Tell him that he had a tiny crowd size at his expensive parade.

Tiny crowd at Trump’s military parade. Quite the turnout…

SAD!pic.twitter.com/NcNvEjw4rF

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 14, 2025

For an event that shut down much of central Washington D.C., closed key roads, and reportedly cost up to $45 million, the promise of a display of America’s military might — that just coincidentally happened to fall on Trump’s birthday — didn’t exactly draw out legions of his fans. Instead, the crowd of supporters, servicemembers, curious locals, and military-adjacent spectators who braved the oppressive heat and humidity of a post-thunderstorm D.C. managed to just fill out their allotted side of the street over several blocks in front of the White House, with plenty of room to spare.

In front of the central stage, a crowd befitting a midsize concert gathered in view of Jumbotrons. The lawns surrounding the Washington monument — which have hosted countless inaugurations, protests, concerts, and gatherings — were largely unused overflow space.

When the TV broadcast showed the crowd risers along the parade route, they were sparsely filled. The National Park Service issued permits for 250,000 people for the National Mall festival and the military parade. An aerial parade of historic military aircraft flew above the National Mall, traversing a course from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Memorial that — despite clear anticipation of crowds by event organizers — was more empty field and food truck line than crowd.

Though rock music blared on TV, the parade itself was eerily quiet. One video posted on X shows tanks squeaking past nearly silent crowds, sounding like a grocery cart in need of grease.

In the weeks leading up to his birthday and the parade, Trump told close associates that protesters were going to try to overshadow the military parade, including in media coverage, in D.C. and elsewhere, and that he was determined not to let that happen, a source with knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone.

I will give him this, that he was right about protesters trying to overshadow his parade.

That was the crowd attending the anti-Trump protest in Idaho.

This was San Diego.

He’s an unpopular president. He’s hated.

I recorded the whole thing. You can take a little tour of downtown Morris, Minnesota right here.

We were just beginning to gather the group for our protest march, when we listened to Governor Walz’s announcement about the murders last night.

Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said the Hoffmans were shot around 2 a.m.

The second shooting, at the Hortman home, happened around 3:35 a.m., with police at the scene exchanging gunfire with the suspect before the suspect fled the scene.

Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said officers did their “due diligence” to check on Hortman’s home after learning that a lawmaker had earlier been attacked.

“When they arrived at Melissa’s house, they noticed that there was a police vehicle in the driveway with the emergency lights on and what appeared to be a police officer at the door coming out o the house. When our officers confronted him, the individual immediately fired upon officers, which exchanged gunfire and the suspect retreated back into the home.”

The manhunt for the suspect, who was impersonating a police officer, is ongoing and involved “hundreds and hundreds” of officers. The suspect fled through the back door of the home and he is on foot and at large.

The suspect was driving a vehicle that looked “exactly like a police vehicle” and they were wearing a vest with a Taser and police badge. Inside the suspect’s vehicle was a manifesto that identified “many lawmakers and other officials,” including Hortman and Hoffman.

“No question that if they were in this room you would assume that they were a police officer,” Bruley said, acknowledging that investigators have “people of interest that they are looking for.”

“This is a dark day today for Minnesota and for democracy,” Minnesota Department of Public Safety Superintendent Bob Jacobson said.

The two homes were 8 miles apart. There is no doubt that this was an intentional, targeted, political assassination of Democratic lawmakers. They’ve at least seized the cowardly criminal’s car, so we’ll probably learn his identity soon enough.

The protest march went ahead as planned. About a hundred people, a remarkably large event for our little town, marched peacefully and legally through the town. This isn’t notable except that the goddamned chickenshit state police were using the violence as an excuse to shut down rallies all across the state.

State officials are urging Minnesotans to refrain from attending political rallies Saturday amid the backdrop of shocking political violence in the state.

“Given the targeted shootings of state lawmakers overnight, we are asking the public to not attend today’s planned demonstrations across Minnesota out of an abundance of caution,” the Minnesota State Patrol wrote on X.

Walz echoed the message in his own post, writing:

“Out of an abundance of caution my Department of Public Safety is recommending that people do not attend any political rallies today in Minnesota until the suspect is apprehended.”

No. Ten thousand times no. This is precisely the time when we have to stand up against political violence.

And we did.

I’m getting ready to leave the house and join the No Kings protest here in Morris, Minnesota. I read up on recommendations made for other protests — stuff like leave your phone at home, mask up, what to do if there is tear gas, etc. — but it all seems like overkill here. I’ll be about 5 or 6 blocks away from my home, in a small quiet rural town, and I anticipate a well-behaved calm protest, so I hope you’re not expecting dramatic news when I get back. It’s just going to be a small group of citizens expressing their civic responsibility, unlike the Republicans in government.

I still think it’s important for everyone to stand up in resistance, even in situations lacking in drama.

Unfortunately, then I learn this morning that two Democratic state legislators, John Hoffman and Melissa Hortman, were shot overnight by a man dressed as a law enforcement officer. Their spouses were also shot. The shootings were in two different locations, so it seems to be a targeted terrorism attack, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the goal was to intimidate protesters on this day.

It’s all the more reason to get out there and peacefully protest. Don’t let the thugs win.

After a busy day protesting the fascist takeover of our country, sit back and listen to the FtB gang discuss their experiences with Large Language Models.

In a war-ravaged street in Mosul, Iraq, a dozen boys are filmed playing football. They run, scramble, shoot, dive in the dust, and occasionally hug when scoring a goal. Yet there is something heart-breaking about this football game – it is played with an imaginary ball. This is haram football, haram meaning forbidden, banned by Islamic State. In 2015, two years before the film was made, 13 boys had been publicly executed by a firing squad for watching a football game on television. The young players here are taking no chances; gunfire is heard in the background as the film ends.

Made in 2017 by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, it is one of a series of short films of children’s street games from around the world made over the past two decades, now part of an international travelling exhibition which stopped off at London’s Barbican in 2024. Impressively, the Children’s Games series is in the public domain and free to watch online, where it has become, according to Alÿs, “something completely and gloriously uncontrollable”. Having racked up thousands of viewings worldwide, it is now being used in refugee camps and child therapy practices.

