Germans are masters of the biting parade float.

How do they make those things? We need to import some German artisans to teach us the skill.

Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian. Can we put him in a concentration camp?

(Also, that chyron gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

Where are the hotbeds of Christian Nationalism? Who is causing all the problems? One approach is to map out the states with the highest density of right-wing Christian weirdos.

That doesn’t suggest any immediate explanations. My first thought was that maybe there is a correlation with poverty.

Nope, that isn’t it.

But then I noticed that Minnesota is always an exception compared to neighboring states. And that Washington, where I was born and grew up, is always on the side of right.

The correlation is clear: I, personally, am a benign influence on any state where I live.

I thought about leasing my presence to any state that wants to join the progressive future, but I had to nix that plan when I realized I might have to move to Arkansas or West Virginia.

The evil cat is tormenting me. At night, she crawls around on my work desk, rearranging things. This morning, I came in to edit some student papers, and what do I find? She has flicked the computer mouse to the floor, where it shattered into 3 pieces.

I have managed to piece it back together into a clumsily functional unit, but it’s going to be struggle to click on those papers to put big red marks on them.

This clip was yanked from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert because Trumpian sycophants did not care at all for James Talarico’s lefty message, criticism of the Christian Right, and opposition to the Republican scumbags of Texas. So I’m doing my small part to disseminate it further.

My opinion: he’s fine, but I’m sick of all the pandering to non-right-wing Christians. Maybe it’s too far for Texas, but I’d rather see a forthrightly secular candidate just dismiss all the imaginary saintliness of the Christian faith. It’s never been this idealized “love your neighbor” belief that they preach.

David Olusoga is a British-Nigerian historian, author, presenter and BAFTA-winning filmmaker. He is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His most recent television series “Empire” – which explored the history of the British Empire and its continuing impact today – aired on BBC Two last year.

Let’s start by talking about the BBC series Empire. What was the motivation behind it?

We have conversations about the British Empire in this country as if we are the only people involved, which, given the nature of empires, is not possible. We often ignore the fact that conversations about the Empire are taking place in those many countries that were formerly British colonies.

There was a huge debate about the meaning of the British Empire in India – historians like Shashi Tharoor are kind of superstar historians because their ideas and their writings about the Empire have become enormous. In the Caribbean, there’s incredible scholarship, but also heritage work and memorialisation.

This conversation about the Empire is not a monologue within this country. It needs to be a dialogue with the countries that were colonies or territories of the British Empire. So the aim is to try to explore the story of the Empire as a history that is being revisited by people across the world. Because more than two billion people are citizens of nations that were formerly British colonies or protectorates or dominions.

What has the reaction been like?

Most people’s reaction to most aspects of history is that it’s interesting – not that this is a challenge to who I am, or an insult to my nation. And the viewing figures for Empire – it was one of the most successful factual programmes on British television in 2025 – show that most people are willing to engage in recognising that there’s much about the Empire that we don’t know.

But we do live in a moment when there is a kind of rearguard action to defend an “island story” version of the Empire, which takes any acknowledgement that the British Empire, like all empires, was at times extractive [as an unfair criticism].

What’s your response to this defensive attitude?

The British Empire lasts 400 years. It involves millions and millions of people, and there are all sorts of motivations and actions and behaviours that range from the genocidal to the purely altruistic. But the structure of an empire ... people don’t set sail to set up colonies in order to benefit the people who already own the land. Empires, by their nature, are about the mother country, the imperial power, more than the colonies.

But the expectation is that this is a history that must be dealt with as a piece of historical accountancy – that if you cover [a negative aspect of the Empire, you must cover a positive one]; if you talk about the Indian famines, you must talk about the Indian railways. When I write about the First World War, nobody ever confronts me for talking about the strategic failures of the generals on the Western Front, or the death toll, or the suffering in the trenches. This only happens with the subject of the British Empire, and particularly anything to do with slavery, where we suddenly feel that we have to be talking in terms of “balance”.

Much of the hostility towards anything to do with the Empire is just a desire to not have to hear difficult things about Britain, and they’re only difficult if you have a magical and exceptional view of Britain, that Britain is a nation unlike every other nation that’s ever existed in all of human history.

Does your work on the Empire feel personal? The phrase that people sometimes use is “we are here, because you were there,” right?

I don’t really think about myself that much, because I don’t look to history to give me a warrant to exist in my own country. There is this idea on the far right that the history of Empire and black history are ways of people of colour claiming their right to be in Britain. I don’t feel that needy. I pay my taxes, I contribute to my society. I don’t need there to have been earlier generations of black people in Britain.

However, I do deploy my background within story-telling, because I’ve been making television programmes as a producer and presenter for a long time, and I’m very good at understanding how to use your own experiences to make stories more impactful. So we end the Empire series with me deploying my ancestors to make the point that confronting the history of Empire, recognising it as part of our history, is not something about guilt or pride.

My Nigerian ancestors were in a town called Ijebu Ode in the 1890s that was attacked by the British, so I’m descended from people who were attacked by the British army. But one of my ancestors on my mother’s side was a Scottish soldier in the pay of the East India Company. So, if I did history in the hope of eliciting guilt from white people, I have a rather large Achilles heel.

I’ve experienced something similar myself. I read a review of one of my books about scientific racism, which argued “well, he would think this, because he’s half-caste.” That’s not a word I would use myself. But I still had a moment of self-reflection, asking myself, “would I be making the same arguments if I didn’t have Indian parentage?” I concluded that the answer was yes, but it stung me in a peculiar way.

