A couple of medieval scholars are arguing over a dick pic. Apparently, the Bayeux tapestry depicts more than just a battle — it has numerous images of penises.

The Oxford professor George Garnett drew worldwide interest six years ago when he announced he had totted up 93 penises stitched into the embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England.

According to Garnett, 88 of the male appendages are attached to horses and the remainder to human figures.

OK, so a handful of warriors were flopping out of their gear, and the tapestry artists were careful to include that detail. The debate is over how many people had a wardrobe malfunction.

Now, the historian and Bayeux tapestry scholar Dr Christopher Monk – known as the Medieval Monk – believes he has found a 94th.

A running man, depicted in the tapestry border, has something dangling beneath his tunic. Garnett says it is the scabbard of a sword or dagger. Monk insists it is a male member.

I’ll let you decide. Here’s the figure in contention. Penis or dagger?

“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say. The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome,” Monk said.

Heh. “Anatomically fulsome” — I’ll say. That thing is hanging down to his knees and is so massive that he’s got to run with his legs spread wide. I wonder if it was stitched by his girlfriend.

I got a new toy! It’s a $30 trail cam that will probably cost $300 once the tariffs take effect, but I got it because I was curious about what has been going on in my back yard. There is a burrow under my deck, and every year we’re surprised by who takes up residence. Groundhogs are common, but one year we had a skunk under there.

I set the camera up to point directly at the hole, but you can’t see the burrow itself because of all the grass in the way. As expected, I knew there’d be squirrels and maybe rabbits hopping around, although the rabbits are currently in their shy phase, hiding with their litters of kits somewhere. We did spot a squirrel in the early evening (time stamp is correct, but I failed to set the date on the camera.)

All was quiet for most of the night, but then around 3AM something was popping it’s head up, multiple times, like they were repeatedly trying to figure out what that thing outside their front door was.

I’m not sure what that is. Maybe a skunk? Maybe an alien. I’d rather it were an alien visitor, because if it is a skunk I’ll need to set up a trap (a humane one, of course!) and relocate it later this summer.

Hmmm, I suppose if it is a small alien, I could also trap it. What kind of bait should I use? I think the last time we had a skunk, they were partial to cantaloupe.

Recall that I sneered at this new book coming out, The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss. It’s a strangely focused book, given that it’s quite clear that it is the Republicans who have accelerated their attacks on education and science, yet Krauss is trying to blame any problems on DEI, the Woke, Leftists, and everyone but MAGA, Trump, RFK jr, Musk, etc. He has rounded up a real rogues gallery of awful and disreputable people to contribute articles to his patently bogus book.

Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson

The one virtue of Krauss attempting to step out of the shadows of his shame is that Rebecca Watson was roused to bring receipts and stomp this guy right down into the ground. I mean, really, if there were any justice in the world, Larry would be crumpled into a puddle, wheezing and begging for mercy through broken teeth, and would be crawling into a snake hole to bleed out and fade from public attention forevermore.

I recommend that everyone try to stay on Rebecca’s good side.

I was going to express amazement that Krauss can even find a publisher for this drivel…but it’s being published by Post Hill Press, a company that specializes in right-wing conspiracy theories. Krauss is now rubbing elbows with Tyrus and Dan Bongino and Kirk Cameron. His peers!

I should just get off the internet altogether, maybe. Get a tarpaper shack with no electricity or running water somewhere.

For those who don’t know, the NY Times Pitchbot posts humorous, sarcastic versions of the kind of centrist bullshit the NY Times is notorious for publishing. Sometimes it hits a bit close to the bone.

There’s a week and a half until the end of the semester…will I make it? I’m giving myself a 50% chance of crawling across the finish line and then curling up into a soggy ball of tears, vs. a 50% chance of exploding before the end of the term and then raining down as smoldering cinders.

I could see this coming way back in August — it’s been a long decade — so I cleverly scheduled student presentations for the last bit of the term. I don’t have to do any class prep right now, even though I’ve got a lot of material lined up just because…because I can’t help myself, and am always tweaking things and making additions just in case I need it. For the same reason, I can’t leave well enough alone and every year I rewrite and change my classes despite having taught this stuff for about 30 years. Nothing is going to help. No matter what, I’m going to be clawing my eyes out and suppressing screams as every term comes to a close.

I really ought to retire, but I can’t, not ever. I guess I get to look forward to death.

The weird thing is that I like teaching. This would be a lot easier if I didn’t care.

Never mind me, I just have to scream into the uncaring void every once in a while.

The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life (Atlantic Books) by Hugo Greenhalgh

Meet George Leo Lucas. At the turn of the 1970s, he is a middle-aged civil servant in London, working for the Board of Trade, where he is responsible for overseeing the papermaking industry. Mr Lucas (never George) is a bespectacled and conspicuously bald-headed figure, conservative in politics and formal in attire.

Outside work, Mr Lucas lives a rather different life. A gay man, not “out” in contemporary terms, but active on the urban “scene”, he tramps the streets and haunts the bars of Soho in pursuit of intimate companionship with younger men – for a price. At a time when same-sex desire between men was stigmatised – and, until 1967 in England and Wales, criminalised – Mr Lucas is ever conscious of the dangers of his double life and perpetually fearful of arrest and exposure.