Some games will be familiar to New Humanist readers – skipping, kite-flying, rock-paper-scissors, hopscotch, leapfrog, freeze (“grandmother’s footsteps”), “It” or chase tag – but others have emerged during war, civil disruption and in conditions of bitter poverty. In Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2023, Alÿs filmed a group of young boys dressed in mock army fatigues, carrying handmade wooden assault rifles and waving down vehicles passing through their village. The cars are stopped and searched and drivers asked to pronounce a password, palyanitsya (a Ukrainian bread but also now the name of a military drone) – a shibboleth that Russians find hard to pronounce. This is serious play.

Children’s Games records both imaginative play and more rule-governed games. Alÿs cites the crucial distinction made by French philosopher Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1961) between paideia (“play”, ancient Greek) and ludi (“games”, Latin). Play evokes more informal and spontaneous forms of recreation, indoors or outdoors, ranging from a single child talking to an imaginary friend to a group of children building a sandcastle, or adults kicking a ball around in a park. In contrast, games are profoundly rule-governed, as psychologist Jean Piaget argued in his pioneering study The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932), where he concluded that even a game of marbles contains “an extremely complex system of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own”.

In elaborating and finessing such rules, children start by accepting them as “divine laws” but later realise they can be amended by common agreement. In this, they have gone beyond the foothills of moral reasoning in developing powerful sentiments of fairness and justice. In Piaget’s view, this is how “moral realities” are handed down from one generation to the next. It is how in some kind of strange alchemy, the morality of duty and obedience to rules allow “for the appearance of the morality of goodness”.

Children’s play rarely leaves a trace in the historical record, as a result remaining something of a blank page in cultural history. For Caillois, developing ideas first proposed by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s now classic study Homo Ludus in 1938, “Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia. The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignificant.” Both assume that throughout history, and in all cultures, children have gathered together, agreed rules, played and dispersed, leaving little evidence behind, with the everyday world reinstating itself, becoming once again “an empty theatre”. Yet while they last, games are a form of bewitchment, a way of temporarily forgetting the difficulties of life and escaping into another world, sometimes within a magic circle or consecrated space which games such as “It” require.

If social history tells us little about children’s games, art history helps fill in the gaps. Pieter Bruegel’s famous “Children’s Games”, cited by Alÿs as a painting he “saw as a child and which really made an impression on me”, not only depicts 90 games played in the Netherlands in the 16th century, but is the most famous example of what became a genre of Dutch painting: the kinderspelen. Common to many of these paintings was the setting of such games in a public square, often against the background of a town hall or other civic building, suggesting a link between play and good citizenship. Alÿs cautions us against too much idealism however, reminding readers that “in most cultures, games are also the first moment of gender separation”. He notes that the games the girls in his films play are more collectively choreographed – for example “Nzango”, a set of synchronised dance movements accompanied by clapping which is now a national sport in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also more likely to involve singing, much as girls sing more often than boys in British playgrounds.

"The playground agenda"

The dangers of seeing games as a rehearsal for adult life – which George Orwell satirised in suggesting that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton – gained a new lease of life in post-war reconstruction, particularly in Europe. Civic leaders and town planners extended their remit to include managing and monitoring play as a discrete area of child development, requiring dedicated play areas where activities could be safely managed through design and even time-tabling. The end result was the “fixed equipment” playground, often subject to notice-board rules. In my childhood, municipal playgrounds were often closed on Sundays, the swings chained up, in respect for the sabbath. These spaces took no account of the fact that most children seem to prefer playing out of sight of the adult world, on back lots or waste ground, places which the planning professionals formalise as SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

“The playground agenda was compelled above all by the imperative of taking children away from the street,” argues architect Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, in a collection of essays, The Nature of the Game, published by Alÿs. He thinks that the world of street games and imaginative play outside the home – particularly in the cities of the global north – is a world already lost. By the 1960s Britain’s traffic planners had won the battle on the ground, with street play now remembered principally in the photographic archives, where local and regional documentary photographers such as Roger Mayne in Notting Hill, Chris Killip and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in the North-East and Nigel Henderson in London’s East End left behind a remarkable legacy, often featured in the social affairs weekly New Society.

Meanwhile, sporting games for children are now more likely to be professionalised and managed by adults. The under-fives attending paid football training in my local park on Saturday mornings are not by any definition of the word “at play”. Bemused, desperate to please their parents, the children are being trained to accomplish outcomes not of their own initiative, but set by others. This is why most definitions of play start by pointing out that it is quintessentially a voluntary, unproductive activity, “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind … ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game”, according to Caillois. Anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it another way, responding to the Alÿs films, defining play as a “way in which, in a collective, everyone raises each other up.”

The acclaim greeting Children’s Games caused critics to compare it with an earlier project concerned with protecting childhood experience as a global social cause: The Family of Man exhibition mounted by Edward Steichen in 1955 at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Containing over 500 photographs by 273 photographers from 69 countries, including Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, it was widely trumpeted as a vision of hope for a better world to come. Opening soon after the end of the Second World War, it seemed to brilliantly capture the mood of the times, and as critic Winfried Fluck wrote of the exhibition, “photography has a special potential for transforming everyday life into a special moment.”

Not all of the photographs portrayed children. Others were of family life, work, war, the ill-treatment of refugees, racism and civil rights activism, but visitors claimed to have been most moved by the images of childhood around the world, and these soon became symbolic of the project as a whole. With record-breaking attendances at MOMA, replica versions of the exhibition then travelled the world for the next seven years, seen by more than nine million visitors in 48 countries. My wife and I saw a scaled-down version of the exhibition in London in the late 1960s, and bought two prints which we dry-mounted and kept until they faded.

Like many others we were also inspired by the exhibition’s proclamation of “the essential oneness of mankind”, announcing a new humanist world order. In their 2018 collection of essays revisiting the story of The Family of Man, Shamoon Zamir and Gerd Hurm, both American academics, claimed it was “the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography” producing “the most successful photography book of all time”.

They went on to describe the international success of the exhibition as “a near universal acceptance of the show’s particular articulation of humanism and a confirmation of its faith in photography as a medium uniquely able to communicate across culture and time”.

