A bill has been introduced in Washington DC by a congressman from Georgia.

H.R.1161 – To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.

It’s real. Buddy Carter has got to be one of the dumbest suck-ups in congress. I am embarrassed to be from this country.

It’s all her fault. Iliana is bringing on Winter Storm Iliana. I hope she doesn’t have to pay for all the damages.

She must like her grandparents though, because it looks like it’s going to miss my part of Minnesota.

Tony Nicklinson pictured with his wife Jane before the stroke that left him paralysed

It’s finally happening: MPs have voted in favour of a bill to introduce assisted dying in England and Wales. In Scotland, MSPs are expected to vote on similar legislation soon.

It’s a huge victory for the many passionate advocates who have spent decades campaigning on the issue. They include the family of Tony Nicklinson, who took his quest for the right to die all the way to the High Court, but was turned down in 2012, with the judge ruling that it was a matter for parliament. “I am saddened that the law wants to condemn me to a life of increasing indignity and misery,” Nicklinson, who was paralysed from the neck down, said after the ruling. He died a week later, after contracting pneumonia and refusing food and treatment.

Nicklinson’s case is one of the most important in the history of the legal battle for assisted dying in the UK. But the fight stretches back much further than that: the campaign group Dignity in Dying, which has been a leading force in this area, was founded as early as 1935. By the 1950s, the issue was being regularly discussed in the pages of this magazine.

Humanists UK, which publishes New Humanist, has been a strong proponent of changing the law, on the grounds of compassion, dignity, personal autonomy and democracy (given the high level of public support for assisted dying indicated in surveys). But for them, like many campaigners, the bills do not go far enough. The Westminster bill, in its current form, restricts assisted dying to patients with less than six months left to live. The Scottish bill is more permissive and would make assisted dying available to patients with “advanced and progressive” terminal illnesses, which would apply to a much wider range of cases.

Yet Nicklinson would likely not have been eligible under these conditions. Humanists UK and others ultimately want to see assisted dying available to those who are “intolerably suffering from an incurable, physical condition”, whether or not it’s considered terminal. But that will now be a discussion for future years.

In Westminster, the text of the legislation is currently being carefully considered by a committee of MPs. It will be sent for a third vote in the House of Commons, likely at the end of April, before moving on to the House of Lords.

In Scotland, the process is slightly different – the bill is being considered by committee before it goes to a parliamentary vote, which is also expected to happen this spring.

Nearly a century after Dignity in Dying was founded, 2025 will be a landmark year in the battle for the right to die in Britain.

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

This drunken sot and serial sexual harasser, Pete Hegseth, was appointed Secretary of Defense by a president who doesn’t give a damn about competence. Hegseth recently banned transgender people from serving in the military, and is starting to make noises against any non-heterosexual people, and is now going on a triumphal tour of military bases around the world.

It’s not going well.

Military families protesting the Defense Department’s anti-DEI push heckled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on his arrival at United States European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday.

On a visit to the U.S. military’s key European military hub in Stuttgart, Hegseth was booed by around two dozen people who live at the base in an apparent demonstration against the policies currently being implemented by the Trump administration.

The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted “DEI,” apparently in a reference to the recent ban Hegseth has placed on some books in defense department schools. Hegseth last week ordered the restriction of learning materials covering subjects that included psychology and immigration in DOD schools.

Is anyone else ironically amused by the fact that all these regressive people have been whining that DEI is weakening the country and corrupting governing agencies and universities, but now it turns out that the anti-DEI fanaticism is the force tearing everything apart? All you had to do was accept that some women have penises and some men can get pregnant, and there was absolutely no problem and we could all get along, but now that they’ve acquired a taste of power the heterosexual purity brigade is using their obsession to do harm. They need to realize that they’ll get the tolerance they’re willing to give.

Everywhere in the world, including Canada, although we shouldn’t talk about it here in the United States.

We can celebrate the day quietly in our hearts, though.

The situation is dire. Here’s a good overview.

Zach is not being hysterical. Everything he said is objective fact and an accurate prediction.

It’s hitting me personally now. I was benefitting from an HHMI grant written with the hard work of two of my colleagues. It wasn’t big money, I was mainly part of an effort to improve teaching in the university, in a project that paired me with another faculty member for an exercise in peer evaluation.

It was part of a category titled “Inclusive Excellence“. Oops. Forbidden word.

