You knew I’d have to read an article titled Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans. How cool is that? And then they’ve illustrated it with some very appealing figures.

Also, the abstract promises much.

Top predators drive changes in ecosystem structure. For the last ~370 million years, large-sized vertebrates have dominated the apex of the marine food chain, while invertebrates have served as smaller prey. Here we describe invertebrate top predators from this “age of vertebrates,” the earliest finned octopuses (Cirrata) from Late Cretaceous sediments (~100 to 72 million years ago), as identified based on huge, exceptionally well-preserved fossil jaws and their wear. This extensive wear suggests dynamic crushing of hard skeletons. Asymmetric wear patterns further indicate lateralized behavior, suggesting advanced intelligence. With a calculated total length of ~7 to 19 meters, these octopuses may represent the largest invertebrates thus described, rivaling contemporaneous giant marine reptiles. Our findings show that powerful jaws, and the loss of superficial skeletons, convergently transformed cephalopods and marine vertebrates into huge, intelligent predators.

But does the paper deliver? Sad to say, it doesn’t. I was disappointed on how far the authors stretched an interesting technique to reach an excessive conclusion.

What they did was collect fossil octopus beaks and subject them to grinding tomography — basically shaving away the rock, photographing each exposed slice, and using an AI to help reconstruct a detailed 3-D image of the beak that allowed them to view the wear and tear on the beak’s surface, presumably seeing the damage acquired as they chewed their way through their Cretaceous prey. The entirety of the data in the paper is an analysis of scratches and wear on these beaks.

That’s good stuff. No data too small — it’s all data. But wait: this paper contains nothing but measurements of beaks, but manages to expand this into a whole set of conclusions about the marine ecosystem.

These wear patterns suggest that Late Cretaceous giant Cirrata were active carnivores that frequently crushed hard shells and bones. The long scratches distributed on wide areas of their jaw reflect the dynamic use of the entire jaw for dismantling prey. Asymmetric loss of the jaw edges suggests lateralized behavior, which has been linked to a highly developed brain and cognition. This, in turn, suggests that the earliest octopuses already possessed advanced intelligence. Laterality is known in modern octopuses, whose high intelligence matches that of vertebrates. The exceptionally large jaws of adult N. jeletzkyi and N. haggarti suggest a strong bite force because cephalopod jaw muscles enlarge as the jaw size increases. The long lateral walls in their jaws revealed by the new digital specimens reported here show that Nanaimoteuthis had large jaw muscles. The chipping on both the rostrum and jaw edge was caused by strong shear stress beyond the yield point of the most robust part of the jaw. The transverse cracks in N. haggarti are probably a trace of larger shear failures. These large fractures thus suggest a powerful bite. In giant Cirrata, the jaws are smaller than those of contemporaneous Cretaceous vertebrate top predators, which measure ~1.7 m in length. Instead of using a large mouth, the long and flexible arms of octopuses serve for catching large prey. The giant Cirrata probably consumed large prey with their long arms and jaws, playing the role of top predators in Cretaceous marine ecosystems.

All we’ve got are scratches on beaks, with extrapolation from beak size to overall size. From that we leap to the conclusion that these giant octopuses were rivals to mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and sharks. We assume they’re top predators in the absence of actual evidence of predation or their role in the ancient ecosystem.

I’m not even going to touch the idea that asymmetric scratches are good evidence of high intelligence.

I am reminded of the speculations of Mark McMenamin, who thought circular shapes in Triassic sediments were evidence of a gigantic Kraken. He also found a broken piece of rock that he extrapolated to claim it was the tip of a giant kraken beak.

At least McMenamin’s extravagant conclusions weren’t getting published in Science.

It’s the perfect storm, and I have myself to blame. I gave the fourth exam of the semester yesterday, and many of the students bombed. This happens every year, and it’s because the fourth exam is the hardest of them all: everything accumulates in this course, and it’s the combination of lots of math and understanding the topology of weird chromosomes entangled and swapping bits around that breaks their brains. Couple the fact that these are generally smart, high-achieving students with the shock of getting a 40% on an exam, and it’s going to get ugly. I’m going over the answers with them this afternoon.

Also, we have a major lab report due next week, and an in-class presentation. It is a high stress situation.

Students are already emailing me with requests for a point here and there on back assignments and exams. I’m going to spend my weekend with spreadsheets recalculating all their old assignments and putting together a final assessment, which will inspire a further frenzy of grade-grubbing.

If I drank anymore, this would be the weekend I’d finish off a bottle of good whisky, but I don’t drink at all anymore. I’d rather talk about genetics than grades, but the system will not allow that.

I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right (St Martin’s Press) by Matt Kaplan

We like to think that science is guided by a noble ideal: evidence rules. When new data emerges, scientists revise their theories, abandon cherished ideas and move on. Except, of course, that this is largely nonsense. Science may aspire to objectivity, but it is practised by humans, people riddled with cognitive biases, egos, tribal instincts and professional anxieties.