The ability to play is at risk

They weren’t entirely correct, as the enthusiasm they described was not shared by everybody. French critic Roland Barthes damned the exhibition soon after its Paris opening in 1956. In an eight-paragraph essay, “The Great Family of Man”, published in Les Lettres nouvelles in 1957, and later to become a chapter in his best-selling book, Mythologies, Barthes decried the idea of a “universal human nature” as privileging nature over history, a view he described as “classical humanism”. Instead, he argued for a “progressive humanism” that looks for the injustices that underwrite the different life experiences of people across the world, bringing these to the surface as a stepping stone to political action.

Some queried whether Barthes had actually seen the exhibition, or simply based his critique on the surrounding publicity, claiming that his essay hadn’t detailed a single photograph by name, subject or photographer, even though the exhibition contained several by his favourite photographer, August Sander. Nor did he mention, let alone discuss, the one photograph that upended the presumed optimistic storyline. All the photographs in the exhibition had been black and white – except one. This final image, which every visitor saw on leaving the gallery, was an enlarged colour transparency of an H Bomb cloud blotting out the sky. In this way the exhibition’s rich evocation of a diverse world of peoples and cultures was end-stopped with a graphic warning of a potential global catastrophe.

The damage had been done, however, and in Gerd Hurm’s words, “Barthes’s review kept its position as a key reference point for The Family of Man in both the academic and the popular field.” This short essay effectively derailed much of the supportive early response to the exhibition, and other intellectuals fell into line. The initial enthusiasm was forgotten.

In their book, Zamir and Hurm examined why the hopes raised by the exhibition failed to be realised. It seemed timely again in the 21st century, they argued, since “the claims of humanism and universalism are open to new debates today, not only in ethical philosophy, but also in anthropology and biology.” Such claims are more urgent than ever, they said, given the rise in ethno-nationalism and the fracturing of inter-personal solidarities resulting from identity politics, both potentially undermining the “one world, one humanity” ambitions that the exhibition sought to foster.

What has occurred in the 70 years since The Family of Man first opened? It’s clear that the post-war project of a humanist universalism has been out-manoeuvred by international power politics, and the lessons of the Second World War forgotten. Furthermore, the battlefields today – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine or Gaza – now encompass densely populated urban areas, where schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure are most at risk, and where women and children make up the majority of casualties. According to the UN, children aged 14 and under made up the biggest share of casualties in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024.

Modern warfare is becoming crueller and there are many signs that “one world” humanism is in a parlous state. As Alÿs reveals, children still want to play, and will go to great lengths to do so, using the considerable power of their energy and imagination. But their ability to play is at risk – not only from actual physical danger to their health and lives, but from the psychological constraints put upon them, from society and conditions of fear and anxiety, much of which is exacerbated by social media.

Huizinga began Homo Ludens asserting: “we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom.” What happens when this freedom is threatened by new forms of urban warfare and fundamentalist religion? “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is a phrase originating with Aristotle, though usually attributed to the Catholic priest Ignatius Loyola. All powerful ideologies, whether political or religious, have designs on children, seeing the necessity to inculcate them with their values from an early age. No wonder children seek somewhere safe and far from the eyes of adults to play and exercise their freedom, often choosing waste ground where they are “oblivious to the depressing background because of play’s enchanting ability to configure a world apart”, as Rodrigo Pérez de Arce argues.

Immersing oneself in Children’s Games and its footage from across the globe recalls a principle enshrined in the post-war exhibition The Family of Man, that protecting children must be at the core of humanist values. This means protecting their right to life, care, education and freedom from harm. But it also means protecting their freedom of expression in all its forms, central to which is the right to play. It is what makes us fully human.

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

The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law (Profile Books) by Jonathan Sumption

The theme of Jonathan Sumption’s new book is a weighty one. Across this collection of 12 essays, previously delivered as lectures or published elsewhere, he addresses nothing less than the future of western democracy. Sumption is an intellectual powerhouse: a former academic historian, he became a high-flying barrister and was, from 2012 until 2018, a member of the UK Supreme Court.

This is a sweeping set of pieces, which canter over subjects from the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong to the contested character of British colonial history. Two themes bind the collection together. The first is the rule of law, where Sumption, drawing on copious amounts of case law, has mastery of his terrain. These essays ask what role law should play in a democracy and how the decisions of judges should interact with those of elected politicians. The second theme is broader and subtler. Laced into Sumption’s essays are reflections on the culture of democracy: the combination of institutions and attitudes that fortify our societies against democratic backsliding.

Notwithstanding its timeless themes, this is a timely book, particularly given Donald Trump’s return to the White House. “The United States is one of the world’s oldest democracies,” Sumption writes, “but its recent history shows how easy it is for even a sophisticated modern state to slide into autocracy.” The UK has experienced its own political turbulence: Boris Johnson was a populist adventurer who, Sumption argues, “showed a cavalier disregard for basic standards of decency and political integrity.”

But Sumption’s true concern is not the personalities involved but the deeper forces at play and the constitutional landmarks that reveal something about the current state of democracy. In a powerful essay titled “The President’s Crimes”, he examines the recent decision of the US Supreme Court to grant presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the course of their duties, a judgement he describes as “absurd”. The president is already immune from civil litigation, on the grounds that the risk of it may encourage overcautious decision-making. The court’s move to extend this to criminal litigation – threatening democratic principles “of an altogether higher order” – is, to Sumption, inexplicable.

It’s a mark of Sumption’s independent-mindedness that the criticism he levels against the European Court of Human Rights is essentially the opposite: rather than erasing legal accountability, he believes it is stretching the law’s reach into every corner of public life. In one essay titled “Mission Creep” he zooms in on Article 6 of the European Convention, which protects the right to a fair trial. He lambasts the judgement last year in the so-called “Swiss Grannies” case, in which the applicants argued that Swiss law was not sufficiently alive to the risk of climate disaster. Their claim was heard by three Swiss courts but failed because they were judged to have no personal stake in the issue beyond that of the public at large. But the ECHR disagreed, concluding that climate disaster was a direct concern for them. They were entitled to bring the case, and they won. The verdict outraged Sumption, who calls it an “abuse of Article 6”: a right created to protect access to justice was, in his view, used to overrule the fair proceedings of national courts.

The same judgement observed that “democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law” – a remark almost tailored to infuriate Sumption, and one which speaks directly to the arguments of this book. The rule of law is a necessary condition for democracy to exist, but it is not a sufficient one. Sumption knows that, and the true purpose of this collection is to explore the different components – legal, institutional and cultural – that allow democracy to flourish.

