New Humanist Articles and Posts

Book review: I Told You So!

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

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.

A tourist in Libya

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

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.

The new generation with something to say?

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

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.

In a word: Climate

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

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.

Book review: Becoming George

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

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.

Book review: The Revolutionists

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Penguin) by Jason Burke

As the subtitle of this book acknowledges, hijacking has a metaphorical resonance as well as a literal meaning. Both describe the garnering of widespread attention by the determined actions of small and reckless groups or individuals. The key characters in this rollicking narrative number barely a few dozen, but they transfixed hundreds of millions throughout the 1970s.

“The Revolutionists” is a clever title, correctly implying a difference between Burke’s protagonists and actual revolutionaries – who, while no less zealous, are also organised and methodical, which is why they sometimes win. Revolutionists, by contrast, are essentially grandstanders and cosplayers, vastly more interested in means than ends. A revolutionary may see the application of violence as a regrettable necessity. A revolutionist is more someone who quite fancies striking poses in a beret and Raybans, and blowing things up, and seeks an excuse.

If one personality exemplifies the revolutionist, it is Andreas Baader: a twenty-something drifter who dominated West Germany’s Red Army Faction to the extent that it became interchangeably known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after Baader and fellow militant Ulrike Meinhof. Burke describes Baader as “spoilt, arrogant and lazy”, and notes that he was “uninterested in politics and unmoved by progressive causes”. Baader was, however, extremely keen on fast cars, women, drink, drugs and the adoration of credulous supplicants. He went to extraordinary lengths to maintain supplies of them.

Baader and his comrades allied themselves early on to the budding militancy attached to Palestine, making their first visits in 1970 to the training camps in Jordan being operated by Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The pages recalling the first trip undertaken by the Red Army Faction to Jordan are rich black comedy. “The following weeks could not be described as an unqualified success,” understates Burke. The Germans whined about the accommodation and the food, wasted precious ammunition acting the cowboy on the firing ranges, and annoyed their hosts with their general performative bohemianism. Nor were they the only vexatious guests (“A group of British International Socialists smuggled alcohol into one camp, got drunk, held an impromptu sing-song, and then got into a fight with a group of British Maoists.”)

Burke is the Guardian’s international security correspondent and the author of several excellent books covering al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other manifestations of a more recent fanaticism. The Revolutionists serves as something of a prequel to his previous works, suggesting a legacy even more baneful than the casualties of the bombings, hijackings and kidnappings wrought by its subjects: that the self-indulgence, self-regard and eventual self-destruction of this broadly secular pro-Palestinian tendency helped bring forth the theocratic nihilists of later decades.

The Revolutionists is a brilliantly told story with many dimensions – Burke also furnishes the wider geostrategic contexts to the follies of the players, even if many of them were ignorant of, or indifferent to these diplomatic shadow plays. It is mostly, however, a story – it might be hoped a cautionary fable – of failure. Things ended badly and/or early for most of the individual “revolutionists” – though some are still with us, including Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the prolific Venezuelan terrorist better remembered as Carlos the Jackal, now serving forever in a French prison.

And while the revolutionists may have got their pictures in the papers, and though they spawned a minor industry of literature, cinema, music and sundry popular culture, it is difficult to make any case that they, or their approximate contemporaries, much advanced any of the actual causes for which they claimed to have taken up arms. The Red Army Faction and similar groups in Italy, Japan and elsewhere fell some way short of dismantling capitalism, while Palestine, for all the picturesque mayhem wrought on its behalf, is arguably further than ever from being a functional sovereign state. The revolutionists did nothing good, and nothing good came of what they did.

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

A new kind of fingerprint

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The names of bacteria rolled off my colleague’s tongue like chocolate bar brands. “There’s all kinds of streptococcus, lactobacillus, E. coli of course, and that’s just the bacteria. You can find out the viruses, too. We’re talking mycoviruses, enteroviruses, astroviruses – oh, and the sample is always contaminated with human DNA.”