It is in this messy, human space that Matt Kaplan’s I Told You So firmly plants itself. At the heart of the book is the tragic and infuriating story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the 19th-century physician who demonstrated that simple hand hygiene by medical staff dramatically reduced deaths from puerperal fever, an infection that was killing vast numbers of women after childbirth. Kaplan tells this story with empathy and narrative drive, capturing Semmelweis as a dogged and deeply principled figure. Yet he also makes clear that Semmelweis was uncomfortable with self-promotion and slow to package his findings in ways that his peers could, or would, accept. This was not simply a failure of evidence, but a failure of communication and culture. By weaving in the work and personalities of contemporaries, he vividly recreates a scientific community on the brink of understanding infection, yet stubbornly resistant to ideas that challenged entrenched hierarchies.

Kaplan portrays Semmelweis’s approach in sharp contrast to Louis Pasteur’s, who worked in adjacent areas of microbiology and vaccination during the same period. Pasteur emerges as an undeniable scientific giant and a gifted communicator, but also as someone deeply unethical in how he presented his work and marginalised competitors. Kaplan details how Pasteur rewrote the narratives of his discoveries to make them more compelling, freely appropriated others’ ideas without proper credit and used his growing fame to erase rivals from the story.

While Semmelweis provides the book’s backbone, Kaplan deftly segues into modern parallels. Threads from palaeontology, drug development and animal welfare show that the dynamics of exclusion and dismissal are far from historical curiosities. Running alongside the Semmelweis narrative is the contemporary story of Katalin Karikó, whose work on mRNA was ignored, ridiculed and repeatedly defunded. The applications of her work were not immediately obvious, nor was it fashionable, and so Karikó was turned down for funding, pushed out of prestigious research environments, demoted and belittled. Yet her years of experience and results eventually led to her joining BioNTech in 2013, and to the subsequent development of the mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives and helped bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control.

Kaplan uses these stories to build a compelling and uncomfortable argument: science does not always advance by rewarding the best ideas, but too often by amplifying the loudest voices. As he writes, “science is rich with tales of those who were right but who had an exceptionally challenging explanation that they needed to communicate.” The lesson is not that all outsiders are correct, nor that consensus is inherently bad, but that healthy science requires humility, curiosity and better listening.

This is where Kaplan’s excellent book quietly becomes a manifesto for science communication. If scientific progress is to be driven by the best ideas rather than the sharpest elbows, then scientists and communicators alike have a responsibility to seek out those doing careful, unfashionable or poorly advertised work and help them be heard. Not everyone can, or should, communicate like Pasteur. Yet the fact that his version of events persists to this day, even when contradicted by his own laboratory notebooks, is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the enduring power of good storytelling in science.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Yesterday, I posted a photo of Theridion on a signpost, and unclefrogy asked:

the question I have is what kind of prey is also attracted to that area and what time of the day because that spider sure looks well fed.

A good question! Theridion is a cobweb spider, and cobwebs are optimized for catching prey on the ground, unlike orb webs which are better for catching flying prey. These particular spiders are on a metal post 1.5 meters off the ground, so they’re unlikely to catch grounded prey. But I was passing by this same signpost today, and saw that the spider had been successful!

That’s a dead dessicated Dipteran by my finger (I had to poke my finger in to stabilize the victim — it’s windy today, and everything on silk was vibrating madly). So…they’re catching gnats and flies and mosquitos that encounter the tangle of cobweb silk.

Also, don’t insult the spider. The Theridiidae all have those nearly spherical abdomens, so she is a beauty among her species.

I don’t pay much attention to site stats, actively avoiding digging into them. I’m not interested in optimizing for traffic, or that SEO nonsense, but as the administrator for this site I’ve got this little toolbar at the top of the window that graphically shows how many visits the site gets. It’s not something I really care about, but I did like the predictable wave-like plot — visits rise until about noon, and then slowly decline over the course of the afternoon and evening, before starting to rise in the early morning. The tide goes in, the tide goes out, and you can’t explain that…OK, except that I can, because it tells me I have a predominantly American audience and it’s just a reflection of human daily activity levels in my hemisphere. That’s another reason to not attach much significance to those numbers.

Except…over the last few weeks, the rhythm has been disrupted. The waves are gone. I’m getting site activity all night long, which makes me suspect this isn’t human activity. On closer inspection, site views have also been more than doubled, which sounds like a good thing, except that I seem to be talking to non-human entities. Not aliens, though — AIs scouring the web.

Then I saw this comment on Mastodon:

It’s all artificial, and not at all intelligent. They’re not contributing anything, they’re not the audience I want to talk to, and I think all they’re going to do is jack up my hosting expenses.