I used the past tense there, because I learned just today that the funding had been pulled, thanks to Trump’s anti-DEI nonsense.

I also have a student trying to get into a graduate program for next year. I’m hoping she gets accepted somewhere — she’s an excellent student with a lot of promise for a research career — but so far, we’re waiting for something. In a normal year, I’d expect grad schools to jump at her, she’s that good. But either nobody has any money, or they’re waiting to hear if their funding has been annihilated, so who knows what will happen? Maybe I should encourage her to apply to Mexican or Canadian schools.

All it took was one election to demolish the American scientific enterprise.

A black and white portrait photo of Bohr as a young man

Years ago, when I was a student at Caltech, I remember the physicist Richard Feynman saying: “You can know more than you can ever prove.” Never was this scientific intuition used to greater effect than by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who in the early 20th century concocted a model of the atom that explained all of chemistry but which had pretty much no scientific justification.

Recently, I lectured on a New Scientist “Bohr’s Copenhagen” tour, and was lucky enough not only to sit at the great man’s desk at the Niels Bohr Institute but to explain his atomic model to the tour group in the lecture theatre there. It sent a shiver down my spine, as did seeing photos of the former occupants of the bench seats: Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Meitner; a roll-call of those who created the quantum revolution of the 1920s, an event as significant as the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

The quantum entered physics in 1900 when Max Planck found that the sole way to explain the light coming from a furnace was to assume that the atoms could exchange energy only in discrete packets, or quanta. Five years later, Einstein explained the “photoelectric effect”, in which electrons were kicked out of a metal by light, by assuming that light too consisted of a stream of quanta: photons.

Enter Bohr. In 1912, he got Copenhagen’s Carlsberg brewery to pay for him to go to Cambridge. But the man who had attracted him there – J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron – kept Bohr at arm’s length, perhaps because Bohr’s English was so terrible that all he could do was point to equations in Thomson’s papers and say, “This is incorrect.”

A chance meeting with Ernest Rutherford sent Bohr to Manchester. There, Rutherford’s group had discovered that the atom was like a miniature solar system, with a nucleus 100,000 times smaller than the whole and containing 99.9 per cent of its mass, around which electrons orbited like planets. The problem was that Rutherford’s atom was impossible. The orbiting electrons should radiate light and lose energy and, in less than a hundred millionth of a second, spiral into the nucleus. Bohr guessed that the everyday laws of physics do not apply in the ultra-small realm of the atom. He remembered the quantum. Maybe only certain orbits with discrete energies were allowed. He had no idea why. But there was an enormous pay-off.

When an electron dropped from a high-energy orbit to a lower-energy one, it gave out light with an energy equal to the difference. Immediately, he could explain why atoms emitted light at only discrete energies, something observed in the laboratory and in the Sun.

Bohr and others elaborated the model. If each orbit could contain only a certain complement of electrons, then each element would have a distinctive number of electrons left over in its outermost orbit. Since it was via the outer electrons that an element interacted with other atoms, it would explain why all elements with one outer electron behave similarly, and so on.

In other words, it would explain chemistry.

The Bohr atom was a patchwork of guesses and intuitions stitched together into a ragged quilt with no fundamental justification. It was like building a passenger jet with no engines, but intending to put them in at a later date. Charles Darwin had done something similar when he proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, not knowing the mechanism of inheritance (DNA) and the mechanism of mutation (mistakes in DNA). Darwin and Bohr were similar geniuses, moving science forward despite enormous holes in their knowledge.

The engines of Bohr’s theory were provided in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, by Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. In Schrödinger’s bizarre picture, an abstract quantum wave encodes everything there is to know about, say, an electron. The wave spreads through space according to the Schrödinger equation, and wherever the wave is big there is a high chance of finding the electron if you look. Confined within an atom, the quantum waves bounce back and forth, cancelling out in some places and reinforcing in others. Where they reinforce are Bohr’s discrete orbits.

The atom, it turns out, is nothing whatsoever like the miniature planetary system imagined by Bohr. Nevertheless, he had been able to capture its essence. Bohr’s genius, to use Feynman’s phrase, was in knowing more than he could ever prove.