Between 1948 and 2009, he recorded his everyday life, observations and innermost feelings in the pages of a long series of hand-written diaries. These eventually passed into the ownership of writer and gay rights activist Hugo Greenhalgh, following a chance meeting and a somewhat awkward friendship. Lucas died in 2014, and Greenhalgh’s book, which draws upon and curates the diaries, was published last year.

Greenhalgh guides us through Mr Lucas’s life, starting in the late 1940s when the diarist is oppressed by his homophobic parents, and his national service in Germany is curtailed when he is caught cruising by the military authorities. The bulk of the book, however, explores Lucas’s rackety life in the 1960s, when the diarist was physically and emotionally entangled with a series of younger male sex workers. One of these connections, with a rent boy, “Irish Peter”, brings Lucas into dangerous proximity to a world of violent criminality.

More generally, Mr Lucas – even then a self-consciously old-fashioned figure – is unimpressed by the advent of the 60s’ “cultural revolution”, perceiving a mixture of social decline and “frivolity”. Greenhalgh is a perceptive guide to the diaries, shepherding the reader through an England long disappeared, in which the very real threat of arrest and prison haunted queer men. His narrative treatment of the diaries includes elements of his own biography, as well as providing a more general meditation on sexuality and sex work.

Diarists may be ordinary, but they are perhaps rarely normal. This is certainly the case with George Lucas, an obsessive who seems to have written his diaries in character as an idealised version of himself with an eye to posthumous publication, yet at the same time used them as a kind of confessional in which he reveals himself as a libidinous misanthrope and an incorrigible suburban snob. The result is a unique view of queer male life in postwar London. Lucas’s diary entries are often characterised by a mixture of sexual intrigue, gossip from the scene, the crushingly trivial and the absurdity of the human condition.

Greenhalgh is candid about his own youthful experience as a sex worker, something which provides him with insight into the emotional and psychological impact of transactional sex. One of the most startling revelations in the book, which considers the moral ambiguities and power dynamics of both commercial and intergenerational sex, is not from the life of Mr Lucas, but Greenhalgh’s own.

Meanwhile the question of whether Mr Lucas exploited his “boys” – all of whom were in their early twenties – is one which the book does not shirk. A pious if unconventional Catholic, the diarist had convinced himself that his patronage of sex workers not only helped them financially but provided them with a relatively harmless client. Similar to the 19th-century tourists of East London slums described in Seth Koven’s book Slumming (2004), Mr Lucas’s motives encompassed a jumbled combination of eros and altruism. He seems to have genuinely wanted to help young men in distress – but ultimately, Greenhalgh writes, only on his own terms.

There is a sense, too, that Mr Lucas was drawn to the drama provided by the damaged lives of his “rent boys and Irish layabouts”, even to the point of quietly attending their courtroom appearances.

A product of his times and his dysfunctional upbringing, Mr Lucas seemed unable to form a companionate intimate relationship. Greenhalgh concludes that his diarist’s unusual and unhappy life, full of emotional pain and the associated miseries of living in an age when simply being gay was illegal, offers few direct lessons for the present day. He does, however, take heart from Mr Lucas’s tenacity as a diary keeper and his resilience in the face of adversity.

We might also see Mr Lucas’s life as an exemplar of the messy ambiguity of the queer past and his diaries as a fine introduction to a vanished social world.

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

Breaking news, a study published this month in Nature Human Behavior has found that American conservatives hate science. This news comes as a shock to everyone who has spent the past several decades not born yet. The researchers told the Associated Press that they hope this finding helps kick start their next project, determining the …

A Nose and Three Eyes (Hoopoe Books) by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin

Egyptian author Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, who died in 1990, is one of the 20th century’s most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction. Born in Cairo in 1919, a contemporary of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel Kouddous also enjoyed a long career in journalism. He was editor at the daily paper Al-Akhbar and editor-in-chief of the political weekly magazine Rose El-Youssef. His bestselling novel A Nose and Three Eyes, deftly translated by Dartmouth professor Jonathan Smolin, is being published in English for the first time, despite having twice been adapted for Arabic-language films – in 1972 and 2024 – and produced for radio and television. The novel explores lust, love and deception in 1950s Egypt, while critiquing the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. According to Smolin’s enlightening introduction, some knowledge of Abdel Kouddous’s biography is necessary to fully appreciate the novel, and I’m inclined to agree.

Abdel Kouddous first rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s, befriending Nasser and other Free Officers (nationalists in the armed forces, drawn from the ranks of the middle class, young workers and government officials) in the early 1950s. He used his position at Rose El-Youssef to uncover scandals among the ruling elite and to call for revolution. When King Farouk was eventually toppled in a coup d’état by the Free Officers Movement in July 1952, Abdel Kouddous was a prominent supporter of their reforms.