If it is aliens, though, welcome. Leave a comment. I’m sure many people here would love to have a conversation with you.

Hi everyone, today we’ll be talking about the most important news of the day: The Quartering is being accused of being a cuck by his fellow rightwing chuds in a massive drama explosion known as The Cuckening. Yep, those sure are all words I just said. English words.  Okay, don’t worry, this is online-drama-adjacent but …

Remember Devin Nunes? He’s the guy who sued a parody account, Devin Nunes Cow for $250 million (I’ve seen that number before — it seems to be a standard ridiculous number used in lawsuits by members of the Trump administration.) He lost. As a member of the Trump coven, though, he couldn’t really lose, and he was appointed to be CEO of Truth Social, the absurd far right social media platform our president uses to broadcast “Truths”.

Alas, the poor man is now stepping down from his lofty position. Don’t feel sorry for him, though, because despite the catastrophic financial losses behind Truth Social, Nunes has been cleaning up.

After soaring shortly before Trump’s re-election in November 2024, stock in the company plunged 67%, wiping out more than $6 billion in investor wealth.
…
Since it went public two years ago, Trump Media has lost more than $1.1 billion. Nunes got total compensation of $47 million in 2024, the last year for which figures are available.

$47 million! In one year! For running a non-viable social media platform!

You know, I’m retiring one year from now, and my wife and I are both concerned about the dramatic drop in our income starting in May 2027. My plan right now is to get a cushy sinecure with some large failing company — a job I’m not qualified to handle, but that therefore cannot demand much work from me — and then retire again after a year or so, once I’ve got a few million dollars. I would never ever have any money worries if I had a $47 million nest egg, which would keep me in grand style from now until my inevitable demise.

Does anyone know of any job openings in the overpaid-with-minimal-duties category?

Or do I need to be Republican with connections to the most corrupt administration in American history?

Last summer, I finally visited Libya. Having worked as a freelance journalist throughout African countries for half a decade, I had wanted to visit Libya for years – not for the beaches or cuisine, but because I have long been drawn to the rough intrigues of North African politics, and the stories surrounding Muammar Gaddafi and his legacy. I also wanted to see the Roman, Phoenician and Greek relics that stand along the Libyan coastline, cut off from the global tourism industry.

What I discovered was a mesmerisingly beautiful but elusive country. To some degree, I knew what I was getting myself into. You can’t just go on holiday to Libya. I had to obtain a letter of invitation, two separate visas and a pre-paid personal security attachment for each side of the country, which is split between rival factions. I also had to solemnly swear to avoid any kind of journalism at any time, or risk being deported from the country.

This produced a level of paranoia I had not felt in any of the previous 37 countries I’ve visited in my long career. I doubt the government would approve of the notes that ended up feeding this piece, but I wanted to try to understand a country that holds such a peculiar place in the western imagination.

For Europeans, Libya is the closest edge of the African continent: a borderland imagined as both exotic and dangerous, a gateway through which migrants might surge north, or oil might flow west. For Americans, it is often thought of less as a nation of people than as a geopolitical riddle – from Gaddafi’s flamboyant dictatorship and the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli to the Benghazi consulate attack by a group aligned with Al-Qaeda, on 11 September 2012. Libya is a canvas onto which western powers project their fears, ambitions and fantasies.

When I touched down in Tripoli at the apex of summer, I had only a cursory knowledge of the country. I knew that Libya today is less a unified nation than a fractured state suspended between competing factions. It sits between Tunisia and Egypt on the Mediterranean’s southern rim, where for most of the 20th century it traded oil for stability. Then came the bloody fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, following the Libyan civil war and Nato’s intervention, which did not, as was piously promised by intervening leaders, deliver Libya into democracy. Libya has since splintered into rival administrations – the internationally recognised government in Tripoli to the west, and the eastern stronghold under General Khalifa Haftar – each backed by a rotating cast of foreign patrons. Hence my two security details.

I was taken to the sanitised centre of the capital, Tripoli, and then to the breathtaking Graeco-Roman ruins scattered along the coast. My tour guides and I also visited the villages of Berber tribes that existed in North Africa long before its Arab conquest. But this was Libya as stage décor: the approved exhibits of a country that seems to fear its own backstage.

In Martyr’s Square, in the centre of the capital, I was delivered to the rows of gigantic Libyan flags towering over children devouring cotton candy, and families meandering between jewelry shops and cafés. My first guide, an older man with a scholar’s passion for archaeology, became a little less stiff when I joined him in his chain-smoking habit. My police escort soon lit up, too. As we drove through Tripoli, the contrasts revealed themselves: glittering hotels, largely empty, standing beside eroded apartment blocks perforated by bullet holes. Whole districts remain scarred from the 2011 conflict, when the uprising against Gaddafi turned the city into a sniper’s playground. Fifteen years later, Tripoli has not healed. I pointed to one scarred façade. “Oh, just some fighting between the militias,” my guide muttered, eager to steer the conversation toward anything else. “You know we have a very nice fish market here!”