I thought for a minute. “So, I could be identified from a sample of my shit?”

“Not could – you already can be! You could call it ... a data dump.” He chuckled.

I was talking with David, my office neighbour at the University of Oxford, about all the new information on humans and bugs that can be learned using cutting-edge methods in pathogen genomics. By examining the genetic material of microorganisms that cause disease, microbiologists can now see how your infection is related to someone else’s, or whether what you have is treatable or not. For example, by studying the DNA of the norovirus you’re carrying, in combination with other kinds of data, they might be able to tell what you have eaten, who you have been in contact with and if you passed the infection on.

It’s an up-and-coming area, already starting to overtake old methods of disease surveillance and diagnosis, which relied on assessing the symptoms of a patient, or sending off a sample of bacteria to be grown in a lab. Some of these new methods can also enable clinicians to look at a range of microorganisms at once, giving them a more complete and detailed set of data.

Your specific set of bacteria and viruses can be as identifying as your fingerprint – not only that, but they can associate you with other people’s disease fingerprints. The information can go on to inform your clinical care, and also public health responses like contacting people you might have infected, or designing vaccines. It’s fast. It’s reliable. It’s powerful.

But as well as helping prevent disease, this data can be used for other means – to establish where a person has been, who they have met and even the nature of the interaction between these people. It can be passed on to health insurance companies, criminal courts or to justify targeted public health measures such as quarantining “disease-spreading” groups.

As a bioethicist, I spend my days learning about ever-accelerating scientific advances like these. It’s my job to help make sure that new technologies are properly regulated and ethically used. So, I listened to David and then did my own research. Some questions immediately came up. “Where are you getting the genome fragments from?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “shit”.) “And that information only gets shared with the individual and their doctor, right?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “no”.)

I discovered that, while it has already had a significant positive impact – like helping us control Covid-19 outbreaks and improving care for people living with HIV/AIDS – pathogen genomics data is also being used in harmful ways.

So, should we simply stop? It’s not that easy. We need to be asking a different question: how do we prevent disease while simultaneously protecting people from privacy violations, unfair discrimination, and other moral wrongs?

Fighting disease outbreaks

My interest in pathogen genomics began during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I came across newspaper reports on apartment blocks full of “superspreaders”. These stories troubled me. The newspapers referenced wastewater testing, which used pathogen genomics to see if Covid-19 and other microbes were in building sewerage. These tests gave public health authorities reliable strain data, so they could take strong, fast action. But they also exposed these people, through their data, to public shame. And the apartments’ occupants didn’t consent to their waste, and therefore their DNA, being tested.

This kind of data collection might be justified on the grounds that no one person in any given apartment block is likely to be identifiable. But what if all the occupants are shunned, or their movements restricted? In Melbourne, Australia, nine social housing apartment blocks experienced extended quarantine during the pandemic, as a collective, as a result of pathogen genomic testing. And who is this most likely to happen to? Probably those living in the most overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where disease transmission is the hardest to control.

We saw too many cases of racism and group discrimination during the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, South Asian people were discriminated against during a wave of the disease originally called the “Indian” strain, because it was first detected in India. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and others then shifted from naming strains by country towards letter names (the “Indian” strain became “Delta”; the South African” strain was “Beta”.) But the problem itself points to risks in associating disease with particular communities, or groups of people. The availability of more – and more detailed – data on disease could lead to more speculation and ostracisation of groups that may already be underprivileged and marginalised.

At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about pathogen genomics, now and in the future. More detailed data on disease is already helping with diagnostics and public health action, while the development of better vaccines against the next pandemic could save countless lives. In the UK in 2022, for example, a salmonella outbreak was curbed by tracing it back to specific contaminated chocolate products and issuing recall notices.

Playing out in real-time

Many of the harms and benefits will not affect us, but future generations. If you’re a parent, you might already be thinking about what this means for your children. It could help keep them healthy, but they also could face Big Brother-style surveillance, where the state has genetic data on people – block by block, city by city – collected in hospital rooms, in wastewater, in prisons, care homes and detention centres. If that powerful data is used for people’s benefit, that’s great. But what if it’s used against them? This depends on whether proper guidance and regulations are put in place.