However, by January 1953 the writer realised that Nasser did not intend to hold democratic elections. A year later, annoyed by his former friend’s denunciations, Nasser imprisoned Abdel Kouddous for three months. On his release from jail, the editor turned to fiction, deciding to employ “the tools of metaphor and symbolism to retell his deeply fraught history with the revolution and dissent against Nasser”.

Like many of his previous novels, A Nose and Three Eyes was serialised in Rose El-Youssef. Abdel Kouddous would finish each chapter hours before it went to press, giving a sense of immediacy to the story. Smolin believes that “Ihsan’s relationship with Nasser – and Nasser’s romance with Egypt – provide a crucial lens through which to understand the work.” The novel’s main protagonist, the titular “nose”, is Dr Hashim, who is considered a “thinly veiled double of Nasser himself”. The eyes are three of his lovers, who represent “the three distinct phases of Nasser’s relationship with the nation” – first, the misplaced belief that he will overcome corruption, second, that he will heal Egypt, and finally his failed desire for pan-Arab unity.

In the autumn of 1963, Abdel Kouddous was seeing a young Lebanese woman, Hanan al-Shaykh, who went on to become a successful author herself (her novels in English translation include The Story of Zahra and Women of Sand and Myrrh). In her excellent foreword to this edition of A Nose and Three Eyes she confirms that she represents the novel’s third “eye”, embodying “a generation that believed in existentialism and modern society with progressive values”.

The first section of the novel is set in the early 1950s. After teenager Amina falls for Dr Hashim, she divorces her businessman husband, a representative of Egypt’s corrupt previous era and a man she has come to loathe. Amina believes that the sophisticated, eloquent, much older doctor will marry her, but he is a lothario, and Amina is eventually discarded.

The second eye is Nagwa Tahir, whose controlling mother turns her into a nervous wreck. When Dr Hashim treats her anxiety, they fall for one another. But Nagwa’s mother has already “sold” sexual rights to her daughter to the wealthy Uncle Abdu. The final part takes place in the late 50s as our protagonist pursues a young Lebanese woman, Rihab, who refuses to be confined by him. Smolin suggests their relationship provides “an obvious parallel for Nasser’s delusional infatuation with Syria in his failed romance with the United Arab Republic”.

While serialising the second eye, Abdel Kouddous was charged with “harming public morality”. He abruptly concluded the serialisation of the novel and left Egypt for the summer to allow things to cool down.

Even today, many may find the book’s themes unpalatable. Hashim repeatedly pursues younger women and exploits their infatuation with him. But reading the novel with its political context in mind, one realises that Abdel Kouddous was indeed challenging a deeply conservative society, and condemning the strictures and expectations faced by women.

A Nose and Three Eyes provides a fascinating entry into Egypt’s past, while also serving to illuminate how powerful men are able to abuse their position in order to dominate and assault women without censure. Plus ça change.

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

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

Here is the full description:

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

Dawn today is a line of apricot beyond the trees. It starts as a smudge behind Credenhill, the silhouettes of pines sketching themselves in. The valley seems sunk in half-light, without birdsong. But if I peer into the dimness below the brightening sky, I can see the valley being revealed, like a diagram of itself.

Pay attention to any slice of the British landscape and you begin to understand how it works, and why and when it took shape. In 1954, W. G. Hoskins’s popularising study The Making of the English Landscape helped a post-war generation realise that the British countryside is as manmade as any townscape. More than 70 years on, as the experience of the majority in Britain becomes ever more urban and digital, those lessons are increasingly forgotten. The rural environment is often disdained as boring, irrelevant or – worse – a kind of reactionary force in society.

Yet the countryside feeds us and provides our clean water and air. To state what should be obvious, these are the building blocks of life. They sustain everything, including the complexities of urban and indeed digital experience. The countryside is also at the cutting edge of climate change, and what’s being done here to minimise it should be at the forefront of our minds. We need to be able to read the countryside in order to understand both global markets and the sweep of history, as well as the effects of locality and individual action.

Right now, for example, the road at the end of this valley is still silent. But I know that in farm kitchens up and down these hills the lights are on, kettles are boiling and toast is being vigorously buttered. The agricultural working day starts early. For some, there’s milking to be done, usually around 5.30am or 6am before the cattle start to feed.

Herefordshire is the home of the Hereford breed, muscular champions with distinctive cream faces and red and cream coats. Herefords are beef cattle, grown for meat and not milked, but there are plenty of dairy herds in the county too. The early spring is when these herds are most likely to be dry – that is, not milked for a couple of months – in preparation for calving. It’s a time of year when cowmen may be freed up for other work. On farms that bring their cattle in there are still barns to be mucked out, and slurry pits to be tackled. Still, every half hour extra in bed of a frosty morning is a bonus.

Yet the kitchen lights are on; and many have been burning all night. Round here, this is high season for lambing. To our east, in the Cotswolds, lambing can be as late as Easter (that moveable feast). Go for a walk in March and you’ll often come across flocks of ewes corralled into small home fields or turned onto almost bare fields where winter kale has already been cropped, so they lose a bit of weight to help with the births. These practices are inflected by the modern Agricultural College, but they’re also traditional to those areas of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire: literally built into the landscape of dry-stone walls and stone-walled sheep folds.