These arguments aren’t arguments. They’re attempts at silencing people, at saying that certain voices saying certain things are illegitimate. What these arguments are all saying is, “I don’t like what this history is saying. Therefore, it’s not real history.” It is easier to attack the messenger than it is to deal with something that you’re uncomfortable with.

Episode two of Empire was particularly striking for me, because it’s about a story that I think isn’t well told – about this period of indenture. As you know, my great-grandparents were Indian indentured slaves (I’ve made a personal decision to use the word “slaves”) brought to Guyana. Could you describe what happened in this period?

In some ways, after slavery was outlawed, the British went back to what they had before slavery, which was the indenture system. British poor people would sell their labour for a period of years – five, sometimes 10 or longer – and they were transported to the colonies. They would then work for a free settler for those number of years, and at the end of it, they were freed. (If they were lucky; this didn’t always happen.)

But the story of indenture from one part of the Empire to another is particularly unknown because there’s no connection to Britain. In the case of India, somewhere between one or two million Indians left to become indentured labourers. There was a huge range of experiences – from the murderously exploitative to, you know, extremely positive for people being able to transform their lives, escape caste, buy land. It’s a system that lasted from the early 19th century, with some stops and starts, right through until almost the First World War.

Can you tell us about how your family got here?

My father was from Nigeria. He was studying here in Newcastle [when my parents met]. Then my parents moved to Nigeria and I was born there. They then separated and we moved back to the UK. So I’m a 1970s story of movement around former Empire connections, because Nigeria had been a British colony. I grew up in Gateshead, near Newcastle, and it was not a very diverse place in the 70s and 80s. It still isn’t. I was brought up in a white, working-class world with my grandparents and my mum and siblings. I have a strong feeling of affection for the north-east and a strong sense of belonging and identity to that.

What’s your family’s relationship with religion?

My mother worked really, really hard to not ever say what she felt, and we went through a normal comprehensive school system with the sort of religiosity and religious education lessons that you’d expect. It [the existence of God] just always struck me as really unlikely.

But I remember being young and thinking that believing in this stuff was part of being good, and I wanted to be good and to do my homework and not get in trouble and not upset my mum. So there was a feeling of “you should believe in this, and you should say the prayers and sing the carols” and all that sort of nonsense. There was a brief period when I went to Sunday school, because it was what you did if you were trying to be a good boy. But that clashed with the fact that I just always felt it was nonsense.

As I got older, I just wanted nothing to do with it. One of the challenges I’ve had as a historian is that I’m so disinterested in religion. And I’ve had to make myself [engage with it] because you can’t study the past when for almost everybody, part of their calculations, for every action that they took, was what was going to happen to their mortal soul. So I forced myself to read religious history, and particularly around the early Church, which was the university of the world. It was the centre of learning.

What about the relationship between the Church and chattel slavery?

The Church was involved in justifying slavery, but it was also involved both with the abolitionists and with enslaved people themselves, who found inspiration in the biblical stories – the obvious stories of Pharaoh and the escape from Egypt. So it was involved in every aspect. There were religious figures who justified slavery. There were religious organisations and individuals who owned enslaved people, who promoted and propagandised for slavery. And there were religious voices who were motivated by their religiosity to oppose it.

And the influence of the Church today?

I do resent living in a country where it is very difficult to educate your children without them being indoctrinated in religion. I believe in absolute toleration, but I am opposed to religious privilege. I don’t see why we have bishops in the House of Lords, having power in our political system. I don’t accept that collective acts of Christian worship should be imposed upon my child, or anybody else’s child. I also think that religious schools are becoming increasingly a force for disunity in the country.

It felt significant that Tommy Robinson did a Christmas carol service last year, which attracted more than a thousand people, and he’s had support from figures like Elon Musk. What do you think about Christian nationalism in the US, and the efforts to export it over here?

I think it’s people with a lot of money who can’t accept how different Britain is to America. You can’t have Christian nationalism in a country that’s essentially not a Christian country. But if you’re trying to keep your American paymasters happy, if that’s where the money coming in from America to foment greater division in Britain is coming from, then you have to do what your paymaster says.

Last time I went to church, it was young Nigerians and very old white British people. And if you go to a Catholic church in many parts of this country, everyone’s Polish. So if you’re interested in bums on seats, Tommy Robinson is not the obvious conduit to achieve that.

I’d like to see him go to church in north-east London with a big Nigerian community. See how he gets on there. But before we end this interview, we have to talk about something more light-hearted. Your appearance on the The Celebrity Traitors.

I was somehow in the final, which has been one of the most watched moments in recent TV history. It’s been interesting being involved in something, at this very difficult time, that made people really happy. Sadly, what made them really happy was seeing those of us who appeared to be incredibly incompetent. So it would have been nice to have made people happy with competency, rather than incompetency.

Rather than incompetency, wasn’t it that you were making very rational, evidence-based arguments, that were just always unfortunately wrong?

I’ve been trying to think about what happened. I spend my life reading, gathering evidence, and then trying to weigh it out, but when there was no evidence, I entered this kind of desperate starvation state, looking for it. I think my theories were entirely rational, but they were also entirely wrong. So for example when Stephen Fry suggested that we should not have discussions at the roundtable and instead we should just vote, most people went, “That’s interesting, Stephen,” and I went, “That would be really useful if you were a traitor.”