The escort, slouched in the backseat, alternated between his phone and sleep. But he was there at every moment. Whenever I needed a light. When I had to cross the street. He even came along on a bathroom stop on the highway. Once, I had a late-night craving for a shawarma from a small bistro no more than a block from the hotel. He came with me, and we ate our spiced meat together.

I had entertained the faint hope that after each neatly choreographed stop, the three of us might slip the leash of our schedule and wander into the neighbourhoods where people actually lived, or the outskirts of the city. My requests were met with polite but firm refusal. I soon found that every step on my itinerary had to be pre-cleared, and that I would be shadowed by my guards – equal parts friendly and suspicious – at every turn.

But I could sense another Libya, beyond the curated facades, where the country’s contradictions thrive quietly. It is a country of tension and inequality. Oil wealth, which might have been a unifying resource for all Libyans, has today become a bargaining chip between militias, bureaucrats and opportunists, feeding a political economy that thrives on corruption and opacity.

And then there is religion. Libya shares some characteristics with other strict Islamic countries: the absence of alcohol, women covering up, commerce shutting on Fridays, and the constant use of religious verbiage: Inshallah (“God willing”), Alhamdulillah (“praise be to God”) or Bismillah, which is said to announce the start of any important action. To ingratiate myself I started to say the latter before each meal, as locals did, to the apparent admiration of my guide and police escort.

But Libya has its own particular brand of Islam. It’s overwhelmingly Sunni but historically rooted in Sufi traditions, particularly the Senussi movement – a puritan yet mystical brotherhood that blended tribal unity with moral restraint. This tradition once bound Libya’s deserts and tribes under a shared faith and even produced the country’s only monarch, King Idris.

Today, though religious freedom is nominally guaranteed, straying from orthodox Sunni Islam can lead to intimidation or persecution, especially in areas controlled by conservative militias. Depending on where you are in the country, the law is uneven and often dictated by local power brokers rather than any real constitution.

I got used to hearing the call for prayer, rising from minarets five times a today and broadcast across radio stations. While I didn’t see the morality police in action, I knew that in November 2024, the Libyan Interior Minister had reinstated this force, which patrols the public and enforces rules around “modest” clothing, and the requirement for women to be accompanied by male guardians when in public.

Men moved through the streets in a disciplined palette of black, grey, brown and sand-coloured thawbs and kanduras, traditional long robes that blurred each individual into a uniform silhouette. Near the restaurants and cafés in Tripoli, I spotted young Libyans wearing western clothes, or designer shirts and jeans, but nothing loud or flashy. I didn’t see many women, except for the occasional matriarch tucked away in the back corner of a restaurant with her family, making sure the children ate.

Yet even through the narrow window given to me, the country’s beauty shone through – the marble and ruins gleamed with a serenity that made me gasp aloud. The Arch of Marcus Aurelius in the Old City of Tripoli, erected to honour the Roman Emperor and his co-emperor Lucius Verus after their victories over the Parthians, is an extraordinary relic that has survived through centuries of conquest and urban transformation. It endures not because anyone cherished it, but because no one quite got around to tearing it down.

At the ancient coastal ruin of Apollonia, I saw the remains of a once-proud Greek port that outlived its makers and their gods, its walls pitted from grenade fire. My guide, my escort and I were the only people there. It was eerie, but beautiful. Archeological sites in Italy or Greece are often surrounded by snack shops, trinket sellers and tourist traps. In Libya there is nothing but the wind, the cry of birds and the faint whisper of the Mediterranean.

It’s a perverse irony that the post-conflict zone offers a form of tourism impossible elsewhere. Standing there, I could imagine what the ancients themselves might have heard, as if time had folded back on itself. Roman amphitheatres, detailed mosaics, coastlines that would be sought-after destinations elsewhere, all languish in silence.

Overall, my Libyan tour offered me as much valuable tourism as it did state theatre. The restrictions I went through as a tourist are a part of a larger policy of restricting free speech and the press, which includes preventing Libyans, as well as foreign journalists, from covering the challenges facing the country. One of these is the presence of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, who risk everything to cross Libya’s porous southern borders in the hope of reaching Europe, usually via Greece or Italy. The continual flow of these desperate people is a rebuke to the idea of Libya as a sealed and orderly state.

I was carried through a curated experience, permitted to see the ruins of antiquity but not the ruins of the present. Yet in the very act of concealment, Libya tells on itself. It reveals a nation desperate to project solidity, but in doing so shows only its divisions.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

First, I have just launched a 3 min survey on magic and it would be wonderful if you could take part. The link is here.

Third, it’s puzzle time! In my last post, I posed this puzzle…

Take a look at this plan of a launchpad.