Lambing season

Sheep have shaped the environment of those limestone wolds since medieval times, when wealthy landowners elbowed other forms of farming aside to capitalise on an international wool trade. Their wealth is celebrated by the pinnacled “wool churches” they built to dominate Cotswold towns and villages. Some traditional breeds, like the shaggy-fleeced Cotswold Lion, have always been kept for meat as well as their yellowish “golden fleece”. But this landscape – today again a wealthy enclave – is one of the first in which profit replaced husbandry of that human necessity, food.

Sheep farming is equally traditional to our west, in the mountains of Powys and Ceredigion, where lambing can start in January or even December. The received wisdom is that this gives lambs time to grow hardy enough to survive winter on the open fields. But lamb for the table is slaughtered at less than a year old: after a year, it becomes hogget and, after two, mutton. New season lamb is four to six months old and, traditionally, the biggest demand was at Easter: you do the maths, as the saying goes.

In a post-Christian Britain, where Easter tends to be celebrated with chocolate rather than a meat freighted with religious symbolism, the seasonal premium may be less marked and imported New Zealand lamb – product of the mirror annual cycle – irons out consumer demand. Still, any bonus helps hill farmers, labouring to make often less than a living. The Welsh government calls these holdings Severely Disadvantaged Areas, SDAs, and records that the average income of an SDA sheep farm fell by 45 per cent in 2022-3 to £28,700, the result of these shifts in global trade.

Geophysically, and so economically, Herefordshire is neither Cotswold tableland nor the slate mountains of Wales. It finds itself somewhere in between. Our characteristic Old Red Sandstone, which colours the county’s fields every shade from orange to plum purple, produces a rich clay loam. We’re a region of fertile river valleys, several of which map the county’s boundaries: Wye, Lugg, Teme and Monnow. This is a watery region, from the Golden Valley to Ross-on-Wye, which saw the birth of the world tourist trade in the shape of the Romantic era’s commercial Wye Tour. That also makes it prone to flooding. Thinly populated and therefore impoverished, the rural county’s infrastructure has been battered by this winter’s succession of storms.

But lambing must go on, come hell or literal high water. In neighbouring valleys, and up lanes so narrow that to drive them is like threading a needle, sheep farmers are “keeping watch over their flocks by night”. Lambs, like human babies, most often get born in the small hours. Farmers on well-appointed holdings may try to drowse indoors, helped by infra-red cameras in birthing pens. But the traditional way to do it is to wait up with the expectant ewes, in byres or even open pens. It’s a time of sleep-deprivation piled on sleep-deprivation, and the sharp chills of below-freezing nights do nothing to help.

The MP for Cider

Then all at once the sky lights up, and here we are. With little haze in the atmosphere, the landscape brightens into blocks of colour. The orchard lawn where young trees, not yet with bushy crowns, stand awkwardly cocked. A silver-and-shadow lake, where the ice has thawed and refrozen in fracturing patterns that look like fish scales. A hedge line. A wide slope of arable, this year planted with winter wheat. Smaller grazing paddocks on the hillside; and, above them, woodland. Coots are beginning to pick through lakeside grass, a buzzard lifts from his hilltop perch and glides overhead. Wherever I look, wildlife is beginning to stir.

Yet, layer on layer, this is a manmade landscape. The new orchard is part-replacement for the orchards that grew here until the middle of the 20th century. This is traditional orchard country; at the end of the 19th century, Hereford was even represented in parliament by a gentleman cider farmer. The Rt Hon Charles Cooke was known as the “MP for Cider”. Many of the orchards which remain within a radius of 10 or so miles of the county town are planted with sour cider apple or even perry pear trees. Their fruit can’t be used for anything else – it purses the mouth like a sloe.

In the UK, commercial large-batch cider increasingly uses apple concentrate – sourced from large-scale, cheaper growers in countries like China, Turkey, the US and Poland. Those countries are now the apple behemoths, and they’ve driven if not a coach and horses then certainly a fleet of articulated lorries through the countryside recorded in the Herefordshire Pomona. This seven-volume catalogue of the county’s apple, perry and pear species, much treasured by 21st-century biodiversity specialists, was compiled in the late 19th century. But today it reads as a lost environmental idiolect: Bastard Foxwhelp, Cock-a-gee, Golden Moyel, Hagloe Crab, Jolly Beggar, Peasgood’s Nonesuch, Gipsy King, South Queening.

Hundreds of acres of orchard have disappeared; more are grubbed up every year. But the mistletoe that floats its goldish balls among the orchard branches is visible at a distance, even in the subdued light of this early morning. This “golden bough”, which gave its name to the hugely influential “study of magic and religion” published by J.G. Frazer in 1907, catches my eye here and there this morning.

Family farms

Nearer the house than the glowing mistletoe, but further than the orchard field, the lake lies cockled with ice. About an acre in extent, this medieval carp lake is a record of over 500 years of settlement on this site. What’s more, it’s still full of carp. In summer these large, lazy fish reveal themselves idling in the shallows, or as they leap for flies. Mirror carp in silver and primrose; bronzed leather carp; common carp. Today it looks like habitat. It’s enough of one for a local wildlife trust to release otters here, but the pond was dug as a fish farm. And the fish resting under this morning’s lid of ice have unimaginably distant ancestors who were introduced to this water in the 15th century.

