The other day, while I was browsing, I was interrupted by an ad for PragerU. I despise PragerU, the totally fake university that specializes in fake history and fake science, led by that smarmy old fraud, Dennis Prager. What caught my ear, though, is that this ad featured Gad Saad desperately pushing his new book, Suicidal Empathy.

I have not read the book. I will never read the book. Gad Saad is a pathetic figure, a pick-me guy for the right wing, who is a professor of marketing who rides the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I’ve written about him a few times before, in particular his efforts to deny the existence of toxic masculinity while simultaneously exemplifying the attitudes and stereotypes that represent toxicity. Like any good evo psych wanker, he justifies treating women poorly by mentioning animals with aggressive, violent mating strategies, as if they apply to us.

Even Larry Moran, who doesn’t normally dip into culture war issues, ripped Gad Saad a new one. Saad is just a sad embarrassment of a man who desperately wants to be legitimized by more successful evo-psych grifters, but doesn’t quite have the smarts to assemble a coherent, logical argument.

I got the gist of his thesis from the ad. He’s trying to thread a needle here: he can’t quite say that empathy is bad, because he wants you to empathize with him, but at the same time he wants you to know that the empathy practiced by Leftists is undeniably evil and wicked. Empathy that leads you to regard Muslims as human beings is “suicidal,” after all. And don’t get him started on women and “effeminate” men!

The book is reviewed in Jacobin, and the review confirms everything I’d expect of Saad.

For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Uh-oh–when an evolutionary psychologist loses the affection of Quillette, you know he’s on the way out. He relies on caricatures of left wing perspectives that he exaggerates into absurdity, so it’s no surprise that his arguments fall apart, even if you sympathize with his views. He has to distort everything to make his case.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

He’s playing a simple-minded game. If you don’t think black people should be discriminated against for the color of the skin, well, that must mean you hate and are ashamed of white people. If you think we should protect ecologies from raging industrialism, by golly, you really hate capitalism. And if you like socialism, you’re a woman, you pussy.

Now you can understand why I won’t read his book. The banality is exhausting. I’ve seen a few of his videos and read a few of his articles, and know that he’s simply a knee-jerk bigot. Hard pass.

To be fair, though, I should at least quote some of Gad Saad’s own words.

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Does that sound like a man anyone, especially any woman, would want to spend 5 minutes in conversation with? Does he even sound like he’s aware of the bigotry implicit in his words?

I’ve been in many departmental meetings, and yes, the safety and well-being of our students comes up fairly often — because it matters. If you were a student, would you want a professor who rolls his eyes at the thought of trying to understand you?

The state conventions have put up their choices for governor, since Walz has announced that he won’t be running.

On the Democratic side, we’ll have Amy Klobuchar, the current senator. I can’t get excited about her — she’s your standard inoffensive middle-of-the-road Democrat, a reliable candidate with lots of money behind her. I’ll almost certainly vote for her, with no enthusiasm.

The Republican side is trying to be exciting, but just comes off as weird. Of course Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was nattering around the edges, talking a big game, but no way were our Republicans going to get that weird — he lost the nomination, but don’t worry, you know he’s going to continue to flush his money away in a quixotic campaign.

The actual Republican nominee is…Kendall Qualls. You’ve never heard of him. He pops up here now and then, runs for an office, fails, and then we all forget him until the next election. His claim to fame is that he is a healthcare executive. They might as well have nominated Satan for all the popularity he’d have.

Satan might have been a better choice, since the Republicans also announced their commitment to outright evil.

The convention day began at 9 a.m. with a prayer from Father Richard Kunst of Duluth that the adopted platform of the party “promotes true, good, conservative values, fiscally and socially,” followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

A delegate then called for a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020 and is in prison. State Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, led a 10-second moment of silence after taking an informal vote.

Monday was the sixth anniversary of Floyd’s death.

And then after hailing Derek Chauvin, they all met their Grindr dates and went off to a black mass, where they drank the blood of poor children.

Jey McCreight is an old friend I’ve known since they were a an undergraduate studying biology in Indiana. I’ve been happy to see their accomplishments over the years: grad school, a post-doc, landing a job at 23andMe as a genomics expert. They were also an activist in the atheist movement — Jey was one of the minds behind Atheism+, and we all know how well that effort to incorporate more humanism into atheism went. Now they are still an activist, founding the organization BeyondXandY arguing that biology is nonbinary and that people are more than their chromosomes. Jey clearly is bold and optimistic enough to take on noble causes in spite of all the haters, and doing the right thing as a trans man has got to be one of the braver things they have done.

Last month, this happened:

McCreight said they had been advertising the event with flyers across the city that included their photo and had also appeared in the local LGBTQ+ publication, Windy City Times. They assume the event’s publicity is how the attacker recognized them.

“I’m telling this story now because I’m finally in a place where I can talk about it without really freaking out badly,” McCreight said, explaining that there are still a lot of gaps in their memory of that night, but they think they were walking home alone from getting food.