One side of the launchpad is 9 metres long and another side is 15 metres long, and the distance between point A and point B is 10 metres. You need to buy some fencing to all around the perimeter of the launchpad. You aren’t allowed to use a ruler, consult a book, or ask a friend.

How did you get on? There’s a remarkably easy solution. You can ignore the distance between point A and point B. All you have to do is imagine moving these two horizontal lines up like this….

…..and these two vertical lines to the right like this…….

….it then you are left with a perfect rectangle like this…..

….and now it’s obvious that the launchpad’s perimeter is 48 metres (two sides that are 9 metres long plus two sides that are 15 metres long).

And here is one extra puzzle….

A magician says that they can throw a ping-pong ball and have it go a short distance, come to a complete stop, and then reverse itself. The magician says that he won’t bounce the ball against any object, or attach anything to it. How can he perform such an amazing feat?

The solution? The magician threw the ping pong ball up in the air.

How did you get on? Try them on your friends and annoy them too.

I am a huge fan of these lateral thinking projects and hope that you are too!

Transcript: Many years ago, a friend of mine suggested an experiment: make up a conspiracy theory that was just plausible enough, and then track how far it spreads. It was fun to talk about, and he had a great one that I will not share here lest it escape containment, but obviously he never did …

There was a time in late 50s, early 60s Paris when something was in the air. In just three years, 162 debut feature films emerged from a new generation of filmmakers, who created energetic, rule-breaking, joy-filled cinema, populated by young men and women running through the streets, filming on the hoof with their new lightweight cameras. They called it the nouvelle vague – the French New Wave. Richard Linklater’s black-and-white film Nouvelle Vague is a loving tribute to that scene. It follows the making of one of the era’s masterpieces: Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout De Souffle, or Breathless for English-speaking audiences.

Each time we meet a new figure, there is a moment when they look to camera and an onscreen caption introduces them to us: Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Claude Chabrol. The sheer number of names is astounding. Many of these talents were friends, who first emerged as writers for the new Cahiers Du Cinema magazine. And there is inevitably some nostalgia, watching Linklater’s film, for that lost era when physical magazines thrived, and living in the heart of a great capital city and pursuing your creative ambition was possible without family money. But what Nouvelle Vague really captures is the excitement of a new world built on talent and the desire to make great art.

The nouvelle vague changed world culture, not just cinema. The director Richard Lester took inspiration from it to capture what his Hollywood producers assumed was a passing pop fad. The resulting film, Quatre Garcons Dans Le Vent (Four Boys in the Wind) – or A Hard Day’s Night as we know it – helped The Beatles conquer the world.

The impact of the nouvelle vague movement was on my mind when I recently attended the British Screen Forum’s annual conference – a gathering of film and television industry creatives. With television and filmmaking in decline, there was eager discussion about how far internet influencers have opened up a screen alternative. Influencers create, film, edit and upload their material to the likes of YouTube, X, Instagram, Twitch and TikTok. In one way what they do is comparable to Truffaut and his friends – grasping the possibilities of the new technology to connect directly with audiences of their own generation.

YouTuber Jacob Collier has performed at the Proms as well as releasing acclaimed albums. Women and people of colour have benefited from being able to bypass traditionally biased gatekeeping by entertainment executives. There are many comedians who launched their careers posting online content, such as Mo Gilligan and, in the Covid lockdown, Rosie Holt and Munya Chawawa.

Meanwhile, others have shattered the old boundaries on entertainment formats, like Tommy Innit (real name Thomas Simons) who began in 2018 with video-game streams and filming his own adventures. He now has more than 27 million subscribers to his YouTube and Twitch channels. There’s a natural charm and wit to Tommy’s style – he’s progressed to live comedy and podcasting, and he’s used his profile to tackle misogyny among young men.

Such young talents seem to be very much in the spirit of the nouvelle vague. But back at the British Screen Forum, the panel discussion I watched featured no one like these names. Rather we met young “creators” with big social media followings who self-promote around topics like wellbeing or travel or entrepreneurship. Other than a few jobs for struggling studio technicians and stylists, what, I wondered were such commercially focused figures really creating? Especially when the goal seemed nothing more than to tie up with a major brand as soon as possible.

The French new wave made art driven by love and ambition. Money was a benefit, but it wasn’t the prime motivation. That attitude can seem like a luxury in our time. But one thing still rings true: art made to be true art, rather than merely revenue-generating “content”, is what people will still be watching decades from now.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: If you’re a space fan, you know that the most exciting astronomical news last week was NOT the diverse team of astronauts working together to fly around the moon in an inspiring display of …

Artemis II has now made its way safely into space and many people have asked if I am related to its commander, Reid Wiseman. This isn’t the case, although I am prepared to step in and take charge of the mission if needed. However, I have written a book about the mindset that took humanity to the Moon and had the privilege of interviewing many of the Mission Controllers involved in Apollo 11 (huge thanks to Helen Keen and Craig Scott for making this happen). At the time of this historic event, they were an amazingly young bunch.  Indeed, when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, the average age of the Mission Controllers was an astonishing 28 years old. 