We are already seeing this tension play out. For a start, tissue or fluid samples are often taken from hospital patients, to confirm their diagnoses or see which drug they should take. But, if they have a notifiable disease, doctors are required to report it to public health authorities – even without the patient’s consent – in order to track disease spread. If the patient’s sample was added alongside other data like their testing location, date or demographic data, the person may then be re-identifiable as a link in a disease transmission chain. The same thing can happen in disease chains in care homes or prisons.

This might not be a problem, if the data was only used for disease prevention. But it can be used for other means, including in criminal courts. In Australia, a 47-year-old man was accused in 2008 of intentionally infecting two people with HIV between 2001-2003. Pathogen genomics wasn’t powerful enough to provide conclusive evidence in the original legal case, but it was later used in a study with more powerful methods to confirm that the defendant had infected the first two people, lining up with the legal decision, which resulted in the man being charged with grievous bodily harm.

On the one hand, I am horrified that someone who knew he had HIV for years would intentionally expose his sexual partners to the disease. On the other, this man went to a clinic to receive a diagnosis, and his sample was used not just to protect his health, but to investigate a crime. And what about other court cases, in other jurisdictions? What about the deterrent effect? In countries where homosexuality is criminalised, men who have sex with men are already fearful of seeking healthcare and testing for HIV. Lower levels of testing can mean higher transmission rates and more deaths.

We need to ask the broader questions. Do people living with HIV have a right for their data to be used only to promote their own health? Many of my colleagues would object to this: it’s the job of clinicians and healthcare systems not only to protect their own patients’ health, but to protect public health more broadly.

The real risk of discrimination

Pathogen genomics follows an already established trend by not requiring individual consent for public health (and even, occasionally, forensic) uses of clinical data. But that has to be balanced against the risk of the data being misused, for example to discriminate or prosecute on the basis of sexual orientation or behaviour.

The stigma of disease can take many forms. Those living in poorer conditions, with inadequate housing or lack of sanitation, are more prone to disease and its spread. Migrant communities may be more vulnerable, particularly those living in refugee camps. In 2015, the BBC reported on chaos on the Greek islands as overcrowded camps left children at risk of disease spread, abuse and heatstroke. In 2020, 140 ill refugee children were moved from the Lesbos refugee camp, with Médecins Sans Frontières accusing the Greek government of “deliberately depriving” the children of adequate medical care. A few months later, refugees and asylum seekers were being blamed by Greek politicians and the media for Covid-19 spreading to the general population. These populations already face systemic discrimination. Then they’re labelled as disease carriers, too.

In the future, our healthcare will look very different. Clinicians will increasingly be supported by AI and care will be highly personalised. So will future ethical issues. Our decision to give away our own data may feel like a personal choice, but it could have significant effects on other people. (How many of your relatives have sent away their DNA for ancestry testing without considering how this might impact you?) Still, if you live in a democracy, then misuse of health data only happens elsewhere, right?

Wrong. Democracies in the western world are gathering and using pathogen genomics data, and there are legitimate concerns that well-intentioned public health authorities might be required to share that data with other agencies – for example, for immigration and customs enforcement, or even to inform political campaigns. There are many incentives for governments to use this data, including the desire to be technologically competitive with other countries and the economic savings to be made by predicting costly events such as potential epidemics.

Biopower

In bioethics, we call this form of state control “biopower”. In the future, it may not matter whether people are willing to disclose information about their interactions, behaviours, locations or health status. The authorities could find out about them regardless. The pathogen genomics data, certainly, is already there: in the water, on the bus handles, in the air of hospitals.

This may seem rather futuristic, but it’s important to look where the slippery slope may lead, and how we can put up barriers along the way to guard against moral failure.

But we also need to consider the significant positive outcomes, in diseases prevented and lives saved. These positives are also likely to increase. So do they outweigh the risks?