The attacker asked if they were McCreight, and McCreight cheerfully confirmed, assuming it might be someone who appreciated their work.

“He very quickly pushed me to the ground and started repeatedly punching me in the eye,” McCreight said. “Afterward, I thought he had maybe hit me with a brick or something because it was so painful. I had never been beat up before in my life.”

McCreight said the attacker also used a pocket knife to cut them all over their body, but not deep enough to leave permanent damage.

“It was very scary. He even tried to strangle me briefly with something that thankfully didn’t work well and just kind of left an abrasion on my neck.”

McCreight said they don’t remember how they got away or if the person eventually just let them go. But somehow, they got home. It took them over a day to realize they needed an ambulance because they were in such a daze.

But on May 1, McCreight recounted, they realized they needed help. An ambulance took them to Chicago’s Advocate Health Center, where they said they received excellent care, which included emergency surgery on their eye. After that, it took weeks for their vision to return to normal.

“I think it’s really important for people to know that this is the reality of being trans in the United States,” they said. “I’m a non-violent nerdy cat guy who likes talking about science and wants to be the next Bill Nye, and because of that, someone basically tried to kill me or at least beat me up bad enough to scare me into silence.”

They said for a little bit, they considered giving up their public-facing activism in the wake of the attack. But then, hospital staff of all kinds – from doctors to nurses to the people bringing them meals – all learned about McCreight’s work and told them to keep going.

“They all told me not to give up on my dream.”

Horrifying. That some guy would just turn and attack a friendly, nerdy fellow walking down the street because they are trans is appalling. Listen to them telling their own story, and support BeyondXandY.

I’m a bit frustrated — this stupid knee doesn’t allow me to walk on rough ground. I can handle floors and sidewalks, but this part of my yard where Mary has been planting new berry bushes is mostly inaccessible to me. Yesterday, Mary tells me she has spotted some interesting new spiders on the leaves. Can I come look? Not without risking a fall.

It would be a bit much for me to hand her my Canon D8 with the 100mm macro lens, so instead I gave her a clip-on magnifying lens for her iPhone, which she was already comfortable using, and she went off into No Man’s Land and got a bunch of very nice photos of these tiny (less than 3mm) guys, and left me feeling useless.

Anyway , what she had found was a lot of meshweavers, small spiders that put down sheet webs, which they use to catch smaller prey, like aphids and leafhoppers. Meshweavers are a gardener’s friend, so it’s good to see them hard at work protecting our raspberries. This is a dwarf spider, also called a money spider:

And this is a pair of dimorphic meshweavers. One species, but males and females look dramatically different.

Clearly, it’s time for me to hang up my pretense of being an arachnologist and teach Mary how to use the D8. I’ll just park myself in a rocking chair on the deck and watch her have all the fun.

Oh no. I have been asked for dietary advice.

I am not qualified. I’ve never taken a nutrition course, I have no degree in the field, you should not take nutrition advice from me. That’s the simple answer.

On the other hand, I’m aware of the problem: there are unholy swarms of people and ‘influencers’ who have less knowledge of basic biology than I do who are flooding the zone with all kinds of cockamamie ideas based primarily on ideology. Sometimes the people who pretend to have the most knowledge about the human body give the very worst advice, so how do you figure out what is good advice? I mean, you’ve got total wackaloons who have driven themselves into induced comas and neurotic breakdowns telling you to eat nothing but beef; you’ve got other nerds insisting that everyone must avoid meat, eggs, and gluten (which is necessary for some people); and then you’ve got breatharians and other insane people who believe in living on diet Coke and Big Macs.

On the third hand, human beings have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without TikTok, eating what was available and tasted good, and cultivating wonderful cuisines without relying on bizarre notions of what some wild-eyed skinny fanatic said. That’s the thing about nutrition: traditions are good guides because they’re the product of people who survived their diet. OK, French sauces and hakarl might be extreme and bad for you in the long run, but human experimentation also gave us curries and bread. We haven’t died of anything like that unless consumed in excess.

My general guide to eating is simple: moderation in everything. Avoid heavily processed foods. Try a variety of things, a ‘balanced’ diet. Beans, rice, and potatoes can be the solid foundation for your diet, and have the additional virtue in these tight economic times of being cheap. Build on them with spices — I feel like one of the cardinal sins of the American diet is the spice deficiency. Spices make mundane, boring, but reliable staples interesting and allow you to get flavor without feeling like you have to indulge in buying exotic, expensive, heavily processed foods.

Add stuff you can find in season. I like to add a piece of fish to a meal for a bit of richness…or use an egg, or some broccoli, or a side of peas. Avoid uniformity.