Here are three of my favourite learnings based around memorable quotes….

The power of optimism

Jerry Bostick grew up on a small farm in Mississippi, graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering and eventually ended up working at the NASA.  Bostick led the group that ensured Apollo 11 went in the right direction (known as Mission Control’s Flight Dynamics Branch).  When I interviewed Bostick, he made a great comment on the importance of the Mission Controllers being a young, optimistic, bunch:

“They decided to go with a bunch of young guys fresh out of college because we didn’t know that it couldn’t be done!  When we were told that we needed to find a way of getting to the Moon, we just got on and did it.”

I have often thought about Bostick’s ‘we were so young we didn’t know it couldn’t be done’ comment. We can all embrace the optimism of youth. Don’t give up before you have begun. Instead, assume there is a way forward and start to try to find solutions.

Personal responsibility

Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly would go to the launch pad and look at the giant Saturn V rocket. Once, he went into a large room packed with electronics and chatted with a technician about the risks involved in the mission. The technician said that he no idea about how many parts of the rocket worked, and Mattingly became concerned. However, the engineer explained that it was his job to ensure that the electronics inside a single panel were in working order, and assured Mattingly that when it came to that panel, the project wouldn’t fail because of him.

Mattingly realized that the complex Apollo missions were successful, in part, because everyone had the same sense of personal responsibility, and that was summed up in a single sentence: It won’t fail because of me.  

It’s a simple but powerful idea. If you say that you are going to do something, do it.  Don’t procrastinate, pass the buck, or cut corners. Be conscientious and make your word your bond. Be fully accountable for what you do and what you don’t do.

Fear and risk taking

Space travel is risky and even the smallest mistake can prove fatal. Flight Director Glynn Lunney noticed that people involved in the Apollo missions often ran away from these risks by holding yet another meeting or other delaying tactic. He understood that if the mission were to become a reality, at some point they were going to have to take risks. He summed up his thoughts in one sentence: If you’re going to go to the Moon, sooner or later you’ve got to go to the Moon.

It is a great mantra. At certain points in our lives, we need to find the courage to face fear in the hope of bringing about a better future.  This means being action-based, taking risks (without being reckless), and focusing on overcoming potential problems. This action-based approach has two advantages. First, you learn by doing. Instead of talking the talk, you roll up your sleeves and get on with it, and so develop the skills needed to make your plans a reality. Second, by putting yourself out there, you increase the likelihood of meeting other like-minded people and coming across unexpected opportunities. 

I wrote all this up (and much more) in my book, Shoot for the Moon, which looks at the new psychology of success through the lens of the Apollo 11 mission. Thanks for reading.

Climate, 14th century: The characteristic weather conditions of a country or region

In 1854, when the United States Magazine of Science, Art, Manufactures, Agriculture, Commerce and Trade used the phrase “climate changes”, they couldn’t have imagined that this would be one of the most pressing matters facing the human race in 2026. And yet the phrase was used like this: “Some have ascribed these climate changes to agriculture – cutting down the dense forests – the exposure of the upturned soil to the summer sun, and the draining of the great marshes.” So they were on to it even then.

The word “climate” first started being used in English in the 14th century as a borrowing from French and Latin. At the time, it was thought that the Earth had seven climate zones, each one determined astrologically. By 1400 or so, Sir John Mandeville, in his famous Travels, was explaining that the people of India were in “the first climate, that is of Saturn”, while the English climate, he said, was determined by the Moon. It was science, but not as we know it.

Of course, the word “climate” is often used figuratively, like when we talk about the “moral climate” or “economic climate”. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, this first occurred as early as 1661 with the phrase “climate of opinion”, a usage that wouldn’t sound out of place in a current Times editorial. But in uses of the word pertaining to the environment, the appearances of particular phrases tell a history all of their own.

“Climate action” and “climate emergency” both appeared in 1989. Seven years later, in 1996, “climate denial” and “climate sceptic” were first used. It took another few years for people to be labelled as “climate deniers” (2003) but, in opposition to these deniers, in 2014, along comes “climate strike”.

The word is likely to remain a battleground over the next few years. On the one hand, we’ll use it neutrally, to say what the weather is like. On the other hand, it will no doubt remain at the centre of some of the big struggles of the 21st century.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand (Transworld) by Fiona Sampson

The title of poet and scholar Fiona Sampson’s latest biography denotes several journeys in the life of one of France’s first great women writers, George Sand. Starting with her childhood in rural Nohant in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it follows her to Paris where she takes part in some of the upheavals that followed, taking in her advocacy for women’s rights and against marriage, her self-discovery as a writer, her turbulent relationships with Alfred de Musset and Fryderyk Chopin, the public scandals caused in part by her adoption of masculine clothing, and by her use of a male nom de plume. To become George Sand, writes Sampson in her introduction to a writer no longer as widely read in the UK as many of her male contemporaries, required “will, imagination, chutzpah”.