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

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …
From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for the outrageous act of … teaching the theory of human evolution. Out of the state’s own authorized textbook! Still, this violated the Butler …

The band Hillsong United perform at a huge stadium in California

Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford University Press) by Cristina Rocha

Hundreds of wide-eyed teenagers bounce up and down in a blacked-out auditorium chanting, “DA-DA DA-DA-DA-DA.” Searchlights flail and a band clad in baggy trousers and jumpers drives the crowd into a frenzy. Is it a school disco? Is it an indie gig? It certainly doesn’t seem like a church. The YouTube clip shows Friday youth night at Hillsong Church, Sydney, Australia. Before the spectacular fall from grace of some of its leaders began in 2020, Hillsong was a cultural and business phenomenon. Established in 1983, the Pentecostal mega-church put down roots in cities right across the globe.

In Cool Christianity, Cristina Rocha’s interest is in the cultural and the social rather than the theological. She considers the appeal of Hillsong as a hip, young product of the global north aimed at educated middle-class youth in the global south, with particular reference to her native country, Brazil. Hillsong is a space where the sacred meets the spectacle. Hip pastors in ripped, skinny jeans and leather jackets preach to clean, young, well-to-do audiences in vast, darkened auditoria. Towering screens display rapid-fire video montages. Light shows and rock music ramp up the emotions. The performances are captured as sophisticated multi-camera shows for online distribution. Hillsong, as one church member puts it, mirrors the highest production values of Broadway or London’s West End.

The church’s founder and former senior global pastor, Brian Houston, said: “Churches are usually old, boring, irrelevant and empty. I always thought church should be enjoyed, not endured.” Houston is an engaging character with a fine line in self-deprecating humour, but his weakness and hypocrisy ultimately led to a global scandal involving allegations of exploitation and abuse that resulted in a spectacular falling to earth.

But the disgrace that drew Hillsong to the attention of the world’s media presents a distraction to Rocha’s central project. Her focus is on a section of Brazilian middle-class youth who feel alienated from the restrictions of a corrupt, authoritarian society riven by class and racial divides. These young people are drawn to the promise of moving away from their Brazilian identity as part of the “developing world”, towards a cosmopolitan world citizenship.

Brazil is traditionally a Catholic country but the Protestant churches have grown to encompass around 30 per cent of the population. A large majority of these are Pentecostalists. Pentecostalism has a strong base among the impoverished black community, but is generally viewed by the middle classes as crude and primitive. These churches practise the casting out of demons and “prosperity theology”, promising an abundance of material goods in return for cash contributions.

Hillsong offered a quite different approach. It has spread its message across the world primarily through recordings of Hillsong United, the church’s praise band that uses modern anthemic rock to sing about the need for individual salvation. This emphasis on celebrating a personal relationship with God helped build a global fanbase for the band and for Hillsong’s celebrity worship leaders.

Rocha describes a process whereby well-heeled Brazilian teens set off with a backpack and a teddy bear to volunteer at the mother church in Australia, or study for a degree at Hillsong College. The college offers accredited undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in theology and ministry. As the book shows, this adventure is often experienced as uplifting. However, some of the volunteers, many of whom grew up with servants, are shocked to find themselves cleaning toilets in the homes of church leaders.

The shaming of the church began with the firing of Hillsong New York City’s hip pastor, Carl Lentz, for sexual misconduct in 2020. The US had been a happy celebrity hunting ground for the church. Lentz claimed to have baptised the pop star Justin Bieber in the bathtub of NBA player Tyson Chandler. Following the pastor’s removal, a four-part documentary, The Secrets of Hillsong, recounted a welter of further accusations against church members, including sexual misconduct, racial discrimination and labour exploitation.

In March 2022, the scandal finally reached Houston, who resigned from leadership of Hillsong following accusations of inappropriate behaviour with two female church members involving the abuse of alcohol and prescription medication. Houston remains unrepentant, quoting Proverbs 19:28 on Twitter/X: “An unprincipled witness desecrates justice; the mouths of the wicked spew malice.”

Rocha’s intriguing verdict is that, in Brazil, the fact that Hillsong was prepared to fire its founder was seen as proof that the church was transparent and ethical. Meanwhile, Hillsong continues to expand its reach in low- and middle-income countries, with global lead pastors Phil and Lucinda Dooley responsible for “planting” the church in South Africa. “Perhaps Hillsong has a brighter future in the global south than the global north,” Rocha concludes.

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

A black and white photo of Dylan Thomas

You too, I know, have waited for doors to fly open, played

with your cold chemicals, written long letters

to the Press; listened to the truth afraid, and dug deep

into the wriggling earth for a rainbow with an honest spade.