Learn how to make a paella, or a curry, or a stew. Just the process of assembling all the elements of these kinds of foods guarantees that you’ll get a dietary variety, and it will taste good. I trust tradition far more than I do the latest influencer fad. Your best bet is to ignore people like me and just spend more time in the produce section of your grocery store, gathering up tomatoes and turnips and cabbage and mushrooms and carrots and peppers and onions and cauliflower and green beans and garlic, and then figure out how to cook them and make a delicious meal. Pick up a variety of fruits for dessert.

It takes a bit more effort than picking up a box of premade something-or-other, but it would be better for you.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Hey, remember Jordan Peterson? He’s the famous Canadian psychologist who hates “woke” stuff, and who helped popularize the carnivore diet. He and his daughter, Mikhaila, announced that they were thriving on a diet of …

A few weeks ago, I talked about the “pandemic” that isn’t actually happening, hantavirus. In the time since then, there have been four new cases and no new deaths, and the Director-General of the World Health Organization has announced that all passengers and crew are still in quarantine and the situation is “stable.” I know …

While many speakers focus entirely on the content of a talk, I put lots of effort into my slides. In fact, my ‘first’ slide is actually three slides that have saved me from many a technical disaster.

Here’s a typical first slide from my deck:

I use a black background and a 4:3 aspect ratio.

While many speakers use the modern 16:9 widescreen format, I stick with 4:3. Why? Because many projector systems are still designed for 4:3. If you project a 16:9 slide onto a 4:3 screen, it can get cut off or letterboxed. But if you project a 4:3 slide onto a 16:9 screen, it puts black bars on the sides—which blend into my black background.

I also put a green frame around the edge of this initial slide. Before the audience enters, I look at the screen. If I can see the entire green frame, I know my slides aren’t being cut off by the projector.

The public never get to see that slide. It is just for me to test the system.

Tip One: Have a secret diagnostic slide just for you.

Before the audience enters, I switch to my second slide. This one looks almost identical, but the green frame is gone, and it contains an embedded audio track.

As people enter the hall, my music plays automatically from this slide (with the speaker icon hidden). This does two things. First, it sets the atmosphere I want, thus avoiding that awkward, dead-silent morgue feeling or relying on the organiser’s random playlist. Second, it shows that my laptop’s audio feed is working through the sound system.

Tip Two: Use your own music to test the laptop feed and control the atmosphere.

Finally, as I am being introduced, I use my remote clicker to advance to my third pre-slide.

To the audience, it looks the same as the previous one. But if you look closely at the bottom-left corner, there is a tiny green dot. If I click and the green dot appears, I know my remote is connected and the system hasn’t frozen. If it has frozen, I can speak for 10 minutes without slides while the problem is fixed (hopefully!).

There is nothing worse than building up audience anticipation, only to find out you can’t advance your first slide. With these quick, hidden checks, you’ll never have to worry about tech failures again.

Tip Three: Use the Green Dot Trick to test the system just before you start.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: This is going to be shocking to anyone born in the past decade, but back in the 2010s, one of the rightwing’s favorite things to complain about was “trigger warnings”–simple statements at the top …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: The party of “free speech” has struck again! The Republicans have censored scientific research because they didn’t like its conclusions, and that’s not me editorializing, that’s actually exactly what they said: “The studies were …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Did you know that May 28th is Menstrual Hygiene Day? Well, it is, and menstrual hygiene season starts earlier and earlier every year, so today we’re going to talk about vaginas and stuff that …

Last week I was walking along the street and recognised a student that I had taught many years ago. They saw me, waved, and shouted ‘Fresh Fish Sold Here Today.’ I was delighted. I use this phrase when I teach presentation skills and was amazed that they had remembered it years later.

The phrase comes from a great magic trick invented by Arnold Furst. A magician starts off with a strip of paper with the words FRESH FISH SOLD HERE TODAY printed along it. In my version, I explain that it’s a sign from a fishmonger’s window and point out that the word TODAY is redundant (when else would you be selling the fish?). I tear TODAY off the strip. Next, I point out that it’s obvious where the fish is being sold, and so I tear off HERE too. Then I point out that you don’t need the word SOLD because it’s obviously a shop, and tear SOLD off. Finally, I note that the fishmonger is obviously selling fish and so that word is torn off too. I am just left with the one word that really matters – FRESH!

In the trick, the pieces are then magically restored, but I don’t bother with that bit. Instead, I point out that the same principle applies to the text on slides. It’s important to be as efficient as possible. Whenever there is text on a slide, audiences start to read it, and so switch their attention from the speaker to the slide. To prevent this, cut any words to the absolute minimum. If it helps, imagine that you are paying £1000 for each word. What can go? In an ideal world, there are no words at all!

For instance, look at this early slide from one of my talks into the psychology of suggestion and séances….

It’s fine but loads of those words can go. Apply the FRESH FISH SOLD HERE TODAY rule and now it reads….

Look at your slides. If you had to pay £1000 per word, what would go?

Shop image produced by AI.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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 […]