So you went for him.

You know, in lots of Victorian novels, there’s the boring accountant that the young woman doesn’t want to marry, and then the exciting cavalry officer? I feel I proved myself to be the boring accountant.

You’re Daniel Day-Lewis in A Room With a View.

Exactly. I should have been the young guy with my chest out, in the field, kissing Helena Bonham Carter.

Did doing The Traitors help restore your faith in TV? This is an industry that is slowly being eroded, and the BBC is constantly under attack.

Well, it didn’t change the BBC being under attack – we’ve lost a director general since Traitors went out. But it is a phenomenon. When I was a kid, when everyone watched something, the whole nation had been through this shared experience. It’s very rare now. The big TV hits of last year were Adolescence and Traitors; they couldn’t be more different but they both began national conversations.

But my passion for TV is because that was a way I could do history. I had a kind of fork in the road. I had to choose the academic path and the PhD that was in front of me, or do something else, and I wanted to do history in the way that it had enraptured me when I was young, which was watching it on television. The person who made me want to do TV – alongside my history teacher Mr Faulkner – was [the historian and BBC presenter] Michael Wood.

But also, I was brought up in a council estate. I had that deep fear of debt that people brought up with no money have. TV offered me a way of doing history and getting paid. Meanwhile, a sector like academia, in which you have to self-fund the necessary qualifications to advance, is closed to a great majority of the population.

What is it about Michael Wood’s work that particularly inspired you?

He did In Search of the Dark Ages and a whole series of different history projects with the BBC. He was often talking about what we don’t know. And I love the idea of unknowability. That’s what I try to do on television, to get to that precipice of what is knowable and unknowable, and then ask questions of the view.

The magic of history is that you can know enough to empathise with people who lived and died before you were born. You can imagine yourself in their situation, and that connection with people of past centuries is a magical thing. I feel deeply emotional about history. Sometimes I’m in an archive, thinking about someone who’s been dead for 100 years. I’m the only person in the world thinking about their existence.

Talking about humanism, it’s that idea that they [people from history] are exactly the same as me, and that I can imagine what they must have gone through, what the city that they walked through was like, and how different it is from the one of today.

I think exactly the same about evolutionary history. It’s just that the history I study is a bit older than yours. For example, the peopling of the Americas is a big question. And a couple of years ago in White Sands, New Mexico, they discovered fossilised footprints that put the date of people there several thousand years earlier than we’d previously thought. The paper described the prints of a young person, possibly a teenager, going out for a looped walk, which lasts about a mile. And at several points there are the footprints of a two or three-year old, but they come and go. So that’s a person with a toddler, and the toddler’s tired, and you pick it up, and it walks for a bit. Twenty thousand years ago, people were doing exactly what you do in a park on a Sunday morning with your child. That is what you’re talking about, for me.

I remember that. Maybe it’s because I was new to fatherhood when it came out. But just ... the universality!

So, what’s next? Will you be doing Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s been mooted. I think I could do Strictly for one reason, which is that I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting against racial stereotypes. And I could destroy the racial stereotype that all black people can dance. But no, I think the country has suffered enough.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

I recently ran a session at the University of Hertfordshire on the 7 factors that I believe underpin an impactful presentation.

While preparing, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a hugely knowledgeable director who had worked with many magicians. He explained that magicians often weaken their performances by letting the audience experience the magic at different times.

Imagine that a magician drops an apple into a box and then tips it forward to show that the apple has vanished. The box must be turned from side to side so that everyone in the audience can see inside. As a result, each person experiences the disappearance at a slightly different moment and the impact is diluted.

Now imagine a different approach. The apple goes into the box. The lid is pulled off and all four sides drop down simultaneously. This time, everyone sees the disappearance at the same time and the reaction is far stronger.

The same principle applies to talks. Some years ago, I ran a year-long experiment with the British Science Association about investing on the FTSE 100. We gave a notional £5,000 to a regular investor, a financial astrologer (who invested based on company birth dates) and a four-year-old child who selected shares at random!

If I simply show the final graph, people in the audience interpret it at different speeds. Some spot the outcome instantly. Others take longer. The moment fragments.

Instead, I build it step by step. First, I show a blank graph and explain the two axes.

Then I reveal that both the professional investor and the financial astrologer lost money.

Finally, I reveal that the four-year-old random share picker outperformed them both!

Now the entire audience sees the result at the same moment — and reacts together. That shared moment creates energy.

It’s a simple idea:

Don’t just reveal information. Orchestrate the moment of discovery.

If you want bigger reactions, stronger engagement, and more memorable talks, make sure your audience experiences the key moments together.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Recently, I’ve seen a few major mainstream media outlets promote an absolute lunatic to their audience while hiding what an absolute lunatic she is, and so it is my duty today to inform you …

My new year began not with resolutions, but with tentacled monsters menacing 1980s children and their trusted adults. At the crack of dawn, I was on the sofa with my 12-year-old daughter, gripped by the Stranger Things series finale.

Watching TV with my children is one of life’s great joys – and at 12, my daughter is at the in-between age when the pool of shows we both love watching isn’t all that vast yet. Stranger Things bridges the gap between us so perfectly that for a couple hours she forgot I was her desperately uncool mother. I was a fellow adventurer flying with her through the Upside Down, entirely absorbed in the fate of the characters we have watched grow up and grown to love.