A. E. Housman’s “valleys of springs and rivers, /By Ony and Teme and Clun” lie north of here, in the country where Herefordshire meets Shropshire. But in this valley, too, there’s an abundance of springs, whose sites keep shifting. Though this pond is spring-fed, there’s a whole system of stream-fed carp lakes of similar size on the other side of the valley, in the lea of the hill. The waterway that feeds them used to be a major tributary of the River Wye. It appears on even the most sparsely detailed of county maps between the 16th and 19th centuries. Today it’s shrunk to a modest brook – not quite a winterbourne – which only comes to life when there’s flooding.

The field beyond the lake is huge and gently convex. It keeps the floods away from here. In the 20th century some ambitious estate manager ripped out hedges to create the “prairie farming” open field that was fashionable at the time. The 1970s were a decade in love with modernity, and big fields suited new super-sized agricultural machinery: combine harvesters in place of tractors, and closed cab tractors several storeys high to replace the old open saddle on a couple of axles, plus trailer.

Today this field is an almost luminous green in the intensifying morning light. But prairie farming, though it may suit the plains of Hungary, or the Ukrainian breadbasket, can be an awkward fit in the variegated, contour-rich terrain of British farmland. The destruction of hedges decimates wildlife. It also leaves topsoil free to shift and slip away – as dust when it’s dry, or mud when it’s wet. Herefordshire is lucky that, unlike the biodiversity deserts in parts of Wiltshire and south Oxfordshire for example, it remains largely worked by family farms. These small businesses, usually run by a single family that’s lived on-site and managed the same few fields, hedges and ditches for generations, aren’t seduced by “economies of scale” and “investment in plant” in the same way as the huge estate farms owned by land banking corporations, or wealthy farming consortia.

You can often guess at a glance whether land is being farmed by actual food producers whose home it is, and who therefore have every personal incentive to sustain their land. The more naked a landscape looks, the more likely it’s managed by a company primarily concerned with extracting profit.

Legible in the landscape

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb. Chalk downland is just one grassy habitat where hedges are non-traditional. Besides, hedges themselves are a quirk of British history. “Vegetable walls”, as a distinguished Romanian writer I know once described them.

Cheaper and quicker to build than masonry walls, and more durable than fences, hedges seen close up are trees trimmed short. In best practice, they’re knitted together by laying: their stems nicked and forced sideways in a long line of diagonals. It’s traditional, if only loosely accurate, to date a hedge by adding a century per species. The hedges on the hill opposite contain hawthorn, ash, hazel, field maple; but not all in the same stretch. Dog rose and bramble, nettles and dock mesh them together. They elbow up towards the wooded and impractically terraced and ditched terrain of the Iron Age hillfort, lozenges of paler green against stands of mixed forestry.

The hedged fields are a product of the Agricultural Revolution which saw gentry landowners enclose their estate land. Enclosure was a paralegal process that closed off common ground on which ordinary people practised subsistence farming. Common grazing land and strip farming had been part of the post-feudal deal by which an English peasantry with few rights continued to labour for local landowners.

But at the end of the 18th century, landowners embraced agrarian modernisation. Mechanisation meant they needed fewer workers, who instead of being settled were re-hired as day labourers. As William Cobbett records in his state-of-the-nation Rural Rides, written in 1822-26, among the many left without means of support or even a home, starvation was commonplace: “How long; how long, good God! is this state of things to last? How long will these people starve in the midst of plenty?” Like the desperate poor everywhere and at all times, they were delivered up to the Industrial Revolution as infinitely exploitable labour.

Yet perhaps the biggest monument to power within this landscape is the wooded top of Credenhill, which draws the eye constantly up towards a sky of by now almost Mediterranean blue. Here the second largest Iron Age hillfort in Britain encloses nearly 50 acres in a tremendous complex of banks and ditches, which centuries of farmers have dismissed as impractical to farm. The resulting woodland is now conserved by the Woodland Trust and home to fallow deer, muntjacs, foxes and raptors.

This typical valley, on this typical morning in February, is an environment of great beauty. But it’s absolutely without innocence. Britain’s social and political history is as legible in its landscapes as its townscapes. If we were to learn habitually to read it, we might begin to think about the rural environment as that which has undergone continual change – and so can be changed again.

Decision-makers could reinterpret the places from which our human essentials come: biodiversity literally keeps the planet alive. They could learn from what works here, and what doesn’t. Who knows what could be gleaned from a set of interlocking practices and systems such as this valley records. In taking advantage of how things work rather than trying to defeat them, the way sustainable family farming does, we might even survive.

Fiona Sampson’s “Limestone Country” is reissued by Little Toller.

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

Everyone knows that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, and that Charles Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection. But how many people know that Cecilia Payne discovered what makes up the Universe?