Dannie Abse, “Letter to Alex Comfort” (1977)

From 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, a group of poets and musicians began to gather each month at the Ethical Church in Bayswater, drawing an eager audience to the dimly lit basement beneath the busy streets of central London. The church was dedicated to no gods – but goodness, truth and beauty. The Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle drew a long list of celebrated writers, among them Stevie Smith, best known today for her macabre humour and the poem “Not Waving But Drowning”; the poet and translator James Kirkup, whose “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name” led to the infamous blasphemy prosecution of Gay News in 1976; and the Tamil poet and editor Meary James Tambimuttu, who founded the literary magazine Poetry London.

The meetings would later be recalled by the teacher and writer Alan Brownjohn as “the contemporary Mecca of most younger (and a few older) London poets and poetry-readers, [and] virtually the only venue for public readings” at the time, before the concept of poets reading their work had really taken off. They undoubtedly contributed to the subsequent public readings boom of the 1960s. But despite the powerful recollections of the participants and audience members, these gatherings are little recorded in the histories of British poetry or of humanism. How did they come about, and what was their legacy?

The Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle began its life as one of the many sub-groups of the Progressive League, an organisation founded by prominent humanists including the science fiction writer H. G. Wells and the philosopher and broadcaster C. E. M. Joad, with the stated aim of bringing together “open conspirators to change the world”. The league was known for its advancement of scientific humanism, and progressive attitudes in matters of sex and society, but it also placed special emphasis on the arts.

In a 1943 edition of the League’s journal, PLAN, they announced the success of an experiment to translate their music and poetry hour – “one of the distinctive features of the Progressive League’s country conferences” – to the “less idyllic atmosphere of the metropolis”. Any feelings of apprehension that the “original bloom of the gatherings might be lost” were soon forgotten in the surrounds of the Ethical Church’s “charming hall”.

The meetings were free to attend but invited donations, with the poetry coordinated by Alec Craig, a poet, writer and activist against obscenity laws. Its musical performances, ranging from folk songs to piano solos, were organised by Alfred Ashton Burall, a civil servant who would later become chair of the Ethical Union, now Humanists UK. A refreshment interval was viewed as an important part of the evening, enabling poets and musicians to speak to those in the audience about their work.

But for its owners, the church was becoming burdensome, with complaints of dry rot in the basement and dodgy electrical wiring. After some tense negotiations, it was eventually sold in 1954 to the Catholic Church – a move that was part of a conscious step away from the aping of religious ceremony, which was increasingly out of step with the wider humanist movement.

In a new – albeit still a little dog-eared – building in Kensington, the Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle continued to cement a reputation as a vital space for poetry performance in the capital. Even then, in the mid-1950s, wrote Brownjohn, “the huge 1960s wave of poetry readings – by everyone, everywhere – was not discernible on the horizon, so younger poets met each other at a relatively small number of venues where the famous or notorious performed their work.”

Both the famous and notorious had certainly found a home in the Ethical Church basement. It was the place where many in London first heard the lauded Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, perhaps best remembered for his rallying “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”. In contrast to an atmosphere generally described as respectful and sedate, one infamous episode occurred in the winter of 1949: a mid-performance attack on the sensitive and socialist poet Stephen Spender by the right-wing writer and Catholic-convert Roy Campbell, described by writer Peter Vansittart as a “hooting dazzle of fisticuffs”.

It was in part retaliation, apparently, for Spender’s criticisms of Campbell in a poetry review a decade earlier, which had included accusations of proto-fascism and anti-semitism, combined with Campbell’s sense of rejection by the London literary elite. There are many accounts of the incident, each of which agrees that while Campbell launched himself at Spender, the performing poet maintained complete calm, returning to the stage after stemming a bleeding nose and begging forgiveness for Campbell – “a great poet ... a great fighter for the things in which he believes”.

Given the Circle’s significance as an incubator of talent, Brownjohn wrote, “someone should, long since, have written a definitive memoir about the readings ... where so many young poets of the time dug for rainbows.” His reference was to a poem by the Welsh poet and physician Dannie Abse, who came to the gatherings. Abse’s “Letter to Alex Comfort” is a missive to his fellow humanist, activist and doctor, who also read at the Circle, who plays with “cold chemicals”, pens “long letters to the Press” and digs “deep into the wriggling earth for a rainbow with an honest spade”.