Sumption never loses sight of the big picture. Amid detailed legal analysis, he zooms out to remind us that “the world is full of countries with impeccable constitutions and courts to enforce them, which have been subverted perfectly legally by governments.” In these places, which serve as a warning to democracies everywhere, “the democratic label remains on the bottle but the substance has been poured out of it by governments” – “often”, he adds grimly, “with public support”.

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

In Silicon Valley, where tech bros tend to revere Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Elon Musk stands out for his love of a very different book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Atheistic, absurd and created in the 1970s, Elon Musk is currently the world’s richest man.

Musk, who calls Hitchhiker’s creator Douglas Adams his favourite philosopher, emblazoned the book’s famous advice, “DON’T PANIC!”, on the dashboard of a Tesla Roadster he launched into space. He also plans to name his first Mars-bound ship after a spacecraft from the book.

For those only recently arrived on Earth, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy series. Beginning as a BBC radio show in 1978, it expanded into a five-book trilogy, television show, video game and movie. The Guide in the title alludes to a book given to the everyman character, the human Arthur Dent, which offers advice for making sense of an infinitely complex and confusing universe. Musk is not the first reader to have drawn from the wisdom buried in its principles. But how well does he really understand the book? Given his economic and now political influence in the Trump administration, the fate of the world may now hang on one tech billionaire’s interpretation of a cult sci-fi classic.

So, let’s see if Musk is abiding by the Guide.

5 Lessons Musk Has Actually Learned

1. It’s All About the Question
Musk’s biggest takeaway? Ask the right questions. In the Guide, an alien species of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings build a gigantic supercomputer to calculate the answer to “life, the universe, and everything”. The computer, Deep Thought, spends 7.5 million years on the problem, only to arrive at the cryptic answer “42”. The problem: the question was too vague.

Musk sees a crucial lesson here. True skill lies not in merely answering questions, but in knowing how to ask the right ones. If an engineer asks, “How can I optimise this part?” before asking “Do we need this part?” they risk wasting time. Once you find the right question, Musk says, the answer is relatively easy – though his definition of “easy” may be one of which many of us ordinary humans were previously unaware (see Lesson 2).

2. Obsession Wins
In the Guide, the Krikkit people – an otherwise charming and delightful alien species – make a shocking discovery: beyond the dust cloud encasing their planet lies an entire galaxy. This revelation instantly transforms them into fanatical xenophobes, convinced that the rest of the galaxy must be obliterated. Their superpower? Relentless obsession. “We can’t win against obsession,” one would-be victim laments, “They care, we don’t. They win.”

Musk shares the obsessive element of the Krikkit mindset. His work philosophy calls for 80- to 100-hour workweeks (whether or not this includes podcast appearances is unclear) and a “do it or die trying” mentality. As a result, although the Krikkit people hold the record for the shortest time between discovering space and launching a spaceship into it, Musk comes a close second.

Whether Musk has taken Adams’ deeper point that unchecked obsession might be ever so slightly less useful than the ability to occasionally stop, have a really hot cup of tea and rethink one’s goal, remains an open question.

3. The Need for Struggle
In the Guide, doctors cure all diseases – only to find that complete cures come with many unpleasant side-effects, including boredom and apathy. Their solution? Recreate ailments in “popular, easy-to-use forms”. This leads to the creation of pseudo-fractures (“all the pain, swelling and immobility of a fracture, without the inconvenience of a fracture itself”) and the use of crisis-inducer alarms to simulate the thrill of working under pressure.

Although Musk may not want you to panic, he prefers you on the verge of it. His seemingly impossible deadlines function like the Guide’s crisis inducers, forcing a sense of urgency with the expectation that this environment will spur achievement.

Pressure can indeed fuel breakthroughs, and literally keeps stars alive – but the same stars can collapse into black holes, where nothing escapes, not even the long-lost memory of why you were so worked up in the first place.

4. The World is Not Enough
The Guide begins with the Earth being demolished ostensibly to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Musk’s take-away? Don’t put all your eggs on one planet. Hence, his company SpaceX aims “to make life multi-planetary”. This would ensure humanity’s survival in the face of nuclear war, rogue AI or the consequences of J. D. Vance leading diplomatic relations with alien visitors to Earth.

5. The Need for Direct Communication
At the start of the Guide, Arthur Dent’s house is about to be demolished. He is understandably annoyed, as although the local council made the plans public they placed them inside a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavatory, in a cellar with neither lights nor stairs, with a sign on the toilet door saying “Beware of the Leopard”. Musk shares the Guide’s disdain for bureaucratic nonsense. He champions ultra-fast, unfiltered communication within his companies. Such direct communications can include being bluntly informed that you’re fired.

Five Crucial Lessons Musk Failed to Learn

1. Power Shouldn’t Belong to Those Who Want It
The Guide warns that anyone who seeks power is unfit to wield it. “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president”, says the Guide, “should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Musk seems to have missed this lesson. Then again, the Guide also states that the president’s job isn’t to wield power but to cause outrage and distract from those with real power. Zaphod Beeblebrox, the galaxy’s two-headed president who spends two years of his tenure in jail for fraud, is supremely good at his job. So, perhaps Musk has not only learnt this lesson, but learnt it too well.

2. Loose Lips Launch Intergalactic Battleships
Musk champions free speech on X, but the Guide repeatedly warns about the dangers of communication. The Babel fish, which instantly translates all languages, thereby removing barriers to communication between peoples, causes “more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation”. The Guide even suggests that speech is often used as an excuse not to think. As one character says of humans, “If they don’t keep on exercising their lips ... their brains start working.”

3. Democracy is Complicated
Musk sees direct democracy (where citizens vote directly on laws and policies) as the future – on both X and on Mars. But the Guide takes a more cynical view. On one planet, the people live under the rule of lizard overlords, whom they despise. Strangely, however, their society is a democracy. Every election, the people dutifully turn up to vote for a lizard, fearing that if they don’t, the wrong lizard may be elected. It never occurs to them that they could simply choose someone who isn’t a lizard.

Musk underestimates how much control lies not in the vote itself but in who decides what is on the ballot. Then again, perhaps he doesn’t: vox populi, vox Musk?

