy shouldn’t just be a side topic, but treated as civic infrastructure. In the UK and US, misinformation is often aligned to deeper social fractures. It’s not that British or American people are less clever than our Finnish peers. It’s just that the scaffolding around how we process information – the cultural, educational and emotional tools – isn’t nearly as strong. Countries like the UK, facing rising public distrust and a fragmented media ecosystem, would do well to look beyond incremental curriculum reform and embrace a systemic rethinking of how media and digital literacy are taught. Ultimately, Finland’s example shows that equipping citizens with critical thinking and media literacy from an early age is not just an educational goal, but a cornerstone of a resilient, informed society.

I asked Van der Linden whether he believes we can meet the challenge of growing misinformation. He hesitates. “I think I’m optimistic in the sense that my experience with developing interventions and training people is that we can cultivate resilience. The real question though is whether we can scale it sufficiently with the right policy support across the population. Time will tell.”

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First, a quick announcement – I will be presenting a special, one-off, performance of The World’s Most Boring Card Trick at the Edinburgh MagiFest this year. At a time when everyone is trying to get your attention, this unusual show is designed to be dull. Have you got what it takes to sit through the most tedious show ever and receive a certificate verifying your extraordinary willpower? You can leave anytime, and success is an empty auditorium.  I rarely perform this show, and so an excited and delighted to be presenting it at the festival. Details here.

Now for the story. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a magazine called World of Wonder (WoW). Each week it contained a great mix of history, science, geography and much more, and all the stories were illustrated with wonderful images. I was especially delighted when WoW ran a multi-part series on magicians, featuring some of the biggest names in the business. My favourite story by far was based around the great Danish-American illusionist Dante, and the huge, colourful, double page spread became etched into my mind.

A few years ago, I wrote to the owners of WoW, asking if they had the original artwork from the Dante article. They kindly replied, explaining that the piece had been lost in the mists of time. And that was that.

Then, in July I attended the huge magic convention in Italy called FISM. I was walking past one of the stalls that had magic stuff for sale, and noticed an old Dutch edition of WoW containing the Dante spread. I explained how the piece played a key role in my childhood, and was astonished when the seller reached under his table and pulled out the original artwork! Apparently, he had picked it up in a Parisian flea market many, many, years ago! The chances!

I snapped it up and it now has pride of place on my wall (special thanks to illusion builder Thomas Moore for helping to make it all happen!). My pal Chris Power made some enquirers and thinks that the art was drawn by Eustaquio Segrelles, but any additional information about the illustration is more than welcome.

So there you go – some real magic from a magic convention!

A few months ago, I was invited to present a series of events at FISM — often referred to as the Olympics of Magic. It’s a gathering of over 2,500 magicians from around the world, featuring days of intense magic competitions alongside workshops, lectures, and performances. This year, the event was organised by my friend Walter Rolfo, who kindly asked me to deliver a lecture, interview several well-known performers — including quick-change artist Arturo Brachetti, Luis de Matos, Mac King, and Steven Frayne — and also stage my show Experimental.

It was an incredible week. Magic is a small, strange, and tightly-knit community, and it was a joy to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in years. One highlight was a great workshop on acting and magic by actor Steve Valentine. Steve and I first crossed paths back in 1983 when we were both competing in The Magic Circle’s Young Magician of the Year. Neither of us won; that honour (quite rightly) went to Richard Cadell—now a regular performer alongside Sooty and Sweep.

My show Experimental is somewhat unusual because there’s no performer. Instead, the audience takes part in a series of illusions and psychological experiments by following prompts on a large screen at the front of the room. Each show is different and shaped entirely by the people in the room. I sit quietly at the back, guiding the experience by choosing the order of the material.

The idea for Experimental came to me years ago, as I was thinking about why magicians perform. It struck me that if a performer genuinely wants to entertain their audience, their words and actions tend to come from a place of generosity. As I like to say, their feet will be pointing in the right direction and so any steps that they take will tend to be positive. But if they come on stage purely to feed their own ego, the audience take second place and the show usually suffers. Removing the performer entirely forced me to design an experience that prioritises the audience from start to finish.

After each performance at FISM, we held a Q&A with the audience. Time and again, I was reminded of something the legendary illusionist David Berglas once told me. One night we were flipping through an old photo album when we came across a picture of him, aged about eight, putting on some kind of show. I asked if it was his first performance. He paused and said, “No. That wasn’t a performance—that was me showing off.”