Like James Kirkup, whose prolific literary output and humanitarian activism have been overshadowed by the infamy of the Gay News trial, Comfort’s pacifism and his wide-ranging poetic and philosophical contributions have been largely lost in his enduring legacy as author of the bestselling The Joy of Sex. In Abse’s poem, though, the multiplicities of Comfort’s life are brought together. Abse, who memorably described himself as a poet first, with medicine his “serious hobby”, expresses his kinship with Comfort, who experiments, takes action and seeks magic in the facts of reality.

This marrying of rationalism’s “cold chemicals” and the “rainbows” of creativity was typical of the Circle and of the wider Progressive League. For the Circle’s poetry organiser Alec Craig, words were “avenues of approach to the mystery of reality”, a means of maintaining reverence for this mystery, while interrogating it. For another attendee, writer and Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, the poet “like the scientist ... is exploring reality. He wishes to make sense of it.” For many in the Circle, this was also a route to remaking reality, not least in the years following the end of the Second World War, when many felt disillusioned, yet tentatively hopeful about how society might be rebuilt for the better. Comfort was explicit about this, writing in 1946 of the artist as an “advocate and defender” of humankind against unthinking obedience to authority, or to tin gods.

Though the Circle came to be independent of the Progressive League, many of those who performed and listened had its causes in common – tending to be left-wing in politics and agnostic in religion. Like the Ethical Union with which it was closely connected, the League worked during the 1950s to liberalise divorce laws, decriminalise homosexuality and reform the obscenity laws that could be used to prohibit publications deemed likely to “deprave” or “corrupt”. Craig, writing in this magazine in 1957, argued fiercely against this form of censorship, believing it to be a menace to “ethical speculation, educational progress, and the freedom of artistic expression”.

As Alfred Ashton Burall wrote in 1945, although the arts could provide “an enrichment of life which is its own justification”, they also explored and enacted the values of their facilitators. This attitude was reflected in the Circle’s internationalist outlook, and its emphasis on fostering young talent and modern poetry. Kirkup recalled “a preponderance of Viennese and German refugee singers” in its early years, as well as the presence of Gloria Komai, the first poet he knew to introduce Japanese sensibility into her work. Music might come from the Hebrides or Latin America, and poetry was regularly read in translation, whether from Chinese or Hebrew. The Circle continued into the late 60s, by which time the huge wave of poetry readings it preceded had arrived.

Alan Brownjohn died in February this year. None of those mentioned above are still with us. But the excavation of the Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle offers us a glimpse into gatherings, held over almost a quarter of a century, that had a marked influence on the history of British poetry, and on the lives and careers of many of those who stepped through its doors. It also speaks to the oft-overlooked relationship between humanism and the arts: ways of seeing which shaped creation, and creativity which shaped how others might see the world – with empathy, imagination and idealism. As Cecil Day-Lewis wrote in This I Believe (1953): “the compulsion of poetry is the sign of a belief ... a belief that men must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best he can.”

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

Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer

Absolution (Fourth Estate) by Jeff VanderMeer

Prequels often feel unnecessary; they indulge in gratuitous over-explication of things that never needed to be explained. Not so with Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution, a prequel to his Southern Reach trilogy which deliberately scrambles chronology and sequence to deny the possibility of origin, backstory and explication.

The Southern Reach trilogy was published simultaneously in 2014 and is now considered a pioneering work of what M. John Harrison has called “new weird” fiction, mixing elements of science fiction, fantasy and horror to create layered and deliberately alienating texts. The first of the novels was adapted for the screen by Alex Garland in the 2018 film Annihilation (the titles are alliterative: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance).

While describing a plot that seeks to erase its own narrative progress may seem a little futile, the novels are broadly about a mysterious event in the 1990s that transforms a section of swampy coastline, possibly in Florida or possibly in the Pacific Northwest, into something else: Area X. Teams of researchers from the mysterious government agency Central are sent in to cross the Border into Area X and are themselves transformed in obscure ways – changed into animals or monsters or doppelgangers of themselves. The expeditions learn little about this mysterious zone where the laws of nature don’t apply – an area which, over the course of the three novels, begins to grow.