4. No one is Useless
In the Guide, the ruling class of the planet Golgafrincham tricks “useless” citizens – hairdressers, jingle writers, management consultants and telephone sanitisers – into boarding a spaceship under false pretences. The plan? Send them away to crash-land elsewhere.

Musk has a Golgafrincham management style, favouring mass firings. While this may work in the tech industry, applying the same philosophy to government services – like public health officials – seems questionable. Indeed, Adams tells us that the Golgafrincham elite were ironically wiped out by a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

5. Machines Don’t Have the Ultimate Answer
Musk’s AI company, xAI, aims to rigorously pursue truth, tackling our biggest questions. Although the Guide agrees that the pursuit of truth is important, it adds that there comes a point “where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”

So although Musk is careful to ask the right questions, he may have missed the most essential insight of the Guide. It’s a mistake to assume that someone out there knows the answer but refuses to tell. We won’t find the ultimate answers to life by passively asking questions, of humans or AI. We do so by actively living our lives – preferably, as the Guide suggests, supported by really hot cups of tea.

If Musk is The Answer, What is The Question?

Much like a Douglas Adams character, Musk is remarkable – the person most likely to do six impossible things before breakfast. He has taken the Guide’s lessons on obsession, struggle, the art of questioning and ensuring humanity’s survival. Yet he overlooks its insights on communication, democracy and the folly of relying on others for ultimate answers. So, is Musk, like the Guide, an “indispensable companion” for navigating an absurd universe?

Or is he more like the Haggunennon, described by the Guide as the most impatient species in the galaxy? Haggunennons embrace change so recklessly that if they can’t reach a coffee spoon, they may mutate into something “with far longer arms, but which is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee”. The Guide’s advice for dealing with such protean figures is to run away, terribly fast.

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

Back in 2015, Jon Ronson published a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which explored the relatively recent phenomenon of people using social media to, well, publicly shame people. The term “cancel culture” would gain prominence a few years later, but the ideas are related: social media suddenly became a great leveler, where it …

Our world is experiencing seismic change with the rise of power-mad leaders, spiralling conflicts and climate chaos. At such times, the big questions of life are brought into sharp relief. And so amid this turmoil, religious leaders are hoping for a return to faith, while ideologues of all stripes are seeking to exploit anxiety by offering purpose and certainty.

How should we navigate questions of meaning in our increasingly secular society, and how might a humanist approach serve as a guide? In this first edition of our new Voices section, we asked six diverse people for their perspectives.

One of the main goals of the modern feminist movement was to challenge and break apart traditional gender roles, liberating women from oppressive stereotypes and men from harmful gendered restrictions. While for centuries, women had been told their purpose in life was wifedom and motherhood, feminism offered a new way of living.

Yet in recent years, a worrying number of men and women – particularly in the younger generation – are turning again towards the old stereotypes, seeking meaning and purpose in pre-feminist ideals. From “trad wives” posting on social media about churning their own butter, or otherwise performing the soft and submissive role of a traditional “homemaker”, to influencer men pushing a macho, aggressive notion of masculinity, the gender binary is back with a bang.

It’s impossible to separate the return of strict gender roles from the rise of the global far right, and its desire to restore a so-called “natural order” of male authority and female inferiority in order to return society to a mythic past of gender “complementarianism”. This is especially attractive to the “incel” community – a subculture of men who have forged an identity around their perceived inability to form romantic or sexual relationships. As I read on one incel forum, a hierarchical version of reality solves their perceived grievance, as “every man is guaranteed a wife.”

The far right sells the return of traditional gender roles to both men and women by claiming that feminism has stolen their rightful purpose. Feminism, it argues, has left men weaker and more effeminate. It has deprived them of jobs, status and sexual partners – leaving them rootless and struggling to find their place in society. That meaning can be restored by men becoming more dominant and reclaiming their traditional, patriarchal authority.

While this thinking started in the far right, it has increasingly moved into the mainstream. Influencers like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson offer “rules” of behaviour to follow that claim to help young men find masculine purpose in a so-called feminised world. Right-wing politicians urge and even incentivise their followers to return to traditional values, with women castigated as selfish or individualistic if they don’t choose to become mothers.

Such messaging is more appealing to men. After all, it’s true that feminism has removed some of men’s power. But in order to get women to reject feminism and embrace regressive gender roles, we have to be convinced that modernity and progress has made us miserable. Happiness, and life’s true meaning, by this thinking, is found in home and hearth, rather than what the far right considers superficial pleasure-seeking and career success.

This is the message behind trad wife influencer Ayla Stewart’s online persona, Wife with a Purpose. The trad movement argues that a woman’s value is predicated on reproduction and service. And for the far right, the wife’s purpose, as per Stewart’s avatar, overlaps with race – Stewart set the “white baby challenge” encouraging white women to have as many white babies as possible. In fulfilling this “natural” purpose, women are rewarded as goddesses, liberated from the challenges of modernity and revered as the saviours of their race/nation/gender.

The only problem is that it’s a con. And dangerous to society. At its more extreme edges, trad movements encourage women to give up their financial independence and submit to their husbands, including sexually and via “domestic discipline”, and advise women to “put on the duct tape” if they are frustrated with their partner – in other words, never answer back or complain. That is not healthy for women. Or, for that matter, men.

Under the glossy Instagram posts from submissive female “role models”, and hyped up-TikTok videos of men pushing jaw extension exercises, the return of gender roles is not so much about young people embracing “traditional gender” as it is about the far right gaining a foothold in a new generation – and, worryingly, successfully pushing their narratives into the mainstream.

What if I told you that it is possible to find joy, hope and purpose, even during these difficult times of climate emergency? While we witness weather disasters that increase in frequency, and world leaders who prioritise profit over people and planet, it can feel almost impossible to see what light there is. Additionally, many of us feel disconnected from those around us, and disillusioned with governments we believed would protect us. But, amidst the doom and gloom we feel about the climate crisis, we can still build hope. In the words of the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

I am a climate justice activist, who one day hit extreme burnout. After this, I learned how to navigate the grief, anger and frustration, without letting it consume me or turn to apathy. I even have a phrase I started using, “climate joy,” to explore why finding joy is essential and how we might practise it together. When we rise collectively, a thriving and sustainable future is ahead of us.