This used to be the simplest pleasure: watching TV with your family. One set, one channel and everyone in the same room. The chances of a shared experience diminished once we could watch our favourite shows on a train or during a challenging bowel movement. And this speaks to the great paradox of being a Generation X parent. We are forever explaining to our children that we were exactly like them once, while also insisting that our childhoods were completely different.

We had no internet, no phones, no streaming platforms – yet we were the modern generation. We had E.T. and Star Wars. We skateboarded without helmets and drank drinks that glowed in the dark. We were supposed to remain eternally youthful, preserved in the amber of grunge and VHS. So the creeping suspicion that our children might see us as old is frankly unbearable.

This is why Stranger Things has been such a joy and relief. Set in the 1980s, it should by rights be pure nostalgia syrup: bikes, basements, synths, curly hair that crunches. Yet somehow it surpasses that. The kids in the midwestern town of Hawkins don’t feel like retro relics. They feel startlingly like Gen Z: clever, funny, emotionally alert, but with more face-to-face bullying than online.

Then there’s the particular joy of Winona Ryder in the series. In the 90s, she was my complicated dream girl, the patron saint of dramatic eyeliner. I so wanted to be like her. Now she’s playing a frazzled single mum – just like me (sort of). Watching her character develop, as her anxiety strengthens into iron-willed protectiveness, has been unexpectedly moving. The show is a meeting point of generations, where Winona is still cooler than all of us combined.

That said, sometimes there are little jolts. Like when Will came out as gay, and my daughter informed me that “there was way more homophobia in the 80s, so Will is really brave and really felt he was risking losing his friends”. She said this, very earnestly, as though I wasn’t from that decade myself, when Section 28 set hatred into law. She speaks as though the 80s weren’t a real period of time, but more like a historical reenactment village.

But there’s something beautiful about that too. My daughter feels ownership over the 80s of Stranger Things – not as my past, but as her story-world. She meets me there, half in history, half in fiction. And for a moment, the generational performance drops away. I’m just a person who was once a child, watching children navigate the strangeness of growing up, next to my own actual child doing the same.

The finale of the show left me aching for my own childhood, where there were endless, wide-open skies of possibility. The writers, Matt and Ross Duffer, in their creation of a world that is part Star Wars, part Godzilla and part Eastenders, gave a glorious piece of my childhood back to me for a moment. As Bowie’s “Heroes” rang out in the final credits, I sobbed and said to my daughter, “See darling? The wonder, the magic never leaves us! It just changes shape and we forget to look for it, but it’s there, darling, the wonder is always there.”

She raised her eyebrows and got up, muttering, “Oh my god, Mummy, it’s just a show”.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

This week we have a quick quiz to test your understanding of sleep and dreaming. Please decide whether each of the following 7 statements are TRUE or FALSE. Here we go….

1) When I am asleep, my brain switches off.

2) I can learn to function well on less sleep.

3) Napping is a sign of laziness.

4) Dreams consist of meaningless thoughts and images.

5) A small amount of alcohol before bedtime improves sleep quality.

6) I can catch up on my lost sleep at the weekend.

7) Eating cheese just before you go to bed gives you nightmares

OK, here are the answers…..

1) When I am asleep, my brain switches off: Nope. When you fall asleep, your sense of self-awareness shuts down, but your brain remains highly active and carries out tasks that are essential for your wellbeing.

2) I can learn to function well on less sleep: Nope. Sleep is a biological need. You can force yourself to sleep less, but you will not be fully rested, and your thoughts, feelings and behaviour will be impaired.

3) Napping is a sign of laziness: Nope. Your circadian rhythm make you sleepy towards the middle of the afternoon, and so napping is natural and makes you more alert, creative, and productive.

4) Dreams consist of meaningless thoughts and images: Nope. During dreaming your brain is often working through your concerns, and so dreams can provide an insight into your worries and help come up with innovative solutions.

5) A small amount of alcohol before bedtime improves sleep quality: Nope. A nightcap can help you to fall asleep, but also causes you to spend less time in restorative deep sleep and having fewer dreams.

6) I can catch up on my lost sleep at the weekend: Nope. When you fail to get enough sleep you develop a sleep debt. Spending more time in bed for a day will help but won’t fully restore you for the coming week.

7) Eating cheese just before you go to bed gives you nightmares: Nope. The British Cheese Board asked 200 volunteers to spend a week eating some cheese before going to sleep and to report their dreams in the morning. None of them had nightmares.

So there we go. They are all myths! How did you score?

A few years ago I wrote Night School – one of the first modern-day books to examined the science behind sleep and dreaming. In a forthcoming blog post I will review some tips and tricks for making the most of the night. Meanwhile, what are your top hints and tips for improving your sleep and learning from your dreams?

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 happened again. I’m mentioned in the Epstein files. Again. You probably saw my first video on this topic and you came away thinking that I’ve spent the past decade being as awesome …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Back in 2008, one of the very first talks I started giving on speaking tours was about “Women’s Intuition,” and how that’s a made-up idea that allows society to continue to think of logic …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: God help me, but in this video, I’m going to defend “AI.” For those who are new to this channel, I have to start by saying this is a real outlier for me. I …

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (William Collins) by Laura Spinney

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British philologist and judge, made the remarkable discovery that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek, “bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident”. So was born the knowledge that has now expanded to recognise almost all of the modern European languages as Indo-European – alongside the main northern Indian languages, and some western Asian ones, such as Farsi.