Let’s return to Australia’s use of this cutting-edge science. It’s true that people’s waste was tested without their consent during the pandemic, resulting in quarantine for some. But public health action based on pathogen genomics information was estimated to have saved almost 1,000 lives, by alerting policymakers early to a second wave of Covid-19. It was used to develop an award-winning wastewater testing initiative, which functioned as an early-warning system.

Also, because the state could better target lockdowns to areas where Covid-19 was circulating more, restrictions were eased earlier in areas where they weren’t needed. On the one hand, targeting lockdowns impinges on some people’s right to freedom of movement and association. On the other hand, it protected rights relating to health and to freedom of movement and association for others.

The same goes for other forms of moral harm. The asylum seekers who arrive at our shores are often not given access to basic healthcare, and pathogen genomics may only exacerbate injustice for them. But what about other groups who, though marginalised, might benefit from the use of this data? In the US, pathogen genomics data on hepatitis viruses has shown up clusters and chains of people who have infected each other – often through injecting drugs and sharing needles. This cluster data has been used to target populations in need of needle exchange programmes and other support.

Preparing for the future

The final piece of the puzzle is to re-examine future uses of pathogen genomics. The WHO is calling for a global network for pathogen genomic surveillance to be established. This network will better inform our response to two major threats: another pandemic, and the rise of antibiotic resistance.

We have seen how the field could help in the next pandemic. It could also help to combat superbugs that emerge in people, animals and the environment and cause deaths from drug-resistant diseases. Pathogen genomics can tell us about what genes a pathogen has that might make it able to flush out certain kinds of drugs. With this knowledge, we can opt for different drugs that can properly treat the disease, and stop the pathogen from surviving and passing its resistance genes down the line.

On balance, it seems that these efforts, and positive results, could outweigh potential future harmful uses of pathogen genomics data.
I knocked on David’s door.

“And? What’s the bioethicist’s conclusion?” David wasn’t exactly holding his breath; he was confident in the moral merit of his research.

“I think it’s really important work. There are so many ways the data can protect our future health. But it can also harm us – it’s chaos out there, and there aren’t enough rules to prevent misuse. We need to do better. Will you help me?”

This is where bioethicists like me need to work with both scientists and members of the public. Firstly, we need to establish how much people care about the different harms and benefits. What is most important to people, and why? Once we’ve answered these questions and followed them up with ethically informed regulation, we can put this exciting new subfield of genomics to good use.

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

Breaking free from faith

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

At 21, Joy Brooks had spent her whole life as a member of an evangelical charismatic church in Leicester. Her husband and three children were part of the community, too, and she worked for the Church as an events producer. But she was struggling to cope with her job, and was burning out. Her husband suggested stepping away from the community for a bit. At first, she was uncertain. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy my kids’ lives if I pull them out [of Church],’” she tells me. But his concern for her mental health gave her pause. “I now know he was thinking, ‘We’re never going back’. He opened the door enough for me to leave.”

Brooks now describes herself as agnostic, “with an allergy to certainty in religion”, while her husband believes “there probably is ‘something’, but he wouldn’t claim to know much more than that”. Having seen other marriages end after one party left the Church, she feels lucky that they moved together. But it still came at a personal cost. “About 90 per cent of our closest friendships ended,” she says. “The relational loss was the thing that hit first, before the loss of beliefs. At first I was too scared to let my beliefs unravel because I couldn’t face losing anything else.”

Twelve years on, Brooks has a Master’s in counselling and provides therapy for people questioning their faith. She’s also a host of Nomad, a podcast for Christians who are questioning their faith, and works part-time as an NHS counsellor. As a private therapist, she specialises in working with clients who are “deconstructing” their beliefs. This is a relatively new term used to describe the process whereby people untangle their own ideas from those imparted by their faith, examining where these might overlap, and where they don’t.