Unicef refers to climate anxiety as a heightened emotional or physical distress in response to the climate crisis. A 2021 Lancet study found that 59 per cent of teens and young adults globally were very or extremely worried about climate change. In 2023, a YouGov poll also discovered that one in three young people in the UK were scared, sad or pessimistic about climate change. So if you feel this way, you definitely are not alone. However, hope is not only possible, it can actually mobilise climate advocacy.

So, how does one hold on to hope and joy in these times? We need a balance between resistance, community care and rest. First, it is crucial to identify how we feel. If you are finding it difficult to come to terms with your emotions, talk to a friend or family member, check in with someone who feels similarly, and speak honestly about how you feel. This eco anxiety is a sign of your humanity, and that you deeply care about what is happening.

After that, find the intersection of what brings you joy, what skills and experience you have, and what needs doing. It could start with simply searching online for a local climate or environmental group in your area, or even a national or international one. Can you dedicate any of your time, knowledge or resources? There is a role for everyone in the climate movement: artists, designers, those good at logistics, caretakers, noise makers, writers, researchers, visionaries, filmmakers, financial experts, legal advisers, or maybe you are just great at spreadsheets. I promise, there is something out there.

And remember: perfectionism is a myth. People can feel that, in order to act on climate, they must know everything and make perfect choices. While it is important to do the best we can individually, governments and corporations are leading the destruction. Blaming yourself for imperfection is a distraction.

There is also a lot we can learn from nature about community. In healthy forests, each tree is connected to others via the mycelium network where they share resources in the “wood wide web”, as it was dubbed by German forester Peter Wohlleben. Mycelia are incredibly tiny threads of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or into tree roots. Just like this network, we are also a movement dependent on each other. We support others with time, advice, love and care through uniting for a better future.

One way I find joy through my activism is through harnessing the power of music and culture, being in community and making sure to spend time mindfully outdoors. Being out in nature brings me a sense of solace. After you read this, consider when you can next go outside, and challenge yourself to identify two birds, plants and trees.

Finally, never underestimate our power collectively, and what is within you to create ripple effects of change. The oceans are rising, but so are we.

A great malaise is upon us, we are told. Prophets of our time warn of a growing “meaning crisis” in the western world. They preach: in this sickly modern age, wrought by secular liberalism, we have lost the shared narratives that once gave us hope and gave coherence to our lives. This existential disaster is leaving us adrift, unmoored from tradition, community and purpose.

Don’t believe it. All this is just the latest version of an age-old fear that has dogged many an anxious man who has lived long enough to witness the world change around him in disappointing ways.

There is nothing so perennial as the myth of the crisis of meaning. Perhaps every generation, upon reaching a certain maturity, looks at the world it once understood and feels some sense of disorientation. The structures that made sense of events shift beyond recognition. The institutions that once seemed permanent are revealed as contingent. New ideas – unfamiliar and unsettling and challenging – take centre stage.

Some people, faced with this natural discomfort, take aim at the changes and, because they represent a different view from their own, accuse them of being wicked, bankrupt or both. The idea that we are living through a uniquely precarious crisis of meaning, on this view, is less a diagnosis of our times than a near-universal experience of middle age.

Or perhaps there is something more cynical going on. The loudest voices warning of our existential vacuum are those who have something to sell – literally or metaphorically. Religious institutions and individuals whose ideas (debunked by history, physics, anthropology and a dozen other disciplines) have long been in decline in most of the west, see in this narrative an opportunity and support it fervently in the hope of a stampede in their direction.

If modernity leaves us lost, the argument goes, then surely a return to tradition, to faith, to the old certainties, is the solution? This is a well-worn strategy. Exaggerate a natural condition of human life and then present yourself as the only remedy. It has been used by the hawkers of outmoded ideas since the beginning of recorded history.

Although it is a strategy that should be threadbare, our current media have burnished it. A burgeoning industry of podcasters and popular authors thrives on stoking fears of cultural decay. They tell us that we are lost because we have abandoned the wisdom of our “Judaeo-Christian” heritage, or that we must rediscover our primal selves. They promote a return to authoritarian structures, bait-and-switching hierarchy and control as a substitute for communal bonds. Others peddle their own bespoke spiritualities, selling millions of copies to an audience primed by this industry to believe that something is missing.

This is another reason for humanists to be sceptical of the claims of the doom-mongers. The principal villain in the cause of the “meaning crisis” – named or unnamed – is humanism itself. The supposed crisis is framed as a loss – of shared moral foundations and of faith.

But these things have never been, and should never be, uncontested. Meaning, belonging and purpose have never been the exclusive province of religious or authoritarian beliefs. From the connections we find in friendship and family to the pursuit of knowledge and the joy of artistic expression, from the struggles for justice to the wonder of scientific discovery, the sources of meaning in modern life are as numerous as they are profound. The fact that they do not come prepackaged is an advantage, not a deficit, and a liberation, not a loss.

I’m not saying we don’t live in a precarious age. We do. But the search for meaning is not a crisis. It is a condition of being human. And what we should attend to is not some so-called crisis of meaning but the ongoing, millennia-old battle of ideas. A humanist response should not deny the unease that can accompany change, nor dismiss the yearning for connection and purpose and the virtue in seeking it. But we should not buy the wares of the revivalists, because they are wrong, and rather than panic in the face of change, we should embrace the opportunities it offers – to grow, to rethink, to imagine new and better ways of living together.

We should reject the idea that we must achieve this through a swerve towards the past; towards conformity, ignorance and obedience to external authorities, to give our lives structure. Meaning is not something given from above, but something made, something emergent in our interactions with the world and each other. We should affirm that again and again – and the immense potential within each of us to live lives of deep significance in the here and now.

When I was a student in the 90s and noughties, I learned that religion all over the world was in a slow but inexorable decline. It was a given. In many countries, including here in Britain, this process has largely unfolded as predicted. But the theory of secularisation has a big problem at its heart: it is obsessed with religion. When we describe society or ourselves as “secular”, the main thing we reveal is our parent complex.

This obsession with religion distracts us from the alternative sources of meaning that have taken the place of faith for so many people. It discourages us from thinking about or even noticing that we make meaning in conversation with other people and as part of broader meaning-making cultures, as part of “worldviews” – or “existential traditions”, as I call them in my work. Some have argued that philosophies of life are rarified things, of interest only to cerebral types – writers, artists and academics, perhaps. But these meaning-making cultures are all around us, in great diversity.