This year marks a century since Payne, an English woman at Harvard university, submitted the most important astrophysics PhD of the 20th century. Her conclusion that the Sun – and by inference, the stars – is 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, two elements virtually non-existent in their free form on Earth, was initially dismissed by the most important astronomer in America. He later took credit for her discovery, which was only attributed many years later.

Born in Buckinghamshire, Payne moved with her family to London to be near her brother’s school – an early lesson that it was a man’s world. She nevertheless obtained a place at Cambridge, where she studied physics. But, on completing her studies, there was no opportunity for a woman to do a PhD. When a friend told her that Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, was giving a talk in London, she turned up and brazenly asked for a job.

Harvard was famous for its female “computers”, as they were called. Shapley paid a pittance to dozens of these women, of varying education levels, to do the labour-intensive work of classifying stars on thousands of glass photographic plates. They included Annie Jump Cannon, who found that the “spectra” of stars – how their light varied with colour – fit into a handful of categories; and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered that “Cepheid variable” stars could be used to measure the size of the Universe. But Payne declined a job as a “computer”, as she wanted to do something more fundamental. That was figuring out what the spectra of stars were actually telling us about their make-up. (To give you an idea of how much her work was valued, her salary was paid from a budget for “equipment expenses”.)

At the time, it was clear that each element in the Sun absorbed light at characteristic colours, causing dips in the spectrum that were like an elemental fingerprint. Each dip corresponded to the light absorbed when an electron jumped from one atomic orbit to another. But there was a complication. In the frenzy of the super-hot Sun, collisions between atoms stripped most of them of their electrons. Fortunately, in 1920 the Indian physicist Meghnad Saha wrote down an equation which, for any temperature, gave the fraction of each element that had lost zero, one, two, and so on, electrons. Payne adapted this equation to decode the solar spectrum. That was when she made her groundbreaking discovery.

Ever since Greek times, the Sun had been thought to be made of the same mix of elements as the Earth. Anaxagoras, in the fifth century BC, had declared that it was a mass of red-hot iron – and modern analysis of sunlight had backed him up, revealing a forest of dips due to iron. But Payne’s analysis told her something profoundly different.

The reason there are lots of dips due to iron is not because it is abundant but because an iron atom has 26 electrons. Consequently, electrons can occupy very many possible orbits and make a bewildering number of jumps between them. By contrast, hydrogen and helium have only one and two electrons, respectively. And at the 5,600 degrees Celsius of the solar surface, most have had their electrons knocked away, making them incapable of absorbing light.

Yet Payne could see that the spectral dips of the two elements were prominent. And she realised that there was only one explanation: she was seeing a tiny fraction of a huge number of atoms, because hydrogen and helium were in fact super-abundant. These two gases made up the majority of the Sun. However, when her dissertation was reviewed, the renowned astronomer Henry Norris Russell dismissed this conclusion. He made Payne insert a caveat, stating that she was almost certainly wrong. Then when he arrived at the same conclusion several years later he failed – surprise, surprise – to give prominence to her work.

Recognition for Payne came much later in life. In 1956, she was appointed the first woman professor at Harvard. Four years later, the Ukrainian-American astronomer Otto Struve referred to her early research as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy”.

The twist in the tale is that visible stars and galaxies account for only one-sixth of the matter in the Universe. The lion’s share is in the form of invisible “dark” matter. And the person who confirmed its existence is another woman: Vera Rubin. But that’s another story.

his article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

If you’re the proud owner of a dog or cat, you might get the distinct impression that your pet has a sense of humour. They don’t literally tell jokes, of course, but many species of animal seem to excel at other behaviours we might qualify as humorous: appearing to tease or mock their targets, or make them the subject of practical jokes. Meanwhile, some researchers claim that apes using sign language have broken the language barrier, while parrots and other birds are able to actually sound the words.

There is debate around the degree to which these behaviours can be compared to the human understanding of humour, or to our conscious efforts to be funny. But if humour is part of what makes us human, what would sharing this attribute mean for our relationship with other animal species?

Humans have noticed animals playing tricks for generations. A classic account by the 20th-century German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler describes a chimpanzee teasing hens with bread. The chimp would hold a slice of bread between the meshes of wire and wait until a hen approached. Then, before it could get a peck in, he would pull the bread back at the last moment. Köhler records that the chimp was clearly enjoying himself, repeating the trick many times. Such activities seem to show that apes are capable of “reading the mind” of another creature, in the sense that they display awareness of two opposed views of the world: their own and that of the unfortunate hen.

The balancing of two or multiple perspectives is a minimum requirement for telling a joke. We also need a certain level of social wherewithal if we don’t want to accidentally insult or rile our audience. This is also true in the animal kingdom, according to recent research into the social lives of the great apes, published in The Royal Society’s biological research journal in February 2024. While observing four different species of apes, the researchers found that the joshing generally starts when the animals are relaxed. (We might think of humans bantering in a pub.) When the group is sufficiently de-stressed, one of their members – usually a young ape, but not always – tends to look for an adult target. Then they pounce, pulling hair, poking ribs and generally indulging in a bit of edgy jesting.