Absolution is split into three sections taking place in three timelines: 20 years before the Border, 18 months before the Border, and during the first Border crossing. These specific chronological markers, though, exist mostly to be blurred and undermined. Rabbits wearing cameras, sent to study the Border, show up in Absolution decades before Area X is supposed to exist, but seemingly transformed by it – turned into meat-eaters, devouring crabmeat and then each other. Old Jim, a Central agent, discovers a diagram on a wall in an abandoned building which seems to outline the forthcoming “plot” of the rest of the books. Jim muses that the “future” is “colonising the past, as if every moment had a permeability that could neither be desired or controlled, like an outstretched hand with the water draining off the sides back into the river.”

The reference to colonisation is an important hint. In his 2008 study Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder pointed out that in science fiction narratives, colonising territory is often framed as colonising the past, since other cultures are supposedly further back along the Darwinian/evolutionary timeline. The notion of progress and linear advancements into the future becomes a way to distinguish between us (advanced, intelligent, worthy to rule) here and them (primitive, worthy of subjugation) over there.

In the first three Southern Reach novels, the distinction between here and over there is blurred and swallowed. People enter Area X and discover a doppelganger of themselves, already across and staring back. The borders collapse and move and seem to transpose themselves across great distances. In Absolution, not just space but time melts down. Cameras replay scenes that never happened; walkie-talkies turn themselves on and start speaking nonsense from nowhere.

The last section of the book is told from the point-of-view of Lowry, a drugged-out and narcissistic military specialist who is part of the first expedition. We know little about Lowry’s background; his main characteristic is that he says “fuck” so often that it turns into a kind of narrative chaff. You follow his exploration of Area X through a haze of sexual and perceptual frustration that mirrors and intensifies the expedition’s own perplexity, as when he laments the inadequacy of his colleague’s expertise: “Fuckable fucking fucked fuck future terminology for college degrees that fucking fell fuck apart in the fuck field like fucking paper bags filled with fuck water.”

Is Area X a mystery because of its own mysteriousness, or because of the scientists and spies attempting to investigate and categorise? Are the book’s readers agents like Old Jim, who along with him “Sift through thin lines of dead seaweed and barnacles to know your future, or maybe just your past”? Like the trilogy, Absolution creates layers of words and speculations that mock and infiltrate any attempt at interpretation.

The pleasure of the novel is precisely this sense of being overwhelmed, of “scrabbling” with the “panic of fifty spasming rabbits” at a cage of crabmeat and old memos. H.P. Lovecraft would infamously tell the reader that the nameless things out there were indescribable, but VanderMeer sets out to actually make the reader feel like their cognition is being leached away. The author could be referring to his own work when he describes some of the Central biologists’ journals as expressing “a descent into a vast internal void, a kind of babbling nothing”. That’s a description of horror. But in the freedom from borders in time and space, it also feels like a kind of absolution.

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

This is the 2025 follow-on from the 2023 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2025 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …
This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

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

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

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

shoes

legs

head

fly

book

 

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! 2024 has been an eventful and uneven year, one marked by important steps forward and more than a few difficult setbacks. Progress, much like history, does not move in a straight line. No matter what the path, however, the intended destination remains (as Richard Dawkins himself says …

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

Hampton-574684As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

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

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

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

hamplan3Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

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

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

IMG_7255This week we will take a detailed look at an optical illusion that I created to shrink people.

There are a few ways of making someone look small. One approach involves making everything else big! Here is a great example of that from a Trick Eye exhibition in Japan. The picture is huge and the glass is painted on the back walls (I pressed my hands against the ground beforehand, so that they looked like they were being pushed against the glass).

Another approach involves forced perspective (making a far-away object appear much closer to the camera) – a technique used in the famous Beuchet Chair illusion….

Presentation1It’s wonderful but is still a big build. I wanted to create something that was far more portable, and had the idea of moving the chair very close to the camera. Here is how this new illusion looks and works.

chair

All of the details and templates were published in the journal iPerception and I was especially happy with the article because that’s my mum in the photos! I have used the idea lots over the years, ….

stv

….including in this quirky video……

Next week I will reveal a brand new optical illusion! Oh, and if you are in Edinburgh, I will be giving a talk on the 28th December at MagicFest about the strange intertwined lives of three master magicians from the city. One was the most famous illusionist in the world, another perfected a trick that revolutionised magic, and the third was frequently asked to appear in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Do come along, fun will be had. Details here.

Welcome to another Thursday post celebrating curious mind stuff. This week, we enter the world of illusion! 