Even quite young children who do not have traditional existential beliefs – beliefs, that is, centred around God – still reflect upon and are able to talk about existential issues, as explored in the book Growing Up Godless by Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe. The children interviewed for the book, aged between eight and 11, were all able to say something about the origins of the Universe and of life itself; about religious ideas and identities, and how their own are similar and different to those around them; or about that particular uncanny quality that is shared, they think, by a special category of beings – Father Christmas, unicorns and God. These children are meaning-making creatures, exploring the world to try to make sense of what it means to exist, to be real.

I collaborated in the research underpinning Growing Up Godless, involving children, their parents and teachers in schools across England. The findings were also published in sociology journals. Children were interviewed in pairs, and their conversations show that they work out their metaphysical and existential orientations together – in conversation with their friends, as well as with parents and teachers. This and other research also points to the arts, literature and other media as sources people draw on to develop their existential orientations and identities. So it is that existential beliefs develop into traditions, shared between people and passed on over time.

However, although kids are thinking about existential issues from a young age, they are not encouraged to think of themselves as doing this. If our capacity to think and experience the world existentially has not declined with “secularisation”, our capacity to understand this aspect of our lives maybe has.

The big factor here is the decline of institutions dedicated to existential meaning-making, as the churches and other religious institutions decline but are not replaced by non-religious alternatives. Children – just like their parents – build their meaning-making positions in interaction with people around them, directly and mediated through culture. These loosely shared beliefs, ethics and aesthetics are not, however, associated with centralised, dedicated worldview institutions.

Does this matter? Maybe not, at least on a personal level. But it does make contemporary existential outlooks much less visible in society, even to those who hold them – and that can have consequences. It can allow the spaces carved out for existential reflection to remain dominated by institutionalised worldviews – that is, religions – even though those worldviews are less and less common. For kids, this means religious education classes that disproportionately focus on traditional religion, in schools that tend to see discussion of non-religious worldviews as a matter for the science classrooms.

More generally, it means widespread illiteracy in nonreligious existential culture that can impact public life in diverse ways. Without making the spaces we dedicate to existential reflection and identities accessible to all, we end up with multiple lines of inequality. Non-religious worldviews sometimes occupy privileged positions in our culture, but are less often subjected to the same historical and critical reflection that their religious counterparts are. The religious, on the other hand, benefit from recognition of their worldviews, as well as extensive dedicated resources for their existential development that are not available to the non-religious.

The majority of people living in Britain are now non-religious, yet they lack dedicated institutions that encourage and support existential reflection. Given this imbalance, schools and universities are of great importance. The humanist movement is part of an important campaign to rename religious education as “religion and worldviews” education, and to fully incorporate the study of non-religious worldviews, which would be a step in the right direction. Meaning-making is for everyone. Our social institutions and common culture should reflect this.

In our age of choice, the decision to have children can no longer be taken for granted: having and raising children has ceased to be the standard outcome of adulthood, and is no longer understood to be a necessary or constitutive feature of a good life. In a UK study released last year, less than half of those surveyed who were 25-34 years old said they “definitely or probably” intended to have kids. In a US survey, only 26 per cent of people agreed that having children is important for living a fulfilling life, compared to 71 per cent for “having a job or career they enjoy”, and 61 per cent for “having close friends”.

When the old frameworks – religion, tradition, social convention – no longer hold sway, what’s left? In recent years, amid cratering global birthrates, crackdowns on reproductive rights and rising concerns about climate change, the role of children in human life has become an ever more politically loaded and personally fraught subject. Against this backdrop, for many liberal and progressive people, the decision around whether to have children must be backed up and justified, either on the basis of personal satisfaction and individual desire – or else by vague appeals to higher forces or callings.

“All the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted,” Rivka Galchen writes of the early months of motherhood in her autofictional novel Little
Labours. “The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning.” Having a baby thrusts Galchen into a strange new world: she describes her encounters with her daughter as if she were a wild animal, or an alien. The forays into spiritual seeking and surrealism that punctuate Galchen’s book are meant to express the way that both the decision and the experience of having children exceed the ordinary.

This very contemporary tendency to mystify and exalt the experience of motherhood (the “extreme sport” and “shamanic experience” of natural birth; the intense, “eerie” but beatific first days with a newborn) reflects the fact that, for many secular people, the decision to become a parent – with its unavoidable implications of identity, sacrifice and fate – is as close as we can get these days to genuine religious questioning.

But the temptation to transfigure parenthood into a quasi-religious experience – redeeming it as a series of signs from another realm of meaning – testifies at the same time to how difficult it is for us to embrace the decision and its aftermath on its own terms. Having children is understood as a worthy choice only once it’s been sublimated into some greater cause or struggle: it must be made “sodden with meaning” to mean much of anything.

But we needn’t protest too much that parenting is the most meaningful or important activity one can ever undertake; we can, with bell hooks, “simply state that it is meaningful and important”. And so we must. For the mystical flights of fancy are always also an implicit admission that our ordinary ethical resources are not sufficient to the task of finding value in the work of raising the next generation, of doing one’s share to contribute to a flourishing human future.

To do so, we don’t have to look far: we can forgo insisting on parenthood’s otherworldly charms and instead focus on the lives we lead, retraining our gaze on the commitments we make every day. Becoming a parent is a tremendous ethical task – nurturing a dependent, helpless being, preparing them to confront life’s endless challenges, their fellow humans’ endless faults, teaching them to affirm life in the face of these difficulties and failings.

There are, of course, other ways of participating in this ethical project: one could be a teacher, a godparent, an aunt or uncle, a mentor, a foster parent. But the brief is the same: “What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken,” wrote the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. “And what is a human being’s vocation but the highest expression of his love of life?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There rarely is only one Lady Gaga. The video for “Disease”, the first proper single from her new album Mayhem, opens with her in a white dress, lying on the hood of a car. It is being driven, we soon find out, by another version of her, this time dressed in black. The two Gagas sing at each other menacingly for a while, from either side of the windshield. Eventually, a third Gaga appears, and drags white Gaga away. The pair end up fighting on the pavement, then running away. Black Gaga looks on.