The term originated in the US, where it was originally connected with the “exvangelical” movement and used to describe people leaving conservative evangelical Christianity, often taking on more liberal positions but not necessarily leaving the faith altogether. That same year, non-denominational pastor and author Brian Zahnd defined “deconstruction” as “believers in the process of paring away the extraneous elements of culture, myth and toxic dogma from their faith”. In 2019, a piece published by Premier Christianity defined it as “what happens when a person asks questions that lead to the careful dismantling of their previous beliefs”.

This process can also be helpful for people leaving their faith, or breaking their connections with institutional religion. The proportion of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated – that is, atheist, agnostic or simply “nothing in particular” – has been growing for many years, although the latest stats suggest this trend may be levelling off. In the US, therapists offer “deconstruction” as a practice, and the term is starting to be used by some therapists in the UK, too, to describe the work of helping their patients navigate profound changes in their belief structure.

When Brooks became a therapist, she decided to specialise in deconstruction. For many clients, “the process is ongoing, maybe for decades or a lifetime,” she says. “But it’s not necessarily all really painful and difficult – there’s a lot of growth and stimulating exploration too.”

'Post-cult counselling'

Therapy to support people leaving religion is nothing new, and there are many kinds of therapy designed to support survivors of religious trauma, or to guide patients through the challenges of leaving a religious community.

The psychotherapist Gillie Jenkinson has developed a new methodology aimed at people who are leaving, or who have left high-control religious groups. She was part of such a group herself, which she describes as “a Bible-based cult”. After leaving, she gained a Master’s in Gestalt psychotherapy and in 2023 published the book Walking Free, which outlines her “post-cult counselling” methodology. She also offers therapy sessions online and trains UK and international therapists in how to use her process.

Jenkinson says her work helps people to understand the dynamics of the group they have left. “This is the process of how they developed a cultic or what I call an ‘introjected pseudo-identity’,” she explains. “You need to change to become a [cult] member ... If you’re born into the group, then you’re ‘introjecting’ constantly.” She describes this pseudo-identity as being like a “foreign” part that belongs to the group, “sitting over” the authentic identity. “For me it took me over. I fully changed when I was in the group.” The untangling process is painstaking. “As one of my therapists said, it’s like sifting sugar and salt.”

The idea of “deconstruction” helps to describe this process, which is not as simple as a total rejection. Some people choose to walk away from their religious group, but find themselves missing the positive aspects of being part of the faith or community. Abi Millar was brought up in an evangelical church in the north east of England but left at the age of 17, after several years of questioning. Later in life, she found that she missed aspects of her former faith, and began to look into secular forms of spirituality, which she writes about in The Spirituality Gap, published in 2025. Through psychedelics, somatic practices, meditation, nature and music, Millar has been able to discover new sources of profound meaning and deeper forms of connection with others and the world.

Millar tells me she didn’t have any therapy while leaving the faith. “I’m sure a therapist could have helped me, but it would have to have been someone specifically trained in these issues,” she says. “Back in the noughties (pre-Zoom) that would have been highly location-dependent and there wasn’t anything local to me.” Instead, she turned to informal support through online forums and books. “I fully believed myself to be ‘bad’, which I now understand is typical for people ‘leaving the fold’,” Millar tells me. “This was the water I swam in, and I didn’t recognise it for what it was: a cognitive distortion. Similarly, I didn’t frame my feeling of unsafety as a problem with me, so much as a problem inherent to the godless universe. It wasn’t till much later that I really grappled with it.”

Beliefs that linger

There are other ways to support the process of deconstruction, aside from therapy. Humanists UK, the charity that publishes this magazine, runs a programme called Faith to Faithless, which provides support and advice to those who have left or are leaving high-control religious groups, with support delivered by volunteers – some of whom have lived experience. The number of people using the programme’s peer support service jumped from 71 in 2023 to 260 in 2025. In February 2024, they launched a helpline, which has already responded to over 900 people.