A book by science journalist Laura Spinney now gives us the background on how the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was discovered, with linguists ingeniously managing to trace dozens of languages back to construct a hypothetical source language, estimated to have been spoken from 4,500 to 2,500 years ago. Most of the book is taken up with the question of where the language originated, and how it managed to spread so successfully across the globe.

The search for the region that birthed the language had proved elusive, until Svante Pääbo, in 2010, developed the technique of ancient DNA sequencing, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2022. Originally used to sequence the Neanderthal genome, the work expanded so rapidly, especially in David Reich’s laboratory at Harvard, that in 2015 the renowned British archaeologist Colin Renfrew wrote that “In just five years the study of ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of world prehistory.”

That same year, a paper was published by Reich’s group, imperiously titled “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe”. This, along with another, similar paper, proclaimed the end of the PIE mystery. The steppe is the vast region of grassland that runs for 5,000 miles from central Europe to Manchuria. The origin of PIE (and hence the languages now spoken by almost half the world’s people) was judged to be the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea – land that is now part of southern Russia and Ukraine. The population of the steppe, the Yamnaya, were animal-herding, horse-riding and chariot-driving nomads.

However, as Spinney explores, the mystery hasn’t been quite resolved. An earlier theory had proposed that PIE originated in Anatolia, land that now makes up the majority of Turkey – and it turns out that both might be correct. In 2022, Reich and his group showed that there had been an earlier migration from the mountains of Armenia, around 5000 BC, to both the Black Sea and Anatolia. In this theory, one branch of an archaic root language became the Anatolian languages, and another – via the Yamnaya culture – went on to produce the plethora of Indo-European languages.

Spinney shows us why this debate matters to us today. One pressing reason relates to false ideas around racial superiority. Yamnaya is the greatest part of the genetic heritage of most white Europeans (including in North America); English is the world lingua franca today; and from 1492 Europeans colonised a large part of the rest of the world. For some people, the belief that so many of our languages were birthed from the Yamnaya lent spurious credence to the notion that it was natural for white Europeans to conquer other peoples. The Nazis were invested in this idea, falsely locating the Indo-European source in Germany.

But how did the Yamnaya manage to dominate other cultures and impose their language? They were highly mobile nomads, and may have been physically stronger. Spinney writes, they are thought to have been “10 centimetres taller than the male farmers they encountered”. But were they violent conquerors? In Britain around 4,000 years ago the population was 90 per cent replaced by people with Yamnaya genes. But Spinney reports that, as with the British colonists in North America, who carried lethal smallpox (to which they were immune), the cause of the population change might have been infectious disease.

As a story emerges, what are we going to make of our exceedingly murky heritage? These issues are only hinted at in Proto but it is the best source – as up to date as possible – on the fantastic odyssey of our languages and the migrating peoples that carried them.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: It’s almost that time again: time for the BIG GAME, the finale of the 2025-2026 National Football League, the Superb Owl, and as I have mentioned in the past, American football is a problematic …

I am a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and mention him in pretty much every interview I give. Carnegie was American, born in 1888, raised on a farm, and wrote one of the greatest self-help books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book has now sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

I first came across his work when I was about 10 years old and read this book on showmanship and presentation….

According to Edward Maurice, it’s helpful if magicians are likeable (who knew!), so he recommended that they read Carnegie’s book. I still have my original copy, and it’s covered in my notes and highlights.

One of my favourite — and wonderfully simple — pieces of advice is to smile more. Since the book was written, psychologists have discovered lots about the power of smiling. There is evidence that forcing your face into a smile makes you feel better (known as the facial feedback hypothesis). In addition, it often elicits a smile in return and, in doing so, makes others feel good too. As a result, people enjoy being around you. But, as Carnegie says, it must be a genuine smile, as fake grins look odd and are ineffective. Try it the next time you meet someone, answer the telephone, or open your front door. It makes a real difference.

In another section of the book, Carnegie tells an anecdote about a parent whose son went to university but never replied to their letters. To illustrate the importance of seeing a situation from another person’s point of view, Carnegie advised the parent to write a letter saying that they had enclosed a cheque — but to leave out the cheque. The son replied instantly.

Then there is the power of reminding yourself how much the people in your life mean to you. Carnegie once asked the great stage illusionist Howard Thurston about the secret of his success. Thurston explained that before he walked on stage, he always reminded himself that the audience had been kind enough to come and see him. Standing in the wings, he would repeat the phrase, “I love my audience. I love my audience.” He then walked out into the spotlight with a smile on his face and a spring in his step.

This is not the only link between Carnegie and magic. Dai Vernon was a hugely influential exponent of close-up magic and, in his early days, billed himself as Dale Vernon because of the success of Dale Carnegie (The Vernon Touch, Genii, April 1973). In addition, in 1947 Carnegie was a VIP guest at the Magicians’ Guild Banquet Show in New York. Here is a rare photo of the great author standing with several famous magicians of the day (from Conjurers Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4; courtesy of the brilliant Lybrary.com).

Front row (left to right): Elsie Hardeen, Dell O’Dell, Gladys Hardeen, J. J. Proskauer
Back row: E. W. Dart, Terry Lynn, Al Flosso, Mickey MacDougall, Al Baker, Warren Simms, Dale Carnegie, Max Holden, Jacob Daley

If you don’t have a copy, go and get How to Win Friends and Influence People. Some of the language is dated now, but the thinking is still excellent. Oh, and there is an excellent biography of Carnegie by Steven Watts here.