But for teasing to be playful rather than aggressive, the teaser, to some extent, has to understand the recipient’s expectations and predict their likely reaction. The researchers found that the antagonist ape would, at a certain point, turn tail and make a brief run for it – before pausing to look back at the target. The researchers called it “response looking”. Comedians call it “waiting for a laugh”. The study deconstructed the process of playful teasing as “attention-getting, one-sidedness, response looking, repetition and elaboration/escalation”. When an animal is teasing, it typically looks at the target’s face either during or immediately after the tease. If the target shows minimal or no response, the action is typically repeated. The teaser also often adopts a “play face” – much like the “I want to eat you!” scowl beloved of human infants.

The anatomy of a joke

Yet if animals enjoy physical humour, what about tickling? It turns out that quite a few animals – even mammals only distantly related to us, such as rats – seem to laugh when you tickle them. As early as the 19th century Charles Darwin had described the phenomenon, writing of a zoo keeper tickling a young chimpanzee: “... the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children – a more decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered.” Apparently, humans have been tickling animals for generations. But it seems to be only the great apes who actually tickle each other (and perhaps some species of monkey, although arguments diverge over this).

We often say that jokes “tickle” us more generally, in the same way as when the soles of our feet are being attacked with a feather. Whether it is a witty aside or a slapstick performance, our laughter is, in part, a spontaneous and unwilled reaction. Otherwise it is forced, or fake, laughter. But spontaneous laughter can get us in trouble. An uncomfortable conflict occurs if we laugh at a politically incorrect joke, or at someone else’s misfortune – watching someone slip on a banana skin being the standard example.

So what is it that “tickles” us mentally? There are three general theories as to the function of jokes and wit, as I set out in my new book, The Ah-Ha Moment. There’s Plato’s claim that it is about feelings of superiority; there’s Henri Bergson and Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea that it’s all about pleasure in observing incongruity; and finally there’s the idea that jokes are a form of “benign violation”. Making mischief, in other words.

First, let’s look at the French philosopher Henri Bergson. His account of humour, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”, made him a cult figure in the early 20th century. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, he probably inspired Freud’s own study, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”, although the founder of psychoanalysis – far more famous than Bergson today – was diligent in hiding his borrowings. Both men saw humour as something distinctively human and also, at times, aggressive: “an unavowed intention to humiliate”.

However, many jokes don’t involve the act of belittling, whether subconscious or not. Take your standard inoffensive dad joke, or Christmas cracker pun. What do you call a sheep who can sing and dance? Lady Bah Bah. But a lot of humour seems predicated on some element of discomfort. Many comic set-ups involve scenarios that seem to be threatening us, while also being essentially safe. We might think of the kind of japes that went on in a show like Noel’s House Party: guns that fire water or glitter, or buckets filled with slime – which, while disgusting, is not actually harmful. Benign violation might also involve word-play, such as the quip to an anxious friend, “Don’t worry, after you’ve been to the dentist a few times you start to know the drill.”

The idea of benign violation attempts to formulate this dynamic and was first proposed by Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren at the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2010. Humour, they proposed, occurs when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously.

McGraw and Warren believe that this idea of humour crosses the human-animal divide. In fact, they have proposed that a “sense of humour” is an evolutionary necessity for any animal that lives in a social group. For example, wolves live in hierarchal packs where it’s essential for each animal to know its place. Wolves may defuse what we might call uncomfortable situations by wagging their tails, or indicate they are only playing by performing a “play bow” (the rear goes up and the front of the chest is brought to the ground).

Laughing dogs and squeaking rats

But what about laughter? Are these animal forms of submissive behaviour akin to the nervous laughter of humans? In 1949, Man Meets Dog was published by Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel Prize winner regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, or the study of animals. In the book, he suggests that dogs not only understand human laughter, but have their own way of laughing, too: a huffing, breathy “laugh pant”. Lorenz goes on: “... the slightly opened jaws, which reveal the tongue, and the tilted angle of the mouth, which stretches almost from ear to ear, give a still stronger impression of laughter.”

In the early 2000s Patricia Simonet, a researcher at an animal shelter in Washington, seemed to add more evidence to this theory. She was looking specifically into the laughing sounds of dogs, which involved a lot of standing in parks with a parabolic microphone, recording the sound of dogs playing. Simonet and her team seemed to confirm that dogs do have a very specific “play pant”.

Her boss at the shelter, Nancy Hill, was doubtful, so they tested it out. When they played the sound of a dog panting in the ordinary sense over the loudspeaker, the dogs in the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of “laughing”, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute. “It was a night-and-day difference,” Hill said. “It was absolutely phenomenal.” Simonet and others went on to present a paper to the 2005 International Conference on Environmental Enrichment suggesting that dog laughter might be employed in animal shelters to reduce stress levels and encourage positive social behaviour.