One of the helpline volunteers, Iacopo, 39 – who did not wish to give his last name – grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He left in 2007. More than a decade later, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, he noticed that something did not feel right for him. At the time he was working for a corporation and says it began to feel controlling in a similar way to how the Jehovah’s Witness community had felt. “It was really very recently when I started deconstructing properly,” he says. “I started to notice that there were things about the way that I was behaving and the issues that I was facing that felt like patterns repeating.” He also found it difficult to shake the influence of particular ideas. He said that the impact of teachings about demons and possession lasted a particularly long time for him.

For the past couple of years Iacopo has worked with a therapist who follows Jenkinson’s “Walking Free” modality. He says specialist therapy was essential for him: “I went for somebody who would immediately get exactly what I’m talking about. That way, I can cut to the chase.”

While therapists with lived experience face particular challenges, they are also able to bring to bear unique insight and understanding. Aisha Khan is a therapist who draws on her own experience of leaving the Islamic faith. Growing up in the UK, she struggled to disclose to her family that she was not a Muslim. When she finally did, a friend – another ex-Muslim – suggested to her: “‘There aren’t many therapists who know what our struggles are. That’s something you should look into doing.’ I didn’t follow up at the time, because I wasn’t in a great place with that stuff myself,” she says. “But years later, I thought, ‘This is something I could support other people with’.”

Why specialists are needed

Khan is now an accredited therapist practising in Yorkshire. As she grew her specialism, she noticed two challenges that non-specialist therapists might face when working with people who are questioning or leaving their religion. The first is a failure to explore beliefs with clients. “People can present in session as religious, for example, wearing religious garments,” she says. “I’ve definitely been guilty in the past [of assuming they believed in that faith]. That’s one thing that I wish had been taught to me when I was in training. We don’t actually know a person’s religious beliefs if they don’t mention it.”

The second is assuming that faith is a “protective factor”, a term used in mental healthcare to describe something that helps someone cope, such as relationships, pets or a creative practice. But faith isn’t always “protective” and a lack of understanding increases the risks to clients, Khan says. For example, those struggling with their faith might be encouraged by their therapist to speak to people within their community, which can actually make things worse.

She experienced this herself after seeking counselling when she was grappling with how to tell her family. “There was a lot of having to explain why, for both the cultural and religious stuff,” she says. “One big area is that not all counsellors or therapists fully understand some of the risks that can be associated with leaving high-control religion. I felt like I had to fill in the gaps of why it wasn’t as simple as walking away, or sharing everything openly.” In new clients, Khan notices a lot of self-blame and perfectionism. “I often hear about guilt and shame, and that goes across all of the religions,” she says. “A lot of the time, people will be hiding parts of themselves from their loved ones.”

After a while, clients might begin to express a newfound vulnerability. “There may well be more existential themes coming up,” Brooks says. “People might say, ‘When I was anxious before, I used to be able to pray,’ or ‘I felt like God cared about me or would help me, and now I don’t know what to do’ – things around what helps a person feel safe in the world.” Khan says she also has clients with “sticky” beliefs. “Some people who’ve actually denounced faith completely and declared they aren’t religious anymore, still have this fear of hell,” she says. This is something she struggles with herself. “In my head I don’t think hell exists, but actually there’s a part of me that feels terrified that I’m going to burn in eternal torment. I can feel it in my body. That’s not an easy thing to tell someone.”

But while having personal experience of leaving a faith helps in many ways, it can also be a hindrance. Brooks says her greatest professional challenge is not to project her own experience onto her clients. Both personal therapy and professional supervision help reduce the risk of this. She’s been left with a lot of anger about the harm and injustice caused, but she sees her work on the Nomad podcast as a form of activism that fulfils her.

True freedom of belief

The wider provision of therapy aimed at supporting apostates, as well as other forms of advice and support, are also part of a broader cause to provide true freedom of religion or belief in the UK, which includes protecting the right of people to leave a faith. Religious affiliation in the UK is declining. Those saying they had “no religion” rose by 12 percentage points at the last census in 2021 and while this is largely due to religion “ageing out” (younger generations being less religious than older ones), a proportion of this shift will also be down to people changing their beliefs.