Charting Sand’s life through the development of mass politics and rapid urbanisation, Sampson bookmarks significant shifts in Sand’s life by spending a few pages between each chapter analysing an image of her subject. As Sand lived from 1804 to 1876, and moved throughout her life in bourgeois circles, she was often captured not just by portrait painters, but also by photographers.

The first “impression” provides circularity, as it catches Sand with her granddaughters, just a year before her death, at the country house where she grew up. This allows Sampson to explore just how much France changed during Sand’s lifetime, positing Sand as a “bridge figure”. In the 18th century, writes Sampson, the likes of Bach, Goethe, Rousseau or Voltaire could shift European culture while working outside their capital cities, whereas Sand had to go to Paris to mix in literary and musical circles, at least for the prime years of her astonishingly productive career.

Sampson spends her first four chapters on Sand’s childhood as Aurore Dupin, establishing the formative nature of her parents’ cross-class relationship, her father’s early death after being thrown from his horse, her being raised largely by her grandmother, and the importance of Nohant as a location throughout her life.

Inevitably, the pace picks up once we move to Paris in 1831, when Sand chose her famous pseudonym – and successfully applied for a permit to wear men’s clothing in public, which was issued by the police at the time. (This permission did not stop newspapers or literary journals from making unkind comments about her lack of femininity, even if the concept of “transgender” was a century from existence, and friends as prominent as Victor Hugo said the matter of whether Sand was “my sister or my brother” did not concern him.)

Sampson, writing in an age of frenzied discussion about gender identity, wisely does not spend much time on the question of whether Sand was a proto-trans pioneer. Assessing Paul Gavarni’s drawing of Sand in male attire, produced for a gossip column in 1831 or 1832, Sampson quotes a letter from 1835 in which Sand writes, “I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which [men] alone believe [they] have the right to enjoy.” It was men’s privileges that Sand wanted, according to Sampson, not a male identity – at a time before the law, and sexologists, defined “the homosexual” or “the transvestite” as types.

Becoming George is at its most interesting when asking what it means to be an author – and what it means to write a biography. “Most of the ceaselessly branching alternatives and decisions that make up a life evade reconstruction,” writes Sampson at the beginning of chapter five, “Becoming a writer”. When discussing authors, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that the thing important writers spend most of their days doing – writing – does not have the same kind of technical interaction with a medium as painting or music, and tends to be solitary. But Sand was more sociable than many, and had complicated, cross-country affairs with famous composers and poets that gave plenty of material to future biographers and writers. (Notably, the German Expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser’s 1922 play Flight to Venice imagined Sand’s relationship with fellow writer de Musset as a shared quest for artistic renewal.)

Sampson explores perennial questions for creative women, asking how Sand dealt with sexism, with men telling her “Don’t make books, make children”; the difficulty of pursuing a career while raising a family, with Sand prioritising her work, and her relationship with her daughter suffering as a result; and how her relationship with Chopin had to end because it was suffocating her ability to write. It’s full of insight that could only be reached by a biographer’s shared experience: “The most difficult step in becoming a published writer isn’t what you do with the blank page [but] what you do with the filled one,” writes Sampson, reflecting on how a person’s mid-twenties can be “when time passing begins to measure not progress but the stalling of some original trajectory”. This anxiety drives Sand to a phenomenal output – 70 novels and more than 50 other published works.

Naturally, an oeuvre so large is somewhat uneven, and Sampson charts the economic, social and political pressures for Sand to be so prolific, even if not every text can be analysed in detail in her 350 pages. Though Sampson occasionally overplays contemporary parallels (in lines such as “enjoying the kind of good life often featured in twenty-first-century lifestyle magazines”), this is a highly readable, subtly inventive book that argues for Sand’s importance not just as a writer but as a cultural figure.

Sampson closes with famous Paris photographer Félix Nadar’s portrait of Sand dressed as the satirical playwright Molière, which is “not of a man or woman, nor even of a woman dressed as a man, but of literary authority itself”. It reminds us that Sand is synonymous with the 19th century, France and the extraordinary written culture of that time and place – and that this remains the most important context within which to judge Sand’s life and work.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I recently stumbled upon a headline that is essentially catnip to me. Beccanip, let’s say. “JD Vance Says UFOs Are Actually Demons.” Yep. Yep, of course JD Vance said that. Why WOULDN’T JD Vance …

Babe, wake up! The Supreme Court of the United States of America has just dropped a new judgment and it fucking SUCKS! I know, it’s not exactly breaking news, but this one IS unique in a few unfortunate ways, so I’m gonna talk about it. On Tuesday, the Trans Day of Visibility, The Supreme Court …

I have recently received emails about my work into the pace of life, and so I thought that it would be a good time to reflect on the topic.