I have created many optical illusions over the years, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with some of the smartest and most inventive folks in the field. Olivier Redon is certainly one of those people. Working with his daughter Chloe, Olivier creates new illusions and wonderful twists to existing ideas. A generous soul, his pieces are as playful as they are fooling.

Here is his Oh La La Box, which won the Best Illusion of the Year in 2021. Simple but brilliant….. 

A man after my own heart, most of Olivier’s creations are built from cardboard and paper, and show how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another instance, the dynamic duo have joined books and boxes together in impossible ways….
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Our paths first crossed when I created a version of the Beuchet Chair, only to discover that Olivier had had pretty much the same idea several years ago (mine involves an addition of a fake cloth to help with the illusion of continuity)!  
IMG_5441Olivier has also used the same idea to make objects shrink and grow in desktop version. Genius. Olivier is based in San Francisco and creates for the fun of making something new and the joy of sharing it with younger minds. Who knows, perhaps there will be a museum dedicated to his work. 

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

fragile long mp4.00_00_02_18.Still001How do you find your creative ideas? 
Very interesting question. At first, I paid attention to what was around me. But then, over time, I noticed that there were no big changes in the world of optical illusions, and so I decided to do something about it and create something new myself. Now I have more than 50 optical illusions that fill 3 rooms in my house!

Who are your heroes of the world of optical illusions?
Jerry Andrus, because he invented so much, yet had no computer or printer! He just worked with metal, cardboard, or wood. I found Jerry Andrus via the internet in 2022, but I didn’t know him before that because I wanted to create my illusions without knowing about what already existed.

Should all the classrooms in the world have optical illusions? 
Of course! It is so much fun to play with your brain and especially for adults, children, teachers and students.     

You can find out about Olivier’s great work here and read more about it in this article.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Another Thursday, another dose of curious stuff. Here is a strange tale combining magic, a trip to Paris, and some remarkable photographs.

180px-Alfbinet copyIn the early 1890s, French scientist Alfred Binet teamed up with several magicians (including sleight of hand expert Edouard-Joseph Raynaly) and photographer Georges Demeny to discover how magic fooled the mind. Demeny had helped to create an early type of film camera and was using it to analyse fast movements by reducing them to a series of rapidly taken still photographs. His clockwork camera could move 24 frames past a lens at the rate of one every tenth of a second. Publishing the results in an 1894 article, Binet describes how the images removed the magician’s patter and speed of movement, and so exposed the illusions. The photographs were not reproduced in Binet’s article, but it did contain a curious note explaining that they were ‘stored in laboratory records.’

DSCF0421I came across Binet’s article when I was writing my PhD on magic. A few years later, I decided to search for the missing images. I first contacted an expert on early film, Professor Marta Braun (Toronto Metropolitan University).  Marta wasn’t aware of the images, but suggested that I reach out to an archivist at the French National Library named Laurent Mannoni. After several weeks of discussions and searching, Laurent discovered 3 sets of Binet’s images in the archive. I headed to Paris!


image4Once in the archive, Laurent led me into a darkened room filled with amazing objects, including Demeny’s camera, apparatus from the famous French magician Robert-Houdin and the 3 sets of images! These images were breath-taking and involved Raynaly springing cards between his hands (11 images), changing one playing card into another (11 images) and making a ball vanish (24 images). Laurent kindly allowed me to make digital copies of the photographs. On the train back to the UK, a thought occurred to me. If I were to present each set of images in rapid succession, I could recreate Raynaly’s performance from over a century ago! So that’s what I did and here is one of the films.

The film shows Raynaly dropping the ball from one hand to another, passing back into his upper hand and then the ball vanishing. Don’t blink or you will miss it! Historians often cite 1896 footage of British magician David Devant as the earliest film of a conjurer, but Demeny’s film predates Devant’s footage by at least two years. I have shown the Raynaly film at many conferences and conventions, and he always receives a much-deserved round of applause!

So, there you have it. A magical detective story borne of curiosity and luck, that ended up uncovering the world’s earliest film of a magician.  What do you think? It’s easy to imagine none of this happening. What if the article hadn’t stuck in my mind. Or Maria hadn’t been as helpful? Or Laurent hadn’t been as generous? But I am glad that it did.

Further reading:

Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Lachapelle S. (2008). From the stage to the laboratory: magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences44(4), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20327

Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016). Scientific Study of Magic: Binet’s Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography. The American journal of psychology129, 313–326. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.3.0313

All images except Binet, copyright Richard Wiseman

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