“Let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

For many of us today, it is commonplace to talk about the “unconscious”. We might use it to explain our own behaviour, or that of others, or try to uncover its secrets in therapy. We convince ourselves that a friend who finds a new partner soon after a breakup is “on the rebound” – we know their motivations better than they do, we think. Perhaps we ourselves struggle with relationships, and believe this is due to something that happened in our childhood, rather than that we have not yet met someone who makes us want to commit. Our moods, our hopes, our actions, are ascribed again and again to hidden impulses.

The unconscious is not a new idea. It was of course given huge impetus by the work of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but the waning of his influence has had little effect on what we might call his cultural – we might even say “pop-cultural” – influence. From Freudian slips to the search for secret motivations, his ideas are now embedded in the way we talk and live. But there is no hard evidence for the existence of something called “the unconscious”. Is the idea just a way of removing blame from ourselves, and placing it elsewhere?

A brief history of the 'unconscious'

In the late 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant produced his masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he put forward a theory of mind which, for the most part, claims that all cognition is conceptual – that is, conscious. According to Kant, we are – or can be, if we take the time to reflect – fully self-aware, and can proceed by reason. As a founding text of modern philosophy, Kant’s theory has remained incredibly influential. But in the eyes of many philosophers, he left something crucial out of his picture of the human mind – what his contemporary Friedrich Schelling named “the unconscious”.

We might think the idea is uncontroversial. There are, of course, many things of which our brain is unconscious, even when they are being processed. If we were conscious of every sound around us, or everything within our field of vision, we would be overwhelmed – our brain is constantly filtering these things for us. But this is not what Schelling meant by the unconscious – the above examples are better described as nonconscious. For Schelling, the unconscious was not simply the passive activities of a brain (while thinking about other things), but an active and dynamic component of mind – it influences consciousness.

Arthur Schopenhauer took the idea further. In his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, not only is consciousness not the whole story of mind, it is merely the surface. For Schopenhauer, the active force of the universe was what he termed “Will”. The whole of the phenomenal world – that which we can see, touch, smell, which we can apprehend rationally and so on – is actually the manifestation of a huge irrational and impersonal drive. This is also the condition of each individual. While we believe our thoughts and motivations are explicable through rational thought, we are deluded. Rather: “The intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions.”

In fact, Schopenhauer was sceptical that we can ever get to know our secret decisions. We can only get at the representations of the truth of the universe, and the truths of ourselves. In this he was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy.

In works such as the sacred canonical text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, dating from at least 3,000 years ago, Schopenhauer’s theory of the world and the mind finds an early parallel, which he was quick to acknowledge. The phenomenal world is, in the Veda, an illusion, with true reality lying behind it – whether we can pull back the veil remains a matter for debate. Similarly, our human self is, in some key sense, ultimately unknowable to itself.

The three 'Master's of Suspicion'

One of Schopenhauer’s great followers – and, later, great critics – Friedrich Nietzsche, is often credited as Freud’s most immediate precursor. As with so much of Nietzsche, his position regarding the unconscious is difficult to pin down. But it remains fascinating. He wanted to question Kant’s idea that we were in control of our chain of thoughts: that when a person goes from thought A to B to C, that is because A led logically to B, which led logically to C. This, to Nietzsche, is to use a current term, “retrofitting” what is actually occurring – finding logical links where none exist. Rather, he argued that “the events which are actually linked play out beneath our consciousness: the emerging sequence and one-after-the-other of feelings, thoughts, etc., are symptoms of the actual event!” The “actual event” is what has happened beneath our thinking, in our unconscious.

In fact, the later French thinker Paul Ricoeur identified Nietzsche as one of what he famously called “the Masters of Suspicion”, each of whom called into question human confidence in our own self-knowledge. The second for Ricoeur was Karl Marx, who saw our minds as created not from within, but out of the social fabric which surrounds us. The third of the three Masters was Sigmund Freud.

Born in 1856, Freud, while being an avid reader of philosophy, trained in medicine before branching off into the field of psychology, establishing his own practice in 1886. While “psychology” as the study of the workings of the mind has been around since the Greeks, the late 19th century saw a great flowering of the discipline, and the Freudian unconscious grew out of a number of similar ideas that were being debated at the time.

Two immediate predecessors were the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Charcot was making groundbreaking discoveries in understanding and treating hysteria, which included the use of hypnosis, while Janet was among the first thinkers to directly link patients’ present conditions to past traumas – in particular traumas which the sufferer had forgotten, or where they were not themselves conscious of a link.

Janet termed this breaking of the link between the trauma and the later symptoms “dissociation”, and placed responsibility in what he called the “subconscious”. Failing to integrate these traumatic experiences with normal selfhood led, he believed, to neurosis. Like Charcot, he used hypnosis, seeing what he called a “magnetic rapport” between the hypnotist and their patient, which allowed for a cure to be performed. This is close to the Freudian model, with hypnosis replaced by “the talking cure”, and the magic rapport being termed “transference”.

Freud's 'internal censor'

But Freud did not just draw on philosophy and psychology as he moved towards his own version of the unconscious. An acute reader of literature, he credited writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky with leading him to theories of unconscious motivation, while of course, his famous – or infamous – concept of the Oedipus Complex is drawn from Greek drama.