I’ve always been fascinated by the work of the late, great psychologist Robert Levine. In the early ‘90s, Robert pioneered a brilliant way to measure the pace of life in cities by secretly timing how fast pedestrians walked.

His findings were startling. People in Western Europe were sprinting through life, while those in Africa and Latin America took a more measured pace. Within the US, New Yorkers were the speed-demons, while Los Angeles leaned into a slower groove.

But this wasn’t just about getting to lunch on time. Levine discovered that a faster pace of life was a double-edged sword. Higher speeds were linked to higher income and increased happiness, but also more coronary heart disease and a decrease in helpfulness.

In 2006, I teamed up with British Council to measure walking speeds across the world. On August 22, our research teams went into city centres and found busy streets that were flat, free from obstacles, and uncrowded. Between 11.30am and 2.00pm local time, they secretly timed how long it took people to walk along a 60-foot stretch of the pavement. All the people had to be on their own, not holding a telephone conversation or struggling with shopping bags. The results are shown in the table below.

City (Country)
Fastest
1 Singapore (Singapore)
2 Copenhagen (Denmark)
3 Madrid (Spain)
4 Guangzhou (China)
5 Dublin (Ireland)
6 Curitiba (Brazil)
7 Berlin (Germany)
8 New York (USA)
9 Utrecht (Netherlands)
10 Vienna (Austria)
11 Warsaw (Poland)
12 London (UK)
13 Zagreb (Croatia)
14 Prague (Czech Republic)
15 Wellington (New Zealand)
16 Paris (France)
17 Stockholm (Sweden)
18 Ljubljana (Slovenia)
19 Tokyo (Japan)
20 Ottawa (Canada)
21 Harare (Zimbabwe)
22 Sofia (Bulgaria)
23 Taipei (Taiwan)
24 Cairo (Egypt)
25 Sana’a (Yemen)
26 Bucharest (Romania)
27 Dubai (UAE)
28 Damascus (Syria)
29 Amman (Jordan)
30 Bern (Switzerland)
31 Manama (Bahrain)
32 Blantyre (Malawi)
SLOWEST

We compared the 16 cities that were in Levine’s work and our own and determined that the pace of life had increased by 10%! The pace of life in Guangzhou (China) increased by over 20%, and Singapore showed a 30% increase, resulting in it becoming the fastest moving city in the study. Projected forward, the results suggest that by 2040, they will arrive at their destination several seconds before they have set-off.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Robert Levine about this work. I believe it may have been his final interview. You can listen to him discussing the “Geography of Time” below.

Finally, what is your pace of life? Are you moving too fast? Here are four questions to help you to decide.

– When someone takes too long to get to the point, do you feel like hurrying them along?

– Are you often the first person to finish at mealtimes?

– When walking along a street, do you often feel frustrated because you are stuck behind others?

– Do you walk out of restaurants or shops if you encounter even a short queue?

Here is a quick and easy way of boosting your motivation….

There was a long running rivalry between tennis stars Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. In 2012, they faced one another in the final of the US Open. Murray took the first two sets but Djokovic battled back to win the next two sets. Murray took a toilet break and, according to several reports, looked in the bathroom mirror and shouted “You are not losing this match…you are not going to let this one slip’ Murray then walked back out and faced his opponent for the deciding set.

In 2014, psychologist Sanda Dolcos (University of Illinois) carried out some great experiments exploring how motivation is affected by whether we talk to ourselves in either the first or second person.

In one study, she had people try to complete some difficult anagrams. Some participants were asked to motivate themselves by using first-person sentences (“I can do it”) whilst others gave themselves a second-person pep talk (“You can do it”). Those using the ‘you’ word completed far more anagrams than those using the ‘I’ word. Dolcos then asked other people to motivate themselves to exercise more in either the first person (‘I should go for a run now’) or second person (’You must go to the gym’). Those using the ‘you’ word ended up feeling far more positive about going for a run or visiting a gym, and planned to take more exercise over the coming weeks.

Whatever the explanation, it is a simple but effective shortcut to motivation. And it worked for Andy Murray because he broke Djokovic’s serve, won the shortest set of the match, and emerged victorious.

When you are in need of some fast acting and powerful motivation, talk to yourself using the magic ‘you’ word. Tell yourself that ‘you can do it’, that ‘you’ love whatever it is that you have to do, and that ‘you’ will make a success of it. You may not end up winning the US Open, but you will discover how just one word has the power to motivate and energise.

Dolcos, S., & Albarracin, D. (2014). The inner speech of behavioral regulation: Intentions and task performance strengthen when you talk to yourself as a You. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44(6), 636–642.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a simple idea:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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