In 2023, the Bloom review into freedom of religion or belief recommended that the UK government fund services like Faith to Faithless as part of a wider package of reforms to protect those leaving faith groups, and those at risk of religious harm. The government hasn’t yet taken up the recommendation.

Whether people are receiving therapy or other forms of support, deconstruction is going to be a long and complex process. Millar says it took many years before she could untangle her old faith from her current desire to live a spiritual life. Today, she sees her departure from the Church as more of an arrival. “Over time, losing your religion may start to feel less like a loss,” she says, “and more like an opportunity to rebuild yourself from the ground up.”

In future, the idea of “deconstruction” may gain more recognition amongst mental health providers, particularly in countries where religion is in decline. And specialised therapists like Jenkinson, Brooks and Khan will be ahead of the curve.

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

You think you know me?

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Olga Koch is a Russian-British comedian. Her award-winning debut show “Fight” told the wild story of how her father briefly served as deputy prime minister of Russia in the 1990s, under President Boris Yeltsin, but later fled the country. She has appeared on television shows including “Mock The Week”, “QI” and “Live at the Apollo” and is working on a PhD in human-computer interaction.

Your new one-woman comedy show “Fat Tom Cruise” is touring in Britain and Australia. It’s described as “immersive” and “genre-defying”. What does that mean?

I want to keep it as vague as I can to preserve the element of surprise. It’s a history lesson, it’s a gossip session and it’s a horror story. I’m really honing my storytelling abilities but also using a tremendous amount of tech in a way that I never have before.

There’s quite a bit of time travel. We’re going from the 70s all the way to the present day and the jumps occur constantly, so it’s a matter of creating a visual language for the audience to understand what timeline we’re in without constantly having to remind them. It’s like watching movies that do a really good job of signposting where you are at the very beginning and then later on you don’t have to be reminded what year it is. So, how do you achieve that on stage with one person who’s wearing the same outfit throughout? It’s a really interesting challenge.

Your first show explained how your dad came to play a key role in Russia’s privatisation efforts in the 1990s. Having moved to the UK when you were 14, is there anything you think the west gets wrong about Russia?

I’m very careful about not co-opting the experience of living in Russia or being Russian today because I truly don’t know what it’s like. Me and my fiancé went to Paris last weekend, and we went to Napoleon’s tomb. On the tomb is every battle he won, and one of them is Moscow. I have never in my life been so angry, because I was like “He didn’t win Moscow, we gave him Moscow! That was a strategic military decision to leave Moscow, light it on fire and then let him have it.” My fiancé was like “I’ve never seen you this angry, and I’ve never heard you refer to Russia as ‘we’ before”. I think it’s because I have as much claim on the Napoleonic wars as any Russian living today, whereas I don’t feel comfortable saying “we” when it comes to Russia now.

That being said, in some aspects the Russia that I lived in and remember was significantly more progressive than people give it credit for. I have a joke that Russia was one of the first countries to grant women the right to vote – in a single-party state. But my grandmothers were engineers and the idea that I would study computer science [Koch has a degree in the subject from New York University] was not as crazy in Russia as it felt in the US at the time I was studying. Obviously, Russia, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, has become more traditional and religious than before, but in the country that I was raised in, some things were more progressive than people realise.

In “Fight”, you mention an interesting anecdote about visiting the “Museum of Democracy” – officially the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center – in Yekaterinburg and seeing that your father had been written out of history. What did you take from that moment?

It was a matter of growing up. The thing that really struck me is how well produced the museum is. It’s a really high-budget operation. They have a recreation of the president’s study there, you walk in and they play Yeltsin’s resignation speech, and it feels very emotionally powerful. And then you leave and realise you’ve just been successfully manipulated into feeling all these things in a sort of Disney-level production.

I was in my early 20s at the time and it generally made me more cynical when it comes to museums and countries writing their own histories as a whole. You know how the domino falls for everyone at some point? That was my sort of red pill Matrix moment – although not in the context of how “red pill” is used today, of course!

