Most of my social interaction comes from work these days. I should probably seek out a more diverse friend group, but there are only so many hours in the day. In recent weeks, I’ve been working alongside an older gentleman we’ll call Chris. We’ll call him that because that’s his name. Chris is a dog person, and has kept pitbulls as pets for most of his adult life. I have cats, so we have a good time talking about how each one’s choice of pet doesn’t make sense to the other. One day, while we’re at our workstations in the shop, Chris sends me an email with a link he says I should find useful. I ..read more

Ways of Being – Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence – James Bridle, Penguin July 2022 Ways of Being – Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence – James Bridle, Penguin July 2022 At the heart of Ways of Being is the idea that intelligence is not a property of brains, central nervous systems or even individual organisms but a collective phenomenon that arises between things. Author James Bridle, computer scientist, artist and artificial intelligence expert, suggests it is hubris that led us to define intelligence as ‘what humans do’ and set ..read more

In August last year, the Religious Education Curriculum Directory announced the release of a new syllabus for Catholic faith schools called ‘To Know You More Clearly’, set to be implemented in September 2023. Catholic faith schools represent roughly 10% of state-funded education and many of them have adopted this syllabus. Currently, students are in their third term of learning under this syllabus. Between the ages of 13 and 14, students enter year nine, a pivotal stage marked by an increased curiosity about the world and increased engagement in social and political affairs. It appears that ‘T ..read more

A campaign has been launched by protestors against the ongoing Gaza-Israel conflict, which says that as the UK government is “actively enabling a genocide in Gaza… British taxpayers can legally withhold taxation.” While much has been written elsewhere on the rights and wrongs of the war and the legalities of the UK’s involvement, I want to focus here on this notion of withholding taxes, the argument for which essentially runs like this: It is illegal to fund genocide.  The UK government is “enabling a genocide” in Gaza.  A portion of our taxes pays for the UK government to do this ..read more

Note: this piece contains descriptions of mental health crises and suicide. I am a solicitor and I represent people before the Parole Board of England and Wales. I used to say I represent prisoners but these days not everyone I represent is in prison – some people who the Parole Board deal with are in the community with you and me. I am going to tell you about one of them: my client, Matthew. I want to talk about it because I think this is an important skeptical story. It has been written before that skepticism can often feel like a Sisyphean project, especially if you subscribe to the idea th ..read more

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 4, from 1988. Since the seventies there has been a revival of interest in, and a considerable expansion of the study of, near-death experiences (NDEs); especially those describable as out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs). For instance, J.C. Hampe’s To Die is to Gain (London: Darton, Langman and Todd, 1972) and R.A. Moody’s Life After Life (New York: Bantam, 1977) have both sold well and attracted the attention of the electronic media. In Immortality or Extinction (London: Macmillan, 1982), Paul and Linda Badham round off their very ..read more

Wear Sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. Every year, as summer approaches, there is a small movement of people for whom a cloud of controversy surrounds sunscreen. Since the development of the first commercial sunscreen by Milton Blake in the early 1930s, some have raised questions regarding sunscreen safety, claiming it is toxic, ineffective, or even deliberately engineered to cause harm. The exact origins of the anti-sunscreen conspiracy theory are difficult to pinpoint. It is often propagated through social media platforms, blogs, and alternat ..read more

Around 2018, a problematic movement started to become visible online. One that has, over the last few years – and especially during the pandemic – incorporated more and more conspiracy theories, transforming from a something notionally supportive of women in domesticity, to a movement shrouded in racism and hatred towards women who choose a different path. I’m talking, of course, about the TradWife movement. #TradWives began on social media as a branding aesthetic, largely based on that of the 1950s in the US. Or, at least, a romanticised version of that period, because it conveniently overloo ..read more

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 2, from 1988. The philosophical world was startled in 1944 by the publication from the head of the Cambridge philosophy department of an extraordinary paper: a 15-page discussion in the journal Philosophy on “The Experimental Establishment of Telepathic Precognition.” Of course this was not the first time that a respected thinker had expressed belief in a fringe science. Newton himself was a devotee of alchemy, Alfred Russell Wallace was a firm believer in spiritualism, Sir William Crookes believed in the séance room materialisat ..read more

Every time you burn your fingers with a hot teapot, your spinal cord rapidly withdraws your hand before you can understand what was the matter – and before you experience an emotionally loaded, unpleasant sense of tissue damage that you call pain. This example of a simple reflex illustrates a usually omitted fact: nociception, which means the ability to sense the actual damaging stimulus by nerve endings, is not yet pain. Pain is a much more complex experience. In this example, nociception results in a defensive action before pain arises in your brain. In humans, pain has cognitive and emotion ..read more