There was also his religion. As the French writer Clémence Boulouque analyses in her excellent new book, On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious Before Freud, the Jewish tradition, both religious and secular, has a strong tradition of engagement with the unconscious – from early works of mysticism and Kabbalism (with their beliefs in an underlying reality generally inaccessible to human understanding) through to the work of Schelling himself, who drew on these traditions. While Freud grew more and more to argue that religion is something to be overcome – in his The Future of an Illusion, religion is the illusion – his work remains peppered with religious symbolism.

For all that, Freud’s version of the unconscious is a more unequivocal one than anything that had preceded it. The unconscious is not, as in Schelling’s understanding, just a place where we store various random parts of our memory and experiences, nor just where we store things we believe we have forgotten.

The unconscious that Freud engages with is one where nothing is random, where nothing psychologically unimportant is stored. It is, specifically, a place formed of our repressed traumas. We have, according to Freud, an “internal censor” that is, in some sense, protecting us from harmful thoughts, by forcing them into the unconscious.

What is crucial here is that, for Freud as for Janet, the unconscious is formed by what happens to us. While Schopenhauer’s version of the unconscious can be criticised for being so impersonal that our individual lives become meaningless (to which criticism Schopenhauer, the great pessimist, might have simply said, “Yup”), for Freud the unconscious is perhaps more personal to us than the selves our conscious thoughts make us believe we are. While some of the behaviours caused by the unconscious of person A might give us clues as to the case of person B, our traumas are deeply individual.

Where, who and what is the 'unconscious'?

Fast forward to the 21st century and, despite criticism of his work, Freud’s ideas on the unconscious have, as we have seen, proved influential on popular beliefs around the workings of the mind, not forgetting the fields of psychotherapy and therapeutic practice. However, the very concept of the unconscious remains a problematic one. Many question whether there is such a thing, and if the idea is even comprehensible.

There is of course the question of location – where is the unconscious exactly? – but this mirrors the question of where consciousness is. Others have raised the question of what it means for Freud (and any psychoanalyst) to “know” about something that is, by its own definition, unknowable.

Further, what sort of game is our internal censor playing that it would hide information from us, and then not only leave clues for us as to its existence (such as, in Freud’s case, slips of the tongue or dream symbols), but also allow us enough access to un-censor the material in some way? And in a way that is good for us – why bother to censor it in the first place? What even is an “internal censor”? Is it part of the mind, too? How? Or we might even ask, “Who?”

This is a version of the homunculus fallacy, where there is a person inside a person inside a person. One thinker to raise it was Jean-Paul Sartre. If “we” are censoring material to keep it away from consciousness, how is that happening? Do we have another consciousness inside us – a little person or homunculus – which knows what is or isn’t acceptable, then makes a decision? But wouldn’t they need another one inside them, like a Russian doll? Finally, how is what is to be censored decided?

A bid to evade responsibility?

Sartre, for whom personal responsibility is paramount, thought the idea of the unconscious was the product of the human desire to evade responsibility. Rather than blaming ourselves for any wrongdoing, we are able to pass on the blame to our unconscious, and then, through psychoanalysis, on to those who have shaped it – our parents, for example.

This is Sartre joining the dots between the gods of the Greeks, the primal Will of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and the unconscious of Freud – they are all of them, in his belief, mythical beasts which allow us to evade culpability. As the first humans invented gods to hold responsible for the great mysteries, so have we, but placed them inside us.

This is not to say that Sartre dismissed Freud’s work entirely. In fact he attempted to create a psychoanalysis aligned to Freud’s – just without the unconscious. This he termed existentialist psychoanalysis. He too believed we were shaped by external forces, but there was no extra layer of repression and censoring which needed to be accounted for.
While he admitted, with Nietzsche, that our motivations and indeed our consciousness might be opaque, opacity does not mean something inside us is performing an act of mysticism. Chinese mathematics is opaque, but it can be learnt. As a contemporary of Sartre’s, Eric Fromm, put it:

“The term ‘the unconscious’ is actually a mystification … There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: ‘the’ unconscious.”

Sartre’s argument is also one against determinism. Given facts A, B and C, Freud seems to suggest in this account, we will have outcome D. Freud believes he can argue, for instance, that a person behaves in a certain way because of this or that childhood trauma. Determinism was anathema to Sartre – we must, in his philosophy, have the ability to shape our own ends.

So, where does this lead us, when we reflect on the workings of our own minds, and the minds of others? We might like to think, as Kant did, that we are entirely rationalist thinkers, or as Sartre did, that we have absolute responsibility. But many of us still speak of, and believe in, the existence of the unconscious. It’s a belief that predates Freud and will undoubtedly continue in different forms for as long as humans try to pin down the self. Much of our burgeoning therapeutic industry relies on the idea, so it’s easy to forget that it is contested.

As Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” The sheer amount of “life” to which we are all exposed makes consciousness seem a thin tool for apprehending it. Perhaps science is not the place to seek the unconscious. Perhaps, like god, the unconscious may simply be a powerful metaphor – one that helps us understand and deal with our experience – rather than a thing?

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

A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir (Macmillan) by Jacinda Ardern

Jacinda Ardern was the 40th prime minister of New Zealand, but the first to become an internationally recognised figure – certainly, Keith Holyoake and Robert Muldoon never appeared on the cover of Vogue. Ardern became an instant object of fascination because – at least when measured against her fellow national leaders, an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged-and-upwards and mostly somewhat dreary cohort – she seemed different: a 37-year-old woman of generally cheerful demeanour. As the title of her book suggests, Ardern also sees herself as different, in substance as well as style.