Curious, I asked him what the difference was. His answer has always stuck in my mind: “Performing is for the good of the audience. Showing off is for the good of the performer.”

I have always thought that there was an interesting life lesson there for everyone, and it was nice to spend many a happy hour chatting about the idea at the amazing and unique event that is FISM.  

I am going to perform a new show at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival called ‘The World’s Most Boring Card Trick.’

The show has its roots in the notion that creativity often comes from doing the opposite to everyone else. Almost every Festival performer strives to create an interesting show, and so I have put together a genuinely dull offering. Because of this, I am urging people not to attend and telling anyone who does turn up that they can leave at any point. Everyone who displays extraordinary willpower and stays until the end receives a rare certificate of completion.  Do you have what it takes to endure the show and earn your certificate?  

I have identified the seven steps that are central to almost every card trick and devised the most boring version of each stage. Along the way, we explore the psychology of boredom, examine why it is such a most powerful emotion, and discover how our need for constant stimulation is destroying the world.

It will seem like the longest show on the Fringe and success is an empty auditorium. There will only be one performance of the show (20^th August, 15.25 in the Voodoo Rooms). If you want to put your willpower to the test and experience a highly unusual show, please come along!

As ever with my Fringe shows, it’s part of PBH’s wonderful Free Fringe, and so seats are allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. I look forward to seeing you there and us facing boredom together.

Around 2010, psychologists started to think about how some of their findings might be the result of several problems with their methods, such as not publishing experiments with chance results, failing to report all of their data, carrying out multiple analyses, and so on.

To help minimise these problems, in 2013 it was proposed that researchers submit their plans for an experiment to a journal before they collected any data. This became known as a Registered Report and it’s a good idea.

At the time, most psychologists didn’t realise that parapsychology was ahead of the curve. In the mid 1970s, two parapsychologists (Martin Johnson and Sybo Schouten from the University of Utrecht) were concerned about the same issues, and ran the same type of scheme for over 15 years in the European Journal of Parapsychology!

I recently teamed up with Professors Caroline Watt and Diana Kornbrot to examine the impact of this early scheme. We discovered that around 28% of unregistered papers in the European Journal of Parapsychology reported positive effects compared to just 8% of registered papers – quite a difference! You can read the full paper here.

On Tuesday I spoke about this work at a University of Hertfordshire conference on Open Research (thanks to Han Newman for the photo). Congratulations to my colleagues (Mike Page, George Georgiou, and Shazia Akhtar) for organising such a great event.

As part of the talk, I wanted to show a photograph of Martin Johnson, but struggled to find one. After several emails to parapsychologists across the world, my colleague Eberhard Bauer (University of Freiburg) found a great photograph of Martin from a meeting of the Parapsychological Association in 1968!

It was nice to finally give Martin the credit he deserves and to put a face to the name. For those of you who are into parapsychology, please let me know if you can identify any of the other faces in the photo!

Oh, and we have also recently written an article about how parapsychology was ahead of mainstream psychology in other areas (including eyewitness testimony) in The Psychologist here.

I am a big fan of magic history and a few years ago I started to investigate the life and work of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello.

Harry enjoyed an amazing career during the early nineteen hundreds. He staged pioneering seaside shows in Edinburgh’s Portobello and even built a theatre on the promenade (the building survives and now houses a great amusement arcade). Harry then toured Britain with an act called The Silver Hat, which involved him producing a seemingly endless stream of objects from an empty top hat.

The act relied on a novel principle that has since been used by lots of famous magicians. I recently arranged for one of Harry’s old Silver Hat posters to be restored and it looks stunning.

The Porty Light Box is a wonderful art space based in Portobello. Housed in a classic British telephone box, it hosts exhibitions and even lights up at night to illuminate the images. Last week I gave a talk on Harry at Portobello Library and The Porty Light Box staged a special exhibition based around the Silver Hat poster.

Here are some images of the poster the Porty Light Box. Enjoy! The project was a fun way of getting magic history out there and hopefully it will encourage others to create similar events in their own local communities.

My thanks to Peter Lane for the lovely Marvello image and poster, Stephen Wheatley from Porty Light Box for designing and creating the installation, Portobello Library for inviting me to speak and Mark Noble for being a great custodian of Marvello’s old theatre and hotel (he has done wonderful work restoring an historic part of The Tower).

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 […]

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