In your previous show, “Olga Koch Comes From Money”, you explored what it means to come from privilege. What made you write about that?

I think socio-economically we have reached a boiling point where it’s something that we can no longer ignore. It’s something that needs to be discussed, and it felt very cruel and unfair that the only people who are forced to have that conversation are people who come from working-class backgrounds. As a person who comes from tremendous privilege, the silence of that became deafening.

But also, after 10 years of doing stand-up, I felt – maybe wrongfully so or rightfully so – that I finally had the writing and performance ability to tackle a subject like that. It was one of the most agonising processes because I wanted to do it in an aggressively objective way, but there was a constant understanding of my own inability and failure to do so, because I’m so entrenched in it. There’s a silly gag in the show, “There’s only so much self-awareness and perspective I can have. It’s like taking a selfie – my hand can only extend so far before I have to hand my camera to my butler.”

You have experience of how different countries and cultures view money, and in the show you talked about the various moral mythologies around it.

Yes, so in Russia, money is luck, in America, money is hard work – with the caveat that people can work hard doing bad things – and then in the UK, money is something you get from your dad. Every country or culture thinks that theirs is the objective and correct attitude, when in reality there is no such thing.

The other big theme in your comedy is tech, and you’re doing a PhD now in human-computer interaction. What does that mean?

Oh boy, if I knew. It started in the 80s but now that computers are everywhere, everything is human-computer interaction. You unlock a door and it’s a computer now, because we don’t use keys anymore. You use a microwave and that’s human-computer interaction because it has a microchip in it. So it used to be how you interacted with a computer at work and what the interface would look like, and now it’s literally everything because we’re putting microchips everywhere.

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is putting a microchip in something that doesn’t need it. A door doesn’t need it, a scale doesn’t need it – there’s even electronic toothpaste dispensers. You can’t squeeze out your own toothpaste? Come on, buddy. The amount of tech waste we are creating with all these micro things, it makes me so angry.

What’s the focus of your PhD?

Parasocial relationships [one-sided relationships that people develop with someone they don’t know, such as a celebrity or social media influencer]. I used to think that parasocial relationships were an anomaly or almost pathological. But then when I met people who have all these intense parasocial relationships – for example, people who have one-sided conversations with celebrities constantly on social media – I realised it was the most normal thing in the world. If you are exposed to personal information about a person, which we are every day on Instagram stories, it is totally normal for your brain to short circuit and think you know this person. I got interested in it because I started experiencing it myself in some small way. People have seen the inside of my house, people have seen me without make-up, in settings that 30 years ago only a close friend or family member would have seen me in. Of course your brain thinks you know me.

It’s a weird phenomenon, but is it a problem?

The problem isn’t people developing any of those feelings or attachments; the problem is the technology that is actively encouraging it in order to increase screen time and addictiveness. People experiencing the effects of the technology aren’t to blame, it’s the architects of the technology. I don’t know if they know the true repercussions [of what they’re doing].

After your PhD, I hear you have plans to go into tech communications?

That’s always been the dream. I think that comedy is the best way to learn things. As children and young adults, we’re okay being patronised when it comes to learning things, but the older we get, the more sensitive we get to feeling like somebody’s patronising us or teaching us something. Comedy is a great way to sneakily teach people.

I read this paper that I keep coming back to. It said that people who watch satirical news shows are actually as, if not more, informed than people who watch the news. But satirical news shows do something that the regular news doesn’t do, which is give context. If John Oliver or Jon Stewart explain something happening in Congress, on The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, they’re never just giving you that piece of news in isolation. They’ll go through the rigmarole of explaining “This is how the Congress works”. But because they’re doing it in a comedy setting, you don’t realise you’re being taught. I mean, Horrible Histories – what’s that? If you’re laughing, you don’t realise that you’re learning.

“Fat Tom Cruise” is touring until 4 December.

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

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Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:00:35 GMT

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