Ardern is, at the very least, a different kind of political memoirist. A Different Kind of Power is short on wearisome policy minutiae, and petulant score-settling. The book’s strength is that it depicts, very capably, the human experience of national leadership – its pressures and dilemmas, its drama and slapstick, its gravity and absurdity. The prologue captures the moment amidst the post-election negotiations which brought her to power in 2017 when Ardern discovers she is pregnant.

After which, Ardern starts at the start: her childhood in small rural towns where her father served as a police officer. Ardern clearly believes this was the making of her: the conscientious, empathetic child becoming a prime minister of similar qualities (if the book has one minor but recurring fault, it is an over-emphasis on the “if anything, I just care too much” schtick).

Ardern grows up a Mormon, but drifts from the church in her twenties. It is always illuminating to discover why people reject the faith in which they are raised. It is not an easy call, risking as it does the ostracism of family, friends and community.

Her departure from the Church of Latter-Day Saints is admirable in motivation and execution. She reaches a point at which she cannot accommodate both her belief in equal rights for gay people and the LDS’s institutional animus towards them – but she moves on without bitterness, while maintaining admiration for the good the Mormons do, and the good people among them. She also drily notes that the experience of knocking on strangers’ doors, trying to interest them in new ideas while they’re trying to eat dinner or watch the match, is excellent practice for becoming a campaigning politician.

The most gripping sections of A Different Kind of Power are those that recall the two worst moments of her premiership – neither of which any incoming prime minister of New Zealand would have imagined likely. One was the predicament that confronted everybody in a job like hers in 2020. Though Covid-19 menaced New Zealand less than it did most countries – far-flung islands had a considerable advantage – its prime minister still faced excruciating choices. “For each decision we made,” Ardern writes, “hundreds of new ones presented themselves.” This summary of the infernal complexity of politics would be lost, regrettably, on the sorry mobs of social media-addled bozos who besieged New Zealand’s parliament, having convinced themselves that they were subjects of a tyranny, as opposed to the supernaturally fortunate citizens of a lavishly blessed nation. (“At one point,” Ardern deadpans, “I even saw the glint of literal tinfoil hats.”)

The other defining crisis of Ardern’s term was the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, in which 51 people were murdered and dozens more injured, by a lone maniac. Ardern deserved the plaudits she received for her calm and thoughtful leadership in the hours and days immediately following this atrocity, but as she tells it here, her initial reaction was less composed. “All of the confusion and frustration I felt,” she writes, “turned into one singular emotion: blinding rage.” A pertinent reminder that despite the perennial voters’ complaint about politicians not saying what they actually think, there are times when it really wouldn’t be helpful, or appropriate.

When Ardern stepped down in 2023, citing exhaustion, cynics claimed that her polling ahead of that year’s election may have been more of a factor. She was, by this time, one of those leaders vastly more popular abroad than at home, and her Labour Party were duly clobbered. But if she was tired, she was entitled to be. The great service A Different Kind of Power performs is that it reminds us that politicians are people – people to whom we give impossible jobs, and of whom we demand impossible results.

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

It’s time for some obscure magic and music hall history.

I’m a fan of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello. He was performing during the early 1900s and built a theatre in Edinburgh that is now an amusement arcade. I have a previous post on Marvello here and have just written a long article about him for a magic history magazine called Gibecière (the issue is out soon).

I am staging a one-off performance of the World’s Most Boring Card Trick at Magic Fest in Edinburgh on the 27^th December. Tickets here. Anyway, I digress. I have long been fascinated by the psychology of humour and once carried out a project called LaughLab. Billed as the search for the world’s funniest joke, over 350,000 people submitted their top gags to our website and rated the jokes sent in by others. We ended up with around 40,000 jokes and you can read the winning entry here (there is also a free download of 1000 jokes from the project).

It was a great project and is still quoted by media around the world. I ended up dressing as a giant chicken, interviewing a clown on Freud’s couch, and brain scanning someone listening to jokes.

A few years ago, I came up with a theory about Christmas cracker jokes. They tend to be short and not very funny, and it occurred to me that this is a brilliant idea. Why? Because if the joke’s good but you don’t get a laugh, then it’s your problem. However, if the joke’s bad and you don’t get a laugh, then you can blame your material! So, cracker jokes don’t embarrass anyone. Not only that, but the resulting groan binds people together. I love it when the psychology of everyday life turns out to be more complex and interesting than it first appears! As comedian and musician Victor Borge once said, humour is often the shortest distance between people.

I recently went through the LaughLab database and pulled out some cracker jokes to make your groan and bond:

– What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer.

– What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.

– What lies on the bottom of the ocean and shakes? A nervous wreck.

– Two cows are in a field. One cow: “moo”. Other cow: “I was going to say that”

– What did the landlord say as he threw Shakespeare out of his pub? “You’re Bard!”

– Two aerials got married. The ceremony was rubbish but the reception was brilliant.

– What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick.

– A skeleton walks into a pub and orders a pint of beer and a mop.

The BBC have just produced an article about it all and were kind enough to interview me about my theory here.

Does the theory resonate with you? What’s your favourite cracker joke?

Have a good break!

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 […]

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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 […]

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