What about other species? As part of an ongoing academic debate over the nature of ultrasonic squeaks made by rats, researchers Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf found that the animals made many more of these squeaks – which they identified as “laughter sounds” – in the context of rough-and-tumble social play. In fact, when primatologist Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant conducted a literature review, in a paper for the journal Bioacoustics in 2021, they found reports of animal laughter in at least 65 species. The list includes not only a variety of the usual primates and domestic dogs, but also foxes, seals, cows and mongooses, as well as several types of birds, including parakeets and Australian magpies. In 2009, a paper in the journal Current Biology by M. D. Ross and colleagues concluded that there was “strong evidence” that tickle-induced animal laughter really was the same kind of thing as human laughter – or, as they put it, that there was a “phylogenetic continuity from nonhuman displays to human emotional expressions”.

Cosmo, Koko and other controversial cases

Telling jokes is a step too far, though, right? It involves language, and animals can’t speak. Not so fast. There is a controversial debate over whether animals are able to speak, or only to mimic human language. The loving owners of parrots are often convinced of the former. Take Betty Jean Craige, sometime director at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia in the US. Craige insists that her African Grey parrot is able to talk independently. “Cosmo and I chat constantly,” Craige says. “She asks me, ‘Where Betty Jean gonna go?’ And she tells me what she wants to do: ‘Cosmo wanna go in a car, please?’ or ‘Cosmo wanna stay home.’ When I’m out of sight, I hear her mutter to herself, ‘Cosmo wanna shower,’ as she heads toward the dogs’ water bowl for a bath.” The parrot is a YouTube star and the subject of Craige’s 2010 book Conversations with Cosmo.

He’s not the only African Grey to receive such attention. In the 1990s and 2000s, Irene Pepperberg, a researcher at Arizona and Harvard universities, claimed that her parrot Alex could not only speak and do basic arithmetic, but also understand analogies. Unlike Craige, she studied Alex under lab conditions. Alex knew 150 English words, she claimed, which he used sometimes to chastise other birds in the lab telling them, “You’re wrong!” and “Speak clearly!” He even combined words when presented with an object he’d never seen before, for example, calling a slice of birthday cake “yummy bread”. The Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist Frans De Waal was suitably convinced, writing that “Alex systematically destroyed the notion ... that all birds can do is mimic human language … Our notion of what a bird is has forever been changed.”

Birds can seem quite alien to us. Humans are much closer to the great apes, with whom we share 96 per cent of our genes. So it is no surprise that perhaps the most controversial story of an animal appearing to learn how to use humour involves a gorilla. Koko was born in San Francisco Zoo, then cross-fostered by researcher Francine Patterson, who eventually obtained custody of her and went on to set up the Gorilla Foundation. Researchers at the foundation claimed to have taught Koko more than 2,000 words through sign language. Like Alex with “yummy bread”, they recorded that she soon started to play with words. For instance, Koko signed “white tiger” for a zebra, and “eye hat” for a mask. Once, when she had been drinking water through a thick rubber straw – after repeatedly asking for juice and not receiving it – she referred to herself as a “sad elephant”.

The team credited Koko with telling jokes, citing her ability to play with words and understand metaphor. They also noticed that she often chuckled at the result of her own or her companions’ discrepant or mischievous actions – for example after watching a research assistant accidentally sit down on a sandwich, and in response to another pretending to feed sweets to a toy alligator.

After appearing in two National Geographic cover stories, Koko became the most famous representative of her critically endangered species. However, the extent to which Koko really used language and humour is disputed, and many scientists today consider the researchers’ findings about her abilities to be invalid. In an influential 1979 book, Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, argued that all Koko – and other subjects of animal language experiments – were really doing was mimicking their trainers, who then over-interpreted the signals.

Anthropomorphism?

All research comparing jokes and laughter in humans with the behaviour of other animals risks the criticism of being unjustified anthropomorphism. Many scholars still insist that the laughter of apes, dogs and rats is better termed something neutral, such as panting or squeaking. Others have grudgingly spoken of “laugh-like” behaviour.

But – setting aside the specific controversies around animal language experiments – why should we be so surprised that other species might understand and practice their own varieties of teasing, jokes and banter, and respond to them in similar ways? The refusal to allow animals a sense of humour may reflect a greater bias, the one the French philosopher Descartes encapsulated when he compared the screaming in pain of animals to the mere squeaking of wheels in machines.

Darwin’s perspective seems wiser, proposing that if related species show similar behaviour under similar circumstances, then it should be assumed that the underlying psychology is similar, too. This principle guides us to both see and value the similarities between us and our animal companions on Earth. The trajectory of research clearly suggests that animals have more of a sense of humour than has been, until recently, appreciated. Perhaps this should lead us to treat other animal species with more respect, or even to start counting some of them as worthy of personhood. No joke!

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

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I first got involved in the “skeptical community” in the early 2000s, and at that time one of the biggest conspiracy theories that needed debunking was 9/11 truthers–people who were convinced that it wasn’t …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! I know the current political and economic situation is overwhelming right now and that’s why I always scour the science news for anything I can talk about that will actually brighten your day. And boy, …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Recently, I switched browsers, which was an annoying process and I’m not sure there’s really much benefit in terms of privacy or whatever, but there WAS one surprising benefit I got from it. On …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Waaaaay back in 2013, I went to a conference where I got a free 23andMe kit. I thought it was pretty cool that there was a tool that could tell me about my genes, …

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

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….including in this quirky video……

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

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 […]