In “Abracadabra”, the second single, she wears a red latex outfit, adorned with intimidating pins and nails, topped with a huge, spiky hat. “The category is,” she says as the video begins, “dance ... or die.” We then move to the arena she is overseeing, which is filled with dancers clad in white – including Gaga herself. Not for the first time, the singer is the judge and the one being judged; the performer and the audience. And the way she walks with her red cane – how could it not be a nod to the video for her song “Paparazzi”, from 2009? The disjointed, jerking movements are eerily similar.

It’s clear that Gaga knows her pop culture references – it’s hard to see some of her looks in “Disease” and not think of Madonna’s “Frozen” – but, on the whole, her main inspiration is herself. Some of the details will only be spotted by obsessives, but others are more blatant. The lyrics “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na / Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga” are a clear echo of “Rah, rah-ah-ah-ah / Roma, roma-ma / Gaga, ooh-la-la” from the iconic “Bad Romance”.

This doesn’t mean she has stagnated as a singer-songwriter. Instead, it should be seen as Gaga doing exactly what she said she would. Interviewed by the Independent in 2009, as she crashed into the mainstream, she described herself as “a bit of a Warholian copycat”. As she argued at the time, “Some people say everything [in music and fashion] has been done before, and to an extent they are right. I think the trick is to honour your vision and reference and put together things that have never been put together before ... I like to be unpredictable, and I think it’s very unpredictable to promote pop music as a highbrow medium.”

Echoing those comments, Rachel Syme wrote in the New York Times in 2018 that Gaga “read Andy Warhol’s books and realized that what most people want, when they dream of fame, is not necessarily wealth or power but limitlessness: the ability to change”.

Stefani Germanotta has been a world-famous artist for almost two decades. A gifted pianist from a young age, she studied method acting for 10 years and gained admission to a New York music school at 17. Before signing her first major contract, she haunted the bars of Manhattan as part of “pop burlesque rock show” Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue. Fame came knocking quickly after that.

Since then, she has used her Gaga persona to speak out on a number of issues, often surrounding the queer community. In 2010, she attended an awards ceremony dressed head to toe in raw beef, as a protest against the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prevented openly LGBTQ people from serving in the army. She spoke at the National Equality March in 2009, campaigned on anti-gay bullying in American schools and was ordained as a minister to marry two of her female friends. Most recently, she has loudly opposed a raft of transphobic policies announced by President Trump.

When it comes to music, she is just as hyperactive. Gaga has released dance-pop and electronic albums; she has strayed into pop, rock, techno, and released not one but two albums of jazz standards with the legendary singer Tony Bennett. She has been happy and sad, broken and defiant, fun and furious. Often, she has been several of those things at once.

At first glance, for example, her last album Chromatica was a joyous one. She had long pink hair and jumped around with Ariana Grande. But there’s a darker undertone to the songs and as Gaga revealed to Vogue a year after its release, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in more pain in my life than when I was making that record.” Mayhem, by comparison, seems dark and ominous but the music radiates with glee. Germanotta is 38 years old and seems to be wildly in love with her fiancé, tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky. By all accounts, she is thriving.

Her recent success wasn’t a given. Last year, she played Harley Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux, a movie that was panned by – well, everyone. It was corny where it should have been camp; dour when it should have been spiky. Back in 2021, she starred in House of Gucci, which, while not as unpopular as the Joker sequel, still received what we may politely call “mixed” reviews. In order to prepare for her role as Italian socialite Patrizia Reggiani, Gaga, who is of Italian descent herself, had “lived as her for a year and a half” and “spoke with an accent for nine months”, as she told Vogue. Despite this, a slightly embarrassed dialogue coach told the Daily Beast that she actually sounded more Russian than Mediterranean.

That is, in effect, the Lady Gaga story: you never know what she will do next, or whether it will be any good, but you can be sure that she’s worked hard and taken it all incredibly seriously.

This is a refreshing approach for a pop megastar to take in 2025, especially considering the way her contemporaries deal with their craft. Taylor Swift, arguably the most famous singer of the century, delivers album after album of similar-sounding songs. The themes remain the same – love and loss, relatable alienation, the trials of young womanhood – and so do the vocals and arrangements. Her last tour mentioned the various “eras” she has gone through but, to the untrained ear, there isn’t much separating albums like 1989 and Midnights. She plays it safe and the fans adore her for that; they know what to expect, and she always delivers.

Beyoncé reinvents herself, but she rarely takes risks. If Queen Bey releases a club album, she will be releasing the best club album of the year. If she chooses to try her hand at country music she will work on this new direction for many years, as she did with Cowboy Carter, collaborating with over 70 writers across the album.

Lady Gaga, the third sister of pop’s triumvirate, refuses to play it safe. When she was 23, she told the Independent that “right now, the only thing that I am concerned with in my life is being an artist. I had to suppress it for so many years in high school because I was made fun of, but now I’m completely insulated in my box of insanity and I can do whatever I like.”

That she is seemingly still operating with the same mindset a decade and a half later is heartening. It would be easier for her to obey the algorithm, and give the fans something predictable to chew on. She has the money and fame to make sure that she never fails again, but she has chosen to keep taking risks instead. There will be victories and there will be failures; the only guarantee we have is that she has poured all of herself into it, and sincerely believes in whatever she has just put out.

Mayhem, as it happens, is fine. It has ups and downs. It doesn’t always know what it wants to focus on, and so sometimes it feels like it’s firing from every cylinder at once, with suitably chaotic results. In a review for Vulture, Craig Jenkins wrote that “if you come for one flavor, you misunderstand the depth of the Gaga palate”. Mayhem isn’t a masterpiece, and that’s the best thing about it. Long may our flawed queen continue to reign.

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Back in March, I talked about a court case in which Trump’s attorneys argued that the administration had the right to discriminate against transgender people by citing research that directly contradicted their own arguments. …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: When I was 18, I was finishing up my freshman year of college and was hoping to stay in Boston by getting an apartment, which would require a roommate. A girl who worked in …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: About 15 years ago, the dumbest politician to take the national stage up until that point was Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and, at that time, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. In …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: There’s so much bad news surrounding “AI” right now that I’ve had a real hard time narrowing down what I want to talk about. By “AI” of course, I’m talking about generative AI, large …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the full description:

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

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

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

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

